Republican elected official Marjorie Taylor Greene apologized on Friday for spreading conspiracy theories that earned her an exclusion from two committees in the House of Representatives, while reaffirming her support for Donald Trump for control of the party. “Republican voters support him, it’s his party,” she assured at a press conference, stressing that “the base is loyal to the president.”
Elected in November in the state of Georgia, she was ousted Thursday from the Education and Budget committees of the lower house of Congress. Eleven Republicans have joined forces with the majority Democrats – a “great betrayal”, according to her – who notably denounced her support for the theses of the far-right conspiratorial movement QAnon.
Before she was elected to Congress, Ms. Greene had also questioned the reality of several deadly shootings, suspecting staging to toughen gun laws, and questioning some of the attacks on the 11th. September. She also claimed in 2019 that Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was guilty of “treason”, a crime she said “punishable by death”.
“I apologize for saying these things that are false and insulting and I say them with sincerity,” said Ms. Greene. “I said wrong things, I believed in things that were wrong”, she explained, assuring that “nobody is perfect”.
But she hasn’t apologized for picking on David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland High School shooting the year before and campaigning for a tougher gun law, in 2019. “I don’t apologize for telling him he shouldn’t be supporting the gun fight,” she said.
I apologize for saying these things which are false and insulting and I say it with sincerity. […] I said wrong things, I believed things that were wrong. […] Nobody is perfect.
Faithful to Donald Trump, she will now campaign to “tilt to the right” the Republican party, divided between supporters of the former president and more moderate conservatives, to regain control of the House in 2022.
She assured that neither she nor Donald Trump were responsible for the violent assault by supporters of the former president on Congress on January 6, despite their calls to march to Capitol Hill. “He is not the cause of the assault, nor I” and “the responsibility rests only on those who invaded the Capitol,” she said.
The elected representative described as a “circus” the impeachment trial of Mr. Trump, accused of “incitement to insurgency”, which begins Tuesday in the Senate.