Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed that the people behind bars for their alleged role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot are being abused and mistreated in jail “because of the color of their skin,” implying that the mostly white defendants are being treated worse than other prisoners because of racism.
“They were isolated in a separate wing of the jail, where they are abused, where they are ridiculed, where they are mocked because of their political beliefs and because of January 6, and because of the color of their skin,” she said during a press conference at the U.S. Capitol to protest the treatment of the alleged Jan. 6 rioters who are jailed in D.C. “So there is a two-tiered justice system, and these are the things that need to end.”
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Greene also claimed that the defendants are being forced into “critical race theory training” by their court-appointed lawyers.
“They’re being represented by public defenders that call them white supremacists, tell them they have to denounce President Trump, tell them they have to denounce their political views, want them to watch videos and read books that basically it’s critical race theory training, in order for them to have this public defender represent them,” she claimed.
The wild claims came during a press conference alongside Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, and Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert where the quartet decried the treatment of the small group of alleged rioters who’ve been jailed because they’ve been charged with some of the most serious crimes committed during the insurrection at the Capitol.
It’s the latest salvo from the group of hard-line conservatives, who have sought to paint the alleged rioters as “political prisoners” while rewriting the history of what happened that day with multiple press conferences and a tour of the jail.
“What is being described by these political prisoners is nothing short of human rights violations,” Gosar said on Tuesday.
Gohmert backed up Greene’s claims that the alleged Jan. 6 rioters were being abused, while offering a caveat on her charge of racism.
“We’ve been accused of saying, ‘Oh, you’re out to help the whites.’ I didn’t know what skin color everybody in the D.C. jail had until I got there. But other inmates are telling me the most verbally abused person in there happens to be Black, that he has caught more flak than any of the white defendants,” he said.
Both Gohmert and Greene pushed conspiracy theories about what took place on Jan. 6.
Greene implied that something suspicious may have happened surrounding the death of Roseanne Boylan, a rioter who died that day after being crushed in a crowd that was warring with police officers.
“I was shown video of Roseanne Boylan dying. I talked to a man who is a Jan. 6 defendant giving her CPR,” she said, before demanding public release of video of her death.
Some video of Boylan’s death has been released, however—the New York Times some months ago published a full shot-by-shot breakdown of how she died based on publicly available footage.
Gohmert pushed yet another conspiracy theory popular on the right.
“If they were going to charge someone with insurrection, it’s beginning to sound more and more like those would be agents for the federal government that were there stirring things up, trying to get people to engage in violence,” he said.
That claim—like many made by this quartet of lawmakers about Jan. 6—has been thoroughly debunked.
