House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy will meet with controversial freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene next week, his spokesperson told CNN on Friday.
The announcement comes as many House Republicans have been silent about Greene’s newly resurfaced incendiary comments – ranging from supporting violent threats against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to spreading baseless claims pertaining to school shootings. The Georgia congresswoman was known for espousing conspiratorial and bigoted views leading up to her election to the House in November.
A CNN KFile review of hundreds of posts and comments from Greene’s Facebook page shows that she repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic politicians in 2018 and 2019, before being elected to Congress.
In one post, from January 2019, Greene liked a comment that said “a bullet to the head would be quicker” to remove Pelosi. In other posts, Greene liked comments about executing FBI agents who, in her eyes, were part of the “deep state” working against Trump. Greene has removed dozens of Facebook posts from 2018 and 2019 since the KFile report was published Tuesday.
“These comments are deeply disturbing, and Leader McCarthy plans to have a conversation with the Congresswoman about them,” Mark Bednar, a spokesman for McCarthy, said in a statement Wednesday evening that was first reported by Axios.
Amid an uproar over her past comments, video of Greene confronting Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg before she was elected to Congress went viral Wednesday.
In the video from March 2019, Greene follows Hogg as he walks toward the US Capitol. She can be heard making false and baseless claims as she asks him a series of questions related to gun rights and how he was able to meet with senators. Hogg continues to walk without addressing Greene.
Greene – who has previously called Hogg “#littleHitler” – said in a written statement to CNN that the video was taken while she was in Washington, “going from office to office in the Senate to oppose the radical gun control agenda that David Hogg was pushing.”
“I understand that fear firsthand and I will always work to protect our gun rights so that Americans can defend themselves and others against bad people intent to harm or kill them,” she added.
McCarthy’s scheduled involvement comes after several Democrats have denounced Greene, with Pelosi on Thursday slamming House Republican leaders for not doing more to rebuke Greene.
Democratic Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri announced Friday that she will be moving her office away from Greene, following a heated exchange earlier this month where Bush confronted Greene about not wearing a mask in a hallway on Capitol Hill. Bush cited Greene’s social media posts that appeared to support violence against politicians as well as “Taylor Greene’s renewed, repeated antagonization of the movement for Black lives in the last month directed towards Congresswoman Bush personally” as reason for the move.
Democratic Rep. Jimmy Gomez of California said he plans to offer a privileged resolution to expel Greene from the House, which is hard to do since it would require a two-thirds majority to pass. And Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida said she is exploring the possibility of a resolution that would strip Greene of her committee assignments if McCarthy doesn’t remove her.
Greene has a long history of baseless claims that some fellow Republicans have condoned. While Republican House leaders opposed Greene in the competitive GOP primary in Georgia and condemned offensive comments she made about Black people and Jewish donors to the Democratic Party, the National Republican Campaign Committee ended up spending thousands of dollars to support her election.
Former President Donald Trump called her a “future Republican star,” while then-Sen. Kelly Loeffler touted her endorsement at campaign events in Georgia. And those who once opposed Greene, such as Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, the House Republican whip, said they wanted to sit down with Greene and talk about her goals once she came to Washington.
Her baseless comments have spanned several controversial topics. She has promoted “Q,” an anonymous central character in a conspiracy theory that claims that Trump secretly fights to bring down a cabal of pedophiles. The FBI has warned such fringe views amount to a domestic terror threat.
KFile reported in August, following Greene’s victory in a primary runoff, that in the years before she ran for office, Greene wrote two conspiracy-laden blog posts speculating that the 2017 White nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that led to one counter-protester’s death was an “inside job” and promoting a debunked conspiracy alleging some Democratic Party leaders were running a human-trafficking and pedophilia ring, known as “Pizzagate.”
CNN’s Manu Raju, Em Steck, Andrew Kaczynski, Paul LeBlanc, Clare Foran, Kristin Wilson, Alex Rogers, Michael Warren contributed to this report
