House to vote on removing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from committee assignments

CORRECTION: The original version of this story said that Rep. Greene had already been voted out of her committees. The House is still deciding whether to remove Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from those committees and will vote Thursday.

Standing on the floor of the House Thursday, an embattled Greene admitted that she had promoted and supported QAnon conspiracy theories and social media posts calling for violence against Democratic lawmakers and that she regretted them.

When describing her past social media activity regarding QAnon, Greene said she “stumbled across” the theory back in late 2017 and “got very interested in it.”

“So I posted about it on Facebook,” the freshman congresswoman said Thursday while wearing a “Free Speech” mask. “I read about it, I talked about it, I asked questions about it. The problem with that, though, is that I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true and I would ask questions about them and talk about them, and that is absolutely what I regret.”

“Because if it weren’t for the Facebook posts and comments that I liked in 2018,” she added, “I wouldn’t be standing here today and you couldn’t point a finger and accuse me of anything wrong because I’ve lived a very good life that I’m proud of […] and that’s what my district elected me for.”

“I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true and I would ask questions about them and talk about them and that is absolutely what I regret,” Greene continued. “If it weren’t for the Facebook posts and comments that I liked in 2018, I wouldn’t be standing here today and you couldn’t point a finger and accuse me of anything wrong, because I’ve lived a very good life that I’m proud of.”

Furthermore, Greene said that “later in 2018, when I started finding misinformation, lies, things that were not true in these QAnon posts, I stopped believing it.”

“I walked away from those things” she added, then saying she decided she was “going to work hard and try to solve the problems that I’m upset about.”

Politifact has reported that the Georgia congresswoman expressed support for certain elements of the QAnon conspiracy theory as recently as February 2019.

In January 2019, Greene also liked a Facebook comment saying that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) should get a “bullet to the head,” CNN reported last week. The month after which, the Georgia Republican during a Facebook Live session from Pelosi’s office said the House speaker would “suffer death or she’ll be in prison” for “treason.”

Also during her floor speech, Greene walked back her past comments about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, saying “9/11 absolutely happened.” She had previously questioned if one of the hijacked planes had actually crashed into the Pentagon, which they did alongside the two that crashed into both towers at the World Trade Center in New York and the one in a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

On Wednesday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had chosen not to remove Greene from her committees but instead pushed for her to openly denounce her past comments.

You can follow Douglas Braff on Twitter @Douglas_P_Braff.