Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) remains adept at comprehensively bungling the basic facts of a situation and presenting her deranged mush to her followers with confidence far outpacing the truth.
Following the emergence of a story involving a member of the Air National Guard leaking secured files revealing military secrets, she’s sided with the leaker, a man named Jack Teixeira, leading to condemnation from figures including former Congresswoman Liz Cheney. Greene has claimed that what Teixeira exposed included a revelation of U.S. troops in apparently combat capacities in Ukraine, where that country’s forces are currently waging a defense against Russia following an expansive invasion early last year that followed years of violence. She seems to take the idea as largely fact, as did Tucker Carlson on Fox News, although the reality remains that no U.S. troops are conducting fighting there.
“US troops are not fighting in Ukraine,” Jacqui Heinrich of Fox News said this week. “NSC’s John Kirby tells Fox there is a small military presence at the Embassy in conjunction with the Defense Attaché’s office working on accountability of material – not providing battlefield support.” The NSC is the federal entity known as the National Security Council, and it seems accountability of material would mean tracking what’s done with the weapons the U.S. has openly provided in support of Ukraine’s defense — tracking that has already been a point of contention.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene makes clear yet again that she cannot be trusted with America’s national security information and should not have a security clearance of any kind,” Cheney added Thursday. Greene, though, presently holds high-ranking positions in the House, including on the chamber’s Oversight Committee, where in the course of her work she may be able to access sensitive files.
You can’t wish U.S. troops operating in a fighting capacity on the ground in Ukraine into reality, even though the spread of these far-right conspiracy theorists’ claims might suggest they’re hoping otherwise. Teixeira has been arrested. There is little evidence he saw himself as necessarily some kind of whistleblower, as he shared the disputed — and protected — materials with gaming groups online rather than anywhere with a remotely wider reach. It seems the leaks were exposed when somebody else then further distributed what he’d improperly released. Whether in protecting intelligence sources or military plans of the U.S. and its allies, lives are at stake around this stuff — and yet, Greene’s been so eager to back Teixeira.
Marjorie Taylor Greene makes clear yet again that she cannot be trusted with America’s national security information and should not have a security clearance of any kind. https://t.co/8RtX3XxMmY
— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) April 13, 2023
