During a recent House hearing, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) went after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), alleging that a recent false claim from the Georgia Congresswoman set up a “pretext for violence.”
Greene alleged, specifically, that federal authorities intended to assassinate former President Donald Trump around the time of a federal search of his Florida property Mar-a-Lago back in 2022 amid what became Trump’s classified documents criminal case. Greene and others on the far-right were peddling outrage and conspiracy theories about a routine allowance for the use of deadly force amid the conducting of that raid: a permission that standard procedure indicates had nothing whatsoever to do with the ex-president in particular.
“This false statement creates the pretext for violence,” Swalwell said of Greene’s claims. “It suggests to Americans, who, by the way, are armed to the teeth […] that their own government and the people who wear the badge are out to assassinate the former president.”
Swalwell, a member of the House Judiciary Committee and the legislative chamber’s Committee on Homeland Security, previously condemned Greene in similar terms on social media.
“This lie is so dangerous,” Swalwell said on X, the site formerly called Twitter. “Its intent is to inspire violence against President Biden and Democrats in a perverted sense of self-defense. MAGA can’t win with votes so they choose violence.”
Greene’s original claims were straightforward. “The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light,” she falsely insisted, mischaracterizing standard procedure for federal searches. Trump himself, though, already ran with the same allegation. As recapped by a report from ABC News, a Trump fundraising email claimed — speaking as if from the former president himself, though these things presumably come from campaign teams — that federal authorities had been “locked & loaded ready to take me out.”
