After agitating for the chance for weeks, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) finally visited alleged Jan. 6 rioters in jail Thursday night and compared them to prisoners of war, part of a months-long campaign to valorize the attack on Congress.
Though the vast majority of people facing charges for their actions on Jan. 6 are not in custody, a few dozen are behind bars. The Washington Post reported this week that 40 Jan. 6 defendants were being held in D.C.’s Correctional Treatment Facility.
Greene has taken the lead on campaigning for these detainees, and following her visit to what she dubbed the “Patriot wing” of the jail Thursday, she said “I was greeted by men with overwhelming cheers who rushed out to meet me with tears streaming down their faces.”
What followed built on the months-long effort to rewrite the history of the Capitol attack, turning it from a violent attempt to steal a second term for Donald Trump — in defiance of the results of the 2020 election — into a story of political persecution against simple patriots.
“It was like walking into a prisoner of war camp and seeing men who eyes can’t believe someone had made it in to see them,” Greene said.
Greene made the wild claim that the jailed Jan. 6 defendants are “being put through re-education which most of them are rejecting.” A spokesperson didn’t respond to TPM’s request to clarify what the congresswoman meant.
In an appearance on Steve Bannon’s “War Room,” Greene said homeless people and detainees at Guantanamo Bay were living in better conditions than those housed in D.C. jail.
“Those men in those jail [sic] that I met with last night are more patriotic than every single American in this entire country, because they still love in this country, while the federal government is abusing them and making them live in their own waste,” she said.
The FBI, Greene said, should go after “criminals, not Americans.” She suggested the DOJ prosecute “antifa,” short for anti-fascists, and other “enemies of our country,” and she blamed the media for dividing the country.
Separately, Greene posted a photo of the detainees singing the national anthem.
The jailed Jan. 6 defendants are being held in D.C.’s Correctional Treatment Facility, which was recently inspected by a team from the U.S. Marshals Service. A report from the inspection found conditions in that facility to be “largely appropriate and consistent with federal prisoner detention standards,” The Washington Post reported.
However, hundreds of inmates at the adjacent Central Detention Facility were transferred to another facility after an inspection found “systematic failures” such as withholding food from detainees and poor sanitation including “standing human sewage,” the Post reported, quoting the inspection report.
