Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) took a bizarre bribe after being called out for lying about her earlier comments suggesting the Parkland, Fla., shooting was staged.
During an interview with CBS News’ Lesley Stahl that aired Sunday on “60 Minutes,” Greene was asked to state her position on the 2018 massacre that killed 17 students and staff. Two years before she was elected to Congress, Greene responded to a Facebook comment calling the shooting a “false flag” operation.
But when asked by Stahl, Greene tried to rewrite history.
“I never said Parkland was a false flag,” Greene said. “No, I never said that. School shootings are horrific. I don’t think it’s something to joke about.”
As he spoke, “60 Minutes” showed a screenshot of Greene’s now-deleted Facebook comment from 2018.
“I checked the facts,” Stahl replied. “Before we get to this interview.”
Greene offered a comeback with word salad, derailing the discussion.
“Did you check all my statements from kindergarten through 12th grade and college? And how I’ve paid my taxes and never broken a law, and the only one, I’ve had a few speeding tickets, do we need to talk about that too? she said. “Because I think where you’re going is the same attacks that people have attacked me with countless times.”
Stahl did not challenge Greene again.
Greene, a Trump supporter who was the first outspoken proponent of the QAnon conspiracy theory to be elected to Congress, has repeatedly spouted school shooting conspiracy nonsense and was filmed in 2019 harassing a Parkland victim who demanded arms control.
In another Facebook comment section from 2018, discovered by watchdog Media Matters for America, Greene replied “it’s all true” to a user who said “none of the school shootings were real or done by those who would should have been arrested for them”.
Greene, during his “60 Minutes” interview, tried to shift the blame for her past social media activity, suggesting that “other people were managing my social media” when she liked a 2019 comment suggesting that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) should be shot in the head. (Greene was not a congressman in 2019.)
Even so, Greene has publicly hinted at his belief that school shootings are organized. Last year, Greene suggested in a video that the July 4 shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, was orchestrated “to get Republicans to agree to more gun control.”
CBS News faced significant backlash over the weekend for interviewing Greene and giving a platform to his dangerous rhetoric. After the meeting was published, Stahl was criticized for allowing Greene to hijack the conversation, for failing to adequately report the lawmaker’s false claims, and for normalizing the extremist’s disturbed behavior.
“I have known Lesley Stahl for more than 40 years, worked with her for many weeks of the campaign. She was a great reporter, but this is a shameful and cringe-worthy performance. Disgraceful to the max” he posted on Twitter Norman Ornstein, scholar emeritus of the American Enterprise Institute.
“It’s even worse than I thought” he wrote Atlantic writer Tom Nichols. “Imagine you passed MTG, whose response was ‘what, you’re going back to everything I’ve said and done since kindergarten,’ and Stahl just agreed.”
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