Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who has led the three-year effort to free those held in jails for participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots, praised President-elect Donald Trump’s renewed promise to grant them pardons.
“I’m going to be acting very quickly. First day,” Trump said on NBC. He said those held “have been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”
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Greene, in a posting on X, wrote, “This is everything he said on the campaign trail. Hold on, January 20th is coming.”
This is everything he said on the campaign trail.
Hold on, January 20th is coming. https://t.co/qye2s5FzBJ
— Marjorie Taylor Greene
(@mtgreenee) December 8, 2024
Trump seemed to put limits on who of the 1,500 arrested and charged pardons, suggesting those convicted of violent acts would not be among those first pardoned. He said he might make exceptions “if somebody was radical, crazy.”
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The riots came after Trump lost the election in 2020 to President Joe Biden. They came on the day that Congress was certifying Biden’s Electoral College victory and after Trump held a rally beside the White House in which he criticized the election which he believes was stolen from him.
In an earlier interview with Secrets, Greene said that even those convicted of smashing windows or pepper-spraying police have served enough time and should be freed.
“That’s what I’m going to push for, even the January 6 defendants that are serving time in prison right now, whether they fought with police officers or pushing and shoving in the tunnel. Maybe they even did damage, broke a window and climbed in the Capitol. I think they’ve served enough time. They didn’t kill anybody, they didn’t rape anybody, they didn’t invade our country, like all these illegal aliens. I think they’ve served enough time, and they’re political hostages,” said Greene.
“My view is every single one of them needs to be pardoned and released. And you know when I always say this, compare it to Antifa and BLM rioters and protesters. Over 95% of charges dropped, let these people out of prison, give them their lives back. It’s time. It’s been too much,” she added.
“I am hoping it’s immediate,” she said of the pardons that Trump promised while campaigning this year.
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“They’re being sentenced almost every week here; there’s more cases going on, more sentencing hearings. It is terrible. It just needs to end as soon as possible,” said Greene.
The lawmaker has charted the deplorable conditions some of the Jan. 6 defendants have lived in at the Washington, D.C. jail. She has also led the calls to better investigate the killing by a U.S. Capitol Police officer of Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, who was among several trying to enter the Speaker’s Lobby behind the House floor.
