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It is Friday! Today’s the day that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene will be touring a Washington, D.C., jail where Jan. 6 defendants are confined. Greene has called these people “political prisoners,” and as a result of this misinformed branding, House Oversight Democrats are sending Reps. Jasmine Crockett and Robert Garcia along to make sure Greene doesn’t pretend everyone is being tortured.
Greene announced this upcoming performance on Wednesday, tweeting: “I’m leading a bipartisan delegation from the Oversight Committee to the DC Jail on Friday.” On Friday, Garcia made sure to give a little more context to Greene’s bluster, tweeting: “I’ve been asked by our @OversightDems Chair @RepRaskin to attend the DC Jail visit today set up by Marjorie Taylor Greene and extremist Republicans. We are not going to allow lies to take away from the clear truth that insurrectionists attacked our democracy and Capitol.” That follows more closely with what we know as the foundations of reality and logic.
Greene’s interest in the quality of D.C. jails is a very new one. When the majority of people locked up in them were Black D.C. residents, Greene seems to have been on a hiatus from caring. This is something that Rep. Jamie Raskin touched on in his “Statement Ahead of MAGA Republican Led Visit of Insurrectionists” that he released Friday.*
RELATED STORY: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's committee debut was exactly as disgraceful as expected
*The statement is reproduced in full below the fold.
When she announced her plans to visit the Jan. 6 defendants, the responses to her were what you expect from a public that remembers Greene bragging to a room filled with white nationalists that she would have been successful in overthrowing the government if she had led the Jan. 6 insurrection. There was a clear winner response.
Some people wanted an encore of MTG’s greatest hits.
There was also some solid advice.
Someone even did an art piece.
Here’s Raskin’s full statement on the matter:
“Rep. Andrew Clyde famously likened the January 6th insurrectionary violence to a ‘normal tourist visit.’ Today, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green and her MAGA army will lead an abnormal tourist visit of their own to the D.C. Jail in a desperate attempt to whitewash the crimes of 20 incarcerated January 6 insurrectionists, 17 of them charged with violently assaulting federal officers and 9 of them already convicted of that crime or other equally serious offenses.
“The problem of prison conditions in America is, of course, a serious one which is why Democrats on the Oversight Committee have been working to bring transparency and reform to the Rikers Island facilities in New York where 19 inmates died in 2022—the highest death rate at Rikers in a quarter century. Alas, we have had no interest from our GOP colleagues in joining us in this endeavor or any similar efforts to improve dangerous and horrid jail and prison conditions.
“Today’s tour has nothing to do with objectively examining or improving jail conditions, which in the District of Columbia’s modernized Central Treatment Facility where the January 6 defendants are housed, are reportedly and by all accounts above average.
“Rather, this tour is part of a continuing bizarre effort by Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Andrew Clyde and the controlling MAGA faction in the Republican Conference to depict the January 6th rioters, assailants and insurrectionist ringleaders now in jail as ‘political prisoners’ or even as ‘political prisoners of war’ and to facilitate their release through political pressure and to get them pardoned by a future Trump Administration.
“Andrei Sakhorov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn were political prisoners in the totalitarian dungeons of the Soviet Union. Nelson Mandela was a political prisoner on Robben Island in the vicious penal system of apartheid South Africa. Alexei Navalny, who war criminal Vladimir Putin tried to poison, is a political prisoner today in Putin’s autocratic regime. These people did nothing other than oppose the lawlessness and rotten policies of the authoritarian regimes in which they lived.
“The 20 prisoners in the Central Treatment Facility are not political prisoners but accused or convicted violent criminals whose violence was part of an effort to overthrow a federal election and defeat the processes of constitutional democracy. Seventeen of them have been charged with violently assaulting federal officers and nine of them have already pleaded guilty or been convicted of that offense or of equivalently serious offenses. Charges against the January 6 defendants include assaulting federal officers with a deadly weapon, impeding federal officers with a dangerous weapon, conspiracy to disrupt a federal proceeding and seditious conspiracy.
“If Representatives Greene, Comer and Boebert believe even one of these convicts or suspects is an actual political prisoner, they should name the person and describe why they are not properly being tried by the United States Department of Justice for their crimes but are rather being held for ideological reasons. So far they have failed to name a single prisoner who is being falsely held or unjustly accused. The claim that this group is made up of ‘political prisoners’ is plainly false and obscene.
“Furthermore, these prisoners are being housed in what is, by far, the superior of the District of Columbia’s two facilities and enjoy access to resources which most inmates in America are denied. Indeed, the mostly black and brown inmates housed in the dilapidated and inferior Central Detention Facility are eager to get moved into the more modern, spacious and comfortable Central Treatment Facility where the January 6 defendants and convicts now reside.
“The outrageous claim that the January 6 defendants are political prisoners and have been subjected to inferior treatment is a fraud.”
RELATED STORIES:
Greene tells gala brimming with white nationalists that she would've led a successful Jan. 6 attack
Horrific conditions at D.C. jail finally get noticed—only because white Republicans experienced them
The spoiled toddler mentality that continues to fuel the Jan. 6 defendants
It's just barely springtime in an off year, but there's been loads of election news lately, so co-hosts David Nir and David Beard have a super-sized roundup on this week's episode of The Downballot. The Davids recap the first round of voting in the race for Jacksonville mayor (which saw Democrats do unusually well) and the collapse of an effort to recall New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell before turning to big batch of 2024 updates.
On tap for the Senate: The GOP's desperate effort to compete with Democratic fundraising enthusiasm by recruiting self-funders; why Republicans are afraid the guy who succeeded John Boehner in Congress will try to challenge Sherrod Brown; and how Democrats' plans to clear the field in Michigan may not succeed. Plus developments in the battle for New Hampshire's governorship, a key House seat in Wisconsin, and the saga of Tennessee's answer to George Santos.