• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, April 25, 2022

Let’s put aside the first-term congresswoman’s politics or her position on issues for the moment. There’s a larger question worth exploring here.

Last week a group of citizens in Georgia sued the state, claiming that Greene’s actions to incent a violent takeover of the Capital made her ineligible to run for re-election. The George Republican primary is May 24, so time is of the essence. 

The prosecutor, Andrew Celli, spent three hours cross-examining Greene under oath. And for three hours, Greene either couldn’t recall or didn’t accept responsibility for almost anything that she or her staff did in the last year and a half. 

The cadence of seeming forgetfulness would have verged on comical if it weren’t for the fact that she is a sitting congresswoman. 

But the thing that was for me most startling, and potentially precedent-setting, is her ability to both deny any responsibility for her own words and at the same time blame CNN for “editing" her words.

@scottnaustin on Twitter played a dangerous drinking game, counting the number of non-answers Greene fired off. “Number of times Marjorie Taylor Greenee said: I don’t know, I don’t remember, I don’t think so, I can’t recall, I don’t recall, I’m not sure, I didn’t say that I had no knowledge, I can’t answer that… 371 times.”

As Greene knows, journalists aren’t simply meant to be “rebroadcasters” of raw speech. So, if CNN took a 10-minute Greene quote that she posted on Facebook about the Jan. 6 attacks and then presented a report about her, excerpting a relevant 45-second sound bite, that isn’t censorship, it’s called journalism. Time and time again Greene claimed that her comments were “edited,” which they most certainly were. But her claim seemed to be that in those edits, the relevant context was removed. She never once pointed out anything meaningful that CNN cut out, just that the cuts themselves made the otherwise damning video inadmissible.

Attorney Andrew Celli helped clarify by showing a clip from NewsMax -- also edited -- but Greene seemed less willing to suggest that those edits were biased. 

What Greene said, and then repeated time and time, was that the source of the material, either CNN or Mother Jones, made anything they reported false, and therefore ineligible for a coherent response.

It was a flagrantly flawed defense, even as the prosecution played video after video that had been found on YouTube, scraped from Greene’s own pages before they were removed --  and then saved for viewers who wanted to see Greene as she lobbied forcefully for Jan. 6 to be “1776,” an attack on the Capital with deadly force, even using the iconic words from the movie “Independence Day” to rally her followers. Greene dismissed the words she’d plagiarized from the film, calling it “a Hollywood movie” -- as if to say, it too couldn’t be trusted.

Then, there was the matter of her tweets and her posts on her Facebook page. Here, she broke new ground. Not just not remembering, but suggesting that so many people published on her pages -- unnamed staff members both from her congressional office and her political team -- that there was no way of knowing if it was accurate, or approved, or attributable to her. 

Here, the question must be asked, if your account is hacked and someone posts without your permission, you have a reasonable argument to make that it wasn’t your responsibility. But if you give a staff member permission to act as your emissary, and you don’t review their words before they’re posted, and then don’t take them down if you object to them -- how can readers not reasonably expect that the statements on the MT Greene Twitter account (before it was shut down) or the Facebook page (which is still live) aren’t attributed to Greene?  

Isn’t that the point of having a branded page in a noisy web word? Voters and fans want to understand your opinion, and point of view. If the POTUS page posted an off-color joke or an inaccurate statement, would voters accept Joe Biden saying: “Oh, sorry, that was a social media staffer who said something I don't agree with, posted to the President’s account”?