Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) gave “provably false testimony” on the stand at a hearing aimed at determining whether her re-election campaign is unconstitutional, her opponents’ attorneys said in a court filing Friday.
Greene has been targeted by a small group of voters in his district, which is outside of Atlanta, who say he violated a provision of the 14th Amendment by advocating insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. The voters are represented by Free Speech. for People, a nonprofit group that works to promote fair elections.
For more than three hours on April 22, the extremist congresswoman largely dodged attorneys’ questions about her earlier statements, providing little or no evidence to contradict the claims against her.
Greene repeatedly and falsely told his supporters that Donald Trump had won the 2020 presidential election over Joe Biden and encouraged them to participate in efforts to overturn the results, culminating in the deadly attack on Capitol Hill.
Some of Greene’s comments were contained in videos or posts that have since been removed from social media; she refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the videos she was shown in court.
“She hid behind her alleged lack of memory, incredibly claiming during her testimony that she could not answer at least 80 of petitioners’ questions because she did not ‘remember’ or could not ‘remember,'” the opponents’ filing said. Greene.
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The attorneys argued in their filing that everything Greene said on the stand should not be considered credible.
At the time of his questioning, Greene said he did not recall speaking with Trump or White House chief of staff Mark Meadows about the possibility of declaring martial law to secure a second term for Trump. Several days later, however, CNN published a text message from Greene on that precise subject.
“In our private members-only chat,” Greene allegedly texted Meadows, “several say the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call for Marshall Law. I don’t know about those things. He just wanted you to tell him.
“Regardless of what Greene meant by ‘I don’t know about that stuff,’ he made it clear that ‘he wanted [the Chief of Staff] tell [the President]this idea,” the attorneys said in their filing.
“His inability to remember this last gasp of insurrection is no more believable than his other lost memories,” it said.
At another point during his testimony, Greene was asked about an interview he gave in October 2020, telling a man in a “1776” T-shirt that if someone takes away his “liberties,” he has to get them back “at the price of blood.”
“Surprisingly, Greene denied in his testimony that suggesting freedoms should be obtained ‘at the price of blood’ was a call to violence,” the filing read.
In fact, Greene claimed on the stand that he had never advocated violence.
A Georgia state judge, Charles Beaudrot, is expected to make a recommendation on whether Greene is constitutionally qualified to run for re-election in the coming days. Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who fought Trump’s election lies, will make the final decision.