Reps. Greene and Gaetz suggest the Capitol security breach may have been orchestrated by federal agents.
QUICK FACTS:
- Florida representative Matt Gaetz and Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene held a press conference on Thursday, one year after the January 6, 2021 Capitol breach.
- “This wasn’t a one-off, on January 6th,” said Rep. Gaetz, referring to the security breach. “We believe there’s a pattern and practice where assets, agents, and informants of the federal government are central to the criminal activity.”
- The Florida congressman was suggesting that government agents, not Trump supporters, planned and carried out many of the most significant criminal events that took place that day at the U.S. Capitol. “But for their involvement, that activity would have been, at a minimum, at a lower acuity,” he said.
- The two Republican members of Congress used footage of several participants in the attack to show there were federal agents who had lured naïve Trump supporters into the Capitol.
- “This was not an insurrection,” Gaetz said, but “it may have been a fedsurrection.”
WATCH THE PRESS CONFERENCE:
GAETZ SPECULATES WHY THE GOVT. INSTIGATED THE RIOT:
“The motive of the federal government may not have been to disrupt the debate [to overturn the election] but to ensnare, target, and trash a political movement [like] we saw during the civil-rights era,” said Rep. Gaetz.
BACKGROUND:
- The Democratic House convened a special session on the anniversary of the Jan 6 unrest.
- Gaetz and Greene delivered the only “Republican response” that day.
- “We did not want the Republican voice to go unheard and have today’s historical narrative be hijacked by those who were the true insurrectionists,” Gaetz stated during the press conference.
- Ted Cruz, once a leader of the effort to overturn the election results, had come under fire from conservatives for referring to Jan 6 as “a terrorist attack,” Gaetz suggesting that Cruz was “bending over” to appeal to the “Establishment” and the media.
