Dispatch writer John McCormack has a lesson for reporters who push Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on her opposition to U.S. strikes in Iran: “She may threaten to call the police on you.”
McCormack caught Greene — who vehemently opposes President Donald Trump’s recent bombing of Iran — near the Capitol this week and asked her to clarify her claim that “I don’t know anyone in America who has been the victim of a crime or killed by Iran,” despite 241 dead U.S. service members killed in a Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon in 1983, among other attacks.
“I was talking about on our homeland,” Greene responded, seemingly unaware that the country had also invaded a U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held Americans hostages. It’s leaders have also plotted assassination attempts on U.S. soil, which the Department of Justice claims included Trump.
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“I asked Greene if the Iranian attacks on Americans demonstrated that the United States had national interest in the strike against Iran — that it wasn’t simply done to advance the interests of Israel.” But by that point, McCormack said Greene was getting furious.
“Your goal is to attack me and twist my words,” she told him, and kept interrupting his repeated attempts at questions.
“I’m done talking to you,” she snapped, according to McCormack. “You know what? I’m going to go tell the Capitol police you’re harassing me.”
McCormack says the exchange went down in a hallway where credentialed press corps members “have every right to ask members of Congress questions,” and that Greene, herself, has been known to chase down teen victims of the Parkland school mass shooting.
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“But the story here isn’t simply another example of Greene’s absurd behavior but of how isolated someone like Greene is inside the Republican Party on matters related to Israel and Iran,” McCormack writes.
Unlike Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who also opposes U.S. Iranian involvement, McCormack says Green posts “antisemitic conspiracy theories” like the one suggesting Israel assassinated President John F. Kennedy.
“There was once a great President that the American people loved. He opposed Israel’s nuclear program. And then he was assassinated,” Greene posted on X as recently as this month. And in 2022, Greene spoke at a conference hosted by a Holocaust-denier who had called a writer a “race traitor” because he “work[s] for Jews.”
Greene isn't just a card-carrying member of the relatively small MAGA caucus that opposes Trump on U.S. intervention in the Middle East, McCormack says.
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“On matters related to Israel and Jews, she’s in a class all by herself.”