Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has wildly claimed, without any evidence, that Democrats want Donald Trump to be “murdered in jail.”
The right-wing lawmaker made the remarks during an interview with Infowars host Alex Jones, in which she suggested that the four criminal cases Mr. Trump is facing – including an ongoing trial where he has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts relating to alleged hush money payments – are an intentional effort by his political rivals to imprison the former president until he dies.
She added that Democrats are also attempting to strip Mr. Trump of his presidential Secret Service detail to accomplish their goal.
“They want to lock him up in jail for the rest of his life so that he dies in jail,” she told Jones, a conspiracy theorist who owes the families of Sandy Hook victims $1.5bn.
“And they want to take away his Secret Service protection so that he is murdered somewhere in jail, possibly. This is how serious they are,” she added.
Ms. Greene was referencing a bill proposed last week by Mississippi Democrat Rep Bennie Thompson – the former chairman of the House January 6 Select Committee – that aims to strip Secret Service protections from former government officials convicted of a felony.
The bill, titled the DISGRACED Act, was co-signed by eight other Democrats and would force the Secret Service to relinquish protective duties to prison personnel.
“Unfortunately, current law doesn’t anticipate how Secret Service protection would impact the felony prison sentence of a protectee – even a former President,” Rep Thompson said in a statement in April.
“Therefore, it is necessary for us to be prepared and update the law so the American people can be assured that protective status does not translate into special treatment—and that those who are sentenced to prison will indeed serve the time required of them.”
It is not the first time Ms. Greene has suggested that the criminal cases against the former president were manufactured by Democrats to kill him by putting him behind bars.
“Biden’s DOJ is trying to put [President] Trump in prison for the rest of his life which would be a death sentence,” she wrote in a post on X in February.
Mr. Trump, 77, is currently on trial in New York accused of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in an alleged bid to cover up hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
He allegedly paid Ms. Daniels, 45, $130,000 in October 2016 in exchange for her silence over a 2006 affair the actress claimed they had.
Mr. Trump denies the affair and all of the charges brought against him by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. If he is convicted of all 34 counts, he could theoretically face more than a decade in prison, according to CNN chief legal analyst Laura Coates.
He is also involved in two other criminal cases related to his alleged attempts to conspire to overturn the result of the 2020 election and another case related to retaining classified documents.
Mr. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him, and has slammed the legal proceedings as a “witch hunt.”
This sentiment was echoed by Ms. Greene during her interview this week, in which she called the criminal cases against Mr. Trump “rigged.”
Ms. Greene, who is also a conspiracy theorist, has historically been one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporters. She previously claimed that the 2020 election was “stolen” but admitted she had no evidence of election fraud.
Meanwhile, during a town hall meeting last year, Ms. Greene seemingly approved of a call to execute her political opponents for “treason.”
Before being elected to Congress in 2020, she accused then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi of being “guilty of treason,” noting that it is “a crime punishable by death.”
-INDEPENDENT
