The court is taking a break — proceedings are expected to resume around 1:30 p.m. ET.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is testifying in court Friday in an administrative hearing on a challenge seeking to block her from the ballot in Georgia based on a post-Civil War era policy about keeping insurrectionists from office.
Asked repeatedly if she knew of certain groups planning demonstrations on January 6, 2021, Greene responded, “I don’t recall.” Greene also repeatedly said she didn’t remember if she talked to other members of Congress or anyone in the White House about protests planned for that day. She was also asked about tweets on her account, including one featuring an Epoch Times article quoting Trump saying supporters should join the “wild” protest in Washington, D.C., on January 6. She said she was just looking to share details about the march.
Ron Fein, the attorney for the group of challengers, Free Speech for the People, said Friday that the “most powerful witness against Marjorie Taylor Greene’s candidacy, in establishing she crossed a line, is Greene herself.”
Greene’s lawyer, James Bopp Jr., said the candidacy challenge “cannot be decided by this court” and suggested that the U.S. House of Representatives should have a role to debate whether she should be disqualified or prevented from being seated as a member of Congress in 2023, after the midterm election.
Bopp called the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol “despicable” but said none of the hundreds of people convicted so far in the assault were specifically charged for insurrection. He did say Greene met with former President Trump on January 3 “about making objections to certain states — based on evidence she believed constituted sufficient voter fraud.”
A federal judge on Monday allowed the effort to disqualify Greene from running for reelection over her role in the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol to proceed.
The challenge to Greene’s candidacy was mounted by a group of five voters from her congressional district who argued she is ineligible to run for federal office under a provision of the 14th Amendment that was ratified after the Civil War and meant to keep former Confederate officers and officials from holding public office again.
