'I'm Not Speaker': GOP Lawmaker Shirks Blame For Marjorie Taylor Greene's Committee Posts

Mary Papenfuss
·2 min read
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Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) scrambled Sunday to wriggle out of responsibility for the appointment of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to the House Homeland Security Committee, even though she questioned if the 9/11 terror attack on the Pentagon actually occurred.

“She doubted 9/11. She doubted a plane hit the Pentagon,” ABC’s “This Week” host Martha Raddatz pointed out to McCaul. “She later apologized for that, but she said that in 2018. Should she be on that committee? You were on that committee.”

“I chaired the committee,” McCaul replied. “You know, these conspiracy theories that people go down, I disagree with those. I’m having to debunk this. This one was the worst violation; 9/11 was not a hoax. It was carried out by al Qaeda. There’s no question in my mind.”

But the lawmaker insisted that Greene “has matured ... I think she realizes she doesn’t know everything, and she wants to learn and become, I think, more of a team player.”

It’s “incumbent upon more senior members to try to ... bring her in and try to educate her that these theories that she has are not accurate,” he added.

“Would you have rather seen a different choice?” Raddatz wondered.

McCaul shot back: “I’m not the chair of that committee, and I’m not the speaker, either.”

New House Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was forced to offer several key concessions to the right-wing GOP extremists in Congress in order to win his speakership. They included, according to boasts from Greene, key committee posts that many critics consider completely inappropriate. She has also been appointed to serve on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, even though she still baselessly insisted the 2020 election was rigged.

Democrats stripped Greene of her committee assignments in 2021 for her past racist, antisemitic and violent remarks, including her declaration that she would have been armed and would have “won” the Jan. 6 insurrection.

CNN commentator S.E. Cupp on Saturday called Greene’s Homeland Security Committee post “incredibly alarming.” As for the lawmaker’s doubts that 9/11 occurred, Cupp said: “I don’t know where” Greene was on 9/11; “I was in New York City — running.”

Cupp called it especially “appalling” that an election “denier, conspiracy theorist, liar, seditionist” would be making decisions about national security on the committee.

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