How do you “exclusively obtain” a press release? Somebody want to explain that one? The “reporter” here is someone by the name of Houston Keene. Is Houston trying to breaking-news-story us about getting a press release?
All right, fine, let’s put that out of our heads. Never mind. Greene’s office tried to make some cheap political hay out of filing her second attempt at “articles of impeachment” against Garland because reasons, called up Fox News to get it done, and is now waving around a document that looks like a AI bot’s attempt at drafting a House resolution based solely around transcripts of Fox News primetime shows.
Greene’s would-be resolution is premised on Garland “facilitating the weaponization and politicization of the United States justice system against the American people,” a phrase that Jim Jordan spent two bucks to win out of a Dave & Buster’s Arcade claw machine.
From there, all we get is Fox News crankery.
Garland “issued an October 2021 memorandum directing the targeting of parents by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” screams the document. She’s referring there, yet again, to FBI investigations into a string of death threats against school board members from anti-maskers, “critical race theory” opponents, and other conservative sources.
That immediately ballooned into Fox News and House Republican outrage that the FBI was daring to investigate death threats, turning it into an attack on conservative parents. Because, of course, Greene and every other Republican is quite sure that if the FBI targets such death threats, they’re going to find Republican supporters behind most of them, and how dare they target Republicans who threaten political violence.
The rest is all the same language. Greene wants to impeach Garland for not prosecuting “leftist extremists” who peacefully protested outside Supreme Court justice’s homes. She’s very mad that Garland is not “prosecuting Antifa and Black Lives Matters rioters that have desecrated American cities and caused billions of dollars worth” of damage, a confusing line that can only be interpreted when you remember that according to Fox News, numerous American cities have been razed to the ground and the reason none of the rest of us know about that is, uh, because Democrats are keeping it a secret from you.
“Attorney General Garland has refused to prosecute the Biden family and its associates for the crimes they have committed at the expense of the American people,” she scrawls, with nobody to this day being able to come up with a damn bit of evidence for these supposed “crimes” or even explain what the actual “crimes” are supposed to be. Sure, impeach Garland for not taking Rudy Giuliani seriously. God help us all if we strip the government of anyone who doesn’t take Rudy Giuliani’s bug-eyed rants seriously; there wouldn’t be anyone left to empty the House cafeteria trash cans.
There’s also a bunch of generic rants that don’t accuse Garland of anything at all, just some word salad thrown in so we can get to the only part of it that matters: The Fox News Extended Universe belief that the government is “persecuting” Donald J. Seditionboy Trump in allowing the government to go find and return classified government documents Trump stole from the White House after the failure of his coup attempt.
Or, as Greene would have it, “documents he legally declassified,” which is yet another Fox News and Trump lawyer wackadoodle claim, based on Trump’s assertion that can and did automatically pre-declassify whatever classified documents the FBI might have discovered in his Mar-a-Lago resort. Oh, and that he did it without telling anyone, using only the powers of his mind.
It is May of 2023 and Trump’s allies are still pushing this secret-mind-powers explanation, and the federal government is still having to explain to these puddingheads that no, actually, there’s a very specific procedure for declassifying government documents, one Donald Trump himself knew about this whole time, and “I did it secretly when you weren’t looking” is not an actual defense.
I do not know how many decades it will take to explain this to Greene and the other Republicans who believe a reality television host obtained fully autocratic powers upon sliding into the White House on his own slick film of lies, but it will still not be a thing even if Greene spends the next 40 years of her life not understanding it.
Again, this is all part of the same pattern from House Republicans, and the important part is that none of us living normal lives are supposed to understand it; if Greene’s rantings look like a string of unconnected buzzwords plucked out of right-wing conspiracy circles it’s because that is exactly what they are. She doesn’t care if everyone in Washington, D.C., who is not Jim Jordan, James Comer, or an OAN host looks at her like she’s grown two heads when she presents this stuff.
Everything Greene and her associated Republicans do is meant to appeal to the small set of Americans who live and breathe Fox News conspiracy claims. It’s not the Biden administration, in her scribbled-up document, it’s the Biden “regime.” It’s not an American writing a pro-choice message in chalk on a sidewalk near a Supreme Court justice’s house, it’s a “leftist extremist” who “harassed” the justice with her chalk-based opinions.
Garland “has declared war on American parents”! Garland has “weaponized” the justice system! How dare he prosecute those who violently attacked police officers in the U.S. Capitol, while not similarly prosecuting Black Lives Matter protesters who “desecrated” our cities!
And, above all, it is not that Donald Trump took boxes of classified and other government-owned documents from the White House and put them in a Mar-a-Lago storage room, or that he lied about it to investigators, or that he took steps to hide them from investigators, it is that Merrick Garland wants to “persecute” His Royal Highness as a means of “silencing” the Fox News base!
All of it is premised on the notion that the government should be focused on prosecuting conservatism’s enemies more, and should be focused on prosecuting conservatives themselves not at all, not for death threats, or making off with classified documents, or an attempted coup, or anything else. Greene may simply not be bright enough to realize her beliefs align one-to-one with fascism’s own, but it doesn’t matter. She and Republicanism’s other loudest voices have cribbed its major themes and techniques with precision.
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