Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia Republican, referred Monday to some of the people still at large for breaching the U.S. Capitol as teenagers who “walked through” the building on Jan. 6.
The first-year congresswoman described the criminal suspects as such on social media while slamming a policing reform bill, H.R. 1280, also known as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.
Posting on Twitter, Ms. Greene claimed that passage of the bill would prevent the FBI from sharing photographs on social media “of teenagers they are pursuing, who walked through the Capitol on 1/6.”
The New York Daily News subsequently accused Ms. Greene of “downplaying” the attack of the Capitol building, when violent mobs breached the building and then roamed the complex while lawmakers hid.
More than 300 people have been charged so far in connection with the events of Jan. 6, and the FBI has continued to circulate images of suspects who investigators are still trying to identify.
“That attack, that siege, was criminal behavior, plain and simple. And it’s behavior that we, the FBI, view as domestic terrorism,” FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said Tuesday at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
The average age of the 257 people facing charges in federal court for crimes related to the Capitol is 40 years old, the George Washington University Program on Extremism reported Tuesday.
Bruno Joseph Cua, the youngest, was 18 when he was arrested on charges related to breaching the Capitol. He is the only person identified in court filings as being under 20, according to the GW report.
A spokesperson for Ms. Greene did not immediately respond to an email regarding the congresswoman’s tweet, including questions about her assertion that teenagers are among the suspects still at large.
The reform bill is named for Floyd, who died in police custody last May in Minnesota. It would limit facial recognition technology, as Ms. Greene tweeted, but not the dissemination by the FBI of images of suspects.
