Marjorie Taylor Greene, a hard-right politician and QAnon conspiracy theorist, has refused to apologise for her controversial views despite being voted off her committee roles in the US Congress.
A motion to remove the fiercely-loyal Donald Trump supporter from the education and labour and budget committees was passed by 230 votes to 199 as the House of Representatives split along party lines.
The newly-elected Republican congresswoman from Georgia had survived a vote of her party colleagues the day before, but could not defeat a motion to take away her appointments when Democrats forced a vote of the whole chamber.
The result of the vote on in-house TV
Ms Greene stated her own case on the House floor, employing a mixture of back-pedalling and finger-pointing while wearing a dark mask emblazoned with the words “Free Speech”.
Nearly all Republicans voted against the Democratic move on Thursday, but none defended her history of outrageous social media posts.
That has included advocating violence against Democrat opponents and casting doubt on the 9/11 terror attacks and the school mass shootings at Parkland and Sandy Hook.
But it is her loud backing for QAnon, the popular hoax that the Trump administration was waging a secret fight against an evil global cabal including a Democrat paedophile ring, which has given her national prominence.
She told House members those were “words of the past” and that she no longer believes in it, but did not explicitly apologise for other controversial remarks.
Those have included mulling about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, being assassinated or the possibility of Jewish-controlled space rays causing wildfires.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has remained loyal to former president Donald Trump
Instead, she portrayed herself as the victim of unscrupulous “big media companies”.
News organisations “can take teeny, tiny pieces of words that I’ve said, that you have said, any of us, and can portray us as someone that we’re not,” she said.
She added that “we’re in a real big problem” if the House punished her but tolerated “members that condone riots that have hurt American people” – a reference to last summer’s social justice protests that in some instances became violent.
She described QAnon as “things that weren’t true” and that she regretted reading and asking questions about it, because “if it weren’t for the [2018] Facebook post and comments that I liked in 2018, I wouldn’t be standing here today”.
“And you couldn’t point a finger and accuse me of anything wrong,” she added.
Ms Greene wore a ‘Trump Won’ face mask to take her oath of office
House speaker Nancy Pelosi said: ‘If any of our members threatened the safety of other members, we’d be the first ones to take them off a committee’
An angry Ms Pelosi told reporters after the vote: “If any of our members threatened the safety of other members, we’d be the first ones to take them off a committee.”
She said she was “profoundly concerned” about Republican leaders’ acceptance of an “extreme conspiracy theorist”.
Kevin McCarthy, leader of the House Republicans, said Ms Greene’s past opinions “do not represent the views of my party”.
