Republican lawmakers sitting on the House Oversight Committee are planning to visit the jail holding Jan. 6 defendants in Washington, D.C., multiple media outlets confirmed.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Rep. James Comer (Ky.), who both sit on the committee, told media outlets on Wednesday that they are intending to organize a trip to the Central Detention Facility to visit defendants who were criminally charged for their involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.
A spokesperson for Comer confirmed with Fox News that Greene is leading the effort.
Greene told ABC that she would send a letter this week to congressional lawmakers to begin the scheduling process for the visit.
Comer told The Hill that the visit is “not high on [his] list” and he will see what his schedule looks like.
The Epoch Times contacted Greene’s and Comer’s offices for comment.
Tucker Carlson Airs Footage
It comes two days after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) released more than 40,000 hours of Jan. 6 footage to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who then aired some of the footage on his show on Monday and Tuesday.
One tape aired Monday showed Capitol Police officers walking alongside Jacob Chansley, a Jan. 6 defendant serving a 41-month sentence after pleading guilty to an obstruction charge. Chansley was unarmed and walked past several Capitol police officers.
Another showed Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick giving directions inside the Capitol apparently after clashing with protestors, which Carlson said casted doubt on the mainstream narrative that Sicknick died of a head injury.
The aired tapes have caused an uproar in the media and in Congress. Republicans have had mixed reactions to the tape release, while virtually all Democrats condemned the release and Fox News’s coverage of the tapes.
Greene said in reaction to the tapes’ airing that Democrats had lied to the American people and that they “had people in place to make” the Capitol breach happen.
“The Democrats that support Antifa terrorism, lied about Covid and locked down America, ripped our borders wide open to Mexican Cartel terrorism and daily fentanyl murder of Americans, were the ones who did not place the National Guard at the Capital on J6 when they knew the intelligence because they had people in place to make it happen,” Greene wrote in a Twitter post on March 7, citing Tucker Carlson’s Monday Segment. “Then they blamed all of us for the breach of the Capital and have tortured American citizens as political prisoners.”
“You don’t get to ignore Antifa anarchists and terrorism on one hand and be all about justice for J6 on the other,” she said in another post.
Since Jan. 6, 2021, more than a thousand Americans have been arrested and charged with crimes related to the Capitol breach, according to a March 8 statement published by the U.S. Attorney’s office in D.C. These include more than 320 individuals charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement, the statement reads.
‘Human Rights Abuse’
The visit is partially to see the conditions of the Washington facility, Greene told The Hill.
“They’re pretrial, and they haven’t even been convicted, and they’re not allowed to see their families, many times are not allowed to see their attorneys. The food has been a major complaint,” Greene told the outlet. “There’s been complaints of it tasting like cleaner.”
“We’re going to be addressing the human rights abuse, such as the fact that they’ve been held in solitary confinement up to 23 hours a day, denied the ability to see their families,” Greene said.
A November 2021 inspection report published by U.S. Marshals Service found “systematic failures” in the conditions of confinement at the Washington jail. Observed violations of civil rights include “overpowering” smells of urine and sewage, punitive withholding of food and water, lack of attentiveness to “observable injuries” on prisoners, and intentional antagonization of prisoners, U.S. Marshal Lamont Ruffin wrote in the report.
The Epoch Times has contacted the Washington Central Detention Facility for comment.
“As prisoners of this Jail, we have witnessed the horrendous treatment and have been personally afflicted by the hellacious conditions this Jail insists on tormenting its traumatized guests with,” reads a letter written by some of the Jan. 6 defendants in prison. “A more accurate terminology to describe the facility … would be to call this location an ‘evisceration facility,’ of the body, mind, and soul.”
