Jake Tapper Asks GOP’s Nancy Mace How She Will Work with 9/11 Denier Marjorie Taylor Greene on Oversight Committee

CNN anchor Jake Tapper pressed Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) on whether or not she believes she can effectively work with one-time 9/11 denier and known conspiracy theorist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on the House Oversight Committee.

“I want to ask you, because you’re on the Oversight Committee, you’re going to sit with Republicans, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who said that a plane did not hit the Pentagon on 9/11, and Paul Gosar, both of them spoke at a white supremacist conference in the last year or so. Is that going to make the Oversight Committee job tougher?” Tapper asked Mace.

“And the reason I ask is because obviously, it is an incredibly important job of Congress to provide oversight over the executive branch. But I wonder if some of these individuals I mean, you once posted a bat, a poop, and clown emoji in reference to Marjorie Taylor Greene. I’m wondering if that’s going to make your job tougher of important oversight,” he added.

“Well, I think the same thing could be said for the left we saw in the 117th Congress that members of the squad have gotten in trouble for perhaps anti-Semitic remarks like Ilhan Omar. Those members were on the Oversight Committee. But I’ll tell you, we’ve done a lot of great work. In fact, the last bill that I passed out of Oversight was with Congressman Ro Khanna out of California. It was a quantum computing bill that the president signed into law at the end of the year,” Mace replied, adding:

So there are great opportunities to get good things done with the right leadership in place. And I do believe in Jamie Comer, as our chairman, I’m going to be handed a gavel. I will have a chairmanship. I’ll be one of five or six committee chairmen on the Oversight Committee, and I plan on working hard, as I always have, and trying to guide what we do on oversight in that direction.

Tapper followed up, recalling how “fringe” elements in the GOP dabbled in conspiracy theories during the Benghazi hearings years ago and asked Mace if that kind of rhetoric was a concern for her.

“So much energy, so much airtime was devoted to people in your party’s fringe, and obviously now blaming you for this, which is some years ago, but your party’s fringe, who would talk about just all these conspiracy theories? And I’m just wondering if you’re worried, given the fact that you have individuals I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene said a plane did not hit the Pentagon on 9/11, you know?” Tapper pushed.

“Well, I yeah. And I said it’s always been my concern. I’ve been very outspoken against conspiracy theories. But again, this is something I’ve seen in just my two years in office. Now, in my second term, I’ve seen it on both sides of the aisle. I’ve seen a lot of performance art, political performative art. We saw that during the week of the speaker’s vote, for example,” Mace replied, concluding:

But we see it over and over again. And that is one of the reasons that I believe there’s so much distrust in Congress and the federal government and our processes because we politicize so much rather than getting to the meat and potatoes of what the American people care about.

Watch the full clip above via CNN