Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., mocked a Florida school shooting survivor as an "idiot" who "only talks when he is scripted" in a 2019 interview with a Georgia gun group, according to a previously unreported video obtained by NBC News.
"He is very trained. He's like a dog. He's completely trained," Greene said of the survivor, David Hogg, now 20, in an interview with Georgia Gun Owners Inc. in April 2019, less than two years before she was elected to Congress.
Videos of Greene, a freshman Republican, berating Hogg in Washington surfaced last week after she was appointed to the House Education and Labor Committee. House Democrats are pushing to bar her from serving on any committees, citing in part her previous statements suggesting that the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, were hoaxes.
Seventeen people were killed in Parkland in February 2018, and 26 people were killed in Newtown in December 2012.
In the 2019 interview, Greene gleefully recounted her encounters with Hogg, then a teenager who had become a gun safety advocate after the Parkland shootings.
"I confronted David Hogg twice, and he ran away from me," Greene said in the interview, in which she bemoaned the ability of Hogg and other gun safety advocates to meet with lawmakers during a trip to the U.S. Capitol.
"I'm looking at this idiot David Hogg leading these girls who are clueless, absolutely clueless, into giving up the greatest thing that protects them, and as an American woman, I know that," she said, referring to the group of young advocates who accompanied Hogg. "Every woman in the world would love to have the rights I have."
"You're trying to get rid of the right to protect yourself from being abused, from being raped, from being taken over by a tyrannical government," she added, complaining that "I don't have press coverage."
"No one's covering my story. I want my Second Amendment, but none of you people are covering my voice," she said. "You're only covering their voice because they're paid for."
She said she repeatedly tried to get Hogg to respond to her, telling him: "Do you realize that if there had been guards with guns at your school that are trained that Nicolas Cruz would not have killed 17 people in your high school? Good guys with guns hurt bad guys with guns, they'll kill them, and it will reduce the number of deaths."
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Greene were meeting late Tuesday about a number of incendiary statements she has made over the years, multiple sources confirmed, but it's unclear whether the party will take any action.
Nothing was decided tonight at a Steering Committee meeting regarding Greene following her meeting with McCarthy, two sources familiar tell NBC News.The group will likely meet again Wednesday, one member said. The Steering Committee, headed by McCarthy, is the group that picks which committees Republican members sit on. The group can also take committee assignments away.
Hogg said Greene shouldn't just be booted from the committees — she should be kicked out of Congress.
"By not expelling Marjorie Taylor Greene, Minority Leader McCarthy has endorsed her," Hogg said in a statement to NBC News.
"For the sake of the future of our country, she must be removed from Congress. In addition to harassing victims, she has made direct threats to kill her colleagues on Capitol Hill," he said, referring to social media activity in recent years in which Greene liked posts calling for violence against prominent Democrats and a speech in which said that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was "guilty of treason" and that treason is "a crime punishable by death."
Hogg said that how Republicans deal with Greene "is bigger than partisan politics and if Leader McCarthy cared about victims, survivors and all their families, and his colleagues in the Congress, he would do the right thing."
In a statement to NBC News, Greene said that she had been "going from office to office in the Senate to oppose the radical gun control agenda that David Hogg was pushing" when they had their encounter and that "I will always work to protect our gun rights so that American can defend themselves and others against bad people."
In 2018, Greene suggested that the Parkland shooting was staged, but she walked back the position on Twitter and in an interview Monday with OAN, a right-wing website, without apologizing.
Greene went on the Georgia gun show to talk about her opposition to "red flag" gun laws, and at one point she called Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a "traitor" for supporting such measures.
She said one of her concerns about the red flag law was a provision that people's guns could be taken away if they posed "a danger to themselves or others."
"The word 'others' could be applied to anything. My question is could that be applied to people in our government, as in the federal government, as in a government, as in a tyrannical government? There's a lot of slippery language," she said.
Rubio said last week that anyone who would suggest that the Parkland shooting was fake "is either deranged or a sadist."
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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., suggested in a statement Monday that Greene should be marginalized.
"Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country," McConnell said. "Somebody who's suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.'s airplane is not living in reality. This has nothing to do with the challenges facing American families or the robust debates on substance that can strengthen our party."
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, sounded a similar note Tuesday.
"I think we should have nothing to do with Marjorie Taylor Greene and think we should repudiate the things she said and move away from her," Romney told reporters at the Capitol. "I think we should make it very clear that she does not represent us in any way. Our big tent is not large enough to both accommodate conservatives and kooks."
