After weeks of wavering, the national Republican party has formally thrown its support behind Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican House candidate who was openly supportive of QAnon.
The National Republican Congressional Committee donated $5,000 to Greene’s congressional campaign on September 25, according to campaign finance records—the maximum amount the committee can donate.
The donation formalizes the GOP’s acceptance of Greene’s candidacy after top officials in the party had signaled hesitancy in backing her. Greene has not shied away from expressing her support for QAnon, a conspiracy theory that holds that President Donald Trump is engaged in a covert war against a pedophile-obsessive “cabal” that’s being fostered by the Democratic Party and other prominent cultural institutions.
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She has also pushed a variety of inflammatory conspiracies on various platforms, suggesting that blacks are “slaves” to the Democratic Party, that George Soros is actually a Nazi, and that Muslims do not belong in government.
After POLITICO surfaced past incendiary remarks, top House Republicans sought to distance themselves from Greene.
“These comments are appalling, and Leader McCarthy has no tolerance for them,” said Drew Florio, a spokesman for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
In late August, the chair of the NRCC, Tom Emmer, declined to commit to financially supporting Greene’s campaign, telling The Hill in an interview: “The conversations that we’ve had basically are congratulations and let us know how we can be of assistance.”
In a change of heart that was hardly shocking, Greene distanced herself from Q once she won her primary election. Following the publication of this piece, her campaign reached out to vehemently insist that any insinuation that she currently believes in the conspiracy theory is false.
After repeated attempts to pinpoint when the conversion took place, an aide pointed to Greene's semi-recent interview on Fox News, in which she said it happened after Republican losses in the 2018 mid-term elections, which Q had predicted would be "safe" for the party. But Greene herself was on twitter thanking a Qanon promoter for a qanon "decode" on December 2018, well after the results of those mid terms.
As she has become more popular in pro-Trump circles, other GOP leaders have embraced Greene. President Donald Trump congratulated her on Twitter and, more recently, Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) touted Greene’s endorsement of her own candidacy.
The NRCC did not immediately return a request for comment.
Greene won a Republican primary run-off in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District and is all but guaranteed to be elected to the House in November. She is running in a conservative district and in mid-September her Democratic opponent in the race dropped out.
UPDATE: This piece has been updated to note Greene's conveniently timed insistence that she no longer believes in Qanon.
