Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) was among numerous lawmakers who shared a post by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) in which the Congresswoman told her followers that “The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light.”
Swalwell warned that Greene’s “lie” about the DOJ and FBI’s plan “to assassinate” Trump — inflammatory of the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search order — was irresponsible and dangerous. (NOTE: The search was conducted under the standard operating procedures of the Department of Justice. Trump was not at the residence at the time and no one was injured in the search.)
Swalwell tried to defuse Green’s disinformation bomb, calling out Greene on what he characterized as the true intent of her rhetoric and naming the targets of its call to violence: Biden and other Democrats. Swalwell serves in the House representing California with his most senior colleague Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), whose husband was violently attacked last year by a man acting on violent rhetoric like Greene’s.
“This lie is so dangerous,” Swalwell wrote. “Its intent is to inspire violence against President Biden and Democrats in a perverted sense of self-defense. MAGA can’t win with votes so they choose violence.”
This lie is so dangerous. Its intent is to inspire violence against President Biden and Democrats in a perverted sense of self-defense. MAGA can’t win with votes so they choose violence. pic.twitter.com/C08wyaY5gN
— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) May 22, 2024
Greene’s assertion derives from a deliberately hyperbolic take on the FBI’s standard procedures, which authorize deadly force in extreme instances and which were in use during the retrieval of confidential documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022.
That standard protocol, in place to protect operations and the agents conducting them, permits the use of deadly force by “law enforcement officers and correctional officers of the Department of Justice” only “when necessary, that is, when the officer has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.”
Trump himself pushed the news of the authorization specifics out to his own followers, though the former president did not claim he was an assassination target. Trump wrote: “Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE.”