Fact check: Marjorie Taylor Greene falsely claims Biden administration is responsible for Michigan brothers’ fentanyl deaths during Trump administration

By Daniel Dale, CNN

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia falsely claimed Tuesday that the Biden administration is responsible for the fentanyl deaths of two young men who actually died during the Trump administration — and her congressional spokesperson profanely dismissed questions about the false claim as irrelevant.

Michigan mother and conservative activist Rebecca Kiessling testified to the House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday about how her sons Caleb, 20, and Kyler, 18, had died on July 29, 2020, as a result of fentanyl poisoning from taking pills Kiessling said they had mistakenly believed were safer pain pills.

Kiessling made an emotional plea for stronger federal action to prevent the importation of fentanyl over the southern border, claiming, “You’re welcoming drug dealers across our border!” (Fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, is largely smuggled in by US citizens through legal ports of entry rather than by migrants sneaking past unprotected stretches of the border.) Then, later in the day, Greene tweeted a video of an exchange she had with Kiessling at the hearing.

But Greene wrongly suggested in the tweet that Kiessling had blamed the Biden administration for the death of her sons. In fact, Kiessling had explicitly told the committee the date of the tragedy, making clear that it happened with more than five months left in the presidency of Donald Trump.

“Listen to this mother, who lost two children to fentanyl poisoning, tell the truth about both of her son’s murders because of the Biden administrations refusal to secure our border and stop the Cartel’s from murdering Americans everyday by Chinese fentanyl,” Greene tweeted.

Greene, who supported the Trump presidency and has endorsed his 2024 run, has more than 2 million followers on Twitter. CNN reached out to the spokesperson for her congressional office, Nick Dyer, on Tuesday night to ask for comment on the false claim and to ask whether Greene had any plans to delete or correct the tweet.

Dyer responded in an email by asking whether CNN thinks the many Americans who have died from drugs under Biden “care about the details” of this particular case. He added, “Do you think they give a f**k about your bullsh*t fact checking?”

Unrelated to CNN’s inquiry, a fact check notice was affixed to the bottom of Greene’s tweet later Tuesday night through Twitter’s “community notes” crowdsourcing feature. The tweet had been viewed more than 3 million times before noon on Wednesday.

Asked about the tweet, Kiessling, an anti-abortion advocate who has been active in the Republican Party grassroots, noted in an email on Wednesday morning that the number of fentanyl deaths increased sharply between 2020 and 2021. She argued that “if the border had been secured during the Obama administration when the federal government first knew of this issue, my sons would be alive today.” Kiessling concluded: “The whole of our federal government has failed, Congress included.”

US deaths from fentanyl and other synthetic opioids first spiked under Obama in the mid-2010s, then continued to rise under Trump and accelerated again during the Covid-19 pandemic, including early in Biden’s presidency. There have recently been preliminary signs of improvement in US overdose-death numbers, though they remain much higher than they were in 2020 and earlier.

Greene’s election lies

Greene’s false tweet about the Biden administration was not her only dishonest claim that day.

At a Tuesday meeting of congressional Republicans’ caucus on “election integrity,” Greene castigated a Georgia Republican election official, Gabriel Sterling, who has repeatedly vouched for the integrity of the 2020 election in the state. Greene’s comments, which she also posted on Twitter, featured a variety of lies that were long ago debunked by Sterling and many others.

Greene falsely claimed that “Trump won Georgia,” though he lost by 11,779 votes, fair and square, in a state with a Republican governor, Republican elections chief and Republican-controlled legislature. She falsely claimed that there were “thousands of dead voters in Georgia,” though Georgia elections officials have found only four such cases in the 2020 election to date and Trump allies’ claims about various other supposedly deceased voters have been disproven by CNN and others. And she falsely claimed that a video showed workers in Atlanta’s Fulton County doing something nefarious while counting ballots, though the workers were simply doing their jobs and though false claims about the video have been debunked not only by Sterling but by Trump’s deputy attorney general and a Trump-appointed former US attorney in Georgia, among others.

Greene has been persistently inaccurate about the 2020 election. Dyer, Greene’s spokesperson, responded with a profane dismissal when asked for comment Tuesday night about Greene’s latest false election claims.

The-CNN-Wire
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