Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene raised a stunning $3.2 million in her first 3 months in office
- Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene raised $3.2 million in her first three months in Congress.
- The size of her haul is almost unheard of for a first-term congresswoman.
- Greene stirred multiple controversies and was kicked off her committee assignments.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
In her first three months in Congress, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene came under scrutiny for pushing Q-Anon-adjacent conspiracy theories, got into direct confrontations with some of her Democratic colleagues, and was stripped of her committee assignments. Campaign donors rewarded her handsomely for it.
Politico’s Huddle newsletter on Wednesday reported that Greene brought in an eye-popping $3.2 million in the first quarter of 2021, January 1 to March 31, alone from 100,000 individual donors, and did not self-fund.
By contrast, Greene raised a little over $3 million during the course of her 2020 campaign for Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, $950,000 of which was self-funded.
Greene’s campaign has not yet filed its first-quarter fundraising numbers, but Greene spokesman Nick Dyer confirmed to Insider that she’d raised $3.2 million.
Read more: These 10 high-profile Republicans who dumped Trump are mostly wary to back Biden’s re-election. At least for now.
The 2020 election cycle saw record amounts of money pouring into competitive races, but a freshman House member raising $3.2 million in their first quarter in office is virtually unheard of.
One of the top fundraisers on the Democratic side, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, known as “the human fundraising machine,” has only boasted fundraising hauls half the size of Greene’s reported first-quarter fundraising.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, brought in $726,000 in her first quarter in office in 2019 and $1.2 million in the second quarter of 2019.
Other high-profile House Democrats and Republicans have similarly boasted big hauls, but Greene’s grassroots fundraising is particularly notable given that her House colleagues, including 11 fellow Republicans, voted to remove her from her assignments on the House Committee on Education and Labor and the House Budget Committee.
The last Republican to be stripped of committee assignments after making controversial comments, former Rep. Steve of Iowa, struggled to raise money and was eventually defeated in a primary challenge from another Republican.
Greene’s social media history had drawn scrutiny during her campaign, but further reports from CNN and Media Matters published after she had taken office revealed disturbing social media postings from before Greene was elected to Congress in which she suggested that several mass shootings were hoaxes and endorsed other conspiracy theories.
Several months after the shooting, Greene posted an article to Facebook about former Broward County sheriff’s deputy Scot Peterson getting a pension.
In a now-deleted comment, she replied “exactly!!” to a comment stating that Peterson’s pension was “a pay off to keep his mouth shut since it was a false flag planned shooting.”
In a separate Facebook post, Greene wrote, “I am told that Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that ‘we need another school shooting’ in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control.”
In other old social media postings, Greene suggested that top Democrats including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should be executed, supported the “Frazzledrip” conspiracy that Hillary Clinton and her aide Huma Abedin had sacrificed a child to drink its blood, and floated an anti-Semitic theory that the deadly 2018 wildfires in California were caused by the Rothschild Inc.-linked laser from outer space.
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