WATCH: Jimmy Kimmel Has A Drop Dead Hilarious Cure For Marge Greene’s Woes

Marjorie Taylor Greene didn’t have a whole lot of credibility to begin with, but her testimony at the evidentiary hearing last week destroyed what shadow of a scintilla of credibility she may have hung onto. Now she truly has nothing.

Marge doesn’t like Jimmy Kimmel much and she’s not going to like him any better after this.

I wish this clip was longer. I could watch this all day.

https://t.co/Yka1WhaK8M

— Ursula Faw (@ursulafaw56) April 27, 2022

Here’s another jewel.

Marge Greene claims she doesn’t know what’s on her own Facebook page, has no knowledge of what’s on there, and doesn’t see things before they are posted on there by other people. pic.twitter.com/8gK2u98E1p

— Ron Filipkowski ?? (@RonFilipkowski) April 22, 2022

I understand, Marge. I don’t know what’s in my Twitter feed or Facebook page, either. I don’t even know what’s on this website. Are there stories here with my byline? Really? Seriously? DAMN! I wonder how they got there. Public Notice:

I’d say the hearing damaged Greene’s credibility, but she didn’t really have any to begin with. And while Greene’s efforts to distance herself from, well, herself may have been absurd, there was clearly a strategy behind them: She was trying to avoid falling into perjury traps set by lawyers representing the group of voters who are seeking to bar her from the ballot.

At issue is the 14th Amendment, which bars anyone who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from running for a House or Senate seat. The argument is that Greene’s role in Trump’s coup attempt fits the bill, and there’s something to that. In the days leading up to the January 6 insurrection, Greene encouraged her followers to refuse to accept the transfer of power to Biden (“You can’t allow it to just transfer power ‘peacefully’ like Joe Biden wants, and allow him to become our president,” she said in a video), promoted Trump’s lies about election fraud, and ultimately voted against accepting the election results.

But Ron Filipkowski, a Florida-based lawyer and prominent online documenter of the far right, who served as legal counsel for many Republican campaigns before he became a Democrat, told me he thinks Greene would probably have to be charged with an insurrection-related crime before a judge would prevent her name from appearing on a ballot.

“I think it shows what Merrick Garland understands, which is that in a conspiracy case, it’s very difficult to get to the smart people at the top who cover their tracks, who, as they say it in the Godfather, put buffers between them and the wrongdoers,” he said. “Especially in the political sense, where you do have the First Amendment, and political speech is, under the law, the most protected speech there is.”

I spent about 15 minutes talking with Filipkowski about Greene’s perjury-avoidance tricks, the parts of her testimony that could potentially put her in legal jeopardy, and the broader lessons to be learned from Friday’s hearing about efforts to hold the January 6 conspirators to account. A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length, follows.

Aaron Rupar

Did you think heading in that there was at all a realistic chance that she would be barred from the ballot, and did your view on that change at all because of the hearing?

Ron Filipkowski

No to both. I think that everybody involved — the judge, the defense, and the prosecutor of the case — I think they all knew that. The feel I got from watching the hearing was, we have to go through this because it’s been filed and [Amy] Totenberg, the federal judge, is making us do this. I think the judges have pretty much thrown these out everywhere else. They’ve been tried all over the place, but this is the first one that’s been ordered to proceed. So yeah, I kind of got the feeling like, Ron Fein [the lawyer questioning her], what was he doing? He was trying to set her up for perjury. It was obvious the style that he was using to ask the questions was just one perjury trap after another. It was obvious her lawyer went into that hearing with the specific objective of avoiding perjury, because everything he did and she did was designed to avoid perjury.

Aaron Rupar

What were Greene’s perjury-avoidance tricks, and do you think they were successful?

Ron Filipkowski

This is something I’ve dealt with as a lawyer thousands of times, where you know that somebody has something incriminating and you want to try to explain it, but you don’t want to directly contradict what they have. She went to the memory thing. She just kept saying, “I don’t remember. I don’t remember. I don’t remember if I posted that.” And that was her answer. She probably said that 500 times. So if you directly say “No, I didn’t say that,” obviously, and it’s on video, then they got you. So her strategy was to shift it to “I don’t remember anything.”

So now, to be prosecuted for perjury, it makes it a lot more difficult because you pretty much have to prove that she is lying about not remembering. And I think you could make that case, certainly, but it’s more difficult, because what she could then use is her other tactic, which was to attack every piece of evidence that they had on authentication. In other words, most of the stuff that they played was stuff that she had posted and deleted, but people like us had grabbed off of those places before she deleted them. The problem with that is a lot of those were edited and cut by different media outlets. So what [a lawyer questioning her] had to use was edited and cut and spliced stuff, because that’s all that exists right now and she deleted all the originals. That was her other tactic — to say, “well, I don’t know what that is. That’s been edited. That’s not the full clip.” Of course it’s not, but it doesn’t change the fact that what she said in the non-edited parts is pretty damning.

Aaron Rupar

What would it take for prosecutors to prove an insurrection case like this?

Ron Filipkowski

Probably a criminal charge. Probably something like that, where she was indicted. That was her lawyer’s consistent theme. He argued two things: He argued she’s never been charged — she said it repeatedly on the stand — and the First Amendment was another big part of his argument. Which is, this is all protected free speech, everything she said is First Amendment-protected, not inciting an insurrection.

The problem is trying to find a direct link between her and the people that stormed the Capitol. He asked her, specifically, had she had any communications whatsoever with anyone storming the Capitol while it was happening? And she said no. Now, of course, if those text messages or phone calls, if the [January 6] committee has something like that, then that would definitely be perjury. Because that question she answered very clearly, no.

I think it would have to be something like that, like a direct link between her and Oath Keepers or her and Proud Boys like Aguero. They asked her specifically about Anthony Aguero, who is definitely a close friend of hers — although she tried to downplay that relationship — but he went into the Capitol. They tried to ask her, were you in communication with Aguero? And she denied that also. So that’s another thing that could be a perjury trap if something like that exists, a text message or something.

You can read the rest of the interview, unless it’s behind a pay wall. I’m a subscriber, so I don’t know. My bottom line is that, one more time, I never thought I’d see this laissez-faire, go ahead and burn down the government, commit sedition openly, kind of behavior go unpunished. I sincerely don’t know how we’re going to continue as a democratic republic setting this kind of an example and letting these kinds of people run free.

I know there are two criminal justice systems, one for the rich and one for the poor but this is beyond the pale.