The mother of a teacher at the Parkland, Fla., high school killed during a 2018 mass shooting said she spoke to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) over the weekend and urged her to stop calling it a fake shooting.
Linda Beigel Schulman, whose son Scott was among the 17 people killed in the shooting, said she spoke with Greene on Saturday over Zoom and that the controversial lawmaker declined to say she would stop calling it a false flag operation put on to inspire stricter gun control measures.
“When we started our conversation, I was totally upfront and told Congresswoman Greene that I was going to be on MSNBC today,” Schulman said during an appearance on the network. “Parameters were set, and the only topic discussed would be the school shootings at Parkland and Sandy Hook and that the conversation would be totally confidential. Our talk went very well.”
Schulman said Greene told her she could speak publicly about their discussion, but declined to go on television and retract statements about Parkland herself.
“My first question to Congresswoman Greene was do you really believe that Parkland and Sandy Hook were false flags and staged?” Schulman said. “That was a real important question to me. To this moment, I cannot fathom that somebody could say something like that. Her answer was unequivocally no, I do not.”
On Monday, however, Greene said during a separate interview on the conservative OAN network that the shooting was real.
She did so as she sought to explain another controversial video that showed her taunting David Hogg, a Parkland student who survived the shooting and who has become a leading gun control advocate, during a visit he made to Capitol Hill.
“I told him you have no idea what you’re doing,” Greene
told the network, referring to Hogg.
“These are not red flag instances. They are not fake and it’s terrible the loss that these families go through … and it should never happen and it doesn’t have to happen if we would protect our children properly,” she said.
Greene is facing a series of controversies, from the Hogg video to previous remarks she made that supported violence against Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democrats.
Pelosi has called on House Republican leadership to renounce Greene, with some members saying she should be removed from Congress.
A spokesperson for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) office last week called the comments “deeply disturbing” and said the leader plans to address them with Greene this week.
Greene’s office did not immediately return a request for comment on her conversation with Schulman.
During a subsequent interview with CNN on Monday, Schulman said she would still like to see Greene disavow past comments about the Parkland shooting.
“So, you know what? I do say to Marjorie Taylor Greene … find your conscience,” she said. “You’re a mother, man up or woman up, whatever you want to say, and tell the truth. Tell everybody what you told me.”
