Rove knocks Greene over Trump assassination ‘misinformation’

Republican strategist Karl Rove criticized Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Thursday over remarks she made that the Biden administration had planned an assassination of former President Trump.

“That was so outlandish that the Russians picked it up, and she is a star on Russian TV because they wanna use that bit of misinformation to paint us in a wrong fashion,” Rove said Thursday on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom” in a clip highlighted by Mediaite.

Rove was referring to a recent Greene claim in a post on the social media platform X.

In the post, Greene wrote that “The Biden [Department of Justice (DOJ)] and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light.” Her comments were in response to a post from Trump on Truth Social in which he said that “[President] Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE.”

In a fundraising email a day after his Truth Social post, the former president claimed that Biden was “locked & loaded and ready to take me out,” misrepresenting standard language from documents that were being prepped when law enforcement was getting ready to search Mar-a-Lago for classified records.

The former president’s comment references a policy statement from court filings prepared by law enforcement that lays out search protocol. The statement allows for deadly force “only when necessary,” including when someone poses “an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.”

The FBI has said that it “followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force.”

“No one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter,” the agency said.

The Hill has reached out to Greene’s office for comment.

The battle bled into the courts when special counsel Jack Smith’s office filed legal papers last week seeking a gag order on Trump as a result of the remarks. That request was denied by Judge Aileen Cannon this week.

Rove separately in the interview criticized both parties for their campaign rhetoric, referencing actor Robert De Niro’s appearance earlier this week outside the courthouse where Trump’s New York hush money trial is taking place.

“Do we really believe, as De Niro said, that Donald Trump wants to destroy New York City, wants to destroy America and wants to destroy the world?” Rove said.

Rove also said it would be more beneficial for Trump to talk about and focus on issues like immigration and inflation instead of “extraneous stuff that is only designed to inflame the people … already revved up and ready to go for their respective candidates” when it comes to winning the upcoming election.