Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), the conservative firebrand who has downplayed the severity of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, is demanding that Mayor Muriel Bowser allow her and other Republicans to visit some two-dozen Jan. 6 detainees being held there and review conditions at the facility.

In a letter sent to Bowser on Thursday, Greene and Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, said that reports they have received about the Jan. 6 detainees in the city’s jail “paint a picture of despair, hopelessness, and a severe abuse of justice.” They requested a range of documents related to the Jan. 6 detainees, and full access to the facilities by March 23.

“The committee is concerned by reports that January 6 detainees are facing a unique form of mistreatment due to their politics and beliefs, representing potential several human rights abuses,” wrote Greene and Comer.

Greene, a two-term representative who has a history of endorsing the QAnon conspiracy movement and has made bigoted and controversial comments in the past, has seen her influence rise within the ranks of House Republicans, and traded her unwavering support for Speaker Kevin McCarthy for a promise to be given wide latitude to launch her own investigation into the events of Jan. 6. And her interest in the fate of detainees arrested in relation to the insurrection isn’t new: in Nov. 2021 she tagged along with a group of D.C. lawmakers for a tour of the jail, where she focused more on those detainees than the roughly 1,200 other people held there.

The D.C. Jail is composed of two facilities: the Central Detention Facility, an older wing where roughly 900 people are held pending trial or while serving short sentences, and the Correctional Treatment Facility, a newer and lower-security building with some 350 inmates. Around 90% of people held in the D.C. Jail are Black; many of the Jan. 6 detainees are white, and have been held in CTF for what officials say is their own security in what’s now known as the “Patriot Wing.”

Complaints about conditions at the aging D.C. Jail have been longstanding, and predate the arrival of the Jan. 6 detainees. In 2015, the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs released a long report detailing what it called “appalling conditions” at the jail; in late 2021 then-attorney general Karl Racine said his office would no longer represent the Department of Corrections in lawsuits over conditions at the jail. Last year there were a number of deaths at the facility. For years, activists and some D.C. lawmakers have been calling for a new jail to be built, and last year Bowser budgeted $250 million to construct a new annex to the CTF to replace the CDF.

An Oct. 2021 inspection of the D.C. Jail by the U.S. Marshals Service identified a range of “systemic failures” and poor conditions at the jail, prompting a move to transfer 400 detainees — almost a third of the jail’s population — to a federal facility in Pennsylvania. That inspection focused on the CDF, though, while the newer CTF was found to have conditions that are “largely appropriate and consistent with federal detention standards.”

Still, that hasn’t limited complaints from those in the Patriot Wing. Last year the Jan. 6 detainees said in a public letter that they’d rather be held at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, where they said they’d get better meals, medical care, and access to exercise. (Personal accounts of conditions at Guantanamo Bay indicate that may not be the case.) Last month, D.C. lawmakers introduced a bill to improve the quality of food offered at the D.C. Jail.

D.C.-based activists have said in the past that while they believe more oversight of the D.C. Jail is welcome, they question the Republicans’ political motivations and sincerity. In a tweet, local activist Ron Moten asked why Greene would “pray and care for people who killed police in pursuit of committing treason but had no concerns about the Black prisoners in D.C. Jail and housed around the country.” Others have noted that they would like to see similar interest from the GOP in conditions in federal prisons across the country, where D.C. residents — the overwhelming majority of which are Black — serve sentences for felony offenses. (Late last year D.C. residents held at a federal prison in Louisiana were transferred out after two died there.)

“The treatment of detained individuals in facilities across the country is an important subject for Congressional oversight,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, in response to Greene’s letter. “That’s why last Congress Oversight Democrats pressed for answers on the deteriorating conditions at Rikers Island in New York, for example. Our GOP colleagues’ sudden and selective sympathy for January 6 insurrectionists reflects their continuing effort to lionize the violent attempt to overthrow the 2020 presidential election.”

Greene and Comer’s interest in the D.C. Jail comes just as congressional Republicans are ramping up their interest — and interference — in the city’s local matters. This week the Senate voted to block the D.C. bill that overhauls the city’s criminal code, and Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Georgia) announced on Thursday that he will push to block a police reform bill passed by the D.C. Council. Like Greene, Clyde has been dismissive of the events of Jan. 6, likening them to a “normal tourist visit.”