GOP's Madison Cawthorn defends jailed insurrectionists -- and claims Republicans plan to bring Trump supporters back to the Capitol

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) described the jailed Jan. 6 rioters as "political hostages" and vowed to continue their work.

The North Carolina Republican took part in a Macon County GOP event on Sunday, where he made numerous false claims about the 2020 election and vowed to remove President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris from office.

"I will remove Joe Biden from office, and then when Kamala Harris inevitably screws up we will take them down one at a time," Cawthorn said.

Cawthorn claimed his office was seeking to have the accused insurrectionists released from jail

"The reason why they have taken these political prisoners is because they're trying to make an example, to say -- because they don't want to see the mass protests going on in Washington," Cawthorn said. "They don't want to see people addressing their government for leaving 13 Marines to die in Afghanistan."

An attendee asked Cawthorn when he would call Trump supporters to Washington again, which drew appreciative laughter and applause.

"We are actively working on that one," the lawmaker said. "I don't have an answer to that one yet. We are actively working on this. We have a few plans in motion I can't make public right now, but this is something we're working on. There are a lot of Republicans that don't want to talk about this, you know, they say, 'Oh, that's too controversial.'"

He then rattled off a series of falsehoods about the jailed insurrectionists.

"What's controversial is we've got 536 people being held in solitary confinement for 23 hours out of the day who are not being allowed to have religious freedoms, who are having their rights stripped away from them, not being able to have, being capable of having someone represent them, and being political hostages," Cawthorn said. "This is something that when I first started hearing about it, I was, like, 'No way that's really going on.' But, my friends, I'll tell you, with the small amount of investigating we've done, it is going on."