If I were the Kamala Harris campaign and the liberal media, I’d be drinking heavily. The vice president’s DC rally, which should have been a media bonanza, for better or worse, got torpedoed when Joe Biden decided to attack Trump supporters, describing them as garbage. The media kicked it into high gear to clean up the mess for two reasons: one, it’s an objectively bad statement and pure accelerant to the GOP base, and two, it smothers their ‘Trump’s MSG rally was a Nazi event’ narrative. Yet, it all fell apart because a comedian’s word isn’t as relevant or powerful as Joe Biden’s.
Tony Hinchcliffe made the ‘Puerto Rico is an island of garbage’ joke at Trump’s rally at the Garden, which has been misattributed to the former president. Now, with Biden’s remarks, they argue that Hinchcliffe’s words have a more significant impact than those of the president of the United States. The latest pivot is some phantom apostrophe to muffle what Biden really said. The game is over, and this could become a major scandal that rocks the final days of the Biden White House. The stenographers knew what Biden said, but there were unadvised tweaks to the transcript, which has set off another wave of controversy—all of this done to help prevent any blowback to Kamala Harris’ operation (via The Associated Press):
👀 oh boy ->
— Rachael Bade (@rachaelmbade) November 1, 2024
“AP sources: White House altered record of Biden's 'garbage' remarks despite stenographer concerns /… “despite objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity.”
https://t.co/NHW6lcwgAD
🚨 “White House press officials altered the official transcript of a call in which Joe Biden appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity.”
— Jerry Dunleavy IV 🇺🇸 (@JerryDunleavy) November 1, 2024
This is a scandal.https://t.co/lYqp7L0naZ pic.twitter.com/i7Vfag8SKL
Biggest scandal of this entire election and it’s not even close.
— johnny maga (@_johnnymaga) November 1, 2024
They altered the transcript.
Biden did, in fact, call us “garbage” and they ignored the stenographers warnings to come to the aid of Kamala in the election. pic.twitter.com/Dp7efbhtaV
Not really joking that Biden's final days might be consumed by a probe into whether someone meddled to clean up his gaffe. https://t.co/w8lWwfrZa4
— David Weigel (@daveweigel) November 1, 2024
White House press officials altered the official transcript of a call in which President Joe Biden appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two U.S. government officials and an internal email obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.
Biden created an uproar earlier this week with his remarks to Latino activists responding to racist comments at a Trump rally made by the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who referred to the U.S. island territory of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
Biden, according to a transcript prepared by the official White House stenographers, told the Latino group on a Tuesday evening video call, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
The transcript released by the White House press office, however, rendered the quote with an apostrophe, reading “supporter’s” rather than “supporters,” which aides said pointed to Biden criticizing Hinchcliffe, not the millions of Americans who are supporting Trump for president.
The change was made after the press office “conferred with the president,” according to an internal email from the head of the stenographers’ office that was obtained by The AP. The authenticity of the email was confirmed by two government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
The supervisor, in the email, called the press office’s handling of the matter “a breach of protocol and spoilation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.”
“If there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently,” the supervisor wrote, adding, “Our Stenography Office transcript — released to our distro, which includes the National Archives — is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff.”
The edit of the transcript came as the White House scrambled to respond to a wave of queries from reporters about Biden’s comments. The president’s remarks clashed with Vice President Kamala Harris’ near-simultaneous speech outside the White House in which she called for treating Americans of differing ideologies with respect.
The Trump campaign quickly moved to fundraise off the quote, and the next day, Trump himself held a photo op inside a garbage truck to try to capitalize on Biden’s criticism.
You want to issue an update on this one @AaronBlake? pic.twitter.com/VsBMFplDm1
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) November 1, 2024
What a mess. Biden has been poking the Kamala campaign for days, wanting to do campaign events together, but that was a long shot then and a definite ‘no’ now. All the questions will be about this colossal screw-up, partially one of the reasons why Kamala’s people wanted to keep Biden away, not that their gal is any better on the stump—she’s a total nightmare. There’s also reported bad blood between the two camps, as Kamala’s staffers believe the president is actively trying to sabotage their campaign.
Now, a public records scandal is brewing. Whereas Trump took cocktail napkins, menus from state dinners, and supposedly super-secret classified files, most of which were empty folders, Biden and his goons unilaterally and quite possibly illegally doctored a transcript for political purposes.
The stream of failure, lies, and self-inflicted mayhem continues with this guy.
