The White House altered the official transcript of a call President Biden did with Latino supporters where he appeared to call Trump supporters ‘garbage’, according to reports by the Associated Press.
The comments were made in response to a joke Tony Hinchcliffe made at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally about Puerto Rico being a ‘floating island of garbage.’
According to the official transcript prepared by White House stenographers, Biden said on the Tuesday call: ‘The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.’
However, the transcript released by the White House press office altered the word supporters. It said ‘supporter’s’ rather than a plural ‘supporters.’
This change, according to aides, corrects Biden’s statement to imply he was criticizing Hinchcliffe alone, not the millions of Americans voting for Trump, the Associated Press reported.
The White House has reportedly altered the official transcript of a call President Biden did with Latino supporters where he appeared to call Trump supporters ‘garbage’
The comments were made in response to a joke Tony Hinchcliffe made at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally about Puerto Rico being a ‘floating island of garbage’
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The change to the transcript was made after the press office ‘conferred with the president,’ according to an internal email from the head of the stenographer’s office.
The email was confirmed to be real by two anonymous government officials.
The supervisor from the stenographer’s office wrote in the email that the press office breached proper protocol and ruined ‘transcript integrity.’
‘If there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently,’ the supervisor wrote. ‘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.’
Per the email, the press office had asked the stenographers to quickly write up a transcript amid the controversy.
He made the incendiary comment on a Zoom call organized by the advocacy group Voto Latino.
Trump, for one, seized on what Biden said, declaring it was ‘worse’ than Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ comment eight years ago.
He then took it up a notch by showing up to a rally in Wisconsin on Wednesday in a garbage truck while wearing a bright orange vest.
Democrats immediately began distancing themselves from the president, including Kamala Harris, who said Wednesday: ‘Let me be clear…I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.’
Trump claimed what Biden said was worse than what Hillary Clinton said about his supporters eight years ago, calling them ‘deplorables’
Trump appeared at a rally in Wisconsin on Wednesday in a garbage truck while wearing a bright orange vest to troll Biden following his comments
‘How do you like my garbage truck? This truck is in honor of Kamala and Joe Biden,’ he told reporters in Green Bay
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There was a team of two people on duty on the stenography team the night of the mad scramble to contain the damage. There was a ‘typer’ and a ‘proofer,’ and they said any edit to the transcript would have to be approved by their supervisor.
According to the AP, the supervisor wasn’t available right then to review the audio and verify the transcript, so the press office published the altered transcript on the White House’s website anyway in an effort to help the president.
White House senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates posted the altered transcript to X that night, writing that Biden ‘referred to the hateful rhetoric at the Madison Square Garden rally as “garbage”‘ and not Trump’s supporters.
This was part of a large-scale effort from Biden’s team to do damage control.
The stenographers’ supervisor raised concerns about what the press office did to numerous communications officials in an email. This included White House communications director Ben LaBolt and press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
‘Regardless of urgency, it is essential to our transcripts’ authenticity and legitimacy that we adhere to consistent protocol for requesting edits, approval, and release,’ the supervisor wrote.
When asked by the AP about the press office’s intervention with the transcript, Bates dodged the question.
White House senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates posted this to X on the night Biden uttered the ‘garbage’ comment. The altered word is ‘supporters,’ which was changed to have an apostrophe
‘The president confirmed in his tweet on Tuesday evening that he was addressing the hateful rhetoric from the comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. That was reflected in the transcript,’ he said.
House Republicans, meanwhile, are reportedly weighing launching an investigation into the matter.
In a letter to White House counsel Ed Siskel on Wednesday, GOP lawmakers told the administration to retain documents and internal conversations related to Biden’s remarks and the transcript of them.
‘White House staff cannot rewrite the words of the President of the United States to be more politically on message,’ they wrote.
House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, from New York, and House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, from Kentucky, said what occurred could violate the Presidential Records Act of 1978.