Joe Biden’s now-infamous “garbage” comment in which he referred to Trump supporters with the derogatory term continues to haunt both the White House and the Kamala Harris campaign. On Thursday evening, things developed into a full-blown scandal, possibly including criminality.
After Biden made the statement while speaking to CNN, the White House immediately edited his remarks to insert a magical apostrophe. The narrative then shifted to claiming that the president was actually referring to a specific Trump “supporter’s” garbage, in this case, a comedian who made a joke about Puerto Rico. As expected, the press ran with the revisionist history.
This is no longer just about politics, though. According to a new report, the White House altered the transcript despite objections from the stenographer, who did not feel an apostrophe should have been added. The problem? That was almost certainly a crime.
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, 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.”
You’ll have to ignore the Associated Press’ false assertion that Tony Hinchcliffe made “racist comments.” Puerto Rico is not a race. It’s not even a human being. It’s a piece of land, and the joke, politically ill-advised as it was, was not about the people who live on the island. Regardless, the story here is that political appointees in the White House press office altered an official transcript in a clear attempt to protect the president.