HOW IT STARTED: Biden White House pledges data, transparency, respect for free press.
—Reuters, January 20th, 2021.
How it’s ending: AP sources: White House altered record of Biden’s ‘garbage’ remarks despite stenographer concerns.
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.”
As Sean Davis tweets, “Nothing to see here, just the Biden-Harris administration deliberately falsifying federal records.”
And trying to survive the last full week of the election: Washington Post Spins Furiously on ‘Garbage!’ ‘Biden’s Defense Is Entirely Plausible.’ The WaPo’s headline was “Did Biden call Trump supporters ‘garbage’? It comes down to an apostrophe.”