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 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.”
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.
The supervisor, in the email, called the press office’s handling of the matter “a breach of protocol and spoliation 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.”
It is a violation of the Presidential Records Act for anyone to tamper with and spoil an official transcript. Any requested changes are supposed to go through the Stenography Office, and they have no duty to abide by such requests if they believe them to be incorrect. The White House press office changing the transcript over their objections appears to be illegal. That it was done for obviously political reasons to protect not only Joe Biden but the Harris campaign as well, only makes the situation that much worse.
“The move is not only craven, but it also appears to be a violation of federal law, including the Presidential Records Act of 1978,” said the letter signed by Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York, House Republican Conference chairwoman, and James Comer of Kentucky, House oversight committee chairman. “White House staff cannot rewrite the words of the President of the United States to be more politically on message,” the two lawmakers wrote.
Will the Biden-led DOJ push this issue and bring charges? Of course, not. That's not even a question at this point. Should Donald Trump's DOJ, if he were to win the election, push the issue? Absolutely. Democrats have had no mercy on Republicans the last four years, including weaponizing the law in ways it was never meant to be used. The only way that stops is by re-establishing some kind of deterrence.