(Headline USA) White House press officials altered the official transcript of a call in which President Joe Biden compared millions of U.S. citizens to “garbage” due to their support of GOP presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump.
The potentially illegal alteration drew 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.
It is one of several instances in which the Biden administration has been suspected or accused of making stealth-edits to the transcripts, including some that it has previously acknowledged.
Biden created an uproar earlier this week with his remarks to Latino activists after comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to the U.S. island territory of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” during Trump’s weekend rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
Several reports, including those of government agencies and environmental activist organizations, have previously called attention to the island’s waste-management issues, stemming, in part, from a lack of landfills and the aftermath of two major hurricanes.
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.”
WATCH: President Joe Biden: "The only garbage I see floating out there is [Trump] supporters." pic.twitter.com/9teSUOytqC
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) October 30, 2024
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 to White House communications director Ben LaBolt, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and other press and communications officials.
The authenticity of the email, obtained by the AP, was confirmed by two government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
“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.
According to the email, the press office had asked the stenographers to quickly produce a transcript of the call amid the firestorm.
The two-person stenography team on duty that evening—a “typer” and “proofer”—said any edit to the transcript would have to be approved by their supervisor, the head of stenographers’ office.
The supervisor was not immediately available to review the audio, but the press office went ahead and published the altered transcript on the White House website and distributed it to press and on social media in an effort to tamp down the story.
White House senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates also posted on X the edited version of the quote and wrote that Biden was referring ”to the hateful rhetoric at the Madison Square Garden rally as ‘garbage.’”
.@POTUS referred to the hateful rhetoric at the Madison Square Garden rally as ‘garbage.’”
Transcript: pic.twitter.com/oBqWHn8xYL
— Andrew Bates (@AndrewJBates46) October 30, 2024
The press office’s handling of the matter constituted “a breach of protocol and spoliation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices,” the stenographers’ supervisor said in the email.
“If there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently,” the email added. “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’s near-simultaneous speech outside the White House, in which she called for treating Americans of differing ideologies with respect—despite having herself spent much of the past two weeks calling Trump a “Nazi” and a “fascist.”
The Trump campaign quickly moved to fundraise off the Biden gaffe, and the next day, Trump himself held a photo op inside a garbage truck to try to capitalize on Biden’s criticism.
Without mentioning or condemning the specific remarks, Harris on Wednesday sought to distance herself from Biden. “Let me be clear,” she told reporters, “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who [sic] they vote for.”
Biden likewise attempted to do damage control via his personal X account, claiming that he he was not calling all Trump supporters garbage but was referring specifically to the “hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally.”
Earlier today I referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump's supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage—which is the only word I can think of to describe it. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable. That's all I meant to say. The…
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 30, 2024
The supervisor declined to comment to The AP and referred questions about the matter to the White House press office.
Asked to comment, Bates did not address the alteration of the transcript and said: “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.”
House Republicans, meanwhile, were debating launching an investigation into the matter. House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., and House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., on Wednesday accused White House staff of “releasing a false transcript” of Biden’s remarks.
In a letter to White House counsel Ed Siskel on Wednesday, they called on the administration to retain documents and internal communications related to Biden’s remarks and the release of the transcript.
“White House staff cannot rewrite the words of the President of the United States to be more politically on message,” the lawmakers wrote to Siskel.
Stefanik and Comer said the action could be in violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978.
That same act was at the heart of the Florida lawfare case against Trump, in which the Justice Department claimed that Trump had mishandled classified documents, while his defense maintained that he had the authority to retain the records from his administration as his own.
The case was dismissed after Judge Aileen Cannon determined that special counsel Jack Smith had been illegitimately appointed.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
