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Joe Biden’s unscripted denunciation of Donald Trump’s supporters as “garbage” threw a monkey wrench into the last week of Kamala Harris’s campaign. The White House scrambled to minimize the damage, ultimately coming up with the idea of adding an apostrophe so that Biden referred to Trump’s “supporter’s” as garbage–meaning just Tony Hinchcliffe.
No one who saw the video was fooled, and the White House stenographers were offended:
The White House press office engaged in a “breach of protocol” when it altered the transcript of President Biden’s “garbage” remark about Donald Trump’s supporters Tuesday over the objection of the administration’s stenographers’ office, according to an internal email.
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The White House press office, however, added an apostrophe to “supporter’s,” suggesting that Biden was only attacking the comedian.“If there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently,” the supervisor of the White House stenographers fumed in an email to the press office, obtained by the Associated Press.
“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 missive continued.
The supervisor further declared that the way the situation was handled amounted to “a breach of protocol and spoilation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.”
White House stenographers are widely considered by reporters who cover the executive branch to be very professional and accurate with their transcriptions. It is highly unusual for the press office to dispute what the stenographers heard.
A “spoliation of transcript integrity”–what a marvelous phrase. In the broader context of Biden administration outrages it is relatively minor, but it still deserves to be noted.