US Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) speaks at a press conference on border security in the US
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The White House on Sunday sharply criticized Sen. Katie Britt, R-Al., for misrepresenting her comments on sex trafficking to attack President Joe Biden’s border policies.
“Instead of spreading more debunked lies to justify opposition to the toughest bipartisan border legislation in modern history, Senator Britt should stop prioritizing human smugglers and fentanyl traffickers over our national security and the Border Patrol Union,” said Andrew Bates, White House spokesman said in a statement.
The White House joined a chorus of Britt critics. The Alabama senator was widely criticized, including by some on the right, for choosing to deliver her rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union from her kitchen and for her often histrionic tone during the speech.
Britt became even angrier after independent journalist Jonathan Katz first exposed her for recycling a 20-year-old anecdote about a sex trafficking victim and portraying it as the result of the current administration’s border policies.
Sean Ross, Britt’s spokesman, denied any allegations of misrepresentation on Saturday.
“The story Senator Britt told was 100% accurate,” Ross said in a statement to CNBC on Saturday. “But there are now more innocent victims of this despicable, brutal human trafficking by the cartels than ever before.”
On Sunday, Britt doubled down on that denial. She argued that she made clear in her rebuttal that the woman at the center of her comments had been a victim of sex trafficking decades earlier in her childhood and that this did not happen during the Biden administration.
“I made it very clear that I spoke to a woman who told me how she was trafficked when she was 12 years old. So I wasn’t talking about a teenager. “I wasn’t talking about a young woman – an adult woman, a woman who was trafficked when she was 12,” Britt said on “Fox News Sunday.”
In her State of the Union rebuttal, Britt refers to “a woman” who “has been a victim of sex trafficking by the cartels since she was 12.”
During the speech, she did not make it clear that the crime occurred decades ago and the woman is no longer a victim of sex trafficking.
The victim, Karla Jacinto Romero, experienced sex trafficking in Mexico from 2004 to 2008. Katz and a chorus of online critics criticized Britt for portraying Jacinto Romero’s story as if it had happened in the United States under Biden’s watch.
Britt said Sunday that she was using the story to compare Biden’s first 100 days to her own first 100 days in office, during which she said she visited the border three times to meet drug cartel victims.
NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” spoofed Britt’s speech on Saturday, pointing out that she used the Jacinto Romero story misleadingly: “Rest assured that every detail about it is true except the year it took place and who was president was when it happened,” said actress Scarlett Johansson, who plays Britt in the parody.
Disclosure: Comcast’s NBCUniversal is the parent company of NBC and CNBC.
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2024-03-10 16:51:54
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