U.S. Senator Katie Britt (R-Ala.) speaks at a press conference on U.S. border security
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The White House on Sunday lashed out at Republican Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, saying she misrepresented her comments on sex trafficking to attack President Joe Biden’s border policies.
“Instead of spinning more debunked lies to oppose the toughest bipartisan border legislation in modern history, Senator Britt should stop choosing human smuggling,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement. and fentanyl traffickers, not our national security and Border Patrol coalition.”
The White House has joined Britt’s critics. The Alabama senator has been widely criticized, including by some on the right, for choosing to use his speech as a rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address. kitchen and for her Very dramatic The tone of voice when speaking.
Britt faces greater criticism after independent journalist Jonathan Katz First it was revealed that she was repeating anecdotes about sex trafficking victims from 20 years ago and presented them as a result of current government border policies.
Britt’s spokesman Sean Ross on Saturday denied any allegations of false statements.
“The story Senator Britt told is 100 percent correct,” Ross said in a statement to CNBC on Saturday. “But now more than ever, the innocent victims of this disgusting, cruel trafficking operation by the cartels are many.”
Britt doubled down on her denials on Sunday. She argued that she made clear in her rebuttal that the women at the center of her comments had experienced sex trafficking as children decades ago, something that had not happened under the Biden administration.
“I said it very clearly, I spoke to a woman who told me she was trafficked when she was 12 years old. So I didn’t say teenagers. I didn’t say young women – one adult woman, one The woman was trafficked when she was 12 years old,” Britt said on “Fox News Sunday.”
In her State of the Union rebuttal, Britt mentioned “a woman” who had been “sex trafficked by a drug cartel since she was 12 years old.”
During her speech, she did not clarify that the crime occurred decades ago or that the woman was no longer being sex trafficked.
The victim, Karla Jacinto Romero, was in sex trafficking in Mexico from 2004 to 2008. Katz and a group of online commentators lambasted Britt for describing Jacinto Romero’s story as if it happened in Biden’s America.
Britt said Sunday she was using the story to contrast Biden’s first 100 days in office with her own, during which she said she visited the border three times to meet with drug cartel victims.
NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” parodied Britt’s speech Saturday, calling out her misleading use of the Jacinto Romero story: “Be assured that in addition to the year, where it happened and who was at the time of it, Outside of the president, every detail about the incident is true,” said actress Scarlett Johansson, who plays Britt in the parody.
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