Former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer facepalmed on Friday as journalist Mark Halperin justified the White House press office reportedly overruling its official stenographers to alter a transcript and cast doubt on President Joe Biden’s “garbage” slur.
Biden on Tuesday referenced a “garbage” joke by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at a former President Donald Trump rally, then added that “the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.” The White House later released a transcript changing “supporters” to “supporter’s,” claiming Biden was addressing Hinchcliffe alone, not Trump voters; Spicer criticized this move on “The Morning Meeting,” but Halperin argued Biden’s statement was “open to interpretation.”
WATCH:
“I’m getting a ton of crap from some folks saying, ‘Oh, my god, you lied, da da da da.’ I never told the White House stenographer to — I mean they went out and said that this was a grammatical mistake and then forced the stenographer to change the transcripts,” Spicer said. “You know, for all the crap that I took and Trump people take, this is them going to the stenographer, who complained and said this isn’t — my job is to write what he says. They changed it. That used to be called lying.”
White House stenographers in their official transcript recorded that Biden had said “supporters,” but the press office published the modified transcript after they “conferred with the president,” according to an internal email The Associated Press obtained. When the lead stenographer found out about the modification, the official wrote that it was “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.”
However, Halperin defended the move.
“I’ll push back on this … So there is a sanctity notion of, you can’t mess with the stenographers, that the political people shouldn’t tell them what to write. But the president’s claiming at least what he said, what he meant,” the journalist said. “And the White House had a political problem and their point is, ‘We talked to the man himself, here’s what he meant.’ It’s not implausible that that’s what he meant to say. It’s not what he said, but it’s not what he meant to say.”
“But that’s not the job of the stenographer. It’s not to interpret you, it’s to write what you said,” Spicer responded. “You don’t get to go back in court and say, ‘Your honor, I meant to say’ — they have a stenographer for a reason.”
Halperin disagreed, saying “You sorta do because it’s open to interpretation. Sean, you can’t hear an apostrophe. You can’t hear an apostrophe, Sean. You can’t. You don’t know whether an apostrophe was uttered or not. You just don’t. It’s not audible.”
Spicer then placed his face into his palm.
“I’ll leave it at this. I wish you guys were around when I was press secretary,” he said. “I mean, this idea of here’s what he might’ve said, here’s what he meant. I was evil and it was horrible … I don’t wanna dwell on it.”
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