U.S. Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) speaks during a press conference on U.S. border security
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The White House criticized the senator on Sunday. Katie BrittR-Al., for distorting his comments on sex trafficking to attack the president Joe Bidenthe country’s border policy.
“Instead of telling more debunked lies to justify his opposition to the toughest bipartisan border legislation in modern history, Senator Britt should stop choosing human smugglers and fentanyl traffickers over our National Security and Border Patrol Union,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.
The White House joined the chorus of criticism of Britt. The Alabama senator was widely criticized, including by some on the right, for choosing to rebut Biden’s comments. State of the Union of her kitchen and for her often theatrical tone during the speech.
Britt received even more heat after independent journalist Jonathan Katz first denounced 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, on Saturday denied any allegations of misrepresentation.
“The story Senator Britt told was 100 percent correct,” Ross said in a statement to CNBC on Saturday. “But there are more innocent victims than ever before of this kind of disgusting and brutal trafficking perpetrated by the cartels.”
Britt doubled down on his denial on Sunday. She argued that in her rebuttal, she made it clear that the woman who was the subject of her comments had been a victim of sex trafficking decades earlier during her childhood, and that this had not happened under the Biden administration.
“I made it very clear that I spoke to a woman who told me she was trafficked when she was 12. So I didn’t say a teenager. I didn’t I didn’t say a young woman – an adult woman, a woman who was trafficked when she was 12 years old,” Britt said on “Fox News Sunday.”
In her State of the Union rebuttal, Britt refers to “a woman” who “had been a victim of sex trafficking by the cartels from the age of 12.”
During her speech, she did not clarify that the crime happened decades ago and that the woman was no longer a victim of sex trafficking.
The victim, Karla Jacinto Romero, was a victim of sex trafficking from 2004 to 2008 in Mexico. Katz and a chorus of online critics blasted Britt for presenting the Jacinto Romero story as if it happened in the United States on Biden’s watch.
Britt said Sunday she was using the story to compare Biden’s first 100 days with her own first 100 days in office, during which she said she went to the border three times to meet with cartel victims drug.
NBC’s Saturday Night Live spoofed Britt’s speech Saturday, pointing out his misleading use of the Jacinto Romero story: “Rest assured that every detail is real except the year, when it took place and who was president when this happened,” actress Scarlett Johansson said. playing Britt in the parody.
Disclosure: Comcast’s NBCUniversal is the parent company of NBC and CNBC.
