Post by Panama pfRedd on Mar 10, 2024 11:27:09 GMT -5
READ: Critics tear into Britt for using 20-year-old story to highlight Biden's border crisis during Republican rebuttal to Biden's State of the Union
By KATELYN CARALLE, U.S. POLITICAL REPORTER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA and DOMINIC YEATMAN FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 10:59 EDT, 10 March 2024 | UPDATED: 11:20 EDT, 10 March 2024
Sen. Katie Britt defended the anecdote she used to condemn President Joe Biden's border policies – even though it happened 20 years ago.
The Alabama senator said she didn't mean to imply that the child trafficking incident happened under the current president's watch, but wanted to compare the policies that lead to horrific things like this.
Britt, 42, delivered the Republican rebuttal to Biden's State of the Union address on Thursday evening from her kitchen table in Birmingham, Alabama where she got emotional while she tore into the president for his lax immigration and border policies.
But her emotive story of a 12-year-old trafficking victim used to illustrate the border crisis under Joe Biden sparked outrage after reports emerged the ordeal actually took place in Mexico when George W Bush was president in 2004.
Speaking to Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream, Britt confirmed the story was old and said she never said it was current.
Asked to clarify if the story happened under Biden's administration, Britt replied: 'Well, I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12. So I didn't say a teenager, I didn't say a young woman. A grown woman – a woman – when she was trafficked when she was 12.'
But her response comes after the junior Alabama senator was already excoriating for using the two-decades-old anecdote.
'I don't know what the F I saw,' former Fox host Megyn Kelly said, 'she embarrassed herself, she embarrassed Republicans, and she embarrassed women.'
Another critic of Britt, writer Nick Knudsen, said she is exposed as a 'lying sack of s***.'
The GOP rising star chose to centerpiece the border crisis aspect of her rebuttal around 'a woman who shared her story with me', after they spoke in Del Rio, Texas .
'She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped,' Britt told viewers.
'The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoebox of a room, and they sent men through that door, over and over again, for hours and hours on end,' she recalled. 'We wouldn't be OK with this happening in a third-world country. This is the United States of America, and it's past time we start acting like it.'
Former AP journalist Jonathan Katz was among the first to realize that Britt was speaking about the case of Karla Jacinto Romero, who was ensnared by a pimp after her mother threw her out of the family home in Mexico City in 2004.
But Britt said she wanted to tell the story to 'bring some light' to the issue of human trafficking and drug cartels 'profiting off of women.'
She hopes 'the media actually decides to cover' that aspect of the crisis and not focus on the timeline of events.
Britt's impassioned 18-minute speech infuriated liberals and was ridiculed by Scarlett Johansen who parodied it on SNL where she was derided as the 'craziest b**ch in the Target parking lot'.
Karla Jacinto Romero was forced into prostitution for four years before escaping and becoming a powerful and high-profile advocate for child sex victims, testifying to Congress in 2015 and meeting the Pope.
'Britt tells it like she was sitting by the banks of the Rio Grande holding her hand, getting her to tell the story she won't tell anyone else,' Katz remarked.
'This senator has gone around telling the story over and over again as if she was describing actions that took place on or even near the US border during Joe Biden's presidency.
'It goes beyond misleading.'
'It just looks like she got on national television and lied about something really horrific and really important for her own personal and her party's political gain.'
Britt traveled to the border at the Del Rio Sector in Texas in January 2023 with fellow Republican Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, according to a news release issued then from Hyde-Smith's office.
'The Senators held a roundtable with former Mexican Congresswoman Rosa María de la Garza, Fox News Contributor Sara Carter and Karla Jacinto Romero, a survivor of human trafficking,' the news release said.
'The Senators learned about cartel activity in Mexico and the work being done to rescue victims of human trafficking.'
Britt, 42, has made immigration one of her top issues in her first years in the Senate, and Republicans have seized on a surge of immigrants entering the country during Biden's term to attack the president.
Donald Trump had endorsed Britt in her 2022 primary after flipping on former Rep. Mo Brooks, who he'd first endorsed.
Britt is married to former NFL player Wesley Britt and they have two children, and Speaker Mike Johnson noted Britt is the 'only current Republican mom of school-aged kids serving in the Senate.'
The youngest Republican woman to be elected to the Senate, drew praise from some for her performance including Texas Senator Ted Cruz
'Congratulations to my friend and colleague @senkatiebritt for showing Texans and Americans what Republicans really stand for—a strong economy, secure border, and good jobs for every American,' he posted.
'She was absolutely spot on and delivered a dynamite response,' wrote Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.
But former GOP Congressman Joe Walsh called her remarks 'despicable'.
'She sat in front of the American people and she lied to us about a very serious problem,' he told CNN.
'It's very clear to me,' Katz concluded, that Britt was 'trying to create an association in the people's mind between Joe Biden, the border, Mexicans or people of Latin descent, and sexual violence.
'That's what she's going for and she's doing it on the basis of what you can only say is just an out and out lie.'
Katz's rapid rebuttal earned more than 150,000 likes after he posted it on TikTok.
'Holy moly. This is worth every minute,' said writer Nick Knudsen.
'Jonathan Katz exposes Katie Britt as a lying sack of s***.'
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