Shortly after Katie Britt delivered her “parody-level terrible” State of the Union response this month, fellow Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville attempted to defend his colleague and the kitchen-table nightmare that had just occurred by telling reporters: “She was picked as a housewife, not just a senator—somebody who sees it from a different perspective…. I thought she did a good job.” This week he returned to the subject to claim that it wasn’t actually Britt’s fault that she told a very big lie about a sex trafficking victim’s ordeal in falsely implying Joe Biden was to blame; rather, it was on the Republican brass for failing to fact-check her, he said.
Speaking to CNN about the criticism Britt has faced for the extremely misleading story, Tuberville told Manu Raju: “Yeah, well, that obviously didn’t go over too well. I would think that our leadership would have vetted that a little bit more, ’cause I would imagine they helped her with that.” As a reminder, Britt’s remarks included a vivid account of a sex trafficking victim who was brutally raped after being trafficked by Mexican drug cartels, which the senator implied was a result of Biden’s border policies. Only, as the victim herself has said, the abuse took place between 2004 and 2008—when George W. Bush was president—and she was trafficked by a “professional pimp,” not drug dealers. While Tuberville blamed leadership for not catching the lie before Britt went live, he insisted the story “was a good point of emphasis of what really goes on from the border. And I think that’s what she was trying to get over more than anything.”
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Britt also appeared on TV recently to defend herself and her misleading account, telling Fox News: “I…said, in [Biden’s] first 100 days, he had 94 executive actions, and those executive actions didn’t just create the crisis—they invited it.” Neither Britt nor Tuberville appears to have commented on the fact that she has reportedly recounted the deceptive sex trafficking story—and used it to attack Biden—on multiple occasions.
In a fundraising email sent last week, Britt wrote about the negative press she has received: “My heart is broken. Not just for myself, but for my children, your children and the ENTIRE next generation of Americans. Why? Because I didn’t prepare a 20-minute speech and stand up to Biden in front of millions of Americans for ME. I did it for them, for YOU and your children, Friend!” She also claimed her detractors are only criticizing her because “they can’t handle the truth.”