Unfortunately, Vice President Kamala Harris’ recent overseas trip to Europe, where she stood on the same stages as world leaders from Poland and Romania, was an absolute disaster from start to finish. Harris’ more notable moments were her nervous cackling when asked a serious question about the level of U.S. commitment to helping Ukrainian refugees and her devolving into incoherent word salads when she got in over her head.
Trey Yingst, a veteran Fox News foreign correspondent, reporting on the ground from the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, even went so far as to describe Harris’ press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda as “detached from the reality on the ground.”
But while Harris is now back home from her European tour, that doesn’t mean the embarrassment for the Biden administration as far as she’s concerned is over. As Legal Insurrection reported over the weekend, during the Democratic National Committee winter meeting in Washington, D.C. Saturday, Harris stood before her fellow Democrats and said that “the United States stands firmly with the Ukrainian people in defense of the NATO Alliance.”
Watch:
The problem here is that Ukraine is not a member of NATO, though they have badly wanted to be. It’s also a significant source of contention for Russian president Vladimir Putin, who, as Axios pointed out, “demanded guarantees that Ukraine would never join NATO” while amassing Russian troops at their border earlier this year, “and invaded after the Western allies refused.”
In other words, as Joe Biden would say, “this is a big f***in’ deal” and it’s imperative that when the United States talks about it that they get it right.
Though Harris left “and” out of her remarks, Fox News added the word in one report they filed, leading to questions as to why they’d see fit to correct a mistake Harris had made, and one worthy of its report:
As it turns out, the likely reason Fox News reported it that way is because that’s how it appeared in the official transcript on the White House’s website (bolded emphasis added):
Russia’s invasion threatens not just Ukraine’s democracy, it threatens democracy and security across Europe. And by extension, when democracy is threatened anywhere, it threatens us all. And the ocean that separates us will not leave us untouched by this aggression.So I will say what I know we all say, and I will say over and over again: The United States stands firmly with the Ukrainian people [and] in defense of the NATO Alliance.
No reputable media outlet should rely solely on White House transcripts for quotes from elected officials, especially when the words appear within brackets, which means something was added in after the fact.
Also, there were videos galore circulating on social media that they could have used to figure out that “and,” a crucial distinction, is not what Harris said despite what was indicated in the transcript, which could only mean one thing: The White House altered the official transcript, which again is a story in and of itself.
In any event, whether the word was left out of the speech that was loaded onto the teleprompter at the time or Harris committed this faux pas all on her own, it’s still another terrible look for the Biden White House at a critical moment in the Ukraine/Russia conflict where our country needs to be putting its best foot forward.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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