White House ALTERS Biden transcript to clean up gaffe implying African American and Hispanic workers don’t have ‘high school diplomas’

The White House edited the transcript of a speech Joe Biden delivered in Maryland to remove his suggestion that blacks, Hispanics and veterans were unlikely to have a high school diploma.

The gaffe-prone president spoke about the economy Thursday at Prince George’s Community College in Largo.

Biden said he was proud to make big businesses pay their fair share of taxes and touted his success in creating 13 million jobs.

But during his speech, he also made a major mistake by implying that minorities and veterans were uneducated.

“We’ve seen record levels of unemployment, particularly – and I’ve focused on this throughout my career – particularly among African American and Hispanic workers and veterans, you know, workers without a college degree. “high school,” he said.

The White House, which releases official transcripts of his speeches, including the “umms” and “ahhs,” later corrected his remarks, in an unusual move.

In the transcript, he reportedly said unemployment had fallen “especially for African-American and Hispanic workers and veterans, you know, and for workers without a high school diploma.”

The president is well known for his slips, his exaggerations and his embellishments of stories.

On Monday, he used the anniversary of 9/11 to claim that he remembered “standing there the next day and looking at the building” in New York – when in fact he was in Washington, D.C. , September 12, 2001.

“Some people said yesterday and today everything changed for America,” the then-Delaware senator said from the Senate floor the day after the attacks.

“I pray that’s not true. I pray that’s not true… The one thing we cannot allow to change are the values ​​this country is built on.

“Because if that were to happen, then they could claim victory, a real victory.”

Biden also embellished his memories of that fateful day on Monday, claiming to have seen a “ball of fire” at the Pentagon on September 11, while in his book he describes it as “a brown haze of smoke.”

Joe Biden is seen Monday, the 22nd anniversary of 9/11, speaking to troops in Anchorage, Alaska. He is the first president not to celebrate his birthday at the scene of one of three plane crashes.

Planes crash into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

Joe Biden speaking to reporters outside Congress on September 11, 2001.

Biden, seen on September 11, 2001, was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time of the attacks.

Speaking to troops in Anchorage, Alaska, on Monday as he returned home from the G20 summit in Vietnam, Biden told them about his memories from 22 years ago, with typical Biden exaggeration.

“The plume of fire that shot into the sky at the Pentagon — I remember seeing it as I was getting off the Amtrak train on my way to work at the U.S. Senate,” he said.

Yet in his autobiography, he writes that the scene was decidedly less dramatic: “I could see a brown haze of smoke hanging in the otherwise crystal clear sky beyond the Capitol dome. »

Biden, who at the time was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was photographed on September 11 speaking to reporters outside the Capitol.

In his 2007 book Promises to Keep, Biden wrote about being in Washington, D.C., the day after the attack: “I went back to the Capitol the next morning,” he noted.

A Gannett News Wire report from September 12, 2001, cited by The New York Post, ” confirmed the version in his biography, beginning with: “Delaware Senator Joe Biden spent Wednesday exactly where he wanted: in the US Senate.

Archived CSPAN footage also showed Biden speaking from the Senate on September 12, 2001, as he and 99 other senators denounced the cowardly attacks.

The president, who joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the age of 32 and became its chairman in 2001, has frequently spoken of his “arrest” by South African police.

On February 11, 2020, Biden told an audience in South Carolina that he had been arrested in the African country.

“Today, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela came out of prison and began discussions about apartheid,” he told the crowd.

“I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being stopped with our UN ambassador in the streets of Soweto to try to see him on Robben Island.

Biden did not specify the year, but was in South Africa in 1977.

Biden is seen in December 2013 visiting a memorial to Nelson Mandela outside the South African embassy. Mandela died on December 5, 2013 at the age of 95.

In late February 2020, amid intense interest over whether he had actually been arrested, Biden told CNN that he was not.

“When I said stopped, I meant I wasn’t able to move,” Biden said after recounting what happened to him.

“The cops wouldn’t let me go with them. I wasn’t arrested, I was arrested. I wasn’t able to go where I wanted to go.

He did not specify whether this meeting took place in Lesotho or South Africa.

Biden has a long history of exaggerating his own biography.

He claimed in January of this year, while speaking to students at historically black colleges in Atlanta, that he had been arrested during civil rights protests – a claim for which there is no evidence. no proof.

In September 2021, he told Jewish leaders that he remembered “hanging out” and “going” to the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh after the mass murder of 11 people in 2018: he It later emerged that he had never been there.

The White House said he was referring to a phone call and misspoke.