Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) defended Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) Tuesday after he was asked to respond to criticism of the human trafficking story she shared during her response to President Joe Biden‘s State of the Union address.
“We were proud of Sen. Britt, thought she did a great job, and I have zero criticism of her performance,” McConnell said when asked at his weekly press conference about reports that Britt misled the public since the harrowing tale she shared did not take place during Biden’s presidency.
“I thought it was really outstanding,” McConnell added, without weighing in on the controversy.
In her response to the State of the Union address, Britt described how she met a woman at the U.S.-Mexico border who shared her story of being raped thousands of times in a sex trafficking operation run by the cartels. Reports later found the victim had spoken publicly in the past about the abuse occurring in Mexico when President George W. Bush was president, and not during the Biden administration, which Britt implied during her speech.
“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,” Britt said during the speech last Thursday from her home in Alabama. “President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace.”
In a recent interview with CNN, the woman at the center of the story, Karla Jacinto, criticized Britt for using her story in what she called a misleading way.
“I hardly ever cooperate with politicians because it seems to me that they only want an image. They only want a photo, and that, to me, is not fair,” Jacinto said in an interview Sunday.
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Britt’s office also continues to defend the senator’s characterization of the story in the wake of the dramatic speech that was quickly parodied as a “Scary Mom” on Saturday Night Live.
“The Biden Administration’s policies — the policies in this country that the President falsely claims are humane — have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic level of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border,” Britt spokesman Sean Ross said in a statement. “Along that journey, children, women, and men are being subjected to gut-wrenching, heartbreaking horrors in our own backyard.”
