Fact Checking CNN's Purported "Fact Check" of Senator Katie Britt's State of the Union Response
Katie Britt's SOTU response was fair game to criticize, of course, but CNN completely lost its mind, made things up, then tried to use a victim of horrific sex trafficking to discredit Britt
By now, you’ve probably seen Republican Senator Katie Britt’s response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, either in full or in part–or, potentially, as portrayed by Scarlett Johansson on Saturday Night Live.
It’s unclear to me why anyone would deliver the SOTU response, since something almost always goes horribly wrong–but Britt, a freshman senator, is already discussed by some as a potential running mate for Donald Trump this November, so it’s logical that she’d want to introduce herself to a national audience, and to show Trump and his team how she performs under pressure.
Well, it’s not exactly bad if you’re a Republican to have SNL and CNN spend days attacking you, which is exactly what’s happened to Britt. Johansson’s impression of her actually looked spot-on, but CNN’s pushback against her has outright left planet earth for a universe of falsehoods that the network seemingly made up out of nowhere.
This isn’t to say that some on the GOP side weren’t critical of how Britt delivered her remarks, but CNN’s temper tantrum is so divorced from reality that it even contradicts some of its own reporting.
Much of the CNN coverage centers around an absolutely horrific anecdote that Britt shared:
When I first took office, I did something different. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas, where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. 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.
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.
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.
President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace. It’s despicable. And it’s almost entirely preventable.
Some important context is useful here. As Britt said, one of her first actions as senator was to go to the southern border with several other Republican senator, where their agenda included a round table about cartel activity, which clearly stuck with her enough that she referred back to this during her State of the Union response. The entire segment is worth watching before continuing to read.
It’s important to both note what Britt said here–and what she didn’t say. Does she say that she met one-on-one with this woman [NOTE: whose name is Karla, and those close to her say that she prefers not having her last name used when possible; I’d further add that Britt never used this woman’s name, but that was added after her speech by the media in an attempt to discredit what she said]? No, she says she spoke with her. Does she say that Karla was trafficked by drug cartels? No, she says “cartels.” As CNN noted elsewhere, Karla in fact previously discussed falling “into the hands of human traffickers.” Does she say that Karla’s horrible saga took place during Joe Biden’s presidency? No, she said she met with a “woman” who had unspeakable things happen to her “starting at age 12.” I know that, if you are a Supreme Court justice, it’s hard to know what a woman is, but 12 year old girls are not women.
Simple math dictates that Britt did not even imply this took place during Biden’s presidency. Karla’s saga took place during President George W. Bush’s administration, but it’s impossible to deny that Biden’s policies did anything but exacerbate our immigration crisis–a point Britt noted. “We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days,” she said.
Finally, did she say that Karla’s awful years in captivity took place in America? Not quite; she said that “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.” In this case, I’ll give it to CNN–you could take her words as implying that these horrific crimes took place in America.
You can probably guess where I’m going with all of this. Despite the obvious facts as laid out above, CNN straight up falsely claimed that Britt “stated” that she met “one-on-one” with Karla and implied that both Britt said Karla was trafficked by “drug cartels,” which she did not say, and that she suggested this occurred during Biden’s presidency, which again, she never said.
The irony to me is that Rafael Romo, the author of CNN’s purported fact check of Senator Britt, has covered Karla’s life story in great detail in recent years. In one harrowing piece, in which Karla talks about being raped 43,200 times, Romo notes that “human trafficking has become a trade so lucrative and prevalent, that it knows no borders and links towns in central Mexico with cities like Atlanta and New York.”
It’s horrifying: “She says up to 30 men a day, seven days a week, for the best part of four years – 43,200.” Karla, who thought she had met the love of her life, was forced into years of prostitution by the man she thought would be her boyfriend–but who was, in actuality, a pimp for an international organized crime ring, as Fox News reported in 2015.
There’s plenty that can be both mocked and fact-checked about Senator Britt’s State of the Union response–in fact, this is an annual tradition that politicians of both parties are subject to. Everyone remembers Marco Rubio’s unquenchable thirst, some people remember Governor Kathleen Sebelius’s lackluster response to Bush 43, and even Joe Biden gave some State of the Union responses during the Ronald Reagan era.
But for CNN to peddle straight up lies, and then to run to a victim of sex trafficking to have her attack a Republican senator for things she never even said is quite pathetic.
Here’s Britt’s take on the whole saga: “It’s past time for the media to stop covering for Joe Biden’s reelection campaign and start talking about the immense, very real human suffering that’s occurring right now. The cartels are making record-shattering profits from human trafficking. Historic numbers of migrants are dying at the border. And between brutal murders and fentanyl poisonings, far too many Americans are being killed. That’s the story the media doesn’t want to tell—and now they’re trying to silence me for telling it.”