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

The White House has changed the transcript of a speech Joe Biden gave in Maryland to remove his suggestion that Black people, 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 corporations pay their fair share of taxes and touted his success in creating 13 million jobs.

But during his speech he also made a big mistake and suggested that minorities and veterans were uneducated.

“We’ve seen record lows in unemployment in particular — and I’ve focused on this my entire career — especially among African Americans and Hispanic workers and veterans, you know, the workers without a high school diploma,” he said.

The White House, which publishes official transcripts of his speeches, including the “umms” and “ahhs,” later corrected his words in an unusual manner.

In the transcript, he says unemployment has decreased “especially for African Americans and Hispanic workers and veterans, you know, and for the workers without high school diplomas.”

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

On Monday, he used the anniversary of September 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, DC on September 12, 2001.

“Some said yesterday and today everything has changed for America,” the then-Senator from Delaware said from the Senate a day after the attacks.

“I pray that isn’t true. I pray this isn’t true… The one thing we can’t allow to change are the values ​​this country was built on.

“Because if that happened, they could declare victory, a real victory.”

Biden on Monday also embellished his memories of the fateful day, claiming he saw a “fireball” at the Pentagon on September 11, describing it in his book as “a haze of brown smoke.”

Biden, on his way home from the G20 summit in Vietnam, spoke to troops in Anchorage, Alaska, on Monday about his memories from 22 years ago, with typical Biden exaggeration.

“I remember the plume of fire that shot into the sky at the Pentagon as I got off the Amtrak train on my way to work in the United States Senate,” he said.

Still, he wrote in his autobiography that the scene was considerably less dramatic: “I could see a cloud of brown smoke hanging in the otherwise crystal clear sky behind the Capitol dome.”

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

In his 2007 book Promises to Keep, Biden wrote that he was in Washington DC 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, quoted by The New York Post, supported the version in his biography, beginning: “Delaware Senator Joe Biden spent Wednesday exactly where he wanted: in the U.S. Senate.”

Archived CSPAN footage also showed Biden speaking from the Senate floor 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 chairman in 2001, has spoken extensively about 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.

“Thirty years ago today, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and started discussions about apartheid,” he told the crowd.

‘I had the great honor of meeting him. “I had the great honor to be arrested on the streets of Soweto along with our UN Ambassador in an attempt to meet him on Robben Island.”

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

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

“When I said arrested, I meant I couldn’t move,” Biden said after recounting what happened to him.

‘The police wouldn’t let me go with them. I wasn’t arrested, I was stopped. I couldn’t move where I wanted to go.”

He did not specify whether that 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.

In September 2021, he told Jewish leaders he remembered “spending time at” and “going to” the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh after the 2018 massacre of 11 people there: it later emerged he was never there been.

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