AP delivers scoop on altered transcript of Biden’s ‘garbage’ comments just days before election with immediate impact

By Aamer Madhani and Zeke Miller

It’s challenging to score a major political scoop in the final days of a presidential election, but AP White House reporters Aamer Madhani and Zeke Miller had much of Washington’s journalism world scrambling to catch up with them on a story just five days out from Election Day.

It started when Madhani got a text from a U.S. government official who had been helpful in the past asking if they could meet after work. Madhani was in Las Vegas to cover Kamala Harris, so the two connected by phone instead that night.

The source revealed that the White House press shop had altered the official transcript of comments by President Joe Biden in which the president had appeared to suggest that Trump “supporters” were “garbage.” Biden later insisted he had said “supporter’s,” indicating that he meant the word “garbage” to apply only to the individual who made a noxious statement about Puerto Rico at a Trump rally, and not to all Trump supporters. The change in punctuation shifted the meaning of the president’s remark to align with what Biden said meant.

The source indicated that they came to the AP with the story because of the importance of the AP brand and because Madhani had pressed White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre about Biden’s “garbage” comments during a White House briefing the previous day.

The official supplied details about the dispute between press aides and the director of the White House stenographers’ unit. It was a solid start, but Madhani needed more. Miller joined the hunt and soon came up with a second source.

Then Madhani went back to his original source to firm up a detail and the source shared an email from the director of stenographers to top White House press officials that laid out all the details in print.

That email bulletproofed their scoop.

Per Parse.ly, the story was the AP’s top 5 performer for the entire week, with 377,000 page views. Virtually every major news organization scrambled to match or pick up the late-breaking story, all of them prominently crediting the AP.

In additional to the wall-to-wall citations in the press, the next day, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and other White House officials were pressed by multiple news organizations to explain the alteration. The story also prompted the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee to send a letter to the White House seeking information about the transcript dispute, citing the AP report in its footnotes.

For exposing a White House attempt to alter the record on an official transcript, an attempt that caused a political brouhaha of its own, Madhani and Miller earn this week’s Best of AP — First Winner.

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