As Florida was being targeted by Hurricane Milton, Vice President Kamala Harris also found herself in the crosshairs — this time for a viral hot mic moment.
The clip, which came during a virtual briefing on the Category 3 storm that featured both Harris and President Joe Biden, led many to suspect she was being fed her lines and questions by someone off-screen.
The briefing, which took place early Wednesday afternoon, also included National Weather Service Director Ken Graham, Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell and others.
The major news that came from the media briefing was a rant by the president over claims “the money is needed to — for the — in the — for this crisis is being diverted to migrants.”
“It’s got to stop,” Biden said, according to RealClearPolitics. “In moments like this, there are no red or blue states.”
Whether or not this will stop the back-and-forth over whether federal money is being tied up in places it shouldn’t be thanks to the Biden administration’s border crisis remains to be seen. However, the media briefing also went viral when Harris had a very Biden-esque moment of her own.
While the vice president wasn’t at the White House with Biden, she joined virtually to warn of the dangers of Milton, which eventually hit Florida’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday night, according to The Associated Press.
Just before Harris was set to speak, she could be seen covering her mouth, then saying to someone off-camera, “It’s a live broadcast.”
She then segued into a question for Graham: “Hey, Ken, I have a question for you. You — you mentioned ‘words matter,’ and I know there is a lot of media following this — this briefing. So, there have been — we’ve gone from a Cat 5 to a Cat 4, and the language that a lot of folks have been using is ‘downgrade,’” she said, as per a White House transcript.
The White House transcript, notably, did not include any mention of the “It’s a live broadcast remark.” Instead, it simply said the veep’s remarks were “(Inaudible.)”
Numerous conservatives and conservative accounts on social media — including Trump War Room, an official Trump campaign account on the social media platform X — made note of the gaffe and insinuated that Harris was being given her lines.
“Kamala can be heard telling an aide (who is feeding her questions) that it’s a ‘live broadcast’ before immediately asking the question,” the Trump War Room post stated. “She’s a total fraud.”
That thought was echoed by others:
However, it was unclear whether she was actually being fed the lines.
Regardless, the incident also marked the return of another commonplace element under the Biden administration: The doctoring of official White House transcripts to make either the president or someone in his orbit — in this case, his chosen successor as the Democratic presidential nominee — look more coherent.
While these edits usually involved Biden’s gaffes, one notable example of the compilers cleaning up for Harris came in July 2023, when she told an audience in Baltimore that, “When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water.”
In the transcript, the word “population” is crossed out. The word “pollution” is substituted for it in brackets.
