‘It’ll be fine’: Katie Britt says Mike Johnson reassured her ahead of SOTU rebuttal
The speech has opened the previously little-known Alabama senator up to strong criticism.
“It’ll be fine.”
That’s the message House Speaker Mike Johnson had for Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) when he called to offer her the chance to deliver the Republican rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech last week, she says.
“‘People are going to tell you horror stories about all of these things that happened and people’s career being blown up over it,’” Britt, who is still recovering from the blowback over the content and delivery of her speech, recalled Johnson telling her during an interview on Sen. Ted Cruz’s podcast released Wednesday. “And he’s like, ‘It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine,’” she said.
The speech has opened the previously little-known Alabama senator up to strong criticism — particularly as it emerged that details of a graphic sex-trafficking story Britt used to highlight Biden’s immigration policies occurred in Mexico during President George W. Bush’s administration.
Appearing on the podcast, Britt accused the media of failing to cover the underlying story.
“They want to silence a conservative woman for speaking out on this topic. They don’t want to bring light and help the women who are actually being trafficked,” Britt told Cruz. The media “didn’t do their homework,” she added.
Former Associated Press reporter Jonathan M. Katz first drew attention to the cloudy details of the story in a roughly seven-minute TikTok video, indicating the woman in question was Karla Jacinto Romero, who met with Britt and two other senators in January 2023. Romero testified before Congress back in 2015 about her experiences a decade earlier with sex trafficking in Mexico. Romero appeared on CNN Monday to slam the Alabama senator for inaccurately using her story.
“In fact 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,” Romero said.
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‘It'll be fine’: Katie Britt says Mike Johnson reassured her ahead of SOTU rebuttal https://t.co/PLgdrlhqxP
— POLITICO (@politico) March 13, 2024
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