Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) defended Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) on Sunday after her infamous SOTU reply, claiming she was “thrown to the wolves” by the Republican Party following her poorly received speech.
In a fiery thread posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, Roy took issue with Republican leadership, which he described as “SwampGOP” who “doesn't get it, as evidenced by the SOTU debacle.”
He continued in one reply, describing leadership as “Uniparty, establishment, swamp, beltway elite, ruling class… pick your poison,” he added. “All true.”
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He criticized GOP “powers-that-be” for choosing Britt to make the important speech despite her lack of experience, writing leadership threw “a freshman Senator to the wolves by asking her to give the rebuttal knowing she had not yet given even a Senate speech.”
Britt was widely criticized for using a harrowing story of a 12-year-old human trafficking victim during her speech, a story she implied had occurred during the Biden administration when in fact it did not happen in the U.S.—or during the last decade.
Independent journalist Jonathan Katz was the first to fact check the anecdote in a TikTok video Friday. When quizzed by Fox News about the issue on Sunday, Britt dodged criticism and used the opportunity to criticize Biden Administration policy.
Roy on Sunday slammed his party for failing to properly prepare Britt, claiming no one bothered “fact-checking the speech to help protect her from making an error with an outdated anecdote & thus allow radical progressive democrats to make THAT the story rather than their dangerous, purposeful open border policies endangering Americans.”
Without naming anyone specifically, he raged at GOP members who sat “silently & let the world pile on Sen. Britt (whose sin is not the speech, but ever siding with fools running #SwampGOP),” he added.
“Want change? PRIMARIES,” he concluded.
The White House on Sunday took Britt to task for the misleading immigration comments, with White House Spokesman Andrew Bates telling NBC: “Instead of telling more debunked lies to justify opposing the toughest bipartisan border legislation in modern history, Senator Britt should stop choosing human smugglers and fentanyl traffickers over our national security and the Border Patrol Union.”
Immediately after her controversial speech, a GOP strategist told The Daily Beast that, “everyone’s fucking losing it...It’s one of our biggest disasters ever.”
