Biden says hurricane relief workers received death penalties in latest embarrassing gaffe

WASHINGTON — President Biden mistakenly said Thursday that hurricane relief workers “received death penalties” as the result of misinformation — when he meant to say death threats.The retiring 81-year-old president made the error twice when speaking for the first time about the impact of Hurricane Milton striking Florida overnight.“Our fellow Americans are putting their lives on the line to do this dangerous work and receive death penalties — some received death penalties yesterday as a result of recklessly irresponsible, relentless disinformation and outright lies that continue to flow,” Biden said.Biden and fellow Democrats have broadly dismissed criticism of the federal response to the earlier Hurricane Helene — the deadliest to hit the US since Katrina in 2005 — as misinformation.The president also accused his predecessor, Donald Trump, of being a chief culprit in spreading wrong information.“Mr.President Trump, former President Trump, get a life, man!” Biden said Thursday.“Help these people.”“The public will hold him accountable,” the president said, “you better in the press hold him accountable, because you know the truth.”Biden and Trump, 78, the Republican presidential nominee in the Nov.

5 election, have clashed over the federal response to Hurricane Helene.Trump accused the Biden administration of neglecting to help heavily Republican areas of western North Carolina and said he called billionaire Elon Musk to deploy Starlink satellites to provide the region with internet — an initiative Biden later claimed credit for.Trump also highlighted FEMA expenditures on illegal immigrants after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claimed last week that hurricane relief funds were running low.The White House has cast that argument as misleading because the migrant funds were approved by Congress for that purpose.Although some local officials blasted FEMA’s initial response to Hurricane Helene, especially in western ...