Fact check: Biden tells three false personal anecdotes in economic speech

[Trump]

On 18 Dec 2023, Rudy Canoza forging David Hartung
<junk@LCMS_shitbags.org> posted some
news:bP2gN.64327$c3Ea....@fx10.iad:

> Biden lies and every progressive in America swears to it.

Washington
CNN
—
President Joe Biden made three false claims about his own past in a
Tuesday speech in Milwaukee.

The speech was focused on the economy and the Inflation Reduction Act the
president signed into law one year ago Wednesday, and his economic claims
in the prepared address were almost entirely accurate. But he also
peppered in three false personal anecdotes, including two that have
previously been debunked, continuing his habit of inaccurate ad-libbing
about his biography.

In addition, Biden repeated one false and previously debunked political
boast. As he did earlier this year and during the 2022 midterm elections,
he wrongly asserted that he has significantly reduced the national debt,
which has actually increased significantly during his presidency. He was
once again mixing up the debt with the deficit; the White House made a
correction in the official transcript, as it previously did with a
transcript in February when Biden did the same thing.

Here is a fact check on his Tuesday remarks.

Another rendition of the Amtrak story
Biden has long been known as a devotee of Amtrak, the train service he
used during his 36 years as a US senator to commute between Washington and
his home in Delaware. At least nine times as president, he has told a
vivid personal story about a conversation he claims to have had during his
vice presidency with an Amtrak conductor named Angelo Negri.

Except, as CNN pointed out in 2021, that conversation could not possibly
have happened – because Negri was deceased at the time the conversation
would have had to have taken place.

In the version of the story Biden told on Tuesday, he said that in the
sixth or seventh year of his vice presidency, a newspaper headline
announced that he had traveled almost 1.2 million miles on Air Force
planes. He said that when he then was “getting on a train to go home and
see my mom, who was sick and in hospice in my home,” a man he identified
as “Ang,” his nickname for Negri, “comes up and goes, ‘Joey, baby,’ and
grabs my cheek.” Biden said he thought the Secret Service was going to
shoot Negri.

Biden then said: “And I said, ‘No, no, no, no.’ I said, ‘What’s the
matter, Ang?’ He said, ‘We just – I read this thing about…over a million
miles on Air Force planes.’ He said, ‘Hell, you know how many miles you
traveled on Amtrak?’ I said, ‘No, Ang. I don’t know.’ He said, ‘We just
had a retirement dinner up in Newark.’ He said, ‘You traveled a hundred –
an average 117 days a year, round trip, 300 miles a day, 36 years. That’s
1,285,000 miles. I don’t want to hear any more about the Air Force!’”

The crowd reacted with laughter and applause, and Biden said, “True story,
I swear to God.” But it isn’t a true story.

Facts First: Biden’s story is false in two ways. First, as CNN and others
have pointed out before, he could not possibly have had this exchange with
Negri: Biden did not reach the million-miles-flown mark as vice president
until September 2015, according to his own past comments, but Negri had
died more than a year earlier, in May 2014. Second, as CNN has also noted
before, Biden’s mother was not sick at his home at the time he hit the
million-miles-flown milestone. In fact, she had died more than five years
prior.

Negri’s stepdaughter, Olga Betz, told CNN in 2021 that Negri and Biden
were indeed friends. She said Negri “adored” Biden and spoke of how Biden
was “very thoughtful and personable with the conductors; knew them all by
name.” She also provided a photo of Biden hosting a retirement party for
Negri in his Senate office in 1993.

Nonetheless, Biden has been telling a false story about his late friend
for more than two years. We wrote in 2021 that Biden might have been
misremembering the details of some real conversation he had with Negri
prior to Negri’s death in 2014 or mixed up Negri with another Amtrak
employee he spoke to in 2015 or 2016. After numerous media fact checks,
however, he has now had ample time to correct himself.

The White House did not immediately respond Wednesday to a request for
comment for this article. When Karine Jean-Pierre, now the White House
press secretary, was asked in 2021 about reports that Biden’s story about
Negri was inaccurate, she said, “I haven’t seen that. But the President’s
long history with Amtrak and appreciation for the hardworking employees is
very well known.”

Biden’s birth and his grandfather’s death
Biden also repeated a version of a family anecdote he told in April. He
said Tuesday that his grandfather, who had worked as an oil company
executive, died just days before he was born himself in the same hospital.

“And, by the way, my Grandpop Biden, who died very young – he was – died
in the hospital I was born in six days before I was there, I mean before I
was born,” Biden said.

Facts First: Biden’s claim is false in two ways, as conservative media
outlets pointed out in April when Biden said his grandfather “died in the
same hospital I was born in two weeks before I was born.” His paternal
grandfather who had worked in the oil industry, Joseph Harry Biden, died
in a hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, in September 1941; the president was
born more than a year later, in November 1942 – and at a different
hospital, in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Biden’s maternal grandfather, Ambrose Joseph Finnegan, did die at the
Scranton hospital where the president was born, but in 1957, when the
president was 14 years old.

Biden and a Pittsburgh bridge collapse
Touting his administration’s investments in infrastructure projects around
the country, Biden invoked a 2022 bridge collapse in Pittsburgh – and
claimed that he personally saw the bridge fall.

“A lot of you were with me when I was in Pittsburgh. And, by the way, the
– Pittsburgh is the ‘City of Bridges.’ More bridges in Pittsburgh than any
other city in America. I watched that bridge collapse. I got there and saw
it collapse. With over 200 feet off the ground, going over a valley, and
it collapsed,” Biden said.

Facts First: It’s not true that Biden “got there and saw it collapse.” The
collapse occurred before 7 a.m. on January 28, 2022, more than six hours
prior to Biden landing in the Pittsburgh area for a scheduled visit that
included a speech about the economy and infrastructure. He visited the
site of the collapse after 1 p.m. that day.

So Biden could have accurately said that he witnessed the damage from the
collapse. But his statement that “I got there and saw it collapse” is not
true.

Biden and the national debt
Biden claimed, “And unlike the last president, in my first two years in
office, even with all we’ve done – I’m the first one to cut the federal
debt by $1 trillion $700 billion.”

Facts First: This is false, as the White House implicitly acknowledged in
the official transcript by striking through the word “debt” and replacing
it with “deficit.” As CNN noted in February, when Biden made a near-
identical claim, Biden has not reduced the national debt (the accumulation
of federal borrowing plus interest owed); in fact, the national debt has
increased from about $27.8 trillion on Biden’s first day in office in 2021
to about $32.7 trillion today, though it’s important to note that debt
increases are not solely the fault of any current president. It is the
federal deficit – the one-year difference between spending and revenues –
that declined by roughly $1.7 trillion between fiscal 2020 and fiscal
2022, from about $3.1 trillion to about $1.4 trillion.

And the debt-versus-deficit mix-up is not the only issue with Biden’s
claim.

As CNN has repeatedly noted, it is highly questionable how much credit
Biden deserves for the $1.7 trillion decline in the deficit, since the
decline happened overwhelmingly because emergency pandemic spending from
the end of President Donald Trump’s administration expired as planned. In
fact, independent analysts say Biden’s own new laws and executive actions
have significantly added to current and projected future deficits, not
reduced those deficits.

You can read more here and here.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/16/politics/fact-check-biden-amtrak-
grandfather-pittsburgh-bridge-debt/index.html