President Biden’s first public speech following his announcement that he would seek re-election contained a wildly inaccurate statement about the time and place of his grandfather’s death.
Biden, 80, claimed that his grandfather “died in the same hospital I was born in two weeks before I was born” as he addressed the North America’s Building Trades Unions Legislative Conference in Washington on Tuesday.
The president appeared to be referring to his father’s father, Joseph H. Biden, an oil executive who died on Sept. 26, 1941, in Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital, according to an obituary published at the time.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. was born more than a year later — at St. Mary’s Hospital in Scranton, Pa.
The president’s maternal grandfather, Ambrose Joseph Finnegan, did die at St. Mary’s, but not until 1957, when the future Democratic president was still a teenager.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment or clarification on the misstatement.
Biden’s propensity for exaggerating, misremembering and making up biographical details is well known.
In December last year, Biden recounted the story of awarding his uncle Frank a Purple Heart for his actions during the World War II Battle of the Bulge — though there is no evidence of the award and parts of the president’s reported chronology are impossible.
That October, Biden said that “I was sort of raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically” while visiting the US territory, despite the fact that there was only a tiny Puerto Rican community in Delaware when he launched his career.
At a fire safety event the same month, Biden said firefighters nearly died extinguishing a blaze in his kitchen in 2004, prompting the local fire department to describe the fire as relatively “insignificant” for trained professionals.
In May 2022, Biden said at the Naval Academy’s graduation ceremony that he was appointed to the military school in 1965 by the late Sen. J. Caleb Boggs (R-Del.). A search of Boggs’ archives failed to turn up evidence of the appointment. The date also doesn’t match up with Biden’s college years and Biden’s requests for Vietnam War draft deferrals cast further doubt on the account.
In 2021, Biden falsely claimed to have met with then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir during the 1967 Six Day War in which he claimed to have served as “liaison” between Israel and Egypt. Biden was actually in law school at that time and appeared to conflate the incident with a 1973 meeting he had with Meir.
Biden’s first presidential campaign ended in 1987 due to a scandal involving plagiarism of speeches and a law school paper.
Then-Senator Biden infamously borrowed British Labour politician Neil Kinnock’s family history —changing geographic details to falsely claim in speeches that “my ancestors … worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours.” Unlike Kinnock, who was describing his own family in Wales, Biden’s ancestors did not mine coal.
Biden also falsely claimed that he “graduated with three degrees from college,” was named “the outstanding student in the political science department,” “went to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship” and ”ended up in the top half” of his class. None of those claims was true.
