President Biden on Monday repeated a since-debunked story involving an Amtrak conductor who calculated that he logged more than one million miles on the rails while serving as a senator from Delaware.
It is at least the eighth time as president that Mr. Biden has repeated the story, despite it being declared “false” last year by CNN and Associated Press, who concluded the conversation could not have happened.
Speaking in Baltimore for the launch of a project to replace a 150-year-old rail tunnel, Mr. Biden retold the anecdote about a trip on Amtrak that supposedly happened toward the end of his term as vice president.
“When I was vice president, I flew over a million miles on Air Force Two and I was going home as the United States Vice President [to Delaware] and one of the conductors said to me, ‘Hey Joe — big deal you’ve traveled over a million miles on Amtrak,’” Mr. Biden told the crowd.
“‘How the hell did you know that?’” Mr. Biden said, repeating his conversation from years ago. “They added it up.”
In some tellings of the story, Mr. Biden says the conductor who added the miles is Angelo Negri, who retired in 1992 and died in May 2014. Mr. Biden didn’t reach 1 million Miles on Air Force Two until September 2015.
David Linenmann, who documented Mr. Biden’s trips on Air Force Two, is the one who calculated when he reached 1 million miles.
In Monday’s version of the story, Mr. Biden did not mention Mr. Negri, nor did he say that it happened “toward the end of my term” — both statements he included in earlier versions.
Mr. Biden most recently told the story in May 2022, when he was promoting his bipartisan infrastructure law with Sen. Sherrod Brown, Ohio Democrat.
He also told the story during a September 2021 Oval Office meeting with former United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The story has drawn repeated criticism from conservative organizations. When asked last year to square the details, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said she wasn’t familiar with the specifics.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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