The White House on Wednesday refused to answer questions about President Biden’s history of telling embellished, if not outright fabricated stories during public remarks.
At the daily White House press briefing, White House spokesperson John Kirby was asked by The Washington Times about a string of misstatements made by Mr. Biden in recent weeks.
“What is going on with the president? Is he just believing things that didn’t happen did happen or is just randomly making stuff up?” Mr. Kirby was asked.
The spokesman refused to answer the question, pivoting instead to talk about the president spending the anniversary of the Sep. 11, 2001, terror attacks with military members.
“The president was deeply touched and honored to be able to spend 9/11 with military members there in Alaska and some families and was honored by their presence and the chance to make an important set of remarks about why we need to remember that day,” Mr. Kirby responded.
“And he’s focused on making sure that an attack like that never happens again, which is why we’ve improved our over-the-horizon counterterrorism capability and why we continue to hold terrorist networks accountable,” he continued.
The Times followed up to ask why Mr. Biden keeps repeating things that are easily debunked, but Mr. Kirby continued to dodge the question.
“The president was grateful to spend that time with those family members and those troops,” he responded.
In a speech to service members on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Mr. Biden falsely claimed that he was at Ground Zero the day after the Twin Towers fell in Manhattan.
“I remember standing there the next day and looking at the building. And I felt like I was looking through the gates of hell. it looked devastating because of the way — from where you could stand,” Mr. Biden told the troops.
But his 2007 memoir “Promises to Keep” offers a different account: Mr. Biden described stepping off the train at Union Station in Washington on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and witnessing “a brown haze of smoke hanging in the otherwise crystal-clear sky beyond the Capitol dome.”
“I headed back to the Capitol the next morning” — Sept. 12, 2001,” he wrote.
The book doesn’t mention any trip to Ground Zero, much less on the day after the attacks.
A report in Mr. Biden’s hometown newspaper in Wilmington, Delaware, from Sept. 12, 2001, says: “Delaware Sen. Joe Biden spent Wednesday exactly where he wanted — in the U.S. Senate.”
It is not the first time in recent weeks that Mr. Biden has made false claims about his own past.
In a speech last month, Mr. Biden falsely claimed to have witnessed a bridge collapse in Pittsburgh in 2022 when he actually visited the site after the collapse; falsely claimed his grandfather had died days before his birth at the same hospital when he actually died over a year later in another state and repeated a long-debunked story about a conversation with an Amtrak conductor who died before the supposed conversation took place.
He has also repeatedly claimed, falsely, that he had been arrested during a civil rights protest and visited the Pittsburgh synagogue after a 2018 mass shooting when he actually had only spoken to its rabbi by phone.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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