Remember when a fact checker pointed out Biden doesn't always tell the truth

President Joe Biden is an old-school politician who likes to tell stories from his life to connect with voters on a deeper level. However, some of the stories that Biden's shared over the years aren't exactly the truth.

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler addressed the president’s problems with the truth in August 2023 and revealed in an article for the news outlet some of Biden’s most prominent exaggerations the president has shared about his life. 

Photo Credit: Twitter @GlennKesslerWP

Kessler pointed out Biden had brought up a conversation with Amtrak conductor Angelo Negri, who allegedly congratulated Biden for traveling more by train than by his Air Force planes. 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By Daniel Schwen, Own Work, CC BY-SA 4.0

Negri read that Biden had flown 1.2 million miles as Vice President but the conductor had calculated the number of miles Biden traveled by train and it worked out to 2 million. 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By Daniel Schwen - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

“Ang walks up to me and goes, ‘Joey, baby!’ Grabs my cheek. And I thought the Secret Service was going to blow his head off,” Biden said about the conversation while giving a talk at a New Jersey Transit facility in October 2021. 

However, Kessler noted that this conversation probably never happened in the way that the president described it because the details of Biden’s travels didn’t line up with reality. 

Biden and Negri were friends, a fact Negri’s stepdaughter Olga Betz confirmed during a 2021 CNN interview, but Negri retired long before Biden hit two million miles traveled. 

Negri retired from Amtrak in 1993 according to Kessler. Biden didn’t hit 1.2 million miles traveled by plane until 2016. Moreover, Negri passed away in 2014, which would make the conversation an impossibility unless Biden was mixing up the person talking to him.

Another example Kessler broke down was Biden’s exaggerations about the extent of a house fire he and his wife experienced in 2004, a story Biden has mentioned or told at least six times since being elected to the presidency. 

Biden claimed that firefighters had to go into the burning house and save his wife, his cat, and his prized 67 Corvette according to a statement he made in March about the fire but other times the story has taken on other elements of complexity and danger.

“We almost lost a couple firefighters, they tell me, because the kitchen floor was... burning between beams in the house, in addition to almost collapsing into the basement,” Biden explained at a summit of fire prevention in October 2022. 

However, Kessler found that news reports from the time showed the fire wasn’t as bad as the president had made it out to be with reports from both The Wilmington New Journal and the Associated Press showing the fire was quickly brought under control. 

“Biden’s house on Barley Mill Road was hit by lightning at 8:16 a.m.,” the News Journal reported. “There were no injuries and firefighters kept the fire contained to one room.” The fire chief told the paper they got there early and had things under control in 20 minutes.

The Washington Post wasn't the only news agency to look into Biden’s relationship with the truth. In August 2023, CNN also flagged three false personal anecdotal stories the president told during his economic speech in Milwaukee, including the Amtrak tale.

One interesting story CNN pointed to was the 2022 collapse of a bridge in Pittsburgh the president said he witnessed: “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.”

While the bridge did collapse, Biden wasn’t there to see it. The incident occurred at 7:00 a.m. according to CNN, a full six hours before the president arrived in the city. Biden did visit the collapsed bridge at 1:00 p.m. but he never saw its collapse. 

There are several more falsehoods among Biden’s tall tales that haven’t been relayed here. But what was covered shows the extent to which the president is willing to stretch the truth—a quality most voters may not want in the Oval Office.