Matt covered this yesterday, but I'd like to linger on the subject for another moment. His post generously referred to this incident as a Biden 'gaffe,' but I'd call it the latest in an endless series of lies, fabrications and embellishments. We've chronicled some of Biden's most bizarre and shameless forays into the land of make believe over time, ranging from insignificant exaggerations (about, say, his athletic prowess), to serious and disturbing false claims about the circumstances surrounding the deaths of immediate family members. A common thread that runs throughout this decades-long pattern of dishonesty is an apparent desire to make his personal history more dramatic, compelling, and relevant to the people who are in front of him in any given moment. He yearns to ingratiate himself with audiences, and he turns to false memories and serial embellishments in order to do the trick. It seems pathological.
Which brings us to the latest instance. A major bridge collapsed in Maryland this week after it was struck by a cargo ship in the middle of the night. People died. When I watched the dramatic and upsetting footage of the incident, I wondered if I'd crossed that bridge. Like the president, I have often traveled north on Amtrak trains, passing through Baltimore on my way to New York. I performed a cursory Google search and learned that the now-destroyed Francis Scott Key Bridge did not support any railroad tracks, so this wasn't the route I could have taken on those journeys. Biden evidently had the same initial thought, and rather than determining whether or not it was true, he blurted out that he'd taken his beloved Amtrak over that very bridge -- which, of course, is impossible. He just said it anyway because that's what he does:
Biden claims to have commuted over the Baltimore bridge by train many times. No trains run over the bridge. pic.twitter.com/GHwNPGjq9R
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) March 26, 2024
On the spectrum of his tall tales and mendacity, this one is relatively harmless. But it's sloppy. It's avoidable. It's undisciplined. And it might upset grieving family members: Why is this man making our tragedy about himself -- and doing so inaccurately, too? One wonders if Biden may have been briefed by a staffer, in order to try to avoid precisely this sort of pointless mess. 'Remember, sir, this bridge had no choo-choo tracks on it, so you did not travel across this bridge that way.' Joe is going to say whatever Joe wants, including one of his favorite Amtrak-related 'memories,' which has been repeatedly debunked. That minor inconvenience has not dissuaded him from continuing to spread it, over and over again. He loves the fabrication too much to let it go. Relatedly, in case you missed it, the Washington Free Beacon recently fact-checked another favored Biden claim, which he's told for many years. It's his political origin story, in which he explains why he decided to leave his legal job and enter public service. It's almost certainly an invention:
Fresh out of law school and working as a clerk at a high-powered Wilmington, Delaware, law firm, Biden, in his telling, was tapped to defend a construction company sued by a 23-year-old welder who "lost part of his penis and one of his testicles" to a fire that broke out when he was working inside a chimney at a Delaware City plant. Thanks to Biden’s shrewd legal defense on the construction company’s behalf, the injured man lost the case. "I wrote this memo. And son of a b—, it prevailed," Biden told Hur on Oct. 8. "And I looked over at that kid…and I thought, ‘son of a b—, I’m in the wrong business, I'm not made for this.’" Biden said he was so wracked with guilt that he concocted an excuse to avoid a celebratory lunch with one of the firm’s named partners and walked into the public defender’s office to ask for a job that very day. It’s "the only time I ever lied," Biden told Hur on Oct. 8...But this story is almost certainly a complete work of fiction. Although Biden did work at a law firm tapped to defend a construction company in a negligence suit like the one he described to Hur, the case concluded in 1968, while Biden was still in law school. And the welder won, walking away with $315,000, more than $2.8 million in 2024 dollars
When this supposedly seminal case was resolved, Biden wasn't even a lawyer yet -- and the plaintiff won the lawsuit. The outcome was the opposite of Biden's, um, 'recollection,' which blows up the whole 'wracked with guilt' storyline. Casual observers may be forgiven for wondering if Joe Biden has ever told a single true story in his life. And no, even though this anecdote is obviously made up, there's no way Hur would charge Biden for lying under oath as a result of rambling about a false memory. A major component of the Special Counsel's rationale against prosecuting the president over multiple clear and willful violations of laws governing the handling of classified documents is that Biden is too mentally compromised, with too faulty a memory, to be convicted by a jury. Chalk this one up to an old man spinning a yarn about his bygone days, with absolutely no regard for accuracy (even if he's been doing this for many years). In the example relayed above, the real timeline placed Biden still in law school when the litigation wrapped up. Perhaps it was around the same time Biden claims to have received a standing ovation from his whole class for a brilliant, extemporaneous speech about a case he hadn't read. True story, not a joke, folks -- my word as a Biden:
President Joe Biden claimed that he received a standing ovation while he was in law school — for a speech about a case he hadn’t even read — and critics immediately called BS. Biden recounted the alleged incident during his five hours of interviews with Special Counsel Robert Hur – and the story went public earlier this week when, ahead of Hur’s Capitol Hill testimony, the transcripts of those interviews were published. According to the president, he was called on in a torts class to discuss a case that he had not read — but said that his subsequent 10-minute discussion on that case was so impressive that his classmates responded with a standing ovation. “We had a really difficult professor,” Biden said. “He called on me to discuss a case, you know, in your first torts class. And I had never read the case, and I stood up and I spoke for 10 minutes. The whole class stood up, started clapping.”
Yeah, that didn't happen. What did happen was Biden finishing near the very bottom of his law school class -- a fact about which he has also, you guessed it, lied:
Stumbled across this montage from the doomed Biden ‘88 campaign and I’m crying at the McLaughlin Group reactions at the end. pic.twitter.com/A9etqn8J4H
— Jimmy (@JimmyPrinceton) May 23, 2022
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