While speaking on Wednesday, President Joe Biden appeared to give a false statement about his uncle’s death during World War II as he took a shot at former President Donald Trump for his recent comments about the military.
“He got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea,” Biden said about his uncle, Ambrose J. Finnegan.
However, the statement has raised eyebrows as fact-checkers quickly found that Finnegan’s U.S. military records made no mention of his aircraft being shot or anything about cannibalism.
“For unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea,” the records say. “Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard.”
The records go on to say that the three men who were killed in the crash were never found, and their bodies never recovered.
When asked for clarification by NBC News, White House spokesman Andrew Bates appeared to sidestep the question, instead saying Biden was “proud of his uncle’s service in uniform, who lost his life when the military aircraft he was on crashed in the Pacific after taking off near New Guinea.”
“The President highlighted his uncle’s story as he made the case for honoring our ‘sacred commitment ... to equip those we send to war and take care of them and their families when they come home,’ and as he reiterated that the last thing American veterans are is ‘suckers’ or ‘losers,’” Bates added in the statement to the media outlet.
The last comment in Bates’ statement was a reference to a 2020 report from The Atlantic that said Trump had referred to military members disparagingly, including calling fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers.”
The former president has denied ever making those remarks.
“What animal would say such a thing?” Trump said in 2020. “And especially since I’ve done more, I think more than almost anybody, to help our military to get the budgets, to get the pay raises for our military. So, I just think it’s a horrible thing that they are allowed to write that. We can refute it. We have other people that will refute it.”
Despite his denial at the time, Biden continued to hammer on this point while speaking earlier this week.
“‘Suckers’ and ‘losers.’ That man doesn’t deserve to have been the commander in chief for my son, my uncle,” Biden said of Trump.