Joe Biden’s tall tales

In the summer of 1987 Biden was a leading candidate for the 1988 Democratic nomination. At a debate at the Iowa State Fair he closed with lines lifted from a Neil Kinnock ad about being the first in his family to go to university, without saying they were Kinnock’s. He had credited Kinnock on other occasions. The story broke in September. [1]

Within days more came out. Syracuse law school had found in 1965 that he plagiarized five pages of a law review article in a first-year paper; he had failed the course and retaken it. And a video showed him telling a voter he went to law school on a full scholarship, graduated in the top half of his class and earned three degrees. He graduated 76th of 85, had a partial scholarship and had one undergraduate degree, with two majors. He withdrew on 23 September 1987. [1][2]

Campaigning in South Carolina in February 2020, Biden said he “had the great honor of being arrested” with Andrew Young in Soweto while trying to see Nelson Mandela, then imprisoned on Robben Island. He repeated a version of it twice more. [1]

Young, who led the 1977 congressional trip Biden was on, said neither of them was arrested. Under questioning Biden said he had been “stopped” at Johannesburg airport when officials tried to send him through a separate entrance from his Black colleagues, and he refused. No record of an arrest exists. [1][2]

In April 2024 Biden said his uncle, 2nd Lt. Ambrose Finnegan, “got shot down in New Guinea and they never found the body because there used to be, there are a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea.” The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency record says Finnegan was a passenger on an A-20 courier flight on 14 May 1944 that, “for unknown reasons,” ditched in the ocean off New Guinea’s north coast after both engines failed at low altitude. Three men went down with the plane; one survived. The record does not mention enemy fire or cannibals. [1][2]

Biden has said many times that Beau “lost his life in Iraq.” Beau served in Iraq in 2008–2009, came home and died of brain cancer at Walter Reed in 2015. Biden means that he blames the burn pits Beau was exposed to; that link is plausible but not established. [3][4][5]