Biden Fails Fact Checks on Oft-Told Background Claims

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President Joe Biden has reportedly failed fact-checks on claims he was a civil rights activist in his youth, had an uncle who fell prey to cannibals, used to drive an 18-wheeler and has known Vladimir Putin “for over 40 years.”

Reviews of the Biden boasts reviewed by the New York Times, Washington Post and Washington Free Beacon didn’t clear the President’s slate.

According to the Times, Biden’s claim to have driven an 18-wheeler was sketchy, with the White House citing Biden’s job driving a school bus during law school. There was no clarity on driving an 18-wheeler either — only a newspaper report in the 1970s that he took a 500-mile trip on a cargo truck.

The Times previously reported Biden has suggested he also played a bigger role in the civil rights movement than he actually did, concluding there was no evidence at all that he was ever arrested.

And though at a May campaign event in Detroit, Biden claimed to be the first member of his family to go to college, the Times reported his maternal grandfather, Ambrose Finnegan Sr., attended and played football for Santa Clara College in California, according to a 1957 obituary.

Biden also wrote he often heard family lore about a hero uncle, Ambrose Finnegan Jr., who was a pilot during World War II — but his suggestion the uncle was shot down and cannibalized in New Guinea isn’t supported by military records or anthropologists, the Times reported.

According to the Free Beacon, Biden’s claim to ABC News anchor David Muir on Thursday that the president has known Putin for over 40 years means they would have met when Putin was serving as an undercover KGB officer.

Putin had never been a public figure until he was chosen by then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin as prime minister in 1999, according to a Washington Post article written in 2000, the Free Beacon noted.

Biden has also claimed, without evidence, that he was arrested in apartheid South Africa in 1977 while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison, the Washington Post reported in 2020.