President Joe Biden has once again stepped up and freely admitted to giving out a false story, which he repeated constantly, about himself throughout his 2020 presidential campaign.
This admission from the president cropped up as part of a meeting in the Oval Office this past Friday with the African President Cyril Ramaphosa while he was once again telling a story he had told quite a few times previously on the campaign trail. Biden once again stated that he was not taken into custody by authorities when he attempted to pay a visit to former South African President Nelson Mandela in the 1970s. He stated to his potential voter base on a total of three separate occasions throughout the 2020 campaign that he was arrested while visiting South Africa.
“One of the great moments of my career was when — the first time Nelson Mandela came to the United States [in 1990]. And we were in — I was a senator at the time, and we met in the Senate Foreign Relations executive committee room,” Biden stated to Ramaphosa, as reported by the New York Post.
“And I said once — I said I got arrested. I wasn’t arrested, I got stopped, prevented from moving. But he was extremely gracious,” stated Biden.
The president’s self-admitted false claim was quickly and savagely picked apart by The New York Times, which wrote back in February of 2020 that Biden had told the story concerning his fictional arrest a total of three times over the course of two weeks.
“This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid,” explained Biden as part of a campaign event held in South Carolina, as reported by the Times. “I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robbens Island.”
The president also made the claim that Mandela personally thanked him for getting arrested. “After he [Mandela] got free and became president, he came to Washington and came to my office. He threw his arms around me and said, ‘I want to say thank you.’ I said, ‘What are you thanking me for, Mr. President?’ He said: ‘You tried to see me. You got arrested trying to see me.’” exclaimed Biden.
The New York Times questioned one Andrew Young, a former U.S. ambassador stationed at the U.N. who then traveled with then-Sen. Biden to South Africa, If Biden’s story sported any merit whatsoever. “No, I was never arrested and I don’t think he was, either,” Young stated to the times.
These false claims from Biden were also quickly fact0checked by The Washington Post, who issued him four Pinocchios for the “ridiculous” story.
Quickly after the statements from Biden, his campaign group quickly jumped forward to clean up after him and admitted that he was not actually arrested while in South Africa, but was instead “separated” from the various members of the Congressional Black Caucus.