While speaking at the William H. Gray III 30th Street Station in Philadelphia to honor the 50th anniversary of Amtrak, President Joe Biden shared a seemingly heartfelt story about receiving the name “Amtrak Joe” as a Senator and hitting the milestones of reaching 1.5 million miles on Amtrak. He even shares that he was personally congratulated by one of the conductors, Angelo Negri. As it turns out, Negri actually retired about 20 years before Biden’s story supposedly took place…and that’s only the first plot hole in his story. Talk about Biden going ‘off the rails.’
President Biden started his story by talking about his time as vice president under the Obama Administration. He said during his “fourth or fifth year as vice president” that one of the Capitol Hill newspapers had published a story claiming he had taken more than 7,000 round trips on Amtrak throughout his career. He said he first thought this was an exaggeration until Conductor Negri had verified the miles and congratulated his rides.
“My mom was sick and I used to try to come home almost every weekend as vice president to see her. I got on the train and Angelo Negri came up and he goes, ‘Joey, baby,’ and he grabbed my cheek like he always did. ’Joey, what’s the big deal? 1,300,000 miles on Air Force Two? Do you know how many miles you traveled on Amtrak?’ I said, ‘No, Angie, I don’t know.’ He gave me the calculation and he said, ‘You traveled 1,500,000 miles on Amtrak.’ The fact is, I’d probably take Angie’s word before I’d take the word of what the article said,” Biden said.
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While the story has flown under the mainstream media radar, a few social media users pointed out how out of place his story seems. When Biden entered the fourth year of his term as vice president, which was around 2013, his mother Catherine Eugenia Finnegan had been dead for three years already. She had passed in 2010, at the age of 92.
According to Negri’s obituary, he had retired from Amtrak in 1993 while Biden was still a senator. Negri had retired 22 years before Joe Biden hit 1 million miles on AF2. Another report shows that Biden’s office had celebrated him hitting 1 million miles on AF2 in 2015.
“A few months ago, Vice President Joe Biden crossed the million-mile mark aboard Air Force Two – the official plane of the Vice President. … I wanted to give you a sense of what those more-than 1 million miles have looked like these past seven years,” Biden’s vice presidential photographer David Lienemann wrote in a February 2016 blog post.
Either Biden is terrible at math (for a story that serves no purpose) or has been plagiarizing and lying about the entire story in the first place. But this isn’t the first time one of his stories has raised a few eyebrows.
On the campaign trail last year, Biden recalled a tale of being the only white lifeguard at an all-black pool in Wilmington, Delaware, where he faced off with a gang leader named “Corn Pop” in 1962. He also talked about the time where he was arrested in South Africa while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison. There has been no supporting evidence or knowledge to support any of these extraordinary claims.
Whether this is the so-called ‘Mandela Effect’ or just another gaffe, there are a lot of things that don’t add up when it comes to Joe Biden and his stories. But the story that doesn’t add up the most about Joe Biden is the 2020 election results.
