Biden claims he was at Ground Zero day after 9/11 — but his own book puts him in DC
WASHINGTON — President Biden said Monday that he was at the World Trade Center site in New York City one day after the 9/11 attacks — despite his own autobiography placing him in DC.
The 80-year-old president also claimed he saw the fireball caused by the plane that struck the Pentagon in northern Virginia from Washington’s Union Station, when his own book says he merely saw “a brown haze of smoke.”
“Ground Zero in New York — I remember standing there the next day and looking at the building. And I felt like I was looking through the gates of hell,” Biden told US troops in Anchorage, Alaska, on the 22nd anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
“It looked so devastating because the way you could, from where you could stand. Shanksville, Pa., the Pentagon in Virginia — I spent many 9/11s in those hollow grounds to bear witness and remember those we lost,” he went on.
Moments later, the president claimed that he saw the immediate aftermath of American Airlines Flight 77 striking the Pentagon.
“The plume of fire that shot up in the sky in Pentagon [sic] — I remember seeing as I got off the Amtrak train on my way to work in the United States Senate,” Biden mused.
The president’s 2007 autobiography “Promises to Keep” gives a different account of his actions on 9/11 and the day that followed.
Biden wrote that he arrived in Washington on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, after the plane struck the Pentagon and “I could see a brown haze of smoke hanging in the otherwise crystal-clear sky beyond the Capitol dome.”
He wrote in the book, “I headed back to the Capitol the next morning” — Sept. 12, 2001.
The book doesn’t describe any trip to Ground Zero, much less on the day after the attacks as search and rescue work was ongoing — despite describing Biden speaking to University of Delaware students on Sept. 19, 2001, and visiting a mosque in Newark, NJ, two days after that.
A Gannett News Wire report from Sept. 12, 2001, began: “Delaware Sen. Joe Biden spent Wednesday exactly where he wanted — in the US Senate.” C-SPAN footage shows that Biden gave a speech.
Two days later, then-President George W. Bush visited the former site of the Twin Towers, where he spoke to workers from a bullhorn and famously said: “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
A White House official told The Post that Biden was thinking about visiting Ground Zero on Sept. 20, 2001, as part of a 38-senator delegation nine days after the attack.
Biden has a decades-long habit of factual embellishments, but his frequent biographical misstatements come as polls show a majority of voters feel he’s too old to be seeking a second term in next year’s election.
The president often exaggerates when attempting to establish a personal connection with his audiences.
Last month, Biden claimed while discussing wildfire devastation in Hawaii that his Delaware house “almost collapsed” from a small kitchen fire nearly two decades ago — after telling survivors at a prior event in Maui that firefighters “ran into flames” to rescue first lady Jill Biden.
At a fire prevention summit in October last year, he claimed “we almost lost a couple firefighters” during the blaze — prompting the local fire department to release a statement calling the blaze “insignificant.”
Biden told students at historically black colleges in Atlanta last year that he was arrested multiple times while protesting in favor of civil rights — a claim for which there is no evidence.
Biden in 2021 told Jewish leaders that he remembered “spending time at” and “going to” Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 after the worst antisemitic attack in US history, in which 11 people were murdered. The synagogue said he never visited, and the White House later said he was thinking about a 2019 phone call to the synagogue’s rabbi.
Later that month, Biden told an Idaho audience that his “first job offer” came from local lumber and wood products business Boise Cascade. Company officials said it was news to them.
Biden said at the Naval Academy’s graduation ceremony in May 2022 — and again at the Air Force Academy this past June — that he was appointed to the prestigious Annapolis military college by the late Sen. J. Caleb Boggs (R-Del.). A search of Boggs’ archives failed to turn up evidence of the appointment.
The latest misremembering comes as polls show Biden’s perceived mental infirmity is a liability in next year’s election.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll from June found that just 32% of voters believe Biden has the mental sharpness needed to be president — while 54% said the same of Donald Trump, 77, the former president and current front-runner for the Republican nomination.
A Wall Street Journal poll released last week found that 73% of registered voters believed Biden was too old, while 47% said the same of Trump.
In addition to public scrutiny of his mental acuity, Biden also has a long record of gaffes and false biographical claims.
His first presidential campaign ended infamously in 1987 due to a scandal involving plagiarism of speeches and a law school paper.
Biden appropriated British politician Neil Kinnock’s family history — with Biden changing geographic details to claim in speeches that “my ancestors … worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours.”
Unlike Kinnock’s Welsh forebears, Biden’s ancestors didn’t mine coal.
Biden also falsely claimed he “graduated with three degrees from college,” was named “the outstanding student in the political science department,” “went to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship” and ”ended up in the top half” of his class.
None of those claims were true.
