President Biden twice implied Wednesday that his uncle Ambrose Finnegan was eaten by cannibals in New Guinea after his plane crashed during World War II — even though military records show that the aircraft plunged into the Pacific.
“He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals at the time,” Biden initially told reporters after visiting a war memorial that bears his uncle’s name in Scranton, Pa.
“They never recovered his body, but the government went back when I went down there and they checked and found some parts of the plane.”
After arriving in Pittsburgh for a speech on steel tariffs, the 81-year-old president told the same story.
“He got shot down in New Guinea and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea,” Biden told United Steelworkers union members.
The Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency says that Finnegan’s plane actually was lost over the open ocean on May 14, 1944.
“For unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea. Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard,” the military’s account says.
“Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash. One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge. An aerial search the next day found no trace of the missing aircraft or the lost crew members.”
Biden told the story while attacking former President Donald Trump for allegedly skipping a 2018 visit to a military cemetery outside of Paris during his term of office after calling fallen US troops buried there “suckers” and “losers.”
“Suckers and losers? The man doesn’t deserve to have been the commander in chief of my son,” Biden said in Pittsburgh, after saying in Scranton that Trump “refused to go up to the memorial for veterans in Paris.”
The disputed account was featured in an article by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg that said Trump “blamed rain for the last-minute decision [not to visit the cemetery], saying that ‘the helicopter couldn’t fly’ and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.”
Documentation emerged in 2020 debunking Goldberg’s account by showing that the Navy made a bad-weather call that prevented the cemetery trip from being made by helicopter.
Before returning to the US from that trip, Trump spoke in the rain without an umbrella at a different military cemetery near Paris.
Biden frequently recounts personal anecdotes that turn out to be untrue — often in an apparent attempt to connect to his audiences.
While president, Biden has shared at least 13 times a debunked story involving an Amtrak conductor, claimed in 2022 that his uncle Frank Biden won the Purple Heart — even though the details of his account make it factually impossible, and has said twice that he was picked to attend the Naval Academy, though no supporting documentation exists.
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 anti-Semitic attack in US history, in which 11 people were murdered.
The synagogue said Biden never visited and the White House later claimed he was thinking about a 2019 phone call to the synagogue’s rabbi.
