Fact check: Biden’s false and misleading claims at high-stakes news conference
By Daniel Dale, CNN
Washington (CNN) — President Joe Biden held a solo news conference on Thursday after a NATO summit in Washington, seeking to reassure voters concerned about his ability to serve and Democratic officials concerned about his ability to defeat former President Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
Biden’s comments included some false and misleading claims. Here is a fact check.
Biden’s Putin-Zelensky gaffe moment
Biden played down a gaffe he made at an event earlier on Thursday in which he had mistakenly introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin” before correcting himself moments later. Biden said at the press conference: “I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, Zelensky.’ And then I added five other names.”
Facts First: Biden’s last claim was false. He didn’t utter “five other names” after he corrected the Putin-Zelensky mix-up. In fact, after Biden corrected himself, Zelensky said he is “better” than Putin, Biden agreed, and then Zelensky delivered remarks as Biden stood silently beside him.
Biden’s travels
Biden spoke of a need to “pace” himself in his activities. He said, “The next debate, I’m not going to be traveling 15 time zones a week before. Anyway. That’s what it was about.”
Facts First: This is misleading. Biden did not travel abroad “a week before” the June 27 CNN presidential debate in which he performed poorly. In fact, he returned to the US from Europe 12 days before that debate, on June 15.
Biden attended a fundraiser in Los Angeles on June 15, returned to the White House on June 16 and went to Camp David on June 20 for intensive debate preparations. He stayed at Camp David until the day of the CNN presidential debate against Trump, which was held in Atlanta.
What Trump said about NATO
Biden, criticizing Trump’s position on the NATO military alliance, said, “I think he said at one of his rallies, don’t hold me to this, recently, where, ‘NATO – I just learned about NATO,’ or something to that effect. Foreign policy’s never been his strong point.”
Facts First: Biden’s description of Trump’s comment was indeed inaccurate. Trump did not say at a recent rally that “I just learned about NATO.” Rather, Trump said at the rally that he had not known what NATO was, “too much,” prior to attending his first alliance summit as president in 2017.
Trump said at his Tuesday rally in Florida: “I didn’t want to be obnoxious because I felt, you know, it was the first time I’d ever done this. I went; I didn’t even know what the hell NATO was too much before, but it didn’t take me long to figure it out. Like about two minutes. And the first thing I figured out was they weren’t paying.” (Trump continued by making his usual false claims about NATO’s funding structure.)
Biden is entitled to criticize Trump for this profession of prior ignorance about NATO or for his continued inaccuracy about NATO, but Biden’s comments made it sound like Trump had acknowledged he had just learned about NATO now rather than seven years ago.
Hamas and the West Bank
Talking about the war between Israel and Hamas, Biden said Thursday, “There is a growing dissatisfaction in, on the West Bank, from the Palestinians, about Hamas. Hamas is not popular now.”
Facts First: The limited available public opinion polling suggests the claim that “Hamas is not popular now” in the West Bank is not true – and that Hamas’ popularity has increased there since its attack on Israel last October.
A poll taken in late May and early June by a well-known pollster based in the West Bank, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, found that 73% of respondents in the West Bank supported the October attack by Hamas, that 82% of respondents in the West Bank were satisfied with Hamas’ performance in the current war with Israel and that 71% of respondents in the West Bank preferred Hamas to control the Gaza Strip after the war. Hamas scored better on all of those questions among the respondents in the West Bank than it did among the respondents in Gaza.
In addition, Hamas had the support of about half the West Bank respondents who said they would vote in hypothetical parliamentary elections – double its support level in a poll nine months prior and more than double West Bank respondents’ support in the latest poll for more moderate rival Fatah.
Biden’s endorsement from the United Auto Workers
When a reporter told Biden that Reuters had reported Thursday that the leadership of the United Auto Workers union was concerned about Biden’s ability to win the election, Biden responded, “UAW just endorsed me, but go ahead.”
Facts First: Biden’s claim that the UAW “just” endorsed him is misleading at best. The UAW actually announced its endorsement of Biden on January 24, more than five months ago.
In other words, Biden attempted to dismiss the reported post-debate concerns of UAW president Shawn Fain by insinuating that Fain’s union had made a recent decision to back Biden. But the endorsement actually came long before the debate and the resulting crisis of confidence among some of Biden’s pre-debate backers.
The war in Afghanistan
Biden spoke of how he had encouraged Israeli leaders not to “occupy anywhere” and instead target the Hamas terrorists who attacked their country, avoiding the mistakes the US made after it was attacked on September 11, 2001. Biden said, “You may recall, I still get criticized for it, but I was totally opposed to the occupation and trying to unite Afghanistan. Once we got bin Laden,” in 2011, “we should’ve moved on, because it was not in our – no one’s ever going to unite that country.”
Facts First: Biden’s claim that he was “totally opposed to the occupation” of Afghanistan is misleading at best. In the early years of the war, Biden, then a US senator for Delaware, was a vocal public supporter of the US having a sustained military presence in Afghanistan and engaging in extensive “nation-building” there – and he explicitly rejected the idea of a narrow military mission targeting terrorists. Biden did eventually change his mind, becoming a sharp internal critic of the war as President Barack Obama’s vice president beginning in 2009; he opposed Obama’s “surge” of additional troops into the country. But Biden has repeatedly suggested he always opposed the idea of a US military presence and nation-building efforts in Afghanistan, and that’s incorrect.
In an October 2001 speech in the Senate, Biden outlined a broad agenda for a “long-term solution” in Afghanistan, which he said would involve everything from “the restoration of women’s rights” to “building basic infrastructure” to the “creation of secular schools” to the establishment of a “crop substitution program for narcotics” – and said that it would be unwise to simply go after terrorists. He said, “We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past. If we think only in the short term, only of getting bin Laden and the Taliban – which we must do, but that is not all we must do – we are just begging for greater trouble down the line.”
In a speech in February 2002, after the Taliban regime was ousted, Biden said, “Like it or not, our leadership role must include soldiers on the ground, in my view. If others step forward and we are not needed on the ground, fine. But whatever it takes, we are going to have to be sure that there is a robust security force not only in Kabul but in every major municipal center in that country if there’s any prospect of transitioning to a government that is stable two years down the road, has a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding, and is able to transition into a military and a police force that is a basic necessity for governance there.”
He continued: “History is going to judge us very harshly, I believe, if we allow the hope of a liberated Afghanistan to evaporate because we are fearful of the phrase ‘nation-building’ or we do not stay the course.”
And in comments on Afghanistan at a February 2003 meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden said, “In some parts of this [President George W. Bush] administration, ‘nation-building’ is a dirty phrase. But the alternative to nation-building is chaos – a chaos that churns out bloodthirsty warlords, drug traffickers, and terrorists. We’ve seen it happen in Afghanistan before, and we’re watching it happen in Afghanistan today.”
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