(PresidentialWire.com)- During an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of Amtrak on Friday, President Joe Biden told an interesting and emotional story about an Amtrak conductor who congratulated him for traveling over 1.5 million miles….but a deeper look at the story reveals some confusing inaccuracies.
The story just doesn’t add up.
“When I became vice president, one of the Capitol Hill newspapers estimated that I had taken more than 7,000 round trips on Amtrak over my career. I think that’s an exaggeration. I’m going to rely on those two conductors … one of them was a guy named Angelo Negri,” Biden said during the event.
Biden added that there was an article in his fourth year as vice president saying “Biden travels 1,300,000 miles on Air Force One, Two…I used to…the Secret Service didn’t like it…but I used to like to take the train home.”
He added that his mother was sick and he would try to go home almost every weekend when he was vice president, and what follows is what he said word for word. So excuse us if it’s confusing to follow:
“I got on the train and Angelo Negri came up and he goes, ‘Joey, baby,’ and he grabbed my cheek like he always did. I thought he was going to get shot. I’m serious. I said, ‘No, no, he’s a friend,’” he said.
“He said, ‘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,” the president continued.
At first, nobody really questioned the rambling tale, but when some eagle-eyed reporters discovered that Negri’s obituary says he retired from the Amtrak service in 1993….it really doesn’t make much sense.
Back in 1993, Joe Biden was a senator, and Barack Obama was certainly not the president.
What’s more, Joe Biden’s mother Catherine Eugenia Finnegan died way back in 2010 – only two years into Biden’s time as vice president.
Nothing adds up!
And to make things worse for him, Biden’s office only celebrated the one million miles mark On Air Force Two…in 2015.
So…did President Biden just make this story up completely? Or is he confused again?
