(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) President Joe Biden stirred confusion when he falsely claimed that his uncle, Ambrose Finnegan, might have been eaten by cannibals in New Guinea during World War II. Biden reiterated these claims not once, but twice on Wednesday.
Despite Biden’s efforts to honor his late uncle, who perished during the war, military records present a different explanation about Finnegan’s death, the New York Post reported.
According to military records, Finnegan died following a plane crash, with his aircraft plunging into the Pacific. Despite this, Biden persisted with his unproven claims during two separate instances while campaigning in Pennsylvania ahead of the state’s Democratic primary.
“He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals at the time,” Biden asserted to reporters gathered outside a WWII memorial in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
“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,” Biden added.
Biden’s got a new story about Uncle Bosey being shot down and eaten by cannibals…
No one believes this shit, right? pic.twitter.com/iBSwrlUrOn
— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) April 17, 2024
The 81-year-old President repeated these unverified claims about his uncle during his conversations with members of the United Steelworkers, as reported by the Post.
“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 remarked.
Biden, for the third time in less than 24 hours, tells the dubious story about his “Uncle Bosey” and “a lot of cannibals” in New Guinea before repeating the debunked “suckers and losers” hoax.
He also claims D-Day was on a Sunday (it was on a Tuesday).
HE IS NOT WELL. pic.twitter.com/iqeOjjFY0v
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 17, 2024
According to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, responsible for gathering information on prisoners of war or missing-in-action servicemen, Finnegan passed away on May 14, 1944, after his plane was compelled to ditch into the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea. His body was never recovered.
“Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard,” the federal agency said. “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’s Pennsylvania campaign stop was already marred by gaffes, notably when he referenced a discredited story from the Atlantic alleging that former President Donald Trump had canceled a visit to a World War I veterans’ cemetery in France because he purportedly did not wish to visit “suckers” and “losers.”
The Atlantic’s claims have been widely debunked, with 25 White House officials saying such claims never happened and the Washington Post’s fact-checker reporting that many of the 25 individuals were present during the France trip. Subsequent, released documents revealed that the trip to the cemetery was canceled due to inclement weather.
Regarding the lede of this story: I obtained documents from the Navy via #FOIA about Trump’s 2018 trip to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris and the documents say his transport was canceled by the Navy due to rain. https://t.co/oNWsvAPy1z pic.twitter.com/keFtW7QC8b
— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) September 4, 2020
