(Headline USA) President Joe Biden repeated a lie on Monday that he was the first person in his family to go to college, despite admitting years ago that this claim was not true.
Biden made the comment during a campaign event in Wisconsin, where he touted his latest efforts to illegally forgive millions of dollars in student loan debt, the New York Post reported.
“I, like an awful lot of people in this audience, was the first in my family to go to college and watched my dad struggle to get there,” he said.
It was this lie that helped lead to the dissolution of Biden’s first presidential campaign back in 1987.
His campaign ended after multiple allegations of plagiarism and falsehoods were leveled against the then-U.S. senator. Confronted about the inaccurate claims he had made, Biden admitted to the New York Times that year that members of his mother’s family went to college before he did.
Biden’s own father also attended Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University for one year, the York Daily Record confirmed in 2020.
And in 2022, Biden admitted in a speech that his maternal grandfather, Ambrose Joseph Finnegan, had been an “All-American football player” for Santa Clara College in California.
“A star athlete, he gained nationwide recognition for his feats while quarterback of the Santa Clara football team,” Biden recalled.
In a statement, however, the White House doubled down on Biden’s lie, saying the president “is proud to be the first Biden to graduate college.”
Biden has made a habit of exaggerating or flat-out fabricating stories from his past in an effort to connect with voters. Even CNN admitted last year that many of the anecdotes Biden shares simply are not true.
One of Biden’s favorite stories, for example, is about a conversation he claims to have had during his vice presidency with an Amtrak conductor named Angelo Negri.
As CNN pointed out in 2021, that conversation could not possibly have happened—because Negri was deceased at the time the conversation would have had to have taken place.
