(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) Among the litany of lies often repeated by President Joe Biden is a dubious—and now debunked—claim that he was arrested “on the streets of Soweto” in apartheid South Africa as he attempted to visit with violent political activist Nelson Mandela.
It turns out that Biden not only was fabricating the claim in order to boost his political appeal—just as he often has dishonorably appropriated elements of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement into his personal history—but he also was using the bogus claim to cover up financial fraud after taking a personal vacation with his brother Frank on the taxpayer’s dime, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
In fact, legendary Secretary of State Henry Kissinger spent his final days in office examining then-Sen. Biden’s misuse of federal funds on his 1976 South Africa trip before Kissenger’s successor, Carter administration official Cyrus Vance Sr. took over. (Vance’s son, incidentally, would go on to launch the Manhattan lawfare investigation into then-President Donald Trump’s business records, which was prosecuted by his successor, Alvin Bragg.)
Kissinger, who fled Europe in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution, served as secretary of State under two Republican presidents—Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—between 1969 and 1977.
In January 1977, just days before Kissinger was to leave office, he penned a cable indicating that he had been reviewing Biden’s receipts from that trip.
“Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. Traveled with [Congressional delegation Rep. Charles Diggs ,D., Mich.] … Would appreciate embassy cabling amounts returned and pouching xeroxed copies of reciepts,” Kissinger wrote to several U.S. embassies in Africa.
Biden’s trip came under scrutiny because, in a now all-too-familiar scenario blending Biden family business with his official duties, the first-term Delaware lawmaker used federal tax dollars to bring his brother Frank—then a senior at San Francisco State University—along on the trip.
A little over a year later, Biden would justify the decision by saying that his brother was helping him conduct official U.S. business in Africa.
“I didn’t take my staff, so he [Frank] was my staff, and for company,” Biden claimed when explaining himself in 1978, before attempting to play the sympathy card about his first wife’s 1972 death in an automobile accident. “I wasn’t married then.”
Diggs, the House lawmaker who had led the expedition, ultimately was convicted on 29 federal corruption counts. However, by time the focus fell back on Biden, many of the Pentagon’s records of the trip had already been destroyed, noted a November 1978 article that ran on page 12 of Wilmington, Delaware’s Morning News, framing it as a meritless allegation from Biden’s GOP senatorial challenger in that year’s re-election race.
Years later, the future president would fabricate his arrest myth, which was so absurd that even the left-wing fact-checkers at Snopes do not believe his tale.
It is unclear who was caring for Biden’s two young sons, Hunter and Beau, as he went on the Africa junket with his younger brother, which included a sightseeing safari.
Frank Biden, an attorney and occasional con-man in Florida, has gone on to become the family black sheep, making the troubled Hunter seem like a Baptist minister by comparison.
Frank has rarely been included in the family business operations, but that hasn’t kept him from capitalizing on the family name and likeness to conduct his own influence-peddling schemes.
He notoriously was found liable to the orphaned daughters of a man who died as the result of a 1999 drunken-driving incident in a rented Jaguar. However, Frank thus far has refused to pay the $1 million he owes in judgment.
Last year, explicit nude photographs of Frank were uncovered on a gay dating site.
