Former Vice President makes more factual errors during event
Presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden has continued to make more factual errors during a virtual roundtable after he claimed he “became a professor” after leaving the Senate.
Biden took questions during an online campaign event while discussing the student debt crisis.
The former Vice President began speaking about all the time he had spent on “campus.”
“When I left the United States Senate, I became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania,” Biden said.
“And I’ve spent a lot of time — and the University of Delaware has the Biden School as well, so I’ve spent a lot of time on campus with college students.”
Notably, Biden became vice president of the United States under President Obama after leaving Senate in 2009.
But it was 2017 when he received the title of “Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor” from the University of Pennsylvania.
The university opened the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C., outside of its campus as part of the professorship, according to The Daily Pennsylvania.
A spokesperson for Biden at the time, Kate Bedingfield, told the paper “He will not be teaching classes.”
Biden also claimed he “became a teacher” on the campaign trail back in February, but failed to say where he taught.
WATCH
So Biden just said “when I left the United States Senate, I became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.”
That’s not true. He never taught a class.https://t.co/zaLzTNDXmn pic.twitter.com/e4fZNUlTUM
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 25, 2020
This is not the first time Biden has got his facts mixed up.
Biden claimed twice he met with Parkland, Florida, shooting survivors when he was Vice President, despite not being in office.
In 2008, while running for president, Biden told the United Mine Workers that he was a coal miner.
“I hope you won’t hold it against me, but I am a hard-coal miner, anthracite coal, Scranton, Pennsylvania,” Biden said.
“It’s nice to be back in coal country. It’s a different accent [in Virginia], but it’s the same deal. We were taught that our faith and our family was the only really important thing, and our faith and our family informed everything we did.”
But Biden later admitted his comment was a “joke,” despite being similar to his claim about coming from a family of coal miners during his 1988 campaign.
Biden admitted the truth in 2004.
“Hell, I might be president now if it weren’t for the fact I said I had an uncle who was a coal miner. Turns out I didn’t have anybody in the coal mines, you know what I mean? I tried that crap — it didn’t work,” he said.
In 2009, Biden claimed he spent “a lot of hours alone” with President George W. Bush while rebuking the president over his foreign policy decisions.
“I remember President Bush saying to me one time in the Oval Office,” Biden told CNN.
“‘Well, Joe,’ he said, ‘I’m a leader.’ And I said: ‘Mr. President, turn around and look behind you. No one is following.’”
But Bush aides told Fox News in 2009 that they couldn’t recall any private meetings between Biden and the president.