President Biden repeated a heartfelt yet factually challenged story about an Amtrak employee during a speech Monday in New Jersey.
For the fifth time during his presidency, Biden told a story dating back to when he was vice president about a lighthearted encounter with former Amtrak employee Angelo Negri.
BIDEN KEEPS TELLING BIZARRE AMTRAK STORY THAT WAS ALREADY DEBUNKED
“I commuted every single day, 263 miles a day, on Amtrak from the time I got elected United States senator,” the president said. “I got to know all the conductors really well, they became my friends – I mean, really, my genuine friends, I’d have them at my home for Christmas and during the summer.
“And Ange walks up to me and goes, ‘Joey, baby,’ grabs my cheek and I thought the Secret Service was going to blow his head off,” he said.
“I swear to God, true story,” he recalled. “I said, ‘No, no, he’s a friend.’ I said, ‘What’s up, Ange?’ And he said, ‘Joey, I read in the paper you traveled 1,200,000 miles on Air Force planes.'”
Negri then informed the vice president that he had traveled 2,200,000 miles on Amtrak, according to Biden’s telling.
“‘So Joey, I don’t wanna hear this about the Air Force anymore,'” Biden recalled Negri joking.
“I’m a train guy,” the president said, concluding his story and launching into his pitch on his Build Back Better agenda and bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Fox News has previously reported that the story does not add up.
Negri’s obituary states he retired from Amtrak in 1993, while Biden was still a senator. Additionally, Biden’s office celebrated him hitting 1 million miles on Air Force Two in 2015 and Negri passed away the year prior.
Biden’s telling of the story has also varied.
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The president previously claimed it happened in the “fourth or fifth year” of his vice presidency, while he claimed as recently as last week that it happened in the seventh year of his tenure.
In another version of the story that Biden has previously told, he was going back to visit his sick mother when the interaction happened, even though his mother, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan, died in 2010.
Fox News’ Evie Fordham and Houston Keene contributed reporting.
