President Joe Biden repeated a widely disputed story Monday while addressing Amtrak employees outside of Wilmington, Delaware.
While in Delaware to announce $16.4 billion in rail grants along the Northeast Corridor, the president repeated the story of how he allegedly discovered he’d surpassed 1 million miles ridden on Amtrak.
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Biden used Amtrak to commute daily to and from Washington, D.C., while serving as a senator for Delaware, and on Monday, he recounted an interaction with an Amtrak employee named Angelo Negri he had gotten to know over the years.
“I was coming home to see my mom, and I just — she was living at this time, my dad had passed away — and I got on the train on a Friday, and I won’t get [the Amtrak conductor] into complete trouble. I’ll just tell you his first name, but I’ll just tell you his first name. He was No. 2 in seniority at the time, Angelo,” Biden told the crowd. “Ang came up to me as I was walking in, and he said, ‘Joey!’ and he grabbed my cheek, and he said, ‘Joey, baby!'”
“They had just published in the newspaper that I had traveled 1,200,000 miles on Air Force planes as vice president. They published that on a regular basis,” he added. “He said — I won’t quote him exactly — but he said, ‘Big deal,’ and I said, ‘What’s it mean, Ang?'”
“You know how many miles you traveled on Amtrak?’” the president continued, still quoting Negri. “I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘A million 320,000 miles, and I said, ‘How do you figure that?’ and he said, ‘Well, 180 days a year, almost 300 miles a day, 36 years.'”
Biden has told this story multiple times since entering office in 2021, despite the fact that fact-checkers have rated the story false or at least misleading.
Based on his Senate commuting alone, Biden has ridden well more than 1 million miles on Amtrak. However, Negri retired from Amtrak in the early 1990s and died in May 2014. Biden did not surpass 1 million miles flown on Air Force Two until September 2015, after Negri’s death.
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You can watch Biden’s comments in full below.
