Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Possibly it is just Biden’s desire to connect with people, but Biden appears to have a habit of claiming connections to mass public shootings that didn’t happen. The latest example occurred on September 2, 2021.
President Biden on Thursday told Jewish leaders that he spent time at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh after the October 2018 mass murder of 11 people there — but the synagogue told The Post he never visited.
“I remember spending time at the, you know, going to the, you know, the Tree of Life synagogue, speaking with them,” Biden said in a 16-minute virtual address ahead of the Jewish holidays Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Barb Feige, executive director of the Tree of Life, said that Biden did not visit the synagogue in the nearly three years since the anti-Semitic attack.
In a phone interview, Feige, executive director since July 2019, said firmly that “no” Biden didn’t visit, even before taking office when he had a lower public profile as a former vice president and then-Democratic presidential candidate.
People might remember that twice Biden falsely claimed that he met with some students who had survived the attack at the Parkland High School while he was vice president.
Joe Biden twice on Saturday said he met with students who survived the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, when he was vice president. But the Parkland shooting took place in February 2018, a little more than a year after Biden left office.
The Democratic presidential hopeful – who is far from the only politician to misspeak but has acknowledged he is a “gaffe machine” – has a reputation for making misstatements on the campaign trail. His latest campaign gaffes came at a gun control forum in Des Moines, Iowa, when he described meeting survivors of the shooting that left 17 dead when they visited Washington to lobby for stricter gun laws.
“I met with them and then they went off up on the Hill when I was vice president,” Biden said at the forum. The former vice president made the same error later that day when he told reporters, “Those kids in Parkland came up to see me when I was vice president,” while describing members of Congress ducking meetings with the students.