The White House has changed the transcript of a speech Joe Biden gave in Maryland to remove his claim that blacks, Hispanics and veterans are unlikely to graduate from high school.
The gaffe-prone president spoke about the economy Thursday at Prince George’s Community College in Largo.
Biden said he was proud that big companies paid their fair share of taxes and touted his success in creating 13 million jobs.
But during his speech he also made a major gaffe and suggested that minorities and veterans were uneducated.
“We’ve seen record lows in unemployment in particular – and I’ve focused on this throughout my career – particularly among African American and Hispanic workers and veterans, you know, the workers without a high school diploma,” he said.
Joe Biden said at a rally in Maryland on Thursday that he has helped reduce unemployment among blacks, Hispanics and veterans – describing them as “workers without a high school diploma.”
The White House, which releases official transcripts of his speeches, including the “umms” and “ahhs,” later corrected his words in an unusual move.
He is quoted in the transcript as saying that unemployment has declined, “particularly for African American and Hispanic workers and veterans, you know, and for those workers without a high school diploma.”
The president is known for his gaffes, exaggerations and embellishments of stories.
On Monday, he used the anniversary of September 11th to claim that he remembered “standing there looking at the building the next day” in New York – when in fact he was in Washington, DC on September 12th, 2001 stopped.
“Some have said that everything changed for America yesterday and today,” the then-Senator from Delaware said from the Senate floor the day after the attacks.
“I pray this isn’t true.” I pray this isn’t true… The one thing we can’t allow is the values this country was built on.
“Because if that were to happen, they could declare victory, a real victory.”
Biden on Monday also embellished his memories of the fateful day, claiming he saw a “fireball” at the Pentagon on September 11, while describing it as a “brown haze of smoke” in his book.
Joe Biden is seen speaking to troops in Anchorage, Alaska on Monday, the 22nd anniversary of 9/11. He is the first president not to spend the anniversary at the site of one of the three plane crashes
The picture shows planes crashing into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001
Joe Biden speaks to reporters outside Congress on September 11, 2001
Biden, seen on September 11, 2001, was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time of the attacks
When Biden spoke to troops in Anchorage, Alaska, on his way home from the G20 summit in Vietnam on Monday, he told them with typical Biden exaggeration about his memories of 22 years ago.
“The cloud of fire that shot into the sky at the Pentagon — I remember seeing it as I was getting off the Amtrak train on my way to work at the U.S. Senate,” he said.
But in his autobiography, he wrote that the scene was much less dramatic: “I could see a haze of brown smoke hanging in the otherwise crystal clear sky behind the Capitol dome.”
Biden, who was then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was photographed speaking to reporters outside the Capitol on Sept. 11.
In his 2007 book “Promises to Keep,” Biden wrote that he was in Washington, D.C., the day after the attack: “I went back to the Capitol the next morning,” he noted.
A Sept. 12, 2001 Gannett News Wire report, cited by the New York Post, backed up the version in his biography, beginning: “Delaware Sen. Joe Biden spent Wednesday exactly where he wanted – in the U.S. Senate.”
Archived CSPAN footage also showed Biden speaking on the Senate floor on September 12, 2001, as he and 99 other senators denounced the cowardly attacks.
The president, who joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the age of 32 and became its chairman in 2001, has frequently spoken about his “arrest” by South African police.
On February 11, 2020, Biden told an audience in South Carolina that he had been arrested in the African country.
“30 years ago today, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and began a discussion about apartheid,” he told the crowd.
“I had the great honor of meeting him. “I had the great honor of being arrested on the streets of Soweto along with our UN ambassador when I tried to meet him on Robben Island.”
Biden did not name the year, but was in South Africa in 1977.
Biden is seen visiting a memorial for Nelson Mandela in front of the South African embassy in December 2013. Mandela died on December 5, 2013 at the age of 95
In late February 2020, Biden told CNN that this was not the case, although there was considerable interest in whether he had actually been arrested.
“When I said ‘arrested,’ I meant I couldn’t move,” Biden said after recounting what happened to him.
“The police wouldn’t let me go.” I wasn’t arrested, I was stopped. I couldn’t move where I wanted to go.’
He did not specify whether this encounter took place in Lesotho or South Africa.
Biden has a long history of exaggerating his own biography.
In January of this year, in a conversation with students at historically black colleges in Atlanta, he claimed that he had been arrested during civil rights protests – a claim for which there is no evidence.
In September 2021, he told Jewish leaders that he remembered spending time and “visiting” the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh after the mass murder of eleven people in 2018. It later emerged that he had never visited her.
The White House said he was referring to a phone call and made a mistake.