Biden Revives Claim He Was ‘Shot At’ in Speech to Diplomats
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President Joe Biden on Thursday repeated a claim to a gathering of State Department employees that he once came under fire abroad.
“You have great personal courage. I’ve been with some of you when we’ve been shot at,” Biden told staff, without detailing the incident in question.
It’s unclear what specific incident Biden was referring to in his remarks, but in the past he has faced scrutiny for similar comments. Biden previously made the claim at a Democratic presidential primary debate in July 2007. “Number one, you take all the troops out,” he said. “You better have helicopters ready to take those 3,000 civilians inside the Green Zone, where I have been seven times and shot at. You better make sure you have protection for them, or let them die.”
He later clarified those remarks to say he was inside a building in Iraq’s Green Zone with a contingent of visiting senators that “rattled” as a result from a blast in 2005, and suggested the “shot” that had been fired was akin to mortar fire. “I was near where a shot landed,” he said. “No one got up and ran from the room — it wasn’t that kind of thing. It’s not like I had someone holding a gun to my head.”
He also described two more incidents that took place during the period, according to a contemporaneous account published in The Hill. One involved traveling in a vehicle that “might also have been hit.” The other involved a trip in a C-130 cargo airplane as Biden was departing from Iraq in 2004. The plane’s anti-missile system was triggered, indicating it had been targeted by a surface-to-air missile.
Biden isn’t the first elected official to make an eyebrow-raising claim of facing enemy fire abroad. Former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton famously faced years of ridicule — particularly during her first presidential campaign in 2008 — for claiming that she landed “under sniper fire” during a 1996 trip to Bosnia. Her compatriots on the trip, including Sheryl Crow and actor Sinbad, claimed the incident never took place.
