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President Joe Biden has been called out by fact-checkers for making a dubious claim about his “Uncle Frank” and a Purple Heart.
During a Dec. 16 speech at Delaware Veterans Summit and the PACT Act Town Hall, Biden claimed his uncle, Frank Biden, got the award, which is given to those wounded or killed in action:
You know, I — my dad, when I got elected Vice President, he said, “Joey, Uncle Frank fought in the Battle of the Bulge.” He was not feeling very well now — not because of the Battle of the Bulge. But he said, “And he won the Purple Heart. And he never received it. He never — he never got it. Do you think you could help him get it? We’ll surprise him.”So we got him the Purple Heart. He had won it in the Battle of the Bulge. And I remember he came over to the house, and I came out, and he said, ‘Present it to him, okay?’ We had the family there.I said, “Uncle Frank, you won this. And
I want to…” He said, “I don’t want the damn thing.” No, I’m serious. He said, “I don’t want it.” I said, “What’s the matter, Uncle Frank? You earned it.” He said, “Yeah, but the others died. The others died. I lived. I don’t want it.”
However, Frank Biden died in 1999, when Joe Biden, who was vice president between January 2009 and January 2017, was in the Senate. Also, Biden’s dad died in 2002, when his son was still in the Senate. Whether Frank Biden actually got the Purple Heart is unknown. The Purple Heart registry is incomplete and, had Biden’s uncle rejected the award, that would not have been in the record. Additionally, it is possible Biden misspoke and mixed up the timeline.
FactCheck.org, VERIFY, Snopes, Forbes, and The New York Post, among others, called out the discrepancy.
The White House declined to comment to Mediaite.