Biden takes heat for repeating walked back claim from 2007 that he had been ‘shot at’

Did President Joe Biden just borrow a page out of Hillary Clinton’s playbook of exaggeration, or is he doing his best Brian Williams impersonation, where the NBC anchor falsely claimed he was in a helicopter that was shot at by a rocket-propelled grenade?

What appears to be clear is that Biden repeated an old claim that he apparently forgot he had walked back well over a decade ago.


The president was speaking to a group of diplomatic aides at the State Department on Thursday when he claimed he’d been shot at.

“You have great personal courage. I’ve been with some of you when we’ve been shot at,” Biden told the group.

Biden’s claim is not new, as he said in a 2007 Democratic debate that he’d been “shot at” inside Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, and would be forced to walk the claim back, according to Fox News.

“Let’s start telling the truth,” Biden said. “Number one, you take all the troops out — 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, number one.”

More on that incident from Fox News:

He amended that later, saying the quarters he was staying in while visiting the Green Zone in 2005 shook from a nearby blast, and “I was near where a shot landed.” He said that he’d been in three near-shooting instances, and in one instance, a shot had landed outside the building where he and other senators were staying. He added that the vehicle he was traveling in the day before might have also been hit.

Biden said the incident wasn’t threatening enough to take cover. “No one got up and ran from the room—it wasn’t that kind of thing,” he said. “It’s not like I had someone holding a gun to my head.”

 

Patrick Campbell, legislative director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said at the time veterans “have names” for people who exaggerate actions in combat zones, like Biden did.

“Veterans don’t like it when people mischaracterize their service, people who overstate what happens to them,” he said, according to Fox News. “We have names for them.”

Political commentator Liz Wheeler responded to note the relative silence from the media.

“Imagine if Trump had falsely claimed he was ‘shot at’ even if it wasn’t true. The MSM would go ballistic,” she tweeted.

Here’s a sampling of other responses to the story from Twitter, to include one stellar social media user who suggested this may be where Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez acquired her tendency to fib:

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