Joe Biden claimed he was once arrested by Capitol Police after he trespassed into Senate chambers at age 21
President Joe Biden has a history of claiming to have been arrested on several occasions, with many not turning out not to be true. One notable instance was during a 2007 appearance on David Letterman, when the then-Senator claimed he was arrested at the US Capitol when he was 21 years old, Fox News reported.
Biden was asked what it was like to walk into the Senate chamber after being elected at the young age of 29. The Delaware Democrat said he had first walked into the Senate chamber when he was 21 and was arrested. He told Letterman he had been visiting some friends at Georgetown University and decided to visit Washington because he "was fascinated with the Senate."
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"In those days, no guards stopping you everywhere. And they just got out of session. I walked in the back, all of a sudden I found myself in the chamber. I was stunned. I walked up, sat down in the presiding officer’s seat, the guy grabbed by the shoulder, said: ‘you’re under arrest,’" Biden said. "Literally nine years later, as I walked onto the Senate floor through the same door, that same guy, cop, said to me, ‘Senator, you remember me?’ I said, ‘geez, I don’t.’ He said, ‘I arrested you nine years ago…welcome back.'"
While it's unclear if Biden was indeed arrested at the Capitol building back in the day, the 46th POTUS has previously been caught bragging about several "arrests" that turned out to be fabrications. Biden, on three separate occasions last year, recounted some version of a story about how he was arrested with Nelson Mandela in South Africa while visiting with the independence hero in the 1970s.
“This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid. I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robben Island,” Biden said during a campaign event in South Carolina on February 11. At the time, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was still a threat to his primary nomination.
There was one problem, however: The arrest didn't happen. In fact, the blatant falsehood was even denounced by independent fact-checkers such as Politifact and the Washington Post, which awarded four Pinocchios to the "ridiculous claim." The backlash forced Biden to come clean during an appearance on CNN two weeks later.
“When I said arrested I meant I was not able to move, cops and Afrikaners would not let me go with them … I guess I wasn’t arrested I was stopped,” he explained.
In the days leading up to the 2008 presidential election, which Barack Obama won in a landslide, Biden conjured yet another "arrest" while addressing students at the University of Ohio. The former Delaware senator, at the time, claimed he was busted for accidentally wandering into a women's dormitory when he was a student at the University of Delaware.
“Barack Obama’s running mate playfully admitting he was arrested more than 40 years ago. Biden joked about it in Ohio. He said he was attending a football game between his university and Ohio University and he mistakenly followed what he called … ‘a lovely group of women into an all-female dormitory.’ Biden said an officer quickly stopped him noting that men were not allowed inside,” CNN's Wolf Blitzer reported in 2008.
But Biden backtracked on his claims while retelling the moment in 2012 during a speech in Athens, Ohio. “The last time I was here, I want to make clear to the press, I didn’t get arrested, but I almost did. Because back in those days … men weren’t allowed anywhere near a women’s dorm,” he clarified.