President Biden appeared to go off the rails with a heartfelt story about reaching 1.5 million miles on Amtrak and being personally congratulated by a conductor — after it emerged the Amtrak worker actually retired some 20 years before his story took place.
Speaking at an event in Philadelphia commemorating the 50th anniversary of Amtrak Friday, Biden — an avid rail user who earned the name “Amtrak Joe” as a senator — launched into a touching tale about hitting the milestone in his “fourth or fifth year as vice president” as he traveled home.
“When I became vice president, one of the Capitol Hill newspapers estimated that I had taken more than 7,000 round trips on Amtrak over my career. I think that’s an exaggeration. I’m going to rely on those two conductors … one of them was a guy named Angelo Negri,” Biden began, according to Fox News.
“There was an article, I guess my fourth or fifth year as vice president, saying Biden travels 1,300,000 miles on Air Force One [Two]. I used to — the Secret Service didn’t like it — but I used to like to take the train home.
“My mom was sick and I used to try to come home almost every weekend as vice president to see her. I got on the train and Angelo Negri came up and he goes, ‘Joey, baby,’ and he grabbed my cheek like he always did,” Biden steamed ahead.
“He said, ‘Joey, what’s the big deal? 1,300,000 miles on Air Force Two? Do you know how many miles you traveled on Amtrak?’ I said, ‘No, Angie, I don’t know.’ He gave me the calculation and he said, ‘You traveled 1,500,000 miles on Amtrak.’ The fact is, I’d probably take Angie’s word before I’d take the word of what the article said.”
However, Biden’s emotive story doesn’t quite add up, with skeptics quickly poking holes in the commander-in-chief’s long-winded account.
Fox News noted that he entered the fourth year of his vice presidency around 2013 — 20 years after Negri’s obit said he had retired from Amtrak in 1993, when Biden would have been in the Senate.
Meanwhile, the president’s mother, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan, died in 2010 — years before his story allegedly took place.
The outlet also pointed out that Biden’s office celebrated him reaching 1 million miles on Air Force Two in 2015.
“A few months ago, Vice President Joe Biden crossed the million-mile mark aboard Air Force Two — the official plane of the Vice President. … I wanted to give you a sense of what those more-than 1 million miles have looked like these past seven years,” vice presidential photographer David Lienemann wrote in a blog post in February 2016, according to Fox News.
The White House told The Post in an email Thursday afternoon that there were two events when Biden was veep “that his conductor could have been at as a guest — the JRB station name dedication and then a recovery act event” in 2009 or 2010.”
