President Joe Biden appeared to claim during Thursday’s presidential debate in Atlanta, Georgia, that his son died in Iraq before correcting himself.
According to the CNN transcript of the debate, Biden stated, “What got me involved to run in the first place after my son had died, I decided — in Iraq — because of Iraq…” on Thursday night before launching into a tirade accusing Donald Trump of supporting white supremacists in the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, riot.
Beau Biden, the president’s late son, died in 2015 of glioblastoma multiforme brain cancer after experiencing what White House officials called “an episode of disorientation and weakness” in a statement to NBC News.
He passed away at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, at the age of 46 — six years after returning from his year-long deployment to Iraq as a military lawyer in a Delaware National Guard brigade.
While Joe Biden has repeated the claim that his son’s cancer was caused by trash-burning pits at U.S. military installations in Iraq, he admitted to PBS’s Judy Woodruff in 2018 that he was unaware of “any direct scientific evidence” of a linkage.
A 2011 National Academy of Sciences investigation into health risks potentially associated with the burn pits found “inadequate/insufficient evidence of an association between exposure to combustion products and cancer, respiratory disease, circulatory disease, neurologic disease, and adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes in the populations studied.”
A reassessment done in 2022 was inconclusive, with the researchers saying their data ended up being “not helpful.”
The president has made the claim that Beau died “in” or “because of” Iraq multiple times over the years.
“My son was a major in the U.S. Army. We lost him in Iraq,” the elder Biden said to U.S. Marines stationed in Iwakuni, Japan, in 2023, according to video obtained by the New York Post.
At an October 2022 U.S. Army event in Colorado, he also claimed Beau “lost his life in Iraq.”
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