President Joe Biden told reporters on Wednesday that his uncle, Ambrose J. Finnegan, was “shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals,” and authorities “never found his body.”
Biden “misstated key details about his uncle’s death,” the Associated Press reported. Finnegan died on May 14, 1944, according to the Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Finnegan was a passenger on an Army Air Forces plane that he ditched “for unknown reasons” in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of New Guinea, the agency reported.
On the tarmac, while traveling to a campaign stop in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Biden told a story about his uncle, alleging his Air Force plane was “shot down” during a “reconnaissance flight over New Guinea” during World War II.
“When D-Day occurred, the next day, all four of my mother’s brothers volunteered to join the military. Three of them made it. One of them couldn’t go,” Biden said.
“Ambrose Finnegan — we called him Uncle Bosie — he was shot down. He was in the Army Air Corps before there was an Air Force, flew single-engine airplanes, reconnaissance flights over New Guinea,” Biden continued.
“[He] got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals at the time. They never recovered his body,” Biden said. “But the government went back when I was down there, and they checked and found parts of the plane and the like.”
Biden told the story to condemn former President Donald Trump’s “debunked” statement allegedly made in France about American military men and women being “suckers” and “losers.”
“What I was thinking about when I was standing there was when Trump refused to go up to a memorial for veterans in Paris, and he said they’re a bunch of suckers and losers,” he said.
“To me, that is such a disqualifying assertion made by a president. The guys who saved civilization in the 1940s, suckers and losers,” Biden said.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former GOP War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.