We spotted a few instances in President Joe Biden’s televised town hall when his answers didn’t square with the facts:
Biden said that both he and his wife had “been” to the U.S-Mexico border. But the White House press secretary said he was referring to a brief drive by the border in October 2008, and Jill Biden went in December 2019 — not since becoming first lady.
The president said the top marginal income tax rate was 35%, but it’s 37%.
Biden said “community policing” caused a significant drop in violent crime in the late 1990s. Experts have said more police did help, but there were many potential reasons.
Biden cited the large increase in vaccinations under his watch and credited buying “everything … in sight.” But while his administration did increase the government’s orders with vaccine manufacturers, the Trump administration had options in place to order more.
He said “we’ve created more jobs in the first eight months of my administration than any president in American history.” That’s correct but doesn’t acknowledge the unique circumstances as the country continues to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic’s economic fallout.
The Oct. 21 prime time town hall on CNN was held in Baltimore at a “pivotal moment” for Biden, as host Anderson Cooper put it. Congressional Democrats are trying to come to an agreement on a reconciliation plan that would incorporate many of Biden’s social policy goals.
When Cooper followed up on an immigration question posed by a college student who asked Biden why he had not been to the “southern border of our country” as president, Biden gave a few reasons and said that he had “been there before.”
Cooper: Do you have plans to visit the southern border?
Biden: I’ve been there before, and I haven’t — I mean, I know it well. I guess I should go down. But the — but the whole point of it is: I haven’t had a whole hell of lot of time to get down. I’ve been spending time going around looking at the $900 billion worth of damage done by — by hurricanes and floods and — and weather, and traveling around the world.
But I plan on — now, my wife, Jill, has been down. She’s been on both sides of the river. She’s seen the circumstances there. She’s looked into those places.
It turns out that Biden was talking about a brief drive by the U.S.-Mexico border in the fall of 2008, when he traveled for a campaign rally in Mesilla, New Mexico.
Biden at the Oct. 21 CNN town hall in Baltimore. Photo by Nicholas Kamm / AFP via Getty Images.
When asked about the president’s town hall remarks in an Oct. 22 press briefing, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, “There’s been reporting that he did drive through the border when he was on the campaign trail in 2008, and he is certainly familiar with the fact, and it stuck with him, with the fact that in El Paso, the border goes right through the center of town.”
David E. Wade, who was a traveling press officer for the Obama-Biden campaign at the time, told the Washington Post‘s Fact Checker that Biden’s motorcade took him from the airport in El Paso, Texas, to the New Mexico suburb of Las Cruces. “The drive took Biden along a route that for a few minutes hugs the border of the United States and Mexico,” the Fact Checker reported.
As for Jill Biden, she visited a refugee camp in Mexico for people seeking asylum to the U.S. in December 2019. But that was during her husband’s presidential campaign — not while she was first lady, as the president’s comments may have led people to believe.
Jill Biden was there with religious and local leaders, as well as volunteer organizations, who went to the encampment in Matamoros — across the border from Brownsville, Texas — to provide meals and gifts to the migrants as they awaited their day in U.S. immigration hearings.