President Biden has been accused of repeating an old lie that he was appointed to a Naval Academy in 1965.
The president had been delivering the commencement address at West Point Military Academy, New York, when he made the remarks to 1,036 cadets.
During the ceremony, Biden told the crowd of graduates that he had been “nominated” to the Naval Academy.
Biden said, “I was appointed to the Naval Academy by a guy I ran against when I was 29.” I was one of ten, I wanted to play football.
“On the day I was supposed to go for the interview, a classmate of mine who was also one of the ten designated to be chosen.”
The president had been delivering the commencement address at West Point Military Academy, New York, when he gave the speech to about 1,000 cadets.
Biden continued: ‘He came to pick me up, I found out two days before that they had a quarterback named Roger Staubach and a running back named Joe Bellino. I said, “Oh, I’m not going there, I went to Delaware.”
Biden had previously made this same claim while addressing 2022 graduates of the US Naval Academy.
Biden said Delaware Sen. J. Caleb Boggs, whom he ran against in 1972, had tried to get him into the Annapolis school seven years earlier.
The New York Post reported at the time that Delaware Historical Association curators sought Academy nominations “box by box.”
Chief Curator Leigh Rifenburg had told the outlet that the president’s claim was “unlikely.”
Rifenburg: ‘Our staff dedicated much of last week to this project.
“We collected and sorted a few dozen boxes from the relevant years, which turned out to be as much of a needle-in-a-haystack proposition as we feared.”
‘To be sure, we searched the entire date range from 1960 to 1965. It seems extraordinarily unlikely that an appointment would have been made in 1965, given President Biden’s years of enrollment at the University of Delaware, but we wanted to be thorough. ,’ She continued.
“We could not find citations for the entry in 1961, 1963, 1964 or 1965,” Rifenburg added.
Graduating cadets listen as President Joe Biden speaks at the U.S. Military Academy graduation ceremony, Saturday, May 25, 2024, in West Point, New York.
During the ceremony, Biden told the crowd of graduates that he had been “nominated” to the Naval Academy.
Also during his speech on Saturday, the president faltered in a sentence when talking about Putin and NATO.
He said: ‘Putin was sure that NATO would fracture right after I was sworn in. We talked about this same topic.
‘The fall, he tied her up, that fall decided, look, I probably shouldn’t get into this. But she excites me a little.’
Since clips of his speech awkwardly speaking and mentioning the Naval Academy surfaced on social media, the president has been criticized online.
One person posted: ‘Keep it home Jill. You are shaming your husband, allowing vulnerabilities in America, and revealing the wife you are not. Pathetic behavior.’
Another posted: ‘Another day, another lie from Biden. When will the left stop making excuses for this man’s blatant dishonesty?
While another said: “Did anyone have ‘Bribery says he was appointed to the Naval Academy’ on their bingo card?”
Biden presents diploma to graduating cadet during US Military Academy graduation
The president used his speech to emphasize the critical role of US support for its allies around the world, including Israel, Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific.
Gaffes aside, the president used his speech to emphasize the critical role of US support for its allies around the world, including Israel, Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific.
Biden described US soldiers as “working around the clock” to support Ukraine in its effort to repel a two-year Russian invasion, but reiterated his commitment to keeping them off the front lines.
“We stand firm with Ukraine and we will stand with them,” Biden told the crowd to applause.
He also highlighted the United States’ role in repelling Iranian missile attacks against Israel and supporting allies in the Indo-Pacific against growing Chinese militarism in the region.
“Thanks to the United States Armed Forces, we are doing what only the United States can do as an indispensable nation, the world’s only superpower,” Biden said.
As vice president, he twice addressed a graduating class of cadets at the academy about 40 miles north of New York City, but this was his first time as president.
Donald Trump, Biden’s Republican rival in the 2024 election, was the last president to speak at a graduation ceremony at West Point, in 2020.