For the second time in a week President Joe Biden is claiming he spoke to someone who was not alive.
During two fundraisers on Wednesday, Biden told a story about a conversation he supposedly had during a G-7 meeting.
He said, per a White House pool report, “When I first got elected, I went to a G-7 meeting with heads of state in Europe. And I sat down and said America’s back. And the president of France looked at me and said, ‘For how long?’ And I never thought of it this way.”
Biden continued:
“And then Helmut Kohl of Germany looked at me and said, ‘Mr. President, if you picked up the London Times tomorrow morning and learned there’s 1,000 broken down doors of the British Parliament… to deny the next prime minister to take office. And you think, what would we think?'”
— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) February 8, 2024
The only problem is that German Chancellor Helmut Kohl died in 2017, and Angela Merkel was the chancellor at the time the conversation took place.
Biden shared the story again with the same slip at a different event on Wednesday, per the pool report.
On Sunday, he told the story with a similar error, but in reference to a different world leader who was also not alive during the meeting.
In that version, Biden claimed Francois Mitterrand, a French president who died in 1996, asked the “how long” question.
When asked how the president will convince voters he is “OK,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed the question as a “rabbit hole.”
“You saw the president in Vegas, in California. You’ve seen the president in South Carolina. You saw him in Michigan. I’ll just leave it there,” she added.
