OAN’s Abril Elfi
5:05 PM – Wednesday, April 17, 2024
President Joe Biden has suggested twice that his uncle may have been eaten by cannibals after his plane crashed in New Guinea during World War II.
On Wednesday, Biden implied that his uncle, Ambrose Finnegan, was eaten by cannibals, even though military records show that the plane plunged into the Pacific.
“He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals at the time,” Biden initially told reporters after visiting a war memorial that bears his uncle’s name in Scranton, Pa. “They never recovered his body, but the government went back when I went down there, and they checked and found some parts of the plane.”
Upon traveling to Pittsburgh to deliver a speech regarding steel tariffs, the 46th president recounted the same story.
“He got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be—there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea,” Biden told United Steelworkers union members.
According to the Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Finnegan’s aircraft was actually lost over the open Pacific Ocean on May 14th, 1944.
“For unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea. Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard,” the military’s account says. “Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash. One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge. An aerial search the next day found no trace of the missing aircraft or the lost crew members.”
While telling the story, Biden attacked Donald Trump for allegedly skipping a 2018 visit to the military cemetery outside of Paris during his term in office after calling fallen U.S. troops buried there “suckers” and “losers.”
“Suckers and losers? The man doesn’t deserve to have been the commander in chief of my son,” Biden said in Pittsburgh, after saying in Scranton that Trump “refused to go up to the memorial for veterans in Paris.”
The remarks come from an article by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg that said Trump “blamed rain for the last-minute decision [not to visit the cemetery], saying that ‘the helicopter couldn’t fly’ and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.”
However, in 2020, evidence surfaced that refuted Goldberg’s story, demonstrating that the Navy had miscalled bad weather, preventing the helicopter trip to the cemetery.
Trump gave a speech at a different military cemetery close to Paris in the rain without an umbrella before leaving for the U.S.
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