Finnegan, a first lieutenant, was a passenger on an aircraft that crashed into the sea off the northern coast of New Guinea in May 1944, according to the Pentagon agency that handles missing persons or prisoners of war. The engine has failed. Three people, including Mr. Biden’s uncle, lost their lives in this accident, and the fourth person was rescued by a passing barge. There is no indication that the plane was shot down or that Mr. Finnegan was in control of it.
Anthropologists and local residents told PolitiFact and The Guardian it was highly unlikely that Mr. Finnegan was a victim of cannibalism in New Guinea. Studies of cannibalism in this country have shown that victims tend to be enemies of warring tribes as an act of revenge or dead relatives as part of a mourning ritual.
Mr. Biden shared his story of Mr. Finnegan’s death after visiting a war memorial named after his uncle in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The story is intended to highlight Biden’s commitment to equipping the military and honoring veterans, the White House said.
What did you say?
“I was on a train and one of the high-ranking people at Amtrak — after all these years, I became friends with all of them. I was a senator for 36 years — he approached me. His name was Angelo – and he came up and said, ‘Joy, baby!’ He grabbed my cheek and I thought they were going to shoot him. And I said, ‘Ang, what’s going on?’ He said, ‘I just read it in the paper.’ That’s because they keep meticulous mileage on how many U.S. Air Force aircraft he used as vice president. ‘I just read in the paper, Joey, you traveled 1,200,000 miles on Air Force 2.’”
– From a speech given in Nevada in December
As I said, this story magnifies credulity. Mr. Biden said he logged 1.2 million miles on Air Force 2 in early 2016. Conductor Angelo Negri retired from Amtrak in 1993 and died in 2014. It is possible that Mr. Biden mistook another deputy for Mr. Negri. He spoke with an anonymous Amtrak employee in 2009, who also told him: Joey, baby.”
