Back on May 27, President Joe Biden delivered a commencement address to the graduating class at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.
In it, he claimed that he was once appointed to the military school in 1965 by then Sen. J. Caleb Boggs (R-DE).
The two faced off seven years later when Biden challenged Boggs for the Senate seat. In one debate, Biden recounted how Boggs said Biden would still be in the military if he had accepted the appointment, as Biden would have graduated in 1969 and then been in the Navy for the next five years at least.
“The best line of the debate was after it’s all over, the announcer, the questioner — who was a good guy, but supported my opponent, who was a good man as well, I might add — and he said, ‘Sen. Boggs, is there anything else you want to say?’ And he said, ‘Yes, just one thing.’ And he took the microphone. He said, ‘You know, Joe, if you accepted my commission to the — my appointment to the academy,’ he said, ‘you’d still have one year and three months’ active duty and I’d have no problems right now,’” Biden recounted in his address.
Since then, journalists have been trying to find any record of that, especially given the fact that Biden often stretches the truth — or tells outright lies.
“Curators at the Delaware Historical Association in Wilmington were able to find records of Boggs’ academy nominations for just one year in the early 1960s and could not locate records for either 1965 or the more plausible year 1961,” the New York Post reported.
“That means, barring evidence from an unlikely third party, that it’s probable only Biden — who often shares incorrect or exaggerated memories — can prove his claim.”
“Our staff devoted a large chunk of last week to this project. We hauled and sorted through a few dozen boxes from the relevant years, which proved to be a needle-in-a-haystack proposition, as we feared,” chief curator Leigh Rifenburg told the Post.
The paper noted that Biden graduated from the University of Delaware in 1965 and then attended law school at Syracuse University, pointing out that a 1965 appointment would have been highly unusual as “the academy doesn’t grant graduate degrees.”
“To be safe, we searched the full range of dates from 1960 to 1965. It does seem extraordinarily unlikely that an appointment would have been made in 1965, given President Biden’s years of matriculation at the University of Delaware, but we wanted to be thorough,” Rifenburg told the paper. “We were unable to find appointments for entry in 1961, 1963, 1964, or 1965.”
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent for a national newspaper. He was also the a.m. editor of the Drudge Report for four years. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.