President Joe Biden claimed that his uncle’s plane was shot down over an area populated with cannibals during World War Two.
Biden’s comments came after visiting a “World War Two memorial built for those who lost their lives” in the conflict, he said.
Speaking from the Wilkes-Barre Scranton International Airport before boarding Air Force One, Biden said that all four of his mother’s brothers volunteered for military service after D-Day.
“And Ambrose Finnegan — we called him ‘Uncle Bosie’ — he — he was shot down,” the president said according to the official White House transcript. “He was Army Air Corps before there was an Air Force. He flew single-engine planes, reconnaissance flights over New Guinea. He had volunteered because someone couldn’t make it. He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time.”
“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 and the like,” he added.
Biden concluded: “My — my gran- — my uncle, Ambrose Finnegan — Uncle — Uncle Bosie was a hell of a guy from what I — I never met him, obviously.” WATCH: Joe Biden says Uncle Bosey was shot down over New Guinea and eaten by cannibals
This guy is cooked
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) April 17, 2024
According to Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), Second Lieutenant Ambrose J. Finnegan entered the U.S. Army Air Forces from Pennsylvania and served in Headquarters, Fifth Air Force.
The sites states that on May 14, 1944, Finnegan boarded an A-20 havoc as a passenger with three crew members. The aircraft “departed Momote Airfield, Los Negroes Island, for a courier flight to Nadzab Airfield, New Guinea.”
In a profile of the Biden family, The New Yorker reports that the plane crashed in the Bizmarck Sea, which is northeast of Papua New Guinea.
DPAA states the “plane was forced to ditch in the ocean … for reasons unknown. Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft's nose hit the water hard. 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.”
The site added: "He has not been associated with any remains recovered from the area after the war and is still unaccounted-for. Today, Second Lieutenant Finnegan is memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines."
Biden, who is currently campaigning for re-election in his home state of Pennsylvania, said the memorial made him think about “when Trump refused to go up to the memorial for veterans in Paris, and he said they were a bunch of ‘suckers’ and ‘losers.’”
“To me, that is such a disqualifying assertion made by a president,” Biden added.
The alleged comments Biden referred to trace back to a 2020 article in The Atlantic that relied on second-hand, anonymous sources as proof that the comments occurred.
Trump has denied making the comments, calling the allegation “totally false.” A former White House aide, former national security adviser John Bolton, and then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also disputed the claim that Trump made the comments.
