‘This Is Disturbing Stuff:’ Biden Lies Straight to the American People with No Care in the World

Angelo Negri, I hope the 83 years you spent upon this earth were as interesting as the two years you’ve spent as a Joe Biden gaffe.

Perhaps you haven’t heard of Mr. Negri. Or perhaps the name rings a bell as a barely remembered bit player in some yarn Biden’s babbled. Regardless, the former Amtrak conductor re-emerged again Monday — if not perhaps by name, then in the same debunked gaffe that has given Mr. Negri some measure of fame in the afterlife.

Speaking in Baltimore to publicize a tunnel project that will replace a decrepit tube that dates from the post-Civil War Grant administration, Biden described, yet again, just how much he rode on our nation’s heavily subsidized national passenger rail carrier during his time as veep.

“When I was vice president, I flew over a million miles on Air Force Two,” Biden said.

“And I was going home … as vice president, and one of the conductors said to me, ‘Hey, Joe, big deal, a million whatever, 200 —’ he said, ‘You said have over a million miles on Amtrak.’ I said, ‘How the hell do you know that?’ And they added it up.”

Biden once again tells the false story of the alleged Amtrak conductor who congratulated him on traveling over 1 million miles on Amtrak.

It literally never happened: https://t.co/6m4yDZENpV pic.twitter.com/xLhHTU2AB0

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 30, 2023

Now, this time, the story was relayed without a name attached. It did, however, come with a claim that he rode with the engineers “15 percent of the time” and had his own key to the back of the train, which is a new one by me.

BIDEN: “I can say it now since there’s different leadership. I used to about 15% of the time ride with the engineers. For real. And I’m the only guy that I’m aware of, when I stopped riding Amtrak that had a key to get in the back.” pic.twitter.com/mhfUeg0kki

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) January 30, 2023

And you already thought U.S. rail travel was dangerous.

Now, here’s the story with Mr. Negri’s name attached to it, with Biden telling it in June of 2021.

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“You know, the Secret Service — they’re the best in the world — doesn’t like you taking Amtrak because it stops too many times — the train. They want me flying home in the small jets that were available as vice president. And but that cost a lot of money, so I would go home on Fridays, you know, because my mom was passing away,” Biden said. “I’d go home on Amtrak. And they published — they keep fastidious record of the miles you travel in an air – in an Air Force aircraft as president and vice president.

“And toward the end of my term, a headline came out in all of the papers: ‘Biden travels’ — I think it was 1.3 or 1.7 million miles on Air Force planes.

“And so, I’m getting on the train on that Friday, and these guys who all became my family, all, the conductor. And a guy named Angelo Negri came up, and he goes, ‘Joey, baby!’ Grabs my cheek like that. And I thought they were going to shoot him, I really did,” he continued.

“I said, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no. He’s a friend.’ He was like, ‘What the hell.” And he said, ‘Big deal, Joey. A million’ — whatever it was — ‘three-hundred thousand miles. You know how many miles you’ve traveled on Amtrak, Joey?’ And I said, ‘No, Ang, I don’t.’ And he said, ‘At that retirement dinner, we calculated it. We estimated 127 days a year, 250 miles back and forth, 3 — 36 years, then as vice president. Joey, you traveled more on Amtrak.’”

I know you’ll never believe this, given that it’s Joe Biden and he’s nothing if not a stickler for facts, but this never freaking happened.

The Associated Press fact-checked this anecdote when it appeared for the fifth time in October of 2021. Here’s the short version of it: While Biden would have racked up over 1.2 million miles on Air Force Two by the end of his vice presidency in early 2016, Negri died two years earlier and Biden’s mother died four years before that.