BIDEN’S PANTS CATCH FIRE IN QUEST FOR BLACK VOTE

Ex-ambassador disputes Biden story of getting arrested during South Africa visit

by Spencer Neale

Washington Examiner
February 22, 2020

A former U.S. ambassador said he can't recall Joe Biden getting arrested during a visit to South Africa in the 1970s, which the vice president and presidential candidate has claimed in recent weeks.

Andrew Young, a former congressman and mayor of Atlanta who served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations between 1977 and 1979 and extensively traveled with Biden, cast doubt on the story the former senator has been telling at campaign stops about the two of them being arrested on the streets of Johannesburg.

“No, I was never arrested and I don’t think he was, either,” Young told the New York Times. “Now, people were being arrested in Washington. I don’t think there was ever a situation where congressmen were arrested in South Africa.”

Biden, 77, did not mention the arrest in his 2007 memoir, which touched on his trips to South Africa in the '70s, and the New York Times couldn't find any reference to his arrest in the paper's archives.

“This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid,” Biden told a crowd during a campaign event in South Carolina. “I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robbens Island.”

Biden, who has struggled in early Democratic primary contests, added more context to the story when he shared that Mandela had visited him in Washington and thanked the Delaware Democrat for getting "arrested trying to see me."

“After he got free and became president, he came to Washington and came to my office,” Biden said of Mandela at a brunch in Las Vegas this week. “He threw his arms around me and said, ‘I want to say thank you.’ I said, ‘What are you thanking me for, Mr. President?’ He said, ‘You tried to see me. You got arrested trying to see me.’”

The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to questions about his story of being arrested.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Joe ‘White Obama’ Biden’s lie about getting busted in South Africa reminds me about Hillary’s lie that she and Chelsey came under sniper fire when in 1996 they landed in Bosnia.