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Biden repeats false Amtrak story for 8th time, vows to end COVID emergency May 11

January 31, 2023 | | Print Article

President Joe Biden told his fabricated Amtrak tale for at least the eighth time in Maryland on Monday, claiming that a conductor congratulated him for traveling over a million miles on the train between Wilmington, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. despite the man retiring 20 years previously.

Standing beside Maryland Governor Wes Moore, the 80-year-old president told the oft-repeated whopper as a project to replace a train tunnel in Baltimore built in the 1870s was launched.

“I was going home as a United States senator – as vice president – and one of the conductors said to me, ‘Hey Joe, big deal, a million – whatever – 200 –,” Biden recounted. “You’ve traveled over a million miles on Amtrak.”

“I said, ‘How the hell do you know that?’ And they added it up there,” Biden claimed, despite fact-checkers repeatedly showing it’s not true.

“But folks, look, I’ve made a thousand trips through this tunnel,” Biden stated on Monday.

The story seems to be an intentional fabrication and is a favorite of Biden’s. He was known as “Amtrak Joe” because he rode the train so much.

At the center of the tale is Amtrak conductor Angelo Negri. Unfortunately, given Biden’s timeline, Negri had been dead for more than a year when he supposedly congratulated Biden and had been retired for more than 20 years. He died in 2014 and had retired in 1993. Biden was elected vice president in 2008.

Whenever trains or infrastructure is involved, it seems he trots out the story.

The president last repeated the yarn in May at the launch of the Additive Manufacturing Forward initiative in Ohio with Senators Sherrod Brown and Rob Portman, according to the Daily Mail. In that instance, he mixed up the date when claiming it happened in 2015, but then asserted it took place before the death of his mother in January 2010, when he was Vice President.

“You’d get a kick out of this, Sherrod,” Biden said, addressing the senator. “I was – the Secret Service doesn’t like me taking the train because it stops too many places. And so I was riding home though to see my mom who was living with me because she was in hospice.”

“And on a Friday, a guy named Angelo Negri, a conductor, senior conductor, walked up and said, ‘Joey, baby!’ – grabbed my cheek. I thought he was gonna shoot him. He goes, ‘Joey!’ I said, ‘Ang!’ I said, ‘He’s okay, he’s a friend.’ True story,” the president falsely recalled. “[Angelo] said, ‘What’s all this I read in the paper? You travel over a million miles on Air Force planes.'”

“Every single mile the vice president or president travels, they keep a public record of on an aircraft, an American aircraft,” Biden continued. “And he said, ‘The boys and I were at the retirement dinner up in Jersey. So we figured it out. Average 222 days a year, 36 years, total of 269 miles every day. Joey,’ – and I don’t know whether it’s true or not – he said, ‘1,200,000 miles, not counted as vice president.’ So I know a lot about trains.”

Biden’s office celebrated his one-millionth mile on Air Force Two in 2015, according to the Daily Mail.

As the president was telling his concocted Amtrak story once again, he was also preparing to declare an end to the COVID emergency.

Biden told Congress on Monday that the COVID-19 emergency will officially end on May 11. Eight months after the pandemic was declared over. Three years after it began.

(Video Credit: WUSA9)

The White House is eyeing a 14-week drawdown of pandemic policies and is warning Republicans that ending it immediately will have wide-ranging consequences.

House Republicans introduced resolutions this week to end COVID restrictions and are vowing to investigate the handling of the pandemic by the Biden administration. The Office of Management and Budget contends that doing so will lead to the lifting of Title 42 on the border in a twist that will now blame Republicans instead of Biden for the looming illegal immigrant catastrophe.

“Congress will effectively be requiring the Administration to allow thousands of migrants per day into the country immediately without the necessary policies in place,” a letter to House Republicans stated.

“An abrupt end to the emergency declarations would create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the healthcare system – for states, for hospitals and doctors´ offices, and, most importantly, for tens of millions of Americans,” the Office of Management and Budget noted in a Statement of Administration Policy.

Biden has been blasted for administrative overreach on his continued emergency orders and over Title 42.

Once the COVID emergency ends, vaccinations will revert to private companies instead of the federal government. This will cause the cost to skyrocket. Pfizer is expected to charge $130 a dose for a COVID jab but few are looking to get one these days.

A senior Biden official speaking on the condition of anonymity to the Daily Mail, said the three months until the expiration would mark a transition period where the administration will “begin the process of a smooth operational wind-down of the flexibilities enabled by the COVID-19 emergency declarations.”

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