CNN ripped Joe Biden for continuing to claim that he opposed the United States entering the Iraq War while on the campaign trail.
Biden, 77, has been claiming that he opposed the Iraq War in 2003 while serving in the U.S. Senate. This claim has been repeatedly debunked with fact-checks since his campaign announcement, but he brought the false talking point back into his campaign stump speech as President Trump faces growing instability in the Middle East.
During a campaign event on Saturday, Biden told a voter that he was against the Iraq War “from the very moment” President George W. Bush started making his case. He claimed he warned Bush against pursuing the war in Iraq, saying, “I opposed what he was doing, and spoke to him.”
Earlier in his campaign, his staff claimed he “misspoke” after the candidate said he opposed the Iraq War, but his campaign defended the statement when confronted, saying, “The Vice President was referring to how he immediately opposed the specific way we went to war — without giving diplomacy and the weapons inspectors a chance to succeed, based on hyped intelligence, without sufficient allies and without a plan for the day after — and the manner in which the war was being carried out.”
[Related: Sanders blasts Biden: ‘He supported the terrible war in Iraq’]
His spokesman added, “He has taken responsibility for his vote for 15 years, calling it out as a mistake in 2005. And that mistake, together with the entirety of his long and distinguished record in national security and foreign policy, has informed his views ever since.”
In its fact-check of Biden’s remarks, CNN wrote, “Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden dishonestly suggested on Saturday that he had opposed the war in Iraq ‘from the very moment’ it began in 2003 — even though Biden’s campaign said in September that he ‘misspoke’ when he made a similar claim.”
CNN also called out Biden for changing his story about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a raid that Biden advised Obama not to pursue. The network also spends a lot of time fact-checking Trump, who they report made 90 false claims in the final two weeks of 2019.
