President Joe Biden admitted Friday that he never got arrested when attempting to visit the late South African President Nelson Mandela while he was in prison — despite claiming otherwise multiple times on the campaign trail.
Biden reflected on meeting with Mandela during his Friday remarks with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa as he visited the White House. The event took place in 1990, during Mandela’s first visit to the United States.
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“I was a senator at the time, and we met in the Senate Foreign Relations executive committee room,” Biden said. “And he came in, and we all stood there and said hello to him and the like. And afterwards, he asked me to come by my office. And he came by to say thank you, because he heard I had been stopped trying to get to — to visit him, to see him in prison.”
Biden then admitted that he never got arrested but was stopped instead, an admission he also made to CNN in 2020.
“I said once — I said I got arrested, I wasn’t arrested. I got stopped, prevented from moving,” Biden said.
Biden’s administration has previously confirmed that the president’s claim of being arrested was not accurate and that he was separated from other congressmen at an airport during a 1976 visit to Lesotho, which borders South Africa. However, the correction has been disputed by another congressman on the trip, according to the New York Post.
Biden has claimed multiple times over the years that he was arrested in the 1970s when trying to visit Mandela. Most recently, Biden made the claim in February 2020 during a speech in South Carolina while running for president.
“I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto,” Biden said, according to the New York Post. “[We were] trying to see [Mandela] on Robben Island.”
Biden made a similar assertion in Nevada during the same month.
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“[Mandela] came to Washington and came to my office,” Biden said. “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 president has built a reputation for sharing false statements to connect with his voter base that the White House additionally had to walk back or clarify, including claims that he was arrested during civil rights protests and that he visited the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh after a mass shooting killed 11 people in 2018. The White House clarified that he was thinking of a phone call instead of a visit.
