While unveiling his latest attempt to offer student loan debt relief, President Joe Biden repeated the false claim that he was the first person in his family to attend college.
"I, like an awful lot of people in this audience, was the first in my family to go to college and watched my dad struggle to help me get there," Biden, 81, said Monday at Madison Area Technical College in Wisconsin.
Biden also made the claim about being the first member of his family to go to college during a CNN town hall when he was running for president in 2020, according to The Washington Times.
However, Biden more than 35 years ago acknowledged the claim was untrue when his 1987 presidential campaign unraveled amid a plagiarism scandal that saw him lift remarks from a British politician, the New York Post reported Tuesday.
In 1987, Biden told The New York Times that "there are Finnegans, my mother's family, that went to college."
In 2020, the York Daily Record reported census records showed that Biden's father attended Johns Hopkins University for one year. A 1941 wedding announcement in the Scranton Tribune said the president's dad "attended Johns Hopkins University," the Post reported.
During a 2106 commencement address at the University of Notre Dame, Biden spoke of his maternal grandfather, Ambrose Joseph Finnegan, who attended and played football at Santa Clara College in California.
Biden joked that "Grandpop" Ambrose didn't care for Santa Clara being referred to as the "Notre Dame of the West," choosing instead to call the Fighting Irish the "Santa Clara of the Midwest," Santa Clara Magazine reported.
Greg Price, communications director for the State Freedom Caucus Network, reminded people on X about Biden's grandfather after the president's claim on Monday.
"Joe Biden just said in a speech in Wisconsin 'I, like an awful lot of people in this audience, was the first in my family to go to college.' That is a lie. One of the reasons we know it's a lie is because Biden has bragged several times in the past about how his grandfather played college football," Price posted on X with a clip from a 2022 speech.
In a statement to the Post, a White House spokesman said the president "is proud to be the first Biden to graduate college."