It wasn't just a random story told by a confused old man. It was that, too, but it wasn't just that.
It was yet another confabulation by a confused old man to brag about himself.
He told the story to indicate that when he was a young (incompetent) lawyer, he fought for the rights of this abused worker. It's a hero origin story.
Trouble is, there's only been one case like that ever reported in legal reporters -- those thick books you see behind lawyers in ambulance-chaser reporters -- and when that case was settled, Biden was still in law school.
It's yet another case of Biden hearing about something and just incorporating it into his ever-expanding self-mythology.
For nearly two decades, President Joe Biden has told a story about why he devoted his life to politics. He repeated the tale, at the risk of facing criminal charges for lying to a federal agent, while speaking to Special Counsel Robert Hur in October 2023.
Fresh out of law school and working as a clerk at a high-powered Wilmington, Delaware, law firm, Biden, in his telling, was tapped to defend a construction company sued by a 23-year-old welder who "lost part of his penis and one of his testicles" to a fire that broke out when he was working inside a chimney at a Delaware City plant. Thanks to Biden's shrewd legal defense on the construction company's behalf, the injured man lost the case.
"I wrote this memo. And son of a b--, it prevailed," Biden told Hur on Oct. 8. "And I looked over at that kid...and I thought, 'son of a b--, I'm in the wrong business, I'm not made for this.'"
Remember that one time in law school when Biden hadn't read the material but gave a 10-minute dissertation on it anyway that caused the class to erupt into spontaneous applause?
Biden said he was so wracked with guilt that he concocted an excuse to avoid a celebratory lunch with one of the firm's named partners and walked into the public defender's office to ask for a job that very day. It's "the only time I ever lied," Biden told Hur on Oct. 8. Thus began, according to a New York Times report on the special counsel interview, "a career that would one day take him to the White House."
But this story is almost certainly a complete work of fiction.
Although Biden did work at a law firm tapped to defend a construction company in a negligence suit like the one he described to Hur, the case concluded in 1968, while Biden was still in law school. And the welder won, walking away with $315,000, more than $2.8 million in 2024 dollars.
Biden, whose 1988 presidential campaign collapsed amid allegations that he had plagiarized speeches and a law school paper, has a long record of embellishments and yarn spinning. Over the years, he has told several stories about himself that don't stand up to scrutiny. Those fibs range from the small and peculiar--he claimed in November 2023 that he was offered a spot on the Naval Academy's football team--to the mendacious, such as his insistence that he never spoke with his son, Hunter Biden, about the latter's foreign business dealings.
He also lied for decades about the death of his first life. She was killed in a car accident; he constantly claimed the other vehicle in the crash was driven by a drunk -- "someone who'd drank his lunch."
That truck driver got hell for years and years due to Biden's lies.
In fact, he not drunk, and the police found that he wasn't at fault. It sounds very much like Biden's wife was at fault.
But having a wife killed by a evil racist trucker who "drank his lunch" is better for the Biden Brand than his stupid wife driving carelessly so into the self-mythology it goes.
There was an episode of Just Shot Me in which Dennis Finch lies profusely about his own origin story. Eventually his lies are discovered. When his co-workers asked him how he could lie so brazenly, he responds: "They're not lies. More like... folklore."
This is the Biden Brand and it has been all of his deceit-filled and filthily-corrupt life