Mandela effect: Biden again brings up debunked South Africa story
By Caitlin Doornbos
October 24, 2022 1:48pm
President Biden again claimed over the weekend that he was detained by South African authorities while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison in the 1970s — despite admitting just last month that his telling of the story was false.
“I got stopped when I was a young senator trying to see Nelson Mandela in South Africa,” Biden said during a forum broadcast Sunday by left-wing outlet NowThis News. “Afterward he heard, and when he got released, he came to see me in Washington and he walked up to me [and] said, ‘Thank you.'”
Biden was responding to Jon-Adrian Velazquez, who received clemency from outgoing New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo after serving more than 23 years for convictions for second-degree murder, attempted murder and three counts of robbery. Velazquez, now a criminal justice reform advocate, had asked the president how he would create “clear, uniform standards for clemency.”
Biden said at least three times while running for president in 2020 that he was arrested trying to visit Mandela before admitting that wasn’t the case on Sept. 16 of this year, during a visit from South Africa’s current president.
“One of the great moments of my career was when — the first time Nelson Mandela came to the United States [in 1990] … and we met in the Senate Foreign Relations executive committee room,” Biden told Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House. “… Afterwards, he asked if he could come by my office and he came by to say thank you because he heard I had been stopped trying to get to visit him, to see him in prison.”
“I said once — I said I got arrested. I wasn’t arrested, I got stopped, prevented from moving,” the president then clarified. “But he was extremely gracious.”
Biden’s tall tale got national attention in February 2020, when he told a South Carolina audience that he “had the great honor of being arrested with our UN ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see [Mandela] on Robbens [sic] Island.”
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https://nypost.com/2022/10/24/biden-again-brings-up-debunked-south-africa-nelson-mandela-story/
