Finnegan was a second lieutenant who was a passenger on a plane that crashed into the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea after an engine failure in May 1944, according to the Pentagon’s record-keeping agency for those missing in action and captured by war. Three people, including Biden’s uncle, were missing in the crash, and a fourth was rescued by a passing barge. There is no evidence that the plane was shot down or that Finnegan was at the controls.
Anthropologists and locals told PolitiFact and The Guardian that it’s unlikely that Finnegan was a victim of cannibalism in New Guinea, where studies of cannibalism have noted that victims tended to be members of rival tribes in an act of revenge, or deceased relatives as part of mourning rituals.
Biden spoke about Finnegan’s death after visiting a war memorial in Scranton, Pennsylvania, that bears his uncle’s name. The White House said the talk was meant to highlight Biden’s commitment to equipping soldiers and honoring veterans.
What was said?
“I was on the train and one of the Amtrak executives — I became friends with all of them after many years and rode with them for 36 years as a senator — came up to me — his name was Angelo — and he came up to me and said, ‘Joey, baby!’ He grabbed me by the cheek and I thought he was going to shoot me. And I said, ‘Ann, what’s wrong?’ And he said, ‘I read it in the paper,’ because they keep detailed records of how many times he flew on United States Air Force aircraft as vice president, how many miles he flew. He said, ‘I read it in the paper, Joey, you traveled 1.2 million miles on Air Force Two.'”
— Speaking in Nevada in December
The story is hard to believe. Biden said he logged 1.2 million miles on Air Force Two in early 2016. Conductor Angelo Negri retired from Amtrak in 1993 and died in 2014. It’s possible Biden mistook another conductor for Negri. Biden said he was speaking with an unnamed Amtrak employee in 2009 who also called out “Joey, baby.”
