Former President Joe Biden has once again shared his repeatedly debunked anecdote about being confronted by an Amtrak conductor.
Appearing on an episode of Jay Leno’s Garage YouTube show airing Monday, Biden shared the charming story about his conductor friend Angelo Negri approaching him about an article in the newspaper that said the then-vice president had flown more than 1.2 million miles via Air Force Two. Biden said Negri had walked up to him and grabbed him by his cheek, in front of Biden’s stunned Secret Service agents, to admonish him for talking about his air miles when he had traveled almost double that by train.
However, the story as Biden tells it, is impossible. Not only had Negri died before Biden logged 1.2 million miles on Air Force Two, he had retired as a conductor in 1993, well before Biden became vice president.
But Biden should be well aware of the inconsistencies in his tale. The former president has been publicly fact-checked on the story several times, including by the Associated Press and CNN.
Newsweek has reached out to Biden for comment via webpage form, and to Leno via email.
What Is Biden’s Amtrak Story?
Biden, 83, who has publicly repeated the anecdote at least a dozen times, told Leno that he had been traveling from Washington, D.C., to visit his mother who was “very sick” at home in Delaware. In other versions, Biden clarified that his mother, Catherine Eugenia “Jean” Finnegan Biden, had been dying. She passed in 2010.
The former president said that he had been surrounded by around 30 Secret Service agents when “a conductor walks up in the middle, and grabs my cheek. I thought they were going to shoot him,” he told Leno. Biden said that the conductor, whom he identified in other tellings as Negri, had wanted to confront him about an article that said he’d flown a million or so miles on Air Force Two.
The former president told Leno that the conductor said to him, “‘Do you realize how many miles you’ve ridden on Amtrak? We calculated it. You, as a senator for 36 years, for you, was a total of 298 miles a day. You averaged 22 trips a year. Thirty-six years times that. And that’s not counting VP. You’ve traveled 1,200,000 miles already. I don’t want to hear any more of this about Air Force Two.'”
Fact Check
It is possible that Biden had traveled more than a million miles on the rails by late 2015, according to CNN reporting from the time, and his official photographer David Lienemann.
Biden may also have continued speaking with Negri after his retirement from Amtrak. The former conductor’s stepdaughter Olga Betz told CNN in 2021 that the two men had been good friends and that her stepfather had “adored” Biden.
However, it is impossible that Biden held the conversation about his Air Force Two milestone with Negri—who died in May 2014—more than a year before Biden reached a million miles.
It could be that Biden spoke with another Amtrak conductor in late 2015 or early 2016, following the announcement of his Air Force Two air miles and possibly conflated or confused the two. However, it is also not possible that he was traveling to visit his dying mother, as she too would have died long before the milestone.
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