In his interview with special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated President Joe Biden for illegally taking classified documents to several unsecured locations, Biden repeated a falsehood he has been telling for years about the beginning of his less-than-stellar legal career.
He claimed to have worked on a case in which his law firm defended a corporation in a liability lawsuit filed by a welder who lost his penis in an explosion. Biden told Hur that he felt so guilty about defending the company that he applied for a job in the public defender’s office.
But on checking Biden’s claim, the Washington Free Beacon found that Biden never worked on the case, which settled before Biden finished law school.
Biden frequently makes mendacious claims about his past, some of which are likely false memories linked to his worsening dementia.
Biden’s Story to Hur
Biden’s tall tale begins with his humbly telling Hur that back in the day, a prospective new hire included a photograph with his application, and that his handsome visage got him the job.
“[The interviewer] looked at me and said, ‘I assume you’re expecting to be hired on your looks,” Biden told Hur and his team.
“And I said — and I thought the job was over, and I said, I said, well, it would improve the look of your firm,” Biden continued.
Thus employed, The Case Of The Missing Member soured Biden on corporate defense law.
“And this poor kid is down a hundred-foot vessel, chimney, scraping the hydrogen bubbles off of the inside,” Biden said:
They were made to shut the plant down once every — whatever, about eight months or six months or a year, whatever it is. And he was wearing the wrong pants, wrong jeans, and he — a spark caught fire and got caught in the containment vessel and he lost part of his penis and one of his testicles and he was 23 years old.
And I sat through the — his presentation with the, with the senior, and we had in Delaware , which is … contributory negligence. If you were slightly contributory negligence, you were out.
And so the senior partner turned to me and said, write a memo for tomorrow, we’re going to make a motion to dismiss after presenting this case. So I did. I wrote this memo. And son of a b***h, it prevailed. And I looked over at that kid and his wife home with two little kids, and I thought son of a b***h, I’m in the wrong business, I’m not made for this.
The guilt was too much for Biden, so he gave up a lucrative career as a corporate attorney to become a public defender. Thus did a strict conscience stymie the career of the next Clarence Darrow of American corporate law.
The Real Story
The Free Beacon helpfully assembled the truth, which in no way resembles Biden’s yarn. The website couldn’t “find any record” of Biden’s working on such a case.
But Biden’s story sounds a lot like a piece in his local newspaper, the Wilmington News-Journal, “which Biden reportedly reads daily.”
“In May 1962, Joseph Januszewski, a welder for the Catalytic Construction Company, was working inside a chimney at the Stauffer Chemical plant in Delaware, the website reported:
At one point, the News-Journal reported, “sparks from his torch apparently ignited a chemical substance used to clean water” and engulfed his body in flames.
The accident left Januszewski disfigured. Surgeons amputated his leg at the thigh and he was wheelchair bound until his death in 1972.
A Pennsylvanian who was 56 years old at the time of the accident, Januszewski was working inside a “vessel” at the plant when the accident occurred, a detail Biden emphasized during his interview with Hur. Both Januszewski and his wife sued the Catalytic Construction Company in 1964. William Prickett represented Catalytic.
Whether Januszewski was left without a penis, as Biden claimed, is unclear.
In April 1968, a federal jury sided with Januszewski and awarded him $315,000, a massive sum worth more than $2.8 million in 2024 dollars.
Biden couldn’t have worked on the case because he was in college at the University of Delaware in 1964, when the injured welder sued the company, the Beacon continued. The Prickett law firm didn’t hire Biden until June 1968, Biden wrote in his memoir. “By then, records show, the case had concluded,” the website reported. “No appeal was filed.”
Nor could the website find another case that resembles the welder’s case. The law firm told the website that it “cannot confirm” that the welder’s story is the story Biden told in his autobiography.
Note also that Biden called the welder a “kid,” 23 years old, with “two little kids.” Januszewski was, again, 56.
Other Lies or False Memories
Also during the interview, Biden repeated the bogus claim that “I had been involved in the civil rights movement.” He has repeated that whopper multiple times in the past few years, with the embellishment that he helped “desegregate restaurants and movie theaters.”
Yet, in 1987 Biden said he was not involved. “I was not an activist. … I was not out marching. I was not down in Selma. I was not anywhere else,” he admitted.
Biden also told Hur that he tried to reform the Democratic Party. In fact, he worked closely and amicably with Southern “segregationists,” and apologized for it during his campaign for president in 2019.
Also in 2019, Biden claimed that he always believed Anita Hill’s claims that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her. Hill’s charges nearly derailed Thomas’ nomination to the high court. In fact, Biden thought that Hill lied, as late GOP Senator Arlen Specter wrote in his autobiography. Specter served on the Senate Judiciary Committee with Biden during Thomas’ confirmation hearings.
Biden is famous for manufacturing tall tales about this past, such as his time as a long-haul truck driver.
Borrowing details from British Labour Leader Neil Kinnock’s life, and plagiarizing his speech, ended his presidential campaign in 1987.
But that was almost 40 years ago, long before Biden’s cognitive ability began its inexorable decline. He has repeatedly said his son Beau, who died of brain cancer at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in 2015, died in Iraq. And during his interview with Hur, he could not remember when Beau died.
On learning that Hur’s report mentioned the memory lapse, Biden fumed in public.
False memories and sudden, inappropriate rages are symptoms of dementia.
Though lying to a federal agent is a crime, as the Free Beacon observed, the likelihood is that Biden will never be charged.
As Hur concluded in not charging Biden in the classified documents case, a jury would never convict “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
H/T: Ace of Spades
