Fox News Political Analyst Juan Williams repeated one of President Joe Biden’s most frequent and abhorrent lies: that Biden lost a son in combat.
The claim came during a segment on Fox News Sunday when Williams offered sympathy for the president, whose family is under multiple federal investigations. Biden is facing a congressional impeachment inquiry over multimillion-dollar global influence-peddling schemes run with his brother, James, and his son, Hunter. Hunter Biden was charged with nine tax-related crimes on Thursday.
“I think that [Joe Biden] loves his son and lost another son in war,” Williams said. “So he’s standing by his son. That’s a family issue.”
President Biden, however, never lost a son in armed conflict. Biden’s son, Beau, died of brain cancer in 2015. But that hasn’t stopped the president from repeatedly claiming his son died in Iraq. The Iraq War ended in 2011.
“My son was a major in the U.S. Army,” Biden said during a speech to troops in Japan on May 18. “We lost him in Iraq.”
Biden had previously made the false claim in November of last year at a speech in South Florida. The president confused the war in Iraq with the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the same address, which was supposedly focused on Social Security and Medicare.
“They talk about inflation … inflation is a worldwide problem right now because of a war in Iraq and the impact on oil and what Russia’s doing … excuse me, the war in Ukraine,” the president said. “I’m thinking about Iraq because that’s where my son died.”
Before that, Biden claimed Beau died in Iraq during a speech in Colorado just weeks earlier.
“American soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division scaled that 1,800-foot cliff at night, caught the Germans by surprise, captured key positions, and broke through the German defense line at a pivotal point in the war,” Biden said. “Just imagine — I mean it sincerely — I say this as a father of a man who won the Bronze Star, the Conspicuous Service Medal, and lost his life in Iraq. Imagine the courage, the daring, and the genuine sacrifice — genuine sacrifice they all made.”
It’s easy to imagine how the press would have reacted had former President Donald Trump lied about his son dying in Iraq — not once but three times. Remember how they had full-blown meltdowns over Trump’s little Twitter jokes. The media’s treatment of Trump versus the White House incumbent could not be starker.
For instance, reporters dare not question Biden’s previous campaign claims that he never spoke business with his son “or with anyone else.” Instead, when details of Biden’s entanglement in his son’s overseas financial deals surfaced before the election, reporters dove in with questions about what kind of ice cream the candidate bought.
Biden’s lie about his son’s made-up combat death, meanwhile, isn’t some satirical meme posted on the internet. It’s an insult to the families of the 7,057 service members who died in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Biden gets away with lies all the time. (The Federalist is tracking them here.)
A Washington Post fact-check of the false claim about Beau’s death is still nowhere to be found. So it’s easy to imagine how Juan Williams might have missed the clarification.
[RELATED: Joe Biden Needs To Stop Lying To Gold Star Families That His Son Died In Iraq]
