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Biden repeats dubious 'Joey, baby' Amtrak story in new interview

President Biden made a questionable claim during a recent podcast that he learned he traveled over one million miles on Amtrak when he was vice president.

President Joe Biden repeated a questionable claim that he traveled over one million miles over the "36" years that he traveled on Amtrak in a recent interview.

Biden, who dates the story to his vice presidency, said that he was once grabbed by a conductor who calculated his Amtrak miles.

"One day as vice president I was going home on the train which the Secret Service doesn't like because there’s so many opportunities to interrupt the train. And this particular guy, I’m not going to embarrass him and say his name, grabbed me on the cheek and goes, ‘Joey baby.’" The man then told Biden that he calculated his miles traveled on Amtrak. 

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"1,200,000 miles, 119 days a year, 300 miles round trip, 36 years. My point was, I was on a train a lot," Biden said. 

That claim — which would have put Biden’s Amtrak miles as being even higher than his miles traveled on Air Force planes, according to his own telling of the story — has been repeatedly fact-checked in the past, according to AP, CNN, the New York Post and other outlets. 

In 2021, AP called out Biden for telling a slightly different version of the Amtrak tale, where he was told that he logged "2,200,000 miles" instead of 1.2 million.

AP continued: "The tale as Biden spins it is wrong. [The conductor] could not have had that conversation because he was already deceased by the time Biden logged 1.2 million miles on Air Force Two," AP reported. CNN also fact-checked Biden in 2021 for "repeating a false story about an Amtrack conductor he knew" named Angelo Negri. 

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"Biden was friends with the Amtrak conductor at the center of the story, Angelo Negri. But Negri had been dead for more than a year – and had been retired for more than two decades – before the earliest moment they could conceivably have had the supposed conversation Biden keeps describing."

"Biden’s account simply does not add up. Biden did not reach the million-miles-flown mark as vice president until September 2015, according to his own past comments," CNN wrote in 2021. 

The president’s telling of the Amtrak story has also varied over the years. 

Biden has previously claimed the Amtrak story happened in the "fourth or fifth year" of his vice presidency, while later claiming that it happened in the seventh year of his tenure. 

In another version of the story that Biden has previously told, he was going back to visit his sick mother when the interaction happened, even though his mother, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan, died in 2010.

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Fox News’ Jessica Chasmar contributed to this report. 

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