No, Biden Did Not Visit Ground Zero on September 12, 2001

He participated in a Senate session in Washington that day.

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President Joe Biden arrives to deliver remarks to service members, first responders, and their families on the 22nd anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, on September 11, 2023. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

In a speech in Anchorage, Alaska, yesterday to commemorate the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, President Joe Biden told service members, first responders, and their families that he visited Ground Zero the day after the September 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. “Ground Zero in New York,” he remarked. “I remember standing there the next day and looking at the building. I felt like I was looking through the gates of hell, it looked so devastating from where you could stand.”

Despite what he said, Biden, who was then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, did not visit Ground Zero on September 12, 2001. He was in Washington that day, participating in a Senate session to consider a joint resolution condemning the attacks, which passed unanimously. (Click the image to watch the video of Biden’s speech.)

While New York Sens. Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer did travel to the World Trade Center site later that evening, Biden did not. Instead, he appeared on WNET’s Charlie Rose—via satellite from Washington—for a segment discussing the international and congressional response to the attacks, a fact identified yesterday by National Review’s Noah Rothman. Notably, the New York Post reported that Biden’s own 2007 autobiography did not include any mention of visiting Ground Zero in the days immediately following the attack. In reality, Biden did not visit the site until nine days later—on September 20—as part of a delegation of fellow senators.

Maybe Biden should be offered some grace for misremembering the days following September 11—after all, many Americans now confuse the facts of the day according to a 2015 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. However, this is not the first time that Biden has been caught embellishing details of his own life experience, and similar incidents relating to a 2004 house fire and a supposed arrest while trying to meet Nelson Mandela in South Africa have drawn criticism in recent years. As far back as 1987, Biden famously admitted that claims that he attended law school on a full ride scholarship and had been named the outstanding student in the political science department as an undergraduate were inaccurate.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    This is honestly insulting. Biden shouldn’t get a pass just because Trump would have been even more narcissistic and untruthful. Why can’t he just say some gracious words about the families of the victims? Why does he have to make it about himself?

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  2. Avatar photo
    Soniak21

    I'm not defending this tendency of Biden's in the slightest. Either he's still in his right mind and should rein in the tall tales... or he's not in his right mind and really shouldn't be president. (Of course, he was already telling tall tales when he was much younger... so there's that.)

    With that said... here's a little half-baked analysis: Biden is a relic from a time when statements weren't instantly checkable and broadcast to everyone in real time through a zillion different platforms. If you ran off at the mouth a bit while addressing the Rotary Club of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, few people outside the room were likely to hear about it. You might develop a general reputation as a guy who exaggerates and gets careless with details, but there usually wouldn't be the impact of actual audio and video.

    Again, not a defense. And we certainly have no shortage of other elderly politicians who manage not to spout quite the same brand of nonsense. Just observing that Biden may be a particularly unfortunate combination in this area: a guy who 1) was always a hyper-loquacious, undisciplined speaker, 2) is now old, with whatever major or minor mental slippage has come with that, and 3) was molded by the norms of an earlier era, when you could be more careless and mostly get away with it.

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  3. Goatprairie

    Hey, Biden was there at the signing of the Constitution, encouraged Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, gave Einstein the inspiration for the theory of relativity, worked with Salk on his vaccine, and marched with ML King and wrote his "I Have A Dream" speech.
    Joe has done it all. What a guy.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Cogitatio

      Hey, leave Joe "Forrest" Biden alone. He was involved in every major event since the US was formed. He was the guy to the left of George Washington in the famous painting showing the crossing of the Delaware.
      It all began there, and he has continued on ever since...

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      1. Goatprairie

        Don't give him more ideas. He might think he WAS!!! Washington.

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    2. Fred Mertz

      My favorite Biden moment was when he was there to high five Neil Armstrong as he descended the lunar lander for being the first man on the moon.

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      1. Avatar photo
        Ben Connelly

        That was up there with the speech he gave at the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth in 1620

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  4. Kittcomm

    The common theme in all of these “gaffes” is that they’re all about him. Wouldn’t it have been enough to say a few words about 9/11 without mentioning his own role in it? Who cares when or whether he visited the site?

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    1. Avatar photo
      Ben Connelly

      I agree. That’s the worst part. Why does he have to make it about himself?

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  5. Scianti7

    While it is important to be accurate, are we really going to have our hair in fire because he was at Ground Zero of the World Trade Center 8 days later than he said, referring to something that happened 22 years ago? He's off by a little more than a week. I imagine it still was horrifying, & ultimately he did actually go there.

    It is better to have your speech fact checked & to use less specific time frames. "Shortly after the attack..." "while it was still smoldering..."

    Is there really a leveragable difference between being there Sept. 12th or Sept. 20th? Certainly not to me. He suited up & showed up, probably at time more convenient to search crews & law enforcement, & that was likely appropriately coordinated to not interfere with those attemptingto save lives. I actually respect that more.

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    1. Avatar photo
      David Chen

      I agree that in this case, there isn't a huge difference in when he showed up between those two time frames, however I don't like giving anyone in higher office a pass for puffing themselves up and playing fast and loose with facts to make themselves look good. Sometimes it will matter a lot. Being part of the first wave at Normandy and being there a week later is a big difference that can both technically be described as "I was there at Normandy".

      But in the case of Biden, here is someone facing real doubts about his mental state of mind, and things like this does raise legitimate questions of his memory and age.

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  6. Avatar photo
    David Chen

    I mean... at least he didn't claim to be part of the group that stormed the cockpit of F93.

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  7. Wwoods6

    And it seems Biden's 'gates of Hell' reaction was plagiarized, from Hillary Clinton.
    “From the sky as we flew in, looking down on the Trade Center, what I saw were what looked like the gates of Hell,” she said, according to the New Yorker.
    https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-hillary-clinton-september-11-911-attacks-nyc-214236/

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  8. R. James

    But yes, Biden is getting impeached.

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  9. Deleted Comment

    This comment has been deleted

  10. Avatar photo
    Retired Prosecutor

    Paradoxically, the most benign explanation is he is simply doing his usual blowhard act; lying in order to make himself look good. The less comforting option is he really believes he was there and now has only a tenuous grip on reality.

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      TimNYC88

      I don't think a "tenuous grip on reality" or "lying" is required to explain this one — as the article states, he was there nine days later. Isn't it possible he just recalled being at Ground Zero shortly after the attacks and misremembered it as "the next day" when it was actually nine days later?

      There are aspects of that day that are a bit fuzzy in my recollection too, for that matter, though there are obviously also some extremely vivid moments. Standing at Ground Zero is probably a powerful memory for Biden, given that he was actually there, but because it's temporally disconnected from the rest of his memories of 9/11, it's only vaguely associated in his memory, and so it's easy to make a mistake.

      Hell, at this point he may not even remember that it was part of a Senate delegation per se — human memory (not just Biden's!) is notoriously fickle and, if the details surrounding a memory aren't there any longer, is prone to substituting in what we've seen/read in fiction, conflating multiple things together, or even just fabricating memories entirely.

      You're making the same mistake the anti-Trumpers do, where they assume everything Trump did or does is a part of a nefarious plot; the same mistake big Trump fans make when they assume he's playing 5-dimensional chess with the rest of the world. Sometimes, even people we really dislike, humans are just human, and even Presidents are imperfect in the same ordinary little ways we all are.

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      1. Avatar photo
        Retired Prosecutor

        “Hell, at this point he may not even remember that it was part of a Senate delegation per se — human memory (not just Biden's!) is notoriously fickle and, if the details surrounding a memory aren't there any longer, is prone to substituting in what we've seen/read in fiction, conflating multiple things together, or even just fabricating memories entirely.”

        Wow! No “nefarious plot” suggested or implied here. Of course you are correct about the effects of aging - my mother is totally that way. And I (years younger than the President)now have memory issues such that I would never dream at this point of prosecuting a serious felony case.

        By the way, did you see the ending of the President’s Hanoi address, where he was essentially dragged off the stage by staff? Embarrassing.

        The point being missed here is that neither my mother nor I are the Chief Executive of the most powerful nation on earth, whose judgment is critical to our safety and security.

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