re: reminder: biden lied his entire career that the driver who hit his wife/child was drunk

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In 2001, the week following the September 11 attacks, Biden gave a speech at the University of Delaware to a crowd of more than 2,700. He told them to not be afraid. He told the students their generation was up to the task to fight this fight. And he grieved for the people who had gotten a call saying their loved ones were dead, just like that, there in the morning, now gone forever. Once, he said, he had gotten that call. “It was an errant driver who stopped to drink instead of drive and hit—a tractor-trailer—hit my children and my wife and killed them,” he said.

Six years later, in a very different context, in Iowa for a second attempt at running for president, he relayed a similar rendering of the accident. “Let me tell you a little story,” he said to a quiet crowd in Iowa City. “ … a guy who allegedly—and I never pursued it—drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family … ”

The problem was it wasn’t true. The driver of the truck, Curtis C. Dunn of Pennsylvania, was not charged with drunk driving. He wasn’t charged with anything. The accident was an accident, and though the police file no longer exists, coverage in the newspapers at the time made it clear that fault was not in question. For whatever reason, Neilia Biden, who was holding the baby, ended up in the right of way of Dunn’s truck coming down a long hill.

“She had a stop sign. The truck driver did not,” Jerome Herlihy told me. He’s a retired judge who then was a deputy attorney general and once was a neighbor to Biden and remains friendly. A pal of Biden at the time asked Herlihy “to go out to the state police troop where the driver of the other vehicle was to make sure everything was going all right,” and so he did. “In the end,” Herlihy said, “I concurred in their decision that there was no fault on his part.”

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