The White House on Thursday refused to answer whether President Biden’s Uncle Ambrose Finnegan was eaten by cannibals, a claim Mr. Biden suggested twice this week and was contradicted by military records.
At two campaign events in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, Mr. Biden implied his uncle was eaten by cannibals after his plane crashed in New Guinea during World War II.
On Thursday, the White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre couldn’t confirm if that happened.
“He was incredibly proud of his uncle’s service in the military. You saw him at the war memorial,” she told reporters traveling on Air Force One to Philadelphia.
“It was a really proud moment. Emotional,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said.
Mr. Biden visited the memorial in his hometown of Scranton that bears his uncle’s name.
“He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals at the time,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the war memorial. “They never recovered his body, but the government went back when I went down there and they checked and found some parts of the plane.”
The president then repeated the story to United Steelworkers union members at a speech in Pittsburgh calling for increasing tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum.
“He got shot down in New Guinea and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea,” he told the steelworkers.
The federal government’s database of POW/MIA soldiers says Finnegan’s plane disappeared over the ocean on May 14, 1944.
“For unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea. Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard,” the military said. “Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash. One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge. An aerial search the next day found no trace of the missing aircraft or the lost crew members.”