President Biden claimed he spoke with the late German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017, in 2021 while recalling past conversations during fundraising events on Wednesday. The gaffe marks his second of the week.
Biden attended three campaign reception events in New York Wednesday afternoon, according to his schedule. At his second and third events, he told donors about conversations surrounding Jan. 6, 2021, at his first Group of Seven (G7) meeting as president, which took place in England in June of that year.
The president said that the late German Chancellor Kohl asked him what he would say if he learned 1,000 people stormed the British Parliament in an attempt to deny the next prime minister from taking office.
The annual meeting was not attended by Kohl, as he had been dead for four years, but by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The gaffe on Wednesday is similar to the one Biden made on Sunday after he claimed he spoke with François Mitterrand, a French president who died in 1996, at the same G7 meeting.
“I sat down, and I said, ‘America’s back,'” Biden told a Las Vegas crowd. “And Mitterrand from Germany — I mean from France — looked at me and said …”
Biden then assembled his thoughts to complete the sentence: “Well, how long are you back for?”
The incidents this week are only the latest in a series of puzzling comments by Biden involving dead people.
BIDEN’S FRENCH PRESIDENT GAFFE JUST THE LATEST INSTANCE OF HIS CONFUSION ABOUT LONG-DEAD PEOPLE
For instance, Biden told supporters at a 2022 gathering in Hallandale Beach, Florida, that he spoke with the man who “invented” insulin.
“How many of you know somebody with diabetes and needs insulin?” Biden asked the attendees. “Do you know how much it costs to make that insulin drug for diabetes? … It was invented by a man who did not patent it because he wanted it available for everyone. I spoke to him, OK?”
By the time Biden was born in 1942, insulin co-discoverers Frederick Banting and John Macleod were already dead. Charles Best and James Collip, two more insulin co-discoverers, were alive for decades after Biden was born, but were named on the patent, which is contrary to his statement.
Not long before the Florida event, Biden was speaking at a September 2022 White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health, and looked in the audience for the late Indiana Republican Rep. Jackie Walorski, who died in a car crash a month prior.
“I want to thank all of you here, including bipartisan elected officials like … Senator Braun, Senator Booker, Representative … Jackie… Are you here? Where’s Jackie?” Biden said while searching for her. “I don’t think [inaudible] she was going to be here.”
Biden also told a group of donors during his 2019 campaign for president that former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who died in 2013, was worried about America under Trump. When people pointed out the mistake, Biden described it as a “Freudian slip” and said he meant to say British Prime Minister Theresa May.
Fox News Digital’s Joe Schoffstall and Cameron Cawthorne contributed to this report.
