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CLAIM: A video shows President Joe Biden openly admitting to selling state secrets.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: Missing context. Biden was making a joke at the outset of a roundtable with India’s prime minister. The video clip circulating on social media cuts off Biden’s remarks just before he makes it clear it was in jest. The official White House transcript of the comments and a longer version of the video shows the president immediately said he was only “kidding.”
THE FACTS: Social media users are claiming the 80-year-old Democrat recently admitted to peddling sensitive national information.
Many are sharing a video clip of Biden seated at a long table with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and prominent business leaders at the White House.
“I started off without you, and I sold a lot of state secrets and a lot of very important things that we shared,” Biden says in the video as Modi and others are seated around him, smiling and laughing.
Other social media users even included a screenshot showing part of the official White House transcript of the Friday event.
“Joe Biden’s brain is going and he’s literally admitting his crimes out loud,” wrote U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, in a widely shared tweet that included the 15-second video. “It’s unreal and so insulting to America.”
But the clip and screenshot both omit Biden’s very next sentence, where the president acknowledges the joke and quickly launches into his opening remarks.
“Now, all kidding aside,” he said, according to the transcript and a longer video of the remarks posted on the White House’s YouTube page. “We’re teaming up to design and develop new technologies that are going to transform the lives of our people around the world.”
The business roundtable focused on efforts to foster more cooperation between the U.S. and India on artificial intelligence, semiconductor production and space.
The event, which took place at the end of a four-day state visit by Modi, featured Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and, NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, among others.
Spokespersons for the White House declined to comment Tuesday, but an Associated Press reporter who attended Friday’s roundtable confirmed Biden made the joke at the beginning of the event as the president and his guests were already seated at the table and reporters were beginning to file into the room.
Nick Dyer, a spokesperson for Greene, argued Biden shouldn’t be joking when he’s “credibly accused of the crime he’s ‘joking’ about” — referencing claims raised earlier this month by House Republicans that Biden was involved in a bribery scheme involving a Ukrainian gas company during his time as vice president.
Meanwhile former President Donald Trump, who is among the Republicans running to oust Biden in the 2024 election, has been charged with mishandling classified information, including sharing confidential military attack plans to a writer and others at his New Jersey golf resort in 2021.
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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.
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