Biden Claims Russian Bots Were Attacking Him On Facebook

Former vice president Joe Biden on Sunday claimed that Russians have spent a “lot of money” on bots to go on Facebook and claim that “Biden is a bad guy.”

But hang on. Biden later acknowledged “that the information came not from the intelligence community, but secondhand from his own staff,” Fox News reported.

“I’m the person most likely to beat Trump,” Biden said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” “The Russians don’t want me to be the nominee. They spent a lot of money on bots on Facebook and they’ve been taken down, saying Biden is a bad guy. They don’t want Biden running. They’re not — no one’s helping me to try to get the nomination. They have good reason.”

Pressed on the matter, Biden said, “I have not spoken to the intelligence community, but I think the intelligence community should inform the rest of us who are running what they told Senator Sanders. .. I was told that there are a lot of bots on Facebook, and they’ve been all taken down. … Fake accounts, yes, and they’re taken down, but I — I don’t know who — I didn’t get a call from Facebook, but I was told by my — my staff that’s what happened.”

Wow.

But there’s more. Biden went on to say that “the people that occupied my [campaign] office … maybe they were Russians. I don’t know, but they — they said they were Bernie supporters.”

Double wow.

Biden is having trouble lately discerning fact from fiction.

In the last few weeks, he’s been telling a campaign trail story that he was arrested in the 1970s in South Africa as he tried to visit Nelson Mandela in prison continues to unravel.

Biden says he was arrested in Soweto, a suburb of Johannesburg, a city in the northeast of the country. But at the time, Mandela was being held on Robben Island, near Cape Town in the southwest part of the country.

The two sites are some 900 miles apart.

Last week, the New York Times called Biden’s tale into question, and journalists have not been able to find any news reports or contemporaneous accounts mentioning an arrest.

“In at least three campaign appearances over the past two weeks, Joseph R. Biden Jr. has told a similar story as he tries to revive his campaign in states with more diverse voters. On a trip to South Africa years ago, he has said, he was arrested as he sought to visit Nelson Mandela in prison,” The Times reported in its piece.

“This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid,” Mr. Biden said at a campaign event in South Carolina last week. “I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robbens Island.”

Mr. Biden referred to his own arrest twice more in the next seven days, including at a campaign stop here on Tuesday where he spoke of getting arrested in South Africa between efforts to coax his wife to marry him. That proposal occurred in 1977, both Bidens have said.

Biden never mentioned the arrest in his memoir. The Times also said, “A check of available news accounts by The New York Times turned up no references to an arrest. South African arrest records are not readily available in the United States.”

Since then, no other journalist has found a contemporaneous account.

The Times reached out to Andrew Young, a former congressman and mayor of Atlanta who was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1977 to 1979. Young said he traveled with Biden on a trip to South Africa.

“No, I was never arrested and I don’t think he was, either,” Young, 87, told The Times.

Biden is adding new twists to the story each time he tells it, too. Last Sunday, he added more details about Mandela.

“After he got free and became president, he came to Washington and came to my office,” Biden said at a black history awards lunch in Las Vegas. “He threw his arms around me and said, ‘I want to say thank you.’ I said, ‘What are you thanking me for, Mr. President?’ He said, ‘You tried to see me. You got arrested trying to see me.’”