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After months of will-he-or-won’t-he, Vice President Joe Biden has announced that he will not throw his hat in the 2016 presidential election ring.
Still, because of all the eyes on him, we decided to look back at some highlights from our Biden coverage over the years.
We’ve fact-checked Biden nearly 70 times, starting with his 2007 presidential bid. His statements have received 13 Trues, 14 Mostly Trues, 20 Half Trues, 10 Mostly Falses, eight Falses and four Pants on Fires. See his entire record here.
Fun Fact: Uncle Joe was our very first Pants on Fire recipient, for an August 24, 2007 claim that then-President George W. Bush was "brain-dead." (Obviously that was a joke. Our philosophy on the Pants on Fire rating has evolved since then.)
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Here are a couple of our favorite Biden checks.
During his 2007 campaign, he took responsibility for "ending genocide in Bosnia." Biden was among the earliest and most vocal members of Congress to advocate an end to the violence there. But it was wrong for him to take sole credit, so we rated the claim Mostly False.
He also took credit for crime reductions, saying, "In the 1990s, the Biden Crime Bill added 100,000 cops to America's streets. As a result, murder and violent crime rates went down eight years in a row." Studies show that no singular thing — not even Biden's army of officers — can take credit for the declining crime rate in the 1990s and early 2000s. Rather, it was likely the result of a complex series of factors. We rated the claim False.
In 2012, to highlight the Obama administration’s progress on Iran, Biden said, "When we took office, let me remind you, there was virtually no international pressure on Iran." While the Obama administration upped the ante, there was international pressure on Iran during the Bush years, through the United Nations. PolitiFact Georgia rated that claim False.
In 2013, six months after a deadly school shooting in Newtown, Conn., Biden said, "Since Newtown, more people have died at the end of a gun than we have lost in Afghanistan." We found that in a span of half a year, there were more than 5,000 gun fatalities in the United States. In a dozen years of fighting, fewer than half that number of Americans died in the war in Afghanistan. We rated this claim True.
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See original Truth-O-Meter articles.