Out of Biden's mind: Did climate deal with Deng Xiaoping?

FPI / February 25, 2020

While citing his accomplishments as vice president in the Obama administration, Joe Biden on Monday claimed that he had worked on the Paris Climate Agreement with China's Deng Xiaoping.

The Paris Climate Agreement was signed on April 22, 2016.

Deng Xiaoping died on Feb. 19 — 1997.

“One of the things I’m proudest of is getting passed, getting moved, getting in control of the Paris Climate Accord,” Biden said in a speech at the College of Charleston. “I’m the guy who came back after meeting with Deng Xiaoping and making the case that I believe China will join if we put pressure on them. We got almost 200 nations to join.”

Deng's reign in China was from 1978 until his retirement in 1992. Xi Jinping, China’s current supreme leader, came to power in 2013 and signed the country onto the 2016 Paris agreement.

In June 2017, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the agreement, stating that the accord would “undermine the economy” and “puts [the United States] at a permanent disadvantage.”

Biden has also been called out for his recent claims that he was arrested in South Africa while on his way to visit Nelson Mandela.

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

Biden also ended his story by claiming Mandela himself thanked him for getting arrested while trying to visit.

“After he got free and became president, he came to Washington and came to my office,” Biden said. “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.’ ”

Biden mentioned the arrest twice more in the next week, claiming he was arrested in between attempts to get his wife, Jill, to agree to marry him. That meant the arrest would have occurred in 1977.

“But if Mr. Biden, then a United States senator from Delaware, was in fact arrested while trying to visit Mr. Mandela, he did not mention it in his 2007 memoir when writing about a 1970s trip to South Africa, and he has not spoken of it prominently on the 2020 campaign trail. 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,” The New York Times reported.

Former congressman Andrew Young, the UN ambassador at the time of Biden’s alleged arrest, said he had traveled to South Africa with Biden but was never arrested and was skeptical that members of the U.S. Congress would have been at risk in the country.

“No, I was never arrested and I don’t think he was, either,” Young told the Times. “Now, people were being arrested in Washington. I don’t think there was ever a situation where congressmen were arrested in South Africa.”

Free Press International