“Our heroes have been returned to American soil and Dover AFB today. No one from the Biden White House attended.”
he tweeted Buzz Patterson, Republican candidate for Congress in California.
Patterson’s tweet, published before 11pm on Saturday, generated thousands of retweets. And other conservatives made similar claims with major Twitter followers.
Ryan Fournier, co-founder of Students for Trump, which has more than 940,000 followers, has tweeted an almost identical statement. Fournier’s tweet specified that “not even the president of the United States” appeared in Dover and concluded, “Remember every moment of it.”
Fox News presenter Laura Ingraham extended a similar tweet; he added: “The Biden administration does not care about our troops.” Richard Grenell, who served as director of national intelligence under President Donald Trump,
too he amplified a similar tweet, though, adding, “How can this be? It’s so offensive.” (When another Conservative commenter responded that the claim had not been confirmed, Grenell added, “I pray no one has made that mistake”).
Facts first: It is entirely false that anyone from the Biden administration showed up at the Dover Air Force base to greet the remains of the 13 soldiers killed in a terrorist attack on Thursday outside Kabul airport. President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden – along with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other government officials – attended the dignified transfer to Dover on Sunday morning. Viral tweets accusing the Biden administration of being absent from Dover were posted hours before the wreckage reached the base.
False claims were earlier
pointed out on Twitter by Travis Akers, a progressive Navy veteran. Ingraham, Fournier, Grenell and Patterson ended up deleting their tweets at different speeds after their inaccuracy was noticed.
What really happened
Christin Michaud, head of public affairs for Air Force Mortuary Operations, told CNN on Sunday that the military plane carrying the remains of the troops arrived in Dover shortly after 8 a.m., ET , on a flight from Ramstein Air Force Base, Germany.
Air Force One landed in Dover at 8:40 a.m. ET, according to a report from the White House press group. It carried the president, the first lady, and, according to the White House, eight Biden aides. In addition to Austin, Joint Chief President Mark Milley and other senior military officials attended the proceedings in Dover.
After Biden left Air Force One and spoke to the military commanders who greeted him, he was driven to a base building. He then met with family members of the troops at the Base Fallen Families Center, according to the White House.
The dignified transfer, in which the wreckage of the plane is moved to a waiting vehicle and then to a mortuary facility, began later in the morning. Biden’s caravan arrived at the dignified transfer at 11:04 a.m., according to a pool report, and the bus carrying the family members of the troops arrived at 11:20 a.m. You can read more about the paperwork here.
Biden schedule
One of the tweeters
who made the false statement that Biden was not running in Dover, Republican businessman and political consultant Blair Brandt deleted that initial fake tweet, but then
he insisted, shortly after 1 a.m. Sunday morning, that Biden still had “no plan” to attend the return of the remains, “according to the current White House schedule.” Then when Biden went to Dover on Sunday, some were lower profile
tweeters claimed Biden should change his plans after criticism on Saturday night.
But these claims were also false.
Biden’s plans to attend the dignified transfer were set long before inaccurate tweets and the resulting outrage on Saturday night. In fact, long before these tweets, TV stations had plans to cover Biden’s trip to Dover.
Brandt was right to say that Biden’s planned trip to Dover did not appear in the public schedule that his staff announced to the press on Saturday night, but
public schedules do not include all activities planned by a president. Previous presidents, including Trump and Barack Obama, have also made visits to Dover that have not been announced in advance in their public schedules.
“The base asked us not to announce it out of respect. This is similar to what they have done in the past,” a Biden White House official said on Sunday on condition of anonymity.
.Source
Related