Joe Biden Botches Veteran Suicide Statistics While Spreading Trump PTSD Lie

Vice President Joe Biden speaks during North Triangle forum accompanied by from left, the
AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana
Charlie Spiering

Vice President Joe Biden is joining the media and Hillary Clinton in spinning out a lie about Donald Trump’s comments about PTSD soldiers.

During a rally in Sarasota, Florida, Biden admitted that he hadn’t seen Trump’s comments but said he was told about them by a CNN anchor.

“I didn’t see this, but I was told this by Chris Cuomo, who interviewed me at the last stop,” he said, quoting only a portion of Trump’s remarks.

“Where in the hell is he from?” Biden raged, reminding the crowd that he was “deadly earnest.”

The Clinton campaign seized on Trump’s comments that some soldiers couldn’t handle PTSD and needed mental and medical help to cope with the horrors of war.

But Biden then misstated the statistics of veterans who are committing suicide.

“But as a veteran can tell you, over 200,000 coming home with unseen wounds,” he said. “Twenty suicides a month.”

The current rate however, is 20 suicides a day, according to the most recent statistics released Department of Veterans Affairs. (Earlier in the day, Trump cited an older statistic of 22 suicides a day).

Biden raged against Trump calling him “just so thoroughly, completely uninformed,” but he did not correct his false statistics.

Biden reminded the audience that his own son, Beau Biden, served in the military for a year.

Last month, Biden was confronted by an Iraq war protester during a Clinton rally.

“My friend died!” the man yelled at Biden.

“Will you listen?” Biden shot back. “So did my son, OK?”

But Beau Biden did not die in the war, rather he passed away from brain cancer in May 2015.

Read Trump’s full comments about military veterans committing suicide below:

When you talk about the mental health problems, when people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over and you’re strong and you can handle it. But a lot of people can’t handle it. And they see horror stories. They see events that you couldn’t see in a movie, nobody would believe it.

Now we need a mental health help and medical. And it’s one of the things that I think is least addressed and is one of the things that — like your question — one of the things that I hear the most about when I go around and talk to the veterans. So we’re going to have a very, very robust, level of performance having to do with mental health. We are losing so many great people that can be taken care of if they have proper care.

You know when you hear the 22 suicides a day it’s a big part of your question. But when you hear the 22 suicides a day that should never be. That should never be. So we’re going to be addressing that very strongly and the whole mental health issue is going to be a very important issue when I take over and the V.A. is going to be fixed in so many ways but that’s going to be one of the ways we’re going to help.

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