Did officers with the U.S. Marshals service closely shadow President Joe Biden at the State of the Union address on March 7, 2024, and would the presence of the U.S. Marshals demonstrate that Biden is not the real president or that the man is not the real Joe Biden? No, that's not true: The president of the United States is always protected by the U.S. Secret Service. Biden is the 46th president, and it was the real Joe Biden who delivered the State of the Union address. The agents who were moving with him through the crowd are with the U.S. Secret Service and have been pictured providing security to Biden in many locations over the years.
The claim appears in a video (archived here) by Chris Yoon on March 8, 2024, under the title "Biden's SOTU is trending due to US Marshal presence vs Secret Service." As the video opens Yoon introduces the conspiracy:
I've talked about that we are in a big Great Awakening operation. We are in a psy-ops war and this whole theatrical thing that's happening right now where people are saying you're watching a movie, you're watching a show and it's intentional how they're certain actors in play and some of them may have, you know, Hollywood-style mask and you have body doubles and doppelgangers and all this stuff, right? Everything that you're seeing, not everything, but a lot of things that you're seeing, is planned and I don't know where all the real people are, I don't know what has happened to them; people speculate about Guantanamo Bay, people speculate that they're in witness protection, and they're just being escorted, you know, by different groups.
This is how the video appeared on YouTube:
(Source: YouTube screenshot taken on Tue Mar 12 23:21:15 2024 UTC)
The Secret Service website explains that protecting the president is part of the agency's mandate:
Permanent protectees, such as the president and vice president, have special agents permanently assigned to them. Temporary protectees -- such as presidential and vice presidential candidates or nominees and foreign heads of state -- are staffed with special agents on temporary assignment from our field offices. Protection for the President and Vice President of the United States is mandatory. All other individuals entitled to our protection may decline security if they choose.
At 4:50 minutes into this video, Yoon makes the argument that the people escorting "this person" (Biden) through the crowd are U.S. Marshals. His evidence for this claim is based on a lapel pin one man is wearing and screenshots of two pages of image search results (5:13 minutes into the video) pictured below. One search (archived here) was for "us marshal emblem pin." The text of the second search is mostly cut off in Yoon's screenshot, but a search for "Secret Service Uniform Suit Emblem" (archived here) matches the character count and returns similar results as the screenshot pictured below right. Yoon says:
... symbols and signals that he's being guarded and escorted by the US Marshals. And so this emblem and you can see it throughout this thing, there's like three or four times that this has happened but basically this, this person uh is being escorted out and he's very close right, he's very close and many others with an emblem of the uh US Marshall pin. So this is the US Marshall pin, and you can do your research right? Don't just look at something this is a, a secret service uniform in the pin and you can see that whenever they, the Secret Service wears certain things it's like a star or like one of these badges and it's very clear, if you zoom in and you can do all the analysis yourself I'm just giving you the summary but it's very clear that he's being escorted by US Marshals.
(Source: YouTube screenshots taken on Tue Mar 12 23:21:15 2024 UTC)
It is not possible to conclude that the security agents accompanying Biden are with the U.S. Marshals Service simply from a star on a lapel pin. Stars also figure into Secret Service badges, patches, pins and logos. A video posted to the U.S. Secret Service YouTube account on March 8, 2024, titled, "Behind-the-Scenes Securing the 2024 State of the Union Address" features the special agent In charge with the Presidential Protective Division of the Secret Service in the introduction -- he is pictured below at 1:34:09 in PBS footage. This is the person Yoon incorrectly stated was a U.S. Marshal.
(Source: YouTube screenshot taken on Wed Mar 13 01:00:16 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories conducted reverse image searches for photos of Biden with a Secret Service detail, and found several photographs of Biden with the same Secret Service agents who were present at the State of the Union address. The composite image below will open larger in a new tab. A December 13, 2023, article in Vanity Fair included a photo of Biden exiting an armored motorcade vehicle (top left). A local publication, the Inquirer and Mirror from Nantucket, Massachusetts, featured a photo of Biden with Secret Service agents shopping downtown on December 1, 2022 (top right). ABC published a photo of Biden on the South Lawn of the White House with Secret Service agents on March 8, 2024 (bottom left), and Reuters featured a photo of Biden with agents at the Philadelphia airport on March 9, 2024 (bottom right).
(Source: Lead Stories composite image with Vanity Fair, Inquirer and Mirror, ABC and Reuters screenshots taken on Wed Mar 13 00:41:21 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories reached out to the U.S. Marshals Service and the Capitol Police for comment and will update this article if we receive a reply. The U.S. Secret Service declined to comment.
Examples of conspiracy claims that Biden has been replaced by a body double have been fact checked by Lead Stories before (here and here).
