Did Jill Biden lead President Joe Biden out of the Normandy ceremony before it ended, as a post on social media implies? No, that's not true: The ceremony on June 6, 2024, honoring D-Day veterans at the 80th anniversary commemoration of the Normandy landings was ending when Biden and the first lady left the ceremony. French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron left the event two minutes after the Bidens, as video from the event shows. The Bidens did not leave early.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, on June 6, 2024. It read:
BREAKING: Jill Biden just pulled Joe out of the Normandy event, Macron staying behind with the veterans
What's going on?
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X website screenshot taken on Thu June 6 16:26:30 2024 UTC)
The Guardian posted a one-hour video on their YouTube channel of the commemoration event on June 6, 2024, at the Normandy American Cemetery, which is near the Omaha Beach landing site where U.S. troops stormed ashore 80 years ago. The footage shows the Bidens leaving, with the Macrons following within two minutes.
At 1:02:55 in the video Biden and Jill Biden are holding hands and leaving the event as concluding music plays. The camera immediately turns back to show Macron saying his goodbyes and leaving the event at 1:04:22, just two minutes later. As the Bidens depart, the president pauses to shake hands with and greet some of the D-Day veterans who were at the ceremony.
After leaving the ceremony, the president and first lady went to another section of the cemetery to lay wreaths on American graves, according to the White House pool report. Macron did not go with the Bidens to the American graves. From the pool report:
They walked about 30 yards across the grass up to the wreath and paused in a moment of reflection. POTUS made the sign of the cross and they both touched the wreath before reading the grave marker and pressing their fingers to the letters in silence.
The White House released details about the grave, noting the soldier was from Delaware, Biden's home state:
President Biden is stopping at the grave of Private First Class John S. Greenfield, from Delaware, who enlisted in the U.S. Army on May 13, 1942 and served in the U.S. Army 115th Infantry Regiment, 29th Infantry Division during World War II. He was born April 23, 1914 in Talleyville, Delaware and resided in Wilmington, Delaware.
The president and the first lady then joined Macron, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Britain's King Charles and other world leaders at Omaha Beach on June 6, 2024, as multiple news outlets reported, including PBS News (archived here) and NBC News.
Other Lead Stories fact checks on claims concerning Joe Biden can be found here.
