Did President Joe Biden board the wrong, empty plane at Joint Base Andrews, where he arrived to meet three Americans freed from a prisoner swap with Russia on August 1, 2024? No, that's not true: White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told journalists that Biden walked inside the plane that had carried the released prisoners to the United States to thank the crew. The aircraft was not empty.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, on August 2, 2024. It said:
SUNDOWN JOE: Confused Biden walks into an empty plane for no reason.
This is what the claim looked like on X at the time of the writing of this fact check:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Aug 2 17:55:37 2024 UTC)
The post implied that Biden confused the plane with Air Force One (archived here).
A longer video capturing the whole scene at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, (archived here), with minimal cuts, is available on C-SPAN. In it, Biden greets and hugs former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan and two journalists, Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, who were among those liberated from Russian prisons during the prisoner swap that concluded on August 1, 2024.
At the 10:29 mark, the president is seen walking into the same aircraft that had carried the released Americans to Joint Base Andrews.
That did not happen for "no reason," and, contrary to the claim, the plane was not empty.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told Mediaite on August 2, 2024, (archived here):
President Biden wanted to personally thank the flight crew who brought these brave individuals home to their families.
A photo (archived here) from the U.S. president's official account on X supports that statement. It features three released Americans on the plane after the White House announcement they were on the way back to the U.S. from Ankara, Turkey (archived here), where the prisoner exchange took place. The image showed a group of 10 people, and only three of them were seen deplaning at Joint Base Andrews.
A Lead Stories staff member who was present at Joint Base Andrew confirmed that Biden spent only several minutes on that plane.
After that, as seen in the C-SPAN video, he continued talking to the family members of the released Americans and, at the 15:17 mark, took more questions from journalists on the ground. His answers did not indicate confusion.
A search across media outlets indexed by Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) produced no results confirming the claim.
Lead Stories contacted the White House for additional comments. If we receive a response, this fact check will be updated as appropriate.
Other Lead Stories fact checks about Joe Biden can be found here. Fact checks of claims about the 2024 U.S. presidential elections are here.
