WASHINGTON — President Biden recalled Friday that “lovely women” mailed him “very salacious pictures” when he was a young and unmarried senator — and that he handed the images over to the Secret Service — in a bizarre interview with Howard Stern.
“A lot of lovely women — but women would send very salacious pictures and I’d just give them to the Secret Service. I thought somebody would think I was —” the 81-year-old president said before trailing off.
It’s unclear why the Secret Service, whose role is to protect the president and investigate counterfeiting and fraud, would have any interest in amateur soft-core porn sent to Biden while he was an unmarried senator from 1973 to 1977.
Biden shared other colorful accounts with Stern, saying that he had “never had been to bed with” his first wife Neilia Hunter when he told her that “I think I’m gonna marry you.” Biden and Hunter did wed in 1966, only for her to be killed in a 1972 car accident.
The president also mixed up basic facts in the interview, which ran for more than one hour. On two occasions, Biden told Stern he was preparing to address the Gridiron Club’s annual dinner in DC Saturday night.
In fact, Biden already appeared at the Gridiron dinner last month, but meant to refer to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
“I’m going to the Gridiron dinner on Saturday…. and the serious thing I’m going to say at the Gridiron dinner… is the free press isn’t speaking up as much as it used to,” Biden told Stern
“I think some of them are worried about attacking [former President Donald Trump].”
Biden claimed at another point he “got arrested standing on the porch with a black family” during civil rights protests — calling it a “true story.”
The president previously has claimed he was involved in the Civil Rights movement and that he had been arrested — but at other points has admitted he was uninvolved and there’s no evidence he was arrested.
The president also said that as a young lawyer he had worked on “a couple murder cases” and saved lives “half a dozen times” while a swimming pool lifeguard in Delaware, adding sheepishly, “it’s not like it’s so heroic.”
“What a crazy career you’ve had!” Stern exclaimed, without directly questioning the veracity of any of Biden’s claims.
Biden mixed up President Richard Nixon and Trump at another point in the interview — calling it a “Freudian slip.”
“Trump makes fun of me,” Biden also told Stern, likening him to a neighborhood bully he’d like to get “head to head” with — recalling Biden’s years-old claim he’d like to take Trump behind a building for a physical fight.
The president then launched into a story about how he had been “smacked” by a bully when he was young, leading his mother to tell him to “go back out there,” bribing him with a quarter to do so.
“You gotta hit him right in the nose, Joey,” his mother allegedly said, so Biden recalled: “I hit him right in his nose and his nose started bleeding and he went ‘ohhh!’”
“It’s a very cinematic life you’ve had!” replied Stern, apparently unironically.
Biden also claimed his mother had once gotten aggressive with a Roman Catholic nun who allegedly mocked his childhood stutter.
“You ever speak to my son like that again,” he quoted his mom as saying, “I’ll come back and rip that damn bonnet off your head, you understand me?”
Later, Biden retold one of his lesser-known stories, saying that he briefly considered killing himself after his first wife died.
“You don’t have to be nuts to commit suicide,” Biden said.
“I was going to just drink [scotch] and get drunk,” the lifelong teetotaler continued. [For] just a brief moment, I thought maybe I’d go to [the] Delaware Memorial Bridge and jump, but I had two kids.”
