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Joe Biden falsely accuses President Trump of nixing White House portrait unveiling for Obama

The former vice president accused the current White House occupant of canceling the decades old tradition because of bad blood

Published: May 20, 2020 12:34pm

Updated: May 20, 2020 3:00pm

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden mistakenly said during a virtual town hall with Yahoo! News that President Trump is refusing to host former-President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama to unveil their official White House portraits.

"I read that he's (Trump) not going to allow Obama's picture to be hung in the White House, as long as he's president," said Biden, who was Obama's vice president for eight years.

The Obamas skipping the event in fact seems mutually agreed upon by the two world leaders.

Obama reportedly said Tuesday that he's not interested in attending the unveiling. 

"You've got a president who's talking about putting the previous one in legal jeopardy, to put it nicely. We have not seen a situation like that in history," Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, told NBC. "It takes antipathy of a new president for a predecessor to a new level."

Just today, Senate Republicans issued their first subpoena of what will become their investigation into actions of the Obama administration. 

The portrait unveiling ceremony is a tradition that started in 1978 when President Jimmy Carter invited Gerald Ford, whom he had defeated two years earlier, back to the White House.

Former White House curator Betty Monkman called the tradition, "a statement of generosity on [the part of] the current president and first lady." 

The unveiling, typically held in the East Room, united the former president's staff, family and other loved ones to meet and interact with current the White House occupants and staffers.

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