The claim is completely false.
You can watch clear footage of Biden presenting the medal to Birdwell at the White House here. Nothing went wrong during the process. The false claim that Biden pinned the medal “backwards” was previously verified by Snopes, Newsweek, the Associated Press and others. After the Twitter post, which received more than 2.9 million video views, was online for more than 24 hours and received more than 2.4 million views, Twitter added a notice at the bottom of the post that the video was presented “out of context ” and linking to previous fact checks. But other Twitter posts of the video with similar captions, including one that has generated more than 971,000 video views, were not tagged with any notification as of Friday morning.
Poster refuses to remove false statement
The post, which has generated more than 2.9 million video views, was posted on Twitter on Wednesday by an obscure account that harshly criticized Biden and promoted conspiracy theories. Anti-Biden commenters with six-figure followers then expanded on that account’s inaccurate tweet, with some adding their own claims about how the video purportedly demonstrated Biden refusing.
The person who runs the obscure Twitter account told CNN in a statement Thursday that they found the video on Telegram, a messaging and chat app, along with the claim that the medal was upside down. The person said that while they are aware that people have said “the medal is like that, not the other way around,” they have no plans to take down the viral tweet.
“I debated whether to delete it and decided not to because this is Biden and he deserves the scrutiny,” they said.
You can read more about the 1968 actions for which Birdwell received the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for military valor, here. After his service in the army, Birdwell became a lawyer and eventually the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Cherokee Nation.
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