Did Biden really once get a job offer from Idaho’s Boise Cascade? Here’s what we know
During his stop in Boise on Monday, President Joe Biden said he once considered moving to the Gem State.
After college, he said, his first job offer came from Boise Cascade Corp., which once owned or controlled 7 million acres of timberland and operated numerous lumber mills, plywood and veneer plants and paper manufacturing plants.
Over the years, he said he shared the story with Idaho Sen. Frank Church, who served in the U.S. Senate from 1957 to 1981 and headed the Church Committee that in 1975 investigated reported abuses by the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency.
“I used to tell Frank Church this. I got my first job offer, where I wanted — my wife, deceased wife, and I wanted to move to Idaho,” Biden said, during a briefing with state and federal fire agency officials. “It’s such a beautiful, beautiful state. And I interviewed for a job with Boise Cascade.”
The New York Post, in a story Monday, cast doubt on whether the story was true. Post reporter Steven Nelson said Biden “is known for sharing memories that did not happen,” and the story’s lead sentence said the company has “no record” of Biden’s statement being true. It quoted Boise Cascade Co. spokesperson Lisa Tschampl saying, “We have no record of President Biden’s application or of him having worked for the company.“
In the 15th paragraph, the Post story said Tschampl “allowed that it’s possible” Biden applied at Boise Cascade, but “records were lost when the company dropped some of its past projects.”
What the Post didn’t quite manage to say was that the Boise company, which was founded in 1957 and employs 6,200 workers today, doesn’t have any employment applications going back that far.
“Boise Cascade Co. does not have job applications from 50 years ago, so we can neither prove nor disprove President Biden’s statement,” Tschampl said in an email to the Idaho Statesman.
The Post said it could not find any record of Biden mentioning Boise Cascade before, including checks of clippings in Nexis and Factiva databases. Nor did Biden mention a desire to work and live in Idaho in his 2007 memoir “Promises to Keep,” the Post said.
The White House did not respond to McClatchy’s request for comment Tuesday.
Biden grew up in Pennsylvania and Delaware. He graduated from the University of Delaware and earned his law degree at Syracuse University in New York. He worked as a public defender in 1969 and later joined a law firm.
Biden was elected to the New Castle County Council in Delaware in 1970 and two years later was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he served from 1973 to 2009.
The Post questioned how Biden’s comments about moving to Idaho would have fit in with a legal and political career based in Delaware. Boise Cascade said it has no insight into Biden’s early career plans.
“The organization had a very diverse portfolio of businesses outside of forest products, including concrete ready-mix plants, plastic manufacturing, textiles, and sand and gravel companies, ownership of a motor-home manufacturer, real estate, and recreation projects,” Tschampl said. “As interest in those businesses were dissolved, any related records would have transferred to the new ownership.”
Boise Cascade went through restructuring in the early 2000s, and in 2004 the paper, forest products, and timberland assets were bought by a private equity firm.
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