Not for the first time, President Biden bragged he’d been shot at overseas, during an address to State Department employees on Thursday. “You have great personal courage,” said Biden. “I’ve been with some of you when we’ve been shot at,” claimed the president to an audience of diplomatic aides in Washington.

While Biden didn’t offer any detailed description of what exactly he meant by being “shot at,” it’s not the first time he made this claim. He said the same thing in 2007 during a presidential debate hosted by CNN in 2007, when he claimed he’d been “shot at” while inside the (fortified) Green Zone in Baghdad. At the time, veterans were incensed at the false claim and Biden was forced to revise this statement, restating his tall tale as “I was near where a shot landed.”

Biden has a reputation for making stuff up and plagiarizing other statesmen. In 2008, for example, he said, “I am a hard coal miner,” and was also forced to drop out of the 1988 primaries for plagiarizing speeches as well as a law school paper. The question is why the media reports such incidents as though they were true.