More than three years after a DNA test confirmed the girl’s Biden bloodline, the president issued the simple, definitive statement that he had been withholding until that point: “Jill and I only want what is best for all of our grandchildren, including Navy.”īiden’s belated affirmation that he has seven grandchildren - not six, as he had been saying in public appearances - hardly puts the matter to rest.

White House aides put together a statement that sat for days, the people familiar with the matter said, and was released Friday, in the wake of a court filing detailing some of the terms of the settlement between Hunter and the mother, Lunden Roberts. Dowd, a journalist he has known for more than 30 years, wrote that “the president can’t defend Hunter on all his other messes and draw the line at accepting one little girl.” A July 8 column by Maureen Dowd of The New York Times weighed on him, a person familiar with his response said. Yet Biden faced criticism from other quarters that got his attention. With the dispute reaching a settlement, the president wanted to speak out and his son agreed he should do so, a source said, in part because, he told his father, it would help negate a Republican line of attack.

In doing so, they could chip away at a central part of his narrative as he runs for re-election.īiden largely followed his son's guidance in keeping quiet as the legal case unfolded, sources familiar with the matter said. Republicans have shown that they plan to target Biden's messy situation, betting the saga will engender so much distaste in voters that it will sully his image as someone who rededicated himself to family after losing his first wife and a young daughter in a car accident a half century ago. Politically, however, it also serves to blunt a GOP line of attack. Publicly claiming Navy Joan as a member of his family may offer Biden a measure of peace. A president who has wrapped himself in family throughout his career is now, in an improbable twist, having to explain why he publicly ghosted a young girl who is as much his grandchild as any of the others whose high school graduation s he attends or who playfully call him ' Pop.' Now, the president wants to meet little Navy Joan Roberts of Arkansas and dispel the notion that he was ignoring a vulnerable member of the Biden family tree that is at the root of his political identity, according to the people familiar with the matter.įamily dramas typically play out in private - though rarely when the nation's first family is involved.

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