President Joe Biden has suddenly expressed a desire to meet his four-year-old granddaughter, Navy Joan Roberts, after refusing to even acknowledge the child’s existence until last Friday’s afternoon news dump.
According to a report published Wednesday by NBC News, people familiar with the matter said that Biden was eager to meet Navy Joan and hoped to “dispel the notion that he was ignoring a vulnerable member of the Biden family tree.”
Biden’s first public acknowledgment of his seventh grandchild came after years of public scrutiny, much of it rooted in the fact that the president’s political identity was very much tied to him being a “family man” who spoke to his children and grandchildren on a near-daily basis.
According to a number of reports, Biden had avoided addressing Navy Joan’s existence because he was “following Hunter’s lead” and waiting for the outcome of legal disputes between Hunter and Navy Joan’s mother, former stripper Lunden Roberts. That excuse was parroted throughout legacy media outlets with varying degrees of success.
But as CNN contributor Scott Jennings pointed out last weekend — after the president had apparently received the “green light” from Hunter to release a statement about his granddaughter — in many cases where a father does not step up, the responsibility falls on grandparents to do the right thing by the child.
WATCH:
Responding to Democratic strategist Michael LaRosa — who argued that the Bidens were just a normal family like any other — Jennings went straight to the issue of the previously-unmentionable granddaughter.
“It’s not Republicans, with all due respect, who made Hunter Biden into a complete scumbag on this and other issues. The — ignoring his own daughter, for four years! And the President of the United States hanging up a stocking for the dog and not for his seventh grandchild?” Jennings said, over protest from LaRosa.
“You know where I’m from a lot of families deal with addiction, and you know who ends up picking up the pieces? The grandparents! And in this case, the grandparents would not acknowledge this little girl —” Jennings continued, and guest host Kasie Hunt pointed out that the Bidens had issued a statement about her just days earlier.
“Oh, what a hero! The polling must have been brutal. The polling must have been brutal,” Jennings replied.
The Bidens’ statement, released late Friday to PEOPLE Magazine, said, “Our son Hunter and Navy’s mother, Lunden, are working together to foster a relationship that is in the best interests of their daughter, preserving her privacy as much as possible going forward.”
According to previous reports, one way in which the Bidens are helping Navy Joan to “preserve her privacy” is through a child support agreement that bars the girl from using the Biden name.
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