Joe Biden pressed from all sides to recognise Hunter’s love child

Joe Biden faces backlash after refusing to recognise grand-daughter born from encounter Hunter claims he can’t remember.

Joe Biden, First Lady Jill Biden and Hunter Biden with his son Beau watch the Independence Day fireworks display from the Truman Balcony of the White House. Picture: AFP.

President Biden is facing a backlash from both left and right in America after refusing to recognise his granddaughter born from an encounter that his son Hunter claims he cannot remember.

Biden, 80, repeatedly proclaims in public how much he dotes on his six grandchildren but DNA tests in 2019 confirmed that Navy Joan Roberts, now aged four, was his seventh.

The president has been accused of hypocrisy by a liberal commentator after building a public image around his strong love for family, including standing by Hunter, 53, in his long fight with drug addiction. Last month Hunter reached a settlement in a legal dispute over child support with Navy’s mother, Lunden Roberts, a former stripper at the Mpire Gentlemen’s Club, in Washington, who now lives in Arkansas.

“Joe Biden’s mantra has always been that ‘the absolute most important thing is your family’. It is the heart of his political narrative,” wrote Maureen Dowd, a columnist for The New York Times. “Empathy, born of family tragedies, has been his stock in trade. Callously scarring Navy’s life, just as it gets started, undercuts that,” she said.

Lunden Roberts first sued Hunter Biden in 2019.

Biden’s “cold shoulder and heart” approach ran “counter to every message he has sent for decades” and was “out of sync with the America he wants to continue to lead,” Dowd continued. “The president can’t defend Hunter on all his other messes and draw the line at accepting one little girl. You can’t punish her for something she had no choice about. The Bidens should embrace the life Hunter brought into the world.”

On Take Your Child to Work Day in April, Biden told youngsters at the White House that “the best part of it all, I have six grandchildren”. He added: “I’m crazy about them. And I speak to them every single day.”

Asked if the president would acknowledge that he had a seventh grandchild, Karine Jean-Pierre, his spokeswoman, told a White House briefing last week that: “I don’t have anything to share from here.”

Elise Stefanik, chairwoman of the Republican conference, a group in the House of Representatives, said: “It is cold, heartless, selfish and cowardly that the president of the United States can’t show love or compassion to his beautiful granddaughter. America sees this for what it is – an inexcusable disgrace.”

In the settlement between Hunter Biden and Roberts, he agreed to hand over some of his artwork to his daughter and to a reduction in monthly payments of $20,000 in child support, while she agreed to drop demands for the girl to have the Biden surname.

The Times