Biden Campaign Manager Bails On MSNBC Interview To Avoid Hunter Questions: Report

President Joe Biden‘s re-election campaign canceled an MSNBC interview last week after the Department of Justice appointed a special counsel in the investigation of his son Hunter.

The New York Times reported that Julie Chávez, Biden’s campaign manager, backed out of a scheduled appearance set for Friday.

As noted by the newspaper, two people familiar with the scheduling conveyed that Chávez bailed on the interview to avoid questions about Delaware’s U.S. Attorney David Weiss being elevated to special counsel status.

Hunter Biden is facing the prospect of going to trial now that a plea deal on tax evasion charges fell apart. Meanwhile his lawyers claim a pretrial diversion agreement on a felony firearm offense — in which prosecutors would drop the case if the younger Biden met certain conditions — remains intact.

Prior to the plea deal drama, the president said in an interview on MSNBC in May that his son “has done nothing wrong.”

More recently, with the criminal inquiry and GOP probe into the Biden family’s finances heating up, the White House sought to avoid commenting on the ”personal matter” involving Hunter Biden.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre rebuffed questions about the special counsel’s investigation, stressing the importance of the Department of Justice handling the case independently and denying that investigators have turned up any evidence that shows wrongdoing by the president when it came to his son’s business dealings.

“I will say this — and you’ve heard this from the President — is that he loves his son, and he is proud of him overcoming his addiction and how he’s continuing to build his life. But I don’t have anything else to add to that,” she said.

Reporters noted that President Biden kept his distance upon returning to the White House on Monday after a weekend at the beach in Delaware.

Questions were thrown his way after the president stepped off Marine One, including queries about Hunter Biden and the special counsel, but the elder Biden “was far enough away that it was unclear whether he could hear the questions over the background noise,” Dallas Morning News correspondent Joseph Morton wrote in a pool report.