Law Professor Jonathan Turley is not letting President Joe Biden off the hook even though the president finally acknowledged his seventh grandchild — all the while blaming his neglect on Hunter’s legal battles with the child’s mother.
The Bidens finally recognized their youngest granddaughter in an online article for PEOPLE Magazine at 5:00 p.m. ET on a summer Friday night right before Joe hit the beach.
Here’s the statement the Bidens provided the media:
“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. This is not a political issue, it’s a family matter. Jill and I only want what is best for all of our grandchildren, including Navy.”
That statement may have smoothed things over for Legacy Media and other Democrats, but Turley was livid in an opinion column for Fox News.
“Even for those of us who merely followed this saga from the beginning, the statement was maddening and frankly insulting,” Turley wrote. “It suggested that there was some reason, until now, that prevented the Bidens from acknowledging the existence of their fifth granddaughter. That is false.”
Those who read or listen to the George Washington University professor, frequent Fox News guest, and writer know that that’s about as fired up as Turley gets. He went on to argue that it wasn’t just the Bidens’ written statement alone that made the Friday night news dump so appalling.
A source told PEOPLE that the Bidens were simply following Hunter’s lead — for reasons that remain unclear.
“You have to remember there were some fairly contentious legal proceedings between Navy’s parents happening until just a few weeks ago. As grandparents, the Bidens are following Hunter’s lead,” the anonymous source told the magazine. “They are — and have been — giving Hunter and Lunden the space and time to figure things out.”
As Turley said in his op-ed, “There was no legal, or even tactical, reason for the refusal of the first couple to acknowledge Navy for four years.”
Turley, who has lived in D.C. for years, also suggested that the Bidens’ treatment of Navy went far beyond the normal callousness people in the District were accustomed to.
“Washington is a hard town,” Turley said. “I have lived and worked here for decades and I am still amazed by the cold calculations of many in this city. Long-standing values and associations are routinely jettisoned for personal advantage. Here the moral strictures of the rest of the nation are flipped; vice is a virtue and integrity is a weakness.”
“Yet, even in this place of utter personal corruption, the Bidens shocked the local population,” he said.
He also speculated that the Bidens relented on this issue due to pressure from fellow Democrats and to try and squash the issue before diving into the 2024 campaign trail.
“In other words, for the first couple, it is a political not a family matter,” he said.
To put in perspective how incredulous the president and first lady handled this issue over the years, consider that the two appeared to care more about the negative press their misbehaving dogs would garner than they did their forgotten granddaughter.
“The Bidens spent more time fretting over the ‘pressure’ of the White House on Major and Commander than they did the emotional impact on a four-year-old child who was prevented from even calling herself a Biden,” Turley said.
It can’t get much lower than that.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.