Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the latest White House scandals, check out some less-than-patriotic Independence Day coverage, and hit more media misses.
Bad News Biden
President Biden’s refusal to acknowledge his seventh grandchild is finally having its moment in the mainstream media.
Hunter Biden’s daughter, Navy Joan Roberts, was born out of wedlock in 2018 after the younger Biden had an affair with former stripper Lunden Roberts. A 2020 paternity test proved he was in fact the father.
Roberts initially sought to have her daughter take the Biden name but eventually agreed to drop her demand, while Hunter Biden agreed to give the girl a number of his paintings that have sold for a questionable amount of money.
Despite President Biden’s alleged focus on family, empathy, and decency, he and wife Jill Biden have turned their back on the four-year-old girl.
Biden recently said he has “six grandchildren and I’m crazy about them — I speak to them every single day; not a joke.” The comment ignores his seventh grandchild, Navy.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has shut down questions about the situation. When asked if Biden acknowledges the girl as his granddaughter, she said:
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote an essay criticizing how the president has handled the situation: “It’s Seven Grandkids, Mr. President.”
“Joe Biden’s mantra has always been that ‘the absolute most important thing is your family.’ It is the heart of his political narrative. Empathy, born of family tragedies, has been his stock in trade. Callously scarring Navy’s life, just as it gets started, undercuts that,” she wrote.
But if you ask NBC host Chuck Todd, the whole ordeal is just another case of Republicans trying to “exploit” Biden.
During Sunday’s Meet the Press, Todd discussed Dowd’s “tough piece.”
“I think we all understand the personal challenge and concern and all of these things that the president has here, but his political foes see this and they’re trying to exploit. There is no doubt, every day DeSantis and Trump try to use this to beat up Biden,” Todd said before asking NBC’s Garrett Haake whether that effort is working.
Haake replied that no one envies the position the Bidens are in: “His family and Hunter specifically have become his primary political liability in a lot of ways, I mean look at the cocaine story from the last week and how many Republicans have tried to seize on that.”
Todd added that it was “kind of ugly.”
“It’s certainly kind of a tacky play here, but I mean look, this is as complex as it gets,” Haake said. “The idea of trying to balance your family’s needs versus your political imperative is just ugly and unpleasant in politics as we’re going to get and we’re going to get way down in it.”
Todd noted, “This is only the beginning.”
Earlier this month, the New York Times published a story on the front page of its Sunday paper about “Hunter Biden and the Politics of Paternity in the Media’s Glare.”
“Both Hunter Biden, the privileged and troubled son of a president, and Ms. Roberts, the daughter of a rural gun maker, have allies whose actions have made the situation more politicized. There is no evidence the White House is involved in those actions,” the report suggests.
It goes on to quote former GOP strategist Stuart Stevens as suggesting Republicans are ignoring that former president Donald Trump is “under more indictments than two Super Bowl teams’ worth of players. But that doesn’t matter: You have Hunter Biden. It’s just anger in search of an argument.” Pollster Frank Luntz told the outlet it is a “waste of time” for Republicans to spotlight the Biden family’s scandals rather than pressing issues such as inflation.
The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky drew an unusual link between Bidenomics and Biden’s granddaughter, claiming that both show “there’s an appalling double standard in how the political press covers the Democrats and Republicans today.”
With that statement, Tomasky is so close to finding the point, but instead goes on to argue that it is Democrats who are put upon by the media.
“In sum: We live now in a political culture where the party that is trying to uphold some standards and values gets judged and punished because it sometimes falls short of those standards and values, while the party that makes no effort along those lines gets away with everything because no one expects any better of it in the first place,” he writes.
His argument is that it’s unfair Biden is “getting dinged” for ignoring his granddaughter because surely the media wouldn’t care this much if it came out that former president Donald Trump had done the same, as no one expects Trump to be a good guy:
While some in the media have been willing to go to bat for Biden over his various family related controversies, the Biden administration found somewhat less sympathetic media coverage about the discovery of cocaine in the West Wing of the White House.
As per usual, Jean-Pierre failed to answer reporters’ questions and then scolded New York Post reporter Caitlin Doornbos for asking the press secretary if she could “say once and for all whether or not the cocaine belonged to the Biden family.”
Jean-Pierre claimed she hadn’t been avoiding the question and that she had in fact “exhaustively” answered questions about the situation.
“You know, there has been some irresponsible reporting about the family. And so I’ve got to call that out here. And I have been very clear. I was clear two days ago when talking about this over and over again as I was being asked the question,” she said.
“As you know, and media outlets reported this, the Biden family was not here. They were not here. They were at Camp David. They were not here Friday. They were not here Saturday. They were not here Sunday. They were not even here Monday. They came back on Tuesday. So to ask that question is actually incredibly irresponsible. And I’ll just leave it there,” she added.
Yet the Friday White House pool report in question notes the president, first lady, Hunter Biden and Hunter’s son didn’t depart for the day until after 6:30 p.m.
While the substance was initially thought to have been found in a locker used by visitors in the West Wing lobby, updated reporting indicates the cocaine was found in a working area of the West Wing. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported that the location is a “much more secure place” with “limited access,” and that “normal people, average people, can’t get in there.”
Despite Biden’s many controversies, CNN host Fareed Zakaria squandered the opportunity to ask the president any real questions about the scandals during an interview on Sunday.
Instead, Zakaria asked a question about Biden’s age in the most deferential way possible.
“Finally, Mr. President, you’ve often said when people ask you about your age, just watch me. And I think a lot of people do watch you and are impressed and they think you’ve been a great president. You’ve brought the economy back, you’ve restored relations with the world. But many of these people do say and these are hardened supporters of yours, the next thing he should do is step aside and let another generation of Democrats take the baton. Why are they wrong?” he asked.
The View’s Ana Navarro offered a blanket defense of the president:
Meanwhile, the hits kept coming for the president: Axios was out Monday with a piece titled, “Angry Joe: When president Biden loses his cool.”
“Behind closed doors, Biden has such a quick-trigger temper that some aides try to avoid meeting alone with him. Some take a colleague, almost as a shield against a solo blast,” the report says.
Among things the president has reportedly shouted at aides: “G** d*****, how the f*** don’t you know this?!,” “Don’t fing bulls me!” and “Get the f*** out of here!”
Headline Fail of the Week
The New York Times offered us a look into why some Americans were not so excited about Independence Day this year. “No Sparklers for These Folks,” the headline read.
“Whether because of crowds, politics or a loss of patriotism, some Americans are conflicted about celebrating the Fourth of July,” a subheading adds.
One person told the Times, “It’s hard to tell the difference between guns and fireworks, and here there is always something on the news about a shooting or something, so it makes me nervous. They are also bad for the environment. They release a lot of toxic chemicals.”
Another said, “Last summer Roe v. Wade was overturned, and that really made me less inclined to celebrate.
Joy Reid said on MSNBC that she stayed home on July 4th: “The idea of going to a mass gathering, a parade, or a big fireworks thing outside seems insane to me, to be blunt, in America, because America is awash with guns, and now people don’t just have them, they seem to want to shoot people with them and use them for whatever, you know?”
Representative Cori Bush, a member of the progressive Squad, took the holiday as an opportunity to say that the “Declaration of Independence was written by enslavers and didn’t recognize Black people as human.” WNBA Washington Mystics guard Natasha Cloud called America “trash in so many ways.”
Media Misses