Joe Biden’s grandchildren were a decisive factor as he weighed a third White House bid, according to the former vice president.
Biden, speaking at a ritzy Bel Air fundraiser in California Wednesday night, told about 130 donors his five grandchildren called a family meeting with him to address concerns he wasn’t going to launch a 2020 presidential campaign.
“They said, ‘Pop, you got to run. You got to run for office.’ And I was worried because I knew what was going to happen if I ran. And they said, ‘But we understand, Pop.’ And then they each gave their own story that they had written out [on] a note as to how mean they knew it was going to be, but why they had to do it,” Biden said at the event, his second fundraiser of the night.
During the meeting, Biden recalled how his grandson, Robert “Hunter” Biden II, showed him a photo of the pair at Beau Biden’s funeral where he was holding the younger Biden’s chin. Joe Biden explained how the image was later labeled by internet trolls as “Joe Biden abusing a child” and push out all over social media.
“I’m not saying Trump did that, I’m just saying that’s what it’s going to be,” the former vice president said Wednesday of the current White House occupant.
Biden, 76, has five grandchildren. His eldest son Beau Biden, from Joe Biden’s first marriage to the late Neilia Biden, had two children with his wife Hallie Olivere before he died from brain cancer in 2015 at the age of 46: Natalie Biden, 15 (born 2004), and Hunter Jr., 13 (born 2006). Joe Biden’s second son Hunter Biden, 49, has three daughters with his ex-wife Kathleen Buhle: Naomi, 25 (born Dec. 1993), Finnegan, 21 (born Sept. 1998), and Maisy, 19 (born 2000).
While the detail of the children reading from prepared notes appears to be new, it’s not the first time Biden has referenced the family meeting and the picture from the funeral. At a May fundraiser in South Carolina, he added how one of Hunter Biden’s adult daughters said, “Pop, I know it’s going to be mean, they’re going to say bad things about daddy. Mommy and daddy had a divorce and they’re going to really go after that.”
Delaware’s senator for 36 years also often cites the fatal unrest in Charlottesville as his impetus for running. Heather Heyer, 32, was killed in 2017 when a white supremacist, in town for a Unite the Right rally, drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters. Jill Biden, his 68-year-old second wife, in turn, talks about how she was approached by strangers as she picked up groceries who urged her to encourage her husband of 42 years to contest the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
Biden’s evocation of his family comes as he and Hunter Biden’s connections with Ukraine come under intense scrutiny.
The former vice president bragged in 2018 that he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees during a 2016 trip to Kiev if Ukraine didn’t fire top prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, alleged for months that Biden wanted Shokin removed because Shokin undertook an investigation into Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma Holdings, which employed Hunter Biden as a board member. Vitaliy Kasko, Shokin’s deputy, however, said the Burisma probe was “dormant” during Biden’s visit. The controversy is now the subject of an intelligence community whistleblower complaint and triggered a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump.
[Previous coverage: U-turn: Biden puts family tragedies at center of 2020 bid, despite condemning ‘tasteless’ approach four years ago]
