While her grandmother prepared for a debate night that would send Joe Biden’s presidential campaign into chaos, five-year-old Navy Joan Roberts sat quietly on a green room couch just a few blocks from the White House.
Her other grandmother did some coloring alongside the five-year-old while Lunden Roberts, Navy Joan’s mother, sat in a nearby room with the Daily Caller and recounted her story of abandonment and struggle.
It’s a story the Biden family has no interest in hearing, despite finally publicly acknowledging Navy Joan four years into her life. The president’s seventh grandchild, the daughter of his son Hunter, has never met her grandpa Joe or grandmother Jill — even after they said in 2023 they only want what’s best for her.
As Lunden and Navy Joan concluded their tour of D.C., the Biden family, Hunter and his children included, huddled at Camp David for a family photoshoot after a disastrous debate night.
Navy Joan, as usual, did not get an invite. (WATCH: Lunden Roberts: Out of the Shadows)
“She was like, ’oh, so [Biden is] out helping all these other people. But when he’s done helping them, he’ll come see me. Right?’ And it’s like, ‘someday.’ You have that hope. And the hope is throughout the book. You see that hope,” Roberts told the Caller.
The last five years for Roberts and Navy Joan have looked drastically different from that of the rest of the Biden family. There have been no fancy motorcades, no constant Secret Service protection. They have been left to fend for themselves — which included filing a paternity suit against the first son to compel him to care for his child in the first place.
Roberts has had enough, and is telling her story in a new book — at the same time the rest of the Biden family is fighting for their political lives, clinging desperately to the power of the White House against all odds.
“She knows my dad is her Pappy, and she knows the man on the TV we are cheering for to win is her other grandpa. She doesn’t understand how that works, or why one grandfather wants to see her nonstop, while the other has never once seen her,” Roberts writes in her book, “Out of the Shadows: My Life Inside the Wild World of Hunter Biden,” set to release on August 20.
“But just like her dad, Navy is quick to love, and even though she’s never met her grandfather on the TV, she adores him from a distance,” Roberts continues.
In the span of a week, the Biden campaign went from battling to make up ground in a tight race to watching it completely unravel. Following the president’s widely-panned debate performance, he rushed back to Camp David, where his family discussed whether to listen to the allies asking him to throw in the towel, or power through.
The calls for Biden to step aside have been deafening, coming from allies in the media, major donors and even now elected Congressional Democrats.
But at that Camp David huddle, Biden’s family — his wife, his son and his grandchildren — backed him in staying in the race, according to the New York Times. Hunter Biden, who was recently convicted on three felony gun charges, has reportedly been pushing the hardest for his dad to stay in, while attending meetings with advisors and aides around the White House.
While the family fights to preserve its political legacy, Roberts and Navy Joan have had their own battles to contend with.
Hunter Biden and Roberts privately settled a child support dispute in June 2023 that slashed Biden’s child support payments from $20,000 to an undisclosed amount. The first son also gave his daughter some of his art, and paid Roberts’ legal fees. As part of the suit, Roberts sought to give her daughter the Biden last name, but she was unsuccessful.
Ahead of filing the lawsuit in 2019, Clint Lancaster, Roberts’ lawyer, told the Caller that he believed if he could get ahold of then-candidate Joe Biden and his wife Jill that the situation would be settled quietly. Lancaster reached out to an email he believed to be Jill’s.
“I got a number of the movers and shakers from the campaign, including some people who now work for him in the White House. And I bought a service, an email tracking service. So [the email for Jill Biden] got opened like 75 times within the first 30 minutes. But yet nobody from the Biden campaign reached out,” Lancaster said. “George Mesires [Hunter Biden’s lawyer] called me up angrily and said, ‘You do not need to be contacting the Bidens. I told you that you were to contact me.’ But I said, George, do you represent Jill and Joe Biden? And he goes, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘shut the fuck up.'”
In 2020, a few months before the election, Jill Biden released a children’s book about her husband’s life. It included a dedication on the inside.
“To my grandchildren: Naomi, Finnegan, Maisy, Natalie, Hunter and Beau,” the inside of the book reads. Jill Biden — the same woman who jetted across the world to be there for Hunter during his criminal case — has never reached out to Roberts to offer any support.
Before the settlement, Hunter denied that Navy Joan, who bears a striking resemblance to her father, was his. A paternity test finally proved him wrong. Even after confirming his fatherhood, Hunter Biden has yet to meet his daughter in person, Roberts has said.
“I called the Little Rock [Secret Service] field office. I call them and I’m like, ‘Hi, I’m an attorney for Lunden Roberts. We just conducted a DNA test with Hunter Biden and Joe Biden’s got a grandkid in Arkansas,’ I got back a ‘what?’ I said, ‘okay, Hunter Biden got my client pregnant. We have a DNA test,’ and he goes ‘Oh you can stop there, I believe you,'” Lancaster told the Caller, saying he believed they began monitoring the situation after the phone call.
To this day, Navy Joan is the only grandchild of President Biden’s without secret service protection.
Lancaster said the paternity suit combined with the presidential campaign resulted in at least 100 phone calls to his office a day. At the time, he took over all press inquiries for Roberts, he said, and to his knowledge, she never received any support from anyone in the Biden family.
Despite the cold neglect, Roberts and Navy Joan display a love for the Biden family they’ve never received back.
“When the time comes to vote, I dress Navy in a mustard-colored velour jumper, with a ‘BIDEN for PRESIDENT’ pin on the sleeve,” Roberts writes in her book, describing heading to the voting booth in 2020. “We walk into City Hall, and I let her choose her grandfather’s name on my ballot.”
“Navy and I support her grandfather, even if her grandfather, and father, don’t support her. If they could only see two-year-old Navy toddling around telling her conservative side of the family ‘No Trump! Let’s Joe baby!’ in her tiny baby voice,” she continued. “And every time she hears the name Trump, her brows furrow, just like her father’s, and she shouts, ‘let’s Joe baby.’”
Two years after the 2020 election, Biden and the first lady would hang Christmas stocking decorations at the White House for all of Hunter’s children, except for Navy Joan.
For this year’s holidays at the White House, we hope to capture the spirit embodied in the very idea of America: We the People. pic.twitter.com/SKyXZ9RkI8
— Jill Biden (@FLOTUS) November 28, 2022
Biden has made a career of putting his Catholic faith and family values front and center. All that is seemingly cast aside for the smiling five-year-old, who came to the Caller’s office dressed in cute bows and a sparkling romper. For Roberts, the treatment has come off as heartless.
“I’m at that point where enough is enough, and this is, you know, me owning that and coming out of the shadows,” she told the Caller.
Hunter isn’t a complete stranger to his child. With the paternity suit settled, he does regular video calls with his daughter.
“Like I said, there’s always that redemption. I want what my daughter wants. And, you know, seeing her face light up on the first zoom call with [Hunter], or every time, you know, she gets to speak to him. A daughter yearns for a father’s love. And she does. And, that’s something that I never want to take away from her,” she continued.
When Joe Biden chose to acknowledge Navy Joan in 2023, it was reportedly because his son gave him the green light to do so. If Hunter had a conversation with his parents about acknowledging Navy Joan, Roberts was unaware.
As to whether Hunter would make the pitch to his parents to embrace Navy Joan — and if it would work — Roberts remained unsure.
“That’s tough, because you want to think that that’s what happened when, you know, they initially made a public statement acknowledging her. So I assumed, you know, that there was some correspondence there with that. I’m not sure,” Roberts said.
“You know, you don’t know what to think when there’s been something, a situation that’s happened to you and there’s continuous hope and then continuous let down. You never, you never know really what to think because it’s unpredictable,” she added.
If Roberts wrote her book with any hope at all that it would catch the Bidens’ attention, the chances likely nosedived the moment the White House entered survival mode.
Biden has publicly ruled out leaving the presidential race, but the calls for the 81-year-old to give it up haven’t subsided. Many of his worried allies are looking to the president’s family to convince him otherwise, as Jill Biden has long been the most influential person in Joe’s life. (RELATED: Jill Biden Reportedly Influenced President’s Decision To Reverse Trump Admin Border Policies)
A primetime ABC News interview was meant to quiet the panic within the Democratic party. It hasn’t. With Biden’s political future in peril, addressing a book highlighting his shortcomings isn’t in the cards.
Amid it all, Jill appeared on the cover of Vogue last week to rave about motorcades and stress why Biden has the best chance at beating Donald Trump in 2024. Hunter has reportedly been gatekeeping his father from advisers and is helping him prepare for speeches and other events.
It’s a world Roberts believes her daughter deserves to be in, and she wants an explanation for why Navy Joan isn’t.
“Why not?” Roberts said of bringing her daughter into the Biden family. “What’s the defense against that? You’re a man that stands on family values, and you have a little girl that is your granddaughter.”
CLICK HERE to watch the full Daily Caller sit down with Lunden Roberts.
Copyright © Lunden Roberts. Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing Inc.
