Long-standing tensions between Biden family and aides spill over

President Joe Biden’s family is trying to become more involved in his campaign and White House affairs as their anger toward his team becomes public.

“The debate fiasco paved the way for the family to go beyond the officials and start helping the father and brother they love so much,” said one of the people with knowledge of the family dynamics.

The rift between the president’s family and some of his closest aides has long been simmering, and his debate performance exacerbated the dynamic, 13 sources familiar with the dynamic told NBC News. In the opinion of some Biden advisors, the family is taking the opportunity to try to settle old scores. From the family members’ point of view, the debate is the culmination of misguided advice from advisers that they do not believe helped the president better showcase his political appeal.

The infighting has angered some Biden officials, who found the accusations were getting in the way of taking the kind of hands-on approach to helping the president combat this crisis.

“It’s not helpful,” said a Biden campaign aide. The view of some Biden allies is that the president’s aides are responsible for most of the management and coordination of post-debate strategy, while the family approaches the situation more emotionally.

Another person close to the president said the Biden family is not seeing political reality clearly.

“It’s Shakespearean,” this person said.

On Friday, Biden said he took full responsibility for his debate performance, saying in an interview with ABC News that “it was no one’s fault but mine.”

Hunter Biden’s appearance at White House meetings this week was just one example of what is expected to be deeper involvement from the Biden family. The president’s sister, Valerie Owens, also traveled to Washington this week to join other family members at the White House and planned in-person meetings about her brother’s campaign.

Members of Biden’s family have discussed whether he should fire senior White House adviser Anita Dunn and her husband, Bob Bauer, who is Biden’s personal lawyer, two people familiar with the matter said. Still, four sources close to the Biden family said there is no active effort to change staffing at this time. They said there is an effort among those close to the president to be measured, focused, thoughtful and deliberate.

“The President and First Lady have complete confidence in their team, including Anita and Bob,” White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients said in a statement. “There is absolutely no truth to these baseless and insulting rumors.”

Since the debate, members of the Biden family have felt that some of the president’s top aides in the White House and on the campaign They threw the president under the bus instead of taking responsibility for what led to a catastrophic debate, according to one of the sources.

“I believe the family has witnessed mistake after mistake made by key staff and the debate is probably the straw that broke the camel’s back,” the source said. “After the debate, the supposedly loyal team, instead of taking responsibility, pointed the finger at the president and said, ‘It’s his fault.’ I can think of no other singular action that would agitate the Biden family more.”

The biggest concern now among some in Biden’s inner circle is that the kind of differences between them that have long been resolved internally are at risk of playing out in public as pressure mounts on the president. Family conversations largely focused on how to continue to support the president in the future, five sources familiar with the matter said.

The dynamic became so tense that after Biden was informed on Sunday that the family was pointing the finger at his debate prep team, the president personally called Ron Klain, his former chief of staff and longtime adviser. date, to say that this did not reflect his or his family’s thinking.

Among Biden’s closest advisers, there has often been recognition that Biden is at his best when he is improvised and improvised. Some of his strongest moments in the last two State of the Union addresses, for example, were when he argued with Republican critics in the House rather than reading from a teleprompter.

But when pressed about why he isn’t in those environments more often, they often point fingers at each other, suggesting it’s a different set of advisors shielding him from scrutiny or shielding him from environments where he might make mistakes.

Some aligned with the family have blamed “the company,” as they call it, for overmanaging the president, but advisers have suggested, often delicately, that it is the family — both his blood relatives and some longtime employees who are considered family – as being protective until failure.

This has led allies to raise the question of whether fear of a gaffe has kept Biden overly sheltered and isolated, or whether this kind of bubble wrap over a long period of time has made him less adept in these environments than he used to be.

Hunter Biden’s heightened involvement has confused some White House staffers and revived a long-standing wound.

For the family, it’s about “old wounds being reopened,” especially with Bauer and Dunn and their recommendations about Hunter Biden keeping a lower profile than he has over the past two years, said a source familiar with the family and family dynamics. employees.

Michael LaRosa, the first lady’s former White House communications chief, defended Hunter Biden’s involvement in political matters, saying that as a Yale-educated lawyer, the president’s son demonstrated shrewdness.

“He was much more effective in media strategy and political knife fighting than the campaign has been so far and they have $250 million,” LaRosa said in an interview.

“In the end of the day, [president Biden is] extremely close to his children, brothers and sister, and values ​​their unfiltered advice… and it would make sense that they would be frustrated if they felt like they were on the outside looking in.”

Asked to comment on Hunter’s presence at White House meetings this week, White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement: “Hunter returned with the president from his family weekend at Camp David and went with the president straight into speech preparation,” referring to Biden’s preparation for remarks on the Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity.

Hunter Biden was found guilty last month by a jury in federal court in Delaware on gun-related charges. He remains indicted for tax crimes, to which he has pleaded not guilty.

He has long been the focus of Republican attacks — including from former President Donald Trump himself — that have centered on Hunter Biden’s foreign trade dealings and questions about whether he benefited from his father’s political stature.

Dunn and Bauer were not afraid to tell the president and first lady “the truth,” said a source familiar with the family and personnel dynamics, when other aides who have been with them much longer can sometimes shy away from it.

“Anita is one of the most respected people both in the White House and on the campaign trail and across the Democratic Party,” said a Biden aide, “and without her leadership there are real fears that we may not be able to recover, recover and win, so as she helped the president do when he recovered from early 2020 primary defeats and defeated Trump.”

In his Friday television interview, Biden repeatedly referred to his 2020 victory, pointing to his ability to defeat Trump once and the unexpectedly strong interim results for Democrats in 2022, to say he had been excluded before. and fulfilled.

“We performed better in the off-year than almost any sitting president ever has,” Biden said.

He also rejected any calls for him to step aside, saying that only the “Lord Almighty” could convince him to withdraw from the race and that the “Lord Almighty will not step down.”