President Biden’s eldest grandchild, Naomi Biden, is for the first time defending her father in detail from allegations that he funneled money from his overseas earnings to his father. Her defense, made in a sympathetic article in the New York Times, comes as House Republicans are seeking to prove that President Biden benefited financially from Hunter’s business of trading on the Biden name to reap millions of dollars from foreign clients.

Ms. Biden told the Times this week that the GOP has launched a dishonest campaign against her father’s character. Her defense addressed a now-notorious 2019 text message, found in Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, in which he told his daughter that he gave half his income to his father.

At the first unofficial impeachment inquiry hearing, Congressman Byron Donalds brought up the text message, reading it to a forensic accountant, Burce Dubinsky.

“This is the famous one that says, ‘I hope you all do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years.It’s really hard but don’t worry, unlike pop I won’t make you … give me half your salary,” the congressman said. “Mr. Dubinsky, if you saw a text message like this in a potential money laundering operation or a potential pay-for-play operation, would you be looking for information related to money going from sun to father?” Mr. Donalds asked. 

“Absolutely, without a doubt,” Mr. Dubinsky, the forensic accountant, replied.

The lengthy Times piece, in which Ms. Biden was quoted, argued that the text message was really a reference from a drug-addled Hunter Biden to how he had to contribute to paying his college expenses with income he earned from part time jobs while he was a student at Georgetown University.

The first granddaughter told the Times that the message Mr. Donalds read in the committee hearing was a nonsense message taken out of context. At the time it was sent, she said, Mr. Biden was high on drugs and had been lashing out at his family, including his ex-wife and three daughters. He was angry that his eldest didn’t take his advice for her sister Finnegan’s medical care, and listened instead to her mother, after Finnegan injured herself skiing at Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

“It just brought me back,” Ms. Biden said about seeing those texts emerge in the media. “I started crying. You really can’t make sense of these texts because they don’t make sense. It was such a hard time. These were his darkest days because of the drugs. It’s just, like, little bits of trauma and anger coming out.”

She said that her father was doing nothing more than referring to his childhood and college years when he paid his father for “room and board” and the future president sought to teach his children about the value of hard work. “Imagine if you read through anyone’s text messages,” Ms. Biden said. “Of course you can twist these things. And of course they’re not going to be understood by everybody, because there’s a lot of personal nuances and inferences.”

Ms. Biden, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University’s law school, lives at the White House with her new husband, Peter Neal, according to a Times piece about her 2022 White House wedding. She has taken on her family’s critics in the past. When President Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, raised concerns about Mr. Biden’s standing in 2020, Ms. Biden took to X to call him out for being “disingenuous.”

“You’ve been predicting his demise and doubting his resilience since beginning,” she wrote to Mr. Axelrod. “There’s a difference between being entitled to an opinion and relishing a platform to  disparage AND between journalism and being a jerk with a microphone.”

After the release of some particularly bad poll numbers for the president in November of this year, Ms. Biden brought up her old message to Mr. Axelrod. “Looking forward to proving the political pundits wrong… again,” she said.