"The View" co-host Sara Haines argued on Monday that Hunter Biden shouldn't have gone to the State dinner after he agreed to plea guilty to two federal tax misdemeanors and said, "sit this one out."
Biden attended the state dinner on Thursday after being charged with two federal misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay federal income tax. He also agreed to enter into a pretrial diversion agreement regarding a separate felony charge of possession of a firearm by a person who is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance, his attorneys said.
"I don’t fault the Bidens for inviting him at all," she said. "As a parent inviting your son. What I take issue is he should have sat this out if we’re being honest. The pride you take in your family – this has been a big struggle and we have addiction in our family. It’s not lost on somebody who addicted, that’s a lot for a family and he’s, you know, with God’s will is getting out of it, but he just got charged with a felony charge misdemeanor."
"You’re going to a dinner where your dad is front and center," she continued. "He’s trying to campaign, and for me, like, I once lied and hit a mailbox and I could barely look my dad in the eye for a month. Like sit it out. Sit at home and just for a minute. Like, take a seat. This is about your seat. This is about your dad."
Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin agreed and said the "optics" were bad for President Biden.
"There’s historic distrust in our institutions and I fully own that many in the Republican Party have undermined trust in it, but this is something a lot of Americans look at and they’re, like, there are the elites putting on their tuxes, going to dinner," Griffin said.
"If I was charged with a felony and misdemeanor, I would not be at a state dinner with the most powerful people on the planet. So I think the optics were bad, and I guarantee that Biden's staffers were trying to talk him out of being there, and Merrick Garland, who has tried to remain above the fray in this, and is now seen hobnobbing with this," she continued.
The other hosts of the show defended Biden and his son's invitation.
"The Hunter Biden story, the scandal, the this, the that, it’s also a story of a father’s love, and Joe Biden has never and will never give up on his son Hunter and will never treat him lesser than. He is a father first. Take it or leave it. That’s who he is. That is part of his heart. There was 380 people at this dinner. It’s not like Hunter was sitting at Merrick Garland’s lap," co-host Ana Navarro said.
Whoopi Goldberg suggested that Hunter might have told his dad that he didn't want to go and Biden insisted he come.
"I’m going to give you a different take right quick. It’s quite possible Hunter said, ‘I don’t want to go’ and his dad said, ‘I want you to go because I need people to understand that, yeah, you did some bad stuff, but I’m your dad and you’re here by my side.’ I don’t want people to just assume that Joe said, Hey. Bring all the kids because it was his cousin and all kind of – 50 Bidens were there. Not just one or two, three. There were more than 10," she said.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., also defended the president and his son's attendance on Sunday.
"You know, I think as the president explained, that's his son. That's a separate thing," Klobuchar said.
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The hosts of "The View" praised the plea agreement last week and Sunny Hostin claimed it proved "no one is above the law."
"It shows no one is above the law, which is important, not even the president’s son," Hostin said.
