Biden Legal Update

Recent Biden legal news confirms what I've been learning about Bidenworld. I found several recent data items to update my Hunter timeline:

• On December 5, 2022, Joe and Jill Biden took out a $250,000 line of credit secured by the equity on their Rehoboth Beach, DE home. Fox News says, "The financial move came as Hunter Biden is embroiled in a federal investigation and the discovery of President Biden's classified documents from his time as vice president was underway."
• On December 21, 2022, Hunter Biden hired Abbe Lowell, of the firm Winston and Strawn, "to help advise him and be part of his legal team to address the challenges he is facing,” said Kevin Morris, a Hunter confidant and Hollywood attorney who has also been funding his Malibu residence and paid off his 2020 tax bill. Lowell has been successful in obtaining acquittals or mistrials for prominent politicians, including Sen. Bob Menendez, former Sen. John Edwards, and Bill Clinton, as well as other shady figures. According to NBC News, "He joins Chris Clark, of Latham & Watkins, who represents Biden in an ongoing tax-related investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware, on a rapidly growing team of attorneys[.}"
• On February 1, 2023, Hunter's team of attorneys sent letters to the Delaware attorney general, the Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service requesting they open criminal investigations into people responsible for disseminating information from Hunter's laptop.
• However, on January 27, 2023, John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the computer repair shop where Hunter abandoned his laptop in April 2019, served papers on Hunter for a defamation lawsuit of his own. Mac Isaac is one of those named in the letters from Hunter's attorneys requesting criminal probes. "A private investigator hired by Mac Isaac tracked down Hunter in Culver City, Calif. on Jan. 27 to serve him with the lawsuit, which seeks damages of $1.5 million from the president’s son."

Several things strike me about these data points. One is that, although Hunter has generally been portrayed since 2020 as confined to a Malibu compound with a detail of Secret Service minders next door, he's been reported in Washington and Delaware more recently, and now in Culver City. According to the link just above,

“It was very difficult to find where he was,” Mac Isaac’s lawyer Brian Della Rocca told Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Thursday about attempts to smoke out Hunter Biden.

“You know, he was in DC for a couple of weeks and he was moving around. Well, we finally tracked him down and we were able to serve him last week."

Hunter is an addict. He's liable to relapse at any time, which is likely why he's been confined to the Malibu compound, which is also said to adjoin a luxury rehab center. It appears that his restrictions have been relaxed as he works more closely with Joe on the classified documents case, but his increased freedom of movement suggests to me that he won't be far from a new binge, which will be a difficult thing for even an attorney of Abbe Lowell's caliber to handle.

Another issue that strikes me is that even for the Bidens, these lawyers are getting to be expensive. So far, just from the public record, Joe is paying Bob Bauer and three partners at Covington & Burling as personal attorneys on the classified documents case. We now know that he's likely now also bankrolling two partner-level attorneys, Abbe Lowell and Chris Clark, on Hunter's behalf in his tax case and other unspecified "challenges" that possibly relate to classified documents as well. And this doesn't account for billings from associates, paralegals, investigators, forensic accountants, and others. We're talkng about tens of millions, month after month, for all of this. I'm not sure where a $250,000 line of credit comes remotely close to paying for anything here.

And what are the Bidens getting for their money? If anything, Biden's personal attorneys on the classsified documents have done little besides report their existence to the Justice Department, which has been the cause, not the cure, of Biden's trouble. But here's Jonathan Turley's take on the current manifestation of the Abbe Lowell strategy on Hunter's behalf:

The letters raise serious constitutional and political concerns. Critics using publicly available material are allowed to reach their own conclusions about the implications of these files.

. . . Hunter Biden is a public figure who must shoulder a high standard for defamation of “actual malice,” requiring that a false statement be made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” Courts are highly protective of the exercise of opinion, particularly on subjects of great political significance like influence peddling.

The laptop’s legal status is also key. To all appearances, Hunter abandoned the laptop at John Paul Mac Isaac’s Wilmington, Del., computer repair shop. . . . Under standard terms of the agreement, an item left beyond a certain number of days at a business or rental housing becomes abandoned property. It can generally then be left on the curb, sold, or given away.

What’s most striking about the Hunter Biden claim is the delay. For more than two years, Hunter has refused to admit the laptop is genuine despite email recipients confirming the content of the communications. The laptop also shows Hunter engaged in potential crimes from drug use to prostitution offenses. Yet he insisted it might all be those pesky Russians again.

Now the laptop is his, and he is fighting mad. Indeed, he’s shocked that anyone would treat his property in this fashion — a property he left at a computer shop and failed to claim for years.

So Lowell's case is flimsy, but beyond that, he's drawing attention to the laptop, which has already been declared authentic and which he's now implying is, or at least was, his. And Lowell is drawing attention to the Marco Polo site, which I only now went to investigate. Let's take the reaction of commentator John Hinderaker, who apparently like me only just now heard of it due to Lowell's letters:

I don’t think I am easily shocked, but what I found there was astonishing. Hunter Biden’s daily preoccupations are (or were, until recently) crack cocaine and prostitutes. His most frequent communications were with crack dealers and pimps, lining up and paying for prostitutes. It goes on and on, day after day. Is there a drug dealer or a pimp on the East Coast, or in California, who is not on close personal terms with Hunter Biden?

The amount of money Hunter ran through was extraordinary. Where did he get it? Not through any legal and gainful employment, certainly. It is reasonable to assume that Hunter’s share of the Biden crime family’s loot went for crack and prostitutes. Follow the link for details: it went on day after day. Frankly, it is surprising that Hunter is still alive.

. . . I can’t begin to convey the extent of Hunter’s depravity, as documented by him in photos, videos, texts and emails. If you are interested, follow the link. The sheer volume is overwhelming. Pretty much everything Hunter did was both appalling and illegal.

I visited the link only because Hinderaker provided it, and I've got to say that the media has been remarkable in keeping its portrayal of what's on the laptop at PG level. I also agree with his astonishment that, given the quantity and type of drugs he's consumed, Hunter is still alive. But if it weren't for Hunter's highly paid celebrity attorney, most of us would still be in the dark about the full extent of Hunter's depravity.

The Bidens appear to be able to collect baksheesh, but they don't know how to spend their money. With defense lawyers like the ones they have, who needs prosecutors?

For me, this is raising serious questions about Joe's judgment, even in the matter of his current legal strategy. Yet again, this is not a medical issue, but it's definitely one of character.