Pound The Table

I'm still puzzled about Abbe Lowell, Hunter Biden's most visible and likely most expensive attorney. Via this account at The Hill,

In a sharply worded opening volley against the House GOP’s probe into Hunter Biden and the business dealings of President Biden’s family, an attorney for the president’s son denied a request for documents and information from the Oversight and Accountability Committee, saying it has “no legislative purpose.”

“Peddling your own inaccurate and baseless conclusions under the guise of a real investigation, turns the Committee into ‘Wonderland’ and you into the Queen of Hearts shouting, ‘sentence first, verdict afterwords,’” Abbe David Lowell, an attorney for Hunter Biden, wrote a letter sent Thursday.

I've never been to law school, and I'm not an attorney. But just a lifetime spent following the news suggests to me that I could have written this statement, and in fact, since I was an English major, I probably could have written a better one. It was utterly predictable, and it was inflammatory, so it will just get Chairman Comer and other high-profile Republicans mad at him, and it will simply add to the eventual fireworks at committee hearings.

Contrast that with the usual consensus attorneys seem to have about defendants, for instance, Sam Bankman-Fried:

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of FTX, has been unusually talkative following the November collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange and his subsequent indictment on fraud and other charges. He’s given a series of interviews intended to present his version of events and used social media to criticize the new management of FTX. The atypical chattiness for a criminal defendant is likely causing Bankman-Fried’s attorneys to scratch their heads, or worse.

Granted, it's Abbe Lowell running his mouth on Hunter Biden's behalf, unlike Sam Bankman-Fried, who's running his mouth on his own behalf. This maybe also brings up something a lawyer told me after I served as a juror in his trial. He won his case, and I complimented him by saying, "I never got to hear an argument by Earl Rogers (a prominent early 20th century Los Angeles attorney who was so good that Clarence Darrow hired him), but I think I just saw something like it. If I'm ever in trouble, I'll call you!" He answered, "You'll never be in that kind of trouble," by which I think he meant that if I'd even managed just to qualify for jury duty, I'd avoided the kind of problems that would make me need to hire him.

But maybe that goes to Hunter Biden's problem. He started out living the sort of life where eventually he was going to need to hire Abbe Lowell. So I was going to write something like, "If I were looking at a likely federal indictment, I'd want to hire an attorney who'd advise me to make no statements, and in fact I'd want him to make only calm and decorous statements on my behalf while he works behind the scenes," but as the attorney suggested, that's why I'm not facing likely federal indictment.

So Abbe Lowell is in Abbe Lowell land, dealing with denizens of that strange place and making a very good living at it, and no doubt the attorney I spoke with sees things in a very similar light. This is kabuki, and Abbe Lowell is a star of sorts. It's like pro wrestling, where there's a villain, or "heel", who plays against a hero, or "face", and they perform in scripted matches. The problem is that his clients are heels. They're going to go down. Abbe Lowell's best chance is to get them mistrials, hung juries, prosecutors who'll refuse to prosecute, or as a longshot, an occasional acquittal.

Meanwhile, he pounds the table. I've still got to wonder how he makes $2000 an hour (or something in that ballpark) for doing this. I could have written his letter to Rep Comer for him. In fact, mine would have been better. Heck, an AI bot could have written that letter. I guess it goes to questions like how people think someone like Adam Sandler is a good actor and can make $20 million per movie. If you think about it, that's way more than Abbe Lowell.

One way or another, though, Hunter Biden is going down. If you think about it, that's part and parcel of why the guy hired Abbe Lowell.