The Real Question About The Latest Payments To Joe

In a nutshell,

Newly disclosed bank records, released on Monday as part of the House Republicans' ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Biden, indicate that Hunter Biden arranged direct, monthly payments to his father. The records show that at least one payment of $1,380 was sent from Hunter Biden’s Owasco PC to Joe Biden in September 17, 2018.

On one hand, this is just the drip-drip-drip pattern of classic Washington scandals, ranging from the White House insistence in March 1973 that nobody had prior knowledge of the Watergate burglary, to Bill Clinton's insistence that he never had sex with that woman, Ms Lewinsky, whereby presidential denials that such-and-such ever happened are gradually refuted as evidence surfaces that indeed they did. Ms Jean-Pierre's comment after being asked about the bank record was simply part of the pattern:

“So, I have to be clear with you. I have not seen that report, so I would have to refer you to my colleagues over at the White House counsel’s office on that particular question,” KJP said as she closed her binder.

The problem with this revelation is that it only raises more questions. The bank record simply indicates that a Hunter Biden shell company set up a monthly direct deposit to a Joe Biden personal account for $1,380, less than the average Social Security direct deposit of $1,705.79. For someone living the Biden lifestyle, this is little more than pocket change.

We've already had the Sept. 3, 2017 $40,000 personal check Joe's sister-in-law Sara signed over to Joe Biden as a "loan repayment. The funding for this has been traced to a $5 million payment from a Chinese company to another Hunter Biden shell company made on Aug. 8, 2017.

Again, this amount alone, while significant to ordinary middle-class people -- it'll buy a nice Toyota -- isn't the sort of thing the Bidens would even notice. To make a difference to any of them, there would need to be dozens of those payments coming in, every day, every month, all the time. While I think something like that must certainly be happening, it's a little strange that we aren't seeing more evidence of it.

The second question, which I think is more important, is that these payments took place in 2017 and 2018, while Joe was out of office and, at least in ordinary public expectations, retired and unlikely to return. If we look a little more closely, we know that he made a calculated decision to sit out 2016, apparently based on a consensus that it was Hillary's turn, but every indication we now have is that this wasn't going to be the end of the story, and by 2018, likely earlier, Joe was planning a 2019 announcement that he'd be running in 2020.

This isn't all that different from the Clinton Foundation, which had been collecting putatively charitable donations from the moment Bill left office in 2001 on the expectation that Hillary would run for president. The main difference was that the Clinton Foundation had a veneer of legality, while the Bidens never had any pretense that their business was anything but an influence shakedown. But let's also keep in mind that the likelihood of Hillary's candidacy, from 2008 onward, was something bankable, and her election once she was nominated would be only slightly less so.

The big-money corporate and quasi-charitable donors to the Clinton Foundation weren't throwing money away. It simply happened that in both 2008 and 2016, Hillary was overtaken by events. What intrigues me is how, in 2017 and 2018, there was at least some money being placed on Joe Biden's odds in an equivalent way. But at least in public, Joe's odds were never anything like Hillary's, and as of 2019, the conventional wisdom was that Joe's campaign was faltering. In The New Yorker on June 28, 2019:

The immediate question is this: Just how much damage did the second Democratic debate do to the campaign of the front-runner, Joe Biden? Only opinion polls conducted in the next few weeks will provide a definitive answer. . . . But one thing cannot be contested. Considering the debate over all, Biden’s performance raised fresh doubts about his preparation, age, grasp of the environment in which he is operating, and basic political skills.

Somehow, an invisible hand, whatever it was, restored Joe's credibility, and another invisible hand, or maybe it was the same one, gave us COVID and put bumbling old Joe in the Oval Office with the 2020 election. Somehow, The New Yorker thought Joe was the front runner in June of 2019 despite his preparation, age, grasp of the environment in which he is operating, and basic political skills, and while there were anxious moments aplenty, he never really lost that status.

As best we can tell, there were people in places like China that thought they had pretty good odds that this would take place, and they were putting money on it. Sounds like they weren't just fools or marks. There are lots of questions here.