Unanswered Questions

Over the past few days, there have been questions about classified documents found in at least two places at the Biden Wilmington home, apparently dating from the big guy's tenure as vice president. Nobody seems to know what they were doing there, but the little bit we've glimpsed looks like it's just the tip of the iceberg.

One big unresolved question is Hunter's role in the Biden family businesses during the interregnum between his dad's departure as vice president in 2017 and his inauguration as president in 2021. As I noted in this post, Hunter was involved in setting up the Penn Biden Center as early as 2016, which as described in e-mails on his laptop was meant to be a "wealth creation" effort for the family, but discussions about which were meant to be highly confidential. During this same period, he was divorcing his first wife, Kathleen Buhle:

[S]he said she began to understand the extent of their financial woes once she initiated their divorce in 2016. She found they had no savings, double mortgage and no equity in their two homes, credit card debt and medical bills.

“The sheer amount of our debt overwhelmed me," she wrote. "We were underwater.”

. . . Buhle started to notice Biden's substance abuse problem "spiral from social to problematic" about eight years into their marriage, according to People's excerpts of the book.

She described a number of stints Biden spent in rehab, including in November 2012 after he showed up drunk to a fundraising event following the reelection of his father and President Barack Obama.

His affair with his brother Beau's widow, Hallie, began in 2015 and lasted through his divorce from Kathleen until 2019. This period also coincided with his extended binges in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, famously documented on his laptop. But during this period, he also lived off and on at the Biden Wilmington house:

Disgraced first son Hunter Biden lived off and on at the Delaware home where classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as vice president were found last month — giving him unrestricted access to America’s secrets while he was addicted to drugs, hammering out shady foreign business deals and under federal investigation.

The now-52-year-old began listing the Wilmington home as his address following his 2017 divorce from ex-wife Kathleen Buhle — even falsely claiming he owned the property on a July 2018 background check form as part of a rental application.

Hunter also listed the home as the billing address for his personal credit card and Apple account in 2018 and 2019, respectively, Fox News Digital reported Friday after reviewing emails from his abandoned laptop.

During the same period, the now-first son was in the grip of a crack cocaine addiction costing thousands of dollars. At one point in August 2018, Hunter was recorded begging his sister-in-law-turned-lover, Hallie Biden, to let him use his credit card points to pay for a stay in rehab.

Another former girlfriend of Hunter’s, Zoe Kestan, testified to a federal grand jury in February of last year that the couple stayed for a month in 2018 at the notorious Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles, where — the younger Biden wrote in his 2021 memoir — he “learned how to cook crack” before being “blacklisted” from the property over complaints tied to his drug use.

Elsewhere, the Washington Examiner reported,

President Biden wired his 52-year-old son $100,000 to help him pay bills from December 2018 through January 2019, the Washington Examiner reported, citing records from a laptop Hunter Biden left behind at a computer repair shop in Delaware.

Hunter Biden, meanwhile, had spent more than $30,000 on sex workers between November 2018 and March 2019, records show — including many linked to Russia-based email addresses and connected to an “exclusive model agency” called UberGFE, the outlet reported.

In another instance, Joe Biden wired Hunter $5,000 less than three hours before he filmed a dispute with an escort regarding a $10,000 payment at a cottage in Boston, the Washington Examiner reported.

The picture that emerges is that Hunter, during much of Biden's term as vice president and especially during the post-Obama administration interregnum, was desperately addicted to drugs and prostitutes while also conducting business related to the Biden family, and even living off and on at the Wilmington home.

Tony Bobulinski told Fox News that, contrary to Joe Biden's statements that he had nothing to do with his son's business affairs, Hunter had "frequently referenced asking him for his sign-off or advice on various potential deals" in China.

Mr Bobulinski, who is reportedly a US Navy veteran, separately told Fox News' Tucker Carlson that he had met on two occasions with Joe Biden to discuss business deals with China, the first time in May 2017 when Barack Obama's former vice-president was a private citizen.

He says he asked Joe Biden's brother, James, whether the family was concerned about possible scrutiny of the former vice-president's involvement in a potential business deal with a Chinese entity. Mr Bobulinski told Fox News that James Biden had replied: "Plausible deniability."

I think this suggests some explanation for the stories that in May 2022, the White House brought Richard Sauber over as Special White House Counsel, apparently to scrub records at the Penn Biden Center, while by July, White House Counsel Dana Remus left, apparently to work as a personal attorney for President Biden. She then surfaced a few months later in October as a partner at Covington & Burling, where she has since been working with two other Covington partners on matters related to the classified material found at the Penn Biden Center and the Biden Wilmington home.

In fact, that whole affair was apperently meant to be kept quiet, with the leak of the November document discovery not at all in the plan:

Not only did the White House and DOJ try to obscure the scandal from public view, but they also refused to divulge that the second trove of classified documents were already unearthed at Biden’s home in Wilmington when CBS News first contacted the White House about the initial leak of classified documents apparently illegally stored at the Biden Penn Center, according to the Washington Post[.]

This suggests to me that Mr Sauber and Ms Remus were put on the case well before the November discovery because troubling issues had emerged by last spring that we still haven't heard about. Indeed, if Mr Sauber and Ms Remus were hired to keep the classified document matter under wraps, they haven't done a very good job. That in turn makes me wonder if what they've actually been working on is even more sensitive, and the classified document leaks are just collateral damage, or possibly a sleight-of-hand distraction.

Heck, Nixon had miscellaneous hard guys like the Plumbers to deal with stuff like petty burglaries. The current leak control team with Biden is a whole lot more expensive. Why should this be?