The Real Story On The Hunter Biden Rental Form

I've been tempted to post on the rental form in which Hunter, in 2018, claimed to have spent $49,910 in monthly rent, but I've held off several times on a hunch that more information would come out. This was a background security request for a rental in a luxury Los Angeles apartment building. The fact checkers were quick to dismiss this as a conspiracy theory:

Days after it was reported that classified documents were found in President Joe Biden’s office at a Washington, D.C., think tank and at his Delaware home, conservative commentators launched new allegations about him and his son, Hunter Biden.

"Hunter Biden paid his dad $50,000 a MONTH in rent for the home that housed classified documents… During the same time, Joe Biden only claimed less than $20,000 in rent payments PER YEAR!!!" read a Jan 17 Instagram post by Newsmax host Carl Higbie.

. . . These posts are inaccurate and were flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed.

It turns out that the real story is more intricate and much more allusive. An article in this morning's Washington Free Beacon outlines the actual circumstances of the application:

The money, $49,910, was actually a reference to rental payment for a Washington, D.C., office space used by Hunter Biden. But the story of the document is more absurd, involving Biden family favor trading, scorned relatives, and an ultimately failed effort to get Hunter Biden’s troubled cousin a new probation officer.

The Washington Free Beacon traced the origin of the document to an attachment in a July 27, 2018, email from Hunter Biden to a luxury apartment complex in Los Angeles. The background check document was part of a rental application, and—though his communications with the building’s property manager indicated the apartment would be for him—text messages and emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop reveal it was in fact for his down-on-her-luck cousin, Caroline Biden, the daughter of Joe Biden’s brother Jim and his wife, Sara.

The president’s niece pleaded guilty in 2017 to buying more than $100,000 worth of makeup with a stolen credit card. While she managed to skirt a grand larceny charge and the prison sentence it carried, she was sentenced to two years of probation—time she wanted to serve in Los Angeles.

She texted Hunter Biden on July 26, 2018, from a New York City probation office, telling him she urgently needed a California address so her lawyer could transfer her probation there.

As I've said here, not only Biden's siblings, but their own "troubled" children as well, have lived privileged lives based on their connections with Joe. I would imagine that the Joe connection helped her avoid prison for the grand larceny charge. The story continues,

Keeping Caroline Biden out of prison was a Biden family affair and Hunter Biden was at the center of the effort. He moved to the West Coast at least in part to escape family drama, he explained in a July 17 message, saying his sister-in-law and former lover Hallie Biden had asked him to leave the state of Delaware.

I get a sense that sending problem Bidens to California was a standard family remedy, since it kept their misdeeds out of the Washington-Wilmington spotlight. Although Hunter was still working on deals with his partners and his father in China and Ukraine, he was doing it from Los Angeles hotel rooms at that time, cranked up on cocaine. Even so, the family expected Hunter to take care of his cousin, presumably to keep her out of sight closer to home:

"I need help with Caroline, she is off the rails," Jim Biden told Hunter Biden in a July 13 message.

The idea to have Caroline Biden move to California appears to have been hatched in a follow-up conversation between Jim and Hunter Biden, but it was on Hunter Biden to deliver. Hunter Biden told Jim Biden as early as July 16 that he was looking for rentals in Laguna for his daughter. But by the time of Caroline Biden’s probation meeting when she messaged Hunter Biden about the address, he had still failed to secure a place.

"Hunter, parole officer needs Caroline’s address in CA in order to transfer to CA," Sara Biden wrote to him on July 27. "Caroline also just said she needs to accept job by end of day today and tell them when she can start."

Shortly after hearing from Sara Biden, Hunter Biden directed his assistant, Katie Dodge, to fill out a rental application on his behalf for an apartment at a luxury complex, the Villa Carlotta, a self-described "residential hideaway for free spirits drawn to the iconoclastic energy of bohemian Los Angeles."

Notwithstanding, free-spirit Caroline felt her status as a Biden entitled her to certain standards:

Jim Biden also asked his nephew to convince Caroline Biden to accept a job, another term of her transfer to California. But Caroline Biden, who at 31 had only had cushy jobs secured by her family and had no intention of lowering her standards.

Emails show she was a candidate for a job from Masimo Corporation, a California company owned by one of Joe Biden’s largest donors, with an $85,000 base salary, a guaranteed 10 percent bonus, and stock options. She was hesitant, she said, because the pay was insufficient.

"That’s below minimum wage in California after taxes," she told her father in an email. "I cannot take this job. I have never made this little money in my life." Caroline Biden said she couldn’t take a job for "less than $180,000."

Indeed, if you look up the Wikipedia entries for other Biden women, Dr Jill, sister Valerie, and daughter Ashley, they all seem to have been provided with highly-paid sinecures and carefully upholstered life circumstances. Caroline clearly expected the same treatment.

What nobody so far has pointed out about this whole story, though, is that it all takes place after Biden left the vice presidency in 2017, at a time when former vice presidents normally fade into the background like Dick Cheney, Al Gore, and Dan Quayle. The conventionmal wisdom at the time was that Biden would be just one candidate among many for the Democrat nomination in 2020, should he even choose to run, and then he could face difficulty running against Trump. This doesn't seem to have been the assumption in Biden's inner circle -- during the same period as the July 2018 Caroline drama, he was occupying his new office at the Penn Biden Center and apparently operating as a de facto president-in-waiting.

I think this is just one example of how reporters willing actually to do some work can turn up much more from the Hunter laptop than has so far emerged. It suggests to me that Richard Sauber, the Covington partners, and other lawyers were brought in last year to deal with the Hunter laptop, not specifically the classified docs, which aren't really important except as they relate to Hunter and the rest of the family frammis. And as I noted yesterday, someone has spent multimillions on those lawyers so far, but as of now, it looks as if their efforts to scrub the record haven't been worth that expense.