A Man Of Infinite Reach

I mentioned the other day that I've had a project of interleaving all the links I've run across to Hunter Biden stories by date, which has grown quite large. So far, it starts about 2006, when he began to set up businesses that would benefit from Joe's campaigns aimed at the 2008 election, first for president and then as Obama's nominee for vice president. Prior to that, he'd prospered mainly as the son of a US senator and influential Delaware politician, attending Georgetown University and then Yale Law on the same basis as the offspring of others in that class. Once he got his Yale degree, he went on to work for a bank, no different from people like San Bankman-Fried or Caroline Ellison, just garden-variety Ivy League gentry.

But once his father finally reached the prospect of national office, the stories began to balloon. The names of his companies and cronies immediately proliferated, and just to follow up on all the references in the various stories, especially since the laptop surfaced in 2020, meant I needed to create a central reference where I could begin to figure out where each individual or corporate entity fit into the overall narrative. I'm surprised that nobody else seems to be doing this.

Let's take just the latest episode, the story that came out in the UK Daily Mail yesterday:

Hunter Biden threatened one of his cash-strapped young female staffers with withholding her pay if she didn't FaceTime him for sex.

Shocking texts between the President's son, 52, and his young assistant, who was 29 at the time, show Hunter asking for video sex sessions and sending her cash via Apple Pay after she pleaded that she was struggling to make rent.

, , , Messages and emails involving his now 33-year-old assistant first appear on Hunter's laptop in June 2018, when he flew her from Los Angeles to Washington DC.

Just for fun, let's go to my timeline for context on what our boy was doing just in the immediate weeks and months surrounding this particular tryst. The previous month, May,

It’s May 2018, and Robert Hunter Biden is trawling through his favorite Los Angeles escort sites. He orders “Yanna,” a 24-year-old Russian native from Emerald Fantasy Girls.

. . . On May 19, 2018, Hunter moves from his cottage at the Chateau Marmont to a cheaper hotel in West Hollywood, The Jeremy, where rooms are $469 per night. He orders an escort from Emerald Fantasy Girls. She stays for a couple days and wants to be paid. The problem is Hunter’s debit cards aren’t working and she’s not leaving without the $8,000 he owes her for the extended callout.

He transfers $8,000. It doesn’t work. A few minutes later, Wells Fargo sends him a fraud detection alert. He reaches into his wallet , pulls out a card and attempts to transfer the $8,000 but it apparently doesn’t go through. He rifles through his wallet again. No luck. He pulls out another card. Bingo.

At that point, for whatever reason, the spigot opens, and there are transfers galore, to the point that Emerald Fantasy Girls calls Hunter to say he's paying too much. Then, a week or two later, Emerald Fantasy Girls disappears, and we know little else. The story continues,

What we do know from the laptop is that a few hours after Hunter’s debit-card woes began, text messages start arriving that are labeled as being from Robert Savage III. Savage was once the Secret Service’s special agent in charge of the Los Angeles field office and a contact card for him appears on the laptop, with a photographic avatar, phone number and Secret Service email address.

The Secret Service told The Post that Savage retired from the agency on April 30, 2018 — weeks before the Biden debauchery — and that the agency “did not provide protection to any member of the Biden family in 2018.”

Joe Biden had, of course, left the vice presidency in January 2017, was a private citizen at the time, and was not eligible for Secret Service protection. Nevertheless,

The activity recorded on Hunter’s devices shows Savage sending Hunter an urgent missive on May 24 at 6:37 p.m.: “H – I’m in the lobby come down. Thanks, Rob.”

, , , Five minutes later, Savage texts Hunter again to say that Dale Pupillo, a retired deputy assistant director of the Secret Service, who used to guard his father, has arrived. Invoices indicate that Pupillo did background checks for Hunter on potential business partners. Pupillo did not return requests for comment.

. . . What these apparent minders told Hunter next isn’t recorded on his devices. We know Hunter stays up the rest of that night, logging into an encrypted government site, “secure.login.gov,” a number of times until 4:04 a.m.

Although Hunter was in Los Angeles in late May, the story about the young staffer shows him in Washington by June, flying the staffer there to frolic with him. But by July, he was back in Hollywood long enough to find he'd been blacklisted by the notorious Chateau Marmont:

On July 18, 2018, the conversation picked up again with the employee texting, “Your profile does say BLACKLISTED … there was a hole in the wall of one of the rooms you had.”

Biden responded: “A hole – what does that even mean? And what does that have to do with drugs? And why would a joke in the wall not be something I paid to repair. And I’ve never put a f****** hole in any hotel wall."

The pair then discussed how best to retrieve Biden’s personal items, which were still at the hotel.

But from June through August of 2018, Hunter was also working closely with Kathy Chung, a longtime Biden family retainer who first began working for Joe in 2012 at Hunter's recommendation.

"Hi, Hunt!! Per your conversation with you Dad, here is he Penn Biden materials and the block schedule. Let me know if you need anything else, Hunt. Miss ya. Kathy," Chung wrote to Hunter Biden in a June 19, 2018. Chung’s message also contained a six-page report covering the results of a Penn Biden Center poll on American attitudes toward democracy.

The story notes that we don't know Hunter's location during the course of these events, but he did apparently fly his staffer from Los Angeles to Washington during this period for sex, and based on this and another Chung message, he was working with his father on projects related to the Penn Biden Center:

Chung's access to the president's inner circle was made clear in August 2018, when Joe Biden included her in a group text message with relatives and confidants, inviting them to install the encrypted messaging app, Signal. Also included in the chat were Hunter Biden, presidential counselor Steve Ricchetti, three other Biden family members, and two unknown individuals with South Korean and Washington, D.C., phone numbers, respectively.

It’s not clear why Joe Biden moved to open a secured line of communication with his family and close aides, nor who owns the unknown phone numbers. Attempts to call and text the numbers were unsuccessful, and the White House did not return a request for comment. Biden continued communicating with relatives over email and through text messages after sending the Signal invitation.

Chung has more recently said

she is 'distressed' that she may have 'inadvertently been involved in moving or storing classified material' that a Biden lawyer later uncovered at the Penn Biden Center in November, the Washington Post reported.

Two things strike me from the context of these stories once they're put together. One is that Joe Biden, a private citizen during 2018, continued to avail himself of quasi-presidential level surveillance, intelligence, and security capabilties, including the services of at least two recently retired Secret Service agents, the apparent ability to monitor Hunter's credit card spending and balance alerts, the ability to override his low balances, and continued access to some type of government or White House secure logon capability, although he was out of office and a private citizen. Somehow in connection with Hunter's credit card issues, the Russian madam and her organization mysteriously disappeared as well. I simply can't imagine someone like Dan Quayle with similar access and authority.

Indeed, by that October, there was another episode suggesting Joe had access to a remarkable level of surveillance and intelligence via the Secret Service, while out of office and a private citizen:

On Oct. 23, 2018, President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and daughter in law Hallie were involved in a bizarre incident in which Hallie took Hunter’s gun and threw it in a trash can behind a grocery store, only to return later to find it gone.

Delaware police began investigating, concerned that the trash can was across from a high school and that the missing gun could be used in a crime, according to law enforcement officials and a copy of the police report obtained by POLITICO.

But a curious thing happened at the time: Secret Service agents approached the owner of the store where Hunter bought the gun and asked to take the paperwork involving the sale, according to two people, one of whom has firsthand knowledge of the episode and the other was briefed by a Secret Service agent after the fact.

. . . The Secret Service declined to answer a question about whether it had informal involvement in Biden’s security during this period.

The other thing that strikes me is that during this period, he was working with his extended family, including his siblings and Hunter, on what appears to have been highly confidential matters involving representatives of foreign countries in an environment where we know classified documents were improperly stored. The Penn Biden Center appears in many ways to have been the office of a de facto president-in-waiting, except without the level of recordkeeping or accountability that would apply to an actual president. How did this take place? Someone above Joe in the food chain could apparently make this happen for him, when it apparently wouldn't happen for a Dick Cheney, a Mike Pence, or even an Al Gore.