"What In The Hell Is The Penn Biden Center?"

This is the question Paul Kengor asked in an essay this past Monday in The American Spectator. Pondering this question, he says,

So, I ventured to the website of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy & Global Engagement. Alas, I remain even more in the dark. I found a few articles and what seem like press releases. I found no reports or policy papers, which is odd because such is the main product of a think tank.

I did, however, find Joe Biden — everywhere. Biden’s grinning mug is splashed all over the thing. When you first open the website, you see Biden. When you click the first heading, labeled, “We’re Focused On,” you’re assaulted with some mindless mishmash about “Advancing the Dialogue of Internationalism.” The viewer is greeted by — surprise — two photos, both of Joe Biden. The first is a photo of, quite appropriately, old Scranton Joe and China’s Xi taking a friendly stroll together at some bridge near Beijing.

His conclusion is fairly simple, it doesn't really do anything but promote Joe Biden:

I’ve worked for think tanks with budgets under a million bucks that produced more in five months than the Penn Biden Center has done in five years. . . . Other than serving as a dubious tribute entity to Joe Biden, I don’t see this thing as doing much.

Here, I disagree. It did a great deal during the main years of its operation in 2018 and 2019, and as far as I can tell, it's been unique. At that time, it was pretty clearly a political operation on behalf of Biden as an undeclared candidate for president in 2020 -- he announced on April 25, 2019, after which his activities at the Penn Biden Center appear to have wound down.

I assume this allowed Joe to collect a salary and pay staff before his announcement without the need to follow campaign laws, in particular without the need to disclose his donors, who seem to have been able to funnel many millions anonymously to the non-campaign via the University of Pennsylvania. So Paul Kengor is saying something basic when he says it isn't a think tank, but that's only what it isn't, and he offers little insight into what it is.

But again, let's look at the context in my Hunter timeline. Just a month before the announcement, in March 2019, the Biden family called Hunter to Wilmington and staged an intervention to get him off drugs. This didn't turn out as expected; according to the link,

Hunter, according to his book, agreed to be taken to a local rehab center by Hallie Biden, his brother Beau's widow with whom he'd had a romantic relationship in the past. But after she dropped him off at the rehab center, Hunter got an Uber to a hotel near BWI Airport. "I sat in my room and smoked the crack I'd tucked away in my traveling bag," wrote.

"I then boarded a plane for California and ran and ran and ran."

The following month, though, Hunter, back in Delaware, abandoned his notorious laptop at the computer repair shop. Also in April, his term as a Burisma director expired, which cut off a good part of his income stream. Nevertheless, by May, Melissa Cohen, a jetsetter with no income of her own, found Hunter attractive enough to wangle a date with him and marry him six days later. I strongly suspect, given the overall hinkiness of Hunter's public record, this wasn't what actually happened, and the fast track appears to have been sponsored and encouraged in some way. According to the link,

Melissa is from South Africa, but recently became a naturalized U.S. citizen, a ceremony Hunter proudly attended.

Right, crackhead Hunter is anxious that his current squeeze, among at least half a dozen others, become a naturalized US citizen? I think it's much more likely that a contingent of handlers devised and supervised the whole arrangement. As of last summer,

Hunter Biden’s marriage to filmmaker Melissa Cohen is on the rocks under the pressure of the federal investigation into him, say insiders.

Sources close to President Biden’s wayward son say both Hunter and his South African wife “are frustrated because they are in lockdown,” while she has confided in friends that life with Hunter is “hard.”

One source close to the couple said, “They never go anywhere because they’ve been instructed to stay out of sight and away from the cameras while the investigation into Hunter continues.

“Added to the pressure, the Secret Service lives in a much larger mansion next door to them and they watch over Hunter like hawks. It is extremely frustrating for both of them.”

The record we have is that, especially from the time Joe left the vice presidency in 2017 through the peak period of 2018, Hunter served as an important proxy and catspaw for Joe, whose interests were, first, to collect payoffs for favors he'd done as vice president but couldn't collect while he was in office, and second, to collect new payoffs in anticipation of favors he'd do once he became president but again couldn't collect while in office.

Joe tolerated Hunter's escapades as long as Joe was out of office, a private citizen, and not an announced candidate. But by March 2019, as he planned to announce, it would be necessary to get Hunter under control. The end of Hunter's term at Burisma was important leverage, as was Hunter's mounting debt load and what had likely become a deficit in his family finance account, given the amounts Joe had had to front him throughout 2018. So he and Melissa were packed away and kept on a very short, if very expensive, leash. How Hunter's full Malibu lifestyle and his mounting legal costs have been covered given his lack of income is still unknown.

First son Hunter Biden's art sales are reportedly falling short of the revenue he needs to cover his mounting legal expenses.

Earnings from his sales of roughly a dozen paintings have generated "a fraction of the $500,000 price tag once estimated," and now some of his allies are contemplating setting up a legal defense fund to help him navigate his legal troubles, the Washington Post reported.

The Penn Biden Center effectively operated for about an 18-month period as office space and a temporary paycheck for Joe and select top-level functionaries like Antony Blinken and Steve Ricchetti. But as soon as Biden announced, Riccetti, for example, moved on to head his campaign committee. The problem is that during its main period of operation, it also appears to have been a central office for overall Biden affairs. It must have paid, directly or indirectly, the retired Secret Service agents already known to Biden who worked on his behalf to manage Hunter (and presumably other delicate matters) duering 2018. A story I covered yesterday mentions Dale Pupillo, who turned up in the lobby of The Jeremy to remonstrate with Hunter on his escort charges. Here's Pupillo's CV:

Assistant Director (Retired), United States Secret Service, Washington, DC

A 32-year veteran of the Secret Service, Dale Pupillo retired as Assistant Director in January 2015. Pupillo is currently a security consultant servicing the DC area.

. . . In 2008 Pupillo was selected as the Special Agent in Charge of the Vice Presidential Protective Division. He served in that role for Vice Presidents Dick Cheney and Joe Biden. In 2013 Pupillo served as Assistant Director for Human Resources and Training. In 2014 he was selected to serve as Assistant Director of Protective Operations.

The story at yesterday's link indicates Pupillo did other work for Hunter, based on "invoices". In fact, it sounds as though during 2018, he was running an effective shadow Secret Service operation on behalf of Joe that mirrored the official organization and provided Joe with services he was no longer eligible to receive as vice president -- and indeed, given yesterday's stories of the escort service that billed Hunter and then strangely disappeared, or the Secret Service agents who tried to erase the paperwork on Hunter's gun in the dumpster, this shadow Secret Service did dirty work the real one presumably wouldn't, or at least shouldn't, do.

The Penn Biden Center operated as a White House-in-exile. It collected payoffs for past and future favors for which Biden couldn't be paid while in office as either vice president or president. It served as a key entity for managing Hunter's activities and the dirty work Hunter either supervised or made necessary due to his indiscretions. It was office space for the rest of the Biden family payoff racket. It was funded via anonymous dontions to the University of Pennsylvania.

However, it served this purpose for only a limited period and seems to have become less active once Joe announced for the presidency in 2019 and had to put a lid on Hunter's excesses. What's interesting is the carelessness whereby it was allowed to sit idle until someone decided it needed to be cleaned up in mid-2022. This was work that should have started in 2019 and will likely be impossible to accomplish now.