The Pistol In The Dumpster Revisited

Lost in the weekend's news about UFOs and space aliens was this item, covered best as usual in the UK Daily Mail:

The Secret Service has been accused of a 'cover-up' over its alleged involvement in a police investigation when Hunter Biden's lover dumped his gun in a trash can near a school in 2018.

Judicial Watch, a justice watchdog nonprofit, announced on Friday that it received 487 pages of Secret Service (USSS) records over the incident, and says the documents cast further doubt over the agency's claims that it was not involved.

Hunter's lover and brother's widow, Hallie Biden, left his .38 handgun at the top of a trash can at Jansens supermarket in Wilmington, Delaware in October 2018, sparking a police probe.

The reemergence of the story is due to new confirmation of Secret Service involvement in the cleanup, even though Joe was out of office at the time, and Hunter wasn't a protectee as a family member. Via a Freedom of Information Act request, Judicial Watch obtained Secret Service communications on the matter:

A flurry of internal emails began on October 29, 2020, when a website called the Blaze published an article about Hallie throwing Hunter's gun in a supermarket trash can.

One official emailed another in the Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division a link to the article.

Another official, whose name is redacted, responded: 'Oh dear…'

After reading the article, one Secret Service Protective Intelligence Research Specialist wrote to their colleagues: 'It's kind of odd that we were involved in the missing gun investigation when neither Hunter or Joe were even receiving USSS protection at the time? Hmmm.'

But when this sort of story treats each incident in isolation, it leaves out important context. During the entire period of the affair between Hunter and Hallie, both were heavy users of cocaine, and Hunter's sister, Ashley, who presumably would know, characterized both as "addicts". In the months before the pistol in the dumpster episode, Hunter had been in and out of rehab. According to the New York Post,

Hunter Biden begged his sister-in-law-turned-lover Hallie Biden for cash to check himself into rehab just six weeks before purchasing a handgun — and attesting on federal forms that he had never used or been addicted to drugs.

A shocking, 4-minute, 30-second recording was discovered by The Post on a copy of the infamous hard drive Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop, and emerges the same week federal agents said they believe they have enough evidence to charge him for making false statements in order to buy the .38-caliber pistol.

. . . In the days before the call, Hunter Biden appears to have completed a course of rehabilitation at The View. The center typically charges $4,000 daily. Hunter’s uncle Jim Biden, however, managed to secure him a bargain rate of $2,500 per day.

His time drying out doesn’t appear to have worked; the points plea came during a period of reportedly extended drug and alcohol use.

“I hesitate to write you this. Because your response is unpredictable. But I can’t help but to plead to you to get well,” Hunter’s sister Ashley Biden wrote to him on Sept. 1, 2018. “Our father is devastated. And his personality has fundamentally changed without you by his side,.”

During this period, Hunter's life appears to have been disintegrating. As I noted in this post, Hunter and Liz Secundy, Hallie's sister, signed a one-year rental agreement on a town house that July, but the relationship among the three seems to have been a menage, since by October, he seems still to have been living with Hallie as well, and it was she who put the pistol in the dumpster. According to the New York Post, Hunter said this on his laptop:

“Then when the police the FBI the secret service [sic] came on the scene she said she took it from me because she was scared I would harm myself due to my drug and alcohol problem and our volatile relationship and that she was afraid for the kids,” he said.

But whatever law enforcement arrived on the scene, and even though Hallie's fear was for the kids, nobody seems to have called child protective services to get the kids out of that environment -- which would be the usual consequence of discovering addicted and alcoholic adults with children and guns in the household.

Then, shortly afterward, according to The Sun,

President Joe Biden’s son, 52, lashed out at Hallie, 47, after claiming to have discovered a designer Hermès box containing what appears to be drug paraphernalia and hard drugs at her home in Wilmington, Delaware.

, , , Two weeks after the gun incident, Hunter texted Hallie the pic of what appears to be a huge crack cocaine rock on top of the Hermès box.

By January 2019, Hunter's laptop showed him in a sensory deprivation tank at Blue Water Wellness in Newburyport, MA, although whatever rehab regimen was in force there didn't keep him from taking hits from a crack pipe while in the tank.

Just one month earlier, Hunter had texted his dad, Joe, complaining he didn't have enough money for the treatment program on top of bills and alimony.

'Hey dad I've been trying to resolve some immediate financial issues - alimony tuitions and my bill for this program but the cash I am counting on will not arrive until the end of the week.

'Is it possible to make me another short term loan in the same amount and I will send it back no later than 10 days.

'I'm really embarrassed to ask and I know it's unfair of me to put you in that position right now,' Hunter wrote on December 4, 2018.

'Hunt tell me what you need. No problem,' the future president responded. 'Ok how do you want to do this I can pay tuition directly and their housing and give you the rest.'

Biden senior messaged again on December 6 to confirm: '75 being wired today. Love.'

This is just one slice of the Hunter timeline covering the period surrounding Hunter's purchase of a gun he was clearly not entitled to have, the feckless and drug-addled efforts of his inner circle to address the problem, and Joe's continued enabling of Hunter's dissipation, not only by funding it to the tune of repeated infusions of cash, but also apparently by calling on federal law enforcement to do cleanup as well.

Interestingly, the gun shop owner involved, possibly sensing irregularities, refused to cooperate with whomever claimed to be from the Secret Service. (I don't rule out Dale Pupillo and Robert Savage III, the two former Secret Service executives who'd been eased out but were apparently then put on the Biden personal payroll. They appear to have impersonated agents in the episode at The Jeremy in Hollywood back in May 2018 as well.)

But the big question that nobody else has asked is that by Hunter's implied account on his laptop, more than one level of law enforcement was involved in tracking down the gun that Hallie left in the dumpster, and at least by Hallie's account, she was concerned for her kids. But any normal law enforcement investigation involving kids, drugs, and guns would wind up taking the kids away. That night. This didn't happen here. Why not?