Friday, March 3, 2023

Why Are The Biden Lawyers Squirrely?

One thing nobody's covered lately is the strange tendency of Biden lawyers no longer to be Biden lawyers. I've already noted here that Patrick Moore, a former Obama White House counsel who appears to have been the key individual tasked with cleaning out President Biden's Penn Biden Center office and who had quietly notified the Justice Department of the classified documents, was no longer representing Joe Biden following the January 9 revelation of the find. Via that link, his first day at a new job with the Massachusetts Attorney General's office was January 18.

More recently, one of Hunter Biden's high-powered defense attorneys, Joshua Levy, has just as quietly withdrawn from that case.

Levy has removed himself from the case, reportedly due to infighting within Hunter’s legal team and specifically with Abbe Lowell, who was hired in December to defend Hunter and the Biden family from nine congressional probes, including money laundering and wire fraud.

. . . Levy was reportedly discontented with Lowell’s legal strategies and feared that his tactics could flop. In February, Lowell was a part of the effort to send Rudy Giuliani, Tony Bobulinski, and 12 others “litigation hold” letters to preserve “Laptop from Hell” records, a move seen by some critics as a public relations tactic to change the troubling narrative for the Biden family.

The link quotes the New York Times on the chronology of Levy's engagement and details the conflicts within the legal team:

President Biden’s personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, had recommended Mr. Levy for the job. But Mr. Levy had clashed with Kevin Morris, a lawyer and close adviser to Hunter Biden who has lent him money to pay his back taxes and some other bills, according to a person familiar with the strategy. Mr. Morris and Hunter Biden brought on Mr. Lowell late last year, prompting Mr. Levy’s departure.

In previous posts here, I've listed Levy and Lowell as part of Hunter's legal team, as well as Chris Clark and Keven Morris. With Levy out, that leaves Lowell, Clark, and Morris, but some of the stories I've seen suggest that Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris, who appears to be a friend of Hunter as well as a financial angel, is calling the shots. But Morris is an entertainment lawyer, not a criminal defense attorney who specializes in issues like taxes and money laundering, which were Levy's skill set. Clark has been representing Hunter in his tax case with the Delaware US Attorney, but a major problem is the commingling of Biden family funds that's likely to metastasize and affect Joe and his brother Jim, if not other members of the Biden family.

Down the road, it's hard not to be suspicious that Joe continues to rely on Hunter as a key confidant, but the problem is that Hunter is an addict who's been in and out of rehab for more than a decade, and if nothing else, his judgment, especially over his own case and the family's legal exposure, is likely to be seriously impaired. And his case will always be closely linked with Joe's and the rest of the family.

This also leaves aside the separate issue of the doubts within the FBI about what led up to the raid on Mar-a-Lago.

According to the Washington Post, the raid took place only after months of debate between the FBI and prosecutors from the Department of Justice. The FBI argued that a request for a full search of the property would have sufficed, according to two senior officials from the bureau.

. . . Most of this we knew already, but not the infighting at the DoJ. So what does this leak to the Washington Post tell us? First off, it probably signals that prosecutors didn’t end up with a usable case even after the raid. Success incentivizes unity; failure incentivizes blame games. The FBI’s two “senior officials” want everyone to know it wasn’t their idea, which wouldn’t be necessary unless the raid and the prosecution has flopped.

I've posted here on what seems to be a new "deep throat" phenomenon whereby unnamed FBI officials brief the Washington Post on chicanery at the White House, just as they did 50 years ago. All I can think is this is a continuation of what we've been seeing since the middle of January, while Biden attorneys are quietly heading for the exits. Meanwhile, the reporters are still working from home.