One No-Brainer And One Big Puzzle

Yesterday I brought up the coincidence that as of 2016, both Hunter Biden's sister-in-law, Hallie, and his father, Joe, found themselves needing money. Hallie's case was a no-brainer: her husband, Beau Biden, had passed away from brain cancer in May 2015. Hallie, who had apparently had no education past private secondary school, appears to have worked only at part-time private school counselor jobs that she must have held only because she was married to Beau, she had no career to fall back on, but she had expenses like private school tuition for her children plus a cocaine habit.

Thus she needed a meal ticket, and based on evidence from Hunter's laptop, she was staying over at Hunter's home while his wife, Kathleen, was away by July of 2015. This is what apparently caused Kathleen to kick Hunter out of their house that month. This affair continued, with Hunter apparently paying for her home, until the Biden family intervention with Hunter in March 2019, when Hunter was prevailed upon to clean up his act prior to Joe's announcement of his 2020 candidacy. Significantly, according to the Wikipedia link above, "In March 2019, The Key School filed a lawsuit against [Hallie], stating that she failed to pay $55,740 in tuition for her two children for the 2018–2019 school year."

By May 2019, Hunter met and married Melissa Cohen and was living under tight security in Los Angeles, which would have effectively curtailed further interaction between Hunter and Hallie. In addition, most of Hunter's prior businesses had collapsed by that time, and according to an e-mail from Hunter's assistant, Joe had been underwriting Hunter's expenses since January 2019. It's unknown how Hallie has supported herself since the end of her affair with Hunter, but it also sounds as if Joe was also subsidizing her lifestyle:

[T]exts on the laptop also reveal that Hallie Biden, his brother Beau's widow who became his lover after Beau died of brain cancer in 2015, has been to rehab four times, costing over $100,000, some of it allegedly paid for by Joe Biden.

. . . During the conversation Hunter discussed which rehab center he will be attending, and revealed that the president spent $45,000 on a ten-day rehab stay for Hallie.

So it isn't difficult to conclude that Hallie's interest in Hunter was at basis financial, and he was also either supplying her with drugs directly or enabling her own purchases. Given her addiction and her minimal job history, she would have had little ability to support herself, and Hunter was effectively her only option.

But let's look at the other figure in this story, Hunter's dad, Joe, who as best we can surmise also saw that he'd need money when he left the vice presidency in January 2017. The vice president's salary is $230,700 per year, which Joe would cease to earn after he left office. The vice presidency does not carry a pension. but the vice president earns a Senate pension as a result of his constitutional duty to preside over the Senate.

This means that a retired vice president earns the same pension as other members of the US Congress, but based on their years of service. Before 1997, vice presidents who served for one term and had less than 5 years in federal service were not entitled to a pension.

After retiring as vice president in 2016, Forbes reported that Joe Biden earned $1 million in federal pension for his 43 years in public service.

Most people can retire comfortably on $1 million a year, especially if we assume Joe would have extensive additional investments, as well as various perks, courtesies, and lagniappes accumulated over his career. On the other hand, it appears that Joe had become accustomed to an extravagant lifestyle, and he'd been enabling extravagant and drug-addicted parasitic lifestyles in his son, Hunter, and his daughter, Ashley, not to mention the rehab for Hallie mentioned above, and likely other payments to Hunter's ex-wife Kathleen and Lunden Roberts, the mother of a Hunter out-of-wedlock child.

In addition, I've estimated here that Joe is spending over $1 million a month on his personal attorneys who are working on the Penn Biden Center and related classified document matters, while Hunter is spending an equivalent amount over his tax issues and other situations connected with his business dealings. It's hard to avoid thinking some of Hunter's expenses are being passed on to his father, and Joe may also be bearing some part of Hunter's extravagant living expenses at his Malibu compound, as well as his wife's own lifestyle.

I've wondered as well whether either Hunter or Joe is getting anything like what they're paying for from those expensive lawyers, and this goes to their judgment -- notwithstanding however much money either can get, can either spend it wisely?

The problem I see in this whole scenario is that both Joe and Hallie seem to have thought Hunter would be the guy who'd fund their lifestyles into the indefinite future, when the history of Hunter's business ventures has been that he formed optimistic partnerships with figures like Christopher Heinz, Devon Archer, and Eric Schwerin, but soon enough, Heinz withdrew from Rosemont Seneca, Archer was convicted of securites fraud, and Schwerin, fed up with Hunter, began to cooperate with investigations. Others of his foreign connections have been convicted of crimes or disappeared entirely. Hunter has turned out to be a will-o-the-wisp, and the people who've been fooled most include Joe and Hallie.

The money people think Hunter will bring in never quite turns up, and Hunter himself becomes a major new expense. But I'm still working on another puzzle: as we saw yesterday, Joe made a deliberate decision not to run for president in 2016. This in turn led to a recommendation from family advisers that Joe set up an enterprise along the lines of the Clinton Foundation to colect payoffs in anticipation of future favors he would give as a president after 2020 or 2024.

But why did so many people think that Joe's election was assured as of 2017? It seems like a good many did. Why?