The Ukraine Hawks' Problem

The policies Donald Trump has articulated over Ukraine have been consistent, and he restated them over the weekend:

Former President Donald Trump said he could solve the Russia-Ukraine war "in 24 hours," while speaking at his presidential campaign kickoff in New Hampshire on Saturday.

. . . "My personality kept us out of war," the former president continued. "And I told you before, [it] would have never happened with Russia. Putin would have never ever gone in. And even now I could solve that in 24 hours. It's so horrible what happened. Those cities are demolished now."

Trump concluded by saying that if he was president, there would have been "zero chance that war would have happened."

The problem for Ukraine is that following the September 2022 Russian rout in Donbas and the November Russian withdrawal from northern Kherson, their counteroffensive has stalled, and they've resumed calls for more effective Western weapons, at this point main battle tanks and F-16 jets. The Western response has been continued reluctant incrementalism, with President Biden repeating the response he's made over the past year, denying such requests but then relenting over a period of weeks:

#BREAKING Biden says "no" to US sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine pic.twitter.com/32Y8S1HUSU

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) January 30, 2023

Given his record, he'll change his mind in March or so, which means it will take just that much longer to bring the F-16s on line.

The difficulty at this point is that the history of the war for much of 2022 was Russian advance, followed by a period of stalemate, followed by a dramatic Russian rout. Nevertheless, as the map above shows, Russia retains considerable area that it had seized after the February invasion, and it continues to hold all its post-2014 territory. Optimistic predictions by the retired general talking heads that much of this could be regained in 2023 are being rolled back. Instead, the Institute for the Study of War now projects:

Western, Ukrainian, and Russian sources continue to indicate that Russia is preparing for an imminent offensive, supporting ISW’s assessment that an offensive in the coming months is the most likely course of action (MLCOA). NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg stated on January 30 that there are no indications that Russia is preparing to negotiate for peace and that all indicators point to the opposite. Stoltenberg noted that Russia may mobilize upwards of 200,000 personnel and is continuing to acquire weapons and ammunition through increased domestic production and partnerships with authoritarian states such as Iran and North Korea. Stoltenberg emphasized that Russian President Vladimir Putin retains his maximalist goals in Ukraine. Head of the Council of Reservists of the Ukrainian Ground Forces, Ivan Tymochko, relatedly stated that Russian forces are strengthening their grouping in Donbas as part of an anticipated offensive and noted that Russian forces will need to launch an offensive due to increasing domestic pressure for victory.

The Ukraine Hawks in the military and foreign policy establishment are beginning to recognize the problem. Michael McFaul is, according to Wikipedia,

an American academic and diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. McFaul is currently the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor in International Studies in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. . . . He is also a Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a contributing columnist at The Washington Post. . . . McFaul worked for the U.S. National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and senior director of Russian and Eurasian affairs. In that capacity, he was the architect of U.S. President Barack Obama's Russian reset policy.

So this is an important guy. He wrote yesterday in Foreign Affairs,

There are risks to providing more and better weapons to Ukraine, but there are also risks to not doing so. If the war in Ukraine drags on for years, so many more people—Ukrainians first and foremost, but also Russians—will die. “Stalemate” on the battlefield is a euphemism for continued death and destruction. This is the cost of incrementalism.

Protracted war also risks losing public support in the United States and Europe. At the end of 2022, Biden signed into law a new $45 billion aid package for Ukraine. This should fund U.S. military assistance until the end of this year, including new weapons systems such as ATACMs and fighter jets, should they be given the green light. But now that the House of Representatives is under Republican control, future appropriations could be less forthcoming.

. . . Western leaders need to shift how they approach the conflict. At this stage, incrementally expanding military and economic assistance is likely to only prolong the war indefinitely.

. . . The way this new military assistance is announced also matters. Rather than providing ATACMs in March, Reapers in June, and jets in September, NATO should go for a Big Bang. Plans to provide all these systems should be announced on February 24, 2023, the first anniversary of Putin’s invasion.

It's worth noting that this has been the strategy Zelensky and the Ukrainian armed forces have advocated all along, and indeed still advocate. As of this morning, though, it appears that President Biden is sticking with the strategy of reluctant incrementalism he's displayed over the past year.

But beyond that, even the strategy McFaul advocates, a Big Bang announcement at the end of next month, has the same problems that have hobbled the existing incrementalist strategy -- the US finally approves Weapon Whatever, but this requires shipping Weapon Whatever first to Poland, and then extensive training of Ukrainian soldiers in the new weapon, new logistical channels to support the new weapon, and so forth, such that the effects of the new weapon don't emerge for months. Meanwhile, there's stalemate, and the war drags on.

Add to that the additional issue that the last Weapon Whatever, HIMARS, allowed some limited gains, but the Russians adapted to it, and the result has been renewed stalemate until the next Weapon Whatever arrives -- in this case, Bradleys. But we won't learn how that will turn out for months.

It's happening now, and it will happen even if NATO announces a Big Bang on February 24. The problem is that whatever we do on February 24, 2023, we're stuck with the results of our strategy throughnout 2022. As a retired US lieutenant colonel pointed out the other day regarding new weapons,

“You can’t send 500 [Ukrainian] dudes to Germany and conduct six weeks of maneuver training and think you’re going to get the same output, because those guys don’t have the experience,” he said. “They don’t even have the baseline understanding that we had a whole career and our whole training before we even arrived at that one year preparation.”

Davis suggests imagining the chances that someone who has “never even seen this equipment” will “have to just fall in on it while they’re in [combat] potentially a few months from now — which is what they’re saying they’re trying to do — and it’s somehow those things are going to be effective in combat.”

“I mean just on the surface of it, that’s ridiculous,” he said. “I mean it’s people who just don’t have any idea of how actual combat power is generated that would believe that.”

Lt Col Davis is referring to Abrams tanks, which are months away from shipping in the current pipeline, but his remarks could apply just as easily to the Bradleys said to be shipping now. One thing that's becoming more clear is that the West went into Ukraine without a serious plan and without a clear set of objectives, which it's never taken the trouble to develop as the war has progressed. As a result, the US runs the risk of having the same result it's had in Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, another long, expensive, and indecisive war.

At the same time, I think I may have made the mistake many others made late last year, assuming Trump was fading from the scene, when it turns out that that which does not kill him makes him stronger. His basic position is that Biden's weakness in Afghanistan created the conditions for Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and the current administration's policy of reluctant incrementalism has simply exacerbated the situation. The foreign policy establishment's belated turn away from incrementalism will likely be too late to fix the problem.

I misunderestimated Trump, I now think.

Looks Like At Least Two Attorneys Have Washed Their Hands Of Biden

I've been following up on the question of Biden's personal attorneys for a while, and the most I can say is we don't know very much. CBS News has done some good research on this, and I linked to a January 12 story earlier here that gives the most comprehensive list so far:

Longtime Democratic lawyer Bob Bauer is serving as the personal attorney for President Biden in the classified documents matter now before a Justice Department special counsel, the White House confirmed Friday.

Bauer has been the primary point of contact between the Biden camp and the Justice Department during the initial investigation, which began in November, CBS News has learned.

. . . Recent filings with the National Archives name three partners at D.C. law firm Covington and Burling as Biden's representatives to the Archives for his vice presidential records: Dana Remus, former Biden White House counsel, Biden campaign attorney Robert Lenhard and James Garland, a former Obama-era Justice Department official.

Their roles in the documents matter is [sic] unclear. Multiple calls and emails to Remus, Lenhard and Garland since Monday have gone unanswered.

Several sources added an additional name in mid-January, M Patrick Moore, who was reported as the individual who discovered and reported the first tranche of classified documents at the Penn Biden Center on November 2. Accordimg to the UK Daily Mail:

Joe Biden's personal attorney - who found classified material inside Biden's Washington DC think tank - has already spoken to federal prosecutors, according to a report.

Patrick Moore was asked to clear out Biden's office in November and found the documents, CNN reported.

Moore then informed the National Archives and Justice Department.

. . . On Tuesday [January 17] it emerged that Moore has already spoken to John Lausch, the U.S. Attorney for the northern district of Illinois.

Lausch was initially tasked with investigating the classified material; his job has now been taken over by the special counsel, Robert Hur, who was appointed on January 12.

According to The Hill,

Reacting to the November discovery of the Biden classified materials, Attorney General Merrick Garland at the time quietly assigned the U.S. attorney in Chicago to review a “small number” of documents with classified marking, which were removed from the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in the nation’s capital and turned over to national archivists by Biden’s personal lawyers, CBS reported.

Time provides more detail:

On November 9, the FBI began an inquiry into whether any laws were broken and if classified information was mishandled. Several days later on November 14, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland assigned John Lausch, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, to the case to determine if a special counsel was needed.

However there appears to have been some agreement to keep the discovery quiet. Time continues,

The following month, Biden’s personal counsel found additional classified documents in the president’s private library attached to his garage during an inspection of his home in Wilmington, Delaware on December 20. The attorneys informed Lausch about the findings and handed the documents over the following day.

A few days into the new year, Lausch filled Garland in on the investigation on January 5 and recommended that the DOJ appoint a special counsel, who would extensively investigate and potentially prosecute any wrongdoing.

On January 9, CBS News was the first to report on November’s discovery of classified documents, bringing the case to public attention. The White House then publicly confirmed the inquiry, saying that the administration was cooperating with the DOJ and NARA, but didn’t mention the additional classified documents found in December.

A January 24 CBS News story adds another data point, the current status of the Biden personal attorney who discovered and reported the first three document tranches:

Two sources familiar with the investigation told CBS News that Massachusetts-based attorney M. Patrick Moore had been part of the president's personal legal team dealing with the documents matter. Moore recently took a senior role in the Massachusetts attorney general's office and is no longer listed on his law firm's website.

A spokesperson for the Massachusetts attorney general said Moore's start date was Jan. 18 and directed further questions about Moore's private representations to [Bob Bauer's spokesperson Molly] Levinson.

Levinson confirmed he is no longer representing the president.

The account above implies that Moore had been performing as Biden's personal attorney in his capacity as a counsel at a Boston law firm, but has recently left that firm and also no longer represents Biden. The firm, Hemenway & Barnes LLP, announced in February 2017, just as the Obama administration ended,

Hemenway & Barnes LLP, one of Boston’s leading legal and fiduciary firms, today announced that M. Patrick Moore Jr. has joined its business and non-profit law practices as Counsel.

Pat is a litigator with a unique perspective on the mechanics of federal and state government. He brings to clients a background in business and appellate litigation, and an understanding of legislative and regulatory initiatives at all levels of government.

Before joining Hemenway & Barnes, Pat was an Associate Counsel and Advisor for Presidential Personnel at the White House, in the administration of President Barack Obama. There, he vetted prospective nominees for executive, judicial, and independent agency positions; evaluated clemency petitions; and analyzed legal issues on behalf of the President. In 2020, he had also been a deputy general counsel to the Biden 2020 presidential campaign.

This set of circumstances strikes me as remarkable for what it doesn't say. As best we can determine, Moore had been working for Biden personally in an effort to review and potentially scrub old files at the Penn Biden Center, as well as potentially also at the Biden residence. On November 2, he found files whose existence he felt compelled to disclose, although from current accounts, it isn't clear to whom he disclosed them, whether the White House Counsel's office or the Department of Justice.

However, Attorney General Garland within days "quietly" assigned a US attorney, John Lausch, to review the situation, and Moore then met with Lausch. A few days later, the situation was deemed important enough to bring in the FBI on November 9. Moore, apparently still on the case, went to the Biden Wilmington home and found additional documents on December 20 and reported them to Lausch as well. After the holiday, at least according to this verison, Lausch went to Merrick Garland on January 5 and recommended a special counsel.

However, no move was made to appoint the special counsel until CBS reported on the previously hidden story on January 9 and another set of documents was found at the Biden home on January 11. As far as I can tell, this was Moore again reporting to Lausch. Lausch apparently went to Garland on January 12, and that afternoon, Garland announced the appointment of a special counsel.

But wait: there's more. That same day, January 12, according to WTTW,

Chicago’s top federal prosecutor, who recently has been tasked with probing classified documents found at President Joe Biden’s home and office, will be leaving his post sometime this year.

John Lausch, who has served as U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Illinois since 2017, is planning to leave the office in “early 2023,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced during an unrelated press conference Thursday.

And as of January 17-18, the days the story about his role broke, M Patrick Moore, who apparently had been tasked with cleaning up the files at Penn Biden Center and the Biden home and weeks earlier had discovered the classified documents in both places, no longer represented Biden as a personal attorney, had left his former law firm, and had taken a job with the Massachusetts Attorney General, where he would presumably be hundreds of miles from either Washington or Wilmington. (I would bet he's taken a big pay cut, too,)

Something's hinky. I get the feeling that two important lawyers decided they no longer wanted to be involved in the case and skedaddled. (My wife suggests that both Moore and Lausch may wish to preserve their roles as witnesses in the matter rather than as potential co-conspirators.)

The Bigger Picture

I found this photo in a Newseek article from January 20 that's labeled as being an aerial view of the Biden property on 1209 Barley Mill Road, Wilmington, Delaware 19807. This is consistent with other published views of the house on the left, but the photo here includes another house. The Newsweek piece puts things in the context of the background check form Hunter submitted for his niece, wherein he apparently claims to own this property while also paying $49,910 in rent there.

Newsweek, as have other sources, traces the $49,910 amount to what was actually a security deposit on quarterly rent paid to House of Sweden by Hunter's firm Rosement Seneca Partners for office space there. Newsweek fills out additional details in the link:

A 2021 report by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, which examined a trove of communications between the National Property Board and Hunter Biden's representatives, stated that in February 2017: "Hunter Biden and his companies" moved into House of Sweden, with rent at "$50,000 per quarter".

Furthermore, an email exchange among files from the Hunter Biden laptop leak, which shows a conversation with "CECILIA BROWNING, GENERAL MANAGER AT HOUSE OF SWEDEN" also lists a security deposit that exactly matches the rent listed on the background check form. Emails within that exchange also roughly match the dates quoted in the background check and the Dagens Nyheter investigation.

The National Property Board of Sweden confirmed to Newsweek that "$49,910 was paid quarterly between March 2017 and February 2018."

. . . "House of Sweden is owned and managed by National Property Board Sweden," general manager Cecilia Browning said to Fox News. "We have tenants who rent office space, and it is correct that Rosemont Seneca LLC rented an office at House of Sweden between February 2017 – February 2018."

But the story doesn't stop there. 2018 was, to put it mildly, a crazy year for Hunter, who in its first months was continuing his affair with his late brother's widow, Hallie, and apparently spending time at her Washington home, while also frequently seen at a Washington strip club , The Mpire Club, where he developed a relationship with a dancer there, Lunden Alexis Roberts, who worked under the stage name “Dallas”. Hunter traveled extensively with her during this period, and she bore his love child that August.

However, neither Hallie nor Alexis had a monopoly on Hunter's time.

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.

However, Hunter moved out of Chateau Marmont, where that escapade took place, later in the month. (He was kicked out for good that July.)

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. On the morning of May 24, hung over and out of sorts, Hunter adds a new recipient on the cash transfer app Zelle, a woman named Gulnora, the registered agent for Emerald Fantasy Girls.

. . . 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 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 again: “Come on H, this is linked to Celtic’s account. DC is calling me every 10. Let me up or come down. I can’t help if you don’t let me H.”

“Celtic” was Joe Biden’s Secret Service code name when he was vice president.

Did one of the credit cards used to pay Gulnora belong to Joe Biden? Was it a shared account?

But while all this was going on, Lunden Roberts, the dancer, was on Hunter's payroll, as was Hallie. There seems to have been some pressure on Hunter, by the summer of 2018, to tone things down and get his affairs in order as Celtic began to clarify his plans for 2020. A few months after the birth of his and Lunden's child in August, Hunter took her off his payroll and insurance.

By December, he was having to deal with the office items left over from the Rosemont Seneca lease at House of Sweden, which had expired in February (we can only assume he'd been so busy he couldn't attend to it before then):

“Have what’s in storage sent to my parents guest house,” Hunter Biden told his assistant Katie Dodge in a Dec. 10, 2018 text message, which was part of a trove leaked online last year and now hosted by nonprofit Marco Polo USA.

Four days later, Dodge followed up with an image from inside a storage facility with large wooden containers stacked three levels on top of each other.

“You have almost I think 3 of these containers full of office and personal items. Will they fit at Barley Road? It’s 3,000 cubic feet,” she said.

I've got to assume the slightly smaller house to the right of the main house in the photo above is the "guest house" Hunter refers to in his text message. This exchange provides some possible insight into how some of the documents that may have been found at the Wilmington location might relate to Hunter's business interests, and it also gives some insight into the actual scale of the task confronting Biden's personal attorneys in going through this information and scubbing it. From this account, these aren't just a few random cardboard cartons.

What I've been doing has simply been collating the dates of the numerous individual stories of Hunter's escapades into a single timeline with links, which is providing a great deal of extra context to each individual episode of his saga during the years of the Biden interregnum. What astonishes me is that nobody else appears to have done this, even though it involves nothing more than a few hours of time and a web connection.

I Love A Corporate Crisis!

Visitors know I'm something of a conoisseur of corporate crises, especially ones that are clumsily mishandled and stem from dysfunctional corporate culture, although that last may be a redundancy. Pfizer has already been suffering from bad publicity in the release of Twitter files and Wednesday's Babylon Bee story:

NEW YORK, NY — Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has unveiled their new mascot, an adorable glob of platelets who goes by the name "Clotty".

"See? Blood clots aren't scary!" said Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla as a smiling Clotty danced onto the stage. "Welcome to Pfizer, Clotty! Let's get one of these little guys into every home in America!"

While Pfizer initially pushed back against evidence tying the vaccine to blood clots, the company has decided to instead embrace it. "We are so excited for Clotty to help us put a friendly face on heart attacks and strokes," said Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. "Every new COVID booster will now come with a plush Clotty doll you can take to the hospital when you inevitably get admitted with a massive embolus. You'll love squeezing Clotty while they wheel you into the cath lab! Thanks, Clotty!"

The new mascot's reception has thus far been overwhelmingly positive, with Clotty paraphernalia already showing up in several politicians' offices. "Gosh darn it, I love the little guy," said Senator Elizabeth Warren, sporting a Clotty t-shirt as she adjusted a picture of her and Clotty. "Every child in America should be so lucky as to have one of these precious little blood clots. I will continue to do everything in my power to make it happen."

The last thing it needed was release of the Project Veritas video in which

A research director with the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer said the corporation is secretly exploring intentionally creating mutations of the COVID virus to “preemptively develop new vaccines,” and said COVID “is going to be a cash cow for us,” in the latest undercover video by Project Veritas.

In the video released yesterday, Jordon Trishton Walker, Pfizer Director of Research and Development, Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planner, says, “One of the things we’re exploring is like, why don’t we just mutate it [COVID] ourselves so we could create – preemptively develop new vaccines, right? So, we have to do that. If we’re gonna’ do that though, there’s a risk of like, as you could imagine – no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating f**king viruses.”

Confronted by Project Veritas about his statements, Walker then becomes hysterical and insists, “I was on a third date with a guy, and like normal men, you lie to impress a date.” Given a day's reflection on the circumstances, several things strike me. The first is that under normal corporate policies, Walker would be at minimum placed on leave pending investigation, but following any such serious investigation, he'd be fired.

For instance, as one commenter pointed out in one discussion, at his level, he has certainly signed a non-disclosure agreement, which he very visibly violated on the excuse that he was trying to impress a date. The second is that he identified himself as a Pfizer employee and then proceeded to damage the company's reputation via bizarre conduct. While Pfizer would be obligated to preserve the confidentiality of personnel actions in any such case, a corporate statement that Walker was not authorized to blah blah blah would be appropriate -- but so far, nothing like this has happened.

No commenter I've seen has dared to mention one of the most obvious features of the whole episode, which is that Walker's expression and mannerisms are stereotypically effeminate, and this becomes more intense as his hysteria mounts when Project Veritas confronts him with his statements. This, and the fact he appears to be of African-American heritage, will place him in a protected class, and it's likely that Pfizer won't make any immediate adverse personnel action, but I would estimate that his career is now effectively sidetracked.

Except that he's probably already been in what the Japanese call a window seat, a job without even token duties that's maintained because the company feels obligated not to lay people off or fire them. This blogger suggested "Dr. Walker probably isn’t a lab scientist doing the 'directed evolution' work," and I agree. But what that does say is that he's more likely always been one of those quasi-workers like the ones recently laid off from Twitter and Google who posted TikTok videos about their meditation rooms and smoothie bars only to be caught in a mass layoff days later.

In other words, he's a member of the entitled gentry class, maintained almost as a status symbol at a certain corporate level. Big Tech is now being forced to lay these people off, but Big Pharma, grown rich and fat most recently from the COVID con, hasn't been forced to do that, at least not yet, and maybe not for the foreseeable future. Days late, Pfizer has so far made only a token response:

New York, N.Y., January 27, 2023 – Allegations have recently been made related to gain of function and directed evolution research at Pfizer and the company would like to set the record straight.

In the ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research. Working with collaborators, we have conducted research where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern.

This story comments,

[I]t seems pretty clear, at least in my view, that Pfizer isn’t doing what it’s doing because they fear future variants, and with so many people already having been infected, the efficacy of more and more boosters remains in doubt anyway. COVID-19 vaccines and antivirals are what make Pfizer billions of dollars, and they have every incentive to keep shoving boosters out while insisting they are needed because of “variants.”

Their statement isn’t going to convince anyone on the fence. It’s obfuscatory and confusing at best, and given Pfizer’s history of misleading the public, there’s no reason to take the company’s word for anything.

For now, what's implicit in Walker's conduct and Pfizer's non-reponse to it is that Pfizer so far thinks it's rich enough, and its advertising dollars are so important to media, that it can simply tough its way through this and all other crises.

Nevertheless, the Republicans have the House, and firebrand members are already threatening investigations, including Reps Ronny Jackson and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

We'll see.

Trump, Tanks, And Ukraine

Former U.S. President Trump:

First come the tanks, then come the nukes. Get this crazy war ended, now. So easy to do! pic.twitter.com/JLOg166tKF

— Clash Report (@clashreport) January 26, 2023

It looks as though Trump is going to side consistently with the US right in opposing increased aid to Ukraine, and to some extent, I can't disagree with his basic point. As this report at Breitbart summarizes the problem:

President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that the U.S. would be sending 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, but did not explain to the American public what the purpose of the tanks would be, or the broader U.S. goal in the war.

White House communications chief John Kirby later tried to assure reporters (and Russia) that the tanks would not be used for an “offensive” purpose, but clearly the hope is to retake territory by attacking Russian forces.

The story throughout the past year has been incrementalism. Zelensky campaigns for new weapons one step beyond what the West is willing to supply, whether it's old Warsaw Pact Migs, M777s, HIMARS, Bradleys, or whatever else; there's a weeks-long interval of dither; finally Biden decides to deliver what's requested. Zelensky's position seems to be consistent but expressed as diplomatically as he can put it, this sort of incrementalism is just prolonging the war.

Zelensky is operating from his position of national interest, as are many neighboring NATO countries. On the other hand, it's hard to tell what the US big picture is. The Breitbart link continues,

The U.S. foreign policy establishment seems to believe that the Russian military is near collapse, and that Putin may be forced from power. There is little thought given to what might happen to Russia afterwards — or how a Russian collapse would strengthen China.

If the current Ukraine conflict is something like a proxy World War III played out in slo-mo, it's worth noting that in World War II, the Germans and the Japanese both held out for years past the point where they might have been expected to collapse. Current Western policy seems driven by wishful thinking that Putin might die of disease or be ousted, but no thought is given to whether, as is likely, his replacement would be worse. In addition, Zelensky has articulated a completely reasonable war aim for Ukraine -- Russian forces must vacate all internationally recognized Ukrainian territory -- but even if that goal is reached, there's no assurance Russia won't simply reinvade a few years later.

As I pointed out last year, so far, there's been no Casablanca, Yalta, or Potsdam conference equivalent that articulates clear war aims, even though this is a proxy, slo-mo World Wat III that will settle world issues like the disposition of the Russian Empire and its successors. The Russia problem won't go away just like that if Putin is out of the picture, or if Russia simply withdraws from Ukraine. Nukes or no, and let's hope it's no, Russia will likely be solved only by a de facto Western occupation that severely limits military reconstruction and imposes a completely new constitution, a la Germany and Japan after 1945.

Trump is implicitly raising these questions. Biden, meanwhile, has little political capital to expend on articulating a clear set of war aims; he's effectively farmed it out to Zelensky, with Secretaries Austin and Blinken tardily and reluctantly signing on to each new Zelensky initiative, when Zelensky has been able to say with some effect that this is simply prolonging the war.

The most favorable interpretation of Trump's view at this point is that the current military and foreign policy establishment needs to be careful what it wishes for. If the West continues incremental increases in aid to Ukraine without a realistic plan and clear overall objectives, the short-term result, whether it's nukes or just some other form of local conflict, will be destablilizing and to the West's ultimate detriment.

In any case, if Trump's message gains traction, as I think it might given what I see in conservative media, Biden will need to reexamine national priorities and increase Ukraine aid sharply now to be sure the war ends before the 2024 campaign. I'm not sure how long he'll have the political capital to do this, but he'll still have the problem that nobody's thought through what the world will look like when that aim is achieved.

The Key Is Hunter

Here's another intriguing data point: in the midst of a current news story that's presumably unrelated to the classified document issue, the emergence of Jeff Zients as Ron Klain's replascement as White House Chief of Staff, we find this:

With his expected return to the highest echelon of the White House as chief of staff, Zients is now taking fire from all ideological directions for his meetings with Hunter Biden, scapegoating of people who resist COVID vaccination and history with healthcare companies accused of billing fraud.

. . . Zients met with the younger Biden at least three times in the first half of 2016 as his father prepared to leave the vice presidency, according to emails from Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop verified by Fox News. The first two meetings took place at the vice presidential residence and included the elder Biden.

The meetings also variously included former lobbyist and current White House counselor Steve Richetti; then-Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Eric Lander; billionaire World Economic Forum member and Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein, the recurring host for Joe Biden's Nantucket vacations; biotech investor Richard Klausner; and Atlantic Media Chairman David Bradley, publisher of the 166-year-old magazine.

Timelines for Hunter's activites are remarkably sketchy, but during this period of his life, Hunter had separated from his first wife, Kathleen Buhle, in 2015, and their divorce was pending over the following year. During 2016, he was also closely involved in setting up what would become the Penn Biden Center:

On April 25, 2016, Creative Artists Agency (CAA) agent Craig Gering emailed Hunter with "confidential notes from our meeting," in which Gering listed apparent plans that were discussed for the vice president upon leaving office.

One of those plans included "wealth creation," with no further explanation, and another included an apparent reference to the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., with a possible job opportunity for Hunter.

. . . Hunter then confirmed Gering's notes but emphasized that they needed to be "very confidential" because they were not set in stone.

In 2014, he joined the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which he continued until 2019. According to Wikipedia,

Because Joe Biden played a major role in U.S. policy towards Ukraine, some Ukrainian anti-corruption advocates and Obama administration officials expressed concern that Hunter Biden having joined the board could create the appearance of a conflict of interest and undermine Joe Biden's anti-corruption work in Ukraine.

During 2016, Hunter also began an affair with Beau's widow, Hallie, that lasted through 2019. As I noted in yesterday's post, by 2018, Hallie had some role in sending Hunter to California to get him out of the spotlight. As I noted last Friday, during his 2016 divorce proceedings, his ex-wife noted,

[S]he said she began to understand the extent of their financial woes once she initiated their divorce in 2016. She found they had no savings, double mortgage and no equity in their two homes, credit card debt and medical bills.

“The sheer amount of our debt overwhelmed me," she wrote. "We were underwater.”

. . . Buhle started to notice Biden's substance abuse problem "spiral from social to problematic" about eight years into their marriage, according to People's excerpts of the book.

She described a number of stints Biden spent in rehab, including in November 2012 after he showed up drunk to a fundraising event following the reelection of his father and President Barack Obama.

As of 2016, Hunter appears to have been essentially the same guy we've come to know through his laptop and other episodes like his paternity case. According to the Wikipedia link above,

Over the past two decades, Biden has been in and out of rehabilitation, with long periods of sobriety followed by relapses. Following the [2015] death of his brother Beau, his addiction escalated, and he claims to have been "smoking crack every 15 minutes." A detailed analysis of Hunter Biden's hard drive by NBC News showed that Biden and his firm were paid $11 million from 2013 to 2018, and the funds fueled his addiction. In his autobiography Beautiful Things, he said that the money from Burisma "turned into a major enabler during my steepest skid into addiction" and "hounded me to spend recklessly, dangerously, destructively. Humiliatingly. So I did."

In the fall of 2016, he was in rehab in Sedona, AZ:

In the fall of 2016, Hunter arranged to go to rehab in Sedona, Arizona. During a layover in Los Angeles, he realized he left his wallet on the plane. While waiting for his wallet in LA, he went to Pershing Square and asked a homeless man where he could buy crack.

He bought crack several times that week, The New Yorker reported. After days of not sleeping, on Oct. 28, Hunter was driving on Interstate 10 near Palm Springs and eventually lost control of the car.

The story continues,

Hunter Biden began dating his brother’s widow while recovering from a week spent buying crack from a homeless encampment in Los Angeles, according to a new report.

. . . He made plans to head to a detox center in Arizona, but got sidetracked during a stopover in Los Angeles, where he soon asked a vagrant where he could buy crack, according to the mag.

. . . Hunter took his rental car to Arizona, where Hertz workers called the cops after finding a crack pipe and a baggie containing a “white powdery substance,” along with a Secret Service business card, Hunter’s driver’s license and a badge from Beau’s time as Delaware attorney general inside.

Local prosecutors declined to pursue the case, citing a lack of evidence that he actually used the pipe, according to the New Yorker.

Hunter, meanwhile, finally spent a week at Grace Grove Lifestyle Center — a local “detox, rejuvenation and healing retreat” — before checking into a resort spa, where Hallie flew to meet him and they decided to become a couple.

The picture that emerges is that during 2016, Biden, set to leave the vice presidency at age 74, was busily planning an active future career during a time when most people are already retired, and indeed, when most former vice presidents leave public life. But Hunter, despite his dire financial straits, his tangled personal life, and his desperate addiction, was closely involved in the whole process. In fact, 2016 seems to be the year when Hunter's pattern of life over the next several years would be established, leaving Delaware for California to minimize publicity but continuing a drug-addled lifestyle enabled by Burisma, but also with financial injections from Joe, as well as visits from Joe's former contacts in the Secret Service.

I've got to think that Jeff Zients has emerged as a choice for Chief of Staff because he's been fully aware of Hunter's position in the Biden universe and will be expected to deal with it. I would also surmise that Joe expects things to continue more or less as they have been -- Zients isn't there to clean house, not least because the problem has long since metastasized. I would guess that this is what Biden's personal attorneys are also discovering.

The Real Story On The Hunter Biden Rental Form

I've been tempted to post on the rental form in which Hunter, in 2018, claimed to have spent $49,910 in monthly rent, but I've held off several times on a hunch that more information would come out. This was a background security request for a rental in a luxury Los Angeles apartment building. The fact checkers were quick to dismiss this as a conspiracy theory:

Days after it was reported that classified documents were found in President Joe Biden’s office at a Washington, D.C., think tank and at his Delaware home, conservative commentators launched new allegations about him and his son, Hunter Biden.

"Hunter Biden paid his dad $50,000 a MONTH in rent for the home that housed classified documents… During the same time, Joe Biden only claimed less than $20,000 in rent payments PER YEAR!!!" read a Jan 17 Instagram post by Newsmax host Carl Higbie.

. . . These posts are inaccurate and were flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed.

It turns out that the real story is more intricate and much more allusive. An article in this morning's Washington Free Beacon outlines the actual circumstances of the application:

The money, $49,910, was actually a reference to rental payment for a Washington, D.C., office space used by Hunter Biden. But the story of the document is more absurd, involving Biden family favor trading, scorned relatives, and an ultimately failed effort to get Hunter Biden’s troubled cousin a new probation officer.

The Washington Free Beacon traced the origin of the document to an attachment in a July 27, 2018, email from Hunter Biden to a luxury apartment complex in Los Angeles. The background check document was part of a rental application, and—though his communications with the building’s property manager indicated the apartment would be for him—text messages and emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop reveal it was in fact for his down-on-her-luck cousin, Caroline Biden, the daughter of Joe Biden’s brother Jim and his wife, Sara.

The president’s niece pleaded guilty in 2017 to buying more than $100,000 worth of makeup with a stolen credit card. While she managed to skirt a grand larceny charge and the prison sentence it carried, she was sentenced to two years of probation—time she wanted to serve in Los Angeles.

She texted Hunter Biden on July 26, 2018, from a New York City probation office, telling him she urgently needed a California address so her lawyer could transfer her probation there.

As I've said here, not only Biden's siblings, but their own "troubled" children as well, have lived privileged lives based on their connections with Joe. I would imagine that the Joe connection helped her avoid prison for the grand larceny charge. The story continues,

Keeping Caroline Biden out of prison was a Biden family affair and Hunter Biden was at the center of the effort. He moved to the West Coast at least in part to escape family drama, he explained in a July 17 message, saying his sister-in-law and former lover Hallie Biden had asked him to leave the state of Delaware.

I get a sense that sending problem Bidens to California was a standard family remedy, since it kept their misdeeds out of the Washington-Wilmington spotlight. Although Hunter was still working on deals with his partners and his father in China and Ukraine, he was doing it from Los Angeles hotel rooms at that time, cranked up on cocaine. Even so, the family expected Hunter to take care of his cousin, presumably to keep her out of sight closer to home:

"I need help with Caroline, she is off the rails," Jim Biden told Hunter Biden in a July 13 message.

The idea to have Caroline Biden move to California appears to have been hatched in a follow-up conversation between Jim and Hunter Biden, but it was on Hunter Biden to deliver. Hunter Biden told Jim Biden as early as July 16 that he was looking for rentals in Laguna for his daughter. But by the time of Caroline Biden’s probation meeting when she messaged Hunter Biden about the address, he had still failed to secure a place.

"Hunter, parole officer needs Caroline’s address in CA in order to transfer to CA," Sara Biden wrote to him on July 27. "Caroline also just said she needs to accept job by end of day today and tell them when she can start."

Shortly after hearing from Sara Biden, Hunter Biden directed his assistant, Katie Dodge, to fill out a rental application on his behalf for an apartment at a luxury complex, the Villa Carlotta, a self-described "residential hideaway for free spirits drawn to the iconoclastic energy of bohemian Los Angeles."

Notwithstanding, free-spirit Caroline felt her status as a Biden entitled her to certain standards:

Jim Biden also asked his nephew to convince Caroline Biden to accept a job, another term of her transfer to California. But Caroline Biden, who at 31 had only had cushy jobs secured by her family and had no intention of lowering her standards.

Emails show she was a candidate for a job from Masimo Corporation, a California company owned by one of Joe Biden’s largest donors, with an $85,000 base salary, a guaranteed 10 percent bonus, and stock options. She was hesitant, she said, because the pay was insufficient.

"That’s below minimum wage in California after taxes," she told her father in an email. "I cannot take this job. I have never made this little money in my life." Caroline Biden said she couldn’t take a job for "less than $180,000."

Indeed, if you look up the Wikipedia entries for other Biden women, Dr Jill, sister Valerie, and daughter Ashley, they all seem to have been provided with highly-paid sinecures and carefully upholstered life circumstances. Caroline clearly expected the same treatment.

What nobody so far has pointed out about this whole story, though, is that it all takes place after Biden left the vice presidency in 2017, at a time when former vice presidents normally fade into the background like Dick Cheney, Al Gore, and Dan Quayle. The conventionmal wisdom at the time was that Biden would be just one candidate among many for the Democrat nomination in 2020, should he even choose to run, and then he could face difficulty running against Trump. This doesn't seem to have been the assumption in Biden's inner circle -- during the same period as the July 2018 Caroline drama, he was occupying his new office at the Penn Biden Center and apparently operating as a de facto president-in-waiting.

I think this is just one example of how reporters willing actually to do some work can turn up much more from the Hunter laptop than has so far emerged. It suggests to me that Richard Sauber, the Covington partners, and other lawyers were brought in last year to deal with the Hunter laptop, not specifically the classified docs, which aren't really important except as they relate to Hunter and the rest of the family frammis. And as I noted yesterday, someone has spent multimillions on those lawyers so far, but as of now, it looks as if their efforts to scrub the record haven't been worth that expense.

It's Important For The Animals To Be Diverse And Inclusive

I found a typo in Sunday's post with the problematic image of a hotdogging W Mark Felt, and even though it had been flagged as sensitive, I decided to fix the typo for the record. When I went in to edit it, I found a new button saying REQUEST REVIEW, although in my research I'd found no reference to any ability to appeal such decisions, and there was wording in the guidelines that suggested this couldn't be done. I figured I had nothing to lose, so I clicked on REQUEST REVIEW, and when I visited my account this morning, the flag and message for that post had been removed, though I've received no other message.

This confirms my view that Blogger's algorithm had somehow been triggered by the image of a G-Man doing his thing, when at least for now, bien pensant opinion actually favors the FBI, which protects us by raiding Area 51 bloggers and former presidents. But just to be on the safe side, I'm going to stick with non-controversial titles and cute pet photos at the top of my posts, at least for a while. I've got to assume that my reach as a blogger is so limited that it really isn't worth anyone's time to review my posts in detail, although the mere fact that a post can be flagged out of the blue for random reasons does create a chilling effect for anyone.

In the matter of the Biden scandals, there's been little new since the weekend, but Rep James Comer, Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, seems to be on the right track:

“We’re trying to trace the money,” Comer told the Examiner. “We’ll be looking at bank statements. We’ll be looking at bank violations. That’s the next phase of our investigation because we’re trying to figure out who these anonymous sources are that are sending so much money to the Biden family schemes — the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Hunter Biden’s artwork.”

. . . “For years, Mr. Biden has attempted to profit off his father’s position in government, and the art deals are merely the latest iteration of these efforts. The investigation into Mr. Biden’s business ventures, and those who have aided him in his dubious endeavors, has been ongoing for over two years, and, if necessary, will continue into the next Congress,” Comer said in September 2021 before Republicans took control the House and gained subpoena power.

According to Comer, recent revelations that classified documents have been discovered at the Penn Biden Center and at the president’s Wilmington, Delaware, home only underscore the need for transparency around Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

Sen Ted Cruz has an additional take:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) called on the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI to search President Joe Biden’s Senate records that are stored at the University of Delaware to see if they contain more classified materials.

. . . Cruz said on an episode of “The Verdict” that the next step was for federal officials to look into Biden’s Senate records at the University of Delaware.

“Let me tell you what the next step in this scandal is going to be,” Cruz said. “The next step in this scandal is going to be, okay, if Biden’s Senate documents include classified documents outside of classified settings — which is illegal — how many more classified documents are illegally in his Senate papers? And here’s where this matters in particular, which is the University of Delaware has more than 1850 boxes of records from Joe Biden’s Senate tenure which he gave to the University of Delaware.”

. . . "During the 2020 campaign, there was a concerted media effort to try to get access to those documents in particular, there were allegations of sexual harassment raised against Joe Biden, and the media wanted to examine the documents on those allegations of sexual harassment. The University of Delaware has said, ‘Nope, they’re not releasing the documents to anybody until two years after Biden retires from public life.’”

All the Bidens appear to have extravagant lifestyles, and in some cases, the extracurricular funding sources are already public: Keven Morris, a Hollywood lawyer, paid Hunter's outstanding $2 million tax bill and is reportedly paying the rent on the Malibu home where Hunter currently lives, although reports have placed Hunter visiting the Wilmington Biden home with his father, so he may be back in Washington now. It would be worth asking if Morris is making these payments on behalf of someone else -- and another good question is who is paying for Joe's personal attorneys, which include three partners that we know of at Covington & Burling:

[S]enior partners there now bill up to $2,500 an hour, which would top other publicly reported billing rates at U.S. law firms.

Covington’s website does not list anyone with the title of senior partner, and a firm spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on who would qualify or how many attorneys bill at that hourly rate.

Let's be conservative and estimate that the three Covington partners we know of are billing at a rate of only $2000 an hour for 40 hours a week. 3 partners X 40 hours X $2000 = $240,000 a week. We don't know how many weeks they've been on the case, but Dana Remus became a partner in October and is thought to have been working on Biden matters there, so let's estimate it's been 16 weeks. 16 X $240,000 = $3,840,000. But this leaves out newly hired Bob Bauer, it leaves out Covington associates who are billing on the case, and it leaves out other lawyers whose names keep popping up, so Biden's personal legal expenses are piling up in the multimillions at minimum, and this isn't likely to stop.

Where is this money coming from? But this leaves aside the question of how so much has already been spent on the case, but more docs keep popping up. That in turn suggests to me that it isn't Biden's own money he's spending.

NothingTo See Here, Blogger!

Yesterday's post got flagged by Blogger for "sensitive content", and visitors got the following notice if they tried to view it (click on the image for a larger copy):

I also got a notification that "This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content as outlined in Blogger’s Community Guidelines." I've been blogging on one thing or another for almost 20 years, often on sensitive topics, but this is the first such notice I've received. I'm assuming the problem was the photo of W Mark Felt posing as an FBI hotdogger in the act of drawing his firearm, and the algorithm deemed it potentially triggering, so to speak.

I'm assuming for now that this was a one-off, and I'm going to proceed as usual. I may try using photos of kittens and ducklings as a header for a while to make it clear to the algorithm that I have no intention of triggering anyone, at least no more than I have in the past, although back in the day, I certainly did some triggering. As far as I can determine, a "sensitive content warning" is the least serious of Blogger's restrictions, although in researching this, I find there's no appeal, and these decisions are final, for whatever that's worth. As my ninth-grade English teacher, Mr Foley, used to say, Quid hoc ad aeternitatem? Mr Foley first encouraged me to become a writer.

Regarding weekend fallout from the Friday search of Biden's Wilmington home, I still think commentators are missing the point. The conventional wisdom is that allowing the documents to be randomly distributed among household effects was variously careless, unacceptable, irresponsible, blah blah blah, but don't we already know this about the Biden family -- most notably, but not exclusively, Hunter? His daughter Ashley is noted mainly for leaving a diary behind from her time at a rehab facility, and at least two generations of the whole Biden family have given new meaning to the term "dysfunctional".

Ever since Biden has been in public life, his siblings, children, nieces, and nephews appear mainly to have made lucrative careers out of their connections to Joe, and starting with Joe himself, they've been remarkably sloppy about it. This is at the root of the current dilemma. We can certainly ask what's in the docs, although between the claim they're classified and assertions of attorney-client privilege, we'll likely never find out, and in my view, the actual contents may be trivial.

The classified docs themselves aren't the reason an ever-growing group of highly connected, highly paid lawyers have been combing through an ever-widening set of Biden family records. As I've been saying, the docs are a byproduct. White House Special Counsel Richard Sauber was brought on last May in anticipation of Republican gains in the November elections, in an attempt to stay ahead of revelations from Hunter's laptop, but I've got to assume the laptop was only the start of thread after thread that by last fall had extended to the Penn Biden Center, which in the nature of things Biden represented just another trove that would lead to yet further questions.

By that point, Dana Remus and at least two other Covinigton & Burling partners were working as Biden personal attorneys, with Bob Bauer joining the team even more recently. Why?

An intriguing recent data point is that Hunter was spotted returning to the Wilmington family home in company with Joe last Wednesday night. It's been put about that Hunter is under de facto house arrest at a compound in Malibu as he dabbles in painting, but it appears he's actually much more closely involved in the family damage control than we've been led to believe.

I think the basic problem is the commingling of Biden family funds, which has already led to tax problems for Hunter, but from what I can gather, the whole family has made a living through collecting baksheesh, some part of which, Hunter's e-mails suggest, goes to Joe. I would imagine problems for the whole family extend not just to taxes, but to questions like money laundering and even bribery, which in the US constitution is mentioned along with treason as a high crime that's grounds for impeachment.

Actually, I think the most generous interpretation of the Biden family frammis is that it's just a con, whereby they represent themselves as working with Joe to collect payoffs that will reach him through the family channels, but Joe just takes them and never delivers. But even that would be a hard thing to recover from.

Who, by the way, is paying for all these lawyers who are working for Joe personally now?

More From The New Deep Throat!

The image above is W Mark Felt, the Watergate Deep Throat, from his glory days as FBI Director wannabe. As I said yesterday, it sounds like we have a new Deep Throat, apparently just as highly placed, who's beginning to leak about Biden's classified documents. So far, nobody seems to be getting the point.

The news yesterday evening was that another half-dozen classified documents had been run down in a new search of the Wilmington home, this one conducted by people from the Justice Department, not Biden's personal attorneys, after those attorneys had insisted everything had been found.

Biden’s lawyers immediately tried to get out in front of the revelation, releasing a statement claiming cooperation with the DOJ. But while the administration continues to talk about transparency, one bombshell detail from the search has left the president’s lies fully exposed. Namely, the fact that documents were found that were taken during Biden’s years in the Senate.

I just don't see a "bombshell" here. It's an indication that Biden has operated the same way for pretty much the whole time he's been in public life, but that's nothing new. What's more interesting is this story in the UK Daily Mail:

The long and winding document trail that leads classified documents from Joe Biden's vice presidential office to the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C. and now back into the hands of the government, includes yet another stopover: a temporary facility in the nation's capital, a source tells DailyMail.com.

"A source". We don't know if this is the same leaker who told CBS News about the November document tranche and then leaked that there'd been a deal to keep that discovery secret, but it really doesn't matter. Nobody knew who the original Deep Throat was for more than 30 years, and it was (and for that matter still is) reasonable to speculate that it may have been more than one person. Mark Felt was a narcissistic guy who'd felt underappreciated, after all; he was fully capable of claiming more credit for Watergate than he deserved. What's interesting is that somebody's leaking, not his precise identity.. Here's the substance:

The documents were moved in the summer of 2017 after spending about six months at a government transition office near the White House once Biden left the vice presidency.

The space, in DC's Chinatown neighborhood, was overseen by the Penn Biden Center while its prized location near the Capitol was being readied. The office had its formal opening, attended by Biden, in 2018.

'Everything was just moved en masse to temporary space, then moved to Penn Biden,' the person told DailyMail.com.

So OK. The White House narrative continues to be that these were just piles of random stuff gathered up in a last-minute frenzy as Biden left the vice presidency, nothing to see here -- but again, that's been the story Trump's people have been telling about how his docs turned up at Mar-a-Lago, with more credibility. The main complaint from the Trump detractors has been that the National Archives should have received that material, it shouldn't even have gone to Florida, and Trump was violating the law even to try to negotiate over it.

The story continues,

The woman who oversaw the packing and shipping of Biden's documents in 2017 was former administrative assistant Kathy Chung, who secured the position with a well-placed recommendation from Hunter Biden, who touted her capabilities to his father.

. . . The former assistant helped oversee the packing of files during the busy tail end of Biden's second term as VP. That was a time that featured a flurry of activity by Biden himself even in his final days in office. It required keeping his office functioning even while things were being put away for safekeeping.

Wait a moment. This is the vice presidency, an office about which no statement is more repeated than John Nance Garner’s observation that “the vice presidency is not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Of classified matters, back in the day, the Manhattan Project "was so secret that FDR did not even inform his fourth-term vice president, Truman, that it existed". But for Joe Biden, "That was a time that featured a flurry of activity by Biden himself even in his final days in office." Color me skeptical, especially given what we've learned about Obama's opinion of Biden's ability.

Whatever the flurry of last-minute activity was, my guess is that it had more to do with keeping up an income stream of baksheesh than anything to do with national business. And I'm still intrigued by all the use of terms like "transition", as in "government transition office" in the link above. We hear of a "transition team" for an incoming administration, but now we're learning of a "transition office" for a departing vice president, whom we would normally expect to be boarding a Southwest flight to fly home coach a la, say, Dan Quayle.

Not Joe Biden. He had to "transition" into a quasi-official headquarters-in-exile at the Penn Biden Center, and it's hard to avoid thinking he felt entitled to quasi-presidential perks there, including continued access to classified material. But why did all this stuff go first to a "transition office" and then, after six months, to the Penn Biden Center? Much was said about how all of Trump's White House detritus should have gone straight to the National Archives, not Mar-a-Lago, but Biden had some sort of special carveout that exempted his stuff.

That's just one queston nobody's asked. Let's just leave aside, at least for now, the whole question of how Biden seems to have been able to represent himself to putative insiders as the president-in-waiting throughout that whole four-year interregnum.

Sounds Like There's A New Deep Throat

A lot has come out over the Biden classified docs over the past few days, but nobody seems to be making much sense of it. I think the key is here:

White House officials are reportedly suspicious about how President Joe Biden’s classified document scandal was leaked to the press after only a select group of White House and Justice Department officials knew about the violation.

The plot to hide the scandal, initially designed by eight of Biden’s closest confidants with apparent approval from the Justice Department, was suddenly leaked to CBS News 68 days after Biden’s personal attorney unearthed the classified documents at the Penn Biden Center. It is unclear why or what Biden’s personal attorneys were originally seeking at the center funded in part by anonymous Chinese donations.

There's the whole thing in a nutshell, at least so far. The discovery of the classified docs was a byproduct of some other project that we don't know much about, except that well before any stray docs were involved, some high-priced, well-placed, highly connected lawyers were on the case. But now there's a leaker, when the whole thing was supposed to have been kept very quiet -- and let's reiterate, the docs in the Corvette garage are a byproduct, a footnote, a bagatelle that are connected only in some remote way to something bigger that's still under wraps.

The new Deep Throat seems to have put this additional information about:

The Justice Department (DOJ) reportedly sent a secret letter to President Joe Biden’s personal attorneys to search his multiple residences for classified documents after the trove at the Penn Biden Center was unearthed on November 2.

. . . The New York Times reported Friday that “[t]he quiet cooperation continued for weeks” between the aides and the DOJ. This not only tried to obscure the scandal from public view but reportedly refused to divulge that the second trove of classified documents was already unearthed at Biden’s home in Wilmington when CBS News first contacted the White House about the initial leak of classified documents stored at the Biden Penn Center.

It was then, during the plot to keep the scandal concealed from the public, the DOJ sent a letter to Biden’s personal attorneys and asked them to confirm that no other classified documents existed apart from the trove already unearthed, the Times reported.

It is unclear why or what Biden’s personal attorneys were originally seeking at the center funded in part by anonymous Chinese donations.

It looks to me like the source of the leak is from the Justice Department, not the White House, and at a high enough level that they have knowledge of a "secret letter". The New York Times article, behind a paywall but excerpted here, goes into detail on the White House strategy to keep quiet on the docs until the whole thing would go away:

The handful of advisers who were aware of the initial discovery on Nov. 2 — six days before the midterm elections — gambled that without going public, they could convince the Justice Department that the matter was little more than a minor, good-faith mistake, unlike former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of documents at his Florida estate…

The discussions on how to deal with the matter, at least at the start, were confined to the husband-and-wife pair of Bob Bauer, the president’s top personal attorney, and Anita Dunn, a White House senior adviser; Mike Donilon, the president’s longtime confidant and speechwriter; Mr. Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens; Stuart F. Delery, the White House counsel; and Richard Sauber, a White House lawyer overseeing the response to investigations, according to people familiar with the situation.

One thing I'm starting to notice is how much Biden relies not just on Hunter, but assorted siblings, Frank, Jim, and Valerie, to manage his affairs. And this family seems dysfunctional even by presidential standards: Donald Nixon, Billy Carter, Roger Clinton, Tony Rodham, and Neil Bush all fade in comparison with the whole Biden clan. These people are going to turn into a major liability. And somebody, maybe multiple people, is now taking notes and talking to the New York Times.

Also yesterday, we got a small hint of what the real search at the Penn Biden Center was about:

Joe Biden’s name was mentioned prominently in an October 2017 email seeking to firm up a controversial, multimillion-dollar deal to ship natural gas from the US to China, the communication, found on first son Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, reveals.

In a missive dated Oct. 27 of that year, Louisiana attorney Robert W. Fenet told Hunter and his uncle, first brother Jim Biden, that he had secured a contact for them at Houston energy company Cherniere, the Daily Mail reported Friday.

“I confirm I have requested [the contact] to be available for a call from Joe Biden and Hunter Biden on Monday morning,” Fenet wrote.

My current surmise is that the Biden legal team has been reviewing Hunter's laptop in great detail and scrubbing any corroborating evidence in other records, including those at the Penn Biden Center and Biden residences. That random new e-mails keep surfacing from the laptop, more than two years after its October 2020 discovery, suggests there's a great deal more to find.

Unanswered Questions

Over the past few days, there have been questions about classified documents found in at least two places at the Biden Wilmington home, apparently dating from the big guy's tenure as vice president. Nobody seems to know what they were doing there, but the little bit we've glimpsed looks like it's just the tip of the iceberg.

One big unresolved question is Hunter's role in the Biden family businesses during the interregnum between his dad's departure as vice president in 2017 and his inauguration as president in 2021. As I noted in this post, Hunter was involved in setting up the Penn Biden Center as early as 2016, which as described in e-mails on his laptop was meant to be a "wealth creation" effort for the family, but discussions about which were meant to be highly confidential. During this same period, he was divorcing his first wife, Kathleen Buhle:

[S]he said she began to understand the extent of their financial woes once she initiated their divorce in 2016. She found they had no savings, double mortgage and no equity in their two homes, credit card debt and medical bills.

“The sheer amount of our debt overwhelmed me," she wrote. "We were underwater.”

. . . Buhle started to notice Biden's substance abuse problem "spiral from social to problematic" about eight years into their marriage, according to People's excerpts of the book.

She described a number of stints Biden spent in rehab, including in November 2012 after he showed up drunk to a fundraising event following the reelection of his father and President Barack Obama.

His affair with his brother Beau's widow, Hallie, began in 2015 and lasted through his divorce from Kathleen until 2019. This period also coincided with his extended binges in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, famously documented on his laptop. But during this period, he also lived off and on at the Biden Wilmington house:

Disgraced first son Hunter Biden lived off and on at the Delaware home where classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as vice president were found last month — giving him unrestricted access to America’s secrets while he was addicted to drugs, hammering out shady foreign business deals and under federal investigation.

The now-52-year-old began listing the Wilmington home as his address following his 2017 divorce from ex-wife Kathleen Buhle — even falsely claiming he owned the property on a July 2018 background check form as part of a rental application.

Hunter also listed the home as the billing address for his personal credit card and Apple account in 2018 and 2019, respectively, Fox News Digital reported Friday after reviewing emails from his abandoned laptop.

During the same period, the now-first son was in the grip of a crack cocaine addiction costing thousands of dollars. At one point in August 2018, Hunter was recorded begging his sister-in-law-turned-lover, Hallie Biden, to let him use his credit card points to pay for a stay in rehab.

Another former girlfriend of Hunter’s, Zoe Kestan, testified to a federal grand jury in February of last year that the couple stayed for a month in 2018 at the notorious Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles, where — the younger Biden wrote in his 2021 memoir — he “learned how to cook crack” before being “blacklisted” from the property over complaints tied to his drug use.

Elsewhere, the Washington Examiner reported,

President Biden wired his 52-year-old son $100,000 to help him pay bills from December 2018 through January 2019, the Washington Examiner reported, citing records from a laptop Hunter Biden left behind at a computer repair shop in Delaware.

Hunter Biden, meanwhile, had spent more than $30,000 on sex workers between November 2018 and March 2019, records show — including many linked to Russia-based email addresses and connected to an “exclusive model agency” called UberGFE, the outlet reported.

In another instance, Joe Biden wired Hunter $5,000 less than three hours before he filmed a dispute with an escort regarding a $10,000 payment at a cottage in Boston, the Washington Examiner reported.

The picture that emerges is that Hunter, during much of Biden's term as vice president and especially during the post-Obama administration interregnum, was desperately addicted to drugs and prostitutes while also conducting business related to the Biden family, and even living off and on at the Wilmington home.

Tony Bobulinski told Fox News that, contrary to Joe Biden's statements that he had nothing to do with his son's business affairs, Hunter had "frequently referenced asking him for his sign-off or advice on various potential deals" in China.

Mr Bobulinski, who is reportedly a US Navy veteran, separately told Fox News' Tucker Carlson that he had met on two occasions with Joe Biden to discuss business deals with China, the first time in May 2017 when Barack Obama's former vice-president was a private citizen.

He says he asked Joe Biden's brother, James, whether the family was concerned about possible scrutiny of the former vice-president's involvement in a potential business deal with a Chinese entity. Mr Bobulinski told Fox News that James Biden had replied: "Plausible deniability."

I think this suggests some explanation for the stories that in May 2022, the White House brought Richard Sauber over as Special White House Counsel, apparently to scrub records at the Penn Biden Center, while by July, White House Counsel Dana Remus left, apparently to work as a personal attorney for President Biden. She then surfaced a few months later in October as a partner at Covington & Burling, where she has since been working with two other Covington partners on matters related to the classified material found at the Penn Biden Center and the Biden Wilmington home.

In fact, that whole affair was apperently meant to be kept quiet, with the leak of the November document discovery not at all in the plan:

Not only did the White House and DOJ try to obscure the scandal from public view, but they also refused to divulge that the second trove of classified documents were already unearthed at Biden’s home in Wilmington when CBS News first contacted the White House about the initial leak of classified documents apparently illegally stored at the Biden Penn Center, according to the Washington Post[.]

This suggests to me that Mr Sauber and Ms Remus were put on the case well before the November discovery because troubling issues had emerged by last spring that we still haven't heard about. Indeed, if Mr Sauber and Ms Remus were hired to keep the classified document matter under wraps, they haven't done a very good job. That in turn makes me wonder if what they've actually been working on is even more sensitive, and the classified document leaks are just collateral damage, or possibly a sleight-of-hand distraction.

Heck, Nixon had miscellaneous hard guys like the Plumbers to deal with stuff like petty burglaries. The current leak control team with Biden is a whole lot more expensive. Why should this be?