More Teasing That Franklin Foer Book About Biden

It looks like I missed the developing buzz over the past couple of weeks about Franklin Foer's new book on Biden, The Last Politician. Foer, it turns out, is a staff writer at The Atlantic and former editor of The New Republic whose views appear to be as predictable as we might assume given that background. According to Axios ,

Frank Foer of The Atlantic worked 2½ years and spoke to nearly 300 people for his forthcoming opus on President Biden's first term, the author tells Axios.

Why it matters: In "The Last Politician," Foer concludes that Biden provides "an instructive example of the tedious nobility of the political vocation. Unheroic but honorably human, he will be remembered as the old hack who could."

Driving the news: The 432-page book, out Tuesday, "dramatizes in forensic detail the first two years of the Biden presidency, concluding with the historic midterm elections," per the publisher.

Foer's work "includes thrilling, blow-by-blow insider reports of the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and the White House's swift response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine."

It sounds as though it's timed to coincide with the start -- or at least, the putative start -- of Biden's reelection campaign, and the buzz is part of the prearranged buildup. But the book's insider accounts conclude with the 2022 midterms, which lets it simply finesse the whole Hunter story.

It's also worth noting that the market for a 432-page $30 doorstop presidential hagiography is thin. My sketchy understanding of the publishing industry is that library sales, a sure thing, will drive the publisher's profit, although educated ladies of a certain class will buy it at bookstores as well. But the problem is that the project has been in the works, as the Axios puff piece says, for 2½ years, and events have a way of moving faster than that.

Yesterday, Real Clear Politics carried an essay by Charles Lipson, What if Biden Backs Out of the Race?:

President Biden has declared he’s running for a second term, but it’s far from certain he actually will. His infirmity and low poll numbers raise serious doubts. His physical decline shows when he walks or climbs the stairs of Air Force One. His cognitive decline shows when he refuses to hold press conferences or answer even the simplest questions, like how he feels about the devastating fires in Maui.

I checked Charles Lipson on Wikipedia. There's not a whole lot there:

Charles H. Lipson (born February 1, 1948) is an American political scientist who is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago.

. . . Lipson attended Yale as an undergraduate, where he studied Political Science and Economics. He received a Master of Arts degree and a doctoral degree from Harvard University.

While studying at Harvard, Lipson won the Chase Prize for the best essay on a subject relating to the promotion of world peace.

He sometimes makes guest appearances on radio shows and writes op-eds, which is what he's doing here. As far as I can see, his views on any subject are utterly conventional. But they're in sharp contrast to Franklin Foer, who sees Joe as a confident, experienced steady hand. Prof Lipson:

Biden’s dismal poll numbers form a somber backdrop for his reelection campaign. That backdrop is even darker now that his health problems are so visible. . . . The biggest “tell” is that Biden is avoiding the very things active candidates do. He’s not campaigning. He’s not attending a lot of small events with big donors. He’s not running ads. He’s not using the White House’s bully pulpit to address the nation on our challenges and his response to them.

He concludes, as any properly dressed Ivy Leaguer who's won a prize for an essay on world peace should, that we don't know what will happen, and we don't know what effect Joe's withdrawal might have if he does, which he might not. But remember, they paid him to write this, however vapid the read. They paid him because they wanted someone to prepare the Real Clear Politics audience for the possibility.

I will say that the buzz over the Foer book confirms another of my inferences about Biden: he resents his handlers. Per this piece at Read State,

[A]fter a now infamous speech in March where Biden said that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power,” his aides had to once again rush out and “clarify” what he “really meant,” which was pretty much the opposite of what he said. Biden reportedly “fumed” about that and complained he was being treated “like a toddler.” (National Review)

But if we give things a little thought, Biden and his handlers appear to be on the same page about the upcoming "campaign", which I think Lipson understands pretty well: the aim will be to keep Joe out of the public eye entirely and instead rely on state and federal indictments and prosecutions to keep the focus on Trump, as well as on efforts to keep him off the ballot in key states. So far, this isn't working; national polls over the past several days show a Trump-Biden matchup well within the margin of error, while each adverse legal development spikes Trump's fundraising and his supporters' enthusiasm.

On the other hand, it appears that the July 26 court hearing, in which the Delaware judge's reluctance to approve Hunter's plea deal resulted in the prosecution withdrawing it and David Weiss's appointment as special prosecutor, closed off another Biden campaign strategy, which was to get Hunter quietly off the stage as a campaign issue. That Abbe Lowell has been uncharacteristically quiet in recent weeks reinforces the surmise that Biden has had to go back to the drawing board to come up with a new Hunter strategy.

Although the House has been out of session and won't return until September 12, Oversight Committee Chairman Comer is telegraphing further investigative discoveries once the House is back in session:

Newsmax anchor Greg Kelly is teasing the release of a damning tape of President Joe Biden.

"Biden has a big mouth and it got him into a lot of trouble, but he hasn't seen the half of it yet," Kelly said on Tuesday's broadcast of Greg Kelly Reports. "There is an audio tape I am told by people in the know—not necessarily in government, not necessarily out of government, I can't say too much—but there is incontrovertible evidence of Joe Biden's corruption that is about to be made public.

"It's not going to happen tomorrow, it's not going to happen before Labor Day, but it will happen sometime between Labor Day and Halloween," the right-wing host said, adding that he also does not know who will be releasing the tape to the public. Kelly claimed that the White House is aware of the tape's circulation.

I have a feeling Joe is doing all he can simply not to think about any such contingencies, hoping his strategy of prosecuting Trump will carry the day if Joe himelf stays quiet. But the House Republicans are mad. My instinct is that Franklin Foer has been overtaken by events even before his book comes out.

My Views On Joe And The Dunning-Kruger Effect Are Vindicated!

The New York Post has a story about a new book, The Last Politician by Franklin Foer, due out Sept. 5, which is excerpted at The Atlantic behind a paywall. The title of the Atlantic excerpt is "The Final Days", which is clearly meant to echo the title of a 1976 book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that covered the end of Nixon's time in the White House. We'll have to see how that goes, but it's intriguing to say the least that the publishers would choose to hitchhike on that story.

Foer's book actually covers the decisionmaking process by which Joe Biden overrode his military and diplomatic advisers and ordered the precipitous withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan as of August 30-31, 2021. As deescibed in the Post story,

President Biden overestimated his own competence in foreign affairs ahead of the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, making unhelpful and impractical suggestions while displaying a “swaggering faith in himself” that left his administration unprepared for the devastating chaos of the evacuation of Kabul, according to a forthcoming book.

In “The Last Politician,” due out Sept. 5, and excerpted by The Atlantic Tuesday, magazine staff writer Franklin Foer says the 80-year-old commander-in-chief “exhibited determination, even stubbornness, despite furious criticism from the establishment figures whose approval he usually craved” over his decision to end the US presence in Afghanistan on Aug. 30, 2021, after two decades.

As far as I can tell, neither the book nor the Post's story about it mentions the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. I've been arguing for some time that this is a good explanation for Biden's approach to life, and the depictions in the Post's story illustrate how well the theory fits Joe's behavior:

“One aide recalled that he would say, ‘You foreign policy guys, you think this is all pretty complicated. But it’s just like family dynamics,'” Foer wrote of Biden, adding that in the president’s assessment: “Foreign affairs was sometimes painful, often futile, but really it was emotional intelligence applied to people with names that were difficult to pronounce.”

“Diplomacy, in Biden’s view, was akin to persuading a pain-in-the-ass uncle to stop drinking so much,” Foer added.

Biden’s commitment to his wisdom continued through the hectic evacuation mission, as he reportedly “would pepper [then-Ambassador to Afghanistan John Bass] with ideas for squeezing more evacuees through the gates” of the airport, most of which were all but impossible given the circumstances on the ground.

. . . “Bass would kick around Biden’s proposed solutions with colleagues to determine their plausibility, which was usually low.”

Consider, though, that Biden's attempts to control his own family dynamics had already proved comically futile, as on several occasions immediately prior to his presidential run, he'd had to send members of his former vice presidential secret service detail out to clean up after the escapades of his pain-in-the-ass crackhead son.

In fact, Joe's insistence on the ill-conceived withdrawal probably influenced Putin's decision to invade Ukraine seven months later, calculating that Biden would either be unwilling to offer any resistance, direct or indirect, or too inept to direct any that he might decide to put up. Biden's reported offer to Zelensky of a flight out of Kyiv after the invasion would confirm this attitude, if true, but the full circumstances of what happened are murky.

Nevertheless, according to the Post,

“When it came to foreign policy,” Foer added, “Joe Biden possessed a swaggering faith in himself.”

So strong was that faith that Biden, once described by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates as having been “wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades,” viewed experienced diplomats and pundits as “risk adverse, beholden to institutions [and] lazy in their thinking,” according to the book.

The impression I have is that in recent weeks, in his vacations in Delaware and Lake Tahoe, Joe has withdrawn even from his White House circle of advisers and is relying incresingly on Hunter. The difficulty is that Hunter is addicted to cocaine, whose effect is to produce temporary feelings of omnipotence and grandeur, which is just the sort of thing Joe shouldn't be exposed to.

This confirms my view that Joe's shortcomings arise not from a medical condiction but from his character, which is driven by a long-held belief that he's the smartest guy in the room. I don't see a good prognosis here.

What Does Zelensky Have On Joe?

I'm not posing this question as though I think there may be a specific answer. I'm posing it more in a spirit that there is a range of possible explanations for current US Ukraine policy, of which one answer might be that Zelensky does have something on Biden, but there are other answers that might include policymaker stubbornness, confirmation bias, or conventional-mindedness, but this would be attributable to Joe's handlers, not Joe himself. If the policy decisions are traceable to Joe and not his handlers, the most likely explanation probably does have more to do with pure venality.

But I think this also goes to what Trump intended to say on the "perfect phone call", in which he is reported to have asked Zelensky in very general terms to help Trump's people to look into Biden and his son, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company. I think putting this request in the way he did, a by-the-way “I would like you to do us a favor, though”, was in Trumpspeak a reference to a set of circumstances that, as I suggested yesterday, was an open secret to everyone on the call, including those in the Deep State who were listening in, and the by-the-way tone was in fact intended to annoy those in that group.

This was Trump as truthteller, Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield, James Dean playing Caleb Trask in East of Eden, and I think Trump was perfectly aware of its likely effect, viz, that it would prompt an impeachment. He was simply saying out loud that there was a great deal in Ukraine that would offend proprieties, and let's acknowledge that in light of present developments, he was right; it's likely to prompt not just one impeachment, but two.

Let's consider, though, that the current status of the Russo-Ukraine war, now in its ninth year after a US-prompted coup deposed an elected president in Kyiv and caused Russia to annex ethnically Russian territory in retaliation, is stalemate. There was an optimistic phase last year, when Ukraine successfully repelled a Russian blitzkrieg and drove those forces back to something approximating the post-2014 borders, but subsequent circumstances haven't been encouraging.

In addition, Volodymyr Zelensky hasn't lived up to his 2022 media hype. For perhaps six months, he could be spun as a modern-day Victor Laszlo -- as a onetime instructor in rhetoric, I bought into this myself -- but the impression didn't survive his Vogue cover shoot, and the uplifting addresses to the world audience stopped (did he lay off his speechwriters?). Word leaked out that he could no longer afford the political cost of the casualties incurred by counteroffensives against dug-in Russian troops.

As time went on, he had his own scandals. As of early this year,

Volodymyr Zelensky has fired a slew of senior Ukrainian officials amid a growing corruption scandal linked to the procurement of war-time supplies, in the biggest shakeup of his government since Russia’s invasion began.

. . . The announcement came after the arrest on Sunday of Vasyl Lozynskyy, the acting minister for regional development. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine has accused Lozynskyy of receiving $400,000 in “unlawful benefits” for facilitating contracts, including for power generators – a sensitive issue in a country that is struggling to cope with freezing temperatures and frequent power cuts caused by the Russia’s attacks on its infrastructure.

The National Anti-Corruption Bureau also said it was investigating “high-profile media reports” into allegations that Ukraine’s defense ministry was buying military provisions, including food for the troops, at inflated prices.

More recently,

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has dismissed all officials in charge of regional military recruitment centers amid a widespread corruption scandal.

A scandal linked to the procurement of war-time supplies had already led to Zelensky firing a slew of senior Ukrainian officials at the start of the year, and prompted Ukraine’s deputy defense minister Viacheslav Shapovalov to resign after allegations of corruption surfaced in the media.

. . . Among the issues, Zelensky cited “iIllicit enrichment, legalization of illegally obtained funds, unlawful benefit, illegal transportation of persons liable for military service across the border.”

He said the decision was to “dismiss all regional ‘military commissioners.’ This system should be managed by people who know exactly what war is and why cynicism and bribery in time of war are high treason.”

Let's recall that the US sponsored the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych as president of Ukraine in 2014, which started the whole war, on the pretext that Yanukovych was corrupt. Yet accounts I've linked here insist that Ukraine is now about as corrupt as it's ever been, except that as a US client, it's demanded far more US money than it ever got under Yanukovych. Most recently, Zelensky is insisting that if the West wants elections as specified in Ukraine's constitution, it needs to cough up even more than it has been:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has demanded that taxpayers in the United States and European Union send the country even more aid if the West wishes for elections to be held next year.

In an interview published by the president’s office on Sunday evening, Zelensky said that he would be willing to hold elections despite the ongoing martial law amid the war with Russia, so long as the U.S. and EU bankroll the voting process.

. . . Zelensky said that he discussed the topic of funding for the 2024 elections with U.S. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who has been one of the staunchest supporters of sending more aid to Ukraine on Capitol Hill.

“I told [Sen. Graham]: If the United States and Europe give us financial support… I’m sorry, I will not hold elections on credit, I will not take money from weapons and give it to elections either. But if you give me this financial support, if the parliamentarians realize that we need to do this, then let’s quickly change the legislation and, most importantly, let’s take risks together,” Zelensky said.

Meanwhile, reports have emerged that Zelensky has bought a luxury home in Egypt:

Egyptian investigative journalist Mohammed Al-Alawi provided exclusive materials concerning the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy. According to the documents, Zelenskyy’s family has acquired a luxury villa in “the city of [millionaires]” El Gouna. According to investigation, Olga Kiyashko, whose name matches the name of Zelenskyy’s mother-in-law, owns a VIP estate worth $5 million. Political scientist Abdulrahman Alabbassy draws a conclusion that the president’s relative purchased the estate with the humanitarian aid funds allocated to Ukraine by the West to repel Russian military aggression.

This guy looks less and less like a Victor Laszlo for our time and more like yet another chiseling strongman in a succession of US clients worldwide. The deal he pitched in 2022 was that he could accomplish the neoconservative agenda -- strengthening the Western alliance by peeling Ukraine away from the Soviet orbit -- quickly and cheaply, with Ukrainian lives and Western weapons. It's looking more and more as though he was writing checks he couldn't cover, that Ukraine wasn't going to sustain casualty rates that experienced observers knew the counteroffensive would incur, while the level of continuing corruption in the country would be harder and harder to conceal.

As of now, official expressed US policy continues to be that it will fund Ukraine for "as long as it takes", although accounts I've linked here suggest the CIA and Pentagon are less confident of the outcome. The queston continues to be why Joe Biden is still the standard bearer of the happy-face faction.

I have a little voice that's been telling me several things. The current indications we have are that Joe was definitely getting payments from Ukraine via Hunter and Burisma between 2014 and 2019. On the other hand, the National Archives now says that it has over 5,000 e-mails to Joe that were addressed to him via any of several aliases, which it's currently refusing to release, although as unclassified public records, it must. I can't imagine that 5,000 e-mails addressed via aliases covered only Hunter and Burisma, or indeed only years from 2014 to 2019.

My little voice tells me this kind of behavior is habitual. People don't just start taking payoffs and stop after five years. Look just at Spiro Agnew, who had been taking payments since he'd been Baltimore County Executive but continued to get bundles of cash while he was vice president and had had nothing to do with Baltimore for years. Joe needed money while he was vice president,didn't stop needing it when he left office, and definitely didn't stop needing it after Hunter left the Burisma board.

I would certainly not rule out that Zelensky has stuff on Joe, but what he has, if he has it, is likely not the end of the story. But that's just my little voice.

Let's Revisit Trump's "Perfect Phone Call"

The "perfect phone call", as Trump himself characterized it, was a heavily monitored 30-minute conversation on July 25, 2019 with current Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. Zelensky, a political outsider but a well-known media figure like Trump, had defeated the incumbent Petro Poroshenko in a runoff election 73%-24% on April 21 of that year. Thus this call would be a get-acquainted opportunity that would set the tone for ongoing relations between the US and its relatively new client state Ukraine.

As far as I can tell, since the "perfect phone call" has simply faded away in the wake of two Trump impeachments, the 2020 campaign and its continuing controversies, as well as Joe Biden's own scandals, nobody has tried to put that 2019 call in the context of what we now know about developments in Ukraine between 2014 and the call itself. As a result, for instance, Wikipedia still has an entry on the Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory that dismisses the story as

part of efforts by Donald Trump and his campaign in the Trump–Ukraine scandal. . . to damage Joe Biden's reputation and chances during the 2020 presidential campaign.

United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that proxies of Russian intelligence promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about the Bidens "to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration."

Just like Hunter's laptop, it was Russian disinformation. But again, let's review what we've come to know about the whole course of US-Ukraine relations since the 2000s.

By Obama's second term, neoconservatives in the Deep State, led particularly by then-Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, had developed a strategy of peeling away former Warsaw Pact countries from the Russian sphere of influence, which had reached as far as bringing Ukraine into the Western fold with the eventual goal of EU and even NATO membership. Intriguingly, this was irrespective of political party, even when Obama himself was well known for his hot-mic remark to Dmitry Medvedev,

“This is my last election ... After my election I have more flexibility,” Obama said, expressing confidence that he would win a second term.

“I will transmit this information to Vladimir,” said Medvedev, Putin’s protégé and long considered number two in Moscow’s power structure.

After Obama's greater reelection flexibility or not, Victoria Nuland and her allies at State and the CIA were pedal-to-the-metal with their scheme during 2013 to engineer a coup to remove Ukraine's moderately pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych was in a tricky spot. Ukraine relied on cheap gas from Russia, but a plurality of the country — not, crucially, an absolute majority — still wanted European integration. His political career was caught in the same bind: with his party formally allied to Vladimir Putin’s own United Russia party, his pro-Russia base wanted to see closer relations with its neighbor; but the oligarchs who were the real reason he had gotten anywhere near the presidency were financially entangled with the West, and they feared competition to their grip on the country from across the Russian border. All the while, two geopolitical powers in the form of Washington and Moscow hoped to use these cleavages to draw the country into their respective orbits.

Following Yanukovych's ouster, Petro Poroshenko, the US-backed candidate, won a 2014 snap presidential election. According to the same link, dated February 7, 2022, just weeks before the Russian invasion:

Little to nothing has changed about Ukrainian corruption or authoritarianism, under either Poroshenko or current president Volodymyr Zelensky, elected in 2019 as an outsider change agent. Each has governed like an autocrat, using their powers to go after political opponents and weaken dissent, and have been embroiled in personal enrichment scandals that remain endemic to the Ukrainian political class.

Not that it stopped either from being feted by Washington and flooded with American support. In fact, this new imperial patron has only added to these problems, with the current US president’s family being personally embroiled in one of the country’s major corruption scandals, before using his position to install a markedly corrupt prosecutor general.

This would be the pre-invasion, post Zelensky election context in which Trump's "perfect phone call" took place. The first thing to keep in mind about this call is how many members of the Deep State were monitoring it, all of them with their factional and career interests in mind. Most of them, whether they were Trump staffers or not (and most of them weren't), had careers that were tied into the existing interventionist strategies on Ukraine. Estimates of how many were on the call, for instance via speaker in the White House Situation Room, differ, but it must have been dozens. According to NPR,

Other duty officers and policy staff for the White House Situation Room are believed to have monitored the call to help memorialize the conversation in written form as the conversation took place — a standard practice for presidential calls with world leaders. Translators for both leaders are also believed to have participated.

Among those listening in the Situation Room was Alexander Vindman, a US Army lieutenant colonel born in Ukraine who speaks fluent Russian and Ukrainian, and who had been able to parlay this into high-level diplomatic assignments:

Beginning in 2008, Vindman became a Foreign Area Officer specializing in Eurasia. In this capacity he served in the U.S. embassies in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Moscow, Russia. Returning to Washington, D.C. he was then a politico-military affairs officer focused on Russia for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Vindman was on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon from September 2015 to July 2018.

In July 2018, Vindman accepted an assignment with the National Security Council. In his role on the NSC, Vindman became part of the U.S. delegation at the inauguration of Ukraine's newly elected President, Volodymyr Zelensky.

It appears that in this position, he felt entitled to monitor policy discussions for conformance to Deep State orthodoxy, and that included the question of whether the Bidens had been entitled to intervene in Ukrainian affairs by pressuring Poroshenko to fire Victor Shokin.

Here I have a question that won't go away: for good or ill, Shokin's firing by 2019 was three years in the past, under prior presidential administrations in both Ukraine and the US, something that ought to have been a single personnel issue from which everyone should long since have moved on. But not for Vindman. According to the Wikipedia link, in closed-doior testimony to the House, he said

he was concerned by two events, both of which he objected to with senior officials in real time, and which he reported to the National Security Council's lead attorney. The first event occurred at a July 10 meeting between Ukraine's then Secretary of National Security and Defense Council Oleksandr Danylyuk, and then US National Security Advisor John Bolton, at which Ambassadors Volker and Sondland, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry were in attendance, and at which Sondland asked Ukraine to launch investigations into the Bidens in order to get a meeting with President Trump. Vindman states that Bolton cut the meeting short, and that both Vindman and Hill told Ambassador Sondland that his comments were inappropriate and reported their concerns to the NSC's lead counsel.

The second event occurred on a July 25 phone call between Presidents Trump and Zelensky. Vindman states, "I was concerned by the call. I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the implications for the U.S. Government's support of Ukraine. I realized that if Ukraine pursued an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma, it would likely be interpreted as a partisan play which would undoubtedly result in Ukraine losing the bipartisan support it has thus far maintained. This would all undermine U.S. national security." Vindman also stated that he reported his concern to the NSC's lead counsel, John Eisenberg.

Note, by the way, that the cabinet secretary at this meeting was the Secretary of Energy, which we may see in the context that the Deep State envoy to Ukraine in 2014-15 was the energy expert Amos Hochstein, not a general or an anti-corruption cop. That reinforces the agenda role of energy in all this.

But in other words, Vindman, a lieutenant colonel, happened to be in a July 10 meeting that included cabinet-level policymakers, who appear to have been aware of the December 2015 Biden-Hochstein visit to Kyiv that resulted in Shokin's firing. It's reasonable to conclude that those policymakers were also aware of Hunter's and Devon Archer's positions on the Burisma board, as well as the concerns over conflict of interest that had already reached Amos Hochstein and, in Hochstein's account, even reached Joe.

Vindman, a lieutenant colonel, not a policymaker and indeed someone sworn to execute policy made by actual policymakers, was also in on Trump's July 25 "perfect phone call", and in his words, he "was worried about the implications for the U.S. Government's support of Ukraine". A non-policymaker, he didn't like potential policy changes that policymakers seemed to have in mind. Just what those were, he never seems to have made clear.

But let's look at the juxtaposition here.

On the call, Trump was first to speak. He showered the 41-year-old Ukrainian, a novice politician and former comedian, with praise following his party’s victory in parliamentary elections. Zelenskiy chatted about how he wanted to “drain the swamp” in Kyiv and how he wished the European Union would provide more financial support. He told Trump that Ukraine was ready to buy more Javelin anti-tank missiles from the United States.

The next 10 words that came out of Trump’s mouth — “I would like you to do us a favor, though” — are what triggered the House impeachment inquiry that has imperiled his presidency.

Trump asked Zelenskiy to work with Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr to look into Biden and his son, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

The first thing that occurs to me is that the problem of Hunter's position on the Burisma board and the related issue of Poroshenko's firing Shokin had to have been unspoken general knowledge to most of the policymakers, both US and Ukraine, on the call, however obscure it may have been to the public. Vindman himself, if he was a competent subject area expert, must surely have been aware of it. But -- and let's get back to my earlier point -- this was water under the bridge.

Vindman must presumably have wanted the water to have flowed downstream years ago and stayed there. All of a sudden, Trump, a member of the former opposition and an outsider, was going to review this whole question of Deep State political involvement in Ukraine and indeed how this related to US politics. In fact, Trump, if nothing else, was proposing a deal with newcomer Zelensky not much different from the deal Joe Biden had already made with Poroshenko, except that this new deal simply wasn't the deal that had been made in 2014 and 2015 with Amos Hochstein.

This made Vindman freak out, and he became a "whistleblower", except that he was simply blowing the whistle about a policymaker's interest in examining policies that had begun to strike him as against our interests and might be subject to change.

Another question that won't go away is why Vindman, a US Army lieutenant colonel who should have been outside politics, was so sensitive about the Bidens. Joe Biden as of July 2019 was out of office and had just recently made the decision to run in 2020, having decided not even to try in 2016. He wasn't taken seriously as presidential material at that point. Why was the Deep State so eager to work on Joe's behalf so early in the electoral process? It sounds as though, although Victoria Nuland and Amos Hochstein left the government when Trump assumed office, there were vested interests in resuming US Ukraine policy as it had been under Joe, anmd once Joe came in, they both came right back, with promotions.

Which has brought us where we are. How'd that happen, really?

Amos Hochstein Fights Corruption!

So let's recapitulate. By February, 2014, the US Deep State, acting through the CIA front National Endowment for Democracy and with the sponsorship of Victoria Nuland at the State Department, had engineered a coup in Ukraine that caused the elected president, who was pro-Russian, to flee the country. At the same time, Putin seized Crimea and much of the Donbas. Over the next two months, the Deep State drew up a plan for Ukraine to navigate these changed circumstances, and they sent two people, Vice President Joe Biden and State Department energy guy Amos Hochstein, to explain to Ukrainians how things were going to go forward in Kyiv.

The Biden-Hochstein team seems to have been ventriloquist and dummy, with Hochstein pulling the string that controlled Biden's mouth while Joe sat in his lap. From what Hochstein explained on background to the press during the flight over, the Deep State plan for a new Ukraine was comprehensive, domestic-political, military, and financial. One part, at least ostensibly, was key: the Maidan revolution, under whose name the coup took place, was against corruption. Ukraine was going to have to "make progress" against corruption, for which the deposed pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych was the poster boy.

The new regime must not be corrupt, or maybe not quite as corrupt, as the old. The problem is that Ukraine was then and is still recognized as one of the most corrupt countries in the world; perhaps the least controversial remark by Col Douglas Magregor in his recent interview with Tucker Carlson was that on the corruption scale, Ukraine ranks somewhere below Mexico and Russia. Good intentions from the US embassy were not going to fix this.

And we can get an idea of actual Deep State priorities in the portfolio of the ventriloquist whom they sent over to speak for Joe Biden, the dummy on his lap. If they thought corruption was the biggest problem, they'd send a cop, maybe a retired FBI director. If they thought the biggest problem was military, they'd send a general. They sent neither. They sent an energy expert. Let's recall that as of 2014-15, according to Wikipedia,

He was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in 2011 and as Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs. In 2015, President Barack Obama nominated Hochstein to be the Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources but the Senate did not act on the nomination.

Let's check back on one key fact. What was Burisma? Again according to Wikipedia,

Burisma Holdings has operated in the Ukrainian natural gas market since 2002. It is one of the largest private natural gas producers in Ukraine. It is owned by Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky through his company Brociti Investments Limited

Burisma's subsidiaries include Esko-Pivnich, Pari, Persha Ukrainska Naftogazova Kompaniya, Naftogaz Garant, KUB-Gas and Astroinvest-Ukraine.

In 2016, Burisma was the second largest privately owned natural gas producer in Ukraine after DTEK, accounting for 26% of all natural gas produced by privately owned companies and more than 5% of total gas production in Ukraine.

Exactly why the Deep State apparently thought Ukraine's energy resources were so important that the guy who should be explaining how things were gonna be to the new regime in Kyiv should be an energy expert rather than an anti-corruption cop or a general is unclear, although this piece suggests that natural gas supplies from Russia had been a sore point between Ukraine and Russia for some time. The key point is that as an energy generalist and a natural gas specialist, Hochstein must certainly have known about Burisma, the second-largest producer in Ukraine.

Not only that, but Hochstein was apparently a major author of the new 2014 plan for how things were gonna be for Kyiv in the first place. Let's recall again that as the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee reported in 2020,

On April 16, 2014, Vice President Biden met with his son’s business partner, Devon Archer, at the White House. Five days later, Vice President Biden visited Ukraine, and he soon after was described in the press as the “public face of the administration’s handling of Ukraine.” The day after his visit, on April 22, Archer joined the board of Burisma. . . . Fourteen days later, on May 12, Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, and over the course of the next several years, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer were paid millions of dollars from a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch for their participation on the board.

It's really hard not to infer that if, within days of Hochstein delivering his comprehensive plan for how things were gonna be to Kyiv, Devon Archer and Hunter Biden wound up on the board of Burisma, this was not baked into that plan with Hochstein's full knowledge.

But Hochstein later told Joe that Hunter's presence on the Burisma board represented a conflict, right? As part of a general timeline of Hunter's dealings with Hochstein, the New York Post reported,

According to a Senate Republican report on Hunter’s business dealings released in December 2020, Hochstein in October 2015 raised concerns with both Biden and Hunter that Hunter's position on Burisma’s board enabled Russian disinformation efforts and risked undermining U.S. policy in Ukraine. He also had another conversation with Biden on the plane ride during the infamous December 2015 Ukraine trip.

That may be, but of course, that's Hochstein's version in Senate testimony. The record we have, outlined in the story at the link, is that this was only one of multiple meetings among Hochstein, Hunter, Joe, and Hunter's partners over the 2014-2016 period. For instance

On Dec. 11, 2014, Hochstein met with Biden and [Biden executive assistant Kathy] Chung in two separate meetings and later attended a holiday party at Biden's residence that same day. Four days later, Hochstein attended a "meeting" at the vice president’s residence, according to White House visitor logs.

Four months after those meetings, on April 16, 2015, Hochstein met with Biden in the West Wing of the White House, the visitor logs show.

That meeting took place the same day that Hunter introduced his father to Burisma executive Pozharskyi and other business associates from Kazakhstan and Russia during a dinner at Cafe Milano in Washington, D.C., Fox News Digital previously reported. It is unclear whether Burisma or Pozharskyi's visit to D.C. was mentioned during that meeting.

In other words, Hochstein had been touching base with Joe, Hunter, and Hunter's partners throughout the period from April 2014 to November 2015, which led to a second trip by both Joe and Hochstein to Kyiv in early December 2015. This latter flight seems to have been just as important as an expression of US policy as the one in April 2014, but its key task this time was to crack down on corruption. Again according to the Post,

During Hochstein’s testimony, he recounted that he spoke with Biden about Burisma in the West Wing of the White House in October 2015. According to visitor logs, he visited the White House three times in October 2015, with two of the visits occurring in the West Wing and the other on the second floor of West Wing.

"We were starting to think about a trip to Ukraine, and I wanted to make sure that he [Vice President Biden] was aware that there was an increase in chatter on media outlets close to Russians and corrupt oligarchs-owned media outlets about undermining his message—to try to undermine his [Vice President Biden’s] message and including Hunter Biden being part of the board of Burisma," Hochstein told Congress, according to the report.

According to Hochstein, Biden told Hunter about the meeting, prompting Hunter to request a meeting with Hochstein, according to the 2020 Senate Republican report.

"You are all set to meet with Amos on Friday at 4pm for coffee," Joan Mayer emailed Hunter on Nov. 3, 2015. She later emailed Hunter to let him know the Nov. 6 meeting with Hochstein at a Starbucks in Georgetown had been moved to 3PM. Hochstein met with Biden in the White House Situation Room on Nov. 5, 2015, the visitor logs say.

. . . The report said Hochstein "did not go so far as to recommend that Hunter leave the board," citing the New Yorker.

. . . On Dec. 11, 2015, Hochstein met with Biden in the West Wing, just two days after the vice president returned from his infamous Ukraine trip, where he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid if Ukrainian leaders did not fire their top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. The Republican Senate report cited testimony that Hochstein also had a conversation with Biden on the flight over to Ukraine in December 2015.

It's hard not to conclude that Hochstein was fully aware of the issues raised by Hunter's presence on the Burisma board, that apparntly he'd heard complaints about it, which he passed on to Joe (at least in his version of events). Nevertheless, although he and Joe met several times in the leadup to the December 2015 flight, on the flight itself, and afterward, in a series of discussions that also involved Hunter, the upshot was that in the updated version of how things were gonna be that Hochstein and Joe took to Kyiv on December 4-5, 2015, the way to fight corruption was to fire Viktor Shokin. As of last night, Shokin has repeated:

On Saturday’s broadcast of FNC’s “One Nation,” former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin said he believed that both President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden were bribed.

According to the former prosecutor general, he said his firing by then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was done at the behest of then-Vice President Biden, who once boasted about it in a discussion with the Council on Foreign Relations.

“I have said repeatedly in my previous interviews that Poroshenko fired me at the insistence of the then-Vice President Biden because I was investigating Burisma,” Shokin said through a translator.

“You understood me correctly. This is how it was,” he added. “There were no complaints whatsoever and no problems with how I was performing at my job. But because pressure was repeatedly put on Poroshenko, that is what ended up in him firing me.”

As best we can infer, Amos Hochstein was the key architect of US Ukraine policy in the 2014-16 period, down to a detailed level. He did apparently respond to pressure, and when pressure was applied, he got with the program. At least in his version, he went to Joe with concerns about Hunter's presence on the Burisma board, even several times, but he got nowhere, and as a practical matter, the Deep State's practical policy was going to be corrupt oligarchs were OK to have in Ukraine, just as long as they were our corrupt oligarchs.

But recognize this is Hochstein's own well-scrubbed version of events, which he gave while he was out of the government. He left the State Department in 2017 with the advent of the Trump administration and returned to government in 2021 as a close "adviser"/handler to Joe. In 2022, he was promoted to Special Presidential Coordinator for Global Infrastructure and Energy Security, where he is presumably again a shadow figure in charge of Ukraine and its energy resources. We may assume that following a four-year Trump interregnum, Ukraine policy is back to where it had been when Hochstein was in charge of things the first time.

What Is Amos Hochstein's Role In The Whole Nine-Year Ukraine Boondoggle?

I'm still working my way through the question I asked at the end of yesterday's post: By the time he was Obama's vice president, Joe Biden wasn't taken seriously. In January, 2014 -- just as the Maidan revolution and the Russian seizure of Crimea were in train -- The Atlantic was quoting Robert Gates, who had been defense secretary under both Dubya and Obama:

"I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates says of Vice President Joe Biden in his new book coming out later this month.

And there's Obama's own estimate:

Speaking to a fellow Democrat about Joe Biden being the party’s nominee in 2020, Obama famously warned, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f–k things up.”

As a true crime fan, I tend to take the homicide detective's truism that there's no such thing as a coincidence to be a useful epistemological tool. But I'm still working my way through the question of how and why Joe Biden was made point man for Ukraine in 2014, except to note that although Joe was the public face of policy, Victoria Nuland and Amos Hochstein in particular were running the show, and in fact Nuland had set all the 2014 circumstances up throughout much of 2013.

The photo at the top of this post shows Amos Hochstein, his face characteristically turned away from the camera, speaking with Joe Biden on the April 21, 2014 flight to Kyiv aboard Air Force Two. Yesterday I quoted a link that referred to him as "the most influential Joe Biden adviser that most people don’t know about". His Wikipedia entry is remarkably vague, especially about what he was doing on the plane with Joe in April 2014.

After working in various roles as a congressional staffer, he went into the private sector as "a counselor and lobbyist for both domestic and international oil and gas companies" and worked in shadowy roles with, among others, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz to assist Equatorial Guinea's repressive regime "to display their political sincerity to change and to improve relations with the United States", which sounds a lot like the behind-the-scenes influence peddling we've seen more recently in Ukraine. But after this chapter,

Hochstein began working at the U.S. Department of State in 2011, joining the newly formed Bureau of Energy Resources. Serving as deputy to Special Envoy Carlos Pascual, Hochstein worked to help Ukraine find new supplies of natural gas in the wake of the 2014 Russian invasion.

He oversaw the Office of Middle East, Asia and Europe, the Western Hemisphere and Africa. Hochstein led the energy related diplomacy efforts.

So as best we can tell from this very sketchy timeline, as of April 2014, he was sora-kinda doing something or other about Ukrainian energy supplies, and he was on board Air Force Two with Joe Biden on the flight to Kyiv where Joe became Obama's point man in Ukraine, except his title of deputy special envoy doesn't really reflect anything like that.

On Thursday I linked to the transcript of a background briefing made by "a senior administration official" on that flight. Although "background" briefings are anonymous, I'm convinced that the "senior administration official" was Hochstein, as he's shown on the plane in the photo above, and no other senior figure is known to have traveled with Joe otherwise. One of Hochstein's points in the briefing was that Joe was traveling to Ukraine to present a whole US package, financial, military, and political, clearly implying an effort to address both the US-sponsored Maidan revolution and the Russian seizure of Crimea:

{I}t’s one of those conversations where it’s a little hard to say whether the President asked him or he said I want to go. It grew out of a conversation that the two of them had, and both of them agreed that it was important for the U.S. to send a high-level signal of support for all of the lines of effort that this government is undertaking.

Obviously, the most pressing and acute right now is the security situation. But these other lines of effort are also existential for Ukraine. Its politics, its economics and its energy also matter acutely, and so they felt it was important to have somebody with deep ties to and a deep passion for the U.S.-Ukraine relationship to come and send that message both privately and publicly. And there’s no better messenger for that than the Vice President.

But the odd thing is that Hunter and his partners were involved in putting this package together from the start. Via a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee report I've linked previously here,

On April 16, 2014, Vice President Biden met with his son’s business partner, Devon Archer, at the White House. Five days later, Vice President Biden visited Ukraine, and he soon after was described in the press as the “public face of the administration’s handling of Ukraine.” The day after his visit, on April 22, Archer joined the board of Burisma. . . . Fourteen days later, on May 12, Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, and over the course of the next several years, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer were paid millions of dollars from a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch for their participation on the board.

In other words, Hunter's and Devon Archer's participation on the Burisma board were being factored into the whole Biden-visit package that was being presented to Ukrainian leadership during Joe's visit on April 21 and 22, 2014. This wasn't an afterthought, it was part of the whole program, security, military, financial, and Hunter. Hochstein's exact involvement in this initial phase is unclear, but by July of 2014, his behind-the-scenes role in the deal was understood by Hunter and Burisma:

In the summer of 2014, shortly after joining the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings, Hunter and his associates at Burisma and his now-defunct Rosemont Seneca Partners discussed speaking with Hochstein for contacts who could help navigate a new tax in Ukraine on private energy companies.

On July 31, 2014, top Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi expressed frustration in an email to the group that the Ukrainian parliament had "voted in favor of the package of laws, among which is a draft law on raising the tax for private gas producers."

Minutes later, Heather King, who did crisis communications for Burisma at the time and was in frequent communication with Hunter, said she was concerned by the news.

"This news is very concerning," she wrote. "I assume you will be sending an email to the State Dept today about this? We will also get you connected with the US Embassy contact so you can hopefully meet with the guy Hochstein recommended as soon as possible."

The implication here is that Hochstein was seen as some sort of uber-fixer who could get Hunter what Burisma needed. This is the first reference we have to contacts, however indirect, between Hunter and Hochstein, as well as a reference to what seems to have been a general understanding that the US embassy in Kyiv was running the whole show, which was also rhe implication in the notorious February 2014 recorded call between Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Pyatt.

This is only the start of Hochstein's puzzling involvement in the whole Hunter-Ukraine saga, but Hochstein is a shadowy figure throughout Joe Biden's later career. Since 2022, he's served as Joe's "Special Presidential Coordinator for Global Infrastructure and Energy Security", and he is characterized, if he's characterized at all, as one of Joe's closest advisers. This 2022 piece says,

“He knows the domestic and international oil and gas issues very well, so he’s capable of speaking to them, but he’s also now a key figure in both domestic and international policy formulations,” said David Goldwyn, who served at the State Department under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and has known Hochstein for about two decades.

Hochstein, Goldwyn added, is “the person who bridges State, Treasury, the White House and Energy.”

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say he must also know where all the Ukraine bodies are buried, and that would include what Zelensky probably has on Joe, because Zelensky has it on Hochstein as well. I would say he can probably also give a good answer to why, if the Obama circle thought so little of Joe's abilities, Obama nevertheless made Joe the point man on the whole Ukraine package, likely because Hochstein would be the one actually in charge.

More tomorrow.

The Same People Who Ran Ukraine For Joe In 2014 Are Still Running It, But They've Been Promoted

The two people in the photo above, conveniently almost unrecognizable behind their COVID masks, are Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the left, and Victoria Nuland, currently Acting Deputy Secretary of State, on the right. I quoted Seymour Hersh Wednesday on Nuland:

. . . “ultra-hawkish” Victoria Nuland was promoted by Biden from Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs to Acting Deputy Secretary of State ”over the heated objections of many in the State Department,” Hersh writes. “She has not been formally nominated as the deputy for fear that her nomination would lead to a hellish fight in the Senate. “

The one other figure who really ought to be in the same photo is Amos Hochstein, described by Politico as "perhaps, the most influential Joe Biden adviser that most people don’t know about. He wants to keep it that way," which is probably why we'll never see him in such a photo, with or without a mask. For good or ill, these three are indisputably running current US Ukraine policy, especially as Joe progressively loses interest in the day-to-day job of president. But let's start with Ms Nuland.

She in particular found herself present at the creation of a new Ukraine policy in 2013-1014, because in the State Department under both the Bush and Obama administrations, she'd done a great deal to bring the circumstances about that caused the US to become more visibly involved. According to Wikipedia,

From 2003 to 2005, Nuland served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, exercising an influential role during the Iraq War. From 2005 to 2008, during President George W. Bush's second term, Nuland served as U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Brussels, where she concentrated on mobilizing European support for the NATO intervention in Afghanistan.

. . . In May 2013, Nuland was nominated to act as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs[18] and was sworn in on September 18, 2013. In her role as assistant secretary, she managed diplomatic relations with fifty countries in Europe and Eurasia, as well as with NATO, the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

. . . During the Maidan Uprising in Ukraine, Nuland made appearances supporting the Maidan protesters. In December 2013, she said in a speech to the US–Ukraine Foundation that the U.S. had spent about $5 billion on democracy-building programs in Ukraine since 1991. The Russian government seized on this statement, claiming it was evidence the U.S. was orchestrating a revolution.

On February 4, 2014, a recording of a phone call between Nuland and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt on January 28, 2014, was published on YouTube. Nuland and Pyatt discussed who they thought should or shouldn't be in the next Ukrainian government and their opinion of various Ukrainian political figures.

. . . Nuland was the lead U.S. point person for Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity [Maidan revolution], establishing loan guarantees to Ukraine, including a $1 billion loan guarantee in 2014, and the provisions of non-lethal assistance to the Ukrainian military and border guard.

. . . Nuland's husband, Robert Kagan, is a historian, foreign policy commentator at the Brookings Institution, and co-founder in 1998 of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC). She has two children.

It's hard to ask for more solid neoconservative credentials. Her thumbnail at the Carnegie Endowment reads in part,

She was also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, distinguished practitioner in grand strategy at Yale University, and a member of the Board of the National Endowment for Democracy.

So, with her neoconservative husband Robert Kagan, whose brother is Frederick Kagan of the neocon Institute for the Study of War, she's part of a nepotistic neocon power network that's been ingrained in the Deep State irrespective of political party. But let's look in particular at the National Endowment for Democracy and its relationship with Ukraine's Maidan revolution:

Obvious examples of Central Intelligence Agency covert action abroad are difficult to identify today, save for occasional acknowledged calamities, such as the long-running $1 billion effort to overthrow the government of Syria, via funding, training and arming barbarous jihadist groups.

In part, this stems from many of the CIA’s traditional responsibilities and activities being farmed out to “overt” organizations, most significantly the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

. . . [In September 2013,} Carl Gershman, NED chief from its launch until summer 2021, authored an op-ed for The Washington Post, outlining how his organization was hard at work wresting countries in Russia’s near abroad -– the constellation of former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact states -– away from Moscow’s orbit.

. . . Along the way, he described Ukraine as “the biggest prize” in the region, suggesting Kiev joining Europe would “accelerate the demise” of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Six months later, Ukraine’s elected president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in a violent coup.

. . . on February 3rd 2014, less than three weeks before police withdrew from Kiev, effectively handing the city to armed protesters and prompting Yanukovych to flee the country, NED convened an event, Ukraine’s lessons learned: from the Orange Revolution to the Euromaidan.

[US Senator John] McCain flew to Kiev in December 2013 to give an address to Maidan protesters, flanked by known Neo-Nazi Oleh Tyahnybok. Then-State Department official Victoria Nuland, now Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, was also present, notoriously handing out motivational cookies to attendees.

On February 4th 2014, . . . an intercepted recording of a telephone call between Nuland –- now [2022] Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs –- and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was leaked, in which the pair discussed how Washington was “midwifing” Yanukovych’s ouster, and named several handpicked individuals to head the post-coup government.

Most discussions of the Maidan revolution treat it in isolation from the Russian annexation of Crimea, which took place in February and March of 2014, but the timing strongly suggests it waa a Russian response to increased US interference in Ukrainian domestic politics, in particular the US-sponsored ouster of the pro-Russian elected president Yanukovych under the pretext of corruption. Whatever the pros and cons of this US skulduggery may ultimately be, especially in the context of Nuland's call with Ambassador Pyatt, there's a most unfortunate connotation of Viet Nam-era Ugly Americanism, in which a quasi-colonialist clique of US diplomats manipulates right-wing factions in a client country to fight a proxy war against Russia.

It's hard to avoid thinking Putin was fully aware of what Nuland was engineering, and in fact the Maidan revolution might reasonably be seen as a US provocation that started the Russo-Ukraine War in the first place. Putin's 2022 invasion must be seen as a flareup in a war that had begun eight years earlier in response to a US-engineered coup.

But this is the context in which we can see Joe Biden's flight to Kyiv on April 21, 2014 following not just the success of the Yanukovych ouster but also the outbreak of the the Russo-Ukraine War, which is still going on, in which we first encounter the shadowy Amos Hochstein. I'll have more to say about him tomorrow.

But here's a question to ponder: as best we know, Barack Obama didn't think much of Joe Biden as either a diplomat or a policy guy. All of a sudden in February and March of 2014, we're looking at a portentous pair of geopolitical developments on Russia's border, both provoked by the US. Why did Obama make Joe, who was little more than comic relief in his administration, the point man to deal with this?

What Did Obama Know?

A couple of stories came out yesterday that raise two questions about Joe's Ukraine timeline, neither especially new, but intriguing as we learn more context. The two questions ultimately boil down to, first, what did Obama know about Joe's Ukraine payoffs, and second, what does Zelensky have on Joe?

Red State brings up the first:

New questions are swirling about Joe Biden's involvement in Ukraine while he served as vice president during the Obama administration.

. . . How did things get to that point, though? A newly unearthed exchange from 2014 is providing a major clue. A "senior administration official" (at the time) gave a press briefing on background about Biden's now-infamous trip to Ukraine. According to one answer given, the now-president may have actually requested the role of overseeing American foreign policy in Ukraine. From there, the timeline only gets more suspicious.

The transcript of the press briefing, which took place on April 21, 20l4 aboard Air Force Two as Joe flew to Kyiv, can be found at the link. Red State quotes this passage:

Q Could you just say how this trip came about? Obviously the Vice President has a long history of diplomatic relations with Ukraine. Was this something that was his initiative? Did the President ask him to go because of those relationships? Or how did that come?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: The reason I’m pausing here is it’s one of those -- it’s one of those conversations where it’s a little hard to say whether the President asked him or he said I want to go. It grew out of a conversation that the two of them had, and both of them agreed that it was important for the U.S. to send a high-level signal of support for all of the lines of effort that this government is undertaking.

A September 18, 2020 report from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee puts Joe's April 21, 2014 visit to Kyiv in partial context:

In late 2013 and into 2014, mass protests erupted in Kyiv, Ukraine, demanding integration into western economies and an end to systemic corruption that had plagued the country. At least 82 people were killed during the protests, which culminated on Feb. 21 when Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych abdicated by fleeing the country. Less than two months later, over the span of only 28 days, significant events involving the Bidens unfolded.

On April 16, 2014, Vice President Biden met with his son’s business partner, Devon Archer, at the White House. Five days later, Vice President Biden visited Ukraine, and he soon after was described in the press as the “public face of the administration’s handling of Ukraine.” The day after his visit, on April 22, Archer joined the board of Burisma. . . . Fourteen days later, on May 12, Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, and over the course of the next several years, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer were paid millions of dollars from a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch for their participation on the board.

The Red State link gives more details of Joe's, Devon Archer's, and Hunter's activites in the runup to the April 21 flight to Kyiv:

That's where the timeline comes in. Devin [sic] Archer, who recently testified in the House Oversight Committee's investigation into Biden family corruption, was told by Hunter Biden to buy a burner phone on April 13th, 2014. Just days later, Archer met with Joe Biden in the West Wing of the White House. On April 21st, 2014, the then-vice president was wheels-up, headed to Kyiv where he would eventually get Shokin fired.

There's no reason to believe that the flow of events shown above is a coincidence. Did Joe Biden specifically go to Barack Obama to position himself as the lead in Ukraine as part of a scheme to enrich his son (and by virtue, his family)? And did the infamous trip to Kyiv that ended with a big win for Hunter Biden and Burisma stem from the conversation with Archer? It certainly looks that way. This onion has a lot of layers, and we aren't near the center yet.

The Washington Examiner published a story in 2019 itemizing Joe's six trips to Ukraine. The first was on July 20-22, 2009, and appears to have been a routine diplomatic visit at the start of the Obama administration. The next didn't take place until April, 2014, five years later. The Senate committee report mentions the abdication of Ukraine's President Yanukovych following anti-corruption demonstrations, but it leaves out the Russian annexation of Crimea in January and February of that year, which took place in the power vacuum that resulted from the anti-corruption demonstrations.

Oddly, the "senior administration official" who conducted the press briefing had little directly to say about Crimea, but the implcation of his general gaseous diplospeak was that Ukraine's position vis-a-vis Putin had suddenly become a major focus of admiminstration policy, and in light of that, Joe was going to be in charge. As a result, from one visit in 2009, Joe then made five visits between 2014 and 2017.

But this brings us to the second of yesterday's stories, at Just the News. In 2014-15, Ukraine had moved up as a US area of interest, and official policy had involved non-lethal military support as an anti-Russian measure and pressure to limit corruption as a domestic political measure, which was reasonable enough if not very imaginative. For much of this time, Joe was with the program, but on his fifth trip to Kyiv, December 7-8, 2015, he suddenly reversed course:

Just a month earlier [November 2015], a task force of top State, Treasury and Justice Department officials had decided that Ukraine and its new top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, had made enough progress on anti-corruption reforms for the country to receive a new $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee.

They drafted a term sheet for the delivery of the new aid to then-President Poroshenko during Biden’s December 2015 trip to Ukraine, and were making plans to invite Shokin’s top staff to Washington in January for a high-level meeting. Shokin himself even got a letter from the State Department declaring it was “impressed” with his reform efforts.

But the vice president and his top advisers on Ukraine, including then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, had a very different plan that began unfolding that Thanksgiving holiday week. In fact, it was an about-face when it came to Shokin’s plight, according to two “goals and objectives” memos drafted four days before Thanksgiving on Nov. 22, 2015 and obtained by Just the News.

“There is wide agreement that anti-corruption must be at the top of this list, and that reforms must include an overhaul of the Prosecutor General’s Office, including removal of Prosecutor General Shokin, who is widely regarded as an obstacle to fighting corruption, if not a source of the problem,” the memos stated.

The odd thing is that we're seeing the start of what reporters like Seymour Hersh are now reporting is a split between the conventional deep state -- "a task force of top State, Treasury and Justice Department officials" -- and Biden loyalists, in particular Victoria Nuland, who advised Joe to reverse US policy on Shokin and use the leverage of the $1 billion loan guarantee to secure his removal. But this advanced only Biden family interests, not US interests as determined by the cabinet-level task force. The Just the News link continues,

A U.S. intervention into the domestic affairs of an ally like Ukraine was rare and intrusive, and the meddling has had years of fallout. And it turns out, according to documents obtained years later by Just the News, that Joe Biden and his son Hunter were both intensely focused on the same prosecutor at that same moment.

A few blocks away from the White House, Hunter Biden and his associates were trying to hire a crisis communications firm to deal with Shokin’s decision to revive a corruption investigation of the Burisma Holdings company where Hunter Biden served as a board member and received $1 million a year in compensation, according to documents reviewed by Just the News.

There can be little question that the sudden US policy reversal calling for Shokin's removal benefited the Biden family interests, while the Biden retainers like Victoria Nuland, Antony Blinken, and Amos Hochstein were apparently on board with the sudden policy switch and continue to drive US Ukraine policy now. The problem is that the Ukraine policy we have is turning out to be yet another neoconservative war with no clear objective and no exit strategy, and signals are beginning to emerge that the Deep State is unhappy.

This strikes me, though, as a good start toward the insightful policy analysis we need over the origins of this war, which may well establish a link between short-term political scandal and longer-term policy error. And they date back to the Obama administration, its policy decisions, Joe's involvement, and his ability to override them. How could he do this, and what did Obama know?

What About Ukraine?

There's general consensus across the spectrum that the planned Ukraine 2023 counteroffensive has "stalled", although that's probably a generous characterization -- it might be more accurate to say it never really got under way. Other than Tucker Carlson's Monday interview with retired Col Douglas MacGregor, which is over-the-top, there's been little other recent discussion. On the other hand, there's a good analysis on Seymour Hersh's Substack, which is mostly behind a paywall, but Gateway Pundit has a summary:

Hersh cites an unnamed intel official who said that SecState Antony Blinken “has figured out that the United States” and Ukraine “will not win the war” against Russia. On Thursday, the Washington Post reported the U.S. intel community realizes the Ukrainian offensive will fail to achieve its key goal of taking the southeastern city of Melitopol, a strategic Russian logistics hub.

“The word was getting to (Blinken) through the Agency that the Ukrainian offense was not going to work. It was a show by Zelensky and there were some in the administration who believed his bullshit,“ Hersh’s source said.

Hersh's implication is that this went against the White House line, although this is probably more accurately characterized as the line of Biden's foreign policy handlers, especially Jake Sullivan:

When war hawk Blinken was “suddenly having doubts,” CIA director Bill Burns “made his move to join the sinking ship,” Hersh writes. Burns may have been jockeying to replace “a disillusioned Blinken,” according to Hersh, but only got “a token promotion: an appointment to Biden’s cabinet.”

At the same time, “ultra-hawkish” Victoria Nuland was promoted by Biden from Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs to Acting Deputy Secretary of State ”over the heated objections of many in the State Department,” Hersh writes. “She has not been formally nominated as the deputy for fear that her nomination would lead to a hellish fight in the Senate. “

“Tony Blinken, who publicly vowed just a few months ago that there would be no immediate ceasefire in Ukraine, is still in office and, if asked, would certainly dispute any notion of discontent with Zelensky or the administration’s murderous and failing war policy in Ukraine,” Hersh writes. The White House’s “wishful approach to the war, when it comes to realistic talk to the American people, will continue apace,” Hersh said. “But the end is nearing, even if the assessments supplied by Biden to the public are out of a comic strip.”

Hersh goes on to imply that there are divisions within the Deep State. He mentions the CIA above, but now he turns to the Pentagon:

In November, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said that a victory by Ukraine may not be achieved militarily and that Kiev should look for a diplomatic solution to the crisis. “We may have missed a window to push for earlier talks,” a US official told Politico, admitting that “Milley had a point.”

A piece from this past Sunday in The Economist gives more perspective:

Having once promised a march to Crimea, occupied and annexed by Russia since 2014, the political leadership in Kyiv now emphasises more realistic expectations.

. . . Ukraine’s leadership is particularly frustrated that Western equipment has not yet arrived in its promised numbers. It is “upsetting…and demotivating,” [presidential spokesman Serhiy] Leshchenko says. Equivocation among allies about the supply of newer weapons, and the prospect of America re-electing Donald Trump next year, have added to Ukrainian anxieties. A source in the general staff says that Ukraine has received just 60 Leopard tanks, despite the promise of hundreds. Demining vehicles are particularly scarce. “We simply don’t have the resources to do the frontal attacks that the West is imploring us to do,” says the source.

. . . Ukraine has since prioritised preserving its army. “We no longer plan operations that presuppose large losses,” says the source. “The emphasis is now on degrading the enemy: artillery, drones, electronic warfare and so on.”

It's hard to avoid thinking there have been flaws in Western Ukraine policy from the start, including Ukraine's early success in resisting the Russian invasion that led to overoptimism about how the war would proceed, along with reluctance, especially from the Biden administration, to supply Ukraine with advanced weapons. Particularly during 2023, Biden's initial hesitation to provide advanced tanks and F-16s, which he eventually approved, has resulted in those weapons not arriving in sufficient numbers until 2024, when it was generally understood that Ukraine needed to make significant progress in its counteroffensive this year before the war becomes an issue in the 2024 election.

On one hand, I've noted throughout that there's been no overall clear allied objective in the war, as opposed to World War II, when there were agreements on a Europe-first policy, as well as an overall policy of unconditional surrender. On the other, so far, there doesn't seem to have been any sort of flexibility on policies that are nevertheless unclear and unstated. In 2006, President Bush lost confidence in the neoconservatives' Iraq war results and fired Donald Rumsefeld as defense secretary. There's been no equivalent move from Joe Biden, while apparent disagreements continue at the State Department, the CIA, and the Defense Department -- and the failed current policies of vacillation and delayed approval of new weapons clearly come from his handlers.

Even at his best, waging a proxy war in Ukraine was probably beyond Biden, and it was certainly beyond his policy handlers Blinken, Sullivan, and Nuland. At this point, Biden has become distracted by his family scandals, and it looks like he's lost interest in the details of being president. Dubya by this point would probably have fired several cabinet-level people. Apparently it was First Lady Laura who told him to fire Rumsfeld.

Now we have Dr Jill.

Nothing New

Joe's performance on his Maui visit wasn't good, especially the visual of him falling asleep at a luncheon meeting and the transcript of his remarks at Lahaina:

Governor Josh Green, you’ve been incredible. From the day we’ve spoken on this, you’ve been way ahead of the curve. Lieutenant Governor Sylvia Luke; Brian Schantz [Schatz], our senator; Senator Mazie Hir- — by the way, Mazie, I told my granddaughter, whose name is Maisy as well — she said, “That’s why I like her.” (Laughter.) Anyway. But her name is Maisy as well.

And — and Jill To- — Tokuda, Representative Ed Chase, and Mayor Rick Bassen [Bissen]. Rick, when we talked on the phone, I never — you look like you played in defensive tackle for — I don’t know who, but somebody good. But, anyway, I want to thank you for your leadership in this unimaginable — during this unimaginable travedy — tragedy.

What puzzles me here is that his own staff has released the official transcript verbatim, with every mispronunciation, misspeak, gaffe, and stumble clearly recorded, with not even the slightest attempt to clean things up. It's pretty clear that he isn't up to speed on the names of either US senator from Hawaii; he gets Sen Schatz's name wrong, and he's also covering for not quite knowing Sen Hirono's last name.

The impression I have is that his staff gave him the usual briefing notes that we sometimes get to see -- YOU enter from left, go to microphone, YOU greet Sen Hirono . . . YOU turn and leave the stage at right. . ." of which he maybe follows the highlights at best, but one thing he clearly didn't do in this case was study the photos and learn the names of the people he was supposed to recognize in his remarks. Why should he? It's only courteous, and the most powerful man in the world doesn't need to be courteous.

He's like a recalcitrant five-year-old who's being dragged to a big family event in a jacket and tie, something he absolutely doesn't want to do, and he's displaying passive resistance to the whole program. The five-year-old resents his parents for making him do it, and he consistently says the wrong thing, gets mixed up while shaking hands with Uncle Ted, turns in the wrong direction, and falls asleep. Joe has precisely the same routine.

In fact, Joe resents his handlers, even though they're the ones who've gotten him where he is (he likely doesn't see it that way). Every indication is that he never wanted to go to Maui, even for half a day, and he probably resisted the advice behind the scenes. It sounds like a few people got to Dr Jill, and she prevalied on him to do it. The problem is that the message was clear.

President Biden was greeted with middle fingers, chants of protest, and signs that said “No Comment” Monday as he arrived in Maui to tour wildfire damage after repeatedly declining to comment last week on the tragedy that killed at least 114 people.

. . . As he drove toward downtown Lahaina, Biden passed signs that said “No Comment,” “Really $7?,” “Action Speaks Louder Than Words”, and “FJB,” as well as at least two flags promoting the 2024 candidacy of former President Donald Trump.

Again, I don't think this is a sign of mental decline. It's a sign of a basic sense of entitlement, a little bit like Lyndon Johnson saying, "I'm the only president you've got." Ed Morrissey at Hot Air had an uncharacteristic flash of insight into the real situation:

{I]f Biden retires and the party doesn’t nominate Harris, all of the bad blood over the diversity promises of 2020 will explode. That will be especially true if the party nominates Gavin Newsom instead, who notably angered the black and female activists in the party by appointing Alex Padilla to fill out the rest of Harris’ term in the Senate rather than another black woman. This won’t be a Kennedy-Carter contest but an explosion of identity-politics grudges and fury, much more 1968 than 1980.

. . . That is why Democrats will prop up Biden for as long as it takes, even if they have to do a Weekend At Bernie’s campaign in 2024.

He's the last old white guy who isn't Bernie Sanders, and he's the last one standing who can maintain the pretense that the New Deal coalition survives. After Biden, the greens, radical feminists, reparations hustlers, homeless-cum-urban criminals, and sexual deviants will fight each other for supremacy with little chance of an electoral majority in a general election.

Whether anyone else wants a Weekend at Bernie's campaign in 2024, that's what Biden prefers. Beyond that, with Biden's weakness as a candidate -- at this point, he can no longer hold a regular press conference due to rhe overhanging questions about Hunter -- it's the only possible option to keep him on vacation or some basement equivalent for the next 14 months. Joe understands this better than anyone.

This is the real Joe we'll be seeing from now on. If Dr Jill and his handlers try to make him do more, it'll just be worse, and Joe is making sure they understand it.