Who Is James Biden?

The House Republicans have subpoenaed Joe's brother James's bank records as part of their impeachment investigation. Wondering why I'd never thought to do this before, I went to Wikipedia, and wonder of wonders, I discovered Jimmy has no separate entry -- he's lumped under "Siblings" in an entry for Family of Joe Biden, which reads in its entirety:

• James B. "Jim" Biden (born 1949), healthcare executive

In fact, the family calls him "Jimmy". Well above this entry is a two-paragraph chronicle of the family's pets. It sounds as though for whatever reason, we aren't going to find a single source on Jimmy that will be productive. In fact, you have to negotiate the results of web searches carefully to avoid the usual puff pieces, and stories with any substance seem to date at the latest from 2020, before the election. There doesn't seem to be any place where you can find anything like a conventional CV.

I asked Google, "Where did James Biden go to college?" and got a lot of hits for Joe and Hunter. Much farther down, I discovered:

Seven years younger than the president, James Biden, 73 [now 74], never graduated from college but has made a successful living with various business ventures, some of the most lucrative deals secured with Hunter Biden.

So we likey aren't ever going to get a good list of Jimmy's employers, dates of employment, job titles, and so forth. This piece from 2020, well before the election, seems to summarize his career as best anyone can:

Jim Biden, 70 [now 74], has cycled over the years from nightclub owner to insurance broker to political consultant and fundraiser to startup investor and construction company executive. But the through line of his resume was his bond with his brother, a Democratic Party stalwart in a position to push legislation or make government contracts happen.

“My sense is that Jim really has been trying to peddle himself on the Biden name for some time,” said Curtis Wilkie, who covered the Bidens as a Delaware political reporter.

However, the pattern of Jimmy's business activities and finances tracks even closer to Hunter's, although much of the evidence in the stories published before the election comes from outside the end dates covered by Hunter's laptop, which makes it even more useful. For instance, in the same source:

It was December 2006, not long before Jim’s older brother and Hunter’s father, Joe Biden, then a Delaware senator, would announce his second campaign for president. [Remember, the laptop covers roughly 2010 to 2019.]

Jim and Hunter Biden got a loan from a bank founded by one of Joe’s political backers — William Oldaker, an attorney for the senator’s presidential campaign and Hunter’s partner at a Washington law and lobbying firm.

Oldaker had strong ties to Joe Biden’s political operation, and at the time, the bank, WashingtonFirst, had nearly half a million dollars in deposits from a Joe Biden political committee Oldaker had helped set up.

. . . The bank required that loans be well secured by borrowers’ assets. Jim Biden put up his house in Merion Station, Pennsylvania, as collateral, but he already had $1.5 million in three mortgages against the property, then roughly valued at just over $1.1 million. Hunter offered as security his recently purchased Washington home, for which he had borrowed almost the entire purchase price.

. . . It was not the first time — or the last — during his long career that Jim Biden turned to Joe’s political network for the kind of assistance that would have been almost unimaginable for someone with a different last name. Campaign donors helped him face a series of financial problems, including a series of IRS liens totaling more than $1 million that made it harder to get bank financing. Jim Biden took out two more loans from WashingtonFirst before its sale in 2018.

Another episode from 2006 is outlined in Politico, which the site claimed in 2020 was "the most comprehensive account to date of the politically tinged business activities of Biden’s brother and son". In 2006, Jimmy and Hunter took over Paradigm Global Advisors, a shaky investment firm founded by the son-in-law of Sun Myung Moon, a South Korean cult leader. According to the link,

The Biden involvement began in January 2006. James Biden called Anthony Lotito, a New York financial adviser, and said his older brother, Joe, wanted his son Hunter to find a job outside of lobbying to avoid damaging his planned campaign for the presidency, according to a complaint Lotito later filed in a New York court, after his relationship with James and Hunter soured.

. . . Things quickly got messy. The prospective purchasers discovered that because of an accounting trick, the fund had only a fraction of the $1.5 billion in assets under management that it claimed, according to court filings.

James and Hunter also discovered that the attorney the trio had hired on Lotito’s recommendation to explore the purchase, John Fasciana, had recently been convicted on 12 counts of fraud, according to court filings.

. . . According to an agreement Lotito and James made with Paradigm in May 2006 that later surfaced in their court fight, they had planned to use their connections to union pension funds governed by the 1947 Taft–Hartley Act, which regulates labor unions, in order to steer new investments to Paradigm.

. . . Firefighters unions have been among Joe Biden’s closest political allies since the start of his political career.

. . . James and Hunter had taken out a loan from WashingtonFirst Bank, which had been co-founded by one of Hunter’s former lobbying partners. A former WashingtonFirst executive said James and Hunter had pledged their houses on the loan and both had paid back their debts after several years.

In the meantime, that debt was causing friction within Paradigm.

At one point, the executive said, Hunter called him and asked him to hand over $21,000 in company funds for a personal mortgage payment. When the executive refused, saying the funds were needed to cover operating expenses, he recalled that Hunter — who recently told The New Yorker he has spent most of his life living paycheck to paycheck — responded that he might lose his house.

“Hunter did take substantial dollars out of the company,” said a second former Paradigm executive, describing the withdrawals as a “semi-regular” subject of discussion and concern within the firm.

. . . A third former executive at Paradigm claimed that at one point around 2008 or 2009, James and Hunter withdrew several million dollars from Paradigm’s coffers for their own use. By this point, “The Bidens didn’t have access to the day-to-day operation of Paradigm at all,” this executive said. “The only thing the Bidens could do was get paid or request to get money out of the hedge fund.” The executive said the Bidens had the right to withdraw the funds and that the transaction was cleared through counsel.

. . . Another former executive said negative press about Paradigm’s ties to fraudulent funds made James and Hunter wary of more scrutiny of “potential conflicts of interest or tie-ins to the Biden family.” As a result, the executive said, “They really just chose to liquidate the hedge fund and give back the money to the investors.” The former WashingtonFirst executive said James and Hunter shut down Paradigm because the global recession had cut into its revenues.

. . . According to a 2013 New Republic story on the Unification Church, [Sun Myung Moon's son-in-law] Park, who did not respond to requests for comment, was never able to collect from James and Hunter on the promissory note they used to acquire the fund.

The piece recounts elsewhere that Jimmy had run the finances for Joe's initial 1972 Senate campaign.

No sooner was freshman lawmaker Joe Biden seated on the Senate Banking Committee than James became the beneficiary of business loans that were described in news accounts at the time as unusually generous because of the relatively large amount of money he was able to borrow with little or no collateral and a lack of relevant prior experience.

In early 1973, on the heels of Joe’s election to the Senate, James Biden and a business partner decided to open a nightclub.

The club, Seasons Change, located in a shopping plaza near the Pennsylvania state line, would eventually fail, leaving behind it a trail of debt and a trickle of embarrassing revelations about its financing.

The pair had obtained a series of loans for $80,000, $60,000 and $25,000 from Wilmington’s Farmers Bank. At least one of those loans was unsecured, meaning it was not backed by collateral that could be seized if the borrowers stopped paying.

When James began missing his payments and risking default, his brother Joe became angry — at the bank.

“What I’d like to know,” the junior senator told his hometown paper in 1977, “is how the guy in charge of loans let it get this far.”

The paper looked into it: “The answer, according to three former officers of the troubled Farmers Bank, is the Biden name,” reported Delaware’s News Journal. According to the paper, the bank thought the senatorial name would attract club-goers.

It did not attract enough to turn a profit, and by 1975, the bank was having problems collecting from James.

. . . Another figure tied to Farmers Bank, the politically connected financier Norman Rales, extended James Biden an unsecured loan.

. . . These unusual arrangements came to light after Farmers Bank nearly collapsed in 1976, forcing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to bail it out. The crisis spurred several investigations into the bank’s lending practices and political connections. It also prompted Moody’s to downgrade the state of Delaware’s credit rating from A1 to A because the state’s finances were so intertwined with the bank’s.

These stories provide insight that hasn't been available elsewhere into how Joe's family used his influence often to bilk banks and investors hoping to gain favor with Joe. Jimmy's loans from Farmers Bank took place when Hunter, born 1n 1970, was in elementary school. The Politico piece also refers to another James Biden enterprise, the Lion Hall Group:

[A]fter a stint selling real estate in San Francisco, [James] returned to the East Coast and set up a new firm, the Lion Hall Group.

This appears to have been in the mid-1990s.

In 1995, famed Mississippi trial lawyer Dickie Scruggs set his sights on a gargantuan national settlement with Big Tobacco worth hundreds of billions of dollars. To make such a settlement work, Congress would have to bless it by immunizing the tobacco companies against future legal claims.

. . . As part of an effort to win over Joe and other Democrats, Scruggs hired James’ Lion Hall Group to help with a “legislative, executive, political and social” campaign, according to Wilkie’s book. Neither James nor Lion Hall appear in federal lobbying disclosures.

While the lobbying effort failed in that case, it's worth noting that Jimmy's Lion Hall Group is still in existence, and it has attracted the Republicans' interest in the current impeachment inquiry:

Last year, Senate Republicans scrutinized James Biden's business ventures, releasing records that showed payments James Biden's company, The Lion Hall Group, received from a Chinese-financed consulting group in 2018, and monthly retainers to James and Hunter Biden.

As I've been saying, there's a great deal to the Biden chronology outside the 2010-2019 period of the laptop, and there's also a great deal that involves relatives other than Hunter.

Hunter's New Chinese Wire Transfers

One point I keep making here is that it's misleading to focus on the Hunter laptop as any sort of key to the Biden family shakedown. While it covers the period from 2010 to 2019, and it has lots of distractions, it leaves out two key periods, Joe's time in the Senate from 1972 to the start of the laptop timeline in 2010, and much more important, payoffs to Joe after 2019, which begins to cover his time as president. In addition, it's misleading to focus on Hunter, because it looks like Joe's brothers Jim and Frank were in on the hustle as well.

Beyond that, the laptop only hints at one feature of Joe's interregnum between 2017 and 2021, when Joe, out of office, seems to have been treated as the likely next president well before the 2020 election and was accorded courtesies consistent with that expectation, such as informal coordination with the Secret Service, although former vice presidents are not entitled to protection. We know very little about how this worked and who was involved.

And I'm surprised that there's been so little attention to one of yesterday's revelations from the House Republicans:

Hunter Biden received wires that originated in Beijing for more than $250,000 from Chinese business partners during the summer of 2019 — wires that listed the Delaware home of Joe Biden as the beneficiary address for the funds, Fox News Digital has learned from a congressional committee.

Joe announced his candidacy for president on April 25, 2019, just outside the time span of Hunter's laptop. According to the link,

The first wire transfer sent to Hunter Biden, dated July 26, 2019, was for $10,000 from an individual named Ms. Wang Xin. There is a Ms. Wang Xin listed on the website for BHR Partners. It is unclear if the wire came from that Wang Xin.

The second wire transfer sent to Hunter Biden, dated Aug. 2, 2019, was for $250,000 from Li Xiang Sheng — also known as Jonathan Li, the CEO of BHR Partners — and Ms. Tan Ling. The committee is trying to identify Ling’s role.

The beneficiary for the wires is listed as Robert Hunter Biden with the address "1209 Barley Mill Rd." in Wilmington, Delaware. That address is the main residence for President Biden.

While this goes some distance to disprove Joe's claims that his family never received money from China, it also reinforces a relationship with Jonathan Li of BHR partners that had existed well before the July-August 2019 wire transfers. BHR Partners "is a private investment fund founded in 2013 by Bohai Industrial Investment Fund Management Co., Ltd., which is controlled by Bank of China Limited along with a partnership with Hunter Biden." Jonathan Li has a history of contact with both Hunter and Joe. On December 4, 2013, Hunter traveled to China with Joe on Air Force Two, and in the course of the trip, Joe met with Jonathan Li in what was described as a social meeting.

In 2017, Joe wrote college recommendation letters for Jonathan Li's son. In July of that year, Hunter sent Li the notorius WhatsApp message “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,” According to that link,

If the message is in fact real and its contents taken at face value, it would certainly raise political and ethical questions for the White House. Hunter Biden and his uncles, James and Frank, have a lengthy record of invoking the family name to secure business deals without Joe Biden's knowledge, which could have been the case in this circumstance. But if Joe Biden wasn't in office at the time, it would not necessarily amount to evidence of a crime.

The problem for that view now is that the news of the summer 2019 wire transfers provides evidence of a business relationship between Jonathan Li and the Bidens extending over a six-year period from 2013 to at least 2019. This begins while Joe was vice president, extends through the interregnum, and into Joe's presidential campaign as of 2019. It raises additional questions about what the expectations were for Joe during the interregnum, when insiders were apparently confident that Joe would become president in 2021, to the point that they wired the Bidens money in apparent anticipation of potential favors.

A question that's so far unanswered is whether the Bidens were actually involved in any specific business deals or quid-pro-quo favors with Jonathan Li. Two logical questions would be what the deal was for which Hunter was demanding payment in the July 2017 WhatsApp message, and what the deal was for which Li wired Hunter over $250,000 in July-August 2019. It seems perfectly reasonable to believe there were either individual deals or a continuing arrangement, and it would be reasonable for the House Republicans to continue to investigate what these were.

The estimate as of yesterday of the Biden family take:

Oversight Committee now has records revealing that from 2014 to 2019, the Biden family and associates raked in $24 million in foreign payments. $15 million of that to the Bidens. That’s $4 million more than previously announced.

But again, this leaves out the years between 1972, whwn Joe was first elected to the Senate, and 2014, as well as ongoing payments after 20l9, which the news of the wire transfers strongly suggests were taking place. We may reasonably surmise that the payments were for something, but so far, especially outside Ukraine, we know nothing, for instance about any specific favors for which the Chinese actors, at minimum Jonathan Li and Ye Jianming, who gave Hunter a diamond worth as much as $80,000, were paying over this extended period.

There's a great deal more to learn. On the other hand, press coverage of only the wire transfers from yesterday hasn't even reached the point of asking the questions I've asked here.

What's Newsom Up To?

For someone who claims he isn't running for president, Gavin Newsom sure is in the news a lot:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom told NewsNation host Chris Cuomo he will not be making a 2024 presidential run and will instead continue to back President Joe Biden.

“I have deep respect, reverence for Joe Biden as a person, his character, his decency and his capacity to do great things,” Newsom told Cuomo. “That’s why. I’m not worthy of that conversation. This guy deserves it, and we as members of the party deserve to have his back.”

Newsom has been considered as a possible Democratic presidential contender by some analysts, but he has repeatedly said he will not run in 2024.

Nevertheless, his presence at the Republican debate in Simi Valley tonight, although ostensibly as a Biden spokesman, raises other possibilities:

CBS13's Steve Large spoke to political strategist Doug Elmets about Newsom's presence.

Steve: "Why would Gavin Newsom want to be at the Republican Presidential debate?"

Elmets: "This is a great opportunity for Gavin Newsom to continue to increase his national profile."

Former Ronald Reagan aide Elmets says Newsom's attendance at the debate helps Biden deliver democratic talking points.

"He's quick on his feet, he's smart," Elmets said.

Elmets says it also puts Newsom in a position to replace Biden if the President does not become the nominee.

"Should Joe Biden trip or fall he wants to be the person that's there to not maybe lift him up, but maybe stand in his place," Elmets said.

There's also the question of why Newsom, who's teased the idea of debating Ron DeSantis since last spring, finalized an agreement to do the debate on November 30, even though this came after his announcement that he wouldn't challenge Biden for the nomination.

If nothing else, this raises Newsom's profile, even if DeSantis has become an also-ran opponent, and it sets up a quasi-campaign context for Newsom when the Democrats otherwise prefer no serious primary challenge for Joe

On the other hand, Newsom can always claim he's just doing it to help Biden, and he can do that until Biden for whatever reason drops out, at which point he's the clear candidate to succeed Joe. But this dodges the question of Kamala, which this piece in the Washington Exsminer also raises:

She is a fellow Californian and the first female, black, and Asian vice president, which could make things awkward for the white male Newsom should he try to overtake her. Yet her approval ratings are dismal, and hopes are fading for her to further connect with Democratic voters.

Team Harris was reportedly upset by Newsom's plan to debate DeSantis, and even his rumored status as a 2024 backup comes with some risk.

“There’s certainly a concern about stepping on her toes,” Cummins said. “That’s the job of the vice president, to fill in if Biden has some health scare or health issue that would incapacitate him. That’s why we have a vice president.”

It's worth pointing out, though, that Nancy Pelosi continues to run the California Democrat machine, of which Newsom and Harris are both members in good standing, if not the whole Democrat party, and she can and will impose a resolution. She did this when she chose Obama over Hillary in 2008:

She was somewhat cool to Clinton and her campaign from the very beginning of the 2008 cycle, and over time began sending clear signals that Obama is her candidate. When George Miller and Anna Eshoo, fellow House Democrats from California through whom Pelosi often telegraphs her wishes, endorsed Obama a few months back, the hand of the Speaker was apparent.

I have a sense she's still just as capable of determining the outcome now as she was then. In fact, I would go so far as to say Pelosi has already gamed the whole set of contingencies out and already let the players know what her preferences are.

I would also say that Newsom is playing his current game while he consults with Pelosi, and the moves he's making now are with her full foreknowledge and approval. That she should even allow a situation where there's any ambiguity at all over Joe's future, with Newsom as the most credible replacement, is significant in itself.

The mere fact that Newsom is allowed to do ambiguous things means Pelosi is making plans. If Joe withdraws as a 2024 candidate, it will be because Pelosi and a few others decide his chances in November are nil. At that point, the only credible replacements are Newsom, JB Pritzker, and Kamala, with Newsom the most attractive choice. Pritzker is short, fat, and Jewish; Kamala is Kamala.

I think Pelosi would order that Kamala be kept on the ticket as vice president to satisfy African-Americans, with the potential that she could succeed to the presidency made safely remote due to Newsom's relative youth, and Newsom would become the nominee.

At least, that's how I see it now.

Seymour Hersh On The One-Year Anniversary Of The Nord Stream Sabotage

I woke up in the middle of last night suddenly thinking I hadn't really looked into the whole Nord Seam Pipeline issue at all, and over breakfast this morning, I discovered that Seymour Hersh, who last February had published a controversial piece on Nord Stream, has just updated his views. The February piece is behihnd a paywall, but as of now, his update is available for free. This summary of Hersh's February story says,

In his online article “How America took out the Nord Stream Pipeline,” Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh sees the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea as a collaboration between Norway and the United States. Based on the testimony of a whistleblower, Hersh situates the planting of C4 explosive devices by U.S. Navy Divers under the cover of the BALTOPS 22 international naval exercise in June; according to Hersh, the explosive devices were triggered by a Norwegian Navy P8, which dropped sonar buoys for this purpose on September 26th, 2022.

The summary concludes,

At its core, Seymour Hersh’s theory is fundamentally conceivable. However, there is a lack of evidence to support his thesis. Therefore, it cannot be ruled out that there were numerous other ways to place the explosive devices. months before detonation or even shortly before. Also, no warship need have been involved. . . . Russia remains suspicious because not all pipelines were affected by the attack and Russia can continue to pledge natural gas supplies, perhaps to disengage Germany from Ukraine’s circle of supporters.

Another question about the original Hersh report would be why the US would do this. Germany's economy has been shrinking this year, and one reason given has been the cutback in Russian natural gas supplies due to the Ukraine war. Germany is a key NATO ally, and for the US to damage its economy would be a sensitive issue. In fact, Donald Trump imposed sanctions on Russian companies building Nord Stream 2, something Biden reversed after he was elected.

But another question I've already asked here, without finding a good answer, has been why Amos Hochstein, an energy expert on Ukraine, has been a close Biden adviser since Joe was vice president, flying with him on the 2015 visit to Kyiv when Joe demanded the firing of Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma. As of a year ago, he'd returned to his job with Biden:

Hochstein, a special presidential coordinator at the State Department, has long been known as an influential behind-the-scenes player on Biden’s energy team. He’s attended at least a dozen one-on-one meetings with the president this year [2022], White House records show. And he’s become increasingly visible lately as the war in Ukraine and soaring gas prices have escalated the importance of Hochstein’s international energy portfolio within the administration.

The map of Russian pipelines to the EU at the top of this post, which I've copied from Hersh's piece on Substack today, gives some idea of where US priorities lie. I count four (five if you count Nord Stream as two) pipeline routes crossing the border into the EU from Russia. Only Nord Stream runs directly into Germany. But there's also a crossing from Belarus into Poland, and in particular another from Ukraine into Slovakia. I've got to assume this is why an energy wonk talks to Joe Biden all the time, and given Burisma's size in the Ukrainian energy industry, why Burisma would be interested in Joe and Joe interested in Burisma.

So let's get to the meat of what Hersh has to say today:

It is important to understand that no Russian gas was flowing to Germany through the Nord Stream pipelines when Joe Biden ordered them blown up last September 26. Nord Stream 1 had been supplying vast amounts of low-cost natural gas to Germany since 2011 and helped bolster Germany’s status as a manufacturing and industrial colossus. But it was shut down by Putin by the end of August 2022, as the Ukraine war was, at best, in a stalemate. Nord Stream 2 was completed in September 2021 but was blocked from delivering gas by the German government headed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz two days prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Given Russia’s vast stores of natural gas and oil, American presidents since John F. Kennedy have been alert to the potential weaponization of these natural resources for political purposes. That view remains dominant among Biden and his hawkish foreign policy advisers, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland, now the acting deputy to Blinken.

Sullivan convened a series of high-level national security meetings late in 2021, as Russia was building up its forces along the border of Ukraine, with an invasion seen as almost inevitable. The group, which included representatives from the CIA, was urged to come up with a proposal for action that could serve as a deterrent to Putin. The mission to destroy the pipelines was motivated by the White House’s determination to support Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Sullivan’s goal seemed clear. “The White House’s policy was to deter Russia from an attack,” the official told me. “The challenge it gave to the intelligence community was to come up with a way that was powerful enough to do that, and to make a strong statement of American capability.”

. . . “The administration put Nord Stream on the table because it was the only one we could access and it would be totally deniable,” the [anonymous intelligence] official said. “We solved the problem within a few weeks—by early January [2022] —and told the White House. Our assumption was that the president would use the threat against Nord Stream as a deterrent to avoid the war.”

In other words, the CIA had submitted a plan to blow up the pipelines even before Putin's February 2022 invasion, and the CIA had expected Biden/Blinken would use the threat to deter Putin from invading in the first place. And on February 7, 2022, two weeks before the invasion, Biden in a press conference with German Chancellor Scholz did publicly threaten to do something unspecific about the pipelines if Putin invaded:

“If Russia invades—that means tanks and troops crossing . . . the border of Ukraine again,” he said, “there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” Asked how he could do so since the pipeline was under Germany’s control, he said: “We will, I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.”

Scholz, asked the same question, said: “We are acting together. We are absolutely united, and we will not be taking different steps. We will do the same steps, and they will be very very hard to Russia, and they should understand.” The German leader was considered then—and now—by some members of the CIA team to be fully aware of the secret planning underway to destroy the pipelines.

But Putin invaded on February 24, and while the bombs were covertly planted that June, Joe never followed through on the threat. Hersh writes,

What I did not know then, but was told recently, was that after Biden’s extraordinary public threat to blow up Nord Stream 2, with Scholz standing next to him, the CIA planning group was told by the White House that there would be no immediate attack on the two pipelines, but the group should arrange to plant the necessary bombs and be ready to trigger them “on demand”—after the war began. “It was then that we”—the small planning group that was working in Oslo with the Royal Norwegian Navy and special services on the project—“understood that the attack on the pipelines was not a deterrent because as the war went on we never got the command.”

But Biden did order the pipelines destroyed (at least by Hersh's account), except he waited until September 26, 2022, long after it would have been a deterrent, and only as the war transitioned into stalemate.

“So the president struck a blow against the economy of Germany and Western Europe,” the official told me. “He could have done it in June and told Putin: We told you what we would do.” The White House’s silence and denials were, he said, “a betrayal of what we were doing. If you are going to do it, do it when it would have made a difference.”

So why did Joe give the order to blow up the pipelines, if that's what he did, when he did it, after it would have made a difference in the war? Hersh concludes.

The Biden administration blew up the pipelines but the action had little to do with winning or stopping the war in Ukraine. It resulted from fears in the White House that Germany would waver and turn on the flow of Russia gas—and that Germany and then NATO, for economic reasons, would fall under the sway of Russia and its extensive and inexpensive natural resources. And thus followed the ultimate fear: that America would lose its long-standing primacy in Western Europe.

On one hand, this view is consistent with the analysis from Col Markus Reisner of the Austrian military academy that he made on YouTube at the time, that one aim of Russian strategy was to leverage withholding Russian gas from Germany and the EU to freeze their population out during the winter and reduce their support for Ukraine. As it happened, this threat turned out to be overrated, but once the winter settled in, the war had stalemated in any case.

On the other hand, sabotaging the pipelines removed the Russian ability to turn them back on as part of their leverage. Instead, for the foreseeable future, it puit Ukraine back in a position of controlling the delivery of Russian gas to the EU -- and if Ukraine, even a Ukraine reduced in size, was a US vassal, this would put the US in control of a good portion of Russian gas going to the EU. We shouldn't ignore that Burisma, until its dissolution early this year, was a major player in Ukraine's natural gas industry.

It isn't clear who has taken over Burisma's role in that industry, but it's hard not to surmise that US players are directly affected and are affecting US policy in the Biden administration.

The US Oligarchs Move In

In last week's news:

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan announced Thursday that President Joe Biden would name Penny Pritzker, a billionaire heiress and former commerce secretary, to manage Ukraine’s economic recovery from the ongoing war.

Sullivan, a major proponent of the “Russia collusion” hoax against President Donald Trump, told reporters that Biden, meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky at the White House for the sixth time on Thursday, would “introduce a special representative for Ukraine’s economic recovery, Penny Pritzker, who will focus on engaging the private sector, partner countries, and Ukrainian counterparts to generate international investment in Ukraine and work with Ukraine to make the reforms necessary to improve Ukraine’s business climate.”

But I thought Joe Biden, as Obama's point man on Ukraine, had already cleaned up all the corruption there when he had Viktor Shokin fired huh? Well, I guess Penny will finish the job. At least, that was Joe's campaign slogan not long ago. Actualy, I think this move goes some way to explaining who's actually pulling Joe's strings. According to Wikipedia,

Penny Sue Pritzker (born May 2, 1959) is an American billionaire businesswoman and civic leader who served as the 38th United States secretary of commerce in the Obama administration from 2013 to 2017. She was confirmed by a Senate vote of 97–1.

Pritzker is a member of the prominent Pritzker family and was involved with the family business empire from a young age. She was eventually being appointed as one of three successors to her uncle, Jay Pritzker. . . . . She is on the board of Microsoft, and chair of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. As of October 2021, Forbes estimated her net worth at US$3.2 billion. In 2009, Forbes named Pritzker one of the 100 most powerful women in the world.

Before entering government service, Pritzker had been involved in many Chicago organizations, including the Chicago Board of Education, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and her own foundation, the Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation. Pritzker was an early supporter of Obama's presidential candidacy, having been a friend of the Obama family since their time in Chicago.

. . . She is the sister of J. B. Pritzker, the current governor of Illinois.

J B Pritzker, of course, is on the short list of potential replacements for Joe Biden, should Joe withdraw as a presidential candidate for 2024. Their cousin, James Nicholas Pritzker AKA Jennifer Natalya Pritzker, is the first transsexual billionaire, which should also give an insight into who's pulling that particular string on the puppet. The answer to the question of whether Obama is pulling Joe's strings is more like the Pritzkers have been pulling the strings on both, and they'll be pulling the strings on their replacements as well.

Also in last week's news:

The Clinton Foundation is back, and it’s headed to Ukraine.

Founded by former President Bill Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the foundation put its annual “Clinton Global Initiative” on a hiatus for a few years when their relevance ebbed and fundraising dried up, but their scandal-plagued charity has returned with a plan to provide humanitarian relief to warn-torn Ukraine, complete with a benediction from Pope Francis.

. . . [T]he largest single contributor to the Clinton Foundation in the 2010s was one Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch whose fortune came from making piping used in the energy industry. In 2008, Mr. Pinchuk made a five-year, $29 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative. The pledge was to fund a program to train future Ukrainian leaders and professionals “to modernize Ukraine,” according to the Clinton Foundation.

And as of this year, everyone's gotten on board again with "modernizing Ukraine", but it's an idea that dates back to Joe's time collecting baksheesh from Ukrainian oligarchs as point man under Obama.. How's that working out? Larry Johnson at Gateway Pundit quotes Seymour Hersh's Substack behind a paywall:

There are significant elements in the American intelligence community, relying on field reports and technical intelligence, who believe that the demoralized Ukraine army has given up on the possibility of overcoming the heavily mined three-tier Russian defense lines and taking the war to Crimea and the four oblasts seized and annexed by Russia. The reality is that Volodymyr Zelensky’s battered army no longer has any chance of a victory.

The war continues, I have been told by an official with access to current intelligence, because Zelensky insists that it must. There is no discussion in his headquarters or in the Biden White House of a ceasefire and no interest in talks that could lead to an end to the slaughter. “It’s all lies,” the official said, speaking of the Ukrainian claims of incremental progress in the offensive that has suffered staggering losses, while gaining ground in a few scattered areas that the Ukrainian military measures in meters per week.

Why does Zelensky insist that the war continue? I don't think it's unreasonable to surmise that it's in his personal interest, as well as the interest of the oligarchs with whom he's allied. I think Larry Johnson at the same link misses the point:

[T]he Biden policy is to keep the war going. Politics is the guiding principle governing the Biden team’s decisions on Ukraine. The American leaders are content, so far, to ignore the military situation on the ground in Ukraine as long as it does not create political problems in the United States. They don’t give a damn about dead and dying Ukrainian soldiers. As long as they are convinced that Ukraine’s attacks on Russia are weakening Putin, Biden and his malevolent advisors will continue to fan the flames of war.

The Pritzkers and their new allies the Clintons aren't stupid, which is why they're pulling Joe's strings instead of the other way around. I don't think it's coincidental that they've come into the picture just as there's increasing indication that the war is at permanent stalemate while Biden, Sullivan, and Blinken insist we're in it for as long as it takes, in other words, forever.

I continue to think there's a skim going on with the Ukraine war. I can't avoid the conclusion that if this is so, it must benefit Zelensky and his allies directly, but there have got to be kickbacks to keep things going to parties in the US as well, quite likely laundered via philanthropy and political donations. That was Jeffrey Epstein's game, for instance, and the game of the people behind FTX as well.

That's why the Clintons and the Pritzkers are in it. It's also got to be big enough to be worth their time. In an interview with Jesse Watters last week, Sen J D Vance has the same idea:

JESSE WATTERS: . . . So Senator, when you see this new news about the Clinton Global Initiative Ukraine Action Network, and we've got Airbnb, you know, we've got famous Hollywood actors now involved, and the World Bank is kind of laundering American taxpayers through the Clintons into Ukraine, it could be a noble cause, yes, but it also seems a little suspicious, considering what the Clintons had been known for their entire career. Do you agree?

SEN. J.D. VANCE: Oh, I certainly agree, Jesse. I really guess that five years from now, we’re going to find out that between the Clintons and a number of American private equity firms and other hyper-global corporations that, you’re going to find a lot of people have gotten rich from this,. And it's really sad and it is really despicable because of course, the Ukrainians didn’t invite the war on themselves.

The indictment of Sen Menendez is just a distraction from the much bigger story.

Why Menendez? Why Now?

The Menendez story has disappared from the headlines after only a day, for reasons that may be related to what I talked about in yesterdays's post -- his case is a little too similar to Joe's, and maybe even related to it, something the Justice Department maybe should have reflected on before they made the indictment public. Just about the only insightful take from anyone during the story's brief moment in the news cycle was from Jesse Watters Friday night, when he asked, "Why now?"

So the question is, why was the Biden administration taking down Menendez at all, and why now? Because the FBI raided Menendez's house last year. Menendez has been walking around Washington knowing Biden's agents have the stack of his gold bars ready to drop at any minute. God, Biden must have been squeezing Bob.

The photo at the top of this post shows Menendez and his trophy wife Nadine in May 2022, just before the FBI searched his house for the cash and gold bars, which took place in June. The G-men tossed Mar-a-Lago just two months later, in August, but they released photos of alleged classified document folders the next day. Why did they keep the Menendez raid quiet for over a year?

On one hand, poor Sen Menendez outdoes trashy even for New Jersey (I say this as a Jersey boy myself). I think one explanation for "why Menendez" is that Biden thinks Menendez is a vulgarian even by Joe's own standards, and he gives graft a bad name. At least Joe's second wife has a doctorate, tasteful hair, and she doesn't flaunt her boobs the way Nadine does.

So that may go some distance to explain "Why Menendez?" Menendez doesn't know how to play the game as well as Joe, and Caesar is rubbing it in his face. But another factor in Menendez's story is that Menendez sold himself remarkably cheap. The big thing that struck me about the pictures of the cash in envelopes and gold bars was that Menendez couldn't spend any of it.

Yeah, he could take a bunch of twenties, buy dinner with them, and not get noticed, but we're talking in the range of half a million dollars, and you can't deposit that in a bank, and you can't spend it all at once, without setting off alarms. The same with gold bars. You can't turn a gold bar into something spendable without having to report it to the IRS. So the cash stayed in envelopes with the gold bars in Menendez's closet, because there was nothing else he could do with it.

Or more accurately, Menendez couldn't figure out how to launder it. He was too much of a small-timer, in other words. They don't make New Jersey jokes for nothing. The same applies to the $60,000 Mercedes. The plebs can buy an F-150 for that amount. Why did Menendez even waste his time with that? Some Kazakh oligarchs bought Hunter a Porsche for $142,300, and that was just a lagniappe. Menendez simply made it easy, and Joe squashed him like a bug because he could.

The current estimate from informed observers of the Biden family boodle is in the range of $20-50 million, but for a dozen people with expensive tastes over a period of decades, I think this will turn out to be low. To launder that much money took some level of expertise from Hunter and his associates, although let's remember that Joe was in Menendez's position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as early as 2001, when Hunter was just a junior lobbyist.

Joe had to have been grafting at a higher level than Menendez even then. Biden Inc has been in business since Hunter was a schoolboy, and we have a great deal to learn.

Why now? Jesse Watters advances the theory that Menendez, corrupt as he is, nevertheless was in favor of policies endorsed by Venezuelans victimized by the regime there, as well as his fellow Cubans, and this went against Biden's handlers and their priorities. But this was nothing new; this piece in Politico from 2021 points out that as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Menendez has always been a rival center of power. It was probably just as much to Joe's benefit to go on squeezing Bob indefinitely. If Joe knocks Menendez out of the running permanently, he has to deal with an unpredictable new state of affairs.

It may be that even if the Republican efforts to expose the Biden Inc graft turn out to be little more than pinpricks, they're pinpricks on Joe's massively inflated self-esteem. Joe, after all, is Caesar. Unfortunately, even Caesar is having trouble prevailing against Trump, and so far, four indictments have done nothing but increase Trump's standing in the polls, while none of them has made the Republican congressional inquiries go away.

So I'm inclined to think poor Bob Menendez, a small-time grafter from New Jersey who couldn't even figure out how to spend his skim, was a handy target of opportunity that Joe could squash when he'd have much preferred to have been able to squash someone bigger. It's hard not to feel some sympathy for Menendez as a little guy. He says he'll fight back, and I wish him luck.

What Are They Thinking?

Only days before the Robert Menendez indictment, California Gov Newsom sought to downplay the Hunter Biden scandal by saying it was nothing new:

Newsom made the remarks during an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash when asked about Republicans launching an impeachment inquiry into the president.

“Republicans have shown that Hunter Biden, he tried to leverage his father’s name and that the president allegedly, before he was president, joined phone calls that Hunter Biden’s business associates were on,” Bash said. “Do you see anything inappropriate there?”

“I don’t know enough about the details of that. I mean, I’ve seen a little of that,” Newsom claimed. “If that’s the new criteria, there are a lot of folks in a lot of industries, not just in politics, where people have family members and relationships and they’re trying to parlay and get a little influence and benefit in that respect. That’s hardly unique. I don’t love that any more than you love it or other people I imagine love that.”

Newsom should know, since he himself is related to Nancy Pelosi by marriage. But Sen Menendez's indictment just underscores how common "influence peddling" is, especially since Sen Menendez was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (he had to resign as chair, but not as senator, following his indictment), a post Joe Biden also held from 2001 to 2003. The level of influence this position gives to its occupants is indicated by the statement of the prosecutors:

Menendez is accused of using “his power and influence, including his leadership role on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to benefit the government of Egypt in various ways,” said the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, during a press conference on Friday.

This is the same US Justice Department that has proven amenable to all sorts of influence, not just from Joe, but from Menendez himself. According to the prosecutors,

[Fred] Daibes, a real estate developer, gave Menendez gold bars and cash after Menendez sought to influence a federal criminal case in New Jersey against Daibes for obtaining loans under false pretenses, federal prosecutors in Manhattan said. Daibes pleaded guilty and received a probationary sentence.

So if you know the right people, you can plead guilty to federal charges and get probation. Where have we heard that before? But the Biden and Menendez cases aren't just parallel, they seem to have some connections: The UK Daily Mail has previously published a memo found on Hunter's laptop in which Hunter and Eric Schwerin discuss coordinating with Menendez to hold a 2010 event at the vice president's official residence in return for access to key Spanish finincial figures. Per the Daily Mail,

[W]hen an aide to Senator Robert Menendez requested VP Biden host the U.S.-Spain Council's 2010 annual meeting at his official Naval Observatory residence in Washington DC, they contacted Schwerin rather than Joe's White House office.

Hunter and Schwerin then privately discussed the potential to ingratiate themselves with 'CEOs of the major banks' if they helped arrange the request.

So I'm scratching my head. The federal prosecutors, who as we've seen are fully capable of slow-walking investigations if it's convenient for the right people, have indicted Menendez, who is nothing if not a frequent flyer in bribery and corruption cases, right at a time when bribery and corruption allegations have surfaced against Joe Biden, who coincidentally has spent his career in precisely the same Senate positions of power as Menendez. Beyond that, one of the allegations in the indictment is that Menendez got kickbacks from military aid to Egypt, which he was in a position to influence:

At all times relevant to this Indictment, MENENDEZ held a leadership position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (the “SFRC”), first as the Ranking Member and then the Chairman, and therefore possessed influence over, among other things, the Executive Branch’s decisions to provide foreign military sales, foreign military financing, and other aid or support to or for the benefit of the Government of Egypt.

. . . [T]he State Department would typically not proceed with a transfer of foreign military financing grant money to Egypt’s bank account (located at all relevant times in Manhattan), or with a foreign military sale to Egypt, while the Chairman or the Ranking Member of the SFRC had not signed off on, and was maintaining a “hold” on, such a transfer or sale. As a result, at all times relevant to the Indictment, ROBERT MENENDEZ, the defendant, as the Chairman or the Ranking Member of the SFRC, possessed substantial influence over foreign military sales and foreign military financing to Egypt.

. . . in or about May 2018, HANA hosted another dinner at a high-end restaurant with MENENDEZ, during which MENENDEZ disclosed to HANA nonpublic information about the United States’s provision of military aid to Egypt. Shortly after the dinner, HANA texted Egyptian Official-1, “The ban on small arms and ammunition to Egypt has been lifted. That means sales can begin. That will include sniper rifles among other articles.”

In other words, the Menendez indictment contains allegations of circumstancrs and methods that are remarkably similar to those that have emerged related to Joe Biden's dealings with Ukraine. Ukraine, like Egypt, is a major recipient of US economic and military aid. The aid is subject to numerous approvals and potential holds, which can be lifted by the right people in the right positions. In the case of Menendez, it's alleged that in exchange for bribes, Menendez, who had the power to get holds lifted, in fact did this.

How does this differ from the case of Joe, who was in a position to threaten a hold on Ukrainian loan guarantees in December 2015 and by his own account demanded the firing of Viktor Shokin to have the hold lifted? Since 2015, Joe has been in a position to influence whether or not Ukraine gets over $100 billion in military aid. Given the parallel circumstances and the parallel opportunities for corruption from two guys who've enriched themselves throughout their political careers, why shouldn't we be suspicious that the same sort of back channel deals that enriched Menendez are also taking place with Ukraine aid and Joe?

So far, nobody at either the legacy media or Conservative Inc has noticed these parallels, but this all reinforces for me the idea that we need to start looking at the Milo Minderbinder theory of the Russo-Ukraine War, that this is being pursued in large part because powerful people, including Joe Biden, are getting kickbacks from a multibillion-dollar skim off economic and military aid that they're promoting and approving.

All the Menendez indictment is doing for now is enabling the possibility that investigators will look into this. Why on earth did Merrick Garland approve this move? Is the guy deeper than he looks, or what?

Joe Goes To New York

Joe had several enagements in New York over the past week, all of which tend to confirm the estimates I've made here of his character all along. Let's just start with the episode where he walked off a stage where he'd appeared with Brazil's President Lula at the UN:

Joe Biden has seemingly wandered off the UN stage without shaking hands with Brazil's Lula at the end of a joint speech.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 77, looked visibly irritated after the two leaders shared a stage to speak about their initiative to improve workers' rights in each country.

Throughout the presentation by Joe, Lula, and the Director of the International Labor Organization, Joe seemed to be fidgety and impatient. By the end, his gestures and body language indicated that whether or not all the ceremonial niceties had been fully observed, Joe was done. He gave a flippant farewell salute to the audience -- and not to either of his fellow speakers on the stage -- turned, and purposefully walked off. Unlike the Daily Mail in the link, I wouldn't characterize it as "wandering" -- he saw the exit and went straight for it.

I put this directly in the context of the September 5 episode, which I covered in this post, when Joe walked straight out of a ceremony in which he awarded the Medal of Honor to a Viet Nam War helicopter pilot. He placed the medal around the recipient's neck and then, without standing on formality, simply walked out of the room. As I said in that post,

I don't think this was a result of Joe being unaware of his surroundings or even the requirements of ceremonial decorum. I think he was either drunk or under the influence of prescription drugs used to excess, he felt like walking out, and he could, because Joe is Caesar.

I think it's fairly plain that Joe generally feels he can get away with offending other heads of state, as he is reported to have done on July 18:

President Joe Biden seemingly fell asleep today while sputtering gibberish during a high-level meeting with the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog.

I noted at the time,

[I]t's indisputable that Herzog was there as a supplicant, and Biden's delivery and overall demeanor brutally reinforced this. Biden, after all, is the most powerful man in the world, he's fully aware of it, and dealing with supplicants, especially an Isreali supplicant, is an annoyance. His handlers have already made all the policy decisions, he's already signed whatever they've told him to sign, and his presence in the Oval Office is entirely pro forma. Get it over with, it's a big waste of time.

I think the same attitude is clear in the episode with Lula at the UN, this is a big waste of my time, it's gone on too long already, I'm done. But troubling as the meeting with Herzog was in July, his encounter with Prime Minister Netanyahu this past Wednesday goes farther:

At the start, Joe refers to talks about the possibility of negotiating with the Saudis and says, "I think we look at each other and kinda, 'Who's been drinking what?'"

Netanyahu replies, "Good Irish whiskey!"

Joe, somewhat nonplussed, responds, "Good Irish whiskey -- that's the reason I've never had a drink!"

As I've said here, I think the legend that Joe's never had a drink is up there with all the other lies he routinely tells about himself, that he drove an 18-wheeler, that he was arrested during the Civil Rights movement, that he went to the Naval Academy, or that he taught political theory at Penn. The evidence we have, which was amply on display at various speeches he gave in New York, is that his speech patterns are often (though tellingly, not always) indicative of intoxication.

Although both Netanyahu and Biden spoke of their friendship in the clip above, there's been tension in their relationship:

At the end of March, President Joe Biden landed a verbal body blow against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden gave a forthright and unequivocal “no” to a question whether he would be hosting Netanyahu at the White House. “Not in the near term,” the president declared.

It has become almost a norm that newly elected Israeli prime ministers visit Washington during the first months of their tenure. That no date had been announced for Netanyahu was already raising eyebrows, alluding to problems in the relationship. But a very public uninvitation is quite another matter, a unique diplomatic occurrence among friends and allies.

Was this just Biden being Biden? Was he shooting from the hip without the requisite consideration?

My sense of the "good Irish whiskey" exchange was a dig back from Netanyahu, which I would read as an indication that the Mossad is fully aware that Joe is usually drunk, and Bibi is letting Joe know it. Joe replies with a nervous laugh; moments later, as Bibi speaks of friendship, Joe crosses himself, which I take in context to mean that Joe doesn't agree, and indeed, he means it as a sub rosa anti-Semitic gesture, much as he's used "God save the Queen" in other contexts to imply "balderdash".

Joe does all this stuff, the walking out, the fidgets, the appearance of falling asleep, the offensively cryptic gestures and remarks, because he can. He's Caesar, he can get away with this stuff, which includes acting like a sophomoric entitled frat boy as he chooses, which is most of the time.

What interests me most, though, is that he can turn some of this off. This is what I noted about his July 10 presser in Hanoi:

[T]he one feature that was missing in Hanoi was the markers of intoxicated speech, stammering, stuttering, tripping over words, sudden extra care in enunciation, sudden slowing, and slurring. His enunciation was clear, and his pace, if slow, was consistent, without stuttering or hypercorrection. He was clearly tired, which led some observers to question whether he was up to the job, but he wasn't talking as though his BAC was somewhere north of the legal limit.

My sense of things for Joe in New York was that unlike in Hanoi, Joe didn't think anything he had to do in New York was so important that he had to stay sober. Because when he really needs to stay sober, as in his 2020 debates with Trump. he can. In New York, he didn't. But his problem isn't senility. His problem is he's Caesar.

President Zelensky, Meet Bud Light!

I'm intrigued by the controversy surrounding Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, most recently characterized as a 46-year-old man from Florida named Mike, because it raises several questions about our involvement in Ukraine.

Sen J D Vance raised the right issues over how Ashton-Cirillo wound up in the news:

Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance wrote this week to top Biden administration officials demanding information on the American citizen after Ashton-Cirillo posted a video on social media declaring that Ukraine was planning to “hunt down” alleged Russian propagandists.

The letter itself reads in part,

I’ve seen claims this individual is an American, a former intelligence operative in the United States, and an employee of the Ukrainian government. Others have argued Ashton-Cirillo is pulling an elaborate prank.

. . . Is this individual an American citizen? Did they ever serve, in any capacity, in American intelligence services?

Sen Vance's questions open the door to what I think is perfectly reasonable surmise: how did it come about that this American guy in a wig and fake boobs became an official spokestrans for the Ukrainian military? Did he have help? Going back to the Wikipedia entry I linked on Tuesday, Ashton-Cirillo simply doesn't seem to have the resources to fly around the globe at whim, which appears to be part of his background:

According to her byline with The Nevada Independent, she has lived in Las Vegas since 2004; according to the Nevada Current she "established residency [there] in 2016 to be closer to" her ex-wife and child. In this phase of her life, she worked as a real estate analyst, a poker player, and the communications director at a healthcare company.

. . . In 2015, before her gender transition, Ashton-Cirillo went to Syrian refugee camps in Turkey to report on the refugee crisis, having been afraid to enter Syria itself.

. . . Ashton-Cirillo said that she began to "hate Russia" after visiting museums in the Baltic States while she was writing a novel, Fair. Right. Just., which she self-published in 2017. When Russia invaded Ukraine in full in February 2022, she traveled to Ukraine with plans to write a book on both the resulting refugee crisis and her previous experience with the Syrian refugee crisis.

Beginning about 2018, he underwent gender transition, including gender-affirming surgery. According to this site, "The cost of medical treatments can add up to more than $100,000, and they’re often not covered by health insurance." The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health says,

In the first five years, the researchers found, providing health care for transgender people cost between $34,000 and $43,000 per year of quality of life; after 10 years, the cost dropped to between $7,000 and $10,000 per year of quality of life.

Add to this the cost of self-publishing his various books and the opportunity cost of travel -- not only does he pay for air fare, food, and lodging, but he isn't getting an income while he's in Syria, the Baltics, and Ukraine. How is he paying for all this? And who vouches for him? He must have handlers. Who are they? This puff piece from last May in the Washington Blade unintentionally raises these questions:

The Blade first spoke with Ashton-Cirillo last December while she was in D.C. to speak with lawmakers on behalf of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry about the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s medical needs.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with President Joe Biden and spoke to a joint session of Congress less than three weeks after the interview.

Ashton-Cirillo early last month became a junior sergeant. She returned to D.C. on May 15.

Ashton-Cirillo met with U.S. Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) and Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) and aides for U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) and U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) before she left the nation’s capital on May 19. Ashton-Cirillo also spoke to journalists from the Global South at the National Press Club and met with José Andrés, whose World Central Kitchen continues to operate in Ukraine, and Amnesty International representatives.

Somebody scheduled all those meetings and convinced all those journalists and politicians he was worth their time. Who was behind this? What was the agenda? And Sarah/Mike seems to fly back and forth from Ukraine to Washington pretty frequently -- even if it's on discount flights, I doubt if the pay of a Ukrainian junior sergeant covers it.

But let's ask another set of questions, that Sen Vance has also brought up:

[T]he U.S. State Department confirmed that the American government is aware that a citizen journalist, known as Gonzalo Lira, is currently in prison in Ukraine. Lira has reportedly been accused by the Ukrainians of having “had a criminal intent aimed at the manufacture, distribution materials containing justification, recognition as legitimate, denial of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, which began in 2014, as well as justification, recognition as legitimate of the temporary occupation of part of Ukraine territory.”

Ashton-Cirillo has publicly admitted to being involved in the prosecution of Lira, who is a dual citizen of the United States and Chile. Last week, the transgender spokesperson claimed to have met with Lira while giving testimony in the case, claiming that the YouTuber is in good mental and physical health. Lira has previously claimed to have been tortured and extorted while in prison after being arrested initially in May.

So Ashton-Cirillo has admitted to some role in trhe prosecution of Gonzalo Lira -- but wait a moment. Isn't he just a combat medic and a junior sergeant, or something like that? What's he doing with the organs of Ukrainian state security and their gulag? Here's what we currently know about Gonzalo Lira:

The State Department has confirmed that American citizen Gonzalo Lira is being held in a Ukrainian prison over charges related to his speech and views on the war in Ukraine.

Lira is a popular YouTuber and journalist who was arrested by the Ukrainian Security Services (SBU) in May for creating content that was critical of the Ukrainian government and explaining how the Russia-Ukraine war was provoked. He was charged over claims that he “justified the Russian invasion.”

. . . “We are aware of the detention of Mr. Lira in Ukraine. We take our role in assisting US citizens abroad seriously and are providing all appropriate assistance,” a State Department spokesperson told Breitbart News on Tuesday.

“We are monitoring the situation but have no further comment at this time. We reiterate our message that US citizens should not travel to Ukraine due to the active armed conflict,” the spokesperson added.

So the State Department is telling US citizens not to travel to Ukraine, but it's hard to avoid thinking that Sarah/Mike is there under some sort of tacit understanding that this is OK, and indeed, to mess around with other US citizens there, to the point of having them sent to the gulag for wrongthink. In any case, yesterday, as soon as the case hit the news via Sen Vance,

The Ukrainian military has announced that it has suspended controversial transgender spokesperson Sarah Ashton-Cirillo for allegedly making unapproved statements on social media; however, there have been no updates from the Ukrainians or the Biden administration on the fate of an American citizen journalist currently imprisoned in Ukraine.

Following a row sparked by inquiries initiated by Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), as reported by Breitbart News, the Command of the Territorial Defense Forces (TDF) of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) announced on Wednesday that Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, an American transgender individual, has been suspended from the role of spokesperson.

So, what's Sarah/Mike's current role? Is he going to stay in Ukraine? Doing what? On whose dime? Is he still in the Ukrainian armed forces as a combat medic or whatever despite his suspension as spokestrans? If not, when will he return to the US? As what? On whose dime?

Sarah/Mike is an expensive project. Somebody's paying for it. I like Sen Vance's initiative, I hope he keeps it up, because I think we have a great deal more to learn.

But another problem is that Mike Ashton-Cirillo could well become Ukraine's Dylan Mulvaney, the public face of the whole ongoing fiasco. I think President Zelensky belatedly woke up to this yesterday.

The Michelle Obama Option

The idea of running Michelle Obama for president isn't new, but Ted Cruz gave it a different twist as a solution to the Joe-and-Kamala conundrum:

“Here’s the scenario that I think is perhaps the most likely and most dangerous,” Cruz said on his “Verdict with Ted Cruz” podcast. “In August of 2024, the Democrat kingmakers jettison Joe Biden and parachute in Michelle Obama.”

Cruz explained that by running Michelle Obama as the party’s candidate, the Democrats could “avoid the problems” of having to choose a candidate among political figures like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Vice President Kamala Harris and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Sen Cruz sees this as effectively a dropping of the charade and an acknmowledgement that Barack has been pulling the strings all along:

“Barack Obama is already running the Biden administration,” Cruz said. “I think he is already the puppet master, behind this Biden White House, I don’t think Joe Biden is the decision maker. And so, when I see the media turning on Joe Biden right now, I think the odds of Michelle Obama parachuting in in August of 2024 have risen dramatically.”

I've posted here that I don't think Barack is the puppet master in the first place. But I also think the idea that putting Barack and Michelle back in the White House with Barack again running the show would be a reprise of the golden age -- or at least, it could be pitched as that -- is just as much a mistake.

I always sensed background vibes in the Obama years that the two didn't get along, and if nothing else, they have to be praised for maintaining the facade that they did for eight difficult years. And as of 2019, things had only gotten worse:

Michelle and Barack Obama are ferociously feuding while living separate lives, and pals fear the bubbling bad blood will boil over into an ugly, scandal scarred divorce!

. . . Currently, Barack jets around the globe on big-money speaking gigs from a base in Washington, D.C., while Michelle, 55, rented a sprawling home in the Hollywood Hills, where she’s expanding her blooming showbiz career and schmoozing with big A-listers Beyoncé, Jay-Z and the Clooneys.

Their separate careers and problems with wild daughters Malia, 21, and Sasha, 18, have torn apart their family life, insiders dish.

Apparently this was the case even while they were in the White House, per this report from 2013:

Michelle Obama has had enough. According to a bombshell new report, the First Lady and Barack Obama are sleeping in separate White House bedrooms. Michelle is also preparing to boot her hubby of 21 years out of their ritzy Chicago home - and seriously discussing divorce.

“The smart money says the marriage is doomed,” a source told the National Enquirer. “Barack and Michelle have had a rocky go for years and mainly stayed together for their daughters and his political career. “But now Michelle is mad AS hell. She feels violated in front of the whole world, and screamed at him, ‘I’ve had enough.’ “She’s met with divorce lawyers and told Barack that she wants a life apart from him. “Michelle will stay in the White House for the rest of Barack’s term for appearances’ sake, but she made it clear they’ll be leading separate lives.

“She’s moving into one of the vacant bedrooms in the family’s private living quarters, and she’s preparing to move his clothes and personal things out of their million-dollar house in Chicago.”

To make a return to the White House by the two as a couple, with Michelle a ventriloquist's dummy on Barack's lap, a remotely credible enterprise would require that the two return to the old charade of domestic bliss. I can't imagine either wants to do this, when they appear to be doing perfectly well individually outside the public eye.

But let's go back to the problem that Hillary first illustrated, but so far, nobody's looked at very closely. On one hand, Hillary was never a charismatic bombshell with working-class appeal like Eva Peron, but on the other, even though Hillary was frumpy, she didn't have the gravitas of Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, or Angela Merkel. In fact, it didn't help her at all that almost any woman besides Hillary could clearly turn Bill's crank better than Hillary could.

In fact, there's the pesky subtext that won't go away that Barack is gay. And let's not forget that by late in the Obama era, YouTubers were calling Michelle "Mike". This is the unspoken problem of Bud Light, that there are subtle signals that resonate in the popular subconscious that can attach themselves to brands without warning: suddenly, Bud Light became gay beer, and nobody who wasn't openly gay wanted to be seen drinking it.

By the same token, Michelle is seen among the same cis male population as unsexy in a masculine sort of way, such that anyone married to her would probably prefer more feminine company, even if they're guys. Michelle as president is so ugly, she'll make all us guys turn gay. Neither Hillary nor Michelle is credible in a conventional spousal role, nor as a symbolic national spouse, even though each tries to seem as though she is, which leads to an overall impression of phoniness.

So I don't think political mechanics would make Michelle electable, especially in the unspoken context that anyone married to her would have to be gay. But this ignores Sen Cruz's implication that the Democrats have to get past the Kamala problem somehow: Biden has announced that Kamala is staying on the ticket, she's his designated successor, and to replace her with a white candidate, even a white female, would lose the party black women voters and surely the general election. Thus Michelle Obama, which nevertheless won't work.

So far, that view is probably correct. The only way it could be contradicted would be to have a Kennedy type who's so charismatic that nobody notices there's no black on the ticket. Robert Kennedy Jr so far doesn't quite qualify. As this piece in Slate puts it, The Cake Is Baked. Deal With It.

[T]here are no magic wands in politics—only unappealing options and constraints imposed by choices made in the past, what social scientists call “path dependence.” The moment Biden selected Harris as his partner in 2020, he all but ensured that she would be more or less irreplaceable.

. . . Rather than worrying about what Harris might do in 2028, Democrats would do well to imagine what she and her team might do if they get thrown under the bus, especially if they feel like they are taking the fall for the failings of the president himself. If you think cutting memoirs from random Cabinet secretaries are bad, imagine the tea that a spurned Harris and her team might spill about the inner workings of the Biden administration. There are probably more embarrassing stories to share than bitey German Shepherds and interminable slide shows over lunch.

So quit it: Vice President Harris isn’t going anywhere.

Let's recall as well that Sen Cruz is a Republican. If he's saying nominating Michelle is a "dangerous" option, maybe we should ask if he's trying to goad the Democrats into picking it.

Things Aren't Going Well In Ukraine

The biological male in the photo above is Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, according to Wikipedia,

an American former journalist serving as a spokesperson for Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces, in which she is a junior sergeant. . . . She arrived in Ukraine in March 2022, shortly after the full-scale Russian invasion, and has variously served as a war correspondent, a representative in aid negotiations, a civilian analyst with the Ministry of Defense, and a combat medic.

. . . Starting in March 2022, Ashton-Cirillo reported on the Russian invasion of Ukraine from Kharkiv, Ukraine, primarily for LGBTQ Nation, often writing about the war's effect on LGBTQ people. A trans woman, she is thought to have been the first openly transgender war correspondent.

The Wikipedia entry lists various official and quasi-official positions she's held in Ukraine:

In Kharkiv, she worked closely with the Ukrainian military and police, and was appointed by the mayor of Zolochiv, Kharkiv Oblast, as a representative to advocate with aid groups. After witnessing and reporting on the October 2022 Kyiv missile strikes—including posting a controversial widely shared video that showed a dead body—she resigned from LGBTQ Nation to become a combat medic in Ukraine's Noman Çelebicihan Battalion, a Crimean Tatar unit. In February 2023, she was wounded by Russian shelling while serving on the front lines in the Donbas with the 209th Battalion of the 113th Kharkiv Defense Brigade. She was subsequently assigned to the Territorial Defense Forces, and became one of its English-language spokespeople in August 2023.

So, whom are they trying to kid? Most Ukrainians belong to Orthodox Christian denominations, which are even less friendly to transsexualism than Roman Catholics or Protestant Evangelicals. A US national, she can't be there to appeal to Ukrainians and rally them to the cause. Yet it appears that she functions as some type of official Englsih-language spokesperson-cum-pinup trans for the Ukrainian armed forces. I doubt if many Ukrainians in or out of their army give her the time of day. She's there to speak English and appeal to a US audience, in particular a US audience aligned with the trans agenda.

Her newfound prominence in US media comes in the context of growing skepticism about the war, for instance in this op-ed in Newsweek:

Despite great hopes for a rapid success, Ukraine's months-in-the-making offensive has sputtered from the outset. That shouldn't have surprised anyone in the White House. On April 5, two months before the start of the offensive, I wrote that "Zelensky's troops—with little to no air power and a dearth in artillery ammunition—could suffer egregious casualties while gaining little."

. . . Whereas Ukraine was reported to have lost 17,500 troops in the first year of the war, it is presently assessed to have lost a breathtakingly high 50,000 additional deaths, for a total of 70,000 dead and 120,000 wounded.

. . . Rather than repeating over the next year and a half what has already not worked—potentially costing Ukraine yet additional hundreds of thousands of losses—it's time to try something that has a chance to succeed. In other words, it's time to acknowledge objective reality and employ policies that can work.

At the official level, this is unlikely to happen, and what we're seeing is an effort by President Zelensky not to focus on battlefield success, but to appeal to a narrow US audience that will continue sending him taxpayer money at the current level. Thus there's an English-language spokesperson who's meant to appeal to the Biden-aligned queer community as informed support for Ukraine's prospects falls away.

Another part of Zelensky's strategy appears to be to acknowledge the obvious, which is that Ukrainian corruption, credibly alleged to be worse than Russia's or Mexico's, is diverting US aid. In response, he's rounding up the usual suspects. Two weeks ago, he fired his defense minister. Oleksii Reznikov:

Although Reznikov has yet to be tied with any of the corruption scandals personally, the Times went on to admit that the resignation has “elevated the issue to the highest level of Ukrainian politics”. Unnamed Ukrainian officials even told the paper that some funds intended for military contracts “failed to produce weaponry or ammunition and that some money has vanished,” while claiming that the issue was merely confined to the early days of the war.

Just yesterday, he fired at least six of Reznikov's deputies as well:

Deputy defense ministers including Hanna Maliar, Vitalii Deyneha and Denys Sharapov, as well as the state secretary of the Ministry of Defense, Kostiantyn Vashchenko, were fired, according to the Telegram account of Taras Melnychuk, permanent representative of the Cabinet of Ministers.

Melnychuk provided no explanation of the firings, but the government has been investigating accusations of corruption in the military related to purchasing equipment.

It's worth noting that throughout history, despots tolerate corruption as a useful tool -- their vassals can steal as long as it's convenient to let them do it. As soon as it's more useful to remove them, they'll be fired (or worse) for the corruption they've always practiced -- but the system functions the same as ever, the point isn't to cure the corruption, the point is to remove whomever isn't convenient at a particular time.

What we aren't seeing is any change in US policy. Instead, we're seeing a gradual acknowledgement in the NATO establishment that they're pulling a bait-and-switch:

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg warned Sunday that the West must make preparations for a “long war in Ukraine,” and declaring that there is “no doubt” Ukraine will eventually join the American-led military alliance.

In an interview with the German Funke media group, the Norwegian politician threw cold water on the notion of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine coming to an end any time soon.

Let's recall that the 2022 line on Ukraine, first from Zelensky and quickly echoed in the West, was that Ukraine's heroic resistance to the Russian invasion would lead to Putin's quick collapse, at the minimal cost of some Ukrainian lives and stockpiles of obsolescent Warsaw Pact weapons held in NATO reserves. A year later, we're looking at a "long war" using tactics that have proven ineffective, funded largely by the US taxpayer in increments of $20 billion here, $30 billion there, with no end in sight.

On the other hand, the Ukrainian people have themselves tired of empty heroics. Larry Johnson at Gateway Pundit quotes the account of a Polish volunteer in Ukraine:

“There are no willing ones. They are looking for them on the streets. In Lviv there are “round-ups”, people are taken from construction sites, from bars. Recently I witnessed such a situation at the bus station in Lvov. Five policemen stood and checked everyone who wanted to leave Lvov.

Eight people were detained in this way. Many reasons for the current situation with mobilization originate in Bakhmut. It was such a plum, such a meat grinder that there was no one left to fight”.

This brings me to the surmise I've had for a while: there's a skim going on in Ukraine. That's just in the news. It's likely in the multibillions, and firing half a dozen bureaucrats won't fix it -- it's not meant to be fixed. The skim will continue as long as multibillions in US aid continues. The fighting itself is increasingly just a charade to justify and prolong the skim. But let's return to Milo Minderbinder, who played both sides of World War II for his own benefit in Catch-22: some of that skim is finding its way back to the US. That's got to be why there's no prospect of any serious change in policy at our end.

Who's getting the kickbacks over here from that Ukrainian skim?