In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Just to inject a note of realism here, I want to suggest a correction to a Breitbart story : Hunter Biden is reportedly weighing the creation of a legal defense fund to cover the charges of his high-powered attorneys, which experts estimate to cost at least $100,000 per month. . . . The attorneys are a formidable front against congressional staffers and public servants. Hunter’s lawyers are lead attorney Kevin Morris, a high-profile entertainment lawyer, and Abbe Lowell, who represents high-profile individuals engulfed in political scandals, along with Chris Clark and Joshua A. Levy. These are all partner-level lawyers, with Abbe Lowell and Joshua A Levy in particular having established track records of getting crooked politicians like Bill Clinton and Bob Menendez out of very hot water with dismissals, acquittals, and hung juries. They don't come cheap. This story says , "Nationally, the average rate billed by partners last year stood at $728 per hour. . . according...

The divorce between Hunter Biden and his first wife, Kathleen Buhle, has lready been the subject of supposed tell-all books from both parties, but their accounts are both heavily sanitized and leave out more than they reveal. For instance, this Vanity Fair story on Kathleen's book, If We Break , quotes this on Hunter's alcoholism and addiction: Buhle shares that she first began noticing Hunter's drinking might be a problem around 2001 after the birth of their second child when he took a job as a partner at a lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. which led to a lot of late nights and long periods away from their home in Delaware. “I watched his drinking spiral from social to problematic,” she writes. “Watching how much he could consume scared me…For the first time, I didn’t trust my husband.” By the fall of 2003, Hunter entered rehab for the first time and, when he returned, the author says their marriage “felt stronger than ever.” But after seven years of sobriety, Hunter r...

The current received narrative of the Biden family as it applies to Hunter's brother Beau is to call for a moment of silence over his death from brain cancer in May 2015 and then, in the spirit of nil nisi bonum . move on. This leaves an impression, intentional or not, that Beau of fond but tragic memory was the Good Son, while the prodigal Hunter, who is still among us, is the Bad Son. It's true that we know much less about Beau and his life as a Biden, but the idea of a Good Son versus a Bad Son strikes me as too reminiscent of dysfunctional family dynamics, and if we know anything about the Bidens, they're dysfunctional. The whole issue of Beau's widow Hallie and her affair with Hunter after Beau's death (if that in fact is when it started) throws the Good Son-Bad Son narrative under a shadow of uncertainty. The version approved by the Biden family, insofar as it exists, appears in People magazine on April 6, 2021 : In a new interview with CBS Sunday Mo...

I'm old enough to remember 1972 (I was young enough to support McGovern, but apparently, though of age, I didn't bother to vote for him, because I think my first vote in a presidential election was for Gerald Ford). I also remember the orchestrated media sob session when the newly elected Sen Biden from Delaware lost his wife and daughter in an auto accident that December. This was the start of the Biden creation myth, but more of that later. A visitor kindly sent me a link to a story at Life Site News that renewed my overall sense of Biden skepticism, Was Joe and Jill Biden’s 1977 wedding at the United Nations done according to Canon Law? This, of course, is the second phase of the Biden creation myth, the marriage to Dr Jill signifying his recovery from setback and tragedy. A typical version is this cloying tribute in Politico : There is no person in American politics today whose life has been so shaped by loss and grief. The long arc of Biden’s career is all but b...

Recent Biden legal news confirms what I've been learning about Bidenworld. I found several recent data items to update my Hunter timeline: On December 5, 2022, Joe and Jill Biden took out a $250,000 line of credit secured by the equity on their Rehoboth Beach, DE home. Fox News says, "The financial move came as Hunter Biden is embroiled in a federal investigation and the discovery of President Biden's classified documents from his time as vice president was underway." On December 21, 2022, Hunter Biden hired Abbe Lowell, of the firm Winston and Strawn, "to help advise him and be part of his legal team to address the challenges he is facing,” said Kevin Morris, a Hunter confidant and Hollywood attorney who has also been funding his Malibu residence and paid off his 2020 tax bill. Lowell has been successful in obtaining acquittals or mistrials for prominent politicians, including Sen. Bob Menendez, former Sen. John Edwards, and Bill Clinton,...

Here's another case of professional reporters, even on the right-wing Hunter Biden beat, who don't seem to have the initiative to do minimal followup when stories break. Earlier this week, I've been relying on a New York Post story from June 2021 covering the efforts of two former Secret Service agents to roust Hunter from his Hollywood hotel room and straighten out his charges for Russian escorts in May of 2018. The reporter, Miranda Devine, lists their names and some details of their Secret Service careers, but it looks like her Google skills, at least at the time, were perfunctory. She notes that one of the former agents, Dale Pupillo, was "a retired deputy assistant director of the Secret Service, who used to guard his father." That's a little like calling Osama bin Laden a distant member of the Saudi royal family who used to be in the construction business. Dale Pupillo, it turns out, was probably the key member of Secret Service management who was ...

This is the question Paul Kengor asked in an essay this past Monday in The American Spectator . Pondering this question, he says, So, I ventured to the website of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy & Global Engagement. Alas, I remain even more in the dark. I found a few articles and what seem like press releases. I found no reports or policy papers, which is odd because such is the main product of a think tank. I did, however, find Joe Biden — everywhere. Biden’s grinning mug is splashed all over the thing. When you first open the website, you see Biden. When you click the first heading, labeled, “We’re Focused On,” you’re assaulted with some mindless mishmash about “Advancing the Dialogue of Internationalism.” The viewer is greeted by — surprise — two photos, both of Joe Biden. The first is a photo of, quite appropriately, old Scranton Joe and China’s Xi taking a friendly stroll together at some bridge near Beijing. His conclusion is fairly simple, it doesn't really do...