In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

An editorial comment at MSNBC caught my eye this morning: A former president of the United States has now been criminally indicted for a fourth time. Less than a decade ago, we would have assumed a sentence like that would be found only in a work of fiction. Never in the history of our country has a former president faced one, let alone four, criminal indictments. It's indisputable that even Tom Clancy, the author of deep state-military thrillers like Clear and Present Danger who foresaw the 9/11 attacks, didn't remotely predict that one US president would be indicted four times as news broke of another allegedly collecting tens of millions in foreign bribes. The problem is that these headlines are playing out in a dreamlike context where they've begun to have the same effect as “I was Bigfoot’s Love Slave,” “Hillary Clinton Adopts Alien Baby,” or “Bat Child Found in Cave”. In other words, if a writer at MSNBC wonders if the Trump indictments sound like a bad To...

On Sunday, I intuited, {N}ow that [Abbe] Lowell is the one talking to CNN, it looks as though Chris Clark has been shunted aside. It turns out I was right. Via Breitbart , Hunter Biden’s criminal defense attorney Chris Clark requested Tuesday to withdraw from representing his client, citing a conflict of continuing to represent the president’s son in a potential trial in which he could be asked to be a witness. This is a remarkable development, since he left the white-shoe Latham & Warkins law firm only this past April to add his name to another firm, Clark Smith Villazor , primarily to represent Hunter as its flagship client. According to Law.com , Chris Clark, a prominent litigation partner at Latham & Watkins who has been representing Hunter Biden in a high-profile tax investigation, has left the elite firm to join boutique Smith Villazor in New York. With his arrival, the boutique has been renamed Clark Smith Villazor, the partners announced Thursday...

This is another of my posts on the futility of trying to explain Joe Biden's behavior with a medical diagnosis that nobody's qualified to make. The big story yesterday was briefly President Joe Biden reportedly said he had “no comment” when asked Sunday about the rising death toll from the devastating Hawaii fires. However, of all the takes i've seen on this episode, almost nobody has suggested it's because Joe has any sort of medical condition (the exception might be Judge Jeanine Pirro, who mentioned the 25th Amendment on Fox). But it seems fairly plain that when Joe made the remark, he had full situational awareness that the was addressing a group of reporters, and to say "no comment" in that environment would normally be completely appropriate. He didn't appear to be hallucinating or in any way distracted. Nor did he seem to be addressing people whom he thought were present but weren't. The most we can say is that Joe might have been unawa...

As I've noted here, Jonathan Turley is a generational member of the Establishment : His father, John (Jack) Turley was an international architect, partner at Skidmore, Owens [sic], and Merrill, and the former associate of famed modernist architect Mies van der Rohe. . . . His mother, Angela Piazza Turley, was a social worker and activist who was the former president of Jane Addams Hull-House in Chicago. He's a law professor at George Washington University who also has a column in the Washington Post, which suggests that intellectually, he's never going to wear stripes with plaid, nor white trousers before Memorial Day. But at the moment, he's verging on conspiracy theories . In his latest column, he repeatedly refers to Attorney General Garland as putting in the "fix" on the Hunter investigation by designating David Weiss as special counsel: The Weiss appointment definitively established Garland as a failure as attorney general. As someone w...

Since the elevation of David Weiss to special counsel in the Hunter cases, the one highly visible member of Hunter's legal team has been Abbe Lowell. In yesterday's post, I quoted from an interview he gave Friday on CNN's The Source with Kaitlan Collins . The context of Mr Lowell's apparent new status as lead in Hunter's Delaware cases appears to be the breakdown of the proposed plea agreement in Judge Noreika's Delaware courtroom on July 26. Hunter's lead attorney on the gun and tax cases up to that point had been Chris Clark. On July 26, Mr Lowell had just been sitting in the courtroom audience along with Kevin Morris, who characterizes himself as Hunter's overall lead attorney and who apparently pays Hunter's legal bills, so he calls the overall shots. When Clark and the prosecutors failed to agree on the deliberately unspoken terms of Hunter's diversion agreement, it sounds as though Messrs Morris and Lowell decided it was time for Lowell ...

Since I'm old enough to have lived through Watergate as an adult and followed it closely, I find a certain amount of déjà vu in Attorney General Garland's announcement that he had given Delaware US Attorney David Weiss special counsel authority in the Hunter Biden investigation. According to the New York Post , Garland’s announcement came 10 months and four days after Weiss allegedly told officials from the FBI and IRS that he lacked authority to charge the first son, now 53, outside of Delaware. The attorney general took no questions following his statement, ignoring a reporter who asked why Weiss had been elevated to special counsel if he had “ultimate authority” to prosecute, as Garland claimed in sworn congressional testimony earlier this year. This comes in the context of new developments in the Hunter Biden case : Court papers revealed Friday the president’s son Hunter Biden’s tax and gun crimes case will now likely go to trial, with negotiations over ...

One of my regular points here has been that it's less productive to try to explain Biden's behavior by saying he has a medical condition, which nobody other than a medical professional who's examined him can say, than it is to refer to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. A clear example of how this works is in Joe's heated exchange with Fox's Peter Doocy in New Mexico this past Wednesday, August 9. Doocy is providing some funny backstory to the exchange, as well as reporting on the White House’s response to his question. Doocy said Biden was waving him over to talk, so he tried to climb over a barrier where the press was being held when he was stopped by a White House aide. The aide was trying to stop him, saying Biden didn’t have time to talk. Doocy joked, cautioning the public not to ever jump over a barrier to do what he did in the face of the Secret Se...