In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

In yesterday's post, I linked to a Breitbart story on how Biden won't discuss the Hunter problem with his staff. This morning I saw a CNN story that says the same thing , but with a different spin: Long among the most sensitive subjects inside the West Wing, Hunter Biden’s legal saga now appears destined to play out amid his father’s bid for reelection, frustrating the president but so far causing little real concern among his advisers. The probe into Hunter Biden is now one of two special counsel investigations – the other being an inquiry into his father’s handling of classified documents after leaving the Senate and the vice president’s office – that both appear poised to extend for months to come. . . . [B]oth investigations take away the fundamental element of control for a White House heading into an election cycle. As multiple Biden advisers conceded privately this week, special counsels have a history of uncovering information they hadn’t set out initiall...

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, a Yale Law graduate and holder of an endowed chair at the University of Tennessee School of Law, is a libertarian, which means that he follows Ayn Rand as his guiding light. (Rand herself described libertarians as "a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people" who "plagiarize my ideas when that fits their purpose".) He is also a transhumanist who in the past has endorsed cryonics (freezing the heads of dead people in anticipation that future technology can resuscitate them) and the technological singularity, which among other things embraces the idea that people can be digitized and uploaded into a giant computer memory, which will ensure their immortality, at least until the next power failure. I wouldn't even ask Glenn Reynolds for advice on a traffic ticket, but before he rose to prominence, I'd already lost confidence in the ability of academic institutions to certify people whom we can trust to teach future generations. Never...

The news that the Comer Committee has asked the National Archives for "unrestricted special access" to unredacted Biden records where the names Robert Peters, Robin Ware, and JRB Ware, among others, appear is particularly delicious. I've got to say my first reaction is that use of aliases is a key indicator for sociopathic or psychopathic personality traits, or, without getting anywhere near a diagnosis, a sign that something is hinky. The most memorable recent use of an alias by a politician is former congressman Anthony Weiner's use of the name Carlos Danger in sexting various women, including at least one minor. That episode ended his marriage, on top of earlier on line indiscretions that had already ended his career, and other e-mails discovered on his laptop during subsequent investigation have been cited by Hillary Clinton as one reason she lost the 2016 election. He eventually served 18 months in federal prison and is a registered sex offender. Another r...

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...