The Real Story On The Hunter Biden Rental Form

I've been tempted to post on the rental form in which Hunter, in 2018, claimed to have spent $49,910 in monthly rent, but I've held off several times on a hunch that more information would come out. This was a background security request for a rental in a luxury Los Angeles apartment building. The fact checkers were quick to dismiss this as a conspiracy theory:

Days after it was reported that classified documents were found in President Joe Biden’s office at a Washington, D.C., think tank and at his Delaware home, conservative commentators launched new allegations about him and his son, Hunter Biden.

"Hunter Biden paid his dad $50,000 a MONTH in rent for the home that housed classified documents… During the same time, Joe Biden only claimed less than $20,000 in rent payments PER YEAR!!!" read a Jan 17 Instagram post by Newsmax host Carl Higbie.

. . . These posts are inaccurate and were flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed.

It turns out that the real story is more intricate and much more allusive. An article in this morning's Washington Free Beacon outlines the actual circumstances of the application:

The money, $49,910, was actually a reference to rental payment for a Washington, D.C., office space used by Hunter Biden. But the story of the document is more absurd, involving Biden family favor trading, scorned relatives, and an ultimately failed effort to get Hunter Biden’s troubled cousin a new probation officer.

The Washington Free Beacon traced the origin of the document to an attachment in a July 27, 2018, email from Hunter Biden to a luxury apartment complex in Los Angeles. The background check document was part of a rental application, and—though his communications with the building’s property manager indicated the apartment would be for him—text messages and emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop reveal it was in fact for his down-on-her-luck cousin, Caroline Biden, the daughter of Joe Biden’s brother Jim and his wife, Sara.

The president’s niece pleaded guilty in 2017 to buying more than $100,000 worth of makeup with a stolen credit card. While she managed to skirt a grand larceny charge and the prison sentence it carried, she was sentenced to two years of probation—time she wanted to serve in Los Angeles.

She texted Hunter Biden on July 26, 2018, from a New York City probation office, telling him she urgently needed a California address so her lawyer could transfer her probation there.

As I've said here, not only Biden's siblings, but their own "troubled" children as well, have lived privileged lives based on their connections with Joe. I would imagine that the Joe connection helped her avoid prison for the grand larceny charge. The story continues,

Keeping Caroline Biden out of prison was a Biden family affair and Hunter Biden was at the center of the effort. He moved to the West Coast at least in part to escape family drama, he explained in a July 17 message, saying his sister-in-law and former lover Hallie Biden had asked him to leave the state of Delaware.

I get a sense that sending problem Bidens to California was a standard family remedy, since it kept their misdeeds out of the Washington-Wilmington spotlight. Although Hunter was still working on deals with his partners and his father in China and Ukraine, he was doing it from Los Angeles hotel rooms at that time, cranked up on cocaine. Even so, the family expected Hunter to take care of his cousin, presumably to keep her out of sight closer to home:

"I need help with Caroline, she is off the rails," Jim Biden told Hunter Biden in a July 13 message.

The idea to have Caroline Biden move to California appears to have been hatched in a follow-up conversation between Jim and Hunter Biden, but it was on Hunter Biden to deliver. Hunter Biden told Jim Biden as early as July 16 that he was looking for rentals in Laguna for his daughter. But by the time of Caroline Biden’s probation meeting when she messaged Hunter Biden about the address, he had still failed to secure a place.

"Hunter, parole officer needs Caroline’s address in CA in order to transfer to CA," Sara Biden wrote to him on July 27. "Caroline also just said she needs to accept job by end of day today and tell them when she can start."

Shortly after hearing from Sara Biden, Hunter Biden directed his assistant, Katie Dodge, to fill out a rental application on his behalf for an apartment at a luxury complex, the Villa Carlotta, a self-described "residential hideaway for free spirits drawn to the iconoclastic energy of bohemian Los Angeles."

Notwithstanding, free-spirit Caroline felt her status as a Biden entitled her to certain standards:

Jim Biden also asked his nephew to convince Caroline Biden to accept a job, another term of her transfer to California. But Caroline Biden, who at 31 had only had cushy jobs secured by her family and had no intention of lowering her standards.

Emails show she was a candidate for a job from Masimo Corporation, a California company owned by one of Joe Biden’s largest donors, with an $85,000 base salary, a guaranteed 10 percent bonus, and stock options. She was hesitant, she said, because the pay was insufficient.

"That’s below minimum wage in California after taxes," she told her father in an email. "I cannot take this job. I have never made this little money in my life." Caroline Biden said she couldn’t take a job for "less than $180,000."

Indeed, if you look up the Wikipedia entries for other Biden women, Dr Jill, sister Valerie, and daughter Ashley, they all seem to have been provided with highly-paid sinecures and carefully upholstered life circumstances. Caroline clearly expected the same treatment.

What nobody so far has pointed out about this whole story, though, is that it all takes place after Biden left the vice presidency in 2017, at a time when former vice presidents normally fade into the background like Dick Cheney, Al Gore, and Dan Quayle. The conventionmal wisdom at the time was that Biden would be just one candidate among many for the Democrat nomination in 2020, should he even choose to run, and then he could face difficulty running against Trump. This doesn't seem to have been the assumption in Biden's inner circle -- during the same period as the July 2018 Caroline drama, he was occupying his new office at the Penn Biden Center and apparently operating as a de facto president-in-waiting.

I think this is just one example of how reporters willing actually to do some work can turn up much more from the Hunter laptop than has so far emerged. It suggests to me that Richard Sauber, the Covington partners, and other lawyers were brought in last year to deal with the Hunter laptop, not specifically the classified docs, which aren't really important except as they relate to Hunter and the rest of the family frammis. And as I noted yesterday, someone has spent multimillions on those lawyers so far, but as of now, it looks as if their efforts to scrub the record haven't been worth that expense.

It's Important For The Animals To Be Diverse And Inclusive

I found a typo in Sunday's post with the problematic image of a hotdogging W Mark Felt, and even though it had been flagged as sensitive, I decided to fix the typo for the record. When I went in to edit it, I found a new button saying REQUEST REVIEW, although in my research I'd found no reference to any ability to appeal such decisions, and there was wording in the guidelines that suggested this couldn't be done. I figured I had nothing to lose, so I clicked on REQUEST REVIEW, and when I visited my account this morning, the flag and message for that post had been removed, though I've received no other message.

This confirms my view that Blogger's algorithm had somehow been triggered by the image of a G-Man doing his thing, when at least for now, bien pensant opinion actually favors the FBI, which protects us by raiding Area 51 bloggers and former presidents. But just to be on the safe side, I'm going to stick with non-controversial titles and cute pet photos at the top of my posts, at least for a while. I've got to assume that my reach as a blogger is so limited that it really isn't worth anyone's time to review my posts in detail, although the mere fact that a post can be flagged out of the blue for random reasons does create a chilling effect for anyone.

In the matter of the Biden scandals, there's been little new since the weekend, but Rep James Comer, Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, seems to be on the right track:

“We’re trying to trace the money,” Comer told the Examiner. “We’ll be looking at bank statements. We’ll be looking at bank violations. That’s the next phase of our investigation because we’re trying to figure out who these anonymous sources are that are sending so much money to the Biden family schemes — the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Hunter Biden’s artwork.”

. . . “For years, Mr. Biden has attempted to profit off his father’s position in government, and the art deals are merely the latest iteration of these efforts. The investigation into Mr. Biden’s business ventures, and those who have aided him in his dubious endeavors, has been ongoing for over two years, and, if necessary, will continue into the next Congress,” Comer said in September 2021 before Republicans took control the House and gained subpoena power.

According to Comer, recent revelations that classified documents have been discovered at the Penn Biden Center and at the president’s Wilmington, Delaware, home only underscore the need for transparency around Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

Sen Ted Cruz has an additional take:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) called on the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI to search President Joe Biden’s Senate records that are stored at the University of Delaware to see if they contain more classified materials.

. . . Cruz said on an episode of “The Verdict” that the next step was for federal officials to look into Biden’s Senate records at the University of Delaware.

“Let me tell you what the next step in this scandal is going to be,” Cruz said. “The next step in this scandal is going to be, okay, if Biden’s Senate documents include classified documents outside of classified settings — which is illegal — how many more classified documents are illegally in his Senate papers? And here’s where this matters in particular, which is the University of Delaware has more than 1850 boxes of records from Joe Biden’s Senate tenure which he gave to the University of Delaware.”

. . . "During the 2020 campaign, there was a concerted media effort to try to get access to those documents in particular, there were allegations of sexual harassment raised against Joe Biden, and the media wanted to examine the documents on those allegations of sexual harassment. The University of Delaware has said, ‘Nope, they’re not releasing the documents to anybody until two years after Biden retires from public life.’”

All the Bidens appear to have extravagant lifestyles, and in some cases, the extracurricular funding sources are already public: Keven Morris, a Hollywood lawyer, paid Hunter's outstanding $2 million tax bill and is reportedly paying the rent on the Malibu home where Hunter currently lives, although reports have placed Hunter visiting the Wilmington Biden home with his father, so he may be back in Washington now. It would be worth asking if Morris is making these payments on behalf of someone else -- and another good question is who is paying for Joe's personal attorneys, which include three partners that we know of at Covington & Burling:

[S]enior partners there now bill up to $2,500 an hour, which would top other publicly reported billing rates at U.S. law firms.

Covington’s website does not list anyone with the title of senior partner, and a firm spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on who would qualify or how many attorneys bill at that hourly rate.

Let's be conservative and estimate that the three Covington partners we know of are billing at a rate of only $2000 an hour for 40 hours a week. 3 partners X 40 hours X $2000 = $240,000 a week. We don't know how many weeks they've been on the case, but Dana Remus became a partner in October and is thought to have been working on Biden matters there, so let's estimate it's been 16 weeks. 16 X $240,000 = $3,840,000. But this leaves out newly hired Bob Bauer, it leaves out Covington associates who are billing on the case, and it leaves out other lawyers whose names keep popping up, so Biden's personal legal expenses are piling up in the multimillions at minimum, and this isn't likely to stop.

Where is this money coming from? But this leaves aside the question of how so much has already been spent on the case, but more docs keep popping up. That in turn suggests to me that it isn't Biden's own money he's spending.

NothingTo See Here, Blogger!

Yesterday's post got flagged by Blogger for "sensitive content", and visitors got the following notice if they tried to view it (click on the image for a larger copy):

I also got a notification that "This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content as outlined in Blogger’s Community Guidelines." I've been blogging on one thing or another for almost 20 years, often on sensitive topics, but this is the first such notice I've received. I'm assuming the problem was the photo of W Mark Felt posing as an FBI hotdogger in the act of drawing his firearm, and the algorithm deemed it potentially triggering, so to speak.

I'm assuming for now that this was a one-off, and I'm going to proceed as usual. I may try using photos of kittens and ducklings as a header for a while to make it clear to the algorithm that I have no intention of triggering anyone, at least no more than I have in the past, although back in the day, I certainly did some triggering. As far as I can determine, a "sensitive content warning" is the least serious of Blogger's restrictions, although in researching this, I find there's no appeal, and these decisions are final, for whatever that's worth. As my ninth-grade English teacher, Mr Foley, used to say, Quid hoc ad aeternitatem? Mr Foley first encouraged me to become a writer.

Regarding weekend fallout from the Friday search of Biden's Wilmington home, I still think commentators are missing the point. The conventional wisdom is that allowing the documents to be randomly distributed among household effects was variously careless, unacceptable, irresponsible, blah blah blah, but don't we already know this about the Biden family -- most notably, but not exclusively, Hunter? His daughter Ashley is noted mainly for leaving a diary behind from her time at a rehab facility, and at least two generations of the whole Biden family have given new meaning to the term "dysfunctional".

Ever since Biden has been in public life, his siblings, children, nieces, and nephews appear mainly to have made lucrative careers out of their connections to Joe, and starting with Joe himself, they've been remarkably sloppy about it. This is at the root of the current dilemma. We can certainly ask what's in the docs, although between the claim they're classified and assertions of attorney-client privilege, we'll likely never find out, and in my view, the actual contents may be trivial.

The classified docs themselves aren't the reason an ever-growing group of highly connected, highly paid lawyers have been combing through an ever-widening set of Biden family records. As I've been saying, the docs are a byproduct. White House Special Counsel Richard Sauber was brought on last May in anticipation of Republican gains in the November elections, in an attempt to stay ahead of revelations from Hunter's laptop, but I've got to assume the laptop was only the start of thread after thread that by last fall had extended to the Penn Biden Center, which in the nature of things Biden represented just another trove that would lead to yet further questions.

By that point, Dana Remus and at least two other Covinigton & Burling partners were working as Biden personal attorneys, with Bob Bauer joining the team even more recently. Why?

An intriguing recent data point is that Hunter was spotted returning to the Wilmington family home in company with Joe last Wednesday night. It's been put about that Hunter is under de facto house arrest at a compound in Malibu as he dabbles in painting, but it appears he's actually much more closely involved in the family damage control than we've been led to believe.

I think the basic problem is the commingling of Biden family funds, which has already led to tax problems for Hunter, but from what I can gather, the whole family has made a living through collecting baksheesh, some part of which, Hunter's e-mails suggest, goes to Joe. I would imagine problems for the whole family extend not just to taxes, but to questions like money laundering and even bribery, which in the US constitution is mentioned along with treason as a high crime that's grounds for impeachment.

Actually, I think the most generous interpretation of the Biden family frammis is that it's just a con, whereby they represent themselves as working with Joe to collect payoffs that will reach him through the family channels, but Joe just takes them and never delivers. But even that would be a hard thing to recover from.

Who, by the way, is paying for all these lawyers who are working for Joe personally now?

More From The New Deep Throat!

The image above is W Mark Felt, the Watergate Deep Throat, from his glory days as FBI Director wannabe. As I said yesterday, it sounds like we have a new Deep Throat, apparently just as highly placed, who's beginning to leak about Biden's classified documents. So far, nobody seems to be getting the point.

The news yesterday evening was that another half-dozen classified documents had been run down in a new search of the Wilmington home, this one conducted by people from the Justice Department, not Biden's personal attorneys, after those attorneys had insisted everything had been found.

Biden’s lawyers immediately tried to get out in front of the revelation, releasing a statement claiming cooperation with the DOJ. But while the administration continues to talk about transparency, one bombshell detail from the search has left the president’s lies fully exposed. Namely, the fact that documents were found that were taken during Biden’s years in the Senate.

I just don't see a "bombshell" here. It's an indication that Biden has operated the same way for pretty much the whole time he's been in public life, but that's nothing new. What's more interesting is this story in the UK Daily Mail:

The long and winding document trail that leads classified documents from Joe Biden's vice presidential office to the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C. and now back into the hands of the government, includes yet another stopover: a temporary facility in the nation's capital, a source tells DailyMail.com.

"A source". We don't know if this is the same leaker who told CBS News about the November document tranche and then leaked that there'd been a deal to keep that discovery secret, but it really doesn't matter. Nobody knew who the original Deep Throat was for more than 30 years, and it was (and for that matter still is) reasonable to speculate that it may have been more than one person. Mark Felt was a narcissistic guy who'd felt underappreciated, after all; he was fully capable of claiming more credit for Watergate than he deserved. What's interesting is that somebody's leaking, not his precise identity.. Here's the substance:

The documents were moved in the summer of 2017 after spending about six months at a government transition office near the White House once Biden left the vice presidency.

The space, in DC's Chinatown neighborhood, was overseen by the Penn Biden Center while its prized location near the Capitol was being readied. The office had its formal opening, attended by Biden, in 2018.

'Everything was just moved en masse to temporary space, then moved to Penn Biden,' the person told DailyMail.com.

So OK. The White House narrative continues to be that these were just piles of random stuff gathered up in a last-minute frenzy as Biden left the vice presidency, nothing to see here -- but again, that's been the story Trump's people have been telling about how his docs turned up at Mar-a-Lago, with more credibility. The main complaint from the Trump detractors has been that the National Archives should have received that material, it shouldn't even have gone to Florida, and Trump was violating the law even to try to negotiate over it.

The story continues,

The woman who oversaw the packing and shipping of Biden's documents in 2017 was former administrative assistant Kathy Chung, who secured the position with a well-placed recommendation from Hunter Biden, who touted her capabilities to his father.

. . . The former assistant helped oversee the packing of files during the busy tail end of Biden's second term as VP. That was a time that featured a flurry of activity by Biden himself even in his final days in office. It required keeping his office functioning even while things were being put away for safekeeping.

Wait a moment. This is the vice presidency, an office about which no statement is more repeated than John Nance Garner’s observation that “the vice presidency is not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Of classified matters, back in the day, the Manhattan Project "was so secret that FDR did not even inform his fourth-term vice president, Truman, that it existed". But for Joe Biden, "That was a time that featured a flurry of activity by Biden himself even in his final days in office." Color me skeptical, especially given what we've learned about Obama's opinion of Biden's ability.

Whatever the flurry of last-minute activity was, my guess is that it had more to do with keeping up an income stream of baksheesh than anything to do with national business. And I'm still intrigued by all the use of terms like "transition", as in "government transition office" in the link above. We hear of a "transition team" for an incoming administration, but now we're learning of a "transition office" for a departing vice president, whom we would normally expect to be boarding a Southwest flight to fly home coach a la, say, Dan Quayle.

Not Joe Biden. He had to "transition" into a quasi-official headquarters-in-exile at the Penn Biden Center, and it's hard to avoid thinking he felt entitled to quasi-presidential perks there, including continued access to classified material. But why did all this stuff go first to a "transition office" and then, after six months, to the Penn Biden Center? Much was said about how all of Trump's White House detritus should have gone straight to the National Archives, not Mar-a-Lago, but Biden had some sort of special carveout that exempted his stuff.

That's just one queston nobody's asked. Let's just leave aside, at least for now, the whole question of how Biden seems to have been able to represent himself to putative insiders as the president-in-waiting throughout that whole four-year interregnum.

Sounds Like There's A New Deep Throat

A lot has come out over the Biden classified docs over the past few days, but nobody seems to be making much sense of it. I think the key is here:

White House officials are reportedly suspicious about how President Joe Biden’s classified document scandal was leaked to the press after only a select group of White House and Justice Department officials knew about the violation.

The plot to hide the scandal, initially designed by eight of Biden’s closest confidants with apparent approval from the Justice Department, was suddenly leaked to CBS News 68 days after Biden’s personal attorney unearthed the classified documents at the Penn Biden Center. It is unclear why or what Biden’s personal attorneys were originally seeking at the center funded in part by anonymous Chinese donations.

There's the whole thing in a nutshell, at least so far. The discovery of the classified docs was a byproduct of some other project that we don't know much about, except that well before any stray docs were involved, some high-priced, well-placed, highly connected lawyers were on the case. But now there's a leaker, when the whole thing was supposed to have been kept very quiet -- and let's reiterate, the docs in the Corvette garage are a byproduct, a footnote, a bagatelle that are connected only in some remote way to something bigger that's still under wraps.

The new Deep Throat seems to have put this additional information about:

The Justice Department (DOJ) reportedly sent a secret letter to President Joe Biden’s personal attorneys to search his multiple residences for classified documents after the trove at the Penn Biden Center was unearthed on November 2.

. . . The New York Times reported Friday that “[t]he quiet cooperation continued for weeks” between the aides and the DOJ. This not only tried to obscure the scandal from public view but reportedly refused to divulge that the second trove of classified documents was already unearthed at Biden’s home in Wilmington when CBS News first contacted the White House about the initial leak of classified documents stored at the Biden Penn Center.

It was then, during the plot to keep the scandal concealed from the public, the DOJ sent a letter to Biden’s personal attorneys and asked them to confirm that no other classified documents existed apart from the trove already unearthed, the Times reported.

It is unclear why or what Biden’s personal attorneys were originally seeking at the center funded in part by anonymous Chinese donations.

It looks to me like the source of the leak is from the Justice Department, not the White House, and at a high enough level that they have knowledge of a "secret letter". The New York Times article, behind a paywall but excerpted here, goes into detail on the White House strategy to keep quiet on the docs until the whole thing would go away:

The handful of advisers who were aware of the initial discovery on Nov. 2 — six days before the midterm elections — gambled that without going public, they could convince the Justice Department that the matter was little more than a minor, good-faith mistake, unlike former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of documents at his Florida estate…

The discussions on how to deal with the matter, at least at the start, were confined to the husband-and-wife pair of Bob Bauer, the president’s top personal attorney, and Anita Dunn, a White House senior adviser; Mike Donilon, the president’s longtime confidant and speechwriter; Mr. Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens; Stuart F. Delery, the White House counsel; and Richard Sauber, a White House lawyer overseeing the response to investigations, according to people familiar with the situation.

One thing I'm starting to notice is how much Biden relies not just on Hunter, but assorted siblings, Frank, Jim, and Valerie, to manage his affairs. And this family seems dysfunctional even by presidential standards: Donald Nixon, Billy Carter, Roger Clinton, Tony Rodham, and Neil Bush all fade in comparison with the whole Biden clan. These people are going to turn into a major liability. And somebody, maybe multiple people, is now taking notes and talking to the New York Times.

Also yesterday, we got a small hint of what the real search at the Penn Biden Center was about:

Joe Biden’s name was mentioned prominently in an October 2017 email seeking to firm up a controversial, multimillion-dollar deal to ship natural gas from the US to China, the communication, found on first son Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, reveals.

In a missive dated Oct. 27 of that year, Louisiana attorney Robert W. Fenet told Hunter and his uncle, first brother Jim Biden, that he had secured a contact for them at Houston energy company Cherniere, the Daily Mail reported Friday.

“I confirm I have requested [the contact] to be available for a call from Joe Biden and Hunter Biden on Monday morning,” Fenet wrote.

My current surmise is that the Biden legal team has been reviewing Hunter's laptop in great detail and scrubbing any corroborating evidence in other records, including those at the Penn Biden Center and Biden residences. That random new e-mails keep surfacing from the laptop, more than two years after its October 2020 discovery, suggests there's a great deal more to find.

Unanswered Questions

Over the past few days, there have been questions about classified documents found in at least two places at the Biden Wilmington home, apparently dating from the big guy's tenure as vice president. Nobody seems to know what they were doing there, but the little bit we've glimpsed looks like it's just the tip of the iceberg.

One big unresolved question is Hunter's role in the Biden family businesses during the interregnum between his dad's departure as vice president in 2017 and his inauguration as president in 2021. As I noted in this post, Hunter was involved in setting up the Penn Biden Center as early as 2016, which as described in e-mails on his laptop was meant to be a "wealth creation" effort for the family, but discussions about which were meant to be highly confidential. During this same period, he was divorcing his first wife, Kathleen Buhle:

[S]he said she began to understand the extent of their financial woes once she initiated their divorce in 2016. She found they had no savings, double mortgage and no equity in their two homes, credit card debt and medical bills.

“The sheer amount of our debt overwhelmed me," she wrote. "We were underwater.”

. . . Buhle started to notice Biden's substance abuse problem "spiral from social to problematic" about eight years into their marriage, according to People's excerpts of the book.

She described a number of stints Biden spent in rehab, including in November 2012 after he showed up drunk to a fundraising event following the reelection of his father and President Barack Obama.

His affair with his brother Beau's widow, Hallie, began in 2015 and lasted through his divorce from Kathleen until 2019. This period also coincided with his extended binges in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, famously documented on his laptop. But during this period, he also lived off and on at the Biden Wilmington house:

Disgraced first son Hunter Biden lived off and on at the Delaware home where classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as vice president were found last month — giving him unrestricted access to America’s secrets while he was addicted to drugs, hammering out shady foreign business deals and under federal investigation.

The now-52-year-old began listing the Wilmington home as his address following his 2017 divorce from ex-wife Kathleen Buhle — even falsely claiming he owned the property on a July 2018 background check form as part of a rental application.

Hunter also listed the home as the billing address for his personal credit card and Apple account in 2018 and 2019, respectively, Fox News Digital reported Friday after reviewing emails from his abandoned laptop.

During the same period, the now-first son was in the grip of a crack cocaine addiction costing thousands of dollars. At one point in August 2018, Hunter was recorded begging his sister-in-law-turned-lover, Hallie Biden, to let him use his credit card points to pay for a stay in rehab.

Another former girlfriend of Hunter’s, Zoe Kestan, testified to a federal grand jury in February of last year that the couple stayed for a month in 2018 at the notorious Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles, where — the younger Biden wrote in his 2021 memoir — he “learned how to cook crack” before being “blacklisted” from the property over complaints tied to his drug use.

Elsewhere, the Washington Examiner reported,

President Biden wired his 52-year-old son $100,000 to help him pay bills from December 2018 through January 2019, the Washington Examiner reported, citing records from a laptop Hunter Biden left behind at a computer repair shop in Delaware.

Hunter Biden, meanwhile, had spent more than $30,000 on sex workers between November 2018 and March 2019, records show — including many linked to Russia-based email addresses and connected to an “exclusive model agency” called UberGFE, the outlet reported.

In another instance, Joe Biden wired Hunter $5,000 less than three hours before he filmed a dispute with an escort regarding a $10,000 payment at a cottage in Boston, the Washington Examiner reported.

The picture that emerges is that Hunter, during much of Biden's term as vice president and especially during the post-Obama administration interregnum, was desperately addicted to drugs and prostitutes while also conducting business related to the Biden family, and even living off and on at the Wilmington home.

Tony Bobulinski told Fox News that, contrary to Joe Biden's statements that he had nothing to do with his son's business affairs, Hunter had "frequently referenced asking him for his sign-off or advice on various potential deals" in China.

Mr Bobulinski, who is reportedly a US Navy veteran, separately told Fox News' Tucker Carlson that he had met on two occasions with Joe Biden to discuss business deals with China, the first time in May 2017 when Barack Obama's former vice-president was a private citizen.

He says he asked Joe Biden's brother, James, whether the family was concerned about possible scrutiny of the former vice-president's involvement in a potential business deal with a Chinese entity. Mr Bobulinski told Fox News that James Biden had replied: "Plausible deniability."

I think this suggests some explanation for the stories that in May 2022, the White House brought Richard Sauber over as Special White House Counsel, apparently to scrub records at the Penn Biden Center, while by July, White House Counsel Dana Remus left, apparently to work as a personal attorney for President Biden. She then surfaced a few months later in October as a partner at Covington & Burling, where she has since been working with two other Covington partners on matters related to the classified material found at the Penn Biden Center and the Biden Wilmington home.

In fact, that whole affair was apperently meant to be kept quiet, with the leak of the November document discovery not at all in the plan:

Not only did the White House and DOJ try to obscure the scandal from public view, but they also refused to divulge that the second trove of classified documents were already unearthed at Biden’s home in Wilmington when CBS News first contacted the White House about the initial leak of classified documents apparently illegally stored at the Biden Penn Center, according to the Washington Post[.]

This suggests to me that Mr Sauber and Ms Remus were put on the case well before the November discovery because troubling issues had emerged by last spring that we still haven't heard about. Indeed, if Mr Sauber and Ms Remus were hired to keep the classified document matter under wraps, they haven't done a very good job. That in turn makes me wonder if what they've actually been working on is even more sensitive, and the classified document leaks are just collateral damage, or possibly a sleight-of-hand distraction.

Heck, Nixon had miscellaneous hard guys like the Plumbers to deal with stuff like petty burglaries. The current leak control team with Biden is a whole lot more expensive. Why should this be?

Southwest Pilots Union Schedules Strike Authorization Vote

When I was racking up free flights on Southwest traveling for work in the 1990s, it was still the old Southwest with "party seating", peanut snacks, cheap drinks, and singing flight attendants. I was drawn to that sort of culture, and I followed stories about it in the Wall Street Journal, which I got for free at my door every morning at my hotel. I learned at the time that its relations with its unions were unique. The airline was succeeding as a discount carrier, and its workers were willing to work for a little less to have secure jobs. Its unions were less adversarial and more inclined to look at win-win opportunities. If Southest prospered, so did its workers.

The last time I flew Southwest, maybe 15 years ago, things had changed greatly; they'd gone corporate, the peanut snacks, party seating, and singing flight attendants were long gone, while the company style had turned to talking down to the public like children. As far as I could tell, though, the unions had stuck with the program. Apparently the holiday-season meltdown has changed even this. Via Epoch Times,

Southwest Airlines pilots have set a “historic” strike-authorization vote, following a lack of progress in contract negotiations and a massive operational meltdown.

In a Jan. 18 announcement, the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) said a vote has been set “beginning on May 1, and will ultimately give pilots the ability to strike.” The union, which represents about 10,000 pilots, said this is the first time in the airline’s 51-year history for such a vote.

The union’s vice president, Capt. Michael Santoro, in a SWAPA Facebook post, said the union is exasperated. He called the vote is “a tool we must employ to wake up management.”

All of a sudden, the pilots are playing hardball:

The union said it picked the May 1 date because it “allows our union time to prepare and gives our customers time to book elsewhere, so that they can have confidence that their summer vacations, honeymoons, and family outings are assured.”

The votes will be counted at the end of May, SWAPA said.

In the past, Southwest's unions would never have implied that Southwest's customers -- who were also their customers -- should maybe think about scheduling flights with more reliable carriers. You plan to fly this summer? Maybe think now about booking cheap tickets in advance with Delta, because we may be on strike here at Southwest.

But things changed over the holidays.

During negotiations, the union has been pushing the company for contract language to address “scheduling work rules and information technology,” SWAPA said.

Those were two of the major factors the union blamed after a winter storm touched off problems that led to 16,700 canceled flights during the holiday rush of the last 10 days of 2022.

As I noted the other day, Southwest management has backed off even the minimal acknowledgement it made during the meltdown that its outdated scheduling software was even partly responsible, although the specific triggering event, the memo from the vice president for ground operations to the Denver ramp workers requiring a doctor's note for any claimed illness, suggests Southwest's labor relations had been deteriorating prior to the meltdown as well,

I'd also noted that another vice president of the Southwest pilots' union wrote an open letter to Southwest's CEO on December 31 strongly suggesting the implicit deal with Southwest's unions was over. After all, the pilots, flight attendants, gate agents, and ramp workers were suffering just as much as the passengers. Some had to sleep at the airport, while they were also the ones who bore the brunt of customer dissatisfaction.

I was actually astonished at the time of the meltdown that Southwest employees appeared to be as supportive of the company as they were. I wrote it up to the fact that, especially among those who'd been with the company since the days of peanut snacks and singing flight attendants, they'd built up seniority and benefits that they'd forfeit if they went to another carrier, although there's a shortage of pilots generally.

But it looks like factors are changing. I knew the old Southwest was gone quite some time ago, and the old-time workers are going to retire very soon.