The Bigger Picture

I found this photo in a Newseek article from January 20 that's labeled as being an aerial view of the Biden property on 1209 Barley Mill Road, Wilmington, Delaware 19807. This is consistent with other published views of the house on the left, but the photo here includes another house. The Newsweek piece puts things in the context of the background check form Hunter submitted for his niece, wherein he apparently claims to own this property while also paying $49,910 in rent there.

Newsweek, as have other sources, traces the $49,910 amount to what was actually a security deposit on quarterly rent paid to House of Sweden by Hunter's firm Rosement Seneca Partners for office space there. Newsweek fills out additional details in the link:

A 2021 report by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, which examined a trove of communications between the National Property Board and Hunter Biden's representatives, stated that in February 2017: "Hunter Biden and his companies" moved into House of Sweden, with rent at "$50,000 per quarter".

Furthermore, an email exchange among files from the Hunter Biden laptop leak, which shows a conversation with "CECILIA BROWNING, GENERAL MANAGER AT HOUSE OF SWEDEN" also lists a security deposit that exactly matches the rent listed on the background check form. Emails within that exchange also roughly match the dates quoted in the background check and the Dagens Nyheter investigation.

The National Property Board of Sweden confirmed to Newsweek that "$49,910 was paid quarterly between March 2017 and February 2018."

. . . "House of Sweden is owned and managed by National Property Board Sweden," general manager Cecilia Browning said to Fox News. "We have tenants who rent office space, and it is correct that Rosemont Seneca LLC rented an office at House of Sweden between February 2017 – February 2018."

But the story doesn't stop there. 2018 was, to put it mildly, a crazy year for Hunter, who in its first months was continuing his affair with his late brother's widow, Hallie, and apparently spending time at her Washington home, while also frequently seen at a Washington strip club , The Mpire Club, where he developed a relationship with a dancer there, Lunden Alexis Roberts, who worked under the stage name “Dallas”. Hunter traveled extensively with her during this period, and she bore his love child that August.

However, neither Hallie nor Alexis had a monopoly on Hunter's time.

It’s May 2018, and Robert Hunter Biden is trawling through his favorite Los Angeles escort sites. He orders “Yanna,” a 24-year-old Russian native from Emerald Fantasy Girls.

However, Hunter moved out of Chateau Marmont, where that escapade took place, later in the month. (He was kicked out for good that July.)

On May 19, 2018, Hunter moves from his cottage at the Chateau Marmont to a cheaper hotel in West Hollywood, The Jeremy, where rooms are $469 per night. He orders an escort from Emerald Fantasy Girls. She stays for a couple days and wants to be paid. The problem is Hunter’s debit cards aren’t working and she’s not leaving without the $8,000 he owes her for the extended callout. On the morning of May 24, hung over and out of sorts, Hunter adds a new recipient on the cash transfer app Zelle, a woman named Gulnora, the registered agent for Emerald Fantasy Girls.

. . . What we do know from the laptop is that a few hours after Hunter’s debit-card woes began, text messages start arriving that are labeled as being from Robert Savage III. Savage was once the Secret Service’s special agent in charge of the Los Angeles field office and a contact card for him appears on the laptop, with a photographic avatar, phone number and Secret Service email address.

. . .The activity recorded on Hunter’s devices shows Savage sending Hunter an urgent missive on May 24 at 6:37 p.m.: “H – I’m in the lobby come down. Thanks, Rob.”

Five minutes later, Savage texts again: “Come on H, this is linked to Celtic’s account. DC is calling me every 10. Let me up or come down. I can’t help if you don’t let me H.”

“Celtic” was Joe Biden’s Secret Service code name when he was vice president.

Did one of the credit cards used to pay Gulnora belong to Joe Biden? Was it a shared account?

But while all this was going on, Lunden Roberts, the dancer, was on Hunter's payroll, as was Hallie. There seems to have been some pressure on Hunter, by the summer of 2018, to tone things down and get his affairs in order as Celtic began to clarify his plans for 2020. A few months after the birth of his and Lunden's child in August, Hunter took her off his payroll and insurance.

By December, he was having to deal with the office items left over from the Rosemont Seneca lease at House of Sweden, which had expired in February (we can only assume he'd been so busy he couldn't attend to it before then):

“Have what’s in storage sent to my parents guest house,” Hunter Biden told his assistant Katie Dodge in a Dec. 10, 2018 text message, which was part of a trove leaked online last year and now hosted by nonprofit Marco Polo USA.

Four days later, Dodge followed up with an image from inside a storage facility with large wooden containers stacked three levels on top of each other.

“You have almost I think 3 of these containers full of office and personal items. Will they fit at Barley Road? It’s 3,000 cubic feet,” she said.

I've got to assume the slightly smaller house to the right of the main house in the photo above is the "guest house" Hunter refers to in his text message. This exchange provides some possible insight into how some of the documents that may have been found at the Wilmington location might relate to Hunter's business interests, and it also gives some insight into the actual scale of the task confronting Biden's personal attorneys in going through this information and scubbing it. From this account, these aren't just a few random cardboard cartons.

What I've been doing has simply been collating the dates of the numerous individual stories of Hunter's escapades into a single timeline with links, which is providing a great deal of extra context to each individual episode of his saga during the years of the Biden interregnum. What astonishes me is that nobody else appears to have done this, even though it involves nothing more than a few hours of time and a web connection.

I Love A Corporate Crisis!

Visitors know I'm something of a conoisseur of corporate crises, especially ones that are clumsily mishandled and stem from dysfunctional corporate culture, although that last may be a redundancy. Pfizer has already been suffering from bad publicity in the release of Twitter files and Wednesday's Babylon Bee story:

NEW YORK, NY — Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has unveiled their new mascot, an adorable glob of platelets who goes by the name "Clotty".

"See? Blood clots aren't scary!" said Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla as a smiling Clotty danced onto the stage. "Welcome to Pfizer, Clotty! Let's get one of these little guys into every home in America!"

While Pfizer initially pushed back against evidence tying the vaccine to blood clots, the company has decided to instead embrace it. "We are so excited for Clotty to help us put a friendly face on heart attacks and strokes," said Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. "Every new COVID booster will now come with a plush Clotty doll you can take to the hospital when you inevitably get admitted with a massive embolus. You'll love squeezing Clotty while they wheel you into the cath lab! Thanks, Clotty!"

The new mascot's reception has thus far been overwhelmingly positive, with Clotty paraphernalia already showing up in several politicians' offices. "Gosh darn it, I love the little guy," said Senator Elizabeth Warren, sporting a Clotty t-shirt as she adjusted a picture of her and Clotty. "Every child in America should be so lucky as to have one of these precious little blood clots. I will continue to do everything in my power to make it happen."

The last thing it needed was release of the Project Veritas video in which

A research director with the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer said the corporation is secretly exploring intentionally creating mutations of the COVID virus to “preemptively develop new vaccines,” and said COVID “is going to be a cash cow for us,” in the latest undercover video by Project Veritas.

In the video released yesterday, Jordon Trishton Walker, Pfizer Director of Research and Development, Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planner, says, “One of the things we’re exploring is like, why don’t we just mutate it [COVID] ourselves so we could create – preemptively develop new vaccines, right? So, we have to do that. If we’re gonna’ do that though, there’s a risk of like, as you could imagine – no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating f**king viruses.”

Confronted by Project Veritas about his statements, Walker then becomes hysterical and insists, “I was on a third date with a guy, and like normal men, you lie to impress a date.” Given a day's reflection on the circumstances, several things strike me. The first is that under normal corporate policies, Walker would be at minimum placed on leave pending investigation, but following any such serious investigation, he'd be fired.

For instance, as one commenter pointed out in one discussion, at his level, he has certainly signed a non-disclosure agreement, which he very visibly violated on the excuse that he was trying to impress a date. The second is that he identified himself as a Pfizer employee and then proceeded to damage the company's reputation via bizarre conduct. While Pfizer would be obligated to preserve the confidentiality of personnel actions in any such case, a corporate statement that Walker was not authorized to blah blah blah would be appropriate -- but so far, nothing like this has happened.

No commenter I've seen has dared to mention one of the most obvious features of the whole episode, which is that Walker's expression and mannerisms are stereotypically effeminate, and this becomes more intense as his hysteria mounts when Project Veritas confronts him with his statements. This, and the fact he appears to be of African-American heritage, will place him in a protected class, and it's likely that Pfizer won't make any immediate adverse personnel action, but I would estimate that his career is now effectively sidetracked.

Except that he's probably already been in what the Japanese call a window seat, a job without even token duties that's maintained because the company feels obligated not to lay people off or fire them. This blogger suggested "Dr. Walker probably isn’t a lab scientist doing the 'directed evolution' work," and I agree. But what that does say is that he's more likely always been one of those quasi-workers like the ones recently laid off from Twitter and Google who posted TikTok videos about their meditation rooms and smoothie bars only to be caught in a mass layoff days later.

In other words, he's a member of the entitled gentry class, maintained almost as a status symbol at a certain corporate level. Big Tech is now being forced to lay these people off, but Big Pharma, grown rich and fat most recently from the COVID con, hasn't been forced to do that, at least not yet, and maybe not for the foreseeable future. Days late, Pfizer has so far made only a token response:

New York, N.Y., January 27, 2023 – Allegations have recently been made related to gain of function and directed evolution research at Pfizer and the company would like to set the record straight.

In the ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research. Working with collaborators, we have conducted research where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern.

This story comments,

[I]t seems pretty clear, at least in my view, that Pfizer isn’t doing what it’s doing because they fear future variants, and with so many people already having been infected, the efficacy of more and more boosters remains in doubt anyway. COVID-19 vaccines and antivirals are what make Pfizer billions of dollars, and they have every incentive to keep shoving boosters out while insisting they are needed because of “variants.”

Their statement isn’t going to convince anyone on the fence. It’s obfuscatory and confusing at best, and given Pfizer’s history of misleading the public, there’s no reason to take the company’s word for anything.

For now, what's implicit in Walker's conduct and Pfizer's non-reponse to it is that Pfizer so far thinks it's rich enough, and its advertising dollars are so important to media, that it can simply tough its way through this and all other crises.

Nevertheless, the Republicans have the House, and firebrand members are already threatening investigations, including Reps Ronny Jackson and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

We'll see.

Trump, Tanks, And Ukraine

Former U.S. President Trump:

First come the tanks, then come the nukes. Get this crazy war ended, now. So easy to do! pic.twitter.com/JLOg166tKF

— Clash Report (@clashreport) January 26, 2023

It looks as though Trump is going to side consistently with the US right in opposing increased aid to Ukraine, and to some extent, I can't disagree with his basic point. As this report at Breitbart summarizes the problem:

President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that the U.S. would be sending 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, but did not explain to the American public what the purpose of the tanks would be, or the broader U.S. goal in the war.

White House communications chief John Kirby later tried to assure reporters (and Russia) that the tanks would not be used for an “offensive” purpose, but clearly the hope is to retake territory by attacking Russian forces.

The story throughout the past year has been incrementalism. Zelensky campaigns for new weapons one step beyond what the West is willing to supply, whether it's old Warsaw Pact Migs, M777s, HIMARS, Bradleys, or whatever else; there's a weeks-long interval of dither; finally Biden decides to deliver what's requested. Zelensky's position seems to be consistent but expressed as diplomatically as he can put it, this sort of incrementalism is just prolonging the war.

Zelensky is operating from his position of national interest, as are many neighboring NATO countries. On the other hand, it's hard to tell what the US big picture is. The Breitbart link continues,

The U.S. foreign policy establishment seems to believe that the Russian military is near collapse, and that Putin may be forced from power. There is little thought given to what might happen to Russia afterwards — or how a Russian collapse would strengthen China.

If the current Ukraine conflict is something like a proxy World War III played out in slo-mo, it's worth noting that in World War II, the Germans and the Japanese both held out for years past the point where they might have been expected to collapse. Current Western policy seems driven by wishful thinking that Putin might die of disease or be ousted, but no thought is given to whether, as is likely, his replacement would be worse. In addition, Zelensky has articulated a completely reasonable war aim for Ukraine -- Russian forces must vacate all internationally recognized Ukrainian territory -- but even if that goal is reached, there's no assurance Russia won't simply reinvade a few years later.

As I pointed out last year, so far, there's been no Casablanca, Yalta, or Potsdam conference equivalent that articulates clear war aims, even though this is a proxy, slo-mo World Wat III that will settle world issues like the disposition of the Russian Empire and its successors. The Russia problem won't go away just like that if Putin is out of the picture, or if Russia simply withdraws from Ukraine. Nukes or no, and let's hope it's no, Russia will likely be solved only by a de facto Western occupation that severely limits military reconstruction and imposes a completely new constitution, a la Germany and Japan after 1945.

Trump is implicitly raising these questions. Biden, meanwhile, has little political capital to expend on articulating a clear set of war aims; he's effectively farmed it out to Zelensky, with Secretaries Austin and Blinken tardily and reluctantly signing on to each new Zelensky initiative, when Zelensky has been able to say with some effect that this is simply prolonging the war.

The most favorable interpretation of Trump's view at this point is that the current military and foreign policy establishment needs to be careful what it wishes for. If the West continues incremental increases in aid to Ukraine without a realistic plan and clear overall objectives, the short-term result, whether it's nukes or just some other form of local conflict, will be destablilizing and to the West's ultimate detriment.

In any case, if Trump's message gains traction, as I think it might given what I see in conservative media, Biden will need to reexamine national priorities and increase Ukraine aid sharply now to be sure the war ends before the 2024 campaign. I'm not sure how long he'll have the political capital to do this, but he'll still have the problem that nobody's thought through what the world will look like when that aim is achieved.

The Key Is Hunter

Here's another intriguing data point: in the midst of a current news story that's presumably unrelated to the classified document issue, the emergence of Jeff Zients as Ron Klain's replascement as White House Chief of Staff, we find this:

With his expected return to the highest echelon of the White House as chief of staff, Zients is now taking fire from all ideological directions for his meetings with Hunter Biden, scapegoating of people who resist COVID vaccination and history with healthcare companies accused of billing fraud.

. . . Zients met with the younger Biden at least three times in the first half of 2016 as his father prepared to leave the vice presidency, according to emails from Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop verified by Fox News. The first two meetings took place at the vice presidential residence and included the elder Biden.

The meetings also variously included former lobbyist and current White House counselor Steve Richetti; then-Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Eric Lander; billionaire World Economic Forum member and Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein, the recurring host for Joe Biden's Nantucket vacations; biotech investor Richard Klausner; and Atlantic Media Chairman David Bradley, publisher of the 166-year-old magazine.

Timelines for Hunter's activites are remarkably sketchy, but during this period of his life, Hunter had separated from his first wife, Kathleen Buhle, in 2015, and their divorce was pending over the following year. During 2016, he was also closely involved in setting up what would become the Penn Biden Center:

On April 25, 2016, Creative Artists Agency (CAA) agent Craig Gering emailed Hunter with "confidential notes from our meeting," in which Gering listed apparent plans that were discussed for the vice president upon leaving office.

One of those plans included "wealth creation," with no further explanation, and another included an apparent reference to the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., with a possible job opportunity for Hunter.

. . . Hunter then confirmed Gering's notes but emphasized that they needed to be "very confidential" because they were not set in stone.

In 2014, he joined the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which he continued until 2019. According to Wikipedia,

Because Joe Biden played a major role in U.S. policy towards Ukraine, some Ukrainian anti-corruption advocates and Obama administration officials expressed concern that Hunter Biden having joined the board could create the appearance of a conflict of interest and undermine Joe Biden's anti-corruption work in Ukraine.

During 2016, Hunter also began an affair with Beau's widow, Hallie, that lasted through 2019. As I noted in yesterday's post, by 2018, Hallie had some role in sending Hunter to California to get him out of the spotlight. As I noted last Friday, during his 2016 divorce proceedings, his ex-wife noted,

[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.

As of 2016, Hunter appears to have been essentially the same guy we've come to know through his laptop and other episodes like his paternity case. According to the Wikipedia link above,

Over the past two decades, Biden has been in and out of rehabilitation, with long periods of sobriety followed by relapses. Following the [2015] death of his brother Beau, his addiction escalated, and he claims to have been "smoking crack every 15 minutes." A detailed analysis of Hunter Biden's hard drive by NBC News showed that Biden and his firm were paid $11 million from 2013 to 2018, and the funds fueled his addiction. In his autobiography Beautiful Things, he said that the money from Burisma "turned into a major enabler during my steepest skid into addiction" and "hounded me to spend recklessly, dangerously, destructively. Humiliatingly. So I did."

In the fall of 2016, he was in rehab in Sedona, AZ:

In the fall of 2016, Hunter arranged to go to rehab in Sedona, Arizona. During a layover in Los Angeles, he realized he left his wallet on the plane. While waiting for his wallet in LA, he went to Pershing Square and asked a homeless man where he could buy crack.

He bought crack several times that week, The New Yorker reported. After days of not sleeping, on Oct. 28, Hunter was driving on Interstate 10 near Palm Springs and eventually lost control of the car.

The story continues,

Hunter Biden began dating his brother’s widow while recovering from a week spent buying crack from a homeless encampment in Los Angeles, according to a new report.

. . . He made plans to head to a detox center in Arizona, but got sidetracked during a stopover in Los Angeles, where he soon asked a vagrant where he could buy crack, according to the mag.

. . . Hunter took his rental car to Arizona, where Hertz workers called the cops after finding a crack pipe and a baggie containing a “white powdery substance,” along with a Secret Service business card, Hunter’s driver’s license and a badge from Beau’s time as Delaware attorney general inside.

Local prosecutors declined to pursue the case, citing a lack of evidence that he actually used the pipe, according to the New Yorker.

Hunter, meanwhile, finally spent a week at Grace Grove Lifestyle Center — a local “detox, rejuvenation and healing retreat” — before checking into a resort spa, where Hallie flew to meet him and they decided to become a couple.

The picture that emerges is that during 2016, Biden, set to leave the vice presidency at age 74, was busily planning an active future career during a time when most people are already retired, and indeed, when most former vice presidents leave public life. But Hunter, despite his dire financial straits, his tangled personal life, and his desperate addiction, was closely involved in the whole process. In fact, 2016 seems to be the year when Hunter's pattern of life over the next several years would be established, leaving Delaware for California to minimize publicity but continuing a drug-addled lifestyle enabled by Burisma, but also with financial injections from Joe, as well as visits from Joe's former contacts in the Secret Service.

I've got to think that Jeff Zients has emerged as a choice for Chief of Staff because he's been fully aware of Hunter's position in the Biden universe and will be expected to deal with it. I would also surmise that Joe expects things to continue more or less as they have been -- Zients isn't there to clean house, not least because the problem has long since metastasized. I would guess that this is what Biden's personal attorneys are also discovering.

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?