"What In The Hell Is The Penn Biden Center?"

This is the question Paul Kengor asked in an essay this past Monday in The American Spectator. Pondering this question, he says,

So, I ventured to the website of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy & Global Engagement. Alas, I remain even more in the dark. I found a few articles and what seem like press releases. I found no reports or policy papers, which is odd because such is the main product of a think tank.

I did, however, find Joe Biden — everywhere. Biden’s grinning mug is splashed all over the thing. When you first open the website, you see Biden. When you click the first heading, labeled, “We’re Focused On,” you’re assaulted with some mindless mishmash about “Advancing the Dialogue of Internationalism.” The viewer is greeted by — surprise — two photos, both of Joe Biden. The first is a photo of, quite appropriately, old Scranton Joe and China’s Xi taking a friendly stroll together at some bridge near Beijing.

His conclusion is fairly simple, it doesn't really do anything but promote Joe Biden:

I’ve worked for think tanks with budgets under a million bucks that produced more in five months than the Penn Biden Center has done in five years. . . . Other than serving as a dubious tribute entity to Joe Biden, I don’t see this thing as doing much.

Here, I disagree. It did a great deal during the main years of its operation in 2018 and 2019, and as far as I can tell, it's been unique. At that time, it was pretty clearly a political operation on behalf of Biden as an undeclared candidate for president in 2020 -- he announced on April 25, 2019, after which his activities at the Penn Biden Center appear to have wound down.

I assume this allowed Joe to collect a salary and pay staff before his announcement without the need to follow campaign laws, in particular without the need to disclose his donors, who seem to have been able to funnel many millions anonymously to the non-campaign via the University of Pennsylvania. So Paul Kengor is saying something basic when he says it isn't a think tank, but that's only what it isn't, and he offers little insight into what it is.

But again, let's look at the context in my Hunter timeline. Just a month before the announcement, in March 2019, the Biden family called Hunter to Wilmington and staged an intervention to get him off drugs. This didn't turn out as expected; according to the link,

Hunter, according to his book, agreed to be taken to a local rehab center by Hallie Biden, his brother Beau's widow with whom he'd had a romantic relationship in the past. But after she dropped him off at the rehab center, Hunter got an Uber to a hotel near BWI Airport. "I sat in my room and smoked the crack I'd tucked away in my traveling bag," wrote.

"I then boarded a plane for California and ran and ran and ran."

The following month, though, Hunter, back in Delaware, abandoned his notorious laptop at the computer repair shop. Also in April, his term as a Burisma director expired, which cut off a good part of his income stream. Nevertheless, by May, Melissa Cohen, a jetsetter with no income of her own, found Hunter attractive enough to wangle a date with him and marry him six days later. I strongly suspect, given the overall hinkiness of Hunter's public record, this wasn't what actually happened, and the fast track appears to have been sponsored and encouraged in some way. According to the link,

Melissa is from South Africa, but recently became a naturalized U.S. citizen, a ceremony Hunter proudly attended.

Right, crackhead Hunter is anxious that his current squeeze, among at least half a dozen others, become a naturalized US citizen? I think it's much more likely that a contingent of handlers devised and supervised the whole arrangement. As of last summer,

Hunter Biden’s marriage to filmmaker Melissa Cohen is on the rocks under the pressure of the federal investigation into him, say insiders.

Sources close to President Biden’s wayward son say both Hunter and his South African wife “are frustrated because they are in lockdown,” while she has confided in friends that life with Hunter is “hard.”

One source close to the couple said, “They never go anywhere because they’ve been instructed to stay out of sight and away from the cameras while the investigation into Hunter continues.

“Added to the pressure, the Secret Service lives in a much larger mansion next door to them and they watch over Hunter like hawks. It is extremely frustrating for both of them.”

The record we have is that, especially from the time Joe left the vice presidency in 2017 through the peak period of 2018, Hunter served as an important proxy and catspaw for Joe, whose interests were, first, to collect payoffs for favors he'd done as vice president but couldn't collect while he was in office, and second, to collect new payoffs in anticipation of favors he'd do once he became president but again couldn't collect while in office.

Joe tolerated Hunter's escapades as long as Joe was out of office, a private citizen, and not an announced candidate. But by March 2019, as he planned to announce, it would be necessary to get Hunter under control. The end of Hunter's term at Burisma was important leverage, as was Hunter's mounting debt load and what had likely become a deficit in his family finance account, given the amounts Joe had had to front him throughout 2018. So he and Melissa were packed away and kept on a very short, if very expensive, leash. How Hunter's full Malibu lifestyle and his mounting legal costs have been covered given his lack of income is still unknown.

First son Hunter Biden's art sales are reportedly falling short of the revenue he needs to cover his mounting legal expenses.

Earnings from his sales of roughly a dozen paintings have generated "a fraction of the $500,000 price tag once estimated," and now some of his allies are contemplating setting up a legal defense fund to help him navigate his legal troubles, the Washington Post reported.

The Penn Biden Center effectively operated for about an 18-month period as office space and a temporary paycheck for Joe and select top-level functionaries like Antony Blinken and Steve Ricchetti. But as soon as Biden announced, Riccetti, for example, moved on to head his campaign committee. The problem is that during its main period of operation, it also appears to have been a central office for overall Biden affairs. It must have paid, directly or indirectly, the retired Secret Service agents already known to Biden who worked on his behalf to manage Hunter (and presumably other delicate matters) duering 2018. A story I covered yesterday mentions Dale Pupillo, who turned up in the lobby of The Jeremy to remonstrate with Hunter on his escort charges. Here's Pupillo's CV:

Assistant Director (Retired), United States Secret Service, Washington, DC

A 32-year veteran of the Secret Service, Dale Pupillo retired as Assistant Director in January 2015. Pupillo is currently a security consultant servicing the DC area.

. . . In 2008 Pupillo was selected as the Special Agent in Charge of the Vice Presidential Protective Division. He served in that role for Vice Presidents Dick Cheney and Joe Biden. In 2013 Pupillo served as Assistant Director for Human Resources and Training. In 2014 he was selected to serve as Assistant Director of Protective Operations.

The story at yesterday's link indicates Pupillo did other work for Hunter, based on "invoices". In fact, it sounds as though during 2018, he was running an effective shadow Secret Service operation on behalf of Joe that mirrored the official organization and provided Joe with services he was no longer eligible to receive as vice president -- and indeed, given yesterday's stories of the escort service that billed Hunter and then strangely disappeared, or the Secret Service agents who tried to erase the paperwork on Hunter's gun in the dumpster, this shadow Secret Service did dirty work the real one presumably wouldn't, or at least shouldn't, do.

The Penn Biden Center operated as a White House-in-exile. It collected payoffs for past and future favors for which Biden couldn't be paid while in office as either vice president or president. It served as a key entity for managing Hunter's activities and the dirty work Hunter either supervised or made necessary due to his indiscretions. It was office space for the rest of the Biden family payoff racket. It was funded via anonymous dontions to the University of Pennsylvania.

However, it served this purpose for only a limited period and seems to have become less active once Joe announced for the presidency in 2019 and had to put a lid on Hunter's excesses. What's interesting is the carelessness whereby it was allowed to sit idle until someone decided it needed to be cleaned up in mid-2022. This was work that should have started in 2019 and will likely be impossible to accomplish now.

A Man Of Infinite Reach

I mentioned the other day that I've had a project of interleaving all the links I've run across to Hunter Biden stories by date, which has grown quite large. So far, it starts about 2006, when he began to set up businesses that would benefit from Joe's campaigns aimed at the 2008 election, first for president and then as Obama's nominee for vice president. Prior to that, he'd prospered mainly as the son of a US senator and influential Delaware politician, attending Georgetown University and then Yale Law on the same basis as the offspring of others in that class. Once he got his Yale degree, he went on to work for a bank, no different from people like San Bankman-Fried or Caroline Ellison, just garden-variety Ivy League gentry.

But once his father finally reached the prospect of national office, the stories began to balloon. The names of his companies and cronies immediately proliferated, and just to follow up on all the references in the various stories, especially since the laptop surfaced in 2020, meant I needed to create a central reference where I could begin to figure out where each individual or corporate entity fit into the overall narrative. I'm surprised that nobody else seems to be doing this.

Let's take just the latest episode, the story that came out in the UK Daily Mail yesterday:

Hunter Biden threatened one of his cash-strapped young female staffers with withholding her pay if she didn't FaceTime him for sex.

Shocking texts between the President's son, 52, and his young assistant, who was 29 at the time, show Hunter asking for video sex sessions and sending her cash via Apple Pay after she pleaded that she was struggling to make rent.

, , , Messages and emails involving his now 33-year-old assistant first appear on Hunter's laptop in June 2018, when he flew her from Los Angeles to Washington DC.

Just for fun, let's go to my timeline for context on what our boy was doing just in the immediate weeks and months surrounding this particular tryst. The previous month, May,

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.

. . . 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.

He transfers $8,000. It doesn’t work. A few minutes later, Wells Fargo sends him a fraud detection alert. He reaches into his wallet , pulls out a card and attempts to transfer the $8,000 but it apparently doesn’t go through. He rifles through his wallet again. No luck. He pulls out another card. Bingo.

At that point, for whatever reason, the spigot opens, and there are transfers galore, to the point that Emerald Fantasy Girls calls Hunter to say he's paying too much. Then, a week or two later, Emerald Fantasy Girls disappears, and we know little else. The story continues,

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 Secret Service told The Post that Savage retired from the agency on April 30, 2018 — weeks before the Biden debauchery — and that the agency “did not provide protection to any member of the Biden family in 2018.”

Joe Biden had, of course, left the vice presidency in January 2017, was a private citizen at the time, and was not eligible for Secret Service protection. Nevertheless,

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 Hunter again to say that Dale Pupillo, a retired deputy assistant director of the Secret Service, who used to guard his father, has arrived. Invoices indicate that Pupillo did background checks for Hunter on potential business partners. Pupillo did not return requests for comment.

. . . What these apparent minders told Hunter next isn’t recorded on his devices. We know Hunter stays up the rest of that night, logging into an encrypted government site, “secure.login.gov,” a number of times until 4:04 a.m.

Although Hunter was in Los Angeles in late May, the story about the young staffer shows him in Washington by June, flying the staffer there to frolic with him. But by July, he was back in Hollywood long enough to find he'd been blacklisted by the notorious Chateau Marmont:

On July 18, 2018, the conversation picked up again with the employee texting, “Your profile does say BLACKLISTED … there was a hole in the wall of one of the rooms you had.”

Biden responded: “A hole – what does that even mean? And what does that have to do with drugs? And why would a joke in the wall not be something I paid to repair. And I’ve never put a f****** hole in any hotel wall."

The pair then discussed how best to retrieve Biden’s personal items, which were still at the hotel.

But from June through August of 2018, Hunter was also working closely with Kathy Chung, a longtime Biden family retainer who first began working for Joe in 2012 at Hunter's recommendation.

"Hi, Hunt!! Per your conversation with you Dad, here is he Penn Biden materials and the block schedule. Let me know if you need anything else, Hunt. Miss ya. Kathy," Chung wrote to Hunter Biden in a June 19, 2018. Chung’s message also contained a six-page report covering the results of a Penn Biden Center poll on American attitudes toward democracy.

The story notes that we don't know Hunter's location during the course of these events, but he did apparently fly his staffer from Los Angeles to Washington during this period for sex, and based on this and another Chung message, he was working with his father on projects related to the Penn Biden Center:

Chung's access to the president's inner circle was made clear in August 2018, when Joe Biden included her in a group text message with relatives and confidants, inviting them to install the encrypted messaging app, Signal. Also included in the chat were Hunter Biden, presidential counselor Steve Ricchetti, three other Biden family members, and two unknown individuals with South Korean and Washington, D.C., phone numbers, respectively.

It’s not clear why Joe Biden moved to open a secured line of communication with his family and close aides, nor who owns the unknown phone numbers. Attempts to call and text the numbers were unsuccessful, and the White House did not return a request for comment. Biden continued communicating with relatives over email and through text messages after sending the Signal invitation.

Chung has more recently said

she is 'distressed' that she may have 'inadvertently been involved in moving or storing classified material' that a Biden lawyer later uncovered at the Penn Biden Center in November, the Washington Post reported.

Two things strike me from the context of these stories once they're put together. One is that Joe Biden, a private citizen during 2018, continued to avail himself of quasi-presidential level surveillance, intelligence, and security capabilties, including the services of at least two recently retired Secret Service agents, the apparent ability to monitor Hunter's credit card spending and balance alerts, the ability to override his low balances, and continued access to some type of government or White House secure logon capability, although he was out of office and a private citizen. Somehow in connection with Hunter's credit card issues, the Russian madam and her organization mysteriously disappeared as well. I simply can't imagine someone like Dan Quayle with similar access and authority.

Indeed, by that October, there was another episode suggesting Joe had access to a remarkable level of surveillance and intelligence via the Secret Service, while out of office and a private citizen:

On Oct. 23, 2018, President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and daughter in law Hallie were involved in a bizarre incident in which Hallie took Hunter’s gun and threw it in a trash can behind a grocery store, only to return later to find it gone.

Delaware police began investigating, concerned that the trash can was across from a high school and that the missing gun could be used in a crime, according to law enforcement officials and a copy of the police report obtained by POLITICO.

But a curious thing happened at the time: Secret Service agents approached the owner of the store where Hunter bought the gun and asked to take the paperwork involving the sale, according to two people, one of whom has firsthand knowledge of the episode and the other was briefed by a Secret Service agent after the fact.

. . . The Secret Service declined to answer a question about whether it had informal involvement in Biden’s security during this period.

The other thing that strikes me is that during this period, he was working with his extended family, including his siblings and Hunter, on what appears to have been highly confidential matters involving representatives of foreign countries in an environment where we know classified documents were improperly stored. The Penn Biden Center appears in many ways to have been the office of a de facto president-in-waiting, except without the level of recordkeeping or accountability that would apply to an actual president. How did this take place? Someone above Joe in the food chain could apparently make this happen for him, when it apparently wouldn't happen for a Dick Cheney, a Mike Pence, or even an Al Gore.

The Ukraine Hawks' Problem

The policies Donald Trump has articulated over Ukraine have been consistent, and he restated them over the weekend:

Former President Donald Trump said he could solve the Russia-Ukraine war "in 24 hours," while speaking at his presidential campaign kickoff in New Hampshire on Saturday.

. . . "My personality kept us out of war," the former president continued. "And I told you before, [it] would have never happened with Russia. Putin would have never ever gone in. And even now I could solve that in 24 hours. It's so horrible what happened. Those cities are demolished now."

Trump concluded by saying that if he was president, there would have been "zero chance that war would have happened."

The problem for Ukraine is that following the September 2022 Russian rout in Donbas and the November Russian withdrawal from northern Kherson, their counteroffensive has stalled, and they've resumed calls for more effective Western weapons, at this point main battle tanks and F-16 jets. The Western response has been continued reluctant incrementalism, with President Biden repeating the response he's made over the past year, denying such requests but then relenting over a period of weeks:

#BREAKING Biden says "no" to US sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine pic.twitter.com/32Y8S1HUSU

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) January 30, 2023

Given his record, he'll change his mind in March or so, which means it will take just that much longer to bring the F-16s on line.

The difficulty at this point is that the history of the war for much of 2022 was Russian advance, followed by a period of stalemate, followed by a dramatic Russian rout. Nevertheless, as the map above shows, Russia retains considerable area that it had seized after the February invasion, and it continues to hold all its post-2014 territory. Optimistic predictions by the retired general talking heads that much of this could be regained in 2023 are being rolled back. Instead, the Institute for the Study of War now projects:

Western, Ukrainian, and Russian sources continue to indicate that Russia is preparing for an imminent offensive, supporting ISW’s assessment that an offensive in the coming months is the most likely course of action (MLCOA). NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg stated on January 30 that there are no indications that Russia is preparing to negotiate for peace and that all indicators point to the opposite. Stoltenberg noted that Russia may mobilize upwards of 200,000 personnel and is continuing to acquire weapons and ammunition through increased domestic production and partnerships with authoritarian states such as Iran and North Korea. Stoltenberg emphasized that Russian President Vladimir Putin retains his maximalist goals in Ukraine. Head of the Council of Reservists of the Ukrainian Ground Forces, Ivan Tymochko, relatedly stated that Russian forces are strengthening their grouping in Donbas as part of an anticipated offensive and noted that Russian forces will need to launch an offensive due to increasing domestic pressure for victory.

The Ukraine Hawks in the military and foreign policy establishment are beginning to recognize the problem. Michael McFaul is, according to Wikipedia,

an American academic and diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. McFaul is currently the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor in International Studies in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. . . . He is also a Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a contributing columnist at The Washington Post. . . . McFaul worked for the U.S. National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and senior director of Russian and Eurasian affairs. In that capacity, he was the architect of U.S. President Barack Obama's Russian reset policy.

So this is an important guy. He wrote yesterday in Foreign Affairs,

There are risks to providing more and better weapons to Ukraine, but there are also risks to not doing so. If the war in Ukraine drags on for years, so many more people—Ukrainians first and foremost, but also Russians—will die. “Stalemate” on the battlefield is a euphemism for continued death and destruction. This is the cost of incrementalism.

Protracted war also risks losing public support in the United States and Europe. At the end of 2022, Biden signed into law a new $45 billion aid package for Ukraine. This should fund U.S. military assistance until the end of this year, including new weapons systems such as ATACMs and fighter jets, should they be given the green light. But now that the House of Representatives is under Republican control, future appropriations could be less forthcoming.

. . . Western leaders need to shift how they approach the conflict. At this stage, incrementally expanding military and economic assistance is likely to only prolong the war indefinitely.

. . . The way this new military assistance is announced also matters. Rather than providing ATACMs in March, Reapers in June, and jets in September, NATO should go for a Big Bang. Plans to provide all these systems should be announced on February 24, 2023, the first anniversary of Putin’s invasion.

It's worth noting that this has been the strategy Zelensky and the Ukrainian armed forces have advocated all along, and indeed still advocate. As of this morning, though, it appears that President Biden is sticking with the strategy of reluctant incrementalism he's displayed over the past year.

But beyond that, even the strategy McFaul advocates, a Big Bang announcement at the end of next month, has the same problems that have hobbled the existing incrementalist strategy -- the US finally approves Weapon Whatever, but this requires shipping Weapon Whatever first to Poland, and then extensive training of Ukrainian soldiers in the new weapon, new logistical channels to support the new weapon, and so forth, such that the effects of the new weapon don't emerge for months. Meanwhile, there's stalemate, and the war drags on.

Add to that the additional issue that the last Weapon Whatever, HIMARS, allowed some limited gains, but the Russians adapted to it, and the result has been renewed stalemate until the next Weapon Whatever arrives -- in this case, Bradleys. But we won't learn how that will turn out for months.

It's happening now, and it will happen even if NATO announces a Big Bang on February 24. The problem is that whatever we do on February 24, 2023, we're stuck with the results of our strategy throughnout 2022. As a retired US lieutenant colonel pointed out the other day regarding new weapons,

“You can’t send 500 [Ukrainian] dudes to Germany and conduct six weeks of maneuver training and think you’re going to get the same output, because those guys don’t have the experience,” he said. “They don’t even have the baseline understanding that we had a whole career and our whole training before we even arrived at that one year preparation.”

Davis suggests imagining the chances that someone who has “never even seen this equipment” will “have to just fall in on it while they’re in [combat] potentially a few months from now — which is what they’re saying they’re trying to do — and it’s somehow those things are going to be effective in combat.”

“I mean just on the surface of it, that’s ridiculous,” he said. “I mean it’s people who just don’t have any idea of how actual combat power is generated that would believe that.”

Lt Col Davis is referring to Abrams tanks, which are months away from shipping in the current pipeline, but his remarks could apply just as easily to the Bradleys said to be shipping now. One thing that's becoming more clear is that the West went into Ukraine without a serious plan and without a clear set of objectives, which it's never taken the trouble to develop as the war has progressed. As a result, the US runs the risk of having the same result it's had in Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, another long, expensive, and indecisive war.

At the same time, I think I may have made the mistake many others made late last year, assuming Trump was fading from the scene, when it turns out that that which does not kill him makes him stronger. His basic position is that Biden's weakness in Afghanistan created the conditions for Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and the current administration's policy of reluctant incrementalism has simply exacerbated the situation. The foreign policy establishment's belated turn away from incrementalism will likely be too late to fix the problem.

I misunderestimated Trump, I now think.

Looks Like At Least Two Attorneys Have Washed Their Hands Of Biden

I've been following up on the question of Biden's personal attorneys for a while, and the most I can say is we don't know very much. CBS News has done some good research on this, and I linked to a January 12 story earlier here that gives the most comprehensive list so far:

Longtime Democratic lawyer Bob Bauer is serving as the personal attorney for President Biden in the classified documents matter now before a Justice Department special counsel, the White House confirmed Friday.

Bauer has been the primary point of contact between the Biden camp and the Justice Department during the initial investigation, which began in November, CBS News has learned.

. . . Recent filings with the National Archives name three partners at D.C. law firm Covington and Burling as Biden's representatives to the Archives for his vice presidential records: Dana Remus, former Biden White House counsel, Biden campaign attorney Robert Lenhard and James Garland, a former Obama-era Justice Department official.

Their roles in the documents matter is [sic] unclear. Multiple calls and emails to Remus, Lenhard and Garland since Monday have gone unanswered.

Several sources added an additional name in mid-January, M Patrick Moore, who was reported as the individual who discovered and reported the first tranche of classified documents at the Penn Biden Center on November 2. Accordimg to the UK Daily Mail:

Joe Biden's personal attorney - who found classified material inside Biden's Washington DC think tank - has already spoken to federal prosecutors, according to a report.

Patrick Moore was asked to clear out Biden's office in November and found the documents, CNN reported.

Moore then informed the National Archives and Justice Department.

. . . On Tuesday [January 17] it emerged that Moore has already spoken to John Lausch, the U.S. Attorney for the northern district of Illinois.

Lausch was initially tasked with investigating the classified material; his job has now been taken over by the special counsel, Robert Hur, who was appointed on January 12.

According to The Hill,

Reacting to the November discovery of the Biden classified materials, Attorney General Merrick Garland at the time quietly assigned the U.S. attorney in Chicago to review a “small number” of documents with classified marking, which were removed from the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in the nation’s capital and turned over to national archivists by Biden’s personal lawyers, CBS reported.

Time provides more detail:

On November 9, the FBI began an inquiry into whether any laws were broken and if classified information was mishandled. Several days later on November 14, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland assigned John Lausch, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, to the case to determine if a special counsel was needed.

However there appears to have been some agreement to keep the discovery quiet. Time continues,

The following month, Biden’s personal counsel found additional classified documents in the president’s private library attached to his garage during an inspection of his home in Wilmington, Delaware on December 20. The attorneys informed Lausch about the findings and handed the documents over the following day.

A few days into the new year, Lausch filled Garland in on the investigation on January 5 and recommended that the DOJ appoint a special counsel, who would extensively investigate and potentially prosecute any wrongdoing.

On January 9, CBS News was the first to report on November’s discovery of classified documents, bringing the case to public attention. The White House then publicly confirmed the inquiry, saying that the administration was cooperating with the DOJ and NARA, but didn’t mention the additional classified documents found in December.

A January 24 CBS News story adds another data point, the current status of the Biden personal attorney who discovered and reported the first three document tranches:

Two sources familiar with the investigation told CBS News that Massachusetts-based attorney M. Patrick Moore had been part of the president's personal legal team dealing with the documents matter. Moore recently took a senior role in the Massachusetts attorney general's office and is no longer listed on his law firm's website.

A spokesperson for the Massachusetts attorney general said Moore's start date was Jan. 18 and directed further questions about Moore's private representations to [Bob Bauer's spokesperson Molly] Levinson.

Levinson confirmed he is no longer representing the president.

The account above implies that Moore had been performing as Biden's personal attorney in his capacity as a counsel at a Boston law firm, but has recently left that firm and also no longer represents Biden. The firm, Hemenway & Barnes LLP, announced in February 2017, just as the Obama administration ended,

Hemenway & Barnes LLP, one of Boston’s leading legal and fiduciary firms, today announced that M. Patrick Moore Jr. has joined its business and non-profit law practices as Counsel.

Pat is a litigator with a unique perspective on the mechanics of federal and state government. He brings to clients a background in business and appellate litigation, and an understanding of legislative and regulatory initiatives at all levels of government.

Before joining Hemenway & Barnes, Pat was an Associate Counsel and Advisor for Presidential Personnel at the White House, in the administration of President Barack Obama. There, he vetted prospective nominees for executive, judicial, and independent agency positions; evaluated clemency petitions; and analyzed legal issues on behalf of the President. In 2020, he had also been a deputy general counsel to the Biden 2020 presidential campaign.

This set of circumstances strikes me as remarkable for what it doesn't say. As best we can determine, Moore had been working for Biden personally in an effort to review and potentially scrub old files at the Penn Biden Center, as well as potentially also at the Biden residence. On November 2, he found files whose existence he felt compelled to disclose, although from current accounts, it isn't clear to whom he disclosed them, whether the White House Counsel's office or the Department of Justice.

However, Attorney General Garland within days "quietly" assigned a US attorney, John Lausch, to review the situation, and Moore then met with Lausch. A few days later, the situation was deemed important enough to bring in the FBI on November 9. Moore, apparently still on the case, went to the Biden Wilmington home and found additional documents on December 20 and reported them to Lausch as well. After the holiday, at least according to this verison, Lausch went to Merrick Garland on January 5 and recommended a special counsel.

However, no move was made to appoint the special counsel until CBS reported on the previously hidden story on January 9 and another set of documents was found at the Biden home on January 11. As far as I can tell, this was Moore again reporting to Lausch. Lausch apparently went to Garland on January 12, and that afternoon, Garland announced the appointment of a special counsel.

But wait: there's more. That same day, January 12, according to WTTW,

Chicago’s top federal prosecutor, who recently has been tasked with probing classified documents found at President Joe Biden’s home and office, will be leaving his post sometime this year.

John Lausch, who has served as U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Illinois since 2017, is planning to leave the office in “early 2023,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced during an unrelated press conference Thursday.

And as of January 17-18, the days the story about his role broke, M Patrick Moore, who apparently had been tasked with cleaning up the files at Penn Biden Center and the Biden home and weeks earlier had discovered the classified documents in both places, no longer represented Biden as a personal attorney, had left his former law firm, and had taken a job with the Massachusetts Attorney General, where he would presumably be hundreds of miles from either Washington or Wilmington. (I would bet he's taken a big pay cut, too,)

Something's hinky. I get the feeling that two important lawyers decided they no longer wanted to be involved in the case and skedaddled. (My wife suggests that both Moore and Lausch may wish to preserve their roles as witnesses in the matter rather than as potential co-conspirators.)

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.