Cracks In The Creation Myth

I'm old enough to remember 1972 (I was young enough to support McGovern, but apparently, though of age, I didn't bother to vote for him, because I think my first vote in a presidential election was for Gerald Ford). I also remember the orchestrated media sob session when the newly elected Sen Biden from Delaware lost his wife and daughter in an auto accident that December. This was the start of the Biden creation myth, but more of that later.

A visitor kindly sent me a link to a story at Life Site News that renewed my overall sense of Biden skepticism, Was Joe and Jill Biden’s 1977 wedding at the United Nations done according to Canon Law? This, of course, is the second phase of the Biden creation myth, the marriage to Dr Jill signifying his recovery from setback and tragedy. A typical version is this cloying tribute in Politico:

There is no person in American politics today whose life has been so shaped by loss and grief. The long arc of Biden’s career is all but bracketed by tragedy. In 1972, his wife and baby daughter were killed in a car accident; in 2015, one of his two sons who had survived the crash died of a rare strain of brain cancer. These wretched tentpoles are not only tragedies the 76-year-old Biden has had to endure. They influenced major decisions he made about his political career. . . . And they defined him as a person as well. . . . They made him more relatable, more authentic, more empathetic. These traits, they say, were there already, instilled by his working-class roots and the teachings of the Catholic church, his mother’s tenets of social justice and his father’s mantra to get up, get up, after getting knocked down—but they were amplified by what Biden was made to learn about himself, and about life, as he fought through these ordeals.

The storybook remarriage to Dr Jill is but one example. But what about the teachings of the Catholic Church, which have done so much to make him the more reliable, authentic, empathetic leader he's become? According to the story linked above,

In “Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself “(2019), Jill’s autobiography, we learn that she and Joe were married at the UN Chapel on June 17, 1977 – and, she says, “by a Catholic priest.”

. . . Given that Joe has been a “priest-collector” his whole life, why go to New York to be married by an anonymous priest? Was he even a priest in good standing?

. . . Online searches for information on the UN Chapel turns up an article about it in the New York Times from May 9, 1976 (“UN Chapel Weddings: Ecumenical Spirit”). The chaplain was a Rev. Dr. Melvin Hawthorne, a minister of the United Methodist Church. He says that the chapel does not have an actual relationship with the United Nations, but that many people associated with the UN do opt for his chapel. In 1976, the chapel was the site of over 400 weddings, 60 percent of which were for couples of different faiths, many of whom had “run into snags elsewhere.”

So, what might the “snags” have been for the devout Catholic Joe Biden and his fiancée? A number of permissions would have been needed (e.g., mixed marriage since Jill is not Catholic; permission to marry outside a church or oratory). Did they participate in the required pre-nuptial investigation, which should have uncovered that Jill was previously married in February 1970 and divorced in March 1975?

An article in the July 24, 1977 edition of Wilmington, Delaware newspaper The Morning News, titled “‘Catholic’ Joe Biden avoids telling the press his wife is a divorcee,” reports Biden saying, “I thought the fact that Jill was married before had no relevance.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says,

1635 According to the law in force in the Latin Church, a mixed marriage needs for liceity the express permission of ecclesiastical authority. In case of disparity of cult an express dispensation from this impediment is required for the validity of the marriage. This permission or dispensation presupposes that both parties know and do not exclude the essential ends and properties of marriage; and furthermore that the Catholic party confirms the obligations, which have been made known to the non-Catholic party, of preserving his or her own faith and ensuring the baptism and education of the children in the Catholic Church.

The story at Life Site News asks,

If that ceremony was recognized by the Church, it should have been entered into the marriage register of the parish church in whose boundaries the UN Chapel sits, which is Holy Family Church.

The pastor, Father Gerald Murray (coincidentally, a canon lawyer) and well-known member of Raymond Arroyo’s “Papal Posse” on EWTN, stated clearly that no such ceremony or any file for that event is to be found at Holy Family Church. Murray went on to mention that several weddings of Catholics at the UN Chapel are, in fact, registered at his church.

This confirms my view that Biden is mostly a Catholic by convenience, and, pace Politico, the teachings of the Church have never been much of a guiding principle for him -- what sort of an example of marriage has he set for his own children, after all? But this raises another question about the Biden creation myth, the nature of his and Jill's first marriages. According to the received version:

As Joe Biden tells the story, he first saw Jill’s photo on an advertisement in Wilmington, Delaware in March 1975. His brother Frank, who knew the model from college, set Joe up on a blind date the following night. They saw a movie together on the date, fell in love and never looked back.

But according to Jill's ex-husband, Bill Stevenson, at the same link,

he and Jill first got to know Joe Biden when Biden was a county councilman in New Castle, Delaware. Stevenson says he asked for Biden’s help obtaining a liquor license. Stevenson also says he threw a fundraiser for Joe that raised between $2,500 and $3,000.

“We got married in '70, I introduced Joe to Jill in ‘72. Right before the election in ‘72, Jill, Joe, Neilia and I were in his kitchen. How do you forget that?” Stevenson said.

That would be three years before the now-famous “blind date.” Stevenson says his first inkling something was up came when Jill refused to go with him to meet Bruce Springsteen, who was booked to appear at The Stone Balloon.

“She said, ‘Joe asked me to keep an eye on the boys.' And I just thought in the back of my mind, ‘hmm!’” Stevenson said.

So by this account, Joe first met Jill at the start of his political career, before his election to the senate and before the December 1972 accident. While Richardson publicly claims the affair with Joe started in 1974, that appears to have been only when he first said, "hmm!", and it could have begun any time after they first met, which by his account would have been before the accident. (Jill has denied this.)

What of the accident itself? The focus has always been on Joe's claim that his wife and daughter were killed by a drunk driver, but the record has never reflected this.

Numerous news reports indicate Neilia Biden was pulling away from a stop sign — not "running" a stop sign — when the collision occurred. Early news stories also did not describe the other driver as being drunk.

. . . In a story from August 2020, The News Journal in Delaware said Neilia Biden was driving west on Valley Road, a then-rural road in Hockessin, around 2:30 p.m. on Dec. 18. Her station wagon "pulled away from the stop sign" at an intersection when she was struck by the front side of the tractor-trailer being driven by Curtis Dunn, who was on his way home to Pennsylvania.

Investigators found that alcohol didn’t play a role in the crash, according to a 2008 News Journal story. Dunn, who died in 1999, was not charged. But, the paper reported, Biden has suggested that Dunn was intoxicated when the crash occurred.

. . . The police file for the crash no longer exists but, Politico reported in 2019, "coverage in the newspapers at the time made clear that fault was not in question. For whatever reason, Neilia Biden, who was holding the baby, ended up in the right of way of Dunn’s truck coming down a long hill." She had a stop sign and Dunn did not[.]

It doen't sound as if Neilia's blood was tested in the course of any autopsy, or if it was, the news was suppressed by people connected with the senator-elect. All we know is that the press at the time and since has insisted that no alcohol was involved, although we then have the issue of how a mother with an infant and two toddlers in the car could be so distracted as to pull away from a rural stop sign into the path of an 18-wheeler. Other causes certainly can't be ruled out, including suicide or depression.

Given what we're belatedly learning about the Biden family, so many of Joe's siblings, children, in-laws, nieces, and nephews struggling with adultery, alcoholism, and addiction, it's hard not to wonder how Joe might in some way be responsible for some part of it, or if he in some way does more than just enable it. Paragraph 1832 of the Catechism says,

1832 The fruits of the Spirit are perfections that the Holy Spirit forms in us as the first fruits of eternal glory. The tradition of the Church lists twelve of them: "charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, chastity."

I've certainly gone to confession and had the priest ask me how, if I'm Catholic, I'm not displaying more of the fruits of the Spirit. So much the more do I ponder this about professed Catholic Joe and what his family's conduct says about him.

Biden Legal Update

Recent Biden legal news confirms what I've been learning about Bidenworld. I found several recent data items to update my Hunter timeline:

• On December 5, 2022, Joe and Jill Biden took out a $250,000 line of credit secured by the equity on their Rehoboth Beach, DE home. Fox News says, "The financial move came as Hunter Biden is embroiled in a federal investigation and the discovery of President Biden's classified documents from his time as vice president was underway."
• On December 21, 2022, Hunter Biden hired Abbe Lowell, of the firm Winston and Strawn, "to help advise him and be part of his legal team to address the challenges he is facing,” said Kevin Morris, a Hunter confidant and Hollywood attorney who has also been funding his Malibu residence and paid off his 2020 tax bill. Lowell has been successful in obtaining acquittals or mistrials for prominent politicians, including Sen. Bob Menendez, former Sen. John Edwards, and Bill Clinton, as well as other shady figures. According to NBC News, "He joins Chris Clark, of Latham & Watkins, who represents Biden in an ongoing tax-related investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware, on a rapidly growing team of attorneys[.}"
• On February 1, 2023, Hunter's team of attorneys sent letters to the Delaware attorney general, the Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service requesting they open criminal investigations into people responsible for disseminating information from Hunter's laptop.
• However, on January 27, 2023, John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the computer repair shop where Hunter abandoned his laptop in April 2019, served papers on Hunter for a defamation lawsuit of his own. Mac Isaac is one of those named in the letters from Hunter's attorneys requesting criminal probes. "A private investigator hired by Mac Isaac tracked down Hunter in Culver City, Calif. on Jan. 27 to serve him with the lawsuit, which seeks damages of $1.5 million from the president’s son."

Several things strike me about these data points. One is that, although Hunter has generally been portrayed since 2020 as confined to a Malibu compound with a detail of Secret Service minders next door, he's been reported in Washington and Delaware more recently, and now in Culver City. According to the link just above,

“It was very difficult to find where he was,” Mac Isaac’s lawyer Brian Della Rocca told Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Thursday about attempts to smoke out Hunter Biden.

“You know, he was in DC for a couple of weeks and he was moving around. Well, we finally tracked him down and we were able to serve him last week."

Hunter is an addict. He's liable to relapse at any time, which is likely why he's been confined to the Malibu compound, which is also said to adjoin a luxury rehab center. It appears that his restrictions have been relaxed as he works more closely with Joe on the classified documents case, but his increased freedom of movement suggests to me that he won't be far from a new binge, which will be a difficult thing for even an attorney of Abbe Lowell's caliber to handle.

Another issue that strikes me is that even for the Bidens, these lawyers are getting to be expensive. So far, just from the public record, Joe is paying Bob Bauer and three partners at Covington & Burling as personal attorneys on the classified documents case. We now know that he's likely now also bankrolling two partner-level attorneys, Abbe Lowell and Chris Clark, on Hunter's behalf in his tax case and other unspecified "challenges" that possibly relate to classified documents as well. And this doesn't account for billings from associates, paralegals, investigators, forensic accountants, and others. We're talkng about tens of millions, month after month, for all of this. I'm not sure where a $250,000 line of credit comes remotely close to paying for anything here.

And what are the Bidens getting for their money? If anything, Biden's personal attorneys on the classsified documents have done little besides report their existence to the Justice Department, which has been the cause, not the cure, of Biden's trouble. But here's Jonathan Turley's take on the current manifestation of the Abbe Lowell strategy on Hunter's behalf:

The letters raise serious constitutional and political concerns. Critics using publicly available material are allowed to reach their own conclusions about the implications of these files.

. . . Hunter Biden is a public figure who must shoulder a high standard for defamation of “actual malice,” requiring that a false statement be made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” Courts are highly protective of the exercise of opinion, particularly on subjects of great political significance like influence peddling.

The laptop’s legal status is also key. To all appearances, Hunter abandoned the laptop at John Paul Mac Isaac’s Wilmington, Del., computer repair shop. . . . Under standard terms of the agreement, an item left beyond a certain number of days at a business or rental housing becomes abandoned property. It can generally then be left on the curb, sold, or given away.

What’s most striking about the Hunter Biden claim is the delay. For more than two years, Hunter has refused to admit the laptop is genuine despite email recipients confirming the content of the communications. The laptop also shows Hunter engaged in potential crimes from drug use to prostitution offenses. Yet he insisted it might all be those pesky Russians again.

Now the laptop is his, and he is fighting mad. Indeed, he’s shocked that anyone would treat his property in this fashion — a property he left at a computer shop and failed to claim for years.

So Lowell's case is flimsy, but beyond that, he's drawing attention to the laptop, which has already been declared authentic and which he's now implying is, or at least was, his. And Lowell is drawing attention to the Marco Polo site, which I only now went to investigate. Let's take the reaction of commentator John Hinderaker, who apparently like me only just now heard of it due to Lowell's letters:

I don’t think I am easily shocked, but what I found there was astonishing. Hunter Biden’s daily preoccupations are (or were, until recently) crack cocaine and prostitutes. His most frequent communications were with crack dealers and pimps, lining up and paying for prostitutes. It goes on and on, day after day. Is there a drug dealer or a pimp on the East Coast, or in California, who is not on close personal terms with Hunter Biden?

The amount of money Hunter ran through was extraordinary. Where did he get it? Not through any legal and gainful employment, certainly. It is reasonable to assume that Hunter’s share of the Biden crime family’s loot went for crack and prostitutes. Follow the link for details: it went on day after day. Frankly, it is surprising that Hunter is still alive.

. . . I can’t begin to convey the extent of Hunter’s depravity, as documented by him in photos, videos, texts and emails. If you are interested, follow the link. The sheer volume is overwhelming. Pretty much everything Hunter did was both appalling and illegal.

I visited the link only because Hinderaker provided it, and I've got to say that the media has been remarkable in keeping its portrayal of what's on the laptop at PG level. I also agree with his astonishment that, given the quantity and type of drugs he's consumed, Hunter is still alive. But if it weren't for Hunter's highly paid celebrity attorney, most of us would still be in the dark about the full extent of Hunter's depravity.

The Bidens appear to be able to collect baksheesh, but they don't know how to spend their money. With defense lawyers like the ones they have, who needs prosecutors?

For me, this is raising serious questions about Joe's judgment, even in the matter of his current legal strategy. Yet again, this is not a medical issue, but it's definitely one of character.

Who Is Dale Pupillo?

Here's another case of professional reporters, even on the right-wing Hunter Biden beat, who don't seem to have the initiative to do minimal followup when stories break. Earlier this week, I've been relying on a New York Post story from June 2021 covering the efforts of two former Secret Service agents to roust Hunter from his Hollywood hotel room and straighten out his charges for Russian escorts in May of 2018. The reporter, Miranda Devine, lists their names and some details of their Secret Service careers, but it looks like her Google skills, at least at the time, were perfunctory.

She notes that one of the former agents, Dale Pupillo, was "a retired deputy assistant director of the Secret Service, who used to guard his father." That's a little like calling Osama bin Laden a distant member of the Saudi royal family who used to be in the construction business. Dale Pupillo, it turns out, was probably the key member of Secret Service management who was fired in the wake of the "wheels up, rings off" scandal, whereby in April 2012, 11 Secret Service agents on a presidential advance party were suspended following an incident with prostitutes at a hotel in Colombia.

The most visible risk was that one or more prostitutes had been brought into the secure environment that had been set up in advance of President Obama's visit, but the agents were intoxicated as well. This led to the resignation of the Secret Service director and a fuller investigation of the agency's culture, which led to further discipline of its upper management. In January 2015,

“Acting Director Joseph P. Clancy on Tuesday informed the four assistant directors who oversee the Secret Service’s core missions of protection, investigations, technology and public affairs that they must leave their leadership positions,” the Washington Post reports. “The departures would gut much of the Secret Service’s upper management, which has been criticized by lawmakers and administration officials in recent months for fostering a culture of distrust between agency leaders and its rank-and-file, and for making poor decisions that helped erode quality.”

. . . Sex scandals, including agents paying for prostitutes on a trip to Colombia, were embarrassing and raised questions about how the agency was being run, but the utter failing of the protective detail to stop an armed intruder from entering the White House appeared to be the final straw. A Department of Homeland Security review of the Secret Service in November detailed a comedy of errors revealing an agency in desperate need of reform.

The Associated Press reports the officials being forced out are: “Dale Pupillo, who led protective operations. . .

An interesting footnote is that President Obama was on board with the move:

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the decision was made by acting Secret Service Director Joe Clancy without consulting the West Wing but that Obama was “certainly very supportive of” the efforts to reform the agency.

. . . “The White House was certainly well-aware of the efforts that the director was undertaking to implement some management leadership reforms at the agency,” Earnest said. “The reforms that he announced are consistent with the findings of the independent blue-ribbon panel that took a look at the [Department of Homeland Security] review of the Secret Service.”

So at the beginning of 2015, after an incident where a nut with a knife was able to jump a fence and open a White House door, which presumably got Obama's attention, a blue-ribbon panel decided it was on Dale Pupillo's watch, and he was fired from his job as head of the Secret Service protection operation.

Next thing we hear, he's in the lobby of The Jeremy in Hollywood three years later trying to entice Hunter Biden to come down and talk about his escort charges. Back in Washington, he was a big-picture kind of guy, responsible for the whole Secret Sevice protection function. By 2018, he was Philip Marlowe tracking down drug addicts in Hollywood hotel lobbies. Where is Raymond Chandler when we need him?

But this isn't over. What of the other Secret Service agent in this story, Robert Savage III? The Miranda Devine story covering the episode at The Jeremy says,

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.”

Savage’s lawyer says, “My client has never met or communicated with Hunter Biden.”

Here's another former high-level guy at the Secret Service who's come down to the Philip Marlowe level doing detail-level work with Hollywood druggies and hookers. And let's face it, the Secret Service is doing what it can to distance itself from the guy. But let's do a little more googling. Right after his retirement on April 30, 1968, just a few weeks before the Jeremy assignment,

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Strategic private security firm 360 Group International, Inc. today announced that Lorenzo Robert Savage III, a retired senior executive with the U.S. Secret Service, has been named CEO of the company effective immediately. Bill Kirkpatrick, founder of 360 Group and former CEO, will remain President of the firm.

Kirkpatrick said bringing Savage to the company “represents a key strategic development in advancing and expanding the mission of 360 Group International. The company’s ongoing growth and strength of reputation is the result of acquiring some of the most senior-level and experienced security experts in the world combined with best-in-class service to our customers.”

Under Mr. Savage’s leadership, 360 Group International is expanding or enhancing its capabilities in many security areas, including cybersecurity assessment and threat analysis. In his prior role, Mr. Savage oversaw the multi-jurisdictional Los Angeles Electronic Crimes Task Force.

Wait a moment. Something's not right. Here's another big-picture guy, hired by 360 Group as CEO, and after a few weeks on the job, he's trying not very successfully to roust crackhead Hunter out of his room at The Jeremy? The 360 Group says of itself on its website:

We pride ourselves on building long lasting client relationships and providing effective solutions for a wide variety of security challenges. We strive to guarantee a superior level of professionalism, discretion and confidentiality.

Our reliable resources and professional associates enable us to provide clients with global security support ensuring that any capability is within reach.

Whatever level of professionalism, discretion, and confidentiality the new CEO of 360 Group was providing, it doesn't seem to have worked very well for his client, which in one way or another was Joe Biden. Nor was his ineffectiveness at handling Hunter at the Hollywood gumshoe level reassurance that "any capability is within reach".

Here's my theory. It's hard not to think Savage was being eased out of the Secret Service. At some point, he'd developed contacts with Joe Biden when Biden was vice president, possibly even knew the rest of the family, including Hunter. The e-mails referenced in the Miranda Devine story suggest there was some sort of private relationship. So he used his contacts, quite possibly knowing the Biden operation-in-exile needed Secret Service-style security work that even the Secret Service under the new regime might not want to undertake itself, and sold them a package.

He then took the package to 360 Group, which was and apparently is a reputable executive protection and private security firm, and told them he can bring them the Joe Biden account -- all they need to do is make him CEO. It sounds like he sold it as a really big deal, long-term money tree kind of arrangement. He's got an inside track with Joe and the whole family. Maybe when Biden's elected, he'll outsource the Secret Service or something, and 360 Group will get the deal.

Instead, he's on the Hunter detail with Dale Pupillo. My guess is that this wasn't what 360 Group had in mind. Anyhow, when I went to the 360 Group site, Robert Savage III no longer appears on the list of executives. Instead, Bill Kirkpatrick, who was "former CEO" in the press release from 2018, is CEO again. It sounds to me as though Robert Savage III didn't work out as expected at 360 Group.

Did Savage hire Dale Pupillo for the Hunter job? Or did Pupillo set up some bigger deal that involved sending Savage to 360 Group? My takeaway is that both Pupillo and Savage were comically incompetent -- they'd in fact turn up in a Raymond Chandler novel, but they'd be bumped off by someone like Weepy Moyer in short order, and Marlowe would dismiss them not quite sadly in a characteristically worldly and pithy remark.

Makes me think I should try another Hollywood noir novel. But this also says a lot about Bidenworld. You don't get figs from thistles.

"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.)