It's Not $100,000 A Month

Just to inject a note of realism here, I want to suggest a correction to a Breitbart story:

Hunter Biden is reportedly weighing the creation of a legal defense fund to cover the charges of his high-powered attorneys, which experts estimate to cost at least $100,000 per month.

. . . The attorneys are a formidable front against congressional staffers and public servants. Hunter’s lawyers are lead attorney Kevin Morris, a high-profile entertainment lawyer, and Abbe Lowell, who represents high-profile individuals engulfed in political scandals, along with Chris Clark and Joshua A. Levy.

These are all partner-level lawyers, with Abbe Lowell and Joshua A Levy in particular having established track records of getting crooked politicians like Bill Clinton and Bob Menendez out of very hot water with dismissals, acquittals, and hung juries. They don't come cheap.

This story says, "Nationally, the average rate billed by partners last year stood at $728 per hour. . . according to data from Wolters Kluwer’s ELM Solutions, a legal analytics company." That would be the US average, not the rate for partners at national white-shoe firms. I've cited links elsewhere that put this at up to $2500 per hour.

In a prior estimate here, I put the rate being charged by the partners at Covington & Burling working for Joe Biden personally at $2000 per hour. I'm using this as a ballpark, and I've been estimating they're billing 40 hours per week, although lawyers typically put much more time in on a case.

But let's assume the four partners working for Hunter are billing just the national average, $728 per hour. Four partners X 40 hours per week X 4 weeks per month x $728 =$465,920 per month, almost five times the estimate in the Breitbart story. But let's assume they're billing $2000 an hour. Four partners X 40 hours per week X 4 weeks per month X $2000 = $1,280,000. If Abbe Lowell and Joshua A Levy are involved, I've got to assume the monthly total is going to be much closer to $1.2 million.

By the way, Hunter brought Abbe Lowell on two months ago, and we have no idea how long this will take. That legal defense fund is going to need scores of millions. We'll definitely want to know who's paying into it.

The Great Divorce

The divorce between Hunter Biden and his first wife, Kathleen Buhle, has lready been the subject of supposed tell-all books from both parties, but their accounts are both heavily sanitized and leave out more than they reveal. For instance, this Vanity Fair story on Kathleen's book, If We Break, quotes this on Hunter's alcoholism and addiction:

Buhle shares that she first began noticing Hunter's drinking might be a problem around 2001 after the birth of their second child when he took a job as a partner at a lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. which led to a lot of late nights and long periods away from their home in Delaware. “I watched his drinking spiral from social to problematic,” she writes. “Watching how much he could consume scared me…For the first time, I didn’t trust my husband.” By the fall of 2003, Hunter entered rehab for the first time and, when he returned, the author says their marriage “felt stronger than ever.” But after seven years of sobriety, Hunter relapsed again only to deny it, forcing Buhle into the permanent role of sobriety detective.

But otherwise, her account goes into very little detail. However, a lengthy story in the UK Daily Mail from March 7, 2017 reports on the initial divorce filing and other legal documents in the case that often contradict both parties' self-serving accounts.

Kathleen is asking for a divorce and sole custody of her minor child with husband Robert 'Hunter' Biden in documents filed on December 9 of last year.

That is over a year after Kathleen claims she and Hunter formally separated in October 2015, which was three months after she kicked him out of their home on July 5, 2015 because of 'his conduct the night before.'

Kathleen does not detail that conduct in her filing, which would have occurred one month after Hunter lost his brother Beau to brain cancer.

. . . July 4, 2015, is when Hunter allegedly committed the offense that Kathleen references in her divorce filing.

The filing goes on to outline indirectly a situation in which neither Kathleen nor their three children were in the family home on that night, but something happened there involving Hunter, while it also suggests significantly that "Hallie's two children were also not home as her father-in-law [Joe] also took along her son Hunter and daughter Natalie on [a] trip." But anyhow, with neither Hallie nor Hunter encumbered by kids,

'His recent conduct creates situations that are unsafe or traumatic for the parties' children and his judgment, is frequently impaired,' wrote Kathleen in the filing.

It's hard not to connect the dots and surmise that Hallie and Hunter were in Hunter's and Kathleen's home creating a situation "unsafe or traumatic" for the children under conditions in which they were impaired. However, Kathleen says in her book, according to the Vanity Fair link,

A year after Beau's death, Buhle finally discovers the true nature of Hunter and Hallie's relationship when their middle daughter Finnegan reads a text conversation between them on Hunter's phone.

This version would have put her discovery in 2016, which matches at least some of Hunter's accounts, when evidence, including the elliptical reference in Kathleen's own divorce filing, suggests it had begun at least a year earlier and likely before Beau's death, and it likely had included cocaine use throughout. And she's delicately vague about when she knew of Hunter's addiction. Again per Vanity Fair:

After over a decade spent grappling with her husband's alcoholism, Buhle admits that the reality that Hunter might also be using drugs had never even occurred to her. That is until he confessed in late 2013 that, earlier that summer, he had failed a drug test necessary to join the Navy, testing positive for cocaine—a drug he completely denies having taken.

This was possibly the same episode that resulted in his administrative discharge from tne Navy Reserve in February 2014. It seems to me that it would be important to her, both as a question of self-esteem and for legal reasons, to minimize her knowledge, and consequently her complicity, in Hunter's prior drug use and other conduct in order to maintain her sole custody of the remaining minor daughter. Thus she is largely on board with Hunter's own sanitized version of his married life with her.

The divoirce filing also corroborates other information in the saga of Hunter's finances. In the UK Daily Mail story,

On or about February 17, 2017, Ms. Biden learned that Mr. Biden was in possession of a large diamond, on information and belief worth approximately $80,000,' states the motion.

'When Ms. Biden, through counsel, asked Mr. Biden to place the diamond in a safety deposit box accessible only to both parties together, Mr. Biden, through counsel, denied possession of the diamond.'

Hunter has now admitted to being in possession of the diamond according to the motion.

This would correspond to a meeting between Hunter and Chinese energy official Ye Jianming in Miami

Biden says he offered to use his contacts to help “identify investment opportunities for Ye’s company CEFC China Energy, in liquified natural gas projects in the United States.” After the dinner, Ye sends a 2.8-carat diamond to Hunter’s hotel room with a card thanking him for the meeting.

The divorce filing covers other Hunter financial issues in detail. For instance, according to the Daily Mail,

Hunter 'secretly continued to spend lavishly' according to Kathleen's motion, and at one point 'instructed a large payment of marital income ($122,179) be made to a TD Bank account in his sole name.'

That money could not be touched by Kathleen or Hunter's office according to the filing, which then claims: 'On information and belief, taxes were not withheld from these funds.'

And Kathleen at minimum knew of bounced checks, declined credit cards, and overdrafts. According to CNN,

Biden’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, wrote a recent memoir chronicling the rockiness of the couple’s finances when they were married. “More than once my debit card was declined at a store. I’d have to call Hunter to transfer money into my account,” she wrote in her memoir published earlier this year. “Hunter and I drove nice cars and had a beautiful home, but we were running fast on that hamster wheel and barely staying on.”

In 2018, Buhle wrote to Morgan, the accountant, who has since died, seeking advice about an IRS tax lien based on an unpaid bill of $112,805.

Buhle said she was at “a loss” and asked Morgan to “Please advise.”

"Please advise", I guess, but don't tell me too much. Notwitstanding the detailed account of Hunter's finances in the divorce filing, she claims she was kept in the dark:

Buhle claimed complete ignorance of her husband's income and tax situation, saying that she hopes women will learn from her mistakes and become more aware of their own finances.

Well, that's not really borne out. She was happy not to think about things as long as her name was Biden and they drove nice cars and had a beautiful home, but that doesn't mean she wasn't complicit. This is the overall problem with Bidenworld. Everyone was along for the ride until they all ran out of gas. What's intriguing about Hunter's lifestyle is that as of 2017-18, two women, his ex-wife Kathleen and his baby mama Lunden Roberts, had legal claim to money from Hunter, several other "associates" could claim back wages, but two, including Hallie, could get nothing at all but still rode along. I'll have more on this tomorrow.

What About Beau?

The current received narrative of the Biden family as it applies to Hunter's brother Beau is to call for a moment of silence over his death from brain cancer in May 2015 and then, in the spirit of nil nisi bonum. move on. This leaves an impression, intentional or not, that Beau of fond but tragic memory was the Good Son, while the prodigal Hunter, who is still among us, is the Bad Son. It's true that we know much less about Beau and his life as a Biden, but the idea of a Good Son versus a Bad Son strikes me as too reminiscent of dysfunctional family dynamics, and if we know anything about the Bidens, they're dysfunctional.

The whole issue of Beau's widow Hallie and her affair with Hunter after Beau's death (if that in fact is when it started) throws the Good Son-Bad Son narrative under a shadow of uncertainty. The version approved by the Biden family, insofar as it exists, appears in People magazine on April 6, 2021:

In a new interview with CBS Sunday Morning's Tracy Smith to promote his new memoir Beautiful Things, the 51-year-old son of President Joe Biden opened up about the public reaction to him dating Hallie, 46, in 2017, two years after Beau tragically died from brain cancer at age 46.

"I think people were confused by it," said Hunter. "And I understand that. I mean, I really do. To me, it's not something that is difficult to explain. Because it came out of a real overwhelming grief that we both shared. And we were together, and trying to do the right thing. And that grief turned into a hope for a love that maybe could replace what we lost."

So far, Hallie is one of the few Bidens who hasn't already written a tell-all, but even if she were to write one, I suspect it would be, like Hunter's version here, heavily sanitized and leave out far more than it revealed. The version Hunter gives in People is that the affair started in 2017, which might make it sound like that was two years after Beau's death, maybe a decent interval as these things might go, but another version from Hunter himself places its start at least a year earlier:

In a candid New Yorker interview with Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden’s troubled son, the 49-year-old lawyer explained the origins of his affair with brother Beau’s widow, Hallie, and the rock-bottom drug binge that came beforehand.

Hunter — who had already moved out of his marital home with estranged wife Kathleen over his failure to stay sober — says he became close with Hallie after a 2016 trip with her to the Hamptons and began spending most nights at her house while “sharing a very specific grief” over Beau’s 2015 death.

The story goes into detail on this 2016 binge:

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

Hunter was taken to a downtown LA homeless encampment, where someone pulled a gun on him — but he nevertheless returned several more times that week to buy drugs.

He then got into a fight outside a Hollywood Boulevard nightclub, and a man nicknamed “Baby Down” took pity on him and deposited him at a Hertz car rental office.

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

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

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

So by this version, the affair began after a 2016 crack binge, which ended in Hunter going to detox in Arizona, where Hallie joined him, and they "decided to become a couple". In the interview, he goes on to say they "split up later that year", i.e., 2016, which means according to that version, they split up a year before he told People the affair started in 2017. But Hunter had been spending most nights at her house even before the 2016 LA binge. And most accounts also say the affair lasted until 2019, when Joe was about to announce and insisted Hunter clean up his act. None of Hunter's version is remotely credible.

Whenever the affair started -- for the time being, we'll grant 2016 -- it appears that throughout it, Hallie was doing more than sharing Hunter's grief, and she was remarkably reckless. If we grant that it started in 2016, there were two children from Hallie's marriage to Beau, daughter Natalie Naomi Biden (born 2004), and son Robert Hunter Biden II (born 2006). If the affair started in 2016, Natalie was 12 then, and Robert was 10. During this period, she and Hunter were remarkably open with the extended Biden family about their mutual drug use.

The Marco Polo site copies a February 24, 2018 e-mail from Joe's daughter Ashley to Hallie's sister Liz Secundy complaining about Hallie's use of cocaine with Hunter, in which she calls both of them "addicts". It says, ". . . they are beyond messy! They left all their drug paraphernalia for my parents [Joe and Jill] to see." It reproduces on the same page a September 24, 2018 text message in which Hunter says to a friend, "If I told you just one truth out of a hundred that I've come to know about her, Robi, you would be hard pressed to not go and take the kids from her imnmediately".

Another entry contains a transcript of an August 23, 2018 phone call backed up on the laptop between Hallie and Hunter, in which Hallie begs Hunter for cocaine:

Hallie: Please just get it [crack cocaine] for me.

Hunter: You're going to tell me your way if I told you I got it [crack cocaine] for you? But now you're saying you don't have a way.

Hallie: I told you --

Hunter: And now you're telling me you don't trust me? I mean, how am I supposed to trust you? What, you're going to make up something?

Hallie: I told you I would. . .

Hunter: What?

Hallie: I told you I would call Lisa.

Hunter: Hallie, there is no way in hell . . . [do] you think that Lisa doesn't know you've been in and out of rehab [and] all the struggles you're going through and is going to get you [crack] cocaine . . . Hallie?

In fact, Hallie and Hunter were in and out of rehab throughout the course of their affair, and Hunter appears to have paid for her stays in at least two luxury rehab centers. The Marco Polo site lists, first, an October 2017 stay at the Passages Malibu luxury rehab center that cost $57,000, paid for in part via wire transfers from Ye Jianming's companies, and another $45,000 January 2018 stay at Caron, a Delray Beach, FL rehab center where Ashley Biden had also stayed, and where Caroline Biden, Joe's niece, had stayed in 2014 following an arrest in New York.

So the sanitized version of the Hunter-Hallie affair is that it was a perhaps excusable lapse caused by their mutual grief a year or two after Beau's death. The actuality is that we really don't know when it began, but by at least 2016 it had merged seamlessly into Hunter's cocaine-filled lifestyle, with both of them in and out of luxury rehab throughout its course. This raises a question for me: how was it so easy for Hallie to slip into this? She had two kids, pre-teens, but apparently made little effort to conceal her affair with Hunter or her addiction from them -- and the family appears to have enabled this.

Wikipedia says of her career,

Biden worked as an admissions counselor at her alma mater, the Tatnall School, and as a guidance counselor at Archmere Academy. She serves as the Chairwoman of the Board of Directors for the Beau Biden Foundation For the Protection of Children.

The protection of children! Whew! I'm with Hunter, it doesn't sound like she should ever have been allowed anywhere near children, although this probably goes for the whole Biden family. For the rest, it sounds like if she ever worked at all, it was at no-show jobs that she held as Beau's wife, and again, this seems to be standard practice for Bidenworld.

If you want my theory, we just don't know when her affair with Hunter began, and I don't rule out that it was going on at some level even before Beau's death. That Hunter would also have had an affair with Hallie's sister Liz Secundy at the same time as the one with Hallie seems not to have been any sort of problem. Every indication is that by the time her affair with Hunter was well under way, she was already addicted to drugs, and she was just continuing that lifestyle. For Bidenworld, this was nothing new.

UPDATE: This site refers to an e-mail on Hunter's laptop quoted here in the UK Daily Mail but not on the Marco Polo site that appears to carry a quote from Hunter's ex-wife, Kathleen, with an accusation from one of their children that "Dad and Aunt Hallie (K's words exactly to me tonight on phone with girls in room) were F***ING the day after Uncle Beau died.”

In fact, her marriage to Beau was her free pass to Bidenworld, and Beau's death ended that pass -- so she took up with Hunter, or maybe just continued with him. But by 2019, when the Bidens put a lid on Hunter's lifestyle, even this couldn't go on. Wikipedia notes,

In March 2019, The Key School filed a lawsuit against Biden, stating that she failed to pay $55,740 in tuition for her two children for the 2018–2019 school year.

I wonder how she's doing on Beau's insurance and maybe pension payments from his job as Delaware attorney general. No more no-show baksheesh, anyhow, except maybe the gig with the Beau Biden Foundation, but that doesn't seem to cover tuition for the kids. Bidenworld at this point doesn't seem to have the money to keep her comfortable and quiet. I wonder if she'll do her own tell-all -- but Bidenworld probably does still have the juice to keep that from happening.

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.