The Domestic Terrorists Behind The UFO Balloons

Via the New York Post, this is a photo of members of the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, which has at least provisionally claimed responsibility for the UFO brought down by an Air Force F-22 over Yukon Territory. (Grammatical side note: certain areas, notably Ukraine, are incorrectly paired with a "the". It's correct to refer to geographical areas that don't correspond to state entities with that designation, as "the Rockies", "the Caribbean", and so forth. However, to say "the Yukon" is incorrect, as it is a definite government entity, as is Ukraine. We don't say "the Arizona".)

Here's a thought experiment. The NIBBB has a website and appears to be an incorporated group with a bank account, among other things. What if the US Secretary of Defense were to have an aide contact the NIBBB and, purely as a public relations gesture, ask the NIBBB to tell him what their balloon cost and offer to reimburse them from the Secretary's personal funds? No need to write a personal check, just pay the amount to the Defense Department and have the DoD write the check.

In fact, it appears that the what the NIBBB calls pico ballooning has become a well-recognized sub-hobby of ham radio. The NIBBB says of itself,

We’re licensed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allowing us to communicate to other Hams throughout the World. Pico meaning small, we send a small transmitter, with GPS tracking and antenna on a balloon filled with Hydrogen, rising to 47,000 feet, and travelling with the speed of the Jetstream. As we travel, our GPS is able to locate our current location, and other information is gathered depending on what chips we have on our transmitter while using other programs to gather other inflight information.

In other words, the NIBBB is only one of what appear to be many pico balloon hobby groups that operate under federal license, with the status and position of each balloon tracked and fully available to the public (and of course the military). Thus, of the three UFOs that were shot down by F-22 or F-16 and half-million-dollar missiles over the past week, they were each in fact fully identifiable as such at the time, with their positions known at least to their sponsoring groups. Thus, although the NIBBB has claimed responsibility for the Yukon balloon, there are presumably two other groups that are just as capable of claiming responsibility for theirs.

In fact, further exploring the NIBBB site, I learn that another site called SondeHub already tracks every such pico balloon, and a page on the NIBBB site shows that such balloons already operate fully within federal regulations, and due to their small size and very light weight pose no hazard to aviation.

So, why can't Secretary Austin have an aide do what he can to contact all three groups, ask them what their balloon outfits each cost, and offer to reimburse them from the Secretary's personal funds? From what I read, the most expensive balloon outfit, complete with transmitter package, costs in the low three figures. My guess is that Secretary Austin could make that up by foregoing a few five-star restaurant lunches and stopping by Burger King instead, which might be good for him anyhow.

Other photos on the NIBBB website suggest there can be few more wholesome activities. I won't link to them here, because they show minor children working under parental supervision on what look to be school or scout projects.

But there's a bigger question. According to Aviation Week,

“I tried contacting our military and the FBI—and just got the runaround—to try to enlighten them on what a lot of these things probably are. And they’re going to look not too intelligent to be shooting them down,” says Ron Meadows, the founder of Scientific Balloon Solutions (SBS), a Silicon Valley company that makes purpose-built pico balloons for hobbyists, educators and scientists.

The descriptions of all three unidentified objects shot down Feb. 10-12 match the shapes, altitudes and payloads of the small pico balloons, which can usually be purchased for $12-180 each, depending on the type.

. . . Aviation Week contacted a host of government agencies, including the FBI, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the National Security Council (NSC) and the Office of the Secretary of Defense for comment about the possibility of pico balloons. The NSC did not respond to repeated requests. The FBI and OSD did not acknowledge that harmless pico balloons are being considered as possible identities for the mystery objects shot down by the Air Force.

“I have no update for you from NORAD on these objects,” a NORAD spokesman says.

Pico balloons, in short, are completely legal, individually licensed, operate within federal regulations, on that basis are no potential harm to aviation, and are comprehensively tracked. Efforts by both the group that sponsored one such balloon and a manufacturer in the industry to contact the relevant agencies and explain what they already should have known were ignored, and at least so far, none has acknowledged what the "UFOs"were other than to make a glib assurance they weren't military or something.

Wouldn't a good-humored acknowledgement, apology, and offer of pro forma reimbursement go a long way here? And maybe even go so far as to suggest they're gonna ease off on Catholic trads and school board protesters? Maybe FBI Director Wray could publicly deliver one such check and announce the FBI was gonna push the reset button.

Just a thought.

The Focus Switches To The University of Delaware -- But What Are They Looking For?

In yesterday's news:

On March 13, 2017, less than seven weeks after concluding his second term as vice president, Joe Biden announced the founding of the Biden Institute at his home state’s University of Delaware (UD). According to the announcement, part of Biden’s “vision for the institute is an annual conference at UD, similar to the World Economic Forum or the Aspen Institute.”

. . . Prior to hosting the Biden Institute, UD had never disclosed any funding from China. One year later (and just two months after the Penn Biden center opened its D.C. office), anonymous donations from China to UD skyrocketed. The first payment came in April 2018 in the amount of $3,204,070 from an anonymous donor in China. In December 2018, another anonymous donation from China arrived for $1,869,515. A third anonymous China-linked payment, for $624,904, arrived in December 2019.

In 2020, the year that Biden was campaigning for president, anonymous Chinese state-linked entities sent three more payments totaling $1,005,761 to UD, the bulk of which arrived after Biden had been declared the president-elect.

In this morning's news:

The FBI raided the University of Delaware twice in recent weeks while probing President Joe Biden's mishandling of classified documents, but didn't find any secret papers.

A source familiar with the investigation told CNN that agents and investigations carried out two searches on two separate days at the college in Biden's home state.

No classified material was found, the Wall Street Journal later reported.

Separate batches of materials retrieved from the university were taken from at least two different locations at the school and are now being reviewed by the FBI.

DailyMail.com revealed earlier this month that the business partner of the president's son Hunter Biden was tasked with moving archives to the university in 2010. The documents Eric Schwerin was moving were sensitive enough to require the involvement of White House lawyers.

It looks like the Biden Institute in Delaware was, or is, basically just a clone of the Penn Biden Center, about which the same questions have arisen:

[T]here is growing concern about how donations to UPenn from foreign countries reportedly tripled in the two years after the Biden Penn Center opened. The Washington Free Beacon reported most of the $61 million in gifts and contracts between 2017 and 2019 came from China, citing records from the Department of Education. Republicans and others have long warned of Biden’s potential for conflicts of interest, especially with the multi-million dollar dealings of the president’s son Hunter involving China and other countries.

But from the sketchy information we have, the problem is something beyond just classified documents, since the FBI in some recent searches like the ones in Delaware didn't find any of those, but nevertheless took others that "are now being reviewed".

And let's recall that Biden personally hired M Patrick Moore, Jr, a Boston law firm partner and former White House counsel under Obama, during 2022 to perform unspecified work at the Penn Biden Center, in the course of which he ran across classified documents. It's gradually become known that this led to a much more elaborate effort to sort the situation out, which was initially concealed from the public:

. . . emails released Friday due to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Bloomberg, show the Archives secretly coordinating with and accommodating Biden’s personal attorneys to retrieve classified records. The emails also show questions were raised about whether classified materials were also stored in Boston and Philadelphia.

The initial reason or cause for the search at the Penn Biden Center by Biden’s attorneys remains unknown.

But whatever the reason, the search keeps widening, and it looks to me as though the focus isn't necessarily on classified documents. Not only that, but

What’s also interesting about this report is that it appears to have been leaked to multiple news organizations by “two senior law enforcement officials,” in the words of NBC. So someone wants us to know this was going on, even if the White House isn’t telling us.

And let's keep in mind that M Patrick Moore, Jr, who represented Biden personally in the Penn Biden Center project and had some Penn Biden materials shipped to his Boston office, quietly withdrew from representing Biden soon after the classified documents case went public last month. Something is bothering some people, but we have no idea so far what it is.

What Was COVID?

I subscribe to COVID skeptic Alex Berenson's Substack, and it's worth noting that pretty much his entire take on COVID from Day One has been vindicated. The whole regime, masks, lockdowns, social distancing, no church, school closures, work-from-home, universal vaccination and universal boosters, has proven not just ineffective but in many cases counterproductive. Overall public health in terms of life expectancy and the effects of delayed non-COVID care has declined. Is it over, tbough? I'm not sure. One thing I've noticed is that the little stickers and calibrations on sidewalks and floors that reminded people to stay six feet apart have largely disappeared.

This suggests to me that there was a program to power wash them away at some point, probably in the middle of the night, but I went looking for web images of the process on the web -- just a guy in municipal coveralls, say, with a spray wand whooshing away the footprint stickers from a sidewalk -- and came up completely empty. "No matches for your search," no matter how I tried to word things. Apparently the algorithm says this never happened.

Anyhow, Berenson's latest post is working toward a summing up, and while I think this is premature, he makes some worthwhile points:

I had coffee yesterday with someone who’s been a behind-the-scenes Team Reality advocate since 2020 - a doctor who figured out early on that Covid’s risks were far overblown. No, not Jay Bhattacharya , though as it happened we also talked yesterday and the conversation confirmed this one.

We should be optimistic, this doctor said. People get it now, no one’s taking the vaccines, it’s over. (He’s a surgeon, not an epidemiologist, thus his sunny demeanor. It takes a special kind of confidence to cut your fellow humans open. Plus surgery, unlike public health, actually works most of the time.)

And you know what? He’s right. Half-right, anyway. The Covid jabs are dead. All over the world people are voting with their arms. Fewer than 1 in 100 Americans will get an mRNA jab this month.

But the threat that Covid exposed is not over. Not the threat of the virus, which had an average age of death of maybe 82 or 83. Not even the threat of government orders like school closures and lockdowns. Those are awful, but they’re reversible and we seem to have rejected them resoundingly, at least in the United States.

No, I mean the scientific threats that the pandemic has exposed. Covid has revealed how out of control the public health establishment and its handmaiden virologists and immunologists have become. Drug companies too, although their corruption of medicine is less of a surprise.

But was any of this deliberate? Was it all cooked up, say, by Big Pharma to prop up their bottom lines? I don't think so. I think the whole episode was accidental, and the various government responses were adventitious, made up as they went along, and the remedies adopted were almost exclusively bad. If the unspoken motto was Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste, the responses of those charged with not wasting the crisis depended on what each group saw as its particular interest.

I agree with Berenson that one part of the threat was "scientific", but only insofar as a particular interest group bases its claims to authority on "science". As Dr Fauci put it, "Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on Science". But "science" as he and his supporters defined it was secularist materialism, and the accidental crisis allowed a particular influential group of public materialists to pursue a specifically anti-religious agenda, insisting that "science" required closing houses of worship for the indefinite duration, or failing that specifically, strict liturgical limitations on singing, congregation size, serving food, shaking hands, and so forth.

I don't think the goal was ever fully articulated or even fully thought through, because the whole crisis, while manufactured from the start (remember the scary expanding red circles on all the news shows from February 2020 onward?) never had the bvenefit of a central plan or overall objective. Big Pharma got on board only several months in when somebody thought maybe there could be vaccines, and then someone else thought the government should maybe be the one to buy them and make everyone get a shot.

Although the US legal system proved fairly robust in ending the most extreme restrictions on churches, they still aren't completely back. People have been slow to return, and of those returning, some number continue to feel the need to wear masks, which were never effective. There's much less shaking hands at the exchange of peace, and the Los Angeles archdiocese still hasn't returned to distributing wine with the sacrament, even though the alcohol content never made it unsafe.

Although Alex Berenson is a COVID skeptic, he also seems to be a secularist at heart, so he sees the aggrandizement of the public health establishment in the name of "science" as the worst effect of the crisis. But because there was no single agenda behind it -- it was seized on independently by separate opportunistic interests -- some effects will last longer than others. The footprints and calibrations on the floors and sidewalks are already mostly gone, but companies and governments are still havintg a hard time getting people back to the office.

The Pistol In The Dumpster Revisited

Lost in the weekend's news about UFOs and space aliens was this item, covered best as usual in the UK Daily Mail:

The Secret Service has been accused of a 'cover-up' over its alleged involvement in a police investigation when Hunter Biden's lover dumped his gun in a trash can near a school in 2018.

Judicial Watch, a justice watchdog nonprofit, announced on Friday that it received 487 pages of Secret Service (USSS) records over the incident, and says the documents cast further doubt over the agency's claims that it was not involved.

Hunter's lover and brother's widow, Hallie Biden, left his .38 handgun at the top of a trash can at Jansens supermarket in Wilmington, Delaware in October 2018, sparking a police probe.

The reemergence of the story is due to new confirmation of Secret Service involvement in the cleanup, even though Joe was out of office at the time, and Hunter wasn't a protectee as a family member. Via a Freedom of Information Act request, Judicial Watch obtained Secret Service communications on the matter:

A flurry of internal emails began on October 29, 2020, when a website called the Blaze published an article about Hallie throwing Hunter's gun in a supermarket trash can.

One official emailed another in the Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division a link to the article.

Another official, whose name is redacted, responded: 'Oh dear…'

After reading the article, one Secret Service Protective Intelligence Research Specialist wrote to their colleagues: 'It's kind of odd that we were involved in the missing gun investigation when neither Hunter or Joe were even receiving USSS protection at the time? Hmmm.'

But when this sort of story treats each incident in isolation, it leaves out important context. During the entire period of the affair between Hunter and Hallie, both were heavy users of cocaine, and Hunter's sister, Ashley, who presumably would know, characterized both as "addicts". In the months before the pistol in the dumpster episode, Hunter had been in and out of rehab. According to the New York Post,

Hunter Biden begged his sister-in-law-turned-lover Hallie Biden for cash to check himself into rehab just six weeks before purchasing a handgun — and attesting on federal forms that he had never used or been addicted to drugs.

A shocking, 4-minute, 30-second recording was discovered by The Post on a copy of the infamous hard drive Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop, and emerges the same week federal agents said they believe they have enough evidence to charge him for making false statements in order to buy the .38-caliber pistol.

. . . In the days before the call, Hunter Biden appears to have completed a course of rehabilitation at The View. The center typically charges $4,000 daily. Hunter’s uncle Jim Biden, however, managed to secure him a bargain rate of $2,500 per day.

His time drying out doesn’t appear to have worked; the points plea came during a period of reportedly extended drug and alcohol use.

“I hesitate to write you this. Because your response is unpredictable. But I can’t help but to plead to you to get well,” Hunter’s sister Ashley Biden wrote to him on Sept. 1, 2018. “Our father is devastated. And his personality has fundamentally changed without you by his side,.”

During this period, Hunter's life appears to have been disintegrating. As I noted in this post, Hunter and Liz Secundy, Hallie's sister, signed a one-year rental agreement on a town house that July, but the relationship among the three seems to have been a menage, since by October, he seems still to have been living with Hallie as well, and it was she who put the pistol in the dumpster. According to the New York Post, Hunter said this on his laptop:

“Then when the police the FBI the secret service [sic] came on the scene she said she took it from me because she was scared I would harm myself due to my drug and alcohol problem and our volatile relationship and that she was afraid for the kids,” he said.

But whatever law enforcement arrived on the scene, and even though Hallie's fear was for the kids, nobody seems to have called child protective services to get the kids out of that environment -- which would be the usual consequence of discovering addicted and alcoholic adults with children and guns in the household.

Then, shortly afterward, according to The Sun,

President Joe Biden’s son, 52, lashed out at Hallie, 47, after claiming to have discovered a designer Hermès box containing what appears to be drug paraphernalia and hard drugs at her home in Wilmington, Delaware.

, , , Two weeks after the gun incident, Hunter texted Hallie the pic of what appears to be a huge crack cocaine rock on top of the Hermès box.

By January 2019, Hunter's laptop showed him in a sensory deprivation tank at Blue Water Wellness in Newburyport, MA, although whatever rehab regimen was in force there didn't keep him from taking hits from a crack pipe while in the tank.

Just one month earlier, Hunter had texted his dad, Joe, complaining he didn't have enough money for the treatment program on top of bills and alimony.

'Hey dad I've been trying to resolve some immediate financial issues - alimony tuitions and my bill for this program but the cash I am counting on will not arrive until the end of the week.

'Is it possible to make me another short term loan in the same amount and I will send it back no later than 10 days.

'I'm really embarrassed to ask and I know it's unfair of me to put you in that position right now,' Hunter wrote on December 4, 2018.

'Hunt tell me what you need. No problem,' the future president responded. 'Ok how do you want to do this I can pay tuition directly and their housing and give you the rest.'

Biden senior messaged again on December 6 to confirm: '75 being wired today. Love.'

This is just one slice of the Hunter timeline covering the period surrounding Hunter's purchase of a gun he was clearly not entitled to have, the feckless and drug-addled efforts of his inner circle to address the problem, and Joe's continued enabling of Hunter's dissipation, not only by funding it to the tune of repeated infusions of cash, but also apparently by calling on federal law enforcement to do cleanup as well.

Interestingly, the gun shop owner involved, possibly sensing irregularities, refused to cooperate with whomever claimed to be from the Secret Service. (I don't rule out Dale Pupillo and Robert Savage III, the two former Secret Service executives who'd been eased out but were apparently then put on the Biden personal payroll. They appear to have impersonated agents in the episode at The Jeremy in Hollywood back in May 2018 as well.)

But the big question that nobody else has asked is that by Hunter's implied account on his laptop, more than one level of law enforcement was involved in tracking down the gun that Hallie left in the dumpster, and at least by Hallie's account, she was concerned for her kids. But any normal law enforcement investigation involving kids, drugs, and guns would wind up taking the kids away. That night. This didn't happen here. Why not?

Project Bluebeam

Regarding the curtrent spate of UFOs, Time reports,

Other than the first balloon, which China has acknowledged was theirs, the Pentagon doesn’t yet know what the objects are or where they came from. Asked directly, a senior military official did not rule out the possibility that their provenance could be extraterrestrial.

I have several reactions, the main one being that if these are alien visitors, they would have needed warp drive-style technology to get here, given their likely home planet would be hundreds or thousands of light years away. So an obsolescent F-16 with a heat-seeking missile can shoot one down as it piddles along at 20,000 feet? This doesn't even fit the War of the Worlds model of alien invasion. According to Wikipedia,

The main narrative begins when an object thought to be a "meteor" lands on Horsell Common, near the narrator's home. The narrator discovers that it is an artificial cylinder. Some Martians emerge briefly, but have difficulty coping with Earth's atmosphere and gravity. When humans approach the cylinder with a white flag, the Martians incinerate them. Military forces arrive that night.

. . . The next day, the narrator takes his wife to safety in nearby Leatherhead. That day, he sees a three-legged Martian "fighting-machine" (tripod), armed with a heat-ray and a chemical weapon: the poisonous "black smoke". Tripods have wiped out the army around the cylinder and destroyed most of Woking.

. . . [The narrator] begins to go mad from his trauma, finally attempting suicide by openly approaching a stationary fighting machine. To his surprise, he discovers that all the Martians have been killed by an onslaught of earthly pathogens, to which they had no immunity.

H G Wells was a 19th-century bourgeois optimist, and, a Darwinian, he saw the force of natural selection overcoming the evil of alien invasion, even though the aliens had a temporary technological advantage. But if the mysterious cylindrical or octagonal objects drifting over Canada and the Great Lakes are from aliens, they seem to be slow and bumbling, they don't fly all that high, and they so far don't seem to have a heat ray.

The YouTube commentator Mark Dice raises the issue of Project Bluebeam, something I hadn't heard of before:

The premise is that government will use a manufactured threat of alien invasion to create mass panic and impose a social agenda. If that's so, they aren't even at the H G Wells/Orson Welles level of inducing it -- but wait a moment. Mark Dice doesn't even mention COVID. As we ever so slowly transition to the morning-after phase of the COVID mass panic, we're gradually being told that the vaccines were ineffective, and even more recently, study after study has confirmed that masks were ineffective as well. In fact, those studies were being published throughout the period of lockdowns, mask mandates, and social distance. Here's one from 2020:

A cloth mask or face covering does very little to prevent the emission or inhalation of small particles. As discussed in an earlier CIDRAP commentary and more recently by Morawska and Milton (2020) in an open letter to WHO signed by 239 scientists, inhalation of small infectious particles is not only biologically plausible, but the epidemiology supports it as an important mode of transmission for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. . . . We also worry that the public doesn't understand the limitations of cloth masks and face coverings when we observe how many people wear their mask under their nose or even under their mouth, remove their masks when talking to someone nearby, or fail to practice physical distancing when wearing a mask.

Even so, the authors carefully hedged their position, insisting that since masks themselves were ineffective, ever more stringent lockdown and distancing measures were the real solution. No doubt this allowed them to keep their jobs despite their heterodox views. Notwithstanding the unsupportability of the public health establishment's claims, even at the height of the pandemic, the narrative was maintained.

What we're learning from the Twitter files and other sources is that an elaborate social mechanism was in place to enforce the norms of the moral panic, and only now, three years later, are we beginning to recover. Over the weekend, our Roman Catholic parish had a fundraising dinner, and our pastor during brief remarks suggested that in many ways, the process of getting back to normal worship life was only beginning. Looking back at the first months of 2020, a key focus of the public health agenda was to prohibit religious gatherings of any sort, indoor or outdoor, prohibit singing or responsive worship, forbid the distribution of food in any religious context, and eliminate hymnals, prayer books, and missals.

In hindsight, these efforts, done in the name of "science", were misguided and ineffective; luckily, sustained legal effort was able to defeat them fairly quickly, although as our pastor pointed out, only now, and only gradually, has the parish been able to recover something as routine as post-Sunday mass coffee hour. I don't rule out that, given even the hokey UFOs we're now seeing at the Plan 9 Fron Outer Space level, the authorities might intend to resume their attack on ordinary institutions in the name of "science".

Pound The Table II

Out of all the weekend's news, the UFOs, the FBI wanting to infiltrate the sedevacantists, the new revelations on the classified document coverup, the one thing I haven't been able to drop is why Abbe Lowell has been pounding the table for his client, Hunter Biden. I talked about this Friday. I'm not a lawyer, but then, neither was Raymond Burr, who just played one on TV. But Jonathan Turley is one, both a law professor and a practicing criminal defense attorney, and he offers an insight that I'd missed:

[Lowell and the Biden team] seem to be adopting the strategy of Steve Bannon that resulted in his conviction for contempt of Congress. Lowell categorically refused to turn over material to Congress this week, leaving his client open to a subpoena and possible prosecution. The move may have thrilled hardcore Democrats, but it is the Republicans who should be most ecstatic with Hunter's initial position.

. . . In a letter to House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY), Lowell declared "Peddling your own inaccurate and baseless conclusions under the guise of a real investigation, turns the Committee into ‘Wonderland’ and you into the Queen of Hearts shouting, ‘sentence first, verdict afterwords.’"

. . . Lowell would have been far smarter to turn over some material to the Committee in good faith while seeking to negotiate on the scope of the inquiry.

. . . In the Bannon case, the Democrats spared little time in seeking a contempt order. Just one week after Bannon missed a date to appear, they voted out the contempt sanction of Committee, and it was quickly approved by the House as a whole. It was contempt of Congress, as I said at the time.

. . . He just [laid] the foundation for the Oversight Committee to move quickly toward a subpoena and ultimately a contempt sanction, if he maintains this position. Lowell actually expedited the process for the House, shortening the calendar for possible contempt proceedings. If this matter were to go to the courts (either as a criminal contempt matter or an enforcement matter, or both), there is now plenty of time for the Committee to prevail in securing much of this material.

That would place Attorney General Merrick Garland in a tough position. After years of the Justice Department largely ignoring contempt sanctions, Garland moved aggressively to prosecute Trump figures like Bannon. The failure to do so with Hunter Biden would fuel concerns over political bias at the Department.

Just from watching true crime shows on TV, I can figure out that especially for a guilty client but even if a case is 50-50, it's in the defense's interest to delay everything. Witnesses' memories deteriorate, police officers leave the force, parties pass away, the case fades into obscurity. Lowell could have unctuously feigned cooperation, turning over thousands of pages of completely innocuous material whlle pretending to negotiate with the committee in good faith. In fact, he could then, standing in front of cartons stacked on dollies, publicly remonstrate that the committee is disregarding his ample cooperation and pursuing a political agenda.

Instead, he leaves this strategy aside, angrily refuses any pretense of compromise, and pounds the table. Taking a different route, Prof Turley is more or less confirming my own instinct that if Abbe Lowell is such a smart guy, why is he acting so dumb? He wrote Chairman Comer a letter that a simple English major could do a better job with -- in fact, an AI bot could have written it, and it quite possibly could have done it for free. I don't want to think about Abbe Lowell's bill for the week. But the bottom line is that, with every delay to his advantage, he set things up for the quickest possible Republican response.

If nothing else, this calls into question Bidenworld's judgment overall. People can claim Joe has cognitive issues, but here, he's surrounded by White House counsel, private attorneys, political advisers, and even family -- from what we hear, first ladies like Nancy Reagan have had great behind-the-scenes influence, as have presidential sons like Bush fils. Whatever Biden's own mental capacity -- my view continues to be that he's been dumb as a rock all his life, but he hasn't deteriorated that much -- nobody around him seems able to give better advice.

They're paying Abbe Lowell how much? And he's doing that? Where are Biden's advisers? Where's Jill? Well, she's smooching Kamala's husband (there's a Bob Dylan lyric lurking there someplace). Where's Ashley? Where's, er, Hunter? Well, as Aquinas said, sin dulls the intellect.

Who Is Kathy Chung?

Almost completely ignored in Thursday's news was this item, which shows how poorly reporters are actually following the classified documents story:

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has issued a detailed request to a former Joe Biden "gatekeeper" for documents and communications from her time working at the Penn-Biden center, specifically anything related to her involvement in the handling and removal of "highly classified" materials.

The story doesn't even mention the gatekeeper's name until halfway down:

"The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating President Biden's possession of highly classified documents from his time as Vice President," Comer wrote to Kathy Chung in a Feb. 4 letter. "The documents retrieved from President Biden's personal office and home included documents designated as 'sensitive compartmented information' ... which is used for highly sensitive information obtained from intelligence sources. The Committee has obtained evidence showing that you had keycard access to Penn Biden Center. Recent reporting indicates in January 2017 you — while serving as then-Vice President Biden's executive assistant — helped pack up the departing Vice President's office.

I've run into her here and there over the past several weeks. for instance in this story at the UK Daily Mail on January 19:

Kathy Chung, who served as Biden's administrative assistant when he was vice president, has been interviewed by law enforcement about the scandal.

She told associates 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.

I haven't been the only person following the case to note that no photos of her appear to be available. However, based on the timeline, I would expect her to be close to retirement age, since she has been a longtime denizen of Bidenworld.

Who is Kathy Chung? Curiously, neither the U.K. Daily Mail nor Fox News, both of which are experts at digging up photos, has been able to come up with a picture of Ms. Chung, despite her currently serving in a rather public position for a rather public figure, the Defense secretary, Lloyd Austin.

. . . Kathy Chung (aka Kathy Sang-Ok Chung, Kathy S. Geraghty) was an assistant to then Vice President Joe Biden--that is, in 2015.

The AKAs simply don't register in web searches. According to the Daily Mail link above,

Chung was an assistant in the Senate Office of the Vice President, after working for a trio of influential senators, including former Delaware Sen. Ted [Kaufman], a longtime Biden advisor who filled his seat when Biden left the Senate.

This brings us to Ted Kaufman. According to Wikipedia,

Kaufman was appointed to the Senate to serve the remainder of longtime Senator Joe Biden's term after he was elected Vice President in 2008. Prior to becoming a U.S. Senator, Kaufman had served as an advisor to Biden for much of his political career and later served as the head of his presidential transition.

In 1972 he joined Joe Biden's U.S. Senate campaign, which was considered to be a long shot, on a volunteer basis. After Biden's surprise victory in 1972, he took a one-year leave of absence from DuPont to organize and head Senator Biden's Delaware Office. In 1976 he became Biden's Chief of Staff and administrative assistant and served until 1995, also working on Biden's subsequent Senate campaigns. After Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election, Kaufman was chosen to head Biden's transition team.

In other words, Kaufman was a long-time Biden political retainer dating from his initial Senate campaign, and Kathy Chung appears to have worked for Kaufman and Biden himself, at least on and off, for much of the same period.

According to Fox News, when Biden's previous executive assistant as vice president, Michele Smith, left that job in 2012, Hunter Biden recommended Chung as her replacement.

Throughout much of her five-year tenure working for Biden during the Obama administration, Chung regularly communicated with Biden's son Hunter Biden, transmitting information about his father's schedule and passing messages directly from the then-vice president, according to emails obtained from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and verified by Fox News Digital.

During this period, she appears to have worked with Hunter on a familiar basis to relay sensitive information to him. The Daily Mail reproduces an e-mail from the laptop, via the Marco Polo site, from June 7, 2015, wherein from her Executive Office of the President e-mail account she e-mails Hunter at his Rosemont Seneca account with the private cell numbers of nearly 30 people, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, Joe Manchin, Steny Hoyer, and Loretta Lynch.

One thing I've come to notice about Bidenworld is that it's populated by long-term retainers, to the point that some, like Ted Kaufman, have simply aged out due to the length of Biden's career. Kathy Chung appears to have moved in and out of the Biden orbit, though likely never too far away. and she's returned to the inner circle when needed.

It seems to me that what such people have in common, and what makes them valuable to the Bidens, is that they're reflexively familiar with how the family operates, and they've been with them so long they can't be shocked by anything they see.

The picture that's beginning to emerge for me is that Biden has been the same guy, and the people around him have operated the same way, for at least 50 years. For that whole period, it's been important that the people around the family be impervious to what might otherwise shock ordinary people. As I said the other day, if you think there's hanky-pank going on, there probably is, and it's worse than you imagined.