Superficial To The Core

As I continue to follow the revelations about the Biden family business ventures, I keep getting the impression that we're learning less about payoffs or influence peddling and more about Joe's character. For instance, as of Friday, he went so far as to say about the current revelations of Hunter's 2017 payments to James, Hallie, and another generic Biden, "That's not true".

On Thursday, GOP lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee revealed that they had obtained bank documents showing that Hunter Biden, the president's brother Jim, and Hallie Biden, the widow of his son Beau, received payments from Hunter's business associate Rob Walker and their joint venture with Chinese energy firm CEFC. A spokesperson for Hunter Biden's legal team confirmed the payments Thursday but emphasized that the recipients' accounts "belonged to Hunter, his uncle and Hallie – nobody else."

However, Biden denied that the payments were made when confronted by a reporter on the White House lawn Friday.

"That's not true," the president said, when asked about the GOP lawmakers' findings.

I basically put this in the same category as the legends he tells of himself, along with things like the Amtrak chestnut:

And so, I’m getting on the train on that Friday, and these guys who all became my family — all — the conductor. And a guy named Angelo Negri came up, and he goes, “Joey, baby!” Grabs my cheek like that. (Laughter.) And I thought they were going to shoot him. I really did. (Laughter.)

I said, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. He’s a friend.” He was like, “What the hell.” And he said, “Big deal, Joey. A million…” — whatever it was — “…three-hundred thousand miles. You know how many miles you’ve traveled on Amtrak, Joey?” And I said, “No, Ang. I don’t.” And he said, “At that retirement dinner, we calculated it. We estimated 127 days a year, 250 miles back and forth, 3 — 36 years, then as Vice President. Joey, you traveled more on Amtrak.” (Laughter.)

CNN fact checked the story:

Biden’s account simply does not add up. Biden did not reach the million-miles-flown mark as vice president until September 2015, according to his own past comments. But Negri retired from Amtrak in 1993 and died in May 2014, according to an obituary published online and in the Asbury Park Press, a New Jersey newspaper.

He does this because he can get away with it, and in fact, he's been getting away with it all his life. I think one reason observers think he has cognitive issues is that he wasn't a nationally familiar figure before he became vice president, but when he was vice president, he was, after all, vice president. But as Rich Lowry put it last year,

If the country thought that it was getting a buttoned-up, by-the-books communicator after four wildly undisciplined years of Donald Trump, it knew nothing about Joseph R. Biden’s long career as Washington’s standout long-winded, seat-of-the-pants, poorly informed and misleading talker.

What we're seeing is nothing new:

When his first presidential campaign was falling apart in 1987 because of plagiarism scandals and obviously false boasts about his resume, Biden apologized, saying, “I exaggerate when I’m angry, but I’ve never gone around telling people things that aren’t true about me.”

Nevertheless, The New Yorker reported that at the time he was “getting a reputation as a pompous blowhard, and congressional staffers circulated a spoof résumé with Biden’s picture and accomplishments, including ‘inventor of polyurethane and the weedeater’ and ‘Member, Rockettes (1968).’”

. . . And Jon Favreau, speechwriter for then-President Barack Obama, said, “Biden’s reputation before he became vice president wasn’t ‘middle-class Uncle Joe’ and it also wasn’t too old and out of touch—it was that he was a blowhard.”

My developing view is that Hunter business deals will continue to come out -- Chairman Comer has teased 11 more over the weekend -- but they're going to continue to be small potatoes, five-figure payoffs to one or another of six or seven likely suspects in the Biden family, mostly with plausible deniability to the big guy, who'll continue to bloviate that they have nothing to do with him.

And in fact, net-net, as I've been saying, Hunter has been, and will continue to be, a loss to the family finances, but Joe will simply continue to pay his debts, alimony, legal, tax, or whatever else. Except that Joe won't have the money to back his promises up -- I have no doubt that Hunter's ex-wife Kathleen has been led to believe Joe will backstop her $37,000 a month alimony payments, just as I have no doubt half a dozen lawyers have been led to believe Joe is good for $2000 an hour billings. Good luck.

Joe's a blowhard, and he's always been one. He says what he thinks he needs to say at any given moment, and he gives it no subsequent thought. So far, he's gotten away with it. The upside for him is tht Hunter's rinky-dink con games will never amount to impeachable high crimes, even if Joe got $10,000 here or $50,000 there. Whether he'll ever have a downside in this life remains to be seen, but he's a man utterly without insight and without reflection, superficial to the core. There are people like that, and they prosper. It's a mystery.

Now It's Dr Jill?

In the UK Daily Mail,

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer revealed yesterday bank records he obtained via subpoena showing money from Hunter's Chinese oil giant business partners was wired to the First Son, Joe Biden's brother Jim Biden, Joe's daughter-in-law Hallie Biden, and a fourth individual referred to only by their last name: Biden.

Comer says he is currently working on obtaining further bank documents to unmask the fourth family member who received $70,000 according to the senior lawmaker.

Among the potential recipients is First Lady Dr. Jill Biden – one of the few individuals close to Hunter who shares his last name.

I'm beginning to develop a theory on things Biden, and it isn't the obvious one. There's no question that the whole family is on the take for rinky-dink amounts -- we've learned most recently of payments to Rob Walker, one in 2017 for about $3 million and one in 2015 for about $180,000, both of which were subdivided into other payments, of which about a third went to Hunter Biden, who in turn apportioned them to various Bidens, himself, his uncle James, Hallie, and now potentially Dr Jill.

In a world of multibillion-dollar scams, this stuff is small potatoes. But I keep going back to the assessment by NBC News that I linked yesterday, "The documents and the analysis indicate that few of [Hunter]’s deals ever came to fruition and shed light on how fast he was spending his money." Hunter is an addict and an alcoholic, and he'd been getting by all his life as the son of a US senator, then as the vice president's son. He had zero personal deal-making mojo. This isn't Elon Musk or even Donald Trump. This isn't even Hillary Clinton.

What strikes me so far is the people he's made deals with -- Ukrainians, Romanians, and Chinese B-listers, or characters like James Gilliar. the former advertising salesman who claims to have been in the SAS and maybe MI6 or something. They all strike me as small-time con artists who are mostly conning each other. But Hunter's biggest mark, I'm starting to think, is his dad, Joe. Here's a 2022 story at the Daily Mail that gives a picture of where I think things are actually heading:

Joe Biden agreed to pay son Hunter's legal fees for his deal with a Chinese government-controlled company, emails reveal.

But Joe has pretty clearly been paying Hunter's legal fees all along, this is nothing unique. The story goes on,

Joe was able to pay the bills after earning millions of dollars through his and his wife's companies after he left office as vice president.

Some of the wave of cash came from their book deals and speaking engagements.

But the president's financial filings reveal that he declared almost $7million more income on his tax returns than he did on his government transparency reports, an analysis by DailyMail.com of the president's financial records shows.

Some of that difference can be accounted for with salaries earned by First Lady Jill Biden and other sums not required on his reports – but still leaves $5.2million earned by Joe's company and not listed on his transparency reports.

The 'missing millions' – combined with emails on Hunter's abandoned laptop suggesting Joe would have a 10% share in Hunter's blockbuster deal with the Chinese – raise a troubling question: did Joe Biden receive money from the foreign venture?

If Joe has been taking in millions, though, as best we can tell for now, it's dribbling in via sporadic five-figure payments doled out by Hunter from his various con artist partners, and possibly 10%-for-the-big-guy deals -- but remember that the 10% idea came from the same James Gilliar who's convinced some of the people some of the time that he's James Bond. And I'm with NBC News in thinking these sorts of deals just don't come through.

I'm beginning to think that if there's a five million discrepancy in Biden numbers, it's because any Biden numbers are pure fantasy.

But even if we grant that Joe's gotten rich at a rate of $35,000 here and $10,000 there, paid indirectly to Jill, James, Valerie, Caroline, Ashley, Hallie, and whomever else, that money is going out even faster to those same people to support their drug habits, shopping sprees, rehabs, vacation trips, fast cars, and lawyers. Don't forget the lawyers. The excerpts I've seen from Hunter's ex-wife Kathleen's tell-all suggest this is just Bidenworld:

She was shocked at the opulence of his lifestyle when [Hunter] took her home to his father’s former du Pont mansion in Greenville, Del.

Joe liked to describe himself as the “poorest man in Congress” and Hunter told Kathleen he came from a middle-class family. But she told him: “Hunt . . . a kid from a middle-class family does not have a ballroom.”

“The front door opened into a foyer with a marble floor and double staircase . . . He had a tuxedo hanging in his closet — a tuxedo he used fairly regularly.

. . . A financial adviser told them they could afford no more than $170,000 for their first house. A few weeks later they bought a 10,000-square-foot mansion with six marble fireplaces on the du Pont Winterthur estate, near his dad’s place, for $310,000.

Hunter “wasn’t nervous about the price . . . We could afford it, he told me.”

Elsewhere, she's quoted,

“It’s embarrassing to say that I ceded all financial control to my husband,” she said, adding, “I liked the nice things. And I didn’t want to think about the cost at which they were coming.”

I'm starting to think Joe simply has the same mindset, and if anything, he's worked himself into a situation where he's ceded financial control to Hunter in the same way that Kathleen did. He's paying out millions for lawyers who're doing him no favors. Where is that money coming from? It's not going to come from $10,000 here and $35,000 there, any more than Hunter was ever going to pay $37,000 a month alimony even out of a $50,000 a month Burisma salary.

For now, Joe is Hunter's biggest mark. But you can't con someoe who doesn't want to be conned.

More Questions About Hunter, Lawyers, And Money

In yesterday's news,

Hunter Biden has filed a countersuit against John Paul Mac Isaac, the computer repair shop owner who turned a laptop belonging to the president's son over to authorities and members of the press.

The lawsuit claims that Isaac illicitly distributed Hunter Biden's personal data and accuses him of six counts of invasion of privacy.

I'm scratching my head. What on earth is the point of suing John Paul Mac Isaac, a bit player in the whole Hunter saga, whose role was simply to pass on the contents of Hunter's laptop after Hunter abandoned it in his shop without paying the bill? That toothpaste is out of the tube. Whatever might be said, there are numerous complete copies of the laptop's contents, as well as an enormous number of e-mails, receipts, and embarrassing photos all over the internet. Suing John Paul Mac Isaac won't make a single one of them go away.

As I'm fond of asking, what problem is Hunter trying to solve? Hunter could hire a hit man and make the guy go away as effectively as Jimmy Hoffa, and it would have zero effect on Hunter's legal situation, which is probably close to dire -- or maybe it would be close to dire except he's Joe's son, and no matter what happens, Joe will likely pardon him. But suing Mr Mac Isaac costs money, which will be paid to lawyers like Abbe Lowell, whose photo is at the top of this post.

As I try to think this through as a strategy for conservation of wealth, given that circumstance, I would spend as little as I could on Hunter's criminal exposure, as well as incidentals like whether he might be able to extract damages from Mr Mac Isaac. This assumes that Hunter and Joe have generally the same legal interests, while at this point, Joe is footing Hunter's bills, legal and otherwise. I would also assume that Joe, or Joe's attorneys, are coordinating Hunter's legal strategy.

But as far as I can see, whatever Hunter's lawyers cost -- and I've estimated that it's in the high six or low seven figures per month -- he's getting little value from them. And it sounds as though the adult who was on Hunter's original legal team, Joshua Levy, as I noted two weeks ago, has left it over disagreements with Abbe Lowell.

Levy was reportedly discontented with Lowell’s legal strategies and feared that his tactics could flop. In February, Lowell was a part of the effort to send Rudy Giuliani, Tony Bobulinski, and 12 others “litigation hold” letters to preserve “Laptop from Hell” records, a move seen by some critics as a public relations tactic to change the troubling narrative for the Biden family.

This sounds like the same strategy as the one behind suing Mr Mac Isaac, a public relations tactic to change the narrative, but let's face it, the narrative isn't going to change. But it sounds like someone has convinced Hunter and/or Joe that that can happen, and some millions of Biden money will be shoveled into that futile effort.

This brings me to another question, the Biden family fortune, and whether it actually exists. The estimates we've been seeing -- and they're just wild ballpark guesses right now -- are that Hunter brought in some tens of millions during his peak years with Rosemont Seneca, Burisma, and similar deals between about 2009 and 2017, but he was spending just as wildly. For instance, this 2022 story in the UK Daily Mail covers just his alimony payments to his ex-wife, Kathleen:

People Magazine reported that 'Buhle says she does not receive alimony from Hunter and that there was no windfall divorce settlement.'

But in a January 2019 email to Hunter's lawyer, she wrote: 'Is there an update on my alimony?'

Buhle was concerned at the time because she had allegedly not received scheduled spousal support payments from her ex.

A letter from her lawyer to Hunter's a week later shows that the couple's divorce settlement included an agreement for Hunter to pay Buhle at least $37,000 per month.

'The MSA [Marital Settlement Agreement] provides that, beginning 04/01/2017, and continuing thereafter RHB shall pay to KBB $37,000 per month as Base Spousal Support,' Sullivan wrote to Mancinelli.

Sullivan claimed that Hunter had failed to make the payments, hand over financial information or 'failed to reasonably cooperate' with Buhle when the IRS slapped a lien for Hunter's unpaid taxes on an Indiana lake house property she got in the divorce.

According to my calculator, $37,000 times 12 months is $444,000 per year, close to half a mil. But that's just alimony, a single line item. This NBC News story from last year summarizes the current consensus on Hunter's overall income vs spending:

From 2013 through 2018 Hunter Biden and his company brought in about $11 million via his roles as an attorney and a board member with a Ukrainian firm accused of bribery and his work with a Chinese businessman now accused of fraud, according to an NBC News analysis of a copy of Biden’s hard drive and iCloud account and documents released by Republicans on two Senate committees.

. . . The documents and the analysis indicate that few of Biden’s deals ever came to fruition and shed light on how fast he was spending his money. Expenditures compiled on his hard drive show he spent more than $200,000 per month from October 2017 through February 2018 on luxury hotel rooms, Porsche payments, dental work and cash withdrawals.

$200,000 per month, according to my calculator, is $2.4 million per year (NBC News is circumspect over how much of this went to crack and hookers). But 2017 is when Hunter's fortunes really started to go south, since Burisma cut his director's fee that May, and Ye Jianming, his main China contact, disappeared in January 2018. According to the NBC News link,

Biden made $5.8 million, more than half his total earnings from 2013 to 2018, from two deals with Chinese business interests.

Biden’s most lucrative business relationship was acting as a consultant in a project with a company that belongs to a once-powerful Chinese businessman who is now thought to be detained in his homeland.

According to business records referred to in the Senate report, Hudson West III, a venture funded by the Chinese oil and natural gas company CEFC and its chairman, Ye Jianming, paid $4,790,375.25 to Owasco P.C. over about one year.

But adding line items like alimony, wild partying, rehab, payments to Hallie and her sister, Elizabeth Secundy, with whom he was having an affair at the same time, plus child support for his natural daughter with the stripper Lunden Roberts, it seems as though Hunter's expenses even during his peak years pretty much canceled out his earnings. But now, with his income much reduced and living under effective house arrest in his Malibu compound, he's got that rent, another child, an expensive new wife, and maybe a million dollars a month in lawyer fees.

I can only think Joe is picking up all these bills, plus he's now apparently supporting Hallie, her kids, and her lifestyle. 10% for the big guy isn't going to cover this, either. We're back to Stein's Law, that which cannot continue must stop.

No Surprise

Although it hadn't hit the news at the time I published yesterday's post, based on what I surmised there, it should be no surprise that Hallie has been identified as the "never before identified Biden" that Oversight Committee Chairman Comer had been teasing over the course of the week:

The Oversight Committee chairman first revealed on Monday that bank records obtained via subpoena implicate three Bidens, including one that’s “never before been identified” as being involved in the family’s alleged influence-peddling operation.

By yesterday, the "never before identified Biden" had been outed:

President Biden’s daughter-in-law Hallie is the mysterious “new” Biden family member who got paid Chinese cash in 2017, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer revealed exclusively to The Post Thursday.

. . . The records show Hallie Biden received $35,000 over two transfers in 2017 from Biden family associate Rob Walker, who got $3 million on March 1, 2017, from State Energy HK Limited, a firm affiliated with CEFC China Energy.

. . . One transfer to Hallie from Robinson Walker LLC was for $25,000 on March 20, 2017, Comer’s staff wrote in a Thursday morning memo to committee members. Another $10,000 was transferred on Feb. 13 — raising “many questions” according to a committee aide because it came shortly before, rather than after, the $3 million haul.

It's known from the numerous stories on the Hunter-Hallie relationship that Hunter had been giving Hallie financial support in various ways between 2015 and 2019, including having her on the payroll of his company Owasco LLC and owning a house with her, so $45,000 in the first months of 2017 would be nothing unusual, although given Hallie's lifestyle, it would have been a drop in the bucket. Nevertheless, in spite of Hunter's regular support, as I noted yesterday, she stiffed her childrens' private school for their tuition in 2018-19, which suggests to me that whatever Hunter was giving her basically went up her nose.

More interesting is the pattern of payments to Hunter and his uncle Jim Biden that this episode represents. According to the Daily Wire,

John Robinson Walker, a Biden family associate, and his company Robinson Walker, LLC used his business to transfer money from the Chinese State Energy HK Limited, a firm affiliated with CEFC China Energy, to Biden family members, including the Hunter Biden (son), James Biden (brother), Hallie Biden (daughter-in-law), and a fourth “unknown Biden” from 2015 to 2017.

. . . According to the memo, less than two months after then-Vice President Biden left office under the Obama administration in 2017, the Chinese state energy company wired $3 million to Robinson Walker, LLC. However, Walker’s business allegedly only had a balance of $159,000 at the time of the transfer.

Following the wire, the committee memo says Walker’s company transferred on March 1, 2017, $1,065,000 to European Energy and Infrastructure Group (EEIG) in Abu Dhabi, which is affiliated with James Gilliar, a business partner of Hunter Biden that has been previously involved in other foreign transactions dealing with the Biden family. Gilliar’s affiliated company allegedly received roughly the same $1,065,000 on March 2, 2017.

According to the New York Post, Walker is a former Clinton administration official whose wife, Betsy Massey Walker, was an assistant to second lady Jill Biden during Joe Biden’s vice presidency.

At the same link, the Post identified Gilliar, a former British special forces officer with ties to UK intelligence services, as the author of the May 2017 email proposing that the “big guy” get 10% of the CEFC deal.

However, the still-incomplete record shows a business relationship among Hunter, Rob Walker, and James Gilliar that extended at least as far back as 2015, when Joe was still in office as vice president. According to the Post,

“Over the course of several years, members of the Biden family and their companies received over $1.3 million in payments from accounts related to their associate, Rob Walker,” Comer said. “Most of this money came as a result of a wire from a Chinese energy company and went not only to Hunter and James Biden but also to Hallie Biden and an unknown ‘Biden.’”

. . . More than a third of the $3 million that Walker’s firm received was forwarded to Biden family associate James Gilliar and “almost the exact same amount,” $1,065,000, was distributed among Biden family members over three months, the committee memo says.

According to the Daily Wire,

On November 5, 2015, the memo says that Walker’s LLC received nearly $180,000 from an unknown company with an overseas bank account. It adds that Walker transferred $59,900 from the business account to his personal checking account the next day, which went to a bank account for “Robert Biden” three days later.

According to the Post,

The Oversight Committee notes that on Nov. 9, 2015, Robinson Walker LLC wired $59,900 to one of Hunter Biden’s accounts and another $59,900 to Gilliar’s EEIG account.

The committee is unsure what company was responsible for initially wiring these funds, totaling $179,836.86, to Walker’s account.

What we see in both cases is a three-way deal, in which some company wires Robinson Walker a lump sum, which Walker splits into three parts, one to Gilliar, one to Hunter, and one that he keeps for himself. If the 2015 deal is like the 2017 deal, we might infer that Hunter then subdivided his share and sent it along to other Bidens, keeping some for himself. And the best we can surmise is that this is under some sort of understanding that had existed at least between 2015 and 2017, but beyond that, we don't yet know how many transactions occurred, how much money was involved in total, where the money came from, and exactly which Bidens got the money from Hunter, although as Chairman Comer says,

At the end of this I think we’re gonna see there are probably six or seven Biden family members that were involved in various business schemes around the world.

As I've mentioned, I've been maintaining a timeline of noteworthy Hunter Biden events, which at present becomes more dense starting in 2016. However, the new report of a November 2015 transaction that mirrors the larger and better publicized 2017 transaction suggests Hunter had been a busy guy well before the events that have come to light up to now. However, it's worth noting that other Hunter enterprises, including BHR partners and Rosemont Seneca partners, date from as early as 2009 and appear to involve issues like travel with Joe to China when Joe was still vice president, so I strongly suspect there's a great deal more to learn.

One No-Brainer And One Big Puzzle

Yesterday I brought up the coincidence that as of 2016, both Hunter Biden's sister-in-law, Hallie, and his father, Joe, found themselves needing money. Hallie's case was a no-brainer: her husband, Beau Biden, had passed away from brain cancer in May 2015. Hallie, who had apparently had no education past private secondary school, appears to have worked only at part-time private school counselor jobs that she must have held only because she was married to Beau, she had no career to fall back on, but she had expenses like private school tuition for her children plus a cocaine habit.

Thus she needed a meal ticket, and based on evidence from Hunter's laptop, she was staying over at Hunter's home while his wife, Kathleen, was away by July of 2015. This is what apparently caused Kathleen to kick Hunter out of their house that month. This affair continued, with Hunter apparently paying for her home, until the Biden family intervention with Hunter in March 2019, when Hunter was prevailed upon to clean up his act prior to Joe's announcement of his 2020 candidacy. Significantly, according to the Wikipedia link above, "In March 2019, The Key School filed a lawsuit against [Hallie], stating that she failed to pay $55,740 in tuition for her two children for the 2018–2019 school year."

By May 2019, Hunter met and married Melissa Cohen and was living under tight security in Los Angeles, which would have effectively curtailed further interaction between Hunter and Hallie. In addition, most of Hunter's prior businesses had collapsed by that time, and according to an e-mail from Hunter's assistant, Joe had been underwriting Hunter's expenses since January 2019. It's unknown how Hallie has supported herself since the end of her affair with Hunter, but it also sounds as if Joe was also subsidizing her lifestyle:

[T]exts on the laptop also reveal that Hallie Biden, his brother Beau's widow who became his lover after Beau died of brain cancer in 2015, has been to rehab four times, costing over $100,000, some of it allegedly paid for by Joe Biden.

. . . During the conversation Hunter discussed which rehab center he will be attending, and revealed that the president spent $45,000 on a ten-day rehab stay for Hallie.

So it isn't difficult to conclude that Hallie's interest in Hunter was at basis financial, and he was also either supplying her with drugs directly or enabling her own purchases. Given her addiction and her minimal job history, she would have had little ability to support herself, and Hunter was effectively her only option.

But let's look at the other figure in this story, Hunter's dad, Joe, who as best we can surmise also saw that he'd need money when he left the vice presidency in January 2017. The vice president's salary is $230,700 per year, which Joe would cease to earn after he left office. The vice presidency does not carry a pension. but the vice president earns a Senate pension as a result of his constitutional duty to preside over the Senate.

This means that a retired vice president earns the same pension as other members of the US Congress, but based on their years of service. Before 1997, vice presidents who served for one term and had less than 5 years in federal service were not entitled to a pension.

After retiring as vice president in 2016, Forbes reported that Joe Biden earned $1 million in federal pension for his 43 years in public service.

Most people can retire comfortably on $1 million a year, especially if we assume Joe would have extensive additional investments, as well as various perks, courtesies, and lagniappes accumulated over his career. On the other hand, it appears that Joe had become accustomed to an extravagant lifestyle, and he'd been enabling extravagant and drug-addicted parasitic lifestyles in his son, Hunter, and his daughter, Ashley, not to mention the rehab for Hallie mentioned above, and likely other payments to Hunter's ex-wife Kathleen and Lunden Roberts, the mother of a Hunter out-of-wedlock child.

In addition, I've estimated here that Joe is spending over $1 million a month on his personal attorneys who are working on the Penn Biden Center and related classified document matters, while Hunter is spending an equivalent amount over his tax issues and other situations connected with his business dealings. It's hard to avoid thinking some of Hunter's expenses are being passed on to his father, and Joe may also be bearing some part of Hunter's extravagant living expenses at his Malibu compound, as well as his wife's own lifestyle.

I've wondered as well whether either Hunter or Joe is getting anything like what they're paying for from those expensive lawyers, and this goes to their judgment -- notwithstanding however much money either can get, can either spend it wisely?

The problem I see in this whole scenario is that both Joe and Hallie seem to have thought Hunter would be the guy who'd fund their lifestyles into the indefinite future, when the history of Hunter's business ventures has been that he formed optimistic partnerships with figures like Christopher Heinz, Devon Archer, and Eric Schwerin, but soon enough, Heinz withdrew from Rosemont Seneca, Archer was convicted of securites fraud, and Schwerin, fed up with Hunter, began to cooperate with investigations. Others of his foreign connections have been convicted of crimes or disappeared entirely. Hunter has turned out to be a will-o-the-wisp, and the people who've been fooled most include Joe and Hallie.

The money people think Hunter will bring in never quite turns up, and Hunter himself becomes a major new expense. But I'm still working on another puzzle: as we saw yesterday, Joe made a deliberate decision not to run for president in 2016. This in turn led to a recommendation from family advisers that Joe set up an enterprise along the lines of the Clinton Foundation to colect payoffs in anticipation of future favors he would give as a president after 2020 or 2024.

But why did so many people think that Joe's election was assured as of 2017? It seems like a good many did. Why?

Where's El Rushbo When We Need Him?

What made Rush Linbaugh indispensable. even though he was well past his prime by the time he died, was his ability to reason past individual data items and see a bigger picture, which more often than not was funny. Nobody now on the scene combines a sharp intellect with a sense of humor, which always softened the blow of what he was actually saying.

Let's take a slowly emerging cluster of data points that hasn't been well examined in the public forum, those being that prior to the 2016 presidential election, Joe Biden made a deliberate decision not to run. Instead, soon after he left office as vice president in January 2017, he began an intense fundraising campaign, not for political office, but for personal aggrandizement. The Penn Biden Center has so far emerged as the most visible manifestation of that campaign.

For reasons that so far haven't been fully examined, Joe had relied for some years on his dissolute son Hunter as his chief confidant, having notably credited him with the advice to run for vice president in 2008,

Listing those he sought out for counsel, he mentioned his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, his mother, Catherine “Jean” Biden, his late son Beau Biden, “and I had my son Hunter, who’s the smartest guy I know.”

What intrigues me, and what nobody so far has pointed out, is that Biden's decision to undertake a major personal fundraising campaign in 2017 coincides almost exactly with Hunter's spiral into the worst phase of his addiction. Even as of mid 2016, Hunter had been severely addicted to cocaine, and that autumn he'd been on a notorious trip to LA and then rehab in Arizona, where he and his brother Beau's widow had decided to become an item.

He filed for divorce from his then-wife in December 2016, which became final in April 2017. A month later, Burisma cut his director's fee. At about that time, he began negotiating with Chinese energy officials, the arrangements for which involved, according to a May 2017 e-mail, 10% to be held by Hunter “for the big guy.”

So far, even without the Treasury Department providing the access Chairman Comer has demanded to suspicious activity reports on Biden family transactions, details have nevertheless been dribbling out:

Comer also dropped a big tidbit about what they had been able to discover to date in their investigations. They had subpoenaed bank records from three Hunter Biden associates, including Rob Walker. They’re now reviewing 14 years of SARs from Bank of America.

. . . According to Comer, Walker was wired millions by CCP-connected individuals two months after Joe Biden stopped being vice president. The money was then distributed to three Biden family members, including a Biden family member whose name has never been included previously as a recipient of any monies. Comer said that he couldn’t identify any related business and that it appeared to go into their personal accounts. He said that he believes it’s influence peddling, and that raises questions about people then being foreign agents.

. . . Interestingly, Comer wasn’t giving up that third name and then he repeated there was a “problem” with figuring out what they were doing to get such sums of money from the CCP-connected people.

Now, what's likely to come out from all this is simply what's going to come out, and so far, it looks like more of the same -- multimillion-dollar wire transfers to Biden intermediaries that don't even have the beard of respectability they might have as campaign donations. They're just payments from a grateful world to Bidens for being Bidens. And there may be subsidiary questions about whether those payments were declared for tax purposes, or whether the Bidens were properly registered as foreign agents -- and I assume they'll work themselves out in whatever way.

But here's the set of inferences El Rushbo is no longer around to make: Joe, by the accounts we've had, made a deliberate decision not to run for president in 2016. Instead, by the same accounts, he and Hunter, with outside advice, decided to set up an operation consciously patterned after the Clinton Foundation to take donations from whomever on the basis that Hillary, in that particular case, would run for and be elected president either in 2008 or 2016, just get in early and you'll get what you want at a discount.

(Let's leave aside that the Clinton Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, but the Biden family is just a bunch of people with their hands out -- the principle is the same. Joe and Hunter seem to have decided they didn't need to waste the time even to look like they were observing the proprieties.)

But even looking toward a presidential run in 2016, Joe was 74 that year, but he decided not to run. At the time he made his decision in 2015, Jeb Bush was the likely Republican nominee, while Hillary was the favorite for both the nomination and the general election. If Hillary had won especially, the conventional wisdom would have had her in office until 2024, when Joe will be 82.

Yet Joe and Hunter decided to defer a run for the presidency until 2020 or 2024, when Joe by any conventional standard would have been too old. They nevertheless decided to undertake a massive personal fundraising operation to secure payments, mostly from foreign donors, in anticipation that Joe would win a general presidential election campaign, quite possibly as early as 2020.

What led them to make this decision? That's the kind of question El Rushbo would be asking. I have a feeling his answer would be funny, and beyond that, he'd be right.

The Proud Boys Trial

One of the January 6 trials that's had less notice is the Proud Boys Trial currently under way:

In Washington, D.C., members of the Proud Boys are on trial related to their alleged actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. It is the second major seditious conspiracy trial related to the insurrection following one late last year involving members of the Oath Keepers.

This hasn't been well covered, in part because so far, it hasn't been a slam-dunk for the government. The AP has more details:

The former Proud Boys national chairman is standing trial on the most serious charge that has been lodged in the U.S. Capitol attack. That’s seditious conspiracy, which is the same offense that two Oath Keepers leaders were convicted of weeks ago.

It’s the third such trial in the massive prosecution of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot that forced Congress to adjourn as lawmakers and staff hid from a violent mob. Opening statements began on Thursday [January 12, 2023], and the trial is expected to last at least six weeks.

Prosecutors in the case against former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and four lieutenants will try to prove that the extremist group plotted for weeks to use force to keep then-President Donald Trump in power. Tarrio wasn’t in Washington on Jan. 6 — he was arrested in a separate case two days earlier — but authorities say he helped put into motion the violence and cheered on the riot from afar as it unfolded.

Even at the start of the case, one of Tarrio's alleged co-conspirators, Ethan Nordean, had to be released on bail when a judge determined he wasn't a specific threat:

“Mr. Nordean’s alleged membership in the Proud Boys does not make him a danger to others or the community,” his defense team had written to the court. “While the government devotes a portion of its lengthy memorandum to the statements and actions of other alleged members of the Proud Boys, none of the footage suggests that Mr. Nordean himself was involved in anything more serious or sinister.”

In Nordean’s case, prosecutors tried to argue he had a passport at the ready that was of another man, and had expressed interest in moving out of Washington state. But his defense attorney on Monday argued that didn’t show he was ready to flee – and that the passport belonged to his wife’s ex-partner, whom he didn’t closely resemble.

This account of the trial indicates it's been contentious throughout:

The Capitol riot trial for Proud Boys leaders promised to be a historic showcase for some of the most compelling evidence of an alleged plot by far-right extremists to halt the transfer of presidential power after the 2020 election.

One month into the trial, there have been plenty of fireworks, but mostly when the jury wasn’t in the courtroom.

Lawyers representing the five Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy have repeatedly sparred with U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly during breaks in testimony. At least 10 times, those lawyers have argued in vain for him to declare a mistrial.

The calls for a mistrial have only increased with the Tucker Carlson release of January 6 film and especially, the testimony of an FBI agent, Nicole Miller:

Lawyer Roger Roots is representing Dominic Pezzola and has moved for the court to not merely dismiss the case, but to pause all Jan. 6 prosecutions pending evidentiary hearings, the Epoch Times reported.

Fueling Roots' request is an exchange from the testimony of FBI Special Agent Nicole Miller. Attorney Nick Smith, who represents Pezzola co-defendant Ethan Nordean, revealed classified FBI emails that included an order to Miller that she remove an FBI agent from the informant report and destroy 338 pieces of evidence outright.

According to Politico,

The lawyers also cited several other exchanges they viewed as fishy: a message from one agent asking that his name be edited out of a report concerning a meeting with a confidential human source; an FBI agent’s opinion about the strength of the Proud Boys conspiracy case; and a message from an agent discussing an order to destroy 338 pieces of evidence in an unidentified case.

Defense attorneys said they should be permitted to grill Miller about each of these topics when the trial resumes this week. The hidden messages sparked an uproar on Thursday, when Nicholas Smith, attorney for defendant Ethan Nordean, began questioning Miller about them. Prosecutors objected and later indicated they believed there had been a “spill” of classified information in the messages — a claim the defense lawyers worried was a pretense to shut down their review. U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly called the trial off for the day Friday to give the Justice Department and the defense a chance to clarify the issues.

Robert Gouveia, a criminal defense attorney, has given an entertaining review on YouTube of both the defense and prosecution arguments submitted to Judge Kelly on Sunday, here and here.

My memory is long enough to take me back to the Chicago Seven Trial over the 1968 riots at the Chicago Democrat Party convention, which was better publicized (likely due to media bias in favor of the defendants) and, it would seem, more entertaining. But it strikes me as covering similar political ground. According to the Wikipedia link,

The Chicago Seven, originally the Chicago Eight and also known as the Conspiracy Eight or Conspiracy Seven, were seven defendants—Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Lee Weiner—charged by the United States federal government with conspiracy, crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot, and other charges related to anti-Vietnam War and 1960s counterculture protests in Chicago, Illinois, during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The Chicago Eight became the Chicago Seven after the case against co-defendant Bobby Seale was declared a mistrial.

All of the defendants were charged with and acquitted of conspiracy; Davis, Dellinger, Hayden, Hoffman, and Rubin were charged with and convicted of crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot; Froines and Weiner were charged with teaching demonstrators how to construct incendiary devices and acquitted of those charges. All of the convictions were later reversed on appeal and the government declined to retry the case. While the jury deliberated, Judge Julius Hoffman convicted the defendants and their attorneys for contempt of court and sentenced them to jail sentences ranging from less than three months to more than four years. The contempt convictions were also appealed, and some were retried before a different judge.

As I write this, Judge Kelly has yet to rule on the arguments the prosecution and defense submitted to him Sunday. But no matter how he rules -- unless he declares a mistrial, for which the likelihood is at least greater than null -- the circus is likely to continue, and I strongly suspect the eventual outcome will be much like that with the Chicago Seven.