DeSantis And The Trump Bump

In this morning's headlines at The Hill: DeSantis sees lowest level of support since December in new poll, trails Trump by 28 points:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) received just 26 percent support in the latest GOP presidential poll from Morning Consult — the lowest number he’s hit in the survey since December.

DeSantis, who has not entered the GOP primary but is expected to do so, trailed former President Trump, who won 54 percent, by 28 percentage points in the new poll published on Tuesday.

It's worth pointing out that predsidential polls this far out from an election year are meaningless. A quick web search brings this from NBC News in June 2015:

A brand-new national NBC/WSJ poll finds Jeb Bush leading the crowded Republican presidential field, with 22% of GOP primary voters saying he’s their first choice. He’s followed by Scott Walker at 17%, Marco Rubio at 14%, and Ben Carson at 11%. While Jeb had a similar five-point lead in our April NBC/WSJ poll, you see his current position has strengthened when you look inside the numbers of this new poll. (It was conducted during the buildup and coverage of Bush’s official presidential announcement on June 16.) The latest survey shows him ahead among self-identified conservative GOP primary voters -- when he was in third place in April behind Rubio and Walker. And as we unveiled on Sunday, 75% of Republican primary voters in our new poll say they could see themselves supporting Bush -- up from 70% in April and 49% in March.

By December 2015, the picture had radically changed:

Donald Trump just got a little more vault in his ceiling. Nationwide, the polling-obsessed Manhattan multi-billionaire and leading Republican presidential candidate broke into the 40s on Monday.

According to the results of the latest Monmouth University pollsurveying voters identifying as Republican or independents leaning toward the GOP, Trump earned 41 percent, nearly tripling the support of his closest rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who took 14 percent.

. . . Monmouth’s survey also held good news for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who moved up to 10 percent support and third place, and bad news for retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who plummeted from 18 percent in October to 9 percent in this latest survey. Other candidates, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, polled within the margin of error, with 6 percent remaining undecided.

Searching the web for more on 2015, I ran into this essay at the Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Meida, Politics, and Public Policy:

[D]uring the year 2015, major news outlets covered Donald Trump in a way that was unusual given his low initial polling numbers—a high volume of media coverage preceded Trump’s rise in the polls. Trump’s coverage was positive in tone—he received far more “good press” than “bad press.” [But of course, as others say, there's no such thing as "bad press". ]The volume and tone of the coverage helped propel Trump to the top of Republican polls.

. . . Although journalists play a political brokering role in presidential primaries, their decisions are driven by news values rather than political values. Journalists are attracted to the new, the unusual, the sensational—the type of story material that will catch and hold an audience’s attention. Trump fit that need as no other candidate in recent memory. Trump is arguably the first bona fide media-created presidential nominee. Although he subsequently tapped a political nerve, journalists fueled his launch.

. . . Journalists seemed unmindful that they and not the electorate were Trump’s first audience. Trump exploited their lust for riveting stories. He didn’t have any other option. He had no constituency base and no claim to presidential credentials. If Trump had possessed them, his strategy could have been political suicide, which is what the press predicted as they showcased his tirades. Trump couldn’t compete with the likes of Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or Jeb Bush on the basis of his political standing or following. The politics of outrage was his edge, and the press became his dependable if unwitting ally.

This is precisely what's happening now, for good or ill. Recall from my post yesterday that Trump himself broke the story of his impending arrest, which nevertheless hasn't happened as predicted, but House Republicans have hopped gleefully onto the bandwagon:

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg faces a Thursday deadline to come forward to appear before three congressional panels for a transcribed interview, the chairman of one of those committees told Breitbart News exclusively here at the House GOP retreat.

“We gave him until Thursday to come forward,” House Administration Committee chairman Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI) told Breitbart News of the push to bring Bragg in. “We look forward to his response.”

Steil chairs one of the three congressional committees—the others being the House Judiciary Committee chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and the House Oversight Committee chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-KY)—that demanded Bragg appear for a transcribed interview with congressional investigators to explain his rationale in the looming indictment of former President Donald Trump.

As long as this kabuki continues, it's good for Trump, and he'll continue to look good in the polls. The conventional wisdom is that Bragg and the leftists who've pressured him to move are doing the worst possible thing for themselves, unless you atrribute to them a calculation that this will give Trump the 2024 nomination and make him an easy target for whomever the Democrats nominate. Actually, I think it's still too early for that sort of handicapping.

But I don't rule DeSantis out. In his interview with Piers Morgan last week, he made a good case against Trump on two major issues:

[I]n a series of jabs at likely his biggest rival for the Republican nomination, DeSantis slammed Trump over his character failings, chaotic leadership style, and for his handling of the COVID pandemic — especially in keeping controversial health chief Dr. Anthony Fauci in his post helping to run the White House coronavirus task force.

. . . When I asked DeSantis to cite specific differences between him and Trump, he said: “Well, I think there’s a few things. The approach to COVID was different. I would have fired somebody like Fauci. I think he got way too big for his britches, and I think he did a lot of damage.”

DeSantis also slammed Trump’s chaotic, self-obsessed, divisive management style: “I also think just in terms of my approach to leadership, I get personnel in the government who have the agenda of the people and share our agenda. You bring your own agenda in, you’re gone. We’re just not gonna have that. So, the way we run the government, I think, is no daily drama, focus on the big picture and put points on the board, and I think that’s something that’s very important.

". . . you can call me whatever you want, just as long as you also call me a winner because that’s what we’ve been able to do in Florida, is put a lot of points on the board and really take this state to the next level.”

DeSantis in that interview is saying he isn't going to go after Trump on issues like Stormy Daniels -- they play into Trump's strategy, to stoke sensation and get press coverage, which benefits him no matter what. On the other hand, Stormy Daniels? I wouldn't go near someone like that without a hazmat suit. Somehow I think DeSantis has that much sense. In fact, my gut instinct is that DeSantis is that smart, and he's also ruthless.

Whoever goes after Trump has to be smart, which people like Liz Cheney or Alvin Bragg aren't. But they have to be ruthless and even mean, which is what you also have to be to beat the Democrats. I think DeSantis is the guy to watch.

Kabuki

At pto-Trump Breitbart News: Donald Trump Jr. and Others Blast DeSantis Response to Looming Donald Trump Arrest: ‘Pure Weakness’. At never-Trump Red State: Trump Keeps His Eye on the Ball, Rants About Ron DeSantis by Insinuating He's Gay.'

At least for trhe short term, the beneficiary of the arrested-on-Tuesday kerfuffle will be Trump, simply because he'll be the focus of the news cycle whether he's arrested or not. The best point I've seen has been that the arrested-on-Tuesday issue is Trump's creation, since he made the announcement, and for that matter, his gift has always been finding ways to get free coverage from the media. And if there have been complaints that the possibility of a Trump arrest or indictment stole news coverage from the latest Hunter Biden payments, that's still Trump's doing, right?

This piece at Hot Air suggests there's only upside for Trump.

Until the actual order (if it exists) is signed, Alvin Bragg still has time to walk back from the brink. And that would probably be a good idea. Virtually every legal analyst who isn’t effectively on the payroll of the Democrats has said that the hush money charge wouldn’t amount to more than a misdemeanor and even then the prosecution would have to prove there was an intent to commit fraud of some sort. Granted, Bragg could probably find a never-Trump judge who is willing to throw the book at him, but the conviction would probably crumble on appeal.

Then we have all of the people who are predicting that arresting Donald Trump in this fashion would prove to the world that the Democrats are engaged in a political witch hunt. Trump would use that moment to his advantage and, at least according to some, it might just launch him back into the White House.

I’m not at all sure that this should be seen as a foregone conclusion this early in the primary process. There is a lot of ground to cover between now and then and Trump’s support, while still significant, is far from universal in his own party. But none of that makes arresting him a good idea, even for his loudest critics.

And even if the arrest doesn't happen -- remember that Trump himself predicted it -- he can claim that Bragg backed down. and he made him do it.

But let's recall that the subtext of the coverage over the last several days is DeSantis, which again Trump has raised with his Truth Social post:

Trump took to Truth Social to say it would be unfair if DeSantis were attacked for grooming young girls or being gay. Trump's post didn't leave much to the imagination: It included a picture of a man, allegedly a younger DeSantis, standing with a group of young women, one of whom is holding a bottle.

"Ron DeSanctimonious will probably find out about FALSE ACCUSATIONS & FAKE STORIES sometime in the future, as he gets older, wiser and better known, when he's unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that are 'underage' (or possibly a man!)," Trump wrote. "I'm sure he will want to fight these misfits just like I do!"

The picture is from a 2021 blog post on a site called The Hill Reporter, which purportedly showed a picture of DeSantis with several young women during his brief time as a high school teacher more than 20 years ago.

As other commentators have said, people have been predicting for seven years now that Trump will be indicted; this is nothing new. It's also too early to predict what will happen in 2024, DeSantis hasn't announced, while several others are already running or are serious about it -- and Biden himself hasn't announced.

So this is all kabuki. But I like DeSantis's attitude:

“We are not involved in this [and] won’t be involved in this. I have no interest in getting involved in some type of manufactured circus by some Soros DA, ok?” DeSantis said, accusing Bragg of creating a “political spectacle” and virtue-signaling to his leftist base.

DeSantis added he has “real issues” to deal with in the Sunshine State.

We need to have someone really mean and really focused to win in 2024.

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?