The Cry Wolf Effect

It seems to me that we're back to a situation where Donald Trump understands media dynamics a lot better than the media professionals who think they run the planet. His response to the latest indictment has been to call it, among other things, just another hoax in a series of hoaxes. According to the BBC,

Mr Trump, who is running for the White House again in 2024, called the indictment a "hoax" by the "corrupt political establishment", also describing it as a "joke" and a "travesty of justice".

On one hand, you can hurt yourself by claiming something that clearly isn't a hoax a hoax. The idea that a bunch of Islamist terrorists didn't bring down the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 is a hoax, and if you claim it isn't, you damage your credibility on anything else you claim. On the other hand, the problem for never Trumpers of any persuasion has become that there's now a series of factoids put forth as truth that have kept turning out to be hoaxes, from the pee dossier to the 2019 Zelensky phone call to the claim that Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation to the whole question of just what happened with COVID. It's the simple cry wolf effect.

Nor does it help that Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who brought the latest indictment, looks like the nebbishy assistant sociology professor you remember from your sophomore year for trying to get the undergraduates to demand the university give him tenure -- but he was so nebbishy, not even the undergraduates would buy it.

So we have a repeating phenomenon, whereby with each new indictment, Trump surges in popularity.

A poll indicates that former President Donald Trump has widened his lead in the GOP primary following the Department of Justice’s indictment of him for allegedly mishandling classified documents at his Florida home.

Surveying 1,798 potential voters between June 9-10 with a margin of error ±3.3 points, the CBS News poll showed the former president had 61 percent support in the Republican primary, leading his opponent, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis by a full 38 points – 61 percent to 23 percent. Republican Sen. Tim Scott (SC) stands in third place with just 4 percent of support, just one point ahead of former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.

This seems to be causing even figures like Alan Dershowitz to question the received wisdom on Trump's supposed predicament. Last week, he was with the establishment:

Since reading the 49-page indictment, which was unsealed on Friday, Dershowitz says, “at least one part of it is somewhat stronger than I had initially believed it would be.” Specifically, the indictment cites a tape recording in which the president allegedly brags to an unnamed person about classified “secret information” in a document about Iran.

By Sunday night, he was starting to hedge:

Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz offered his legal insight into the indictment of former President Donald Trump, saying Special Counsel Jack Smith had only one job when he was assigned to the case: "Get Trump."

Beyond the legalisms, though, we're in a situation where the plebs is behaving unpredictably. The Bud Light-Dylan Mulvaney boycott caught everyone by surprise, and even in the early weeks, nobody thought it would last. Then it moved to Target, and again, its specificity, strength, and persistence have defied conventional wisdom. As of now, it appears that it may spread to other brands like Cracker Barrel. The plebs simply doesn't respond well to being told to believe things that go against common sense.

I would go so far as to say that questions like whether the pee dossier or the Hunter laptop Russian disinformation story were hoaxes have had far less impact on the public mood than the whole COVID-lockdown-masking-social-distance-mandatory-vaccine-booster-after-booster brainwash that's soured the public mood, likely for years to come. If Dylan Mulvaney and Alissa Heinerscheid allowed the plebs to pick the targets, freeze them, and personalize them as the problem, Trump has been able to move into a posiiton where he can be picked, frozen and personalized as the antidote.

And for now, it's William Barr, Jack Smith, and President Brandon himself who are playing the bigger media roles of Dylan Mulvaney and Alissa Heinerscheid as the frozen and personalized targets.. Bud Light and Target haven't figured out how to extricate themselves from their predicament. It doesn't look like the puppets who think they're running the political show have figured things out yet on a bigger scale, either.

Back To David Brooks

I was going to write about David Brooks's latest pronouncement that he made on last Friday's PBS News Hour, and I'll get to that, but in searching for an image to put at the top of this post, I ran into the one above. You might think somebody had photoshopped a photo of Hunter off the notorious laptop onto the great man's visage, but on fact, the photo is from 2015, when Hunter's own crack-addled capers were hardly a glimmer in his own eye. The title of the oddly sibylline piece where it appeared was I Don't Think David Brooks Is Okay, You Guys, and it was written by Albert Bourneko.

It's strangely prophetic in more than one way, because it mirrors the impression I've begun to have that there's a connection between David Brooks's world view and that of another sage observer of our time, the powerful new novelist Kevin Morris. A few weeks ago, I noticed that both Brooks and Morris focus on the creature Brooks calls Patio Man, the prosperous former Democrat who's moved over to the Trump column. Bourneko saw this trend nearly a decade ago in Brooks's writing:

I’ve been a pretty regular reader of the New York Times columnist since before he even came to the Times, going all the way back to his seminal 2000 book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, which revealed, to the astonishment of various residents of the East Coast media world’s upper crust, that the rich white people of the Clinton years were different from previous generations of rich white people, because they used their money to buy elite refrigerators instead of jewel-encrusted top hats.

But Bourneko also saw a darker shift:

When David Brooks’s marriage collapsed, reportedly, around the end of 2013, it should have freed him to enjoy the spoils of pundit-class celebrity. He would be Out There, America’s most eligible thinkfluencer, thinkfluencing a perky publishing assistant onto his elbow for mutually rewarding committed relationship action and/or love!

. . . How he burns with resentment. The hot millennials do not want a New York Times columnist from whom to receive stimulating discourse about the moral and attitudinal deficiencies of the poor. No, they want a “not-repulsive person” who “does not look like a waxed talpid,” thanks to some cockamamie notion that “sexual attraction” might be a more fruitful basis for a relationship than “being lectured by a fusty boomer pissbaby about how masculine chivalry is the bedrock of civilization and both were destroyed by the sexual revolution.”

Which brings me to the question of how at the News Hour, anchors have come and gone, other talking heads have come and gone, interlocutors for David Brooks have come and gone, but David Brooks remains. And as of last Friday,,

New York Times columnist David Brooks stated that he thinks President Joe Biden’s staff overprotects him and that the President should be out in public more. Brooks also said that from what he hears from inside the Biden White House, the President’s “not a doddering old grandpa either.” And Biden “can be a very tough, mean guy and a very harsh boss sometimes.”

Brooks said, “[L]onger-term…I do think Biden is still underexposed. I think his staff is still overprotective of him. And he’s much smarter in public than a lot of people think — in private. And so, I do think they need to let him get out more, because it’s just not good for the presidency for him to be that much in the shadow of Donald Trump.”

Wait a moment. And he’s much smarter in public than a lot of people think — in private? What on earth does that mean? It sounds as though whatever ails the big guy isn't conventionally contagious, since Brooks imples he's not around Joe all that much, but somehow, mentally, he and Biden are starting to get into the same groove. So he thinks Biden should be "out in public more". Here's the problem. When Biden's out in public, he does things like try to do a little skip to prove he's spry, but instead, he falls over, which is what happened in Colorado Springs.

Or, asked about the allegations that he'd taken a $5 million bribe, he answers, "Where's the money? I'm joking. It's a bunch of malarkey," which, like Brooks's own remarks is meaningless. But Brooks goes on to say, "He’s like — can be a very tough, mean guy and a very harsh boss sometimes."

So what are the fruits of this tough, harsh, mean, demanding boss? Just yesterday, we saw his staff in action yet again:

President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden will welcome the NCAA men’s and women’s national championship teams to “College Athlete Day” at the White House on Monday.

In an email from the White House Office of Legislative Affairs addressed to members of Congress, Covid protocols were listed, notifying lawmakers that they would need to show a negative Covid test before being allowed to attend the event. If unvaccinated, the attendees must wear a mask and social distance.

“Masking guidance: Fully vaccinated guests are not required to wear a mask on the White House grounds. Guests who are not fully vaccinated must wear a mask at all times and maintain at least six feet distance from others while on the White House grounds,” the email states.

How 2022! The crack White House staff, with Mean Joe at the reins, belatedly recognized its mistake:

But the federal government has already terminated the national emergency declaration for the COVID-19 pandemic.

. . . But later in the week, the White House told Fox News Digital that the guidance in the email had been sent inadvertently and was out of date, according to the outlet. A White House spokesperson said they might be sending out another email before Monday's event with the up-to-date guidance.

It might be a better idea to surmise, contra Brooks, that Biden has exactly the sort of staff he deserves, if not just what he wants as well. I don't think it's out of line to suggest that, even if Biden isn't a doddering old grandpa, something's seriously off. I continue to think a medical diagnosis isn't necessary to draw some tentative conclusion about wnat's up, and we may not need to go much farther than the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people’s lack of knowledge and skills in a certain area causes them to overestimate their own competence. Or maybe just the Peter Principle, which simply says that people rise to their level of incompetence.

But a better interpretation might come from Catholic moral philosophy: as St Thomas Aquinas puts it, sin dulls the intellect. Here we have an individual who represents himself as a Roman Catholic -- he attends weekly mass, and that paragon of virtue Hunter goes with him when he's in town. (I would add the caveat that like another sketchy public Catholic, Speaker Emeritus Pelosi, he was formed in the faith before the Second Vatican Council, so that can't be blamed.)

Yet Biden continues to endorse public policy directly opposed to Catholic teaching, including recent statements by the current pontiff on transsexualism. I don't think we need to go a whole lot farther than just to ask about that contradiction. Let's say you're with the whole LGBTQIA+ program. Shouoldn't you be wondering why Biden goes to mass every week? Why can't he drop that superatitious medievalism? Isn't he living a basic contradiction, and doesn't this in some way affect his mental health?

Even David Brooks ought to be able to acknowledge this, except that even in 2015, some guy named Albert Bourneko thought there was a basic problem there, too.

Where Do Things Stand?

I suppose I have to take Jonathan Turley seriously, but I've expressed my reservations before: he's a generational member of the Establishment, and he isn't going to rock any boats. As well, he's speaking to Fox News, which clearly likes what he's saying:

It is an extremely damning indictment. There are indictments that are sometimes called narrative or speaking indictments. These are indictments that are really meant to make a point as to the depth of the evidence. There are some indictments that are just bare bones. This is not. The special counsel knew that there would be a lot of people who were going to allege that the Department of Justice was acting in a biased or politically motivated way.

This is clearly an indictment that was drafted to answer those questions. It’s overwhelming in details. And, you know, the Trump team should not fool itself, these are hits below the waterline.

The problem with this view is that we're talking about Donald Trump. Most recently, Trump gave a town hall on CNN that went so unpredictably badly for CNN that it fired its CEO six weeks later, almost certainly as a direct result. Trump's already been impeached twice, but so far he's the clear front runner for the 2024 nomination. He's survived epsiodes like the Access Hollywood tape that people thought was a political kill shot at the time, but have faded into history as trivial footnotes. It's a major error to underestimate Trump.

There's another factor, which is that the Republicans have a number of credible replacements for Trump, while the Democrats don't have equivalents for Biden. November 2024 is still a long way away, and anything can happen to Trump, who is 76, irrespective of any indictments. The ideal situation people have put forward is that Trump makes DeSantis his 2024 running mate, he wins that election, and DeSantis then succeeds him for a solid eight years. Well, hey, I could win the lottery tomorrow, too.

The problem for the Democrats is that anything can happen to Biden, who is 80 and vunerable to falls, as is anyone of that age, but if he's unable to run for reelection, the Democrats have only bad choices to fall back in, primarily Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom. And this brings up the basic Democrat problem, that Biden is the last credible Democrat who represents anything like tne old New Deal coalition of the working class; Catholics, Jews, and other ethnics; minorities; Ivy League gentry; and Southern segregationists, which Biden originally was as a Delaware Democrat himself.

If Biden is out of the picture, the parlor leftists, greens, reparations hustlers, radical queers, and prison abolitionists will be at each others' throats, and nobody like Newsom or Harris will be able to unify them, especially against potential third-party candidates like Robert Kennedy Jr or Joe Manchin.

So the basic problem for 2024 is that the Democrats have to run the table with a Biden who must stay healthy and avoid serious scandal, while the Republicans can recover with DeSantis or another candidate if they lose Trump for any reason. Beyond that, I think it's way too early to make any call on Trump's prospects.

On the other hand, I note this story at RedState on Biden's performance yesterday in North Carolina:

Let’s start with how the Handler-In-Chief looked when she was supposed to be introducing Biden during a military event at Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg). He was nowhere to be found at first, and she jokingly commented to someone who wasn’t in the video that “we forgot those two.” Though she nervously laughs throughout there was an undercurrent of tension clearly visible at the start of the video and when she stepped up to the podium.

. . . Most alarmingly however was how Joe Biden looked after (presumably) posing for pictures with a group that was on stage. Watch as Biden looks as though he’s about to lunge at someone, moving his head to the left and right confusingly at one point as though the people around him are speaking a foreign language, before someone comes over and rescues him from disaster by whispering in his ear, apparently telling him which way to go.

I'm not sure if this is necesarily mental deterioration, but it's likely general aging, a slow recovery from his fall in Colorado Springs, and his own laziness and sense of emntitlement, which he's displayed all his life. He's President of the United States -- why should he have to pay attention to which way he needs to turn, where to stand, or with whom to shake hands? The biggest problem is that this likely drives all his political decisions, and indeed, decisions on where he should be spending his limited time.

He's complacent, while Trump is lucky. I don't expect the current situation to last.

More Dribbles Out On The FD-1023 Form

As I've outlined over the past several days, my working hypothesis of the Biden boodle is simply that Hunter, a hopeless alcoholic all his life who'd also become addicted to cocaine by the time Joe was vice president, was never competent to operate a business enterprise and could never be trusted around money. The record we have, whatever we can make of it, is that the dozens of shell companies he set up with various cronies and partners could never, as some have alleged, have supported nine to 12 Bidens, plus the cronies and partners, several of whom were addicts themselves, and all of whom lived extravagant lifestyles.

Hunter's appointment to the Burisma board in 2014 had no effect other than to give Hunter an annual income of about $1 million, which prompted the start of an epic five-year binge of crack cocaine, incestuous affairs, hookers, fast cars, condos for girlfriends, luxury hotels, and phony rehab. According to Reuters, Hunter never even visited Ukraine while he was on the Burisma board. Hunter was too busy with everything else to spend any time on Burisma, and any actual advice he might have given them would probably have been worse than none at all -- and we may be sure the people behind Burisma recognized this fully.

On the other hand, Joe as vice president was Obama's point man on Ukraine, and unlike Hunter, he visited Ukraine fully six times as vice president. So if we apply some basic algebraic logic to this problem, Hunter got payments from Burisma totaling maybe $3 million between 2014 and 2017. In 2017, Joe left the vice presidency, and Burisma cut Hunter's payments roughly in half, so he got an additional $1 million or so between 2017 and when he left the board in 2019. So that's maybe $4 million total for doing nothing.

What's begun to dribble out yesterday is that there seem to have been at least two payments to Joe from Ukraine that are alleged in the FD-1023 form that was disclosed to the Comer committee. The first is referenced by Rep Bobert:

Congresswoman @LaurenBoebert after reading FD-1023 form involving Biden Family corruption:

"There was a $5 million payment made to Joe Biden. Not Hunter Biden. Joe Biden— 'The Big Guy.'"

SUBSCRIBE to The Benny Show: https://t.co/nyq1HbI8gn pic.twitter.com/rSZcHDbnke

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 8, 2023

Rep Greene, also on the Comer committee, references a second $5 million payment, also covered on the FD-1023:

Biden sought to pressure Ukraine into firing top prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who had been conducting an anti-corruption investigation into Burisma, by threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees.

. . . Greene, who also goes by “MTG,” said she learned that Burisma hired Hunter Biden “to make the problems go away” and the owner said he was “stupid.” Ultimately, she said, the Burisma owner paid $5 million to one Biden and $5 million to another Biden in a bid to remove Shokin from office and end the investigation.

. . . “It was all a bribery to get Shokin fired and end the investigation into Burisma,” Greene said, adding that the Burisma executive told the informant that he has “two pieces of evidence showing proof of payment to Hunter and specifically Joe Biden.”

Naturally, we need to keep in mind that these are just allegations, but it sounds as though there may be a paper trail somewhere that could back them up. A couple things are notable here. We have what I think is a first allegation of a direct payment to Joe Biden himself, as well as a second $5 million to what sounds like another of the Biden shell companies.

The first thing that strikes me is that if a single $5 million payment went to Joe himself, we're just starting to get into a range where this exercise might be worth his time. The previous theory was the Biden deals carried a skim of "10% to the big guy", which in the context of a million here, three million there through shell companies to a dozen Bidens and their cronies, wouidn't be worth Joe's time, leaving aside that Hunter would steal most of that before it got to any of the others.

And if Joe went to Ukraine six times as VP, this leaves open the possibility that there were other deals besides just getting rid of that Shokin guy, so again, we're looking at the possibility of payoffs at a level that could actually start to interest a Vice President of the United States. We're at least starting to reach the level of passing a reasonability check. And that would actually put the amounts being paid to Hunter -- apparently the guy behind Burisma recognized Hunter was "stupid" -- in perspective. If there were multiple bribes to Joe of, say, $5 million, with more to other Bidens, then $3-4 million to Hunter would be just a lagniappe.

But this brings me back to my other point, that throughout his career as a putative Biden fixer, Hunter fixed nothing, while Joe, or someone other than Joe, picked up his debts starting at least in 2019. (Remember that by Hunter's own account in his tell-all, even the Burisma payments from 2014 to 2019 never covered his expenses.) After 2019, Hunter's expenses for alimony and child support alone amounted to more than half a million a year, to which we have to add what must be millions in legal fees to cover his child support, tax, and firearm cases -- and that leaves aside his expensive new wife and son.

I can only surmise that there is a Biden mother lode somewhere that's covering expenses at this level not just for Hunter, but it's apparently supporting up to a dozen other Bidens, as well as cronies, lawyers, retainers, and fixers. This must be a pretty big sum, but so far we know nothing about it. As Joe said with a smirk just yesterday, "Where's the money?"

That sounds like a dare.

Kevin Morris, Literary Giant

I continue to be intrigued by Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden's reputed sugar bro, because he's just one more feature of the whole Biden narrative that simply doesn't fit. He and his wife, Gabrielle Morgerman, a senior VP at the William Morris agency, are reputed to be powerful behind-the-scenes Hollywood figures, but for all that, they've both kept low profiles, except that in recent years, Kevin has been heavily promoting himiself as a novelist, of all things.

Sor far, he's published a collection of short stories, White Man's Problems (2014), and two novels, All Joe Knight (2016) and Gettysburg (2019). As best I can tell, he's been attempting to recasst himself as a major novelist of bourgeois angst, a John Updike for our current epoch, for some time. The review of All Joe Knight at Amazon says,

A prominent figure in the entertainment world who has turned to fiction in the last decade, Kevin Morris received wide literary acclaim with his story collection White Man's Problems, praised by David Carr as "remarkable" and Tom Perrotta as "revelatory". Now Morris cements his place as a bold new voice in American literature with his muscular debut novel, All Joe Knight.

Esquire ran an interview with him in 20l6 at the time of All Joe Knight's debut, and it at least gives us a fuller picture of how he wishes to be seen:

Kevin Morris, one of Hollywood's most successful entertainment lawyers, always wanted to be a writer. Finally, seven years ago, he found a writing space in Santa Monica and started work on his debut novel. In between bouts of trying and failing to get it published, he self-published a collection of short stories, White Man's Problems, for which South Park co-creator Matt Stone, Morris' friend and client, threw a book party. Grove/Atlantic publisher Morgan Entrekin attended that party and soon after offered Morris a two-book deal, to include a novel.

But nothing here fits. In 2009, Morris decided to become a wtiter or something, and he did what every aspiring writer does, he "found a writing space in Santa Monica", one of the most expensive places to rent a space you can imagine. And as a struggling young writer (born in 1963, he was 46 at the time), he tried and failed to get his first novel published. Well, the chances for anyone to get a first novel published are dismal. On the other hand, if your wife is a senior VP at the William Morris agency, that does change things somewhat.

In fact, let's check in on the couple's married life: in 2009, just as Kevin decided to become a struggling young first novelist, according to the Los Angeles Times,

It took singer Olivia Newton-John almost a year to find a buyer for her Malibu home, but she finally did -- and didn’t even have to get physical about it.

. . . The buyer is a trust representing Patrick Kevin Morris and his wife, Gaby Morgerman -- both entertainment industry heavyweights. Morris is an entertainment lawyer and Morgerman a senior vice president at William Morris agency. They own another Malibu house that is on the market.

. . . The Mediterranean-style house has four bedrooms and seven bathrooms in 6,482 square feet. The 1.28-acre compound includes a pool, spa and two-bedroom guesthouse.

The gated neighborhood is no stranger to celebrity owners. Newton-John bought the property in 2004 for $5,995,000 from the widow of actor Charles Bronson, and Britney Spears used to live next door.

So why did Kevin need to find a "writing space" in Santa Monica when he could perfectly well have used the two-bedroom guesthouse in the Malibu compound?

Something else doesn't fit. Novelists can't make money off their writing alone. Even if one of their books makes it to the best-seller list, that just gives a spike in income that lasts only a short time, and then they have to write another novel to pay the bills. As a result, in the modern age, they have to get gigs as cretive writing professors, which is how they make any sort of steady income.

But this is in turn based on a scam whereby undergraduates can be convinced they can make careers as novelists, which they can't -- the only way a novelist can survive is to teach creative writing, and that depends on duping yet another generation of undergraduates into thinking they can make careers as novelists, when their only actual hope is to get a writer-in-residence gig. As Kurt Vonnegut, himself a creative writing professor, wrote, so it goes.

The only way a writer can get rich off writing is to have a novel made into a Hollywood blockbuster, which is how Steinbeck and Hemingway got rich, more or less, although much of that money went to their ex-wives. But Kevin Morris, despite his wife being one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood, has yet to see any of his stuff made into a movie.

I won't dwell on the literary merit, or the lack of it, in his writing, but about all I can tell from the reviews I've read is that he writes about himself. The story lines all involve a kid who grows up poor in Philadelphia, gets rich, but discovers that isn't what it's cracked up to be, and more or less settles into cynical detachment. He says in the Esquire link,

There's always this assumption that somebody comes out the other side of the midlife crisis sort of repaired in one way or another. Either they have a brand new Camaro or they move to England or they go back to their same old job and are happy. Nobody spends too much thinking about: What if somebody just doesn't get happy?

So let me figure this out. Kevin Morris grows up poor in Philadelphia, gets into an Ivy League school, goes to law school and becomes a slick lawyer, marries a powerful agent, and decides to become a writer. But he's already rich. And apparnetly his books don't quite have what it takes to make it into Hollywood movies, even bad ones, despite his wife being a powerful agent. So he lives in this luxury Malibu compound and poses as a writer, sort of a dilettante John Updike for our age. Or at least, that was the story as of 2016 or so.

From what I've seen, Morris met Hunter Biden in 2019, when Hunter would have been at rock bottom and heavily in debt. He seems to have taken on Hunter as some sort of charity project. He appeared in a peculiar episode reported in the New York Post last year, but the filming of My Son Hunter in the Balkans took place in 2021:

It was a scene straight out of a film noir: A glamorous Hollywood writer flies in his private jet to a small Balkan enclave posing as a documentarian to gather information on a group of actors and filmmakers in the midst of shooting a biopic about Hunter Biden.

But the star of the surreal scenario that took place last fall in Serbia was Los Angeles-based lawyer Kevin Morris, a friend of Hunter’s who is now being accused of “spying” on the set of “My Son Hunter.”

. . . “On set, a man named Kevin Morris arrived and told us he was working on a documentary exposing Hunter’s corruption,” a tweet from the official “My Son Hunter” site declared on Tuesday. “He told us he was a retired lawyer associated with South Park. We allowed him and his crew to interview us, cast members, and film on our set.”

. . . Morris is a highly successful lawyer and a self-made businessman, who rose from humble origins in Pennsylvania to launch his own firm, raking in hundreds of millions for his first clients, the creators of “South Park.” Now he’s thrown in his lot with the disgraced, drug-addled son of a president, filming his own documentary about Biden.

“The whole thing is so bizarre,” one Hollywood insider told The Post. “What is a guy like that doing with Hunter Biden?”

The story goes on to detail the help Morris has given Hunter with his Hollywood connections:

The Hollywood attorney even found a high-powered literary agent for Biden, 52, when he was writing “Beautiful Things,” a 2021 memoir that chronicles his drug and alcohol addictions. Biden was so grateful for Morris’ counsel that he included him as part of “the outstanding team behind this book” on the acknowledgments page of his memoir.

In fact, both Morris and Biden are represented by the same agents — Aevitas Creative Management — which looks after Morris’ own works, the novels “All Joe Knight” and “Gettysburg,” and the short story collection “White Man’s Problems.”

But this is another piece that doesn't fit. The total income from all three of Kevin Morris's books is probably in the low two digits per month now. It probably isn't even worth it for that agency to continue Morris as a client. If he were a real writer, he'd certainly have to have a teaching gig.

It almost sounds as if Morris, who represented himself on the set of My Son Hunter as a retired attorney, has now also retired as a writer and is spending his time and considerable resources trying to rehabilitate Hunter Biden -- a fool's errand, it would seem, and for what reason, we don't know.

But beyond that, I'm more and more convinced that Hunter himself is a distraction. Rather than the kingpin of the Biden family frammis, he's been an enormous drain on Joe's fortunes, to the point that it's worth asking where the family money is in fact coming from if it never came from Hunter. And this may also be reflected in the strange, near-obsessive appeal Hunter has for Kevin Morris.

There's a great deal more to learn here.

Only Lunden Roberts's Attorneys Are Asking The Right Questions

The conventional view of the Biden family finances we've had from the quasi-investigative right-wing press, along with limited information from the Comer committee, has been that Hunter is the business mind and the bagman who collects payments from assorted foreign businessmen, gangsters, and wannabes and funnels them into a general Biden family fund that supports somewhere between nine and 12 parasitic family members with assorted other cronies and retainers. It's alleged that part of the scheme is "10% to the big guy", based on a cryptic reference in an e-mail on the Hunter laptop. In part, this is also a view that Hunter himself promotes among some in the family, including his uncle James and daugther Naomi, also based on e-mails in the laptop.

But let's take a 30,000-foot look at Hunter's actual career. Every indication is that he never had much business or financial acumen, and in fact he himself led a parasitic lifestyle based on his position as son of a US senator until Joe became vice president. His most visible job before that was on the Amtrak board of directors, for which it was acknowledged at the time that he had no qualifications. He was nominated by Dubya in 2006 as part of some kind of deal, and he resigned in 2009 after Joe was elected vice president. This site estimates his salary as an Amtrak director at $123,704 per year.

The best authority we have on Hunter's finances during this period and earlier in his career is his ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, who was interviewed extensively during the release of her tell-all, If We Break. By the time of their divorce in 2016, she wrote,

Both our houses had a double mortgage and no equity. We had credit card debt and medical bills. We were in terrible financial shape. The sheer amount of our debt overwhelmed me. We owed as much for both houses as when we’d bought them. We were underwater.

So throughout this period, Hunter's earlier jobs at investment banks and lobbying firms, followed by his stint on the Amtrak board, and then the various deals and partnerships he formed after leaving Amtrak like Rosemont Seneca and BHR Partners, never paid his own bills. At the same time, the few more or less reputable people he worked with like Christopher Heinz wound up breaking with him -- Heinz did so after Hunter joined the Burisma board in 2014. As far as we can tell, the Burisma board was Hunter's peak. It paid him $83,333 a month until Joe left the vice presidency in 2017, when it was cut to $41,500 per month. But by my own estimate on Monday, even the million dollars a year he was said to be earning at his peak there couldn't have covered his extravagant expenses.

Hunter left the Burisma board in 2019, which was around the time the Bidens staged a family intervention over Hunter's lifestyle, which in turn was in anticipation of Joe announcing his run for president. There are numerous references on Hunter's laptop in January of that year to Joe assuming hundreds of thousands of dollars of Hunter's debts and meeting other shortfalls, again presumably to clean things up in anticipation of a presidentiual campaign.

So as of 2019, Hunter had left Burisma, but as was his pattern throughout his life, he was heavily in debt. His various other businesses and partnerships had collapsed or gone inactive by then as well. By that March, his employees were dunning him for unpaid wages. The terms of his divorce from Kathleen apparently included $37,000 a month in alimony, while his 2020 paternity settlement with Lunden Roberts was another $20,000 a month.

But in May 2019, he married Melissa Cohen, a "documentary filmmaker" with no income of her own but an apparent jet-set lifestyle; they had a child in 2020.

So every indication is that after 2019, although Joe had assumed his prior debts and shortfalls, Hunter had no regular income, yet nowithstanding any other obligations, he had $57,000 a month in alimony and child support, which comes to $684,000 per year. He is said to have sold some paintings via a gallery in several tranches. According to the New York Post,

Hunter, 52, has asked as much as $500,000 for his beginner works. He earned at least $375,000 in 2021 for five prints at a Hollywood art show attended by his father’s embattled nominee to be ambassador to India, then-Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, and it’s unclear how many additional sales he may have made.

But as with all things Hunter, whatever he may have made selling paintings won't ever cover his actual expenses. This brings us to an obvious question: who is sustaining his lifestyle? But the only people who are seriously asking it are Lunden Roberts's attorneys:

Judge Holly Lodge Meyer, who is handling Hunter Biden’s child support case in Arkansas, issued an order Monday saying President Joe Biden’s son must appear on July 10 at the Independence County Courthouse in Batesville to explain “why he should not be held in contempt” after lawyers for Lunden Alexis Roberts, the mother of Hunter Biden’s child, argued that Hunter Biden was ignoring the judge’s May order to hand over information on his finances.

. . . Hunter Biden has been ordered to answer inquiries about the current state of his finances, including all of his investments, his art sales, and other relevant financial transactions.

Hunter Biden’s 10% ownership stake in a Chinese government-linked investment firm has apparently been transferred to his Hollywood lawyer “sugar brother,” who paid off millions of dollars of Hunter Biden's back taxes, company records indicate.

But if we add over half a million a year in alimony and child support payments to what are now legal bills that must be in the range of a million dollars a month, plus the expenses of his new marriage and child, plus whatever else he's spending on whatever, just selling some paintings won't cover it.

Hunter is continuing to incur millions of dollars in expenses with no comparable income to cover them -- which of course has been his pattern all along. But these are non-trivial amounts, millions upon millions over a period of seveal years -- and this assumes Hunter is currently clean and sober. Where is this money coming from? Kevin Morris? I don't think so. I'll get into Kevin in more depth tomorrow.

But the one thing we can rely on is that Hunter, an addict who can never be trusted with money under any circumstances, can't possibly ever have been the guy who's been funding the Biden family lifestyle. This amounts to enormous sums that must be coming from someplace else.

My Kabuki Alarm Hasn't Stopped Beeping

On Saturday I said my kabuki alarm has been going off since the start of the elaborate cat-and-mouse between the Comer committee and FBI Director Wray over an FD-1023 form that may contain allegations of bribery against Joe Biden when he was vice president. This was all going to be settled when Wray brought the FD-1023 in question over to the Capitol yesterday to show it to Chairman Comer and Ranking Member Raskin in person -- except, of course, it wasn't. According to NBC:

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., announced Monday that his panel will start proceedings to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress, a move the agency called "unwarranted."

The FBI briefed Comer and Oversight Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin, D-Md., on Capitol Hill for more than an hour Monday and offered them the chance to review a document that purportedly describes an allegation that Joe Biden accepted a bribe as vice president.

Speaking to reporters outside the

secure briefing site afterward, Comer said the "FBI again refused to hand over the unclassified record to the custody" of the committee. "And we will now initiate contempt of Congress hearings this Thursday.

. . . In a statement, the FBI said it had been cooperative with Comer's request.

“The FBI has continually demonstrated its commitment to accommodate the committee’s request, including by producing the document in a reading room at the U.S. Capitol. This commonsense safeguard is often employed in response to congressional requests and in court proceedings to protect important concerns, such as the physical safety of sources and the integrity of investigations," the statement said.

"The escalation to a contempt vote under these circumstances is unwarranted,” it added.

Robert Spencer comments on PJ Media:

It’s a positive development, and long overdue: Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, announced on Monday that he would start proceedings to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress. Still, even though this is welcome news, Wray is unlikely to suffer any significant consequences, even if the full House votes that he is indeed in contempt of Congress.

How on earth is any of this a "positive development"? As far as I can see, this is a kabuki exercise that's been choreographed from the start and is likely to go on indefinitely. Based on what we've learned in the last several days, both Sen Grassley and Chairman Comer have already seen the FD-1023 in question. Director Wray was forced, once he was made aware of this last week, to acknowledge that the document exists, and that the allegations in it are at least credible.

But it also goes without question that whatever the merits of the allegations in the FD-1023, the Wray FBI is going to slow-walk any investigation. Whether any House action over finding Wray in contempt of Congress would actually open a substitute investigation into those allegations is a remote question and unlikely. But let's postulate that it will, and there'll be some type of House hearing on whether Joe actually took a bribe from some foreign actor to influence US policy as VP.

The sketchy information we have is that Joe took $5 million to do something unspecified about an unspecified US policy. The one thing that rings true here is how cheaply he was being bought, if in fact he was being bought. The Vice President of the United States took a bribe for five million? This is in league with the guy who tells a yokel that the Brooklyn Bridge is for sale, and he can have it for $50,000.

Right now, we don't know just when this is alleged to have taken place, so we can't locate it in the timeline of Hunter's over-the-top expenses, but as I've been saying here all along, the current level and timeline of payments alleged to have gone into a Biden family boodle just don't add up. We're talking about somewhare between nine and 12 completely unproductive people, of whom four or five are addicts with expensive habits on top of their other worldly tastes.

The level of payments into this boodle are generally described so far as a million here, three million there, every few years, passed on through shell companies, yada yada. Let's add this new $5 million alleged to the big guy himself. The problem with what we've been seeing is that Hunter alone, who is alleged to be the kingpin and the driving force behind the boodle, had expenses himself that, as I estimated yesterday, were at minimum in the $1 million a year range and for many years, especially after 2015, were probably much larger.

Hunter would have had to be skimming almost all the money that was coming into the putative family boodle for himself -- yet there were still eight or more other Bidens with their palms out. And beyond that, for much of the period after 2015, references on the laptop strongly suggest Joe himself was making up Hunter's shortfall. Even if Joe took a $5 million bribe from Chinese intellegence in a briefcase full of unmarked bills, all Joe could have done with an amount like that would be give it to Hunter to go up his nose. Even at that level, Dr Jill, brother James, sister Valerie, daughter Ashley, niece Caroline, Hallie, her kids, and the rest would have gone hungry and without a fix, and this still leaves out Kathleen Buhle and her alimony check.

So far, none of the allegations here meet any sort of reasonability check. This is not to say that the family isn't a thoroughly corrupt bunch whose lifestyles are far beyond their apparent means and who may well be on the take, but the amounts that would support the lifestyles of those dozen useless types are far, far greater than what's reflected in the rinky-dink frammis of sporadic baksheesh through shell companies we've heard about so far.

Short of much more convincing revelations about payoffs much bigger than what we've seen, I don't think it's productive to wish a Biden family boodle will have any effect on the 2024 election. Although I agree with Nikki Haley on almost nothing else, I think she's right to say it's a much better bet to campaign against President Kamala.