The photo above is of Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian oligarch and Burisma owner who is now alleged to have passed a $5 million bribe to Joe Biden and kept tapes of the discussion. Before I finished yestereday's post, I went to Wikipeida to see what I might be able to glean. In my post yesterday, I credited Wikipedia and summarized the key points of the entry.

So this morning at Breitbart News, fully a day later, I found the headline on Breitbart Meet the Ukrainian Oligarch Who Allegedly Paid Joe Biden $5 Million by some guy named Wendell Husebø. Without crediting Wikipedia at all, he gives the same dates and details you can find there, as well as an April 2017 article at the Guardian, which he presumably found the same way I did, via a five-minute web search.

That's fine, of course, except that Mr Husebø is a Professional Journalist, while I'm an old guy on a 401(k) with a desktop, and I beat him to precisely the same story by 24 hours. This is what Conservative Inc is giving us. Beyond that, the guy is presumably making good money as a full-time Professional Journalist, but he doesn't have any better resources than I do, viz, a search engine and a desktop.

But this does lead me to one conclusion he doesn't seem to have drawn, that either potential sources in the FBI, the Comer committee, or Sen Grassley's staff have no confidence in Mr Husebø as a Professional Journalist, or those same people in the know are disciplined enough not to leak to anyone, least of all Mr Husebø. Take your choice. Either way, it says little for Conservative Inc media, but it does bolster somewhat my confidence in the people on the staffs of the Comer committee and Sen Grassley.

But let's tease things out a little farther. Chairman Comer said this about the interaction between Zlochevsky and the Bidens to Larry Kudlow on Fox News Monday:

Yeah, what the motive was, Larry, was they [Zlochevsky/Burisma] were wanting to enter into the US energy market through an IPO. They felt like they couldn’t conduct an initial public offering if they were under investigation for corruption in Ukraine. That’s what it all pertained to. That’s where the supposed bribe happened. That’s why it happened, because they wanted to get rid of the prosecutor and try to clear up their name and have a Biden on the board. . . . They also wanted to buy an existing energy company, and I believe it was in Texas, but I don’t know the name of the company. So that was their whole business model to get their foot in the door, buy a company and do an IPO.

But isn't that pretty small ball? This doesn't fit a reasonability check. You want to buy some Texas energy company and do an IPO, so what you have to do is bribe the Vice President of the United States? In addition, I've seen references to the idea that the IPO was an idea Hunter himself was pushing as a Burisma board member, and as part of that pitch, he was selling his services as an intermediary -- except that, like nearly every other castle in the air Hunter tried to sell, it never went through.

The one pattern we keep seeing throughout the Biden family frammis is that it's a con. Whether it's Hunter, Joe's brother James, his sister Valerie, or any other member of the family, they promote schemes that just happen to need Joe's coopration to work, so all you have to do is cross some Biden's palm with cash, Joe will look upon this scheme with favor, and you'll be rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Except that for some reason or other, the castles in the air the Bidens keep pitching never quite work out, and after all, you were trying to bribe Joe, weren't you? This is not an enforceable contract, sorry.

That's the long and the short of the Biden frammis. But let's delve a little deeper. Zlochevsky was last seen at all in Odesa in 2018. So he's been on the lam for five years, maybe living in Monaco, maybe in Cyprus, nobody's quite sure, but apparently some guy the FBI trusts knows how to get in touch with him, and it's being bruited about that he's either credibly got the Biden tapes, or he's already turned them over.

That suggests he's still alive, which for an oligarch with Russian connections on the lam for five years is something of an accomplishment. There've been an awful lot of Russian oligarchs on the lam in places like Spain or Monaco who haven't made it that far in the last couple of years, sudden illnesses, inexplicable falls from windows, suicides, all very tragic. What's Zlochevsky's secret?

Well, maybe it's this, which I've already pointed out:

Burisma Holdings founder Mykola Zlochevsky. . . is believed to be an asset of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) by the United States intelligence community, according to a national security source speaking to RedState on condition of anonymity.

This guy, a Russian agent, has tapes of himself paying bribes to Joe Biden and his son Hunter? Might that be a pretty good reason for Putin to want to keep him alive? Consider that playing those tapes would at minimum affect the reelection of Joe, who has been the primary funder of the Ukrainian side in the Russo-Ukrainian war, with an influential faction of Republicans much less enthusiastic about continuing that commitment should Biden be defeated in 2024.

Zlochevsky, as far as I can see, let Joe and Hunter walk right into a trap he'd laid for them. They thought they were playing a game of pretending to sell Joe's influence but never following through, what the Bidens had been doing for years. The problem was that they did collect the money, whether they ever meant to do what they were paid to do or not, and it's on tape.

Isn't that worth a whole lot more to someone like Zlochevsky, especially if he's a Russian agent, than a measly $10 million or an IPO? That's the one thing that's never fit for me in this story -- if Biden sold out for $10 million, he was still selling out for cheap. It's a price like $50,000 for the Brooklyn Bridge. The Bidens were selling the bridge but were never going to follow through. The problem was that Zlochevsky was one step ahead of them.

The project for Chairman Comer and Sen Grassly is still to nail down the money and paper trail of those payments. I feel pretty confident they'll do it, if they haven't done it already. Again, I have the feeling that the people behind the scenes here are highly disciplined, and every question they've asked has been one to which they've already had the answer.

The Plot Thickens

By late last week, I was beginning to get the impression that Sen Grassley and Chairman Comer were acting like homicide detectives. In particular, they were asking FBI Director Wray questions to which they already knew the answers, to wit, what was on the FD-1023 form that Wray was so coy about revealing to the Republicans. By Thursday, clearly coordinating with Chairman Comer, Sen Grassley announced that he'd already seen the FD-1023 in question, and it contained a highly credible allegation that Joe Biden had taken a $5 million bribe while he was vice president.

This was likely a major factor that overcame Wray's unwillingness to cooperate, and it illustrates the effectiveness of pretending you don't have information when you're interrogating a suspect. It gives suspects the latitude to lie, and then you can catch them when they do, which throws them off balance. In addition, and probably more important, it leaves the suspect unsure about what else the detective knows that he isn't revealing.

Thus, since late last week, there's been a series of new revelations about what's in the FD-1023. The first, made public at the time Wray agreed to let the full Comer committee review the original FD-1023, was that there were two additional FD-1023s referenced in the original, which would also be provided to the committee. But Sen Grassley made it plain yesterday on the Senate floor that what Wray had given the Comer committee was redacted, that the redactions concealed important information, and this was unacceptable:

Congress still lacks a full and complete picture with respect to what that document really says. That’s why it’s important that the document be made public without unnecessary redactions for the American people to see.

Let me assist for purposes of transparency. The 1023 produced to that House Committee redacted reference that the foreign national who allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly has audio recordings of his conversations with them. Seventeen total recordings.

According to the 1023, the foreign national possesses fifteen audio recordings of phone calls between him and Hunter Biden. According to the 1023, the foreign national possesses two audio recordings of phone calls between him and then-Vice President Joe Biden. These recordings were allegedly kept as a sort of insurance policy for the foreign national in case he got into a tight spot. The 1023 also indicates that then-Vice President Joe Biden may have been involved in Burisma employing Hunter Biden.

He concluded, lest there be any doubt,

I want everyone to remember, that I have read the unredacted version.

It was then reported later in the day that the "foreign national" was Burisma Holdings founder Mykola Zlochevsky. So I checked Wikipedia:

Mykola Vladislavovich Zlochevsky (Ukrainian: Микола Владиславович Злочевський; born 14 June 1966) is a Ukrainian oil and natural gas businessman, politician, and an oligarch. Zlochevsky was Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources from July 2010 until April 2012 and was the deputy secretary for Economic and Social Security of the National Security and Defense Council from April 2012 until February 2014 when Euromaidan occurred.He is wanted by Ukrainian authorities for attempting to bribe the prosecutors in order to drop all charges against him.

. . . In 2012, Viktor Pshonka, the Ukrainian prosecutor general, began investigating Burisma Holdings owner, Zlochevsky, over allegations of money laundering, tax evasion, and corruption during 2010–2012.

In April 2014 Zlochevsky named Hunter Biden, son of then U. S. Vice President Joe Biden, to Burisma’s board as a director of Burisma, where he was said to have earned over $80,000 monthly.[21] Joe Biden had been made the point man on Ukraine after February 2014, when the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, was ousted and fled. Then U. S. President Barack Obama's administration was prepared to work with the new government, a position shared with European governments and institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But they were all concerned about Ukraine's corruption, which had plagued the country ever since it gained independence in the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union. Joe Biden became a frequent visitor to Ukraine. By his own count, Biden said he went there about a dozen times from early 2014 through early 2016.

. . . On 15 June 2018, after the Solomyansky District Court in Kyiv had annulled the ruling of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAP) to close a criminal proceeding against him in 2017, Zlochevsky was accused of having illegally issued, while he was Ecology Minister in 2010–2012, oil and gas licenses to the companies that belonged to him.[34]

According to Ukrainian authorities Zlochevsky is suspected of "theft of government funds on an especially large scale". Authorities said the criminal investigation on suspicion of embezzlement is currently on hold because Zlochevsky's whereabouts cannot presently be determined. As of 2019, Zlochevsky is reported to live in Monaco. According to an investigation by Al Jazeera he bought Cypriot citizenship somewhere between 2017 and 2019.

According to RedState, Zlochevsky

is believed to be an asset of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) by the United States intelligence community, according to a national security source speaking to RedState on condition of anonymity.

But nobody quite knows where Zlochevsky is, cough, cough, except he's talking to a credible third party that the FBI respects. And he says he's got recordings that he uses as an insurance policy.

Meanehile, Alan Dershowitz is calling the upcoming trial of Donald Trump

The most important trial in modern history, maybe the most important trial since -- since -- Aaron Burr or the assassins of Abraham Lincoln in terms of constitutionsl lsw. . .

It's hard for me to see how Dershowitx doesn't see the potential problem in a Russian agent actually bribing a president of the US. The phony pee dossier and the Hunter's-laptop-is-Russian disinformation hoax quickly fade in comparison, but Dershowitz is a smart guy.

What we're seeing from Sen Grassley and Chairman Comer appears to be very carefully calculated releases of precisely limited information about what Zlochevsky knows and what he has, and the way it's coming out also suggests the Republicans have more in reserve. At minimum, they've got to be off balance wondering who's talking go Zlochevsky and what else he's said. Something tells me the Republicans have more than an FD-1023, and it will come out exactly when it suits Sen Grassley and Chairman Comer.

Well, the Whitre House canceled Joe's schedule yesterday and today, ostensibly for a root canal, while even the New York Poat frets that he eats too much ice cream. We live in unserious times.

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.