Ukraine Counteroffensive A "Suicide Mission"

As I look at this morning's news, I'm beginnoing to think Austrian Col Markus Reisner buried the main insight in the presentation I linked yesterday. I quoted him there:

The West will only support Ukraine as long as the West believes it is important to support the war against Russia, and the West believes the Ukrainian forces are winning.

For now, the second part of his statement is key, and it sounds as if President Zelensky is acutely aware of the problem, especially since Ukraine's winter counteroffensive didn't happen at all, and the spring counteroffensive, which Zelensky announced only on June 8, has apparently now been paused after only a week.

But even as of June 8, the day Zelensky announced the start of the counteroffensive, Forbes reported problems:

A Russian artillery strike on a Ukrainian vehicle column during a daytime assault on or around the town of Novopokrovka—35 miles southeast of Zaporizhzhia city in southern Ukraine—apparently knocked out at least one Leopard 2 tank on Wednesday.

A Russian drone orbited overheard as the shells rained down, its crew presumably helping to direct the strike and assess the resulting damage. The Russians posted the drone’s video on social media, finally achieving what Russian propagandists earlier had tried and failed to do: posit the destruction of a Ukrainian Leopard 2.

The Leopard 2 and other armored vehicles were traveling in an uncomfortably tight column along an unpaved road outside Novopokrovka or nearby Mala Tokmachka—both occupied by Russian troops—when the artillery struck.

By June 10, Asia Times reported deeper issues:

American and European military observers in Ukraine described the Ukraine Army’s efforts of the past two days as a “suicide mission” that violated the basic rules of military tactics. “If you want to conduct an offensive and you have a dozen brigades and a few dozen tanks, you concentrate them and try to break through. The Ukrainians have been running around in five different directions,” complained a senior European officer.

“We tried to tell them to stop these piecemeal tactics, define a main thrust with proper infantry support and then do what they can,” the officer added.

“They were trained by the British and they’re playing Light Brigade,” the officer added, referring to the 1854 disaster at the Battle of Balaclava when misreported orders sent British cavalry into massed cannon fire.

Ukraine’s tanks charged directly into minefields without deploying mine-clearing vehicles first, contributing to the loss of 38 tanks during the night of June 8, including numerous of the newly delivered Leopard II tanks.

Modern Diplomscy added three days later,

Of the 14 Leopard tanks Germany has provided to Ukraine, 3 have been destroyed, along with several of the Leopards provided by Poland.

The Institute for the Study of War, as far as I can determine, deletes each of its daily Ukraine assessments after a few days, so I've been unable to go back to the period June 8-June 12 to see if its reports reflected any of the issues in the links above. However, its June 20 assessment now says,

Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported on June 19 that Russian forces have committed significant forces to stop Ukrainian offensives, making Ukrainian advances difficult. Malyar added that ongoing Ukrainian operations have several tasks that are not solely focused on liberating territory and that Ukrainian forces have yet to start the main phase of counteroffensive operations.

Except that in the effort announced by Zelensky June 8 as the start of the counteroffensive, they quickly lost dozens of tanks, including several of the advanced types just sent by the West, in what military observers called a "suicide mission". How's the "main phase" going to go when, or if, it starts?

Both Col Reisner and the ISW refer to an "information space" that, looking more closely at their context, is much better characterized as a "propaganda war". Last year, Ukraine was winning this hands down, with videos showing scenes like farmers towing away abandoned Russian tanks with their tractors. One thing I've noticed in more recent months is there's been nothing new for the Ukrainian side. The war porn on YouTube and Twitter shows just the same old vignettes of Ukrainian drones dropping grenades on Russian trenches, with occasional analyses showing Ukrainian missile attacks on bases in Crimea accomplishing nothing.

Beyond that, Oryx, the open-source intelligence blog that had become the go-to place that documented equipment losses on both sides of the Russo-Ukraine war, announced over the past several days that it was ceasing operations:

I would hereby like to inform you that I will be ending Oryx on October 1st. I originally started Oryx Blog 10 years ago to cure my boredom. Little did I know Oryx would escalate into the all-consuming project it is today. All of us work on the articles and lists in our free time. It's not our job. We don't get paid. Though I hoped our work would one day lead to a job, no such thing occurred. Oryx just doesn't make me happy anymore, and continuing with it prevents me from finding a happier place in life.

According to Wikipedia,

The blog gained international prominence through its work during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, counting and keeping track of material losses based on visual evidence and open-source intelligence from social media. It has been regularly cited in major media, including Reuters, BBC News, The Guardian,The Economist, Newsweek, CNN, and CBS News. Forbes has called Oryx "the most reliable source in the conflict so far", calling its services "outstanding". Because it reports only visually confirmed losses, Forbes claimed that Oryx's tallies of equipment losses have formed absolute minimum baselines for loss estimates.

There is no question that since the start of the war, Oryx was seen as objective support for Ukraine's side. Oddly, it doesn't look as though anyone saw fit to give it financial support, although the ISW gets heavy funding from the US defense industry -- but try as the ISW might, it's never carried Oryx's credibility.

All this adds to a sense that since last fall and the lack of any new counteroffensive, Ukraine was losing, and had begun to recognize it was losing, the "information space", or better expressed, the propaganda war. Just as spring was about to end without any promised spring counteroffensive, Zelensky announced this had begun -- but it sounds as though within a week, and probably even within days, this had effectively been called off, with lame explanations that it hadn't really started anyhow.

Col Reisner is correct, though, the West will only support Ukraine as long as it thinks Ukraine is winning. My own position on the war in the middle of last year was also based on the assumption that Ukraine would keep winning -- but it's important to recognize that the wartime leaders to whom I compared Zelensky at the time, Lincoln, Churchill, and Roosevelt, were acutely aware of the need for victories to sustain public support for wartime sacrifice. Thus they needed, and knew they needed, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, El-Alamein, Midway, and Guadalcanal, and they pushed hard to get them.

For whatever reason, Zelensky seems to have lost sight of that important part of his job, and it looks right now as if, belatedly recognizing it, he's now desperate. This doesn't augur well, and it lends support to the Trump-Tucker Carlson view of rhe war.

Ukraine's Spring Counteroffensive Falters

As of June 11,

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky appears to have confirmed that his country's long-awaited counter-offensive against Russia has started.

"Counter-offensive and defensive actions are taking place," he said.

But he added that he would not talk in detail about which stage or state the counter-offensive was in.

The comments come after an escalation of fighting in the south and east of Ukraine and speculation about progress of the widely anticipated push.

But as oif June 18, only a week after that announcement, The Institute for the Study of War reported,

Ukrainian forces may be temporarily pausing counteroffensive operations to reevaluate their tactics for future operations. Head of the Estonian Defense Forces Intelligence Center Colonel Margo Grosberg stated on June 16 that he assesses "we won't see an offensive over the next seven days.” The Wall Street Journal similarly reported on June 17 that Ukrainian forces “have mostly paused their advances in recent days” as Ukrainian command reexamines tactics.

A month ago, I noted that an expected Ukrainian spring counteroffensive was being steadily delayed despite predictions that it would take place first in April, then in May. Now, with just days left in spring, it sounds like the spring counteroffensive won't take place at all, at least this spring.

The ISW hedged its report farther down:

ISW has previously noted that Ukraine has not yet committed the majority of its available forces to counteroffensive operations and has not yet launched its main effort. Operational pauses are a common feature of major offensive undertakings, and this pause does not signify the end of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

But the neoconservatives behind ISW are precisely the same people who brought us the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, amid a dozen years and more of happy talk about progress. The ISW as of yesterday resumed the narrative as though its report of June 18 never happened:

Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations in at least three sectors of the frontline and made gains on June 19. A Russian milblogger reported that Ukrainian troops continued attacks northwest, northeast, and southwest of Bakhmut on June 19 and claimed that Ukrainian forces advanced near Krasnopolivka (about 12km northeast of Bakhmut).

The problem I see is that these reports haven't changed qualitatively since last November, when Russian forces left the city of Kherson. That was the last tangible progress for Ukraine in the war. The latest English-language video from Col Markus Reisner of the Austrian military academy sums up the current situation at the top of this post. As of last year, I'd begun to lose patience with Col Reisner, as I thought he was too pro-Russian in the face of last year's Ukrainian military successes. Apparently I wasn't alone, as he begins his presentation:

Before we start, I would like to say thank you for all the feedback we are getting for our videos. I would like to state very clearly that it is obvious who is the aggressor and who is the defender. But I would like to stay as neutral and objective as it is possible. Therefore we need a clear picture of the situation along the front lines. It doesn't help to underestimate the Russians and to overestimate the Ukrainians, especially it is not helpful to the Ukrainian armed forces.

My takeaway from his overall assessment is that the Ukrainians are likely to try to recapture Crimea as their main priority for the year, but this strategy will demand both a second destruction of the Kerch bridge and a severing of the Russian land connection north of the Azov Sea. This is a tall order.

But he also switches to what he calls the "information space" of the war, which I would actually, and I think more accurately reflecting his meaning, call the propaganda war. He says,

The West will only support Ukraine as long as the West believes it is important to support the war against Russia, and the West believes the Ukrainian forces are winning. On the other side, we have the center of gravity of Russia, and this is the Russian people, who are close to the regime and who are willing to assist with all the needs the regime considers necessary to fight a long war against Ukraine. And here it is the aim to make the Russians believe that they are fighting a wrong war and that they are losing.

He concludes with an assessment that

the American strategy obviously is called "boiling the frog", that means the Ukrainians will get what they need, but not more. And the question is why is that the case? Well, it looks like the Americans want to avoid to corner the Russians and escalate the conflict.

I'm not sure if Col Reisner fully understands the English-language analogy of boiling the frog:

The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death.

I suppose Col Reisner means that the American strategy is to lull the Russians into fighting a long war, but gradual but imperceptible Western escalation will somehow kill the Russians slowly without their noticing. The problem I see is that time isn't on the Western, or Ukrainian, side. If the neoconservatives have their way, well, yes, by 2025 or whenever, we'll have supplied the Ukrainians with F-16s and Abrams tanks, but the Russians won't notice, and we'll have chased them out of Ukraine by 2028 at the latest.

The problem is going to be that there's an election campaign under way, and Trump, the current front runner in both the primary and potential general matchups, is advocating a settlement. Even if Trump's prospects decrease, other Republicans, and potentially even Democrat challengers, will advocate settling the war as opposed to years of further struggle. This is an aspect of the "information space" that Col Reisner gives too little attention. He does assess, though, that the West will only support the war as long as it believes Ukraine is winning.

Ukraine basically has until fall of this year to make that case, or a Republican will force a settlement on both parties. This has been a flaw in the Western strategy that's bothered me since the middle of last year: there's no clear end state, especially in the Biden-Blinken strategy on the war. Boiling the frog is not a strategy, it's an attempt to pretend something isn't happening.

Biden Being Biden

Axios ran as piece over the weekend that supports my view of Biden's Friday "God save the queen" remark that I ran on Saturday:

Biden’s quirky aphorisms are sometimes weaponized by Republicans to insinuate the 80-year-old president is in mental decline. But Biden has been using unique phrases for years — but even some of his aides aren't exactly sure what he means by them.

. . . Biden also said, “God save the queen,” when he was vice president in January 2017, after he certified Donald Trump's 2016 election victory, The Telegraph reported at the time.

The story noted that they'd asked several Biden aides what he meant by the phrase, but none could give a clear answer. But it went on,

During this year's State of the Union, he told Republican lawmakers, “Lots of luck in your senior year.”

Some Biden allies believe that's his way of saying, "Good luck with that." But at the time, the White House declined to tell The New York Times what he meant — and some administration officials still chuckle about how they don’t quite know, either.

The first thing I would point to is, again, the problem of the Dunning-Kruger Effect as it relates to humor: people who suffer from it think they're being funny, when nobody gets the joke. And those who study Biden's speech are finding that he actually repeats his strange phrases, as he now has done with "God save the queen". Whatever he means by it, he seems to use it in a particular private context that he thinks is funny.

My surmise is that it's a shorthand for "balderdash" or something like that -- in 2017, he certified Trump's electoral victory and essentially commented "balderdash". In 2023, he uttered a string of conventionally patriotic sentiments at the University of Hartford before explaining he wouldn't shake hands with the audience and then essentially commented it was all balderdash anyhow.

The subtext here, I think, is he's the most powerful man in the world, he can utter cryptic phrases that can easily enough be parsed out to mean he doesn't think much of his audience, and they've just got to deal with it. Two years ago, I noted Biden's disdain for anyone who objected to his abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan, which I said at tht ime

fits what I'm coming to see from this sort of offhand remark is Biden's view of himself as a skilled Machiavellian manipulator, operating in a behind-the-scenes dimension of Realpolitik beyond conventional expectations.

This brings me back to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Frankly, I don't think I ever had a boss (maybe with one or two exceptions) who didn't suffer from the Dunning-Kruger Effect. None, for instance, was ever promoted from the ranks of people who did the actual work their subordinates did, but since they were the boss, they assumed they could do it. (I sometimes got in trouble for asking such a boss, complaining about something i'd done, to show me how to do it right. That sort of question was beyond the pale and showed I was a troublemaker.)

But this goes to the simmering resentment that underlies Dunning-Kruger. One of my worst bosses was a lady who spent her days driving around San Francisco-area freeways, ostensibly supervising various activities at different sites, except she never quite stopped her car to supervise anything. She just drove around, calling everyone from her car, and I don't rule out that she was plastered as she did this as well. She had her job because she'd been promoted at some company that had been merged into the current tech giant years before, and she'd just ridden the wave of mergers and acquisitions ever since. She had no idea of how actually to do any of the work.

She'd punctuate her calls with snarky little remarks like "sh*t rolls downhill" and "I hate my life", knowing there was absolutely nothing any one of us could do about it -- but I also think that behind those remarks was a seething resentment at the worker bees who could actually do their jobs, which she could not. She could fire any of us, and she often did, but we could land on our feet and get new jobs, because we knew how to do the work. She hated us for it.

I think something like that, a vestigial remnant of rudimentary conscience, is behind Biden's cryptic remarks. He rose to the presidency in an election that, if not stolen outright, was certainly hinky, and he was nominated in the first place because, at long last, he was the only credible Democrat alternative to Bernie Sanders. Other than not being Bernie Sanders and not being Donald Trump, he had no other qualifications for the job, except, as he suffered from Dunnng-Kruger, he was utterly convinced he was the man for it.

And he hates the voters who put him there. Down deep, and maybe not even that deep, he knows the jokes he keeps telling aren't funny, he knows his audience knows it, but he keeps telling the dumb stories and making the dumb remarks because people have to listen and make the best of it. I don't think even Dunning or Kruger understood that part of the Dunning-Kruger Effect -- the point is to make the competent suffer.

The Axios story concludes, and I endorse this:

There are legitimate questions about Biden's age and stamina as he runs for a second term — but his off-beat proverbs are just Biden being Biden.

Fought To A Draw

The headlines at the right-wing aggregators were misleading: Dodgers Wind Up With About 60 People Attending The Game For Their Anti-Catholic Stunt. What actually happened was that the Dodgers, caught between a rock and a hard place, split the difference and gave the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence their community hero award at a ceremony on the field but considerably before the actual game. (Most of the aggregators, including Breitbart at the link, eventually clarified this.) The 60 people who were there were just a select group watching the little pre-game ceremony. Nevertheless, a few booed loudly.

So the Dodgers' strategy was to finesse the "sisters" without re-un-disinviting them, without an apology or even a direct acknowledgement of the problem, and hope it all blows over. This has mirrored the corporate strategies of Bud Light and Target, as well to a lesser extent other companies like Kohls and Starbucks, which have quietly removed Pride Month signage and merch in hopes this will avert the consumer boycotts that consumed the other two.

This response by the corporate mainstream to date has been remarkably pusillanimous, and so far, it hasn't fixed things.

Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth plans on hitting the road this summer amid major issues with Bud Light.

The alcohol powerhouse company has seen its stock price get hammered and Bud Light sales collapse ever since BL decided to team up with Dylan Mulvaney.

The incredibly stupid March Madness promo featuring the transgender activist was more than two months ago, but the bleeding just doesn’t stop.

Sales were down more than 24% in the latest data.

The "listeing tour" strikes me as a last-ditch attempt by CEO Whitworth to hold onto his job, but still without an apology or acknowledgement of the problem. In fact, it's just a continuation of the strategy that's put them where they are now: pretend it was a little glitch, fire the lower-level managers involved, and tell the distributors they'll sorta-kinda fix it down the read.

But was Corporate America caught by surprise here? I'm not so sure. As I pointed out in this post, professional hockey players resisted wearing "pride" logos on their jerseys as early as January of this year, well before the Bud Light controversy broke out. Fully a year ago, five Tampa Bay Rays players refused to wear "pride" logos for the team's 2022 Pride Night. Although Major League Baseball appears to have solidified a policy of not requiring players to wear "pride" insignia in the wake of the Dodgers fiasco, this had already been raised by the players' union over the past year.

With June being Pride Month, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred was asked Thursday following the owners meetings in New York about the possibility of LGBTQ+ Pride celebrations being standardized leaguewide in the future.

Each individual club currently makes the determination of whether to host a Pride-themed night, but Manfred said Thursday that the league has discouraged teams from wearing Pride logos on their jerseys this season to "protect" the players.

As I've said here already, the issue in professional sports is that the star players have individual brands, which are valuable for endorsements and retirement income. As Bud Light made clear, the wrong sort of association can badly damage a brand, and wearing a totem that endorses the gay lifestyle can do just that, since it can carry the implication that the player himself is gay. The players' union was aware of this well before Bud Light, and Major League Baseball has been brought into line with the program.

But there's clearly a bigger trend.

The annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention voted to affirm a decision made earlier this year to remove Saddleback Church, a major southern California congregation founded by the pastor and author Rick Warren, due to its having women pastors.

Representatives at the conference in New Orleans overwhelmingly supported the decision to expel the church, according to the vote count reported Wednesday morning, despite pleas a day earlier by Warren, the author of “The Purpose Driven Life.” The representatives, known as messengers, also voted to affirm the ousters of two other churches, including Fern Creek in Louisville, Kentucky, which has had a female pastor since 1993.

The vote to uphold those removals came just a few hours before a two-thirds majority of the Southern Baptist Convention – the largest Protestant denomination in the United States – separately voted to approve an amendment to its constitution that would more broadly prohibit churches from having women hold any pastoral title.

Contrast this with the contemporary schism in the United Methodist Church, which is the second-largest US Protestant denomination after the Southern Baptists, in which the Methodists, while acknowledging division over the issue of sexuality, simply offered the conservatives an amicable divorce, allowing them to leave but retaining control over the brand. In contrast, the Southern Baptists told the liberals to get out and kept the brand as well.

The Methodists in turn were trying to avoid the precedent set by the Episcopalians two generations earlier, whereby dissidents walked out with their property, causing decades of wasteful litigation while destroying that denomination's carefully nurtured prestige. In fact, learning nothing, they repeated the same pattern, first in the 1970s over ordaining women and then in the 2000s over gay bishops, with the end result that traditionally stable careers for all but a few Episcopal clergy have disappeared.

It looks to me as if the Southern Baptists finally reversed this Protestant trend of feckless piecemeal appeasement, which is why they're going to continue as the largest Protestant denomination in the US, unlike the Episcopalians, which were always the smallest.

The overall picture suggests to me that the more observant Christian and Jewish denominations have begun to fight secularism to a draw, something that started with the lawsuits over the COVID lockdowns. I think about the 1916 naval battle of Jutland, which was in fact a near-defeat of the British, but its effect was to keep the German fleet in port for the rest of thr war, which was one factor that led to an eventual German defeat in 1918. I think the 2023 Battle of Bud Light may be something similar in a much more extended conflict between the forces of secularism and the forces of natural law.

At minimum, the forces of secularism have at least temporatily lost the initiative, and official pusillanimity has begun to prove an ineffective strategy.

"God Save The Queen, Man!"

From CTInsider:

President Joe Biden ended his keystone speech Friday at the National Safer Communities Summit at the University of Hartford with a line that has drawn confusion and criticism.

"God save the queen, man," Biden said.

The site gave the White House explanation for the line:

The comment puzzled some people because Queen Elizabeth II died last September, but White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Olivia Alair Dalton said Biden's remark was directed at someone in the audience. Dalton said Biden was unable to do a full rope line, where he usually interacts with audience members in close spaces, because he needed to leave as a storm approached.

The certainly leaves open the interpretation that Joe is completely out of touch, recognizing neither that the queen of the UK isn't sovereign over the US, but beyond that, she's deceased, and there's now a king. But I simply think it's another indication of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, "a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge." I've mentioned this in connection with Joe here frequently.

In this case with the "God save the queen" remark, Joe was cracking a joke, or at least he thought he was. This site talks about the Dunning-Kruger Effect as it relates to comedy, which was one focus of the original study:

Standup comedy is a magnet for the delusional, in part because everyone assumes they have a good sense of humor.

. . . The Dunning-Kruger effect is excruciating to behold: This guy really thinks he’s funny? But it’s also reassuring. In an industry that offers few clear paths for advancement, self-doubt is as crucial a tool for success as bravado. In comedy, anxiety and neurosis are the keys to the kingdom. If you’ve ever asked yourself if you’ve got Dunning-Kruger, you probably don’t.

One artifact of Joe's everyday speech is his frequent remark "No joke, man!" or, conversely, "I'm joking", when he's about the least funny guy there is, no matter what he says or how he means it. This is a man without reflection and without insight, from which it follows that he's without humor. This probably contributes to an impression that he suffers from a medical disorder of cognition, when it's much closer to an issue of being unable to read a room or more generally relate to his circumstances.

Nor does it help that he's the most powerful man in the world, and he inevitably traces this to his own innate ability. But let's see if we can parse out why he said, "God save the queen, man!" and thought it was a joke, when pretty much the whole world took it instead as just a strange and recondite remark. Go to the start of the YouTube excerpt above at the end of his speech:

We're the United States of America, and there's nothing beyond our capacity when we do it together. God bless you all, and may God protect our troops! We can get this done! Thank you, thank you, thank you, I mean it! Thank you!

He then diverges into an explanation of why he isn't going to go down to the audience and shake hands, when he normally would, because there's a storm or something -- and then he wraps it up,

Alright? God save the queen, man!

Putting this in context, a moment earlier, he'd just uttered what he must have understood was the most conventional politicians' bloviation, we're the United States of America, nothing we can't do, God bless, God protect our troops, thank you, I mean it! -- and he's disgusted with it. In fact, it's beneath him. His handlers are making him do this one more time, and he'd rather be back in Delaware. So he sums it all up with "God save the queen, man!" which is his private little joke about how everything he's just said is as empty as if it were said in a foreign country.

In other words, the one thing he's sure about is he's the most powerful man in the world, and he thinks all patriotic platitudes are a waste of time, and he's letting the people who really know what's up know that he understands this perfectly. (This probably extends to his private opinion of the Roman Catholic Church and its mass, for all his weekly attendance there. He's never done it for other than the most cynical reasons, and he's always been on the verge of losing patience with it as well.)

For that matter, God save the pope and God save the holy Roman emperor, if he could only figure out who that guy was. This also goes to why he always has to be led off the stage, as he was at the end of yesterday's vignette. He's the most powerful man in the world, and also the smartest, and he doesn't think he should be wasting his time remembering which way to leave the podium.

Yet again, this is not a medical condition. I think it's important that his opponents understand this. People think he's sick and feeble, when he's just stupid, which requires a different set of strategies.

Updates On The Biden Boodle

On of the big questions I've had throughout this saga has been that the sums of moneyjust don't seem right. The Vice President of the United States is alleged to have sold out for a measly $5 million. The Biden family overall, nine or 12 mwmbers, is alleged to have taken in $10 million over a period of years, when this amount wouldn't cover just the cocaine habits, shopping sprees, and luxury rehab stays of Hunter, Hallie, Caroline, or Ashley, leaving all the others and their extravagant lifestyles aside.

Either there's a lot more to this story, or it's all bunk, because the numbers we've been seeing just don't fit. However, via the New York Post,

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer on Thursday teased that new bank records his panel expects to obtain will reveal that the Biden family has accepted as much as $30 million from foreign nationals.

“We have more bank records coming in, we’re going to exceed $10 million this week. And I think we’ll get up to between $20 and 30 million,” Comer (R-Ky.) told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo when asked how much money the committee has identified as being obtained by President Biden’s family members from overseas sources.

. . . The panel has gleaned the information from records Comer has issued subpoenas for from four banks — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, HSBC and Cathay Bank.

. . . “We’re pretty confident from other sources that that number will grow to beyond $20 million and it could be more if you factor in the president’s brother, who dealt mainly in the Middle East. We haven’t even gotten to him yet,” he explained.

The same story lists with greater specificity the members of the Biden family that the Comer committee believes have taken foreign payoffs. Putting names to references in the text, these would be:

1. Hunter
2. Naomi Biden, Hunter's daughter
3. Joe's brother James
4. Caroline Biden, James's daughter
5. James Biden Jr, James's son
6. James's wife, Sara
7. Hallie, Beau's widow
8. Melissa Cohen, Hunter's current wife
9. Kathleen Buhle, Hunter's ex-wife

Although the total here is nine, Comer has said that as many as 12 could be recipients of the payments, which might include Joe himself, Dr Jill, and Joe's daugher via Dr Jill, Ashley. This would also explain Hunter's extreme reluctance to disclose his income sources in the court case over his child support payments to Lunden Roberts. Again, the very sketchy data we've had suggests that Hunter has over $600,000 per year in alimony and child support payments, but his publicly available income source is just sporadic payments for his paintings -- but he must also be paying millions to attorneys like Abbe Lowell for both his child support and tax cases. That his wife Melissa is getting Biden payoffs suggests this is an effort to conceal Hunter's income as well.

A story by Margot Cleveland at the Federalist fleshes out details of the alleged $10 million in payments to both Joe and Hunter from Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky:

The Bidens allegedly “coerced” a foreign national to pay them $10 million in bribes, according to individuals familiar with the investigation into the FBI’s handling of the FD-1023 confidential human source report.

. . . In the FD-1023 from June 30, 2020, the confidential human source summarized earlier meetings he had with Zlochevsky. According to the CHS, in the 2015-2016 timeframe, the CHS, who was providing advice to Zlochevsky, told the Burisma owner to stay away from the Bidens. Then, after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential contest, the CHS asked Zlochevsky if he was upset Trump won.

, , , The CHS responded that he hoped Zlochevsky had taken precautions to protect himself. Zlochevsky then allegedly detailed the steps he had taken to avoid detection, stressing he had never paid the “Big Guy” directly and that it would take some 10 years to unravel the various money trails. It was only then that Zlochevsky mentioned the audio recordings he had made of the conversations he had with Hunter and Joe Biden, according to the CHS.

Coy references in the story suggest that the "CHS" cconfidential source was a subordinate to Zlochevsky who knew him well and has stayed in touch. Vague references to "sources" familiar with the investigation also suggest that there have been multiple whistleblowers speaking to Sen Grassley and the Comer committee.

It's hard to avoid thinking there are major tax issues here for all the Bidens that could make Hunter's current tax problems seem trivial, and that's before we get to the question of money laundering -- and that in turn is before we get to the question of bribery. Any one instance, including the revelation of a new income source in Hunter's child support case, could start to unravel a great deal else. And it isn't 2024 yet.

"Where's The Money? I'm Joking."

The problem I keep seeing about the Biden boodle that won't go away for me is precisely the question Joe asked a week ago: where's the money? What we've seen, at least since 2019, is the appearance of multimillion-dollar expenditures on Hunter's debts and legal problems, followed since last year by other multimillion-dollar legal expenditures for Joe's own classified document issues, yet I'm about the only one out there asking where all this money comes from. High-power, partner-level lawyers don't work for free, and being lawyers, they know how to get paid.

This story came out on Breitbart yesterday, but it was buried almost immediately: Exclusive: GOP Lawmakers Question Who Gave Joe Biden’s Corporation Nearly $10M in 2017.

Republican lawmakers are demanding transparency from President Joe Biden regarding his 2017 tax returns in which his entity, “CelticCapri Corp,” listed nearly $10 million without specifying revenue line items, raising concerns about who paid the entity and for what in the wake of Joe Biden’s alleged link to a $5 million Ukrainian “bribery” scheme.

. . . “Now that we know there are recordings of conversations Joe Biden and his degenerate son had with a Burisma executive, it’s becoming more and more obvious how the indictment of President Trump is meant to be a distraction,” [Rep. Eli] Crane added. “It would shock no one in this town if Joe Biden received millions of dollars from selling out the country in a bribery scheme and then hid that money in shady shell companies.”

The implication in the story is that the "nearly $10 million" on Biden's 2017 tax return roughly corresponds with the total of $10 million, $5 million to Joe himself and $5 million to Hunter, that's allegedly discussed in the tapes Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky apparently claims to have made of his discussions with Hunter and Joe.

However, as best we can surmise for now -- the FBI's FD-1023 forms in question haven't been made public, and we have no assurance that the alleged Zlochevsky tapes even exist -- the bribes, if they were paid, were paid in return for Joe's alleged insistence that prosecutor Victor Shokin be removed from a Burisma investigation in March, 2016.

Biden did demand that Shokin be removed. At an event at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in 2018, Biden seemed to boast about it, saying that during a visit to Kyiv -- likely in December 2015 -- he told Ukrainian officials: "We're leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor's not fired, you're not getting the money."

"Well, son of a bitch," Biden continued. "He got fired."

Shokin was indeed fired, but not until March that year [2016?].

But the vagueness of the timing, mixed with Joe's well-established tendency to fabricate, puts the precise date of any discussion, and any resulting payment from Zlochevsky to the Bidens, into question. If Biden spoke with Zlochevsky during a December 2015 visit to Ukraine, as the story suggests, we've got to assume the money was paid even before Shokin's 2016 removal and would have needed to be covered up in a Biden tax return earlier than 2017.

And of course, the tale of the fired prosecutor could simply be just another of Joe's routine fabrications, that he's Greek, was raised by Puerto Ricans, went to shul as a kid, or maybe went to black churches then instead.

The problem for Joe overall, even if the story of Zlochevsky's 17 recordings turns out to be the purest moonshine, is that the numbers have never added up. For ibnstance, I have a hard time with the idea that Zlochevsky ever paid $5 million to Hunter; he never had that kind of money, and the money he had appears to have come in large part from stiffing his employees and partners over much smaller payments. The Bidens overall seem to have obtained lines of credit or debt forgiveness simply on the basis that they were Bidens, but that sort of thing goes only so far.

As well, Rep Greene's account of the 1023 has Zlochevsky referring to Hunter as "stupid", which has the ring of truth, but it does then raise the question of why Zlochevsky would give him $5 million. But that in turn raises the question of how much was enough to buy Joe, if in fact Joe was being bought.

I don't think $5 million alone was enough to buy Joe, nor would an additional $5 million to Hunter have done it. But let's just say Zlochevsky paid Joe-and-Hunter $10 million in December 2015, as the link above suggests. That dosn't account for the mystery "nearly $10 million" that appeared on Joe's 2017 tax return -- and $10 million won't buy you all that much these days, maybe a five-bedroom mcmansion in a leafy suburb. Joe needs more than that kind of money.

Where is it? That's not a joke.