I'm Still Wondering About Kevin Morris's Angle

One takeaway I had from last week's case of the balcony bong was that Kevin Morris seems to own yet another house, this one a pied-a-terre on a swanky street that might be in Pacific Palisades. This is apparently in addition to his sprawling loft in Tribeca, as well as the $11 million Malibu compound that he bought from Olivia Newton-John.

Hunter Biden's Secret Service detail drives him over for casual afternoons on weed, but it pretty clearly wouldn't matter what they smoke together, because the men in the black SUV waiting outside will keep things quiet no matter what. And that's the main puzzle I have: Morris is supposed to be a rich lawyer, but it's hard to avoid thinking he's hanging with Hunter because he needs something, not least protection. Protection from what?

It has to be something important. Just yesterday, we learned that in addition to setting up the whole deal whereby Hunter would sell his paintings to unknown buyers, Morris himself bought unspecified paintings for unspecified amounts:

Hunter Biden also reportedly sold art to his top lawyer, Kevin Morris, who also paid Hunter Biden’s unpaid IRS bill of about $2 million. The entertainment lawyer is at the center of Hunter Biden’s new-found career of painting modern art, an occupation connected to the art market known for corruption.

Morris helped Hunter forge a framework to sell art to anonymous buyers through a dealer with ties to the Chinese art market. Morris was also involved in Hunter’s 2021 controversial memoir.

Nevertheless,

During a July 9, 2021, press briefing, then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki addressed Hunter Biden's sale of artwork and concerns that his works may present conflicts of interest with the administration.

"After careful consideration, a system has been established that allows for Hunter Biden to work in his profession within reasonable safeguards. . . . all interactions regarding the selling of art and the setting of prices will be handled by a professional gallerist adhering to the highest industry standards, and any offer out of the normal, of course, would be rejected out of hand."

"And the gallerist will not share information about buyers or prospective buyers, including their identities, with Hunter Biden or the administration, which provides quite a level of protection and transparency," she continued.

. . . Despite the alleged safeguards, the younger Biden did ultimately learn the identity of at least two buyers, including one who donated to his father's campaign.

Further,

Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali, a Los Angeles real estate investor and Democratic donor named to a U.S. commission, is among the buyers of novice paintings by Hunter Biden. The price: $1.3 million.

Naftali, picked by President Joe Biden to serve on a prestigious preservation commission, bought an artwork from the son of the nation’s commander in chief, the New York Post reported, citing Business Insider.

The Hunter Biden sale to a standing U.S. commissioner may have broken an “absolute wall” between President Biden’s official duties and his family’s business interests. It came to light in sales records from Hunter Biden’s art dealer, the Georges Bergès Gallery of Manhattan.

But the problem I see is that Ms Hirsh Naftali engaged in a single quid-pro-quo transaction with the Bidens, but Kevin Morris seems to have been running a good part of the whole family boodle -- he lent Hunter the money to pay his tax bill, he brokered his memoir, he set up the art sale scam, and oh by the way, he's Hunter's lead attorney in his federal tax and firearm case. So what else is there?

I'll bet there's a lot more to learn. Morris has got to want something important.

The History Channel's The FoodThat Built America Glorifies Bud Light!

The History Channel's The Food That Built America is a slick and glitzy business-school style "whig history" that covers why we have the wonderful frozen waffles, fried chicken, fast-food burgers, or packaged luncheon meats we have in this best of all possible consumer worlds. It can sometimes be vaguely informative, and even when it isn't, it gives some insight into the thought processes of the people who fancy they control the planet.

This past Sunday's episode is important for what it leaves out, since it chronicles how that wonderful product Bud Light became the top US beer, which is perfect anyhow. I'll grant that the episode must have been produced and in the can before last March, when a trans influencer singlehandedly destroyed the brand in a matter of weeks, but even if it hadn't been finished by then, that part of the story would have been so alien to the show's mission that they'd probably have had to scrap the whole episode rather than add an update.

The first part of the show covers the rise of yet another perfect, wonderful product, light beer. Philip Morris, a tobacco company, was faced with increasing regulatory limits on cigarette sales in the 1960s and decided to expand its business by buying Miller, an also-ran brewer. Philip Morris had already pioneered "light" cigarettes and was able to sell them successfully by identifying them with the macho Marlboro man, rather than trying to market any health benefits they might have.

In the process of branching into beer, they acquired another brewery that in fact produced a low-calorie beer marketed mostly toward women. That was a niche market that was going nowhere, but it also didn't taste good. Still, the Philip Morris wheels began to turn, and they decided the way to sell low-calorie beer was to call it "light", not low calorie, and imply that its main benefit was you could get more buzzed on more beer with the same amount of calories. Health had little to do with it.

Thus they made commercials with sports figures and other macho guys roaring "Tastes Great!" and "Less Filling!" According to Wikipedia,

Miller Lite was introduced nationally in 1975 and became the first successful mainstream light beer in the United States.

Miller's youth-oriented, heavy-advertising approach worked where the two previous light beers had failed, and Miller's early production totals of 12.8 million barrels quickly increased to 24.2 million barrels by 1977 as Miller rose to 2nd place in the American brewing marketplace,

Wikipedia continues,

Other brewers responded, in particular Anheuser-Busch with its heavily advertised Bud Light in 1982, which eventually overtook Lite in sales by 1994. Anheuser-Busch played on the branding style of "Lite", boasting that next to Bud Light "everything else is just a light". In 1992, light beers became the biggest domestic beer in America[.]

However, Bud Light didn't overtake Miller Lite until it decided to market to males as welL, According to The Atlantic,

A Super Bowl ad changed everything. In 1987, Anheuser-Busch made a play for younger male drinkers with a 30-second spot during the big game featuring a bull terrier named Spuds MacKenzie—“Bud Light’s original party animal!” Spuds became a pop-culture sensation, skateboarding in sunglasses and drawing the thirsty gaze of scantily clad women. “He’s Spuds MacKenzie,” the narrator of a later ad exclaimed: “One party-loving, happening dude!” . . . Spuds came to embody the fun-loving-frat-boy image that set Bud Light apart from the more staid Budweiser brand.

. . . Seven years later, in 2001, Bud Light passed Budweiser to become America’s best-selling beer, period: a staple at grocery stores and bars, a ubiquitous option at the ballpark, an entry-level lager to crush at college parties and tailgates.

This is the place where The Food That Built America ends its story. What a country! The Atlantic takes it farther:

“I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light, and it was, ‘This brand is in decline, it’s been in a decline for a really long time, and if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand, there will be no future for Bud Light,’” Alissa Heinerscheid, vice president of marketing for Bud Light, told the Make Yourself at Home podcast in March. A month later, Heinerscheid was placed on leave as the company tried to control the fallout of the anti-Mulvaney boycott. Her effort to shed the company’s frat-boy image may have been too tall an order for a brand that built its empire by encouraging young men to imagine themselves as a literal horndog.

But this raises a key question. A declining top brand is still a top brand. What if Anheuser had just left Ms Heinerscheid's position vacant and decided Bud Light wasn't broken enough to try to fix? Wouldn't they have had decades of continuing profit? At this point, they'd be happy just to coast down to number two after x years without the black eye they've had from the Mulvaney fiasco. The Atlantic concludes with a shrug:

But tastes change. Schlitz was once America’s best-selling beer, and the original Budweiser’s run ended in 2001. Bud Light rose to prominence as a good-time brand that brings the party: Our beer is fun! Drink a lot of it! Today’s drinkers tend to have a more sophisticated self-conception. They also have far more options—and opinions. Beer exists in a fractious world in which anything can become ammo in the culture war, be it Disney movies or clothing at Target. No beer brand will ever be so dominant again. It’s difficult to know quite how to feel.

I'm not sure if it's that easy. By the 1960s, brewers knew you don't sell beer by marketing to women. Light beer rose to prominence by claiming to be a macho product. Suddenly a woman Harvard graduate whose appearence is calorie-conscious verging on anorexia decides the way to go is to market to guys who pretend to be skinny women. Even The Atlantic tacitly acknowledges this decision became ammo in a culture war, and that war has been a debacle.

It's probably best the History Channel could pretend it hadn't heard anything about Dylan Mulvaney. But the real history here is yet to be written.

Dylan's 15 Minutes Of Fame Are Up

Via The New York Post:

Mulvaney — who recently escaped to Peru to “feel safe” from the backlash and boycotts hounding her and the fizzling beer brand — offered up her [sic] services in an Instagram post Wednesday.

“Booking speaking opportunities for the upcoming 23/24 school year and would love to come visit,” she told her [sic] 2 million followers.

My impression of the college lecture circuit has always been that it features faded celebrities and other special pleaders past their sell-by dates. From my own time as an undergraduate in the 1960s, I remember Judy Garland (then, though still alive, largely a gay cult icon); Madalyn Murray O'Hair (prominent in the anti-school prayer movement, who quickly faded after the Supreme Court outlawed it); Immanuel Velikovsky (author of the 1950 Worlds in Collision, which argued that Biblical miracles were a misreading of astronomical catastrophes); and Michael Meeropol (son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who argued his parents had been falsely accused of espionage, something he and his brother eventually retracted in part).

According to the them website,

It’s unclear what exactly Mulvaney will be up to next. “So, right now, I’m thinking about longevity — how do I hopefully have a career that goes on for the next 40 years?” she told Them. “And how do I be happy outside of social media? Because that’s what I think I’m retraining my brain to figure out: All the other aspects of my life have to be just as important as that one.”

The overwhelming puzzle of Dylan Mulvaney is how he managed to inspire what has proven to be one of the most successful product boycotts of all time. One commentator called it not just a brand boycott, but a brand revulsion, and there's an important distinction there. A boycott is an essentially political phenomenon that may have limited short-term success. The closest example might be the boycott of Dow Chemical over napalm in the 1960s:

Dow was not known as a defense contractor — in fact, until its Pentagon contract, the business was best known for making industrial chemicals and household plastics like Saran Wrap.

But over the next few years, as Americans began seeing gruesome images of South Vietnamese children with horrific napalm burns, the antiwar movement set its sights on the company.

Activists boycotted Dow Chemical’s products, staged protests at its recruiting events on college campuses and barraged its executives with accusations of unethical war profiteering.

. . . All told, the $5 million napalm contract most likely cost Dow Chemical billions of dollars. And it was the kind of unforced error that could have been avoided if company executives had listened to early signs of opposition, done some risk analysis and changed course.

But even the emotional impact of photos showing children with napalm burns fades in comparison with images of Dylan Mulvaney that produce more like a disgust instinct that's implied in the characterization of a "brand revulsion", or the suggestion that blue-collar males now avoid drinking the brand because women will think they're gay. According to Wikipedia,

It is believed that the emotion of disgust has evolved as a response to offensive foods that may cause harm to the organism. A common example of this is found in human beings who show disgust reactions to mouldy milk or contaminated meat. Disgust appears to be triggered by objects or people who possess attributes that signify disease.

It would seem there's a great deal to be said about the Dylan Mulvaney phenomenon and how it appears to have produced something like mass disgust. One thing that's clear is that after the Bud Light influencer deal, Mulvaney will never be asked to endorse another major brand.

What if he were to reflect on his situation and produce an account where he could speak with genuine insight into his experience? That might be worth hearing. Otherwise, he's still likely to cast about for something todo over the next 40 years.

A Former Addict Solves My Puzzle Over The White House Cocaine

Last Thursday, I posted on the details we know about the baggie of coke that was found in a cubby outside the White House Situation Room, and I concluded that nothing really fit.

Former Secret Service agents are unanimous that nobody who isn't the president, vice president, or a member of their immediate families gets into the business areas of the White House without a search, which includes metal detectors and emptying of pockets, as well as drug sniffing dogs. In other words, it's highly unlikely that either an outsider or a staff member could bring cocaine in.

On the other hand, if the suspect is a protectee, which is to say Hunter himself, the mathematics of addiction say that someone like Hunter needs a lot more than a random baggie of cocaine to satisfy his habit. He needs near-industrial quantities of coke, and it just isn't worth his trouble to smuggle in a baggie at a time; the supply is too small and unreliable.

The Secret Service people say it's the protectees who are never searched, so logically, we would expect Hunter to bring his own drugs in anyhow. Why would he need a drop at all? That just doesn't make sense.

Jesse Watters interviewed Jordan Belfort, the so-called "Wolf of Wall Street" and a former cocaine addict, on his Fox News program this past Monday evening, and as an ex-addict, he was able to clarify the potential issues surrounding Hunter's situation, while making it clear that he was speculating, and Hunter has not been tried or convicted. The Fox segment is shown via a YouTube at the top of this post, while the text quotes are from the UK Daily Mail's account of the program.

'Obviously I don't know for sure, but here's my theory,' he said. 'The obvious person to point to is Hunter Biden.

'Why? Because of the action - what people aren't focusing on is why would someone take it out of their pocket and leave it somewhere?

'The answer is because, when you're in that mindset of an addict, you want to have little 'drop points' so you can kind of sneak in, take a quick hit, leave it there for safekeeping, and come back. So it was being stored somewhere.

'In other words, you could easily keep it in your pocket and get in and out without getting detected, so the person that put it there had to be there on a consistent basis to keep using it undetected.'

So the Dan Bongino theory that I quoted last week and found implausible was that someone was bringing the cocaine in a baggie at a time and leaving it in a drop for Hunter to pick up later. Mr Belfort's theory is that Hunter has already brought a much larger quantity in and is simply secreting small amounts of it around the White House for convenience, and this cubby is one of them. This resolves my doubt about the baggie as a reliable way to smuggle the drug in from outside, and it also addresses the problem that Hunter needs a much bigger supply than baggie-level over the course of a day.

Mr Belfort also addressed the issue of whether Hunter has turned his life around, kicked his habits, and is now clean and sober.

'People don't typically stop using the drug unless they've suffered massive consequences,' he told Watters.

And this guy hasn't suffered consequences for anything - whether it's not declaring taxes, whether it's going on the board of Burisma - like why was he there? - whether it's becoming a famous artist overnight and selling scribble-scrabble for like hundreds of thousands of pounds - no consequences there.

'So why would he have stopped using drugs, I wonder, when there's no consequences?'

But this brings me back to the question of what the Secret Service knows, and the degree to which they're looking the other way over Hunter's drug use. Consider that the cubby outside the Sit Room would be just one potential spot where an addict like Hunter or Mr Belfort might secrete small amounts of a drug as a stash of convenience. In that case, when the question comes up over which location the July 2 cocaine was found -- the library, the lobby cubby, or the Sit Room cubby -- the answer might well be all of them. That could in fact have been the source of the confusion after that story broke.

This also goes to a question that came to mind after I posted on Hunter's visit with Keven Morris yesterday. I assume the Secret Service escort waited in the black SUV in which they'd driven Hunter to his "meeting" to take him back to where he was staying afterward. But in that case, even if he hadn't been smoking weed from a bong himself, he'd have been reeking of it from just being in the same room with Morris. If they had no other sign of what Hunter was up to before this, they'd have a good idea then. But this is presumably a regular detail, they know their protectee, and their protectee is regularly vioating federal law; not just cocaine, but marijuana is still illegal federally. What are their instructions?

This actually brings me to my last question: for the past several months, although nobody knows for sure, it's been more or less assumed that Hunter has been living in the White House, where he can be kept on a shorter leash. With the Sit Room episode, people like Mr Belfort are credibly inferring that under those circumstances, Hunter has been stashing cocaine all over the residence and offices to support his habit. It may well be that Joe has been getting advice that this has become unsustainable, the risk of another such discovery that might be more provably tied to Hunter is too great, and it's time for him to leave.

The trouble is that as soon as he's left -- which might be what's led to him being found smoking weed with Kevin Morris in LA -- he's going to revert to even more risky behavior like what he was doing from 2015 to 2019. For Joe, this is basically just two bad options, either drugs in the White House, or something even worse outside of it. But my bet is that a year or so ago, Hunter's minders at the Malibu compound had been warning Joe that Hunter was basically getting out of control there, which is why he was brought into the White House.

Something more is likely to break, sooner rather than later. At minimum, Kevin Morris is not the kind of guy you want Hunter hanging around with. But that brings up another question: what's in it for Kevin Morris? Running around with Hunter, at least right now, is a get-out-of-jail-free card for anyone who does it. What does Kevin Morris need something like that for?

As I Suspected

Via the UK Daily Mail,

Hunter Biden visited his 'sugar brother' Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris – who was photographed appearing to smoke from a bong.

. . . While Hunter was at the house, Morris was snapped on a balcony in plain view of the public street appearing to huff from a white bong, in photos exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com.

. . . It is not clear what substance was in Morris's bong, and recreational marijuana use is legal in California. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This vignette raises several important questions for me, but it begins to answer one I posed a couple of weeks ago about Hunter and Kevin:

Do they do coke together? I don't think this bodes well for Hunter's future. Kevin Morris is not a serious guy.

Bongs actually came after my time doing this sort of thing in college (which I did on and off for about 18 months but outgrew pretty quickly), when all we had was old-fashioned joints, so I went to Wikipedia for an explanation:

A bong (also known as a water pipe) is a filtration device generally used for smoking cannabis, tobacco, or other herbal substances.

Mr Morris is demonstrating its use pretty clearly in the photo. There is a large-diameter glass tube filled with water or other liquid, from which we can see him inhaling with vigor. In front of the glass tube, partly obscured by the forefinger of his right hand, is a stem loaded with cannabis. He appears to be holding a lighter in his left hand that he's using to ignite the cannabis in the stem, which in turn produces smoke that's drawn through the water in the tube and inhaled to give a euphoric effect. (But despite the Daily Mail's characterization that he "appeared relaxed", the wild-haired dude looks kinda like a hungry freak to me.)

Possession of small amounts of cannabis or marijuana for personal use is legal in California and some other states. According to writers like Alex Berenson, this has been a major public policy error, and I tend to agree. But just from watching police shows like On Patrol: Live, it appears that when people who are stopped and searched for drugs have marijuana, even in states where it's legal, they also carry other drugs like cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, and fentanyl, which currently are illegal everywhere. This contributes to the impression that marijuana is a "gateway drug" that simply makes it easier to obtain and use more dangerous and illegal drugs.

This in turn leads to the perfectly reasonable question whether Mr Morris and Hunter used other drugs besides marijuana during their visit, but even if they didn't, this largely discredits the argument that Hunter has cleaned up his act and is living a life of sober respectability. If he were, it would be a major betrayal for Mr Morris to do anything that might encourage Hunter to relapse, like use drugs in his presence and in an environment where Hunter might also feel encouraged to use them. This in turn suggests that Hunter and Mr Morris mutually and cynically understand that the idea Hunter is clean and sober is for public consumption only.

But also, according to the Daily Mail link,

Hunter arrived in the afternoon in a black SUV, escorted by Secret Service bodyguards and dressed in a blue shirt, jeans and aviator sunglasses favored by both him and his father.

Presumably Hunter is routinely tailed by paparazzi, who alerted to the black SUV and followed it to Mr Morris's place, where they got their photos and sold them to the Daily Mail. But we may surmise that the Secret Service waited around for Hunter to finish his "meeting" and drove him back to the Malibu compound or wherever else he was staying, so they must have observed just as much as the paparazzi did of Mr Morris and the bong. This in turn strongly suggests to me that the Secret Service is fully aware of Hunter's drug use and other lifestyle issues and effectively enables them -- which they've had a history of doing since Joe's time as vice president.

But finally, it's hard to avoid the impression that Mr Morris is not acting in his client's interest. According to the Daily Mail link above,

Morris is currently suing right wing nonprofit Marco Polo and its founder, former Donald Trump White House staffer Garrett Ziegler, who has been investigating the Biden family.

The attorney accused Ziegler and his nonprofit of harassment, invasion of privacy and 'criminal impersonation' in court documents filed in Los Angeles.

But Morris himself is acting in a way that damages Hunter's reputation, by portraying him as someone who is present when drugs are used -- and in fact, in the deal that Hunter agreed to for his firearm charge, for which Mr Morris was lead attorney,

Hunter Biden also has agreed to enter into a so-called pretrial diversion agreement in connection with a federal felony charge of possession of a gun by a person who is a user or addict of illegal drugs, according to the filing by prosecutors in U.S. District Court in Delaware.

Typically, such agreements call for the related criminal charge to be dismissed if a defendant complies with the conditions of the deal for a set period of time.

Those conditions would normally include abstaining from any drug or alcohol use -- but Mr Morris is by his own actions suggesting he won't encourage Hunter to take this seriously.

Well, prolonged cannabis use affects overall judgment. I disagree with the media accounts that call Kevin Morris a "legal heavyweight". He's just an entitled a stoner with more money than brains.

Maybe They Have A Point

In a post last week, I said I was skeptical of reports that some Democrats are trying to find a younger candidate who can replace Joe Biden as their 2024 nominee because, as I said at that time, Joe Biden is their only hope of claiming to maintain the nearly expired New Deal coalition. In fact, it seems to me that if they want a viable national candidate who could actually do this, they have a perfectly good one in Robert Kennedy Jr, whom they currently abjure.

This isn't to say that they don't see a legitimate problem in Biden, although yet again, I don't think a medical diagnosis is needed to point it out. Take his meeting with Israel's President Herzog at the White House Tuesday, where he's reported to have said,

“The Israelis and the Palestinians… uh… on a political level… They uh, and… uh… They uh… And, I… Agwai endhole and whole shegwam… And uh…” said Biden.

The fact-checkers insisted that the big guy wasn't asleep, he was just reading from notes in his lap, but that didn't excuse his detached, offhand, garbled delivery.

Or take his Philadelphia speech yesterday:

“How many times you read in inflat—that a recession’s comin’?” Biden said in garbled fashion. “They’ven wall street today said no you’ll don’t say resheck comin’ now!”

I’m just going to take a wild guess and say that isn’t what it said on the teleprompter. . . . I tip my hat to the folks at the Townhall Twitter account for that translation because that certainly had to be a bit of a challenge.

The commentator goes on to wonder if Biden might even be having a stroke, but again, this needs a medical diagnosis that neither he nor I is qualified to give. I think a more likely explanation is suggested by this story from Politico on Tuesday:

President Joe Biden will make his longtime residence of Wilmington, Del., the headquarters of his 2024 campaign, he announced Tuesday.

“My family’s values, my eternal optimism and my unwavering belief in the American middle class as our nation’s backbone comes from my home — from Delaware,” Biden said in a statement.

Insofar as there's been comment about this at all, it's taken as an indication he expects to run the same sort of "front porch" campaign he ran in 2020, although even then, his actual campaign headquarters was in Philadelphia. It seems to me that given his character -- he's lazy, grandiose, and entitled (I don't need to be a medical professional to say this) -- this is a fully consistent strategy for him to take, and it's consistent with the attitude we saw in the recent public appearances I cited above.

As for his photo op with Isaac Herzog, it's indisputable that Herzog was there as a supplicant, and Biden's delivery and overall demeanor brutally reinforced this. Biden, after all, is the most powerful man in the world, he's fully aware of it, and dealing with supplicants, especially an Isreali supplicant, is an annoyance. His handlers have already made all the policy decisions, he's already signed whatever they've told him to sign, and his presence in the Oval Office is entirely pro forma. Get it over with, it's a big waste of time.

He reinforces this with a heavy-lidded lack of affect as he ostentatiusly gives a garbled reading from notes in his lap. He's neither sick nor senile, he's just incredibly bored. At his Philadelphia appearance, according to RedState,

After the story that broke over the past day about his staff having to make “accommodations” for his issues, Biden came trotting out, trying to look vigorous. But then he kind of blew that immediately, by then stopping suddenly, throwing his arms up, and telling someone up in one of the seats, “Don’t jump!” — that weird thing that he keeps doing.

As I've been saying all along, Biden sees himself as a skilled Machiavellian manipulator, operating in a behind-the-scenes dimension of Realpolitik beyond conventional expectations. With moves like that, he's simply flipping the bird to his own staff, who apparently urge him not to say all those dumb things. He'll say what he pleases, he'll do what he pleases, and he'll wander off the stage as he pleases, godammit. He'd just as soon be home in Wilmingon; this other stuff is a waste of his valuable time.

What may be bothering the Democrats who're trying to find a better candidate most isn't a possible medical condition, it's that Joe is conscious, aware of his environment, and making fully informed decisions based on his own appraisal, however cynical, of the political circumstances. As far as I can see, he doesn't think much has effectively changed since 2020, and he's simply going to repeat his 2020 stategy. I have a feeling that the Dunning-Kruger effect will be validated here, probably sooner than later.

I suppose if I were a Democrat strategist, I'd be nervous, too -- but what can they change?

Here's My Puzzle Over The White House Cocaine

I certainly agree that the unanswered question of who brought the baggie into the cubby outside the Sit Room is important, but I'm less and less convinced the answer has much to do with Hunter. Let's take the latest theory from Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who's been serving as the vehicle for unnamed colleagues still on the force who are expressing their skepticism about the investigation. As of Tuesday, he was saying:

“Let’s just say a friend called me up and said, ‘Don’t preclude the possibility that the cocaine found in the White House there was not accidentally left behind.’ In other words, it was left there deliberately for someone to find, and let you say someone else may have found it. So that’s the story I kind of heard from someone who may know a little something about something. We’ll see what happens, but they know who it is. I’m sure of it.”

As best I can translate this, he seems to be saying that the baggie was something like a dead drop, a dealer or some intermediary left the baggie in a place where its intended recipient could find it, and the drop somehow went awry until the uniformed officers found it on a routine search that Sunday night.

But that theory goes only so far. According to ABC News reporting on the Secret Service briefing to Congress, Rep. Tim Burchett said the bag contained less than a gram of cocaine. But every indication we have is that Hunter has been a longtime addict, and he failed a drug test in the Navy as of October 2014.

Much more recent photos that I covered in this post appear to show Hunter snorting at public White House events. Both his long history with drugs and the apparent frequency of his use suggests he's a confirmed addict, and this means he needs much more than just a small bag containing less than a gram to get through the day. According to this site, "Though people use Cocaine at different rates depending on their addiction and tolerance to its effects, consistent users usually use up to 5 grams per day."

So a random dead drop of a single baggie doesn't seem reasonable for someone who likely needs as many as five of those baggies a day, or 35 a week. But if, as is generally speculated, Hunter is currently living at the White House, or at least is there pretty frequently, he would need a delivery system that's much more reliable and capable of supplying a much more significant amount. So on one hand, I don't think the baggie outside the Sit Room had anything to do with Hunter. On the other, we've got the question of how a much larger quantity must in fact be finding its way to him.

I'm surprised that nobody is probing Dan Bongino over this question. He can't be that naive about how much cocaine an addict like Hunter uses and how a single baggie in a dead drop won't suit the purpose. But at the same time, every indication we have is that Hunter indulges all his vices on an industrial scale, to the point that his Secret Service bodyguards must be fully aware of what he's up to, and that's got to be well beyond a baggie in a cubby now and then.

In fact, I don't see how the Secret Service Biden family detail can't be directly enabling Hunter's vices. But nobody's passing the word about this to Bongino? That just doesn't fit. Either Bongino is completely out of the loop, or he isn't telling the full story.

This brings me to yesterday's hearing at the House Oversight Committee, in which Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene discussed evidence showing Hunter purchased an airplane ticket for a supposed "paralegal" to travel to Los Angeles and back to have sex with him, paid for with law firm funds. (I believe this is the series of episodes from late 2018 and early 2019 covered in this story at the UK Daily Mail.)

This level of vice becomes an ingrained habit. The semi-official line is that once Hunter married Melissa Cohen in the spring of 2019, he got clean, changed his ways, and has become a model of filial respectability, but this is hard to believe, especially since he's so seldom seen with Melissa these days, especially in the White House, and this brings up the question of how he satisfies his other industrial-level vices and how this relates to his status as a Secret Service protectee.

According to the Secret Service website, protectees include the President and Vice President of the United States and their immediate families, which includes Hunter.

Permanent protectees, such as the president and vice president, have special agents permanently assigned to them. . . . Protection for the President and Vice President of the United States is mandatory. All other individuals entitled to our protection may decline security if they choose.

The protection of an individual is comprehensive and goes well beyond surrounding the individual with well-armed agents. As part of our mission of preventing an incident before it occurs, we rely on meticulous advance work and threat assessments to identify potential risks to protectees.

It isn't entirely clear whether Hunter can selectively decline security, but especially if he's in residence at the White House, we've got to assume the Secret Service is fully aware of whom he's seeing, where he's going, who's visiting, and what they're all up to. At least in 2018 and 2019, this included violation of federal law, the Mann Act. Whether or not Hunter was an official protectee at a given time, we know there appears to have been a Secret Service network throughout this period that was doing cleanup work over things like his wrecked rental car in Arizona (fall 2016) and the firearm in the Wilmington dumpster (October 2018). There's never been a satisfactory explanation for either of these episodes.

As far as I can see, the Secret Service has been aware of Hunter violating federal law while Joe was vice president, in the interregnum when Joe was out of office between 2017 and 2021, and as best we can infer, while he's president now -- and beyond that, not just aware of it, but enabling it. Somebody needs to get real and tell Bongino to put up or shut up.