More From Abbe Lowell

Since the elevation of David Weiss to special counsel in the Hunter cases, the one highly visible member of Hunter's legal team has been Abbe Lowell. In yesterday's post, I quoted from an interview he gave Friday on CNN's The Source with Kaitlan Collins. The context of Mr Lowell's apparent new status as lead in Hunter's Delaware cases appears to be the breakdown of the proposed plea agreement in Judge Noreika's Delaware courtroom on July 26.

Hunter's lead attorney on the gun and tax cases up to that point had been Chris Clark. On July 26, Mr Lowell had just been sitting in the courtroom audience along with Kevin Morris, who characterizes himself as Hunter's overall lead attorney and who apparently pays Hunter's legal bills, so he calls the overall shots. When Clark and the prosecutors failed to agree on the deliberately unspoken terms of Hunter's diversion agreement, it sounds as though Messrs Morris and Lowell decided it was time for Lowell to step in.

“Abbe Lowell freaked out, according to my buddy in the courtroom,” said Will Scharf, who also worked as a staffer supporting the Supreme Court confirmations for justices Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

. . . Lowell’s outburst came when federal Judge Maryellen Noreika asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Leo J. Wise if the government was foregoing future prosecutions of Biden based on conduct known to the government, Wise said: No.

Scharf said that his courtroom source told him that Lowell was incensed and glared at the federal prosecutors when it was revealed that Biden would still be subject to violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and other charges—which Wise confirmed to the judge when he told her there were still ongoing investigations.

“Lowell stood up and made a commotion,” said Scharf, who earned his bachelor’s in history at Princeton.

“Then, apparently, he approached one of the DOJ lawyers and said: ‘I wasn’t involved in this case. Now, I am involved in this case.”

As I noted yesterday, Lowell's position as implied in his remarks to Kaitlan Collins is that the prosecutors were acting in bad faith, backing off what Lowell clearly felt was a previous unspoken agreement. And now that Lowell is the one talking to CNN, it looks as though Chris Clark has been shunted aside. We've seen many different interpretations of Attorney General Garland's naming David Weiss special counsel since Friday, but I think Abbe Lowell's take is a strong one, since he's looking at the situation entirely from Hunter's interests -- and he thinks Garland caved to political pressure from the right.

“From the moment this arrangement and agreement has been announced and filed, you have every MAGA right-wing, fanatical person, yelling, and screaming, and saying: ‘It’s not right, and it’s not fair, and it’s not just,’” said Abbe Lowell, Washington’s premier defense attorney and fixer of legal entanglements.

. . . “You have the former president trying to use Hunter Biden as a way to excuse his own conduct,” he said. “At some point, that could pierce; the noise could actually be so noisy that it’d get in the way of the facts and the law.”

Then, Lowell sent a shot across Weiss’ bow: “I am confident that a responsible prosecutor would not let that happen, and we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Lowell, whose job again is to protect his client's interests, is going to maintain the position that the original favorable deal with the guilty pleas and the diversion agreement should stand, and the prosecutors backed off at the last minute due to political pressure. But from Hunter's standpoint, nothing has changed:

Lowell said it should not matter that Weiss is now a special counsel because he and Garland have said there were no restrictions on Weiss taking the investigations and prosecutions wherever he wanted to go, so nothing has changed.

“David Weiss was in charge of the investigation last year, the year before that, and the year before that,” he said.

“He is in charge of the investigation today and tomorrow. He has a new title. His powers, in our view, are the same,” he said. “The evidence hasn’t changed. The law hasn’t changed.”

Now, of course, something has in fact changed, if nothing else, because Garland and Weiss are responding to political pressure, at minimum to improve appearances. As of Friday,

David Weiss, the U.S. attorney leading the investigation moved to dismiss the case against Biden in new court filings so prosecutors can bring charges in Washington, D.C., or California.

. . . After the hearing last month, both parties were directed to submit in writing their responses to Judge Maryellen Noreika’s concerns. On Friday, the Justice Department asked Noreika to set aside those briefing deadlines.

“The Court’s briefing order is premised on the idea that the parties intend to continue towards a guilty plea in Criminal Action No. 23-mj-00274 and diversion in Criminal Action No. 23-cr-00061,” prosecutors wrote.

“But that is no longer the case,” they said. “Following additional negotiations after the hearing held on July 26, 2023, the parties are at an impasse and are not in agreement on either a plea agreement or a diversion agreement. Therefore, the Government believes the Court’s briefing order should be vacated.”

The general reaction to Weiss's designation as special counsel has been that it enabled him to make this move, and the assumption has also been that the likely result will nevertheless be that Weiss will resume a strategy of delaying any action over Hunter, at least until after the 2024 election.

But Lowell's problem, as Hunter's attorney, is that this extends Hunter's risk, and it subordinates the favorable resolution of his client's case to the political winds as they affect Joe. Up to July 26, Hunter had a sure thing, and his risk would end on that day. Now he doesn't, his risk now continues indefinitely, irrespective of any under-the-table renegotiations or assurances Garland and Weiss may give him, which in Lowell's view can no longer be trusted anyhow.

But let's think this through. Abbe Lowell is a seasoned Washington player. He has a client whose interests he's obligated to pursue, and the client is Hunter, not Weiss, not Garland, not even Joe. What I'm reading from this situation is that Hunter's interests are no longer necessarily aligned with Joe's, and that changed on July 26. This changes the dynamic: what does Hunter have on Joe that he could use to protect himself from bad faith dealing and political expedience in these changed circumstances? As Lowell himself says, we’ll just have to wait and see.

The Attorney General Names A Special Prosecutor

Since I'm old enough to have lived through Watergate as an adult and followed it closely, I find a certain amount of déjà vu in Attorney General Garland's announcement that he had given Delaware US Attorney David Weiss special counsel authority in the Hunter Biden investigation. According to the New York Post,

Garland’s announcement came 10 months and four days after Weiss allegedly told officials from the FBI and IRS that he lacked authority to charge the first son, now 53, outside of Delaware.

The attorney general took no questions following his statement, ignoring a reporter who asked why Weiss had been elevated to special counsel if he had “ultimate authority” to prosecute, as Garland claimed in sworn congressional testimony earlier this year.

This comes in the context of new developments in the Hunter Biden case:

Court papers revealed Friday the president’s son Hunter Biden’s tax and gun crimes case will now likely go to trial, with negotiations over a new sweetheart plea deal appearing to collapse.

The case will likely now be moved out of Delaware. The court papers indicated a plea deal had reached an “impasse” and the case is headed toward trial.

. . . “After the hearing, the parties continued negotiating but reached an impasse. A trial is therefore in order,” prosecutors said in their Friday filing, the NBC News report sets out.

Elizabeth Stauffer writes at Power Line:

Sources told Sean Hannity that President Joe Biden is said to be “distraught” over the spectacular collapse of his son’s sweetheart deal. Of course he is. What parent wouldn’t be?

But he is also upset for himself. . . . Despite the Left’s insistence that this is a Hunter Biden story, mounting evidence shows that Joe Biden is inextricably linked to his son’s unsavory foreign business dealings.

It’s also a Justice Department story. Judge Maryellen Noreika’s refusal to rubber stamp the agreement exposed the weaponization of the DOJ for the world to see.

. . . There’s no question that prosecutors were more interested in protecting the Bidens than in pursuing actual justice. Rather than following the law in this case, they looked for a path to a predetermined outcome.

Their actions may open up DOJ prosecutors and those up the chain of command, including Attorney General Merrick Garland himself, to obstruction of justice charges.

This unavoidably takes me back to Watergate and Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, whose photo is at the top of this post. Cox has little in common with David Weiss except that both found themselves in the middle of a major scandal, but it's likely that Weiss will wind up little better off than Cox. But Nixon, who was forced to accept Cox's appointment as the cost of Senate confirmation for Elliot Richardson, his choice for attorney general, understood that Cox was his enemy from the start, while it appears that Weiss is in his job to continue covering for the Bidens.

The Wikipedia entries on Archibald Cox and the Saturday Night Massacre of October 20, 1973 suggest the extreme sensitivity of special prosecutors' positions during a constitutional crisis, which it looks like the Biden cases will also become. But just so far, there are intriguing historical parallels.

Nixon fired Cox as apecial prosecutor that October 20 in the wake of a guilty plea by former White House counsel John Dean on October 19, which included an agreement to cooperate with prosecutors. Dean subsequently testified in the trials of Watergate conspirators Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Robert Mardian, and Kenneth Parkinson. It's likely that with Dean's guilty plea, which in fact resulted in his receiving extremely lenient treatment in his sentencing, Nixon sensed the game was up and had little choice but to fire Cox, although this only delayed his own departure.

It's beginning to look like the failure of Hunter's attempted guilty plea in Delaware in exchange for equivalent lenient treatment is setting potentially similar processes in motion for Joe Biden, but they'll result not from firing a special prosecutor but from naming one. In the case of Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre, firing Cox had the opposite effect of what was intended, while Garland's naming Weiss to the same position may or may not have a similar effect. Nevertheless, on one hand, we see the press asking why Garland felt the need to name Weiss special prosecutor if Garland had already claimed Weiss already had such authority, while Hunter's lawyer Abbe Lowell has now effectively said the same thing:

On Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Source,” Hunter Biden attorney Abbe Lowell stated that David Weiss has no more power as a special counsel than he did before and noted that both Attorney General Merrick Garland and Weiss himself “have said for weeks, months, that he had all the authority he needed to bring any charge that was merited, at any time that was appropriate, in any place that made sense. … So, from a practical point of view, nothing really changed.”

Mr Lowell has an intriguing take on how the negotiations changed:

Later, Lowell added that the failure to reach plea bargain showed there was “a disagreement” over what the plea deal meant. . . . It could be that somehow the prosecutors thought they were making a statement that they turned out either not to be accurate about or not to be specific about. Or it could be, as you saw in court, that they seemed to be changing their position as the proceedings went along.”

In effect, Mr Lowell, who is neither a naif nor a novice to such processes, is accusing Weiss and Garland of bad faith in not quite so many words. What's changed? Interesting question. It isn't a good sign, though, that parties -- indeed, a father and son tacitly coordinating through proxies -- who were up to now thought to have been working in covert harmony are now in public disagreement.

There may even turn out to be parallels between John Dean and Hunter Biden. Is Hunter mad enough at the Delaware deal falling through to decide he's not going to take the fall for Joe? I'm starting to wonder if more was involved in the Delaware deal than we've so far learned, and Hunter may not want to risk going to prison just to cover up for Joe and the rest of the family. At least, that's what I might read into Mr Lowell's remarks.

Dunning-Kruger In Action

One of my regular points here has been that it's less productive to try to explain Biden's behavior by saying he has a medical condition, which nobody other than a medical professional who's examined him can say, than it is to refer to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. A clear example of how this works is in Joe's heated exchange with Fox's Peter Doocy in New Mexico this past Wednesday, August 9.

Doocy is providing some funny backstory to the exchange, as well as reporting on the White House’s response to his question.

Doocy said Biden was waving him over to talk, so he tried to climb over a barrier where the press was being held when he was stopped by a White House aide. The aide was trying to stop him, saying Biden didn’t have time to talk. Doocy joked, cautioning the public not to ever jump over a barrier to do what he did in the face of the Secret Service.

Elsewhwere, Doocy stressed that Biden had specifically invited him to cross the security barrier:

I had a chance at the president’s invitation – he waved us on over – to ask him.

According to The Hill,

Doocy, who returned to Fox’s airwaves this week after a stint on paternity leave, has gotten under the president’s skin with his line of questioning on multiple occasions.

The Independent link above repeats the point that Doocy is the one reporter whose questions Joe most resents:

Early last year, a hot microphone captured the president referring to Doocy as “a stupid son of a b****” following a question posed by the reporter about inflation.

But Biden repeatedly seeks out Doocy specifically to set up the same sort of exchanges in which Joe comes off second best. The puzzling thing is why this pattern exists -- the White House staff is clearly aware of it and tries to prevent new instances.

Such was the case on Wednesday, when during the now-infamous clip of Biden losing it with Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy, a handler stepped in moments after Doocy began asking the Devon Archer speakerphone question — and proceeded to promptly take control of the situation… and Joe Biden.

Fox reporter Peter Doocy shouted a question to the president during the event in New Mexico. When the president could not hear him, he asked him to get closer. Doocy jumped over the barriers to speak with the president. It is hard to hear the conversation, but it was an… pic.twitter.com/dgRxxmTqam

— Emel Akan (@mlakan) August 9, 2023

The Red State writer comments,

I mean seriously – this woman absolutely means business.

The problem is that Joe himself works against his staff, as he did in New Mexico. I think the reason is clear: he simply thinks he's smarter than Doocy, whom he sees as the most capable of his opponents in the press, so he deliberately seeks Doocy out to prove it. And in his mind, he does in fact think he's proven it, every time, which is why he keeps doing it. Cut to the Dunning-Kruger effect:

John Cleese, the British comedian, once summed up the idea of the Dunning–Kruger effect as, “If you are really, really stupid, then it’s impossible for you to know you are really, really stupid.”

One problem Joe has is that not only does he think he's smarter than Peter Doocy, and not only does he believe he proves it every time he engages Doocy, but he also clearly thinks he's smarter than the White House staff who keep trying to prevent him from doing it.

Pelosi Steps Out

It turns out that while I quoted Speaker Emerita Pelosi's apocalyptic remarks on Trump yesterday, they were from a piece in New York Magazine, How Nancy Pelosi’s Long Game Led to Trump’s Indictment, and I actually missed much more important content that bears on what I've been writing about for the past several days.

(While various accounts of her retirement have referred to her as "emeritus", a term I've been using, it turns out from the piece that she is actually styled "Speaker Emerita", though I would think the politically correct usage would be "Emeritx".)

In the interview at the link, Pelosi takes credit for Trump's indictment, and indeed by implication almost everything that's happened since January 6 -- although she avoids taking credit for the Capitol incursion itself.

It was the then-Speaker of the House who insisted that there be a congressional inquiry following January 6. And it was the work of the select committee she fashioned that finally appears to have spurred a reluctant Justice Department to action, setting in motion a more intense phase of criminal scrutiny focused on Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The resulting indictment closely tracks the select committee’s work and findings, presenting a factual narrative that traces — almost identically — the evidence presented by the committee of a sophisticated, multipronged effort by Trump to remain in power that culminated in the mayhem at the U.S. Capitol.

What's been puzzling me is how little has been said of Trump's actual plan, or maybe more accurately, the plan of some of his congressional supporters.

Long before January 6 itself, Pelosi had been preparing for Trump to try to disrupt the transfer of power. “During the election, I thought, ‘He’s going to try to pull a stunt and we have to try to have as many states in the Democratic column as possible,’” she told me, contemplating the possibility that Biden’s victory might not be certified and that the House would have to move to an obscure procedure in which each state’s congressional delegation would cast a single vote to determine the next president.

As I've outlined here, the specific plan was to use the Twelfth Amendment of the US Constitution, which reads in part:

The person having the greatest number of [electoral] votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote. . .

That procedure, outlined in the Constitution, is hardly "obscure". What is possibly more obscure is the means by which a majority of the electoral votes can be challenged, which is outlined in the Electoral Count Act of 1887 that provides for objections to the electoral count on the day of certification. The best account I've seen of what appears to have happened on January 6 is at the Wikipedia link:

Following on attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election leading up to congressional certification, Representative Paul Gosar and Senator Ted Cruz filed an objection to the certification of the electoral votes of Arizona. The two houses withdrew and debated the objection, but were evacuated during an attack on the Capitol by pro-Trump protesters. After the crowd was expelled and the Capitol secured, the question was taken up again and the Senate rejected it 6–93 and the House rejected it 121–303. Representative Scott Perry and Senator Josh Hawley later filed an objection to the electoral votes of Pennsylvania with the result that the objection was rejected 7–92 in the Senate and 138–282 in the House.

It is probably correct to say that it wasn't in Trump's interest for supporters to storm the Capitol, but it's also clear that neither house of congress was willing to support any electoral challenge under the 1887 act. The best that can be said is that Trump's congressional supporters had an extreme uphill battle, and they certainly didn't have their ducks in a row going into the process. In addition, it doesn't seem that much effort was made to bring Vice President Pence on board, and his subsequent remarks suggest he never had a clear idea of what was intended.

However, every indication is that the attempt to throw the election into the House was based on the US Constitution and existing law, but as such, it failed under existing procedure. There were no tanks in the streets, it was never any sort of unlawful insurrection or coup attempt.

Speaker Pelosi at the time apparently did have a much clearer idea of what some of the Republicans intended than most of the Republicans themselves. On the other hand, especially given the way the New York Magazine piece praises her savvy, she likely also knew perfectly well what the outcome would be of any debate in the House or Senate following such a challenge, namely, that it would fail massively. So what was her object? The New York Magazine link says,

Republicans in Congress . . . could have exiled Trump from political life and perhaps spared him more intense legal scrutiny if they had voted to convict him in the impeachment trial over his role in the siege of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In other words, her object was to drive a stake through Trump's heart. Her continuing problem is that this hasn't happened, and the point of the story seems to be that she's acutely aware of it -- and a major cause, in her pretty clearly expressed view, has been the dithering of Biden and his appointees over doing what must be done:

Meanwhile, there were questions about what the Justice Department was doing to address the potential criminal culpability of Trump and those in his orbit. The committee’s members and staff were uncovering — and presenting to the public — damaging evidence that they had obtained from Trump administration officials, but the DOJ was not pursuing those same threads — despite public frustration among some observers — seemingly content with focusing on the people who had stormed the Capitol or who played a role in organizing the violence that day.

In effect, Pelosi in this interview is saying she engineered Trump's impeachments and laid out a strategy for ending Trump's career after January 6, but Biden and Garland have waited too long to make their move and botched the job. There may be some truth to this, and it probably unintentionally shows what she thinks of Biden, but it also underestimates Trump. Still, it sets up a narrative by which the Democrat establishment can back off a 2024 debacle by blaming Biden, and that might be the real takeaway from the New York Magazine piece: Pelosi senses a disaster on the horizon and is going to blame Biden.

Götterdämmerung Redux!

Back in 2021, I was intrigued by what I called the Democrats' Götterdämmerung strategy, which they implemented following their narrow congressional victories in 2020, along with the hinky Biden electoral victory for the presidency. I called it that, because it reminded me of the lighthearted comment some people made over the Mayan calendar prediction that the world would end on December 21, 2012, that if thry knew it would end on a date certain, they'd run up their credit cards over the prior month knowing they'd never have to pay them back. At the time, I noted

[Speaker Pelosi] expected to enact the Great Reset agenda via a pair of infrastructure bills in 2021, getting it all done before the start of the 2022 election cycle, when by this point conventional wisdom expects Republican control of congress to return. The problem with this strategy is that it simply doesn't think past 2021 -- who cares if everything falls apart after this year? Speasker Pelosi will retire! The Götterdämmerung won't be her problem! The COVID strategy fails? The border collapses? The Taliban humiliates us? Inflation? None of those bills will come due until next year, when the Speaker will retire!

Something like what I predicted seems to be taking place now. Speaker Pelosi, having retired (at least as Speaker, but she kept her seat) following a narrow loss of her House majority in 2022, is invoking, of all things, the end of the world as we know it:

When asked about the possibility of another Trump presidency, Pelosi commanded the reporter “Don’t even think of that.”

“Don’t think of the world being on fire,” she continued, adding “It cannot happen, or we will not be the United States of America.”

“If he were to be president, it would be a criminal enterprise in the White House,” she added, without a hint of irony.

However, as I've noted, Speaker Emeritus Pelosi has close family and political connections with California Gov Gavin Newsom, who appears to be making contingency plans to run for president should Joe Biden ultimately decide not to run, and as I've said, Ms Pelosi continues to be a major figure in the Democrat party, and Newsom would not be doing this without her tacit endorsement. But the inescapable fact is that the Democrats ran up the credit card balances expecting the world to end, it didn't, and now they have to figure out how to pay the bills.

The Speaker Emeritus's hysteria comes at a time when the incumbent party ought to be expressing quiet confidence about the next election, which is over a year away. But indications are that the effort to defeat Trump by piling on indictments is backfiring:

World's least surprising news: 'The public's attention to former President Trump's legal drama has declined with each subsequent indictment.' From @axios https://t.co/Fi0xANKUU9

— Byron York (@ByronYork) August 8, 2023

This brings me to an estimate I've made that the Democrats can't dump Biden, because as an old white guy who isn't Bernie Sanders, he's the last vestige of the New Deal coalition, and any successor will inevitably be just an unelectable front for one or another leftist splinter faction of the old party. Paul Gottfried at American Grestness had a similar take last month:

If the DNC, Democratic congressmen and the MSM were eager to dump Biden, they would have done so by now. . . . If Biden suddenly fell behind in hypothetical races against Republican presidential contenders, then the powerbrokers might decide to pursue a different course. But this has not yet happened.

. . . Joe does have an advantage over other Democratic contenders, and that advantage is precisely his cognitively weakened, morally compromised state. Like John Fetterman, Biden is ridiculously easy for the Left to manipulate. He can also be easily blackmailed. Enough of the public already knows that Biden runs a crime family, and if he falls out of line, the media and his more immediate handlers may stop hiding this fact. Despite his cognitive limits, Joe is sufficiently sentient to understand his own vulnerability. He will therefore continue obeying his political masters, who have stood behind him while keeping his enemies in check.

Nevertheless, it's been leaked that Obama is worried, and Speaker Emeritus Pelosi is now contemplating the end of the world. Trump, meanwhile, is using the indictments and the media coverage to suck out all the air in the room from the other Republican candidates, and in fact he's using the attention he gets from rallies and social media posts to troll Biden, Pelosi, the judges, and the prosecutors, which so far appears to be working well for him, notwithstanding the likes of Jonathan Turley are clutching their pearls at the spectacle.

But if the public is beginning to see the indictments as a joke, the only effective response is to treat them as precisely that. And now his attorneys are joining the fun:

Washington, D.C., District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan requested the federal prosecutors and the Trump team to agree on a day this week, but Trump's leading attorneys, John Lauro and Todd Blanche, cannot appear on Trump's behalf before early next week, Smith's filing Tuesday showed.

Smith told Chutkan that his team is ready for a hearing Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday , but was told by Trump's team that Lauro and Blanche are unavailable together before Monday or Tuesday of next week.

. . . Prosecutors with Smith's team quickly countered with their own filing, accusing Trump of objecting to their proposal because he wants to be able to use the government's evidence to "try the case in the media rather than in the courtroom."

Whatever the prosecutors and the judge try to do, Trump and his attorneys will do everything they can to make monkeys out of them, because they have nothing to lose. This is the William Kunstler-Chicago Seven defense to a political trial; it worked then, and it will work now.

Meanwhile, as I noted yesterday, the House Republicans are seizing the opportunity to challenge the received narrative over the 2020 election. We can only wait and see how this plays out, but so far, I think my Götterdämmerung model is proving itself.

Yes, They're Going To Relitigate The 2020 Election

On Sunday, I noted the phenomenon we've seen since Trump's arrival as a political contender whereby received opinion has promoted a series of quasi-verities that go unquestioned, at least for a period of years, and anyone who doubts them is called a conspiracy theorist. Then something happens, and the quasi-verity collapses and turns out to have been a hoax. One that has continuing prestige, at least so far, is the idea that Trump is delusional or in denial that he lost the 2020 election, which was, as it's sometimes put, stolen fair and square.

But the history we've seen of such quasi-verities makes me skeptical. One of the shorter-lived examples promoted by received opinion was the idea that Hunter Biden's laptop was just Russian disinformation. Recent testimony from FBI whistleblowers has established that

The FBI “verified” the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in November 2019 and a federal computer expert assessed “it was not manipulated in any way,” IRS supervisory agent Gary Shapley told Congress in explosive testimony released Thursday.

. . . “In October 2019, the FBI became aware that a repair shop had a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden and that the laptop might contain evidence of a crime. The FBI verified its authenticity in November of 2019 by matching the device number against Hunter Biden’s Apple iCloud ID,” [whistleblower] Shapley said.

. . . Most news outlets ignored the laptop’s contents until well after Biden won the 2020 election, with the Washington Post and New York Times saying only in March 2022 that they had confirmed the authenticity of files.

This was actually a pretty short life for that particular quasi-verity. However, it's generally acknowledged that had the FBI acknowledged its authenticity, it would have been a bigger issue in the election and could conceivably have affected the outcome.

When President Donald Trump raised Hunter Biden’s laptop during the final 2020 presidential debate, Joe Biden dismissed it as a “Russian plant,” citing “five former heads of the CIA” who say it’s “a bunch of garbage.”

We now know this was patently untrue. The laptop was authentic. But at the time, almost no one in the news media questioned Biden’s false assertion. To the contrary, CNN questioned whether Trump had “spread Russian disinformation” during the debate by raising the laptop.

Twitter suppressed the New York Post story that broke the news of the laptop’s existence, preventing users from sharing the story or even sending it by direct message (a tool usually used to stop the dissemination of child pornography). Worse, the company suspended the New York Post’s Twitter account, as well as other accounts that shared the story.

By last June, we learned that Secretary Blinken was at least involved in coordinating a letter from 51 former spy-agency leaders that claimed The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop could be Russian disinformation.

Blinken’s October 2020 outreach to former CIA acting director Michael Morell was credited by Morell with inspiring the letter, though Morell says Blinken, then a Biden campaign aide, didn’t specifically ask him to write it.

But Jordan and Turner revealed that other letter-signers described Blinken as asking for the letter in their own depositions by the committees.

We've become generally aware over the past year that there was a coordinated effort to discredit the Hunter laptop story, but yesterday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan added important detail:

Jordan published documents showing the FBI's comments on the Hunter Biden story when it first broke and how FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan testified about his meetings with Facebook representatives.

Chan and Foreign Influence Task Force Section Chief Laura Dehmlow met with Facebook on Oct. 14, 2020, the day the New York Post published its story on the Hunter Biden laptop. Dehmlow met with both Twitter and Facebook that day.

At this time, the FBI had the laptop in its possession and knew that it was real, Jordan said.

Documents published by Jordan show that when a Twitter representative asked whether the story was real, an FBI agent said "yes," but an FBI lawyer jumped in, cutting him off with, "No further comment."

Dehmlow then said the FBI held emergency deliberations on how to respond to the question going forward. When the Facebook meeting was held later in the day, the FBI simply said, "No comment," when asked whether the Hunter Biden story was factual.

Twitter and Facebook then censored the story.

In December of last year, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan, who worked on the agency's Foreign Influence Task Force, testified in a lawsuit that he met weekly with Twitter and Facebook to "warn against Russian disinformation attempts ahead of the 2020 election". Although this testimony about the existence of these meetings was known at the time, Chairman Jordan's new allegation is that Chan purjured himself in this testimony.

In a sworn deposition in the Missouri v. Biden case, FBI special agent Elvis Chan, who is the main conduit between the bureau and big tech companies, claimed that apart from one instance, he was not aware of any meetings between Facebook and the FBI regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story.

In the same deposition, he also claimed that he had “no internal knowledge” of the FBI’s investigation regarding the troubled Biden son’s laptop.

The Facebook files reveal both claims to be false. An internal Facebook communication reveals that Chan had more than one meeting with Facebook regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story.

In addition,

When Facebook initially asked the FBI if the Hunter Biden laptop story was real, Laura Dehmlow, currently Section Chief of the Foreign Influence Task Force, said “no comment.” At that point, the FBI was fully aware that the laptop was real, according to Rep. Jordan.

What I find most intriguing about this latest data point is that it reveals an effort within the FBI under Director Wray, a Trump appointee working within his administration, to influlence social media with false information that would aid the Biden campaign. In tandem with the letter from 51 former intelligence officers discrediting the laptop story, it strongly suggests a coordinated effort within the organs of state security to influence the election in Biden's favor. That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.

Did anyone suggest to Director Wray that he should so this, especially in coordination with members of the intelligence community? If so, who? The FBI was fully aware that the laptop was authentic. Why did Wray allow the agency to promote this false information? What was Biden's role, or he role of close campaign advisors working on his behalf, in influencing these activities?

And this brings us to a bigger question, what is Biden's role in influencing the current prosecutions of Trump?

[A] story from the New York Times published in April 2022 is gaining new attention, especially after Smith indicted Trump for speech surrounding the events of January 6, 2021 last week.

"The attorney general’s deliberative approach has come to frustrate Democratic allies of the White House and, at times, President Biden himself. As recently as late last year, Mr. Biden confided to his inner circle that he believed former President Donald J. Trump was a threat to democracy and should be prosecuted, according to two people familiar with his comments. And while the president has never communicated his frustrations directly to Mr. Garland, he has said privately that he wanted Mr. Garland to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6," the paper reported.

. . . More than a year later and at the beginning of the 2024 presidential election, the Department of Justice has fulfilled President Joe Biden's demands Trump be indicted over January 6.

My sense is that the House Republicans have Director Wray in their immediate crosshairs, and that will be a conduit to get Attorney General Garland. An inevitable result of these efforts, fed by material that will inevitably emerge from discovery following Trump's third indictment, will be a re-litigation of the 2020 election and the question of how justified Trump was in believing it was "rigged" or "stolen". This willl also come out in the continuing Republican primary process: given the positions of anti-Trump candidates like Pence and Christie that Trump is delusional, this will be up for real debate.

I had originally expected that the August congressional recess would be a vacation with little news, but it looks like the Republicans have a sense of urgency, and this won't be the case.

Back To 1876 And Mike Pence

Over the weekend, since the third Trump indictment, I've begun to see renewed references to the 1876 election, the Compromise of 1877, and the Electoral Count Act of 1887. Trump's strategy, given assertions that the 2020 vote counts in several states were irregular, was to throw the election into the House of Representatives per the Twelfth Amendment of the US Constitution, as intepreted by the Electoral Count Act of 1887. This post at the National Constitutional Center from December 15, 2020, anticipates and explains this strategy:

Federal law requires the states to deliver certified electoral college results to the vice president, serving as president of the Senate, and other parties by December 23. Then a joint meeting of Congress is required by the 12th Amendment to count the electoral votes and declare the winners of the presidential election. The session on January 6, 2021 starts at 1 p.m.

Objections at that meeting about electors will be settled using a process established by the Electoral Count Act of 1887. The law has its origins in the contested presidential election of 1876 between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes. Several states during the 1876 election sent rival electoral ballots to be considered by Congress, which lacked a procedure to decide among contested slates of electors. The short-term solution was a special 15-person commission (including five House Representatives, five Senators, and five Supreme Court justices) to decide the election, which went to Hayes. In the end, the participating Supreme Court justices cast the deciding votes, after the House and Senate members voted on party lines.

The Electoral Count Act of 1887 and several federal statutes address questions about contested electors that land in Congress. The Congressional Research Service’s current interpretation of the Electoral Count Act explains its understanding of the process when it comes to objections to electoral votes.

“Objections to individual state returns must be made in writing by at least one Member each of the Senate and House of Representatives. If an objection meets these requirements, the joint session recesses and the two houses separate and debate the question in their respective chambers for a maximum of two hours,” the CRS said. “The two houses then vote separately to accept or reject the objection. They then reassemble in joint session, and announce the results of their respective votes. An objection to a state’s electoral vote must be approved by both houses in order for any contested votes to be excluded.”

As Trump's lawyer Christina Bobb explained in yesterday's post, Trump's congressional allies began the process by having one senator and one congressman object to the Arizona electors, Pence in his role as President of the Senate recessed the joint session, and the process of debate began. This was interrupted by the incursion of a crowd of demonstrators into the Capitol, which in effect stopped the process. As Ms Bobb pointed out, this was contrary to the interests of Trump and his allies, and the actual origins of the incursion are still unclear.

While there are questions about the vice president's role in such proceedings, the Electoral Count Act does provide that the vice president in his role as President of the Senate presides over them. Vice President Pence appears to have vacillated over his precise powers on January 6.

[Trump's] Attorney John Lauro said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that Mr. Trump’s defense team believes Mr. Pence’s court testimony could be crucial in exonerating the former president of any wrongdoing in the so-called Jan. 6 case.

. . . “The reason why Vice President Pence will be so important to the defense is . . . number one, he agrees that John Eastman, who gave legal advice to President Trump, was an esteemed legal scholar,” Mr. Lauro told the outlet. “Number two, he agrees that there were election irregularities, fraud, unlawful actions at the state level. All of that will eviscerate any allegation of criminal intent on the part of President Trump,” he added.

Mr. Lauro added that Mr. Pence believed doubts around the 2020 election were legitimate enough to warrant debate during the proceedings on Jan. 6, 2021, when lawmakers assembled Capitol Hill to certify the Electoral College vote.

Ahead of Jan. 6, Mr. Pence’s chief of staff said that the former vice president welcomed an effort by some lawmakers to raise objections on Jan. 6.

. . . Mr. Lauro added that there was a “constitutional disagreement” between Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence around whether the vice president at the time had the legal authority to reject questionable electoral votes and kick the issue back to the states for further debate or audit.

The attorney said that, at the end of the day, what Mr. Trump wanted from Mr. Pence to do on Jan. 6 was not to overturn the results of the election but stop the counting of electoral votes to allow further debate at the state level.

“The ultimate ask of Vice President Pence was to pause the counts and allow the states to weigh in,” Mr. Lauro said.

We must assume that Pence agreed sufficiently with Trump's interpretation of his role that he did in fact recognize the objections of one senator and one congressman and begin the process of debate in the individual houses, but that process was interrupted and never resumed. The link above continues,

In an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Mr. Pence insisted that Mr. Trump’s team had asked him outright to overturn the results of the election.

“They were asking me to overturn the election. I had no right to overturn the election,” Mr. Pence told the outlet.

There seems, though, to be a general understanding that while interpretations of the Electoral Count Act may differ, Pence had already followed provisions of the act by placing the January 6 joint session in recess for separate debate on the Arizona objections. This debate never concluded, and apparently the joint session never resumed to hear subsequent objections on January 6 after the incursion. At no point in the process does there appear to have been any real opportuinity for Pence to "overturn the election". On the other hand, he never had an opportunity to continue to preside under the provisions of the act to hear further objections to other states' electors.

It's hard to avoid thinking that the various pressures Pence has faced since January 6, 2021 have left him confused over even his generally acknowledged role as president of the joint session that day. That he's now a candidate for the Republican nomination against Trump gives him some incentive to claim Trump wanted him to "overturn the election", but voters so far are rejecting this.

Former Vice President Pence on Friday faced heckling from supporters of former President Donald Trump outside a campaign stop in Londonderry, N.H.

“Why did you sell out the people?” one heckler can be heard saying in a video taken outside of the event and shared across social media.

Pence's current claim, from the link farther above, is “From sometime in the middle of December, the president began to be told that I had some authority to reject or return votes back to the states. I had no such authority. No vice president in American history had ever asserted that authority and no one ever should.”

But as far as I can tell, he was asked only preside over the joint session of congress specified in the Electoral Count Act and recess the session for debate once the specified objections were received. But no ther vice president had been called upon to do this, ever, since the need to invoke the act had never some up since 1887, even though this was completely legal, and it was what Pence did in fact do before the demonstators broke into the Capitol. For whatever reason, the separate debates over the Arizona electors were never concluded, and the joint session never resumed to hear addional objections to other states' electors. It almost sounds as though Pence was complicit in this and simply stopped the process specified in the Electoral Count Act, possibly because even though it was constitutional, he was prevailed upon to stop it due to the potential outcome.

What last weeK's indictment has done has been simply to reopen the 2020 election and raise both old and new questions about the events of January 6, which simply increases the chance that the existing accepted narratives will collapse. It was an unwise move by the deep state to do this. On the other hand, Mike Pence's reputation will now be irredeemably destroyed.