The National Work Of Fantasy

An editorial comment at MSNBC caught my eye this morning:

A former president of the United States has now been criminally indicted for a fourth time. Less than a decade ago, we would have assumed a sentence like that would be found only in a work of fiction. Never in the history of our country has a former president faced one, let alone four, criminal indictments.

It's indisputable that even Tom Clancy, the author of deep state-military thrillers like Clear and Present Danger who foresaw the 9/11 attacks, didn't remotely predict that one US president would be indicted four times as news broke of another allegedly collecting tens of millions in foreign bribes. The problem is that these headlines are playing out in a dreamlike context where they've begun to have the same effect as “I was Bigfoot’s Love Slave,” “Hillary Clinton Adopts Alien Baby,” or “Bat Child Found in Cave”.

In other words, if a writer at MSNBC wonders if the Trump indictments sound like a bad Tom Clancy knockoff, maybe it's because that's what they are. Consider yesterday's report from the Marist Institute on their latest poll:

Many Republicans are unfazed by former President Donald Trump’s legal woes. While a majority of Americans say Trump should abandon his 2024 presidential bid, most Republicans and nearly half of independents want Trump to carry on. About two in three who align with the GOP consider Trump to be the best person to lead the Republican Party in 2024 and plan to back the embattled former president over his Republican rivals. Trump leads GOP primary rival, Ron DeSantis, by more than two-to-one in a head-to-head matchup. And, bolstered by support among independents, Trump runs competitively against President Joe Biden in a general election rematch.

And Marist leans Democrat. This phenomenon takes me back to Paul Fussell's remarks in Class about alien baby headlines in the tabloids, that the working-class readers aren't stupid, they're fully aware that neither Elvis nor JFK has been found alive, but they enjoy a certain level of tall-tale entertainment. The problem with the current state of discourse is that the people who think they control the media have lost track of this distinction -- they think they're reimagining a new version of reality in which alien babies or Elvis found alive are credible, when the public has always had the basic good sense to know they aren't.

Exactly when the soi-disant masters of the universe fell into this delusion is hard to trace. Just this morning I ran into a reference to this remark from 2008: “The bad thing is that the federal government has figured out that it can borrow a lot more money than it previously thought,” and this takes me back to the dreamlike environment portrayed in The Big Short where strippers were buying multiple homes, refinancing them, and buying more.

But certainly as of 2020, the media mainstream was writing freakout headlines like "Superbug Virus Threatens To Wipe Out Human Race!" and expecting the proles to believe it, which set off three years of conflict in which the proles, complaining they couldn't understand why they couldn't go to work, go to the beach, or go to church, undertook an ultimately successful campaign of passive resistance against the tabloid-headline propaganda, or more accurately, that one particular manifestation of tabloid-headline propaganda.

At roughly the same time, we began to get another set of tabloid headlines, "Scientists Say Boys Can Turn Into Girls!" That brought us Dr Rachel Levine and Dylan Mulvaney, and it evoked yet another insight from Paul Fussell's Class. A piece in The Atlantic from 2009 prophetically summarized part of Fussell's point:

Some 25 years have passed since the publication of Paul Fussell’s naughty treat Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, and I think this quarter-century mark merits the raising of either a yachting pennant, an American flag, or a wind sock with the Budweiser logo (corresponding to Fussell’s demarcations of Upper Class, Middle Class, and Prole).

But how, 14 years after The Atlantic's summary, we find the proles have risen to tear down that very emblem of their class status, the Budweiser logo. And they've done it in rebellion over the upper class's appropriation of that emblem, in the person of the Budweiser marketer Alissa Heinerscheid, the upper-class, oh-so-Episcopalian woman who is neither too rich nor too thin, who eagerly expected the proles to believe the tabloid headline "Scientists Say Boys Can Turn Into Girls!" and buy lots of Budweiser beer.

That worked about as well as "Superbug Virus Threatens To Wipe Out Human Race!" That in turn worked about as well as "Strippers Get Rich Flipping Florida Homes!" Now we get "President Trump Indicted For The Fourth Time!" Fussell said, or at least he claimed at one time to believe, that the proles dig this stuff for entertainment, but they don't actually believe it. Maybe he had a point.

On the other hand, at the end of his life in Doing Battle, he claimed he never meant Class to be taken seriously, it was just a big windup. Still, it's hard not to conclude that his model of prole opinion has some weight -- the proles can recognize a tabloid headline when they see it, and they take it as seriously as it deserves to be taken. The masters of the universe have yet to figure this out. The elites dismiss the commmon sense of the workers at their peril.

Chris Clark Is Off Hunter's Case

On Sunday, I intuited,

{N}ow that [Abbe] Lowell is the one talking to CNN, it looks as though Chris Clark has been shunted aside.

It turns out I was right. Via Breitbart,

Hunter Biden’s criminal defense attorney Chris Clark requested Tuesday to withdraw from representing his client, citing a conflict of continuing to represent the president’s son in a potential trial in which he could be asked to be a witness.

This is a remarkable development, since he left the white-shoe Latham & Warkins law firm only this past April to add his name to another firm, Clark Smith Villazor, primarily to represent Hunter as its flagship client. According to Law.com,

Chris Clark, a prominent litigation partner at Latham & Watkins who has been representing Hunter Biden in a high-profile tax investigation, has left the elite firm to join boutique Smith Villazor in New York.

With his arrival, the boutique has been renamed Clark Smith Villazor, the partners announced Thursday. He joins Patrick J. Smith and Rodney Villazor, who launched the white-collar litigation boutique in 2016 after leaving DLA Piper.

According to press reports, Clark has been representing Biden in a tax investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware. In an interview Wednesday, Clark said his representation of Biden was not a factor in his decision to make the move and that he will continue to work with Biden. Latham will continue advising Biden as well, he said.

The main effect of Latham's continuing advice to Hunter Biden has been for Latham to risk sanctions in connection with accusations that a member of their staff misrepresented whom she worked for while requesting that amicus filings from a House committee chair be removed from the public docket. Clark was quite possibly behind this move, which arguably was a factor that prompted Judge Noreika's unwillingness to approve Hunter's plea deal on July 26.

In the wake of his request for removal as Hunter's attorney, Clark's web page hasn't been updated yet; it still says,

Chris Clark is a pre-eminent litigator who has successfully handled the highest stakes and highest profile matters in nearly every type of major dispute.

Chris has delivered amazing results for clients. . . . Chris currently represents Robert Hunter Biden in his federal criminal investigation. Clients come to Chris for smart, aggressive, and proactive handling of their weightiest issues and come back because of extraordinary results.

According to the Breitbart link,

Clark cited a Delaware rule that prevents lawyers from advocating on behalf of their clients if it is likely a lawyer will be called as a witness.

“Pursuant to Delaware Rule of Professional Conduct 3.7(a), ‘a lawyer shall not act as advocate at a trial in which the lawyer is likely to be a necessary witness unless… disqualification of the lawyer would work substantial hardship on the client,’” Clark wrote in his filing.

In general, when lawyers request to withdraw from a case, it's for the most neutral public reasons, especially to avoid damaging the client's interests, but also to preserve the lawyer's own reputation. But some of Abbe Lowell's recent public remarks suggest he wasn't happy with Clark's performance, such as on CNN Friday evening:

So, the proceedings on July 26th, obviously disclosed a disagreement. And the disagreement was that we said what we understood the agreement to mean, which is what Chris said.

So, let me ask you, and anybody, who's paying attention, the following question. What group of experienced attorneys would have their client plead guilty, on Monday, to a misdemeanor, believing that the prosecutors could bring a felony, on Wednesday?

What group of experienced attorneys indeed? My wife, a retired attorney, thinks this is a humiliating development for Clark, who on his own website was clearly anticipating a victory in Hunter's headline case, getting him off with a misdemeanor plea and a diversion agreement. Think of the white-collar crooks who'd be lining up to have him defend them after that! But the celebration has turned out to be premature.

Instead, he's off the case amid what's so far looking like a catastrophic development, with Clark himself potentially a key trial witness in a Watergate-level scandal. And I'm not sure if the whole question of how someone from Latham & Watkins called Judge Noreika's clerk to have an amicus filing taken off the docket has been resolved -- Clark may well still have questions to answer there, too.

My wife thinks Clark was probably overhyped and overrated from the start, and it's probably also the case that Latham & Watkins is now heaving a sigh of relief that he's out the door. Meanwhile, Abbe Lowell has his work cut out to salvage Hunter's plea deal.

So, Why Did He Say, "No Comment" Yesterday?

This is another of my posts on the futility of trying to explain Joe Biden's behavior with a medical diagnosis that nobody's qualified to make. The big story yesterday was briefly

President Joe Biden reportedly said he had “no comment” when asked Sunday about the rising death toll from the devastating Hawaii fires.

However, of all the takes i've seen on this episode, almost nobody has suggested it's because Joe has any sort of medical condition (the exception might be Judge Jeanine Pirro, who mentioned the 25th Amendment on Fox). But it seems fairly plain that when Joe made the remark, he had full situational awareness that the was addressing a group of reporters, and to say "no comment" in that environment would normally be completely appropriate. He didn't appear to be hallucinating or in any way distracted. Nor did he seem to be addressing people whom he thought were present but weren't.

The most we can say is that Joe might have been unaware of how people might have reacted to the precise situation on which he refused to comment, namely, the record death toll of the Maui wildfires. People qjuickly called it "cold", and the New York Post called him "Heartless Joe". A reasonable interpretation might be to invoke the Dunning-Kruger Effect, simply to say that like an unfunny standup comic, he's unable to read a room, but he's nevertheless in that room, and he knows it.

But this leaves out another factor, which is that he's a politician of many decades experience, and he must almost certainly know how to read a room, or at least a room that matters. If he's meeting with people who might give him money, we must assume he'll avoid gaffes or unintentional slights, and he'll make every effort to keep them happy. But if he's in a room with people he thinks are unimportant, or whom he thinks he can easily manipulate, he won't bother.

This is a side to Joe's character that's becoming increasingly visible, and I think it gives an insight into how he plans to handle developments over the Hunter story going imto the 2024 campaign. As of yestereday, accoring to the Washington Examiner,

The White House has largely avoided publicly answering questions from reporters for more than two weeks as legal headaches for President Joe Biden continue to mount.

Biden started August vacationing at his family home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, before briefly returning to Washington, D.C., on Monday, Aug. 7. The president did hold a public event that day, a ceremony honoring the 2022 World Series champion Houston Astros, but the White House did not hold a briefing before Biden departed for Arizona.

He then traveled to New Mexico and Utah later in the week, and though the president returned to Washington, D.C., Thursday evening, the White House again chose not to hold a briefing on Friday.

The last briefing with White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre took place on July 27, the day before Biden took an economy-focused trip to Maine.

Jean-Pierre has held two 10-15 minute gaggles aboard Air Force One over the past two-plus weeks, with one occurring on the July 28 flight to Maine and the second occurring on August 7 on the flight to Arizona.

In this, we may assume that he thinks his own interests coincide with the interests of his handlers, the less opportunity he has to make any statement, the better. But let's not forget that he also thinks he's smarter even than his handlers. When he said "no comment" when he was asked about a Maui death toll likely to rise well over 100, he was flipping the bird at the public and the press, but he was also smirking at his own staff: See? I'm just doin' what you told me to do! How do you like that!

So I think he's lookinig at the reactions of "cold" and "heartless Joe" with secret satisfaction. He's the most powerful man in the world, and there's nothing they can do about it.

I think we also need to look at this in the context of Democrats who worry about things like third-party challenges or the effect of the Hunter scandals on Joe's 2024 electability. He's just going to flip everyone the bird and run on the basis that he's the most powerful man in the world.

I don't think anyhone will be able to persuade him to change his mind about running in 2024. He's the most powerful man in the world, and doggone it, he should be.

Jonathan Turley vs Abbe Lowell

As I've noted here, Jonathan Turley is a generational member of the Establishment:

His father, John (Jack) Turley was an international architect, partner at Skidmore, Owens [sic], and Merrill, and the former associate of famed modernist architect Mies van der Rohe. . . . His mother, Angela Piazza Turley, was a social worker and activist who was the former president of Jane Addams Hull-House in Chicago.

He's a law professor at George Washington University who also has a column in the Washington Post, which suggests that intellectually, he's never going to wear stripes with plaid, nor white trousers before Memorial Day. But at the moment, he's verging on conspiracy theories. In his latest column, he repeatedly refers to Attorney General Garland as putting in the "fix" on the Hunter investigation by designating David Weiss as special counsel:

The Weiss appointment definitively established Garland as a failure as attorney general. As someone who initially praised Garland’s appointment, I now see that he has repeatedly shown he lacks the strength and leadership to rise to these moments.

On the other hand, he's also beginning to encompass the idea that's being quietly mooted elsewhere, that the Democrats should throw Hunter under the bus:

None of this means that Hunter Biden will be protected by Weiss from additional charges. He will likely pursue long dormant charges, such as Hunter’s being an unregistered foreign agent. He could also pursue felonies on the crimes detailed in the now-defunct plea bargain.

But this brings us to Abbe Lowell, who now appears to have replaced Chris Clark as Hunter's lead attorney on the Delaware cases. Yesterday, I pointed out here that Judge Noreika's mere act of questioning Hunter's plea deal on July 26 changed Hunter's legal situation, however she eventually rules on it, or indeed even if the prosecution is now successful in dropping the whole Delaware tax case as it petitioned to do on Friday.

The fact is that by removing certainty from Hunter's future, the judge has established that Hunter's interests are no longer the same as either Joe's or Attorney General Garland's, since both now have to scramble to protect themselves from the mere existence of Hunter, who can no longer be quietly ushered into obscurity.

Abbe Lowell has effectively acknowledged this on the weekend talk shows. I mentioned his appearance Friday on CNN in my last post. Yesterday, he expanded on his views on Face the Nation. His point was that both the prosecution and the defense had agreed on the diversion agreement, which kept Hunter out of jail and insulated him from further prosecution. But as soon as this began to look like it wouldn't fly politically, the prosecution reneged on what they'd agreed.

If the now Special Counsel decides not to go by the deal, then it will mean that he or they decided that something other than the facts and the law are coming into play.

On Friday, now-Special Counsel Weiss asked Judge Noreika for the authority to “voluntarily dismiss” the charges that Hunter Biden had committed willful failure to pay more than $1.2 million in federal income taxes in 2017 and 2018. The judge gave Hunter's attorneys until today to reply. In a filing last night, Mr Lowell repeateed the arguments he made on Face the Nation. Via Red State:

The first thing to notice is that Hunter Biden’s team is now asserting that the questions presented by Judge Maryellen Noreika on July 26th are now mooted in agreement with the prosecution, which is seeking to dismiss the charges in Delaware in order to supposedly move them to another district.

Secondly, the filing also notes that the original plea and diversion agreement worked out between the two parties did constitute a complete end to the “sprawling five-year investigation.” The notion of broad immunity comes immediately after that in the filing when Hunter Biden’s team says the diversion agreement is in effect[.]

This strikes me as something of a Hail Mary play on Lowell's part. Yes, if everything works out exactly right, and the judge throws her hands up and says this thing has gone too far to withdraw at the last minute, and the agreement the prosecutors signed must stand, including its interpretation by the defense that precludes any other case being brought against Hunter ever, then Hunter gets the status quo ante that everyone had assumed going into the courtroom on July 26, Hunter walks, and most important for Joe and Merrick Garland, it's all forgotten well before next year's election.

But even Mr Lowell knows that most important part isn't going to happen, because in his own words, "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.'" You can't go back to things as they were before July 26, because things weren't even as Mr Lowell claims they were before July 26. That's why Weiss and Garland reneged on the deal, if in fact even that's as Mr Lowell claims.

The only outcome that Mr Lowell is working for, of course, is the restoration of a blanket immunity deal for Hunter. Hunter could then, at least theoretically, retire to obscurity and let the resulting storm rage on without him, but even that is something of a fantasy. Jonathan Turley probably has a more accurate view of the likely outcome no matter what happens to Hunter:

As it stands, Garland [by naming Weiss special counsel] has virtually ensured that Congress will pursue an impeachment inquiry as the only body seriously investigating the scandal.

Mr Lowell must be enough of a realist to recognize the political realities here. Joe has been a doting father eager to protect his son for only as long as it's suited Joe, and the winds are beginning to change. Even Joe's defenders are promoting the story that Hunter was a con artist who sold the "illusion" of access to Joe, but Joe was an innocent victim of the scheme. At some point, Mr Lowell is going to need a new strategy, likely derived from John Dean's Watergate survival plan: a new guilty plea that still keeps him out of prison, but in which he now testifies against Joe.

That must surely be a contingency in Mr Lowell's thinking.

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.