Joe's Nixon Problem

In yesterday's post, I linked to a Breitbart story on how Biden won't discuss the Hunter problem with his staff. This morning I saw a CNN story that says the same thing, but with a different spin:

Long among the most sensitive subjects inside the West Wing, Hunter Biden’s legal saga now appears destined to play out amid his father’s bid for reelection, frustrating the president but so far causing little real concern among his advisers.

The probe into Hunter Biden is now one of two special counsel investigations – the other being an inquiry into his father’s handling of classified documents after leaving the Senate and the vice president’s office – that both appear poised to extend for months to come.

. . . [B]oth investigations take away the fundamental element of control for a White House heading into an election cycle. As multiple Biden advisers conceded privately this week, special counsels have a history of uncovering information they hadn’t set out initially to discover. The fact that it’s also a delicate family matter, people close to Biden say, is creating a level of personal angst unlike any other challenge for the president. . . . “Hunter Biden is not a topic of discussion in campaign meetings,” a senior aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity, given the sensitivity of the subject. “It’s just not addressed.”

As I compare the Joe-and-Hunter saga to Watergate, I see an area where Joe may have tailored a strategy to avoid one of Nixon's biggest mistakes -- he talked too much with his staff, especially John Dean. Dean was able to parlay his testimony on Nixon's incriminating remarks into lenient treatment for his own offenses, which should be a warning to anyone in any White House thinking of making conspiracies, but that Joe Biden should be avoiding Nixon's error is another indication that Biden isn't as senile as he wants people to believe.

Now this piece at Politico gives some insight into how Joe actually operates. There's been a great deal of recent speculation on how the "sweetheart deal" with David Weiss's prosecutors was worked out, and the story fleshes out some details. It summarizes "more than 300 pages of previously unreported emails and documents exchanged between Hunter Biden’s legal team and prosecutors" that shed "new light on the fraught negotiations that nearly produced a broad plea deal".

The problem, of course, is that the deal fell through, but the document trove indicates that Chistopher Clark, now off the case in something close to disgrace as he's likely to be a witness, was running the whole strategy. In a 2022 letter to Weiss's prosecutors, Clark

laid out what could have been seen as a promise, a warning, or just some very zealous lawyering: He said Joe Biden would undoubtedly be a witness at trial because of leaks about the probe. He wrote that just a few weeks before sending his letter, there had been two back-to-back leaks related to Hunter Biden and the gun issue. First, someone told The Washington Post that investigators thought Biden deserved tax and gun charges. Then a few days later, The Daily Mail reported on a voicemail Joe Biden left for his son in the window of time when he allegedly owned the gun.

. . . “There can be no doubt that these leaks have inserted President Biden into this case,” he said.

He then described a nearly unthinkable scenario: The president would testify to undermine a criminal case brought by prosecutors representing the United States of America.

Red State commented,

Politico offers the description of the move as a promise, warning, or very zealous lawyering, but that’s the mildest way to put it. Hunter Biden's legal team essentially gave the DOJ a choice: Stop pressing the gun charge or face the implied wrath of the president, with an assertion that the DOJ's reputation would be damaged in the process.

. . . Sure enough, instead of prosecuting the gun crime, Weiss and his team moved to offer pre-trial diversion. Now, we have ample evidence that the DOJ made that decision under the threat of involving and angering the President of the United States. Did that influence Weiss' decision? It's hard to see how it didn't given Hunter Biden's legal team apparently made it a centerpiece of their negotiations.

What we're seeing is a variation on what's starting to look like Joe's modus operandi, Hunter and his proxies make veiled references to the Big Guy while preserving his deniability, yet they make it clear that if their victims make Mr Big unhappy, things could go south in a hurry. In this particular case, it also looks like any discussions that took place between Hunter and Joe that were relayed to Clark would be covered by attorney-client privilege. (But then, maybe not. Clark had to withdraw because he could be a witness, which suggests exceptions to that privilege.)

The Politico story details months of negotiations on the plea deal between Clark and the prosecutors, with interruptions and changes in terms at many points along the way as the Comer committee released new information and IRS whistleblowers came forward. It's plain in the narrative that both Weiss and Garland were highly sensitive to such revelations, and they recognized throughout that the interests of the Justice Department and their personal legal exposure were not the same as Joe's or Hunter's.

This came to a head when Judge Noreika expressed her reservations about the deal. Weiss and Garland had become nervous. Back to the Politico link:

In the weeks that followed, Biden’s defense lawyers and federal prosecutors reopened their talks. They didn’t go well. According to court documents, Biden’s lawyers and prosecutors met shortly after the hearing, and Biden’s team suggested changes to the plea deal and the diversion agreement. The prosecutors didn’t accept their proposals, and instead suggested their own changes on July 31. But Biden’s lawyers rejected their suggestions on Aug. 7.

According to a letter Clark sent to the prosecutors on Aug. 7, those prosecutors had proposed, “without explanation, completely deleting the immunity provision” in the agreement. It was an abandonment of the language they had painstakingly negotiated, and it was a non-starter for Biden’s lawyers. It’s unclear why the prosecutors, after weeks of negotiations, now wanted to narrow the immunity they would offer. ["Unclear"? cough, cough. They were nervous.]

. . . The day after Clark sent his letter, Weiss asked Garland to make him a special counsel.

That would have been August 8; Garland officially made Weiss special Counsel on August 11. Presumably after talking with Weiss, Garland was nervous as well. On that day, Abbe Lowell took over from Clark as Hunter's de facto attorney, going on the weekend talks on Hunter's behalf on August 12 and 13. On Tuesday, August 15, Clark officially withdrew from the case.

Other accounts suggest Joe was closely involved with Hunter in the runup to the disastrous July 26 hearing in front of Judge Noreika. The New York Post reported this past Thursday,

The president’s embattled 53-year-old son began what ended up being a two-week stay at the Executive Mansion on June 21 — one day after he reached a doomed plea agreement with US Attorney David Weiss, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.

. . . The report notes that most White House aides, including senior staffers, are not only “not involved” in conversations about the president’s son but “strenuously avoid” discussing Hunter Biden’s legal woes with the commander-in-chief because of the belief that their “contributions and ideas would not be welcome.”

They refuse to broach the topic with the president despite concern over the “toll” Hunter Biden’s legal predicaments are having on the oldest president in US history.

. . . However, aides cleared the president’s schedule on July 26, so he could closely monitor his son’s appearance in a Delaware courtroom, where it was expected that his plea deal with Weiss would be finalized, according to the Washington Post.

. . . The president’s personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, gave the commander-in-chief updates as the hours-long hearing unfolded and Hunter Biden’s deal fell apart, culminating in a not-guilty plea by the first son.

Attorney General Merrick Garland subsequently elevated Weiss to special counsel, which “blindsided” President Biden, according to the report.

What I'm gathering from all these data points is that Joe and Hunter are closely coordinating their strategies via a very small number of personal attorneys who are continuing to play the "Big Guy sorta wants it" game. They aren't making Nixon's mistake of bringing in White House staff, which then have an interest in testifying against them to save their own skins. On the other hand, it looks like Joe and Hunter spent many months bullying Weiss and his prosecutors into doing the "sweetheart" deal, which wound up making them so nervous they reneged on it in Judge Noreika's courtroom, and the fallout from that made Garland so nervous that he named Weiss a special prosecutor.

The problem is that the Joe-and-Hunter strategy of bullying Weiss into negotiating a "sweetheart" deal has fallen apart. There isn't, as some people still assert, some grander plan to execute a new, mega-sweetheart deal in another jurisdiction. For Weiss to drop the charges in Delaware and Garland to make him special prosecutor were last-minute attempts to cover themselves in a situation that had already made them very nervous. Why did Garland make Weiss special counsel, when what should have been done was to name a respected neutral outsider? Because Garland has his own problems now, and Weiss has the same ones -- they let Hunter, Joe, and Clark bully them into the sweetheart deal, which has fallen apart with no hope of bringing it back.

Joe and Hunter are off on a "vacation" at Lake Tahoe under the pretense of a family get-together. They're sorta-kinda working on a Plan B, in between Hunter stepping out of the room for a bump every 15 minutes. Let's hope the Secret Service swept the place for bugs before the family moved in. But Hunter's working it all out, he's the smartest guy Joe knows. Things'll be fine!

Glenn Reynolds Isn't The Sharpest Knife In The Drawer, But. . .

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, a Yale Law graduate and holder of an endowed chair at the University of Tennessee School of Law, is a libertarian, which means that he follows Ayn Rand as his guiding light. (Rand herself described libertarians as "a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people" who "plagiarize my ideas when that fits their purpose".)

He is also a transhumanist who in the past has endorsed cryonics (freezing the heads of dead people in anticipation that future technology can resuscitate them) and the technological singularity, which among other things embraces the idea that people can be digitized and uploaded into a giant computer memory, which will ensure their immortality, at least until the next power failure.

I wouldn't even ask Glenn Reynolds for advice on a traffic ticket, but before he rose to prominence, I'd already lost confidence in the ability of academic institutions to certify people whom we can trust to teach future generations. Nevertheless, like a few other commentators, he's beginning to ask the right question about Joe Biden:

In public he appears increasingly out of it.

He speaks nonsense, he shows flashes of inappropriate anger, he walks off stage in the middle of events, and he has trouble with stairs.

. . . But what if it’s all an act?

He cites as evidence Joe's use of pseudonymous e-mail addresses while he was vice president, apparently to pass privileged information to Hunter so that Hunter could in turn pass it on to foreign Biden family clients as proof that they were getting what they paid for, viz, Joe's influence on their behalf.

I'm not sure if this proves Reynolds's point -- Joe did use phony e-mail accounts at least up to 2016, but it says little about his cognitive abilities in 2023, although I agree in general that Joe isn't suffering from a medical condition that impairs his thinking. (A separate question that's worth asking is if he's still using fake e-mail.)

Reynolds cites Charles CW Cooke at the National Review behind a paywall:

Writing in National Review, Charles C.W. Cooke observes: “If this allegation is proven to be accurate, what could the defense possibly be? . . . I honestly can’t think of one.”

. . . I suppose there may be other, more innocent, explanations, but like Cooke I’m having trouble thinking of anything that makes this pattern of behavior look innocent.

Which is why I’m wondering if when Joe Biden is acting senile, he’s actually acting senile.

The accounts we're seeing suggest that there is in fact a purposeful effort coming from the White House to do what it can to control the metastasizing scandal, although the ability to address it is limited by Joe's apparent unwillingness to discuss it with aides:

President Joe Biden reportedly ignores most White House aides when they try to share “contributions” or “ideas” about how to handle Hunter Biden’s legal position, according to a report.

. . . “Inside the White House, most aides strenuously avoid discussing Hunter’s troubles with the president, believing their contributions and ideas would not be welcome,” the Washington Post reported Thursday based on comments from half a dozen current and former administration officials. “[O]nly a small group of longtime trusted aides are engaged in conversations about how to handle family matters.”

Joe Biden, who is reportedly “consumed” with his son Hunter’s scandals, allegedly angrily dismisses White House aides who believe Hunter Biden’s controversial history might politically hurt his father, NBC News reported in June.

Of course, Joe's problem isn't just Hunter, it's looking more and more as if Joe's problem is what Hunter was doing for Joe, especially when the phony e-mail accounts appear to have been directly related to their joint business effort. Newt Gingrich on Thursday referred to other purpose-driven activity from within the White House:

In an interview with Charlie Kirk, Gingrich said it is hearsay but that he was told from a reliable source, "Friday evening, somebody from Washington called the district attorney in Atlanta and said, You have to indict on Monday." He added, "We have to cover up all of the mistakes we just made with Weiss."

"She said apparently, my jurors aren't coming back till Tuesday," Gingrich continued. "and they said you didn't hear me. You have to indict on Monday."

"And she said, Well, they're not gonna get here before noon," he said. "They said that doesn't matter."

"She says this means it's going to be eight or nine or 10 o'clock at night," he added, "It doesn't matter. We need the news media shifting."

Kirk asked who made the phone call, but Gingrich said he didn't know, and reiterated that it was hearsay.

The bottom line here, for anyone even as obtuse as Glenn Reynolds, is that Joe himself has full situational awareness and probably understands his potential risks better even than his staff, which is why he won't discuss them. Still, we're seeing at least inchoate and piecemeal recognition of a problem and the start of a game plan to deal with it.

But for now, it looks like Joe's public strategy will be to do everything he can to avoid publc contact and definitely questions fron the press, but when he absolutely can't avoid them, he'll continue to play senile. The question will be how long he can maintain that facade.

Joe, AKA Robert L Peters AKA Robin Ware AKA JRB Ware

The news that the Comer Committee has asked the National Archives for "unrestricted special access" to unredacted Biden records where the names Robert Peters, Robin Ware, and JRB Ware, among others, appear is particularly delicious. I've got to say my first reaction is that use of aliases is a key indicator for sociopathic or psychopathic personality traits, or, without getting anywhere near a diagnosis, a sign that something is hinky.

The most memorable recent use of an alias by a politician is former congressman Anthony Weiner's use of the name Carlos Danger in sexting various women, including at least one minor. That episode ended his marriage, on top of earlier on line indiscretions that had already ended his career, and other e-mails discovered on his laptop during subsequent investigation have been cited by Hillary Clinton as one reason she lost the 2016 election. He eventually served 18 months in federal prison and is a registered sex offender.

Another recent case is failed Republican presidential candidate and current US Senator Mitt Romney's use of a Twitter account under the name Pierre Delecto.

Twitter user Pierre Delecto was found out to be Romney after the Utah senator and GOP presidential candidate mentioned using a private account to follow what was happening on the social media website. It didn't take long for Slate reporter Ashley Feinberg, who also outed former FBI Director James Comey's secret account, to discover Delecto was in fact Romney.

During a 30-minute interview with USA TODAY, Romney said the account was set up by his son, Matt, in 2011. He says it was used mainly to browse what was being discussed and read news articles.

, , , "I think I had eight people who were following me, so it's not like I was shaping public opinion," he added.

Romney did reply to some tweets, both from journalists and colleagues in Congress, sticking up for himself or offering his opinion on issues. It's not uncommon for politicians to use Twitter to get their views across or reply to journalists or colleagues or even stick up for themselves – but Romney's use of an anonymous account was peculiar.

Use of phony names on accounts is common on social media, but it's usually associated with immaturity, social media overuse, or intent to deceive, and if Romney has never been implicated in any sort of unethical or improper behavior, unlike Joe, he did himself no favors with Pierre Delecto. Nobody does himself any favors with aliases.

Chairman Comer's take seems credible:

“I believe that one reason that Hunter was CC’ed on those emails, where Joe Biden was using a fake name, is so Hunter could prove to the Ukrainian oligarch that help is on the way,” Comer said. “We heard Devon Archer say that the owners of Burisma were squeezing Hunter Biden, saying we need help from Washington.”

“Who do you think they were referring to when they were talking to Hunter Biden — who they said was dumber than their dogs, who was a drug addict, who had no experience, that 'we need help from Washington?' Who do you think they were talking about?” the congressman continued. “And here we see, now, evidence that shows Joe Biden didn’t have a wall between the government and his son’s shady business dealings. He was copying him on foreign policy to let him know ahead of time: ‘Help is on the way. We’re gonna go in there, and we’re going to fire that prosecutor who is trying to bust you for corruption, son.’”

. . . When asked if the investigation now directly includes allegations against Joe Biden for bribery and money laundering, the Kentucky Republican said, “That’s a very fair statement.”

The question of the aliases does in fact bring the questions closer to Joe himself, and this changes the White House game. Up to now, the line, steadily losing credibility notwithstanding, had been that Hunter's business was separate from Joe, that the Department of Justice is doing an independent investigation, and all questions must go to DOJ. All of a sudden, for the first time, reporters can ask why Joe himself used aliases. The problem now seems to be that Joe's handlers can't discuss it with him:

"Hunter Biden is not a topic of discussion in campaign meetings," a senior aide told CNN. "It’s just not addressed."

CNN's Jeff Zeleny detailed this reporting on Thursday and said that aides "do wonder if there will be a blind spot about this because it is simply not mentioned or discussed on the campaign."

The evidence we have from Watergate is that even if Nixon discussed his problems with his staff, their advice was never very helpful, mostly just adding neologisms like "modified limited hangout" to the language without developing any effective strategy.

"Mr President, why did you have the Obama White House copy you on policy e-mails using alias names?" is an obvious question any reporter should ask, but it's something Joe can't allow without a really convincing answer. We'll have to see what develops.

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.