Space Aliens And Queering God

I want to make clear from the start that I'm subscribed to, and a daily watcher of, Fr Mke Schmitz's Catechism in a Year series from Ascension Presents on YouTube. In general, I'm a big Fr Mike Schmitz fan. Still, in the video above, which may not have been subject to the same editorial rigor as the Catechism in a Year series, I think he makes some remarks that open a door he may not have intended to open. At about 2:45, he says,

Could it be possible that God has made other beings? Well, yeah. He has made angels. Those aren't really, technically speaking, aliens. The same God who created human beings also created angels. He created human beings with an intellect and will and bodies, and he created angels, with an intellect and a will, with no body. Who is to say that God couldn't continue to create? . . . God is infinitely creative. . . . So -- would it make sense that He would create and then just stop?

The discussion in the comments, though, wandered off somewhat predictably. One commenter said,

One thing I've thought about at times, and speculated on: What if beings on other world's didn't fall like we did on Earth? Would they be so advanced as to be indistinguishable from angels? They may very well be. However, I don't know to what degree (if at all) God would allow them to interact with us at this point in time.

And this goes to the bigger question, can God create an alternate universe? Because that's something like what we'd have if there were a Planet Bltsfx with unfallen beings, sort of like the houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels, but Swift is actually hinting there about the difficulties that arise from that whole idea. An unfallen being like a houyhnhnm wouldn't be human and wouldn't be in God's image, unless God created an alternate universe in which the houyhnhnms would be in God's image. But this runs against the idea that God is one, and beyond that, that while God could contradict Himself, He doesn't.

So I'm just not sure about Fr Mike's idea of whether God can just keep creating, and in the process, by implication, create some new type of being, Being X, that has an intellect and a will but isn't human. But his language here isn't precise, and the forum in which he's talking won't let us interrogate his remarks with greater precision.

But this brought me to a homily I heard in my Episcopalian days, in which a curate addressed a hypothetical question from a hypothetical elderly Episcopalian lady: "What about the scriptural condemnations of gay sex, like the punishments of Sodom and Gomorrah or 1 Corinthians 6:9-10? How do we justify gay sex in light of those?"

To which the curate roared in his homily, "YOUR GOD IS TOO SMALL!!"

In other words, there must be a God who is bigger than that one, the one that gave us scripture. There must be a God who's bigger than that, like the one that can just keep on creating whatever new orders of beings he chooses -- but this runs up again against the problem that God is one. And it's interesting that the idea of a God who is bigger than God is actually common in queer theology. For instance,

The University of Chicago’s 2023-2024 course catalog includes a religious studies course on “Queering God,” applying LGBTQ+ ideology to different religions and examining the ways gender is being reimagined in theology.

“Can God be an ally in queer worldmaking? Is God queer? What does queerness have to do with Judaism, Christianity, or Islam? This course introduces students to foundational concepts in queer and trans studies by focusing on queer Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologies,” the course description reads.

This theme frequently occurs in queer theology, that there is effectively a different God or a better-understood God who sanctifies Queer:

There’s little to fear from a queered approach to talking about God, because it’s about nothing more or less than setting God free to be God. By implication, if we are to be bearers of the image of God, called into the likeness of Christ, it’s about setting us free, too. Queer theology offers a way of unearthing what is already present—the fact that God is, by any stretch of the imagination, queer—and helping humans to inhabit that reality. It is the best kind of skewed God-talk.

. . . Althaus-Reid talks about how so many traditional ways of talking about God “closet the divine.” The church wants to force God’s abundant and life-transforming outrageousness into hiding. As a Latinx Catholic growing up in Argentina, Althaus-Reid witnessed the garish campiness of festivals in which statues of the Blessed Virgin, the Queen of Heaven, were processed through streets. Yet for all her sense that this was something that held the possibility of queering our imaginations, she came to see that the authorized church version of the Mother of God was sanitized: Mary was presented as a rich white woman who never walked. The divine image was made bland, and the unruly facts of actual cis and trans women’s lives were erased.

As Galileo put it, there's a book of nature and a book of scripture, and as Fr Mike puts it, they don't contradict each other. But when he speaks to people asking him if aliens exist, I think his answer, "they could", is misleading. Lots of things "could" exist, starting with bigfoot and proceeding down through unicorns and phlogiston. The problem is that so far in the book of nature, we've neither seen them nor any remotely credible hints of them.

On top of that is the logical problem that given the size of the universe, even considering the billions of planets that might or might not be friendly to life, in most parts of the universe, an advanced society could rise and disappear without the remotest possibility that even if we somehow read a message from it, so many eons would have passed since it was sent at the speed of light, we couldn't send them an answer that would get back to them, much less travel there. Thus we have the logical difficulty that even if space aliens did exist, as a practical matter, they would be irrelevant.

So I think the idea of space aliens invites just about anyone to construct a sort of science-fiction religion that inevitably includes unfallen beings of a new order, of whom it follows implicitly that they will land on this planet and straighten us out. (Remember that Gulliver's Travels is just an early variant of Star Trek.) I think priests answering questions about this informally tend to feed this assumption when they say something like "maybe"or "it could" or "can't rule it out", or in the account of one commenter, "God is great!" But God doesn't contradict Himself.

In fact, I think the idea of enlightened/unfallen space aliens who'll one day land on earth isn't too far from the queer theologians' idea that one day we'll be able to free God to be queer, and LGBTQ+ will be created in queer God's image, a special sanctified class above the traditional Christian saints. This is basically fantasizing a whole new book of nature that will supersede the old book of scripture -- but the problem is that in this universe, the two books don't contradict each other. I think a better course for priests when asked about science fiction religion is to be more precise in speech and emphasize "probably not".

More Teasing That Franklin Foer Book About Biden

It looks like I missed the developing buzz over the past couple of weeks about Franklin Foer's new book on Biden, The Last Politician. Foer, it turns out, is a staff writer at The Atlantic and former editor of The New Republic whose views appear to be as predictable as we might assume given that background. According to Axios ,

Frank Foer of The Atlantic worked 2½ years and spoke to nearly 300 people for his forthcoming opus on President Biden's first term, the author tells Axios.

Why it matters: In "The Last Politician," Foer concludes that Biden provides "an instructive example of the tedious nobility of the political vocation. Unheroic but honorably human, he will be remembered as the old hack who could."

Driving the news: The 432-page book, out Tuesday, "dramatizes in forensic detail the first two years of the Biden presidency, concluding with the historic midterm elections," per the publisher.

Foer's work "includes thrilling, blow-by-blow insider reports of the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and the White House's swift response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine."

It sounds as though it's timed to coincide with the start -- or at least, the putative start -- of Biden's reelection campaign, and the buzz is part of the prearranged buildup. But the book's insider accounts conclude with the 2022 midterms, which lets it simply finesse the whole Hunter story.

It's also worth noting that the market for a 432-page $30 doorstop presidential hagiography is thin. My sketchy understanding of the publishing industry is that library sales, a sure thing, will drive the publisher's profit, although educated ladies of a certain class will buy it at bookstores as well. But the problem is that the project has been in the works, as the Axios puff piece says, for 2½ years, and events have a way of moving faster than that.

Yesterday, Real Clear Politics carried an essay by Charles Lipson, What if Biden Backs Out of the Race?:

President Biden has declared he’s running for a second term, but it’s far from certain he actually will. His infirmity and low poll numbers raise serious doubts. His physical decline shows when he walks or climbs the stairs of Air Force One. His cognitive decline shows when he refuses to hold press conferences or answer even the simplest questions, like how he feels about the devastating fires in Maui.

I checked Charles Lipson on Wikipedia. There's not a whole lot there:

Charles H. Lipson (born February 1, 1948) is an American political scientist who is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago.

. . . Lipson attended Yale as an undergraduate, where he studied Political Science and Economics. He received a Master of Arts degree and a doctoral degree from Harvard University.

While studying at Harvard, Lipson won the Chase Prize for the best essay on a subject relating to the promotion of world peace.

He sometimes makes guest appearances on radio shows and writes op-eds, which is what he's doing here. As far as I can see, his views on any subject are utterly conventional. But they're in sharp contrast to Franklin Foer, who sees Joe as a confident, experienced steady hand. Prof Lipson:

Biden’s dismal poll numbers form a somber backdrop for his reelection campaign. That backdrop is even darker now that his health problems are so visible. . . . The biggest “tell” is that Biden is avoiding the very things active candidates do. He’s not campaigning. He’s not attending a lot of small events with big donors. He’s not running ads. He’s not using the White House’s bully pulpit to address the nation on our challenges and his response to them.

He concludes, as any properly dressed Ivy Leaguer who's won a prize for an essay on world peace should, that we don't know what will happen, and we don't know what effect Joe's withdrawal might have if he does, which he might not. But remember, they paid him to write this, however vapid the read. They paid him because they wanted someone to prepare the Real Clear Politics audience for the possibility.

I will say that the buzz over the Foer book confirms another of my inferences about Biden: he resents his handlers. Per this piece at Read State,

[A]fter a now infamous speech in March where Biden said that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power,” his aides had to once again rush out and “clarify” what he “really meant,” which was pretty much the opposite of what he said. Biden reportedly “fumed” about that and complained he was being treated “like a toddler.” (National Review)

But if we give things a little thought, Biden and his handlers appear to be on the same page about the upcoming "campaign", which I think Lipson understands pretty well: the aim will be to keep Joe out of the public eye entirely and instead rely on state and federal indictments and prosecutions to keep the focus on Trump, as well as on efforts to keep him off the ballot in key states. So far, this isn't working; national polls over the past several days show a Trump-Biden matchup well within the margin of error, while each adverse legal development spikes Trump's fundraising and his supporters' enthusiasm.

On the other hand, it appears that the July 26 court hearing, in which the Delaware judge's reluctance to approve Hunter's plea deal resulted in the prosecution withdrawing it and David Weiss's appointment as special prosecutor, closed off another Biden campaign strategy, which was to get Hunter quietly off the stage as a campaign issue. That Abbe Lowell has been uncharacteristically quiet in recent weeks reinforces the surmise that Biden has had to go back to the drawing board to come up with a new Hunter strategy.

Although the House has been out of session and won't return until September 12, Oversight Committee Chairman Comer is telegraphing further investigative discoveries once the House is back in session:

Newsmax anchor Greg Kelly is teasing the release of a damning tape of President Joe Biden.

"Biden has a big mouth and it got him into a lot of trouble, but he hasn't seen the half of it yet," Kelly said on Tuesday's broadcast of Greg Kelly Reports. "There is an audio tape I am told by people in the know—not necessarily in government, not necessarily out of government, I can't say too much—but there is incontrovertible evidence of Joe Biden's corruption that is about to be made public.

"It's not going to happen tomorrow, it's not going to happen before Labor Day, but it will happen sometime between Labor Day and Halloween," the right-wing host said, adding that he also does not know who will be releasing the tape to the public. Kelly claimed that the White House is aware of the tape's circulation.

I have a feeling Joe is doing all he can simply not to think about any such contingencies, hoping his strategy of prosecuting Trump will carry the day if Joe himelf stays quiet. But the House Republicans are mad. My instinct is that Franklin Foer has been overtaken by events even before his book comes out.

My Views On Joe And The Dunning-Kruger Effect Are Vindicated!

The New York Post has a story about a new book, The Last Politician by Franklin Foer, due out Sept. 5, which is excerpted at The Atlantic behind a paywall. The title of the Atlantic excerpt is "The Final Days", which is clearly meant to echo the title of a 1976 book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that covered the end of Nixon's time in the White House. We'll have to see how that goes, but it's intriguing to say the least that the publishers would choose to hitchhike on that story.

Foer's book actually covers the decisionmaking process by which Joe Biden overrode his military and diplomatic advisers and ordered the precipitous withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan as of August 30-31, 2021. As deescibed in the Post story,

President Biden overestimated his own competence in foreign affairs ahead of the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, making unhelpful and impractical suggestions while displaying a “swaggering faith in himself” that left his administration unprepared for the devastating chaos of the evacuation of Kabul, according to a forthcoming book.

In “The Last Politician,” due out Sept. 5, and excerpted by The Atlantic Tuesday, magazine staff writer Franklin Foer says the 80-year-old commander-in-chief “exhibited determination, even stubbornness, despite furious criticism from the establishment figures whose approval he usually craved” over his decision to end the US presence in Afghanistan on Aug. 30, 2021, after two decades.

As far as I can tell, neither the book nor the Post's story about it mentions the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. I've been arguing for some time that this is a good explanation for Biden's approach to life, and the depictions in the Post's story illustrate how well the theory fits Joe's behavior:

“One aide recalled that he would say, ‘You foreign policy guys, you think this is all pretty complicated. But it’s just like family dynamics,'” Foer wrote of Biden, adding that in the president’s assessment: “Foreign affairs was sometimes painful, often futile, but really it was emotional intelligence applied to people with names that were difficult to pronounce.”

“Diplomacy, in Biden’s view, was akin to persuading a pain-in-the-ass uncle to stop drinking so much,” Foer added.

Biden’s commitment to his wisdom continued through the hectic evacuation mission, as he reportedly “would pepper [then-Ambassador to Afghanistan John Bass] with ideas for squeezing more evacuees through the gates” of the airport, most of which were all but impossible given the circumstances on the ground.

. . . “Bass would kick around Biden’s proposed solutions with colleagues to determine their plausibility, which was usually low.”

Consider, though, that Biden's attempts to control his own family dynamics had already proved comically futile, as on several occasions immediately prior to his presidential run, he'd had to send members of his former vice presidential secret service detail out to clean up after the escapades of his pain-in-the-ass crackhead son.

In fact, Joe's insistence on the ill-conceived withdrawal probably influenced Putin's decision to invade Ukraine seven months later, calculating that Biden would either be unwilling to offer any resistance, direct or indirect, or too inept to direct any that he might decide to put up. Biden's reported offer to Zelensky of a flight out of Kyiv after the invasion would confirm this attitude, if true, but the full circumstances of what happened are murky.

Nevertheless, according to the Post,

“When it came to foreign policy,” Foer added, “Joe Biden possessed a swaggering faith in himself.”

So strong was that faith that Biden, once described by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates as having been “wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades,” viewed experienced diplomats and pundits as “risk adverse, beholden to institutions [and] lazy in their thinking,” according to the book.

The impression I have is that in recent weeks, in his vacations in Delaware and Lake Tahoe, Joe has withdrawn even from his White House circle of advisers and is relying incresingly on Hunter. The difficulty is that Hunter is addicted to cocaine, whose effect is to produce temporary feelings of omnipotence and grandeur, which is just the sort of thing Joe shouldn't be exposed to.

This confirms my view that Joe's shortcomings arise not from a medical condiction but from his character, which is driven by a long-held belief that he's the smartest guy in the room. I don't see a good prognosis here.

What Does Zelensky Have On Joe?

I'm not posing this question as though I think there may be a specific answer. I'm posing it more in a spirit that there is a range of possible explanations for current US Ukraine policy, of which one answer might be that Zelensky does have something on Biden, but there are other answers that might include policymaker stubbornness, confirmation bias, or conventional-mindedness, but this would be attributable to Joe's handlers, not Joe himself. If the policy decisions are traceable to Joe and not his handlers, the most likely explanation probably does have more to do with pure venality.

But I think this also goes to what Trump intended to say on the "perfect phone call", in which he is reported to have asked Zelensky in very general terms to help Trump's people to look into Biden and his son, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company. I think putting this request in the way he did, a by-the-way “I would like you to do us a favor, though”, was in Trumpspeak a reference to a set of circumstances that, as I suggested yesterday, was an open secret to everyone on the call, including those in the Deep State who were listening in, and the by-the-way tone was in fact intended to annoy those in that group.

This was Trump as truthteller, Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield, James Dean playing Caleb Trask in East of Eden, and I think Trump was perfectly aware of its likely effect, viz, that it would prompt an impeachment. He was simply saying out loud that there was a great deal in Ukraine that would offend proprieties, and let's acknowledge that in light of present developments, he was right; it's likely to prompt not just one impeachment, but two.

Let's consider, though, that the current status of the Russo-Ukraine war, now in its ninth year after a US-prompted coup deposed an elected president in Kyiv and caused Russia to annex ethnically Russian territory in retaliation, is stalemate. There was an optimistic phase last year, when Ukraine successfully repelled a Russian blitzkrieg and drove those forces back to something approximating the post-2014 borders, but subsequent circumstances haven't been encouraging.

In addition, Volodymyr Zelensky hasn't lived up to his 2022 media hype. For perhaps six months, he could be spun as a modern-day Victor Laszlo -- as a onetime instructor in rhetoric, I bought into this myself -- but the impression didn't survive his Vogue cover shoot, and the uplifting addresses to the world audience stopped (did he lay off his speechwriters?). Word leaked out that he could no longer afford the political cost of the casualties incurred by counteroffensives against dug-in Russian troops.

As time went on, he had his own scandals. As of early this year,

Volodymyr Zelensky has fired a slew of senior Ukrainian officials amid a growing corruption scandal linked to the procurement of war-time supplies, in the biggest shakeup of his government since Russia’s invasion began.

. . . The announcement came after the arrest on Sunday of Vasyl Lozynskyy, the acting minister for regional development. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine has accused Lozynskyy of receiving $400,000 in “unlawful benefits” for facilitating contracts, including for power generators – a sensitive issue in a country that is struggling to cope with freezing temperatures and frequent power cuts caused by the Russia’s attacks on its infrastructure.

The National Anti-Corruption Bureau also said it was investigating “high-profile media reports” into allegations that Ukraine’s defense ministry was buying military provisions, including food for the troops, at inflated prices.

More recently,

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has dismissed all officials in charge of regional military recruitment centers amid a widespread corruption scandal.

A scandal linked to the procurement of war-time supplies had already led to Zelensky firing a slew of senior Ukrainian officials at the start of the year, and prompted Ukraine’s deputy defense minister Viacheslav Shapovalov to resign after allegations of corruption surfaced in the media.

. . . Among the issues, Zelensky cited “iIllicit enrichment, legalization of illegally obtained funds, unlawful benefit, illegal transportation of persons liable for military service across the border.”

He said the decision was to “dismiss all regional ‘military commissioners.’ This system should be managed by people who know exactly what war is and why cynicism and bribery in time of war are high treason.”

Let's recall that the US sponsored the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych as president of Ukraine in 2014, which started the whole war, on the pretext that Yanukovych was corrupt. Yet accounts I've linked here insist that Ukraine is now about as corrupt as it's ever been, except that as a US client, it's demanded far more US money than it ever got under Yanukovych. Most recently, Zelensky is insisting that if the West wants elections as specified in Ukraine's constitution, it needs to cough up even more than it has been:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has demanded that taxpayers in the United States and European Union send the country even more aid if the West wishes for elections to be held next year.

In an interview published by the president’s office on Sunday evening, Zelensky said that he would be willing to hold elections despite the ongoing martial law amid the war with Russia, so long as the U.S. and EU bankroll the voting process.

. . . Zelensky said that he discussed the topic of funding for the 2024 elections with U.S. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who has been one of the staunchest supporters of sending more aid to Ukraine on Capitol Hill.

“I told [Sen. Graham]: If the United States and Europe give us financial support… I’m sorry, I will not hold elections on credit, I will not take money from weapons and give it to elections either. But if you give me this financial support, if the parliamentarians realize that we need to do this, then let’s quickly change the legislation and, most importantly, let’s take risks together,” Zelensky said.

Meanwhile, reports have emerged that Zelensky has bought a luxury home in Egypt:

Egyptian investigative journalist Mohammed Al-Alawi provided exclusive materials concerning the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy. According to the documents, Zelenskyy’s family has acquired a luxury villa in “the city of [millionaires]” El Gouna. According to investigation, Olga Kiyashko, whose name matches the name of Zelenskyy’s mother-in-law, owns a VIP estate worth $5 million. Political scientist Abdulrahman Alabbassy draws a conclusion that the president’s relative purchased the estate with the humanitarian aid funds allocated to Ukraine by the West to repel Russian military aggression.

This guy looks less and less like a Victor Laszlo for our time and more like yet another chiseling strongman in a succession of US clients worldwide. The deal he pitched in 2022 was that he could accomplish the neoconservative agenda -- strengthening the Western alliance by peeling Ukraine away from the Soviet orbit -- quickly and cheaply, with Ukrainian lives and Western weapons. It's looking more and more as though he was writing checks he couldn't cover, that Ukraine wasn't going to sustain casualty rates that experienced observers knew the counteroffensive would incur, while the level of continuing corruption in the country would be harder and harder to conceal.

As of now, official expressed US policy continues to be that it will fund Ukraine for "as long as it takes", although accounts I've linked here suggest the CIA and Pentagon are less confident of the outcome. The queston continues to be why Joe Biden is still the standard bearer of the happy-face faction.

I have a little voice that's been telling me several things. The current indications we have are that Joe was definitely getting payments from Ukraine via Hunter and Burisma between 2014 and 2019. On the other hand, the National Archives now says that it has over 5,000 e-mails to Joe that were addressed to him via any of several aliases, which it's currently refusing to release, although as unclassified public records, it must. I can't imagine that 5,000 e-mails addressed via aliases covered only Hunter and Burisma, or indeed only years from 2014 to 2019.

My little voice tells me this kind of behavior is habitual. People don't just start taking payoffs and stop after five years. Look just at Spiro Agnew, who had been taking payments since he'd been Baltimore County Executive but continued to get bundles of cash while he was vice president and had had nothing to do with Baltimore for years. Joe needed money while he was vice president,didn't stop needing it when he left office, and definitely didn't stop needing it after Hunter left the Burisma board.

I would certainly not rule out that Zelensky has stuff on Joe, but what he has, if he has it, is likely not the end of the story. But that's just my little voice.

Let's Revisit Trump's "Perfect Phone Call"

The "perfect phone call", as Trump himself characterized it, was a heavily monitored 30-minute conversation on July 25, 2019 with current Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. Zelensky, a political outsider but a well-known media figure like Trump, had defeated the incumbent Petro Poroshenko in a runoff election 73%-24% on April 21 of that year. Thus this call would be a get-acquainted opportunity that would set the tone for ongoing relations between the US and its relatively new client state Ukraine.

As far as I can tell, since the "perfect phone call" has simply faded away in the wake of two Trump impeachments, the 2020 campaign and its continuing controversies, as well as Joe Biden's own scandals, nobody has tried to put that 2019 call in the context of what we now know about developments in Ukraine between 2014 and the call itself. As a result, for instance, Wikipedia still has an entry on the Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory that dismisses the story as

part of efforts by Donald Trump and his campaign in the Trump–Ukraine scandal. . . to damage Joe Biden's reputation and chances during the 2020 presidential campaign.

United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that proxies of Russian intelligence promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about the Bidens "to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration."

Just like Hunter's laptop, it was Russian disinformation. But again, let's review what we've come to know about the whole course of US-Ukraine relations since the 2000s.

By Obama's second term, neoconservatives in the Deep State, led particularly by then-Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, had developed a strategy of peeling away former Warsaw Pact countries from the Russian sphere of influence, which had reached as far as bringing Ukraine into the Western fold with the eventual goal of EU and even NATO membership. Intriguingly, this was irrespective of political party, even when Obama himself was well known for his hot-mic remark to Dmitry Medvedev,

“This is my last election ... After my election I have more flexibility,” Obama said, expressing confidence that he would win a second term.

“I will transmit this information to Vladimir,” said Medvedev, Putin’s protégé and long considered number two in Moscow’s power structure.

After Obama's greater reelection flexibility or not, Victoria Nuland and her allies at State and the CIA were pedal-to-the-metal with their scheme during 2013 to engineer a coup to remove Ukraine's moderately pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych was in a tricky spot. Ukraine relied on cheap gas from Russia, but a plurality of the country — not, crucially, an absolute majority — still wanted European integration. His political career was caught in the same bind: with his party formally allied to Vladimir Putin’s own United Russia party, his pro-Russia base wanted to see closer relations with its neighbor; but the oligarchs who were the real reason he had gotten anywhere near the presidency were financially entangled with the West, and they feared competition to their grip on the country from across the Russian border. All the while, two geopolitical powers in the form of Washington and Moscow hoped to use these cleavages to draw the country into their respective orbits.

Following Yanukovych's ouster, Petro Poroshenko, the US-backed candidate, won a 2014 snap presidential election. According to the same link, dated February 7, 2022, just weeks before the Russian invasion:

Little to nothing has changed about Ukrainian corruption or authoritarianism, under either Poroshenko or current president Volodymyr Zelensky, elected in 2019 as an outsider change agent. Each has governed like an autocrat, using their powers to go after political opponents and weaken dissent, and have been embroiled in personal enrichment scandals that remain endemic to the Ukrainian political class.

Not that it stopped either from being feted by Washington and flooded with American support. In fact, this new imperial patron has only added to these problems, with the current US president’s family being personally embroiled in one of the country’s major corruption scandals, before using his position to install a markedly corrupt prosecutor general.

This would be the pre-invasion, post Zelensky election context in which Trump's "perfect phone call" took place. The first thing to keep in mind about this call is how many members of the Deep State were monitoring it, all of them with their factional and career interests in mind. Most of them, whether they were Trump staffers or not (and most of them weren't), had careers that were tied into the existing interventionist strategies on Ukraine. Estimates of how many were on the call, for instance via speaker in the White House Situation Room, differ, but it must have been dozens. According to NPR,

Other duty officers and policy staff for the White House Situation Room are believed to have monitored the call to help memorialize the conversation in written form as the conversation took place — a standard practice for presidential calls with world leaders. Translators for both leaders are also believed to have participated.

Among those listening in the Situation Room was Alexander Vindman, a US Army lieutenant colonel born in Ukraine who speaks fluent Russian and Ukrainian, and who had been able to parlay this into high-level diplomatic assignments:

Beginning in 2008, Vindman became a Foreign Area Officer specializing in Eurasia. In this capacity he served in the U.S. embassies in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Moscow, Russia. Returning to Washington, D.C. he was then a politico-military affairs officer focused on Russia for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Vindman was on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon from September 2015 to July 2018.

In July 2018, Vindman accepted an assignment with the National Security Council. In his role on the NSC, Vindman became part of the U.S. delegation at the inauguration of Ukraine's newly elected President, Volodymyr Zelensky.

It appears that in this position, he felt entitled to monitor policy discussions for conformance to Deep State orthodoxy, and that included the question of whether the Bidens had been entitled to intervene in Ukrainian affairs by pressuring Poroshenko to fire Victor Shokin.

Here I have a question that won't go away: for good or ill, Shokin's firing by 2019 was three years in the past, under prior presidential administrations in both Ukraine and the US, something that ought to have been a single personnel issue from which everyone should long since have moved on. But not for Vindman. According to the Wikipedia link, in closed-doior testimony to the House, he said

he was concerned by two events, both of which he objected to with senior officials in real time, and which he reported to the National Security Council's lead attorney. The first event occurred at a July 10 meeting between Ukraine's then Secretary of National Security and Defense Council Oleksandr Danylyuk, and then US National Security Advisor John Bolton, at which Ambassadors Volker and Sondland, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry were in attendance, and at which Sondland asked Ukraine to launch investigations into the Bidens in order to get a meeting with President Trump. Vindman states that Bolton cut the meeting short, and that both Vindman and Hill told Ambassador Sondland that his comments were inappropriate and reported their concerns to the NSC's lead counsel.

The second event occurred on a July 25 phone call between Presidents Trump and Zelensky. Vindman states, "I was concerned by the call. I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the implications for the U.S. Government's support of Ukraine. I realized that if Ukraine pursued an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma, it would likely be interpreted as a partisan play which would undoubtedly result in Ukraine losing the bipartisan support it has thus far maintained. This would all undermine U.S. national security." Vindman also stated that he reported his concern to the NSC's lead counsel, John Eisenberg.

Note, by the way, that the cabinet secretary at this meeting was the Secretary of Energy, which we may see in the context that the Deep State envoy to Ukraine in 2014-15 was the energy expert Amos Hochstein, not a general or an anti-corruption cop. That reinforces the agenda role of energy in all this.

But in other words, Vindman, a lieutenant colonel, happened to be in a July 10 meeting that included cabinet-level policymakers, who appear to have been aware of the December 2015 Biden-Hochstein visit to Kyiv that resulted in Shokin's firing. It's reasonable to conclude that those policymakers were also aware of Hunter's and Devon Archer's positions on the Burisma board, as well as the concerns over conflict of interest that had already reached Amos Hochstein and, in Hochstein's account, even reached Joe.

Vindman, a lieutenant colonel, not a policymaker and indeed someone sworn to execute policy made by actual policymakers, was also in on Trump's July 25 "perfect phone call", and in his words, he "was worried about the implications for the U.S. Government's support of Ukraine". A non-policymaker, he didn't like potential policy changes that policymakers seemed to have in mind. Just what those were, he never seems to have made clear.

But let's look at the juxtaposition here.

On the call, Trump was first to speak. He showered the 41-year-old Ukrainian, a novice politician and former comedian, with praise following his party’s victory in parliamentary elections. Zelenskiy chatted about how he wanted to “drain the swamp” in Kyiv and how he wished the European Union would provide more financial support. He told Trump that Ukraine was ready to buy more Javelin anti-tank missiles from the United States.

The next 10 words that came out of Trump’s mouth — “I would like you to do us a favor, though” — are what triggered the House impeachment inquiry that has imperiled his presidency.

Trump asked Zelenskiy to work with Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr to look into Biden and his son, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

The first thing that occurs to me is that the problem of Hunter's position on the Burisma board and the related issue of Poroshenko's firing Shokin had to have been unspoken general knowledge to most of the policymakers, both US and Ukraine, on the call, however obscure it may have been to the public. Vindman himself, if he was a competent subject area expert, must surely have been aware of it. But -- and let's get back to my earlier point -- this was water under the bridge.

Vindman must presumably have wanted the water to have flowed downstream years ago and stayed there. All of a sudden, Trump, a member of the former opposition and an outsider, was going to review this whole question of Deep State political involvement in Ukraine and indeed how this related to US politics. In fact, Trump, if nothing else, was proposing a deal with newcomer Zelensky not much different from the deal Joe Biden had already made with Poroshenko, except that this new deal simply wasn't the deal that had been made in 2014 and 2015 with Amos Hochstein.

This made Vindman freak out, and he became a "whistleblower", except that he was simply blowing the whistle about a policymaker's interest in examining policies that had begun to strike him as against our interests and might be subject to change.

Another question that won't go away is why Vindman, a US Army lieutenant colonel who should have been outside politics, was so sensitive about the Bidens. Joe Biden as of July 2019 was out of office and had just recently made the decision to run in 2020, having decided not even to try in 2016. He wasn't taken seriously as presidential material at that point. Why was the Deep State so eager to work on Joe's behalf so early in the electoral process? It sounds as though, although Victoria Nuland and Amos Hochstein left the government when Trump assumed office, there were vested interests in resuming US Ukraine policy as it had been under Joe, anmd once Joe came in, they both came right back, with promotions.

Which has brought us where we are. How'd that happen, really?

Amos Hochstein Fights Corruption!

So let's recapitulate. By February, 2014, the US Deep State, acting through the CIA front National Endowment for Democracy and with the sponsorship of Victoria Nuland at the State Department, had engineered a coup in Ukraine that caused the elected president, who was pro-Russian, to flee the country. At the same time, Putin seized Crimea and much of the Donbas. Over the next two months, the Deep State drew up a plan for Ukraine to navigate these changed circumstances, and they sent two people, Vice President Joe Biden and State Department energy guy Amos Hochstein, to explain to Ukrainians how things were going to go forward in Kyiv.

The Biden-Hochstein team seems to have been ventriloquist and dummy, with Hochstein pulling the string that controlled Biden's mouth while Joe sat in his lap. From what Hochstein explained on background to the press during the flight over, the Deep State plan for a new Ukraine was comprehensive, domestic-political, military, and financial. One part, at least ostensibly, was key: the Maidan revolution, under whose name the coup took place, was against corruption. Ukraine was going to have to "make progress" against corruption, for which the deposed pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych was the poster boy.

The new regime must not be corrupt, or maybe not quite as corrupt, as the old. The problem is that Ukraine was then and is still recognized as one of the most corrupt countries in the world; perhaps the least controversial remark by Col Douglas Magregor in his recent interview with Tucker Carlson was that on the corruption scale, Ukraine ranks somewhere below Mexico and Russia. Good intentions from the US embassy were not going to fix this.

And we can get an idea of actual Deep State priorities in the portfolio of the ventriloquist whom they sent over to speak for Joe Biden, the dummy on his lap. If they thought corruption was the biggest problem, they'd send a cop, maybe a retired FBI director. If they thought the biggest problem was military, they'd send a general. They sent neither. They sent an energy expert. Let's recall that as of 2014-15, according to Wikipedia,

He was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in 2011 and as Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs. In 2015, President Barack Obama nominated Hochstein to be the Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources but the Senate did not act on the nomination.

Let's check back on one key fact. What was Burisma? Again according to Wikipedia,

Burisma Holdings has operated in the Ukrainian natural gas market since 2002. It is one of the largest private natural gas producers in Ukraine. It is owned by Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky through his company Brociti Investments Limited

Burisma's subsidiaries include Esko-Pivnich, Pari, Persha Ukrainska Naftogazova Kompaniya, Naftogaz Garant, KUB-Gas and Astroinvest-Ukraine.

In 2016, Burisma was the second largest privately owned natural gas producer in Ukraine after DTEK, accounting for 26% of all natural gas produced by privately owned companies and more than 5% of total gas production in Ukraine.

Exactly why the Deep State apparently thought Ukraine's energy resources were so important that the guy who should be explaining how things were gonna be to the new regime in Kyiv should be an energy expert rather than an anti-corruption cop or a general is unclear, although this piece suggests that natural gas supplies from Russia had been a sore point between Ukraine and Russia for some time. The key point is that as an energy generalist and a natural gas specialist, Hochstein must certainly have known about Burisma, the second-largest producer in Ukraine.

Not only that, but Hochstein was apparently a major author of the new 2014 plan for how things were gonna be for Kyiv in the first place. Let's recall again that as the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee reported in 2020,

On April 16, 2014, Vice President Biden met with his son’s business partner, Devon Archer, at the White House. Five days later, Vice President Biden visited Ukraine, and he soon after was described in the press as the “public face of the administration’s handling of Ukraine.” The day after his visit, on April 22, Archer joined the board of Burisma. . . . Fourteen days later, on May 12, Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, and over the course of the next several years, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer were paid millions of dollars from a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch for their participation on the board.

It's really hard not to infer that if, within days of Hochstein delivering his comprehensive plan for how things were gonna be to Kyiv, Devon Archer and Hunter Biden wound up on the board of Burisma, this was not baked into that plan with Hochstein's full knowledge.

But Hochstein later told Joe that Hunter's presence on the Burisma board represented a conflict, right? As part of a general timeline of Hunter's dealings with Hochstein, the New York Post reported,

According to a Senate Republican report on Hunter’s business dealings released in December 2020, Hochstein in October 2015 raised concerns with both Biden and Hunter that Hunter's position on Burisma’s board enabled Russian disinformation efforts and risked undermining U.S. policy in Ukraine. He also had another conversation with Biden on the plane ride during the infamous December 2015 Ukraine trip.

That may be, but of course, that's Hochstein's version in Senate testimony. The record we have, outlined in the story at the link, is that this was only one of multiple meetings among Hochstein, Hunter, Joe, and Hunter's partners over the 2014-2016 period. For instance

On Dec. 11, 2014, Hochstein met with Biden and [Biden executive assistant Kathy] Chung in two separate meetings and later attended a holiday party at Biden's residence that same day. Four days later, Hochstein attended a "meeting" at the vice president’s residence, according to White House visitor logs.

Four months after those meetings, on April 16, 2015, Hochstein met with Biden in the West Wing of the White House, the visitor logs show.

That meeting took place the same day that Hunter introduced his father to Burisma executive Pozharskyi and other business associates from Kazakhstan and Russia during a dinner at Cafe Milano in Washington, D.C., Fox News Digital previously reported. It is unclear whether Burisma or Pozharskyi's visit to D.C. was mentioned during that meeting.

In other words, Hochstein had been touching base with Joe, Hunter, and Hunter's partners throughout the period from April 2014 to November 2015, which led to a second trip by both Joe and Hochstein to Kyiv in early December 2015. This latter flight seems to have been just as important as an expression of US policy as the one in April 2014, but its key task this time was to crack down on corruption. Again according to the Post,

During Hochstein’s testimony, he recounted that he spoke with Biden about Burisma in the West Wing of the White House in October 2015. According to visitor logs, he visited the White House three times in October 2015, with two of the visits occurring in the West Wing and the other on the second floor of West Wing.

"We were starting to think about a trip to Ukraine, and I wanted to make sure that he [Vice President Biden] was aware that there was an increase in chatter on media outlets close to Russians and corrupt oligarchs-owned media outlets about undermining his message—to try to undermine his [Vice President Biden’s] message and including Hunter Biden being part of the board of Burisma," Hochstein told Congress, according to the report.

According to Hochstein, Biden told Hunter about the meeting, prompting Hunter to request a meeting with Hochstein, according to the 2020 Senate Republican report.

"You are all set to meet with Amos on Friday at 4pm for coffee," Joan Mayer emailed Hunter on Nov. 3, 2015. She later emailed Hunter to let him know the Nov. 6 meeting with Hochstein at a Starbucks in Georgetown had been moved to 3PM. Hochstein met with Biden in the White House Situation Room on Nov. 5, 2015, the visitor logs say.

. . . The report said Hochstein "did not go so far as to recommend that Hunter leave the board," citing the New Yorker.

. . . On Dec. 11, 2015, Hochstein met with Biden in the West Wing, just two days after the vice president returned from his infamous Ukraine trip, where he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid if Ukrainian leaders did not fire their top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. The Republican Senate report cited testimony that Hochstein also had a conversation with Biden on the flight over to Ukraine in December 2015.

It's hard not to conclude that Hochstein was fully aware of the issues raised by Hunter's presence on the Burisma board, that apparntly he'd heard complaints about it, which he passed on to Joe (at least in his version of events). Nevertheless, although he and Joe met several times in the leadup to the December 2015 flight, on the flight itself, and afterward, in a series of discussions that also involved Hunter, the upshot was that in the updated version of how things were gonna be that Hochstein and Joe took to Kyiv on December 4-5, 2015, the way to fight corruption was to fire Viktor Shokin. As of last night, Shokin has repeated:

On Saturday’s broadcast of FNC’s “One Nation,” former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin said he believed that both President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden were bribed.

According to the former prosecutor general, he said his firing by then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was done at the behest of then-Vice President Biden, who once boasted about it in a discussion with the Council on Foreign Relations.

“I have said repeatedly in my previous interviews that Poroshenko fired me at the insistence of the then-Vice President Biden because I was investigating Burisma,” Shokin said through a translator.

“You understood me correctly. This is how it was,” he added. “There were no complaints whatsoever and no problems with how I was performing at my job. But because pressure was repeatedly put on Poroshenko, that is what ended up in him firing me.”

As best we can infer, Amos Hochstein was the key architect of US Ukraine policy in the 2014-16 period, down to a detailed level. He did apparently respond to pressure, and when pressure was applied, he got with the program. At least in his version, he went to Joe with concerns about Hunter's presence on the Burisma board, even several times, but he got nowhere, and as a practical matter, the Deep State's practical policy was going to be corrupt oligarchs were OK to have in Ukraine, just as long as they were our corrupt oligarchs.

But recognize this is Hochstein's own well-scrubbed version of events, which he gave while he was out of the government. He left the State Department in 2017 with the advent of the Trump administration and returned to government in 2021 as a close "adviser"/handler to Joe. In 2022, he was promoted to Special Presidential Coordinator for Global Infrastructure and Energy Security, where he is presumably again a shadow figure in charge of Ukraine and its energy resources. We may assume that following a four-year Trump interregnum, Ukraine policy is back to where it had been when Hochstein was in charge of things the first time.

What Is Amos Hochstein's Role In The Whole Nine-Year Ukraine Boondoggle?

I'm still working my way through the question I asked at the end of yesterday's post: By the time he was Obama's vice president, Joe Biden wasn't taken seriously. In January, 2014 -- just as the Maidan revolution and the Russian seizure of Crimea were in train -- The Atlantic was quoting Robert Gates, who had been defense secretary under both Dubya and Obama:

"I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates says of Vice President Joe Biden in his new book coming out later this month.

And there's Obama's own estimate:

Speaking to a fellow Democrat about Joe Biden being the party’s nominee in 2020, Obama famously warned, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f–k things up.”

As a true crime fan, I tend to take the homicide detective's truism that there's no such thing as a coincidence to be a useful epistemological tool. But I'm still working my way through the question of how and why Joe Biden was made point man for Ukraine in 2014, except to note that although Joe was the public face of policy, Victoria Nuland and Amos Hochstein in particular were running the show, and in fact Nuland had set all the 2014 circumstances up throughout much of 2013.

The photo at the top of this post shows Amos Hochstein, his face characteristically turned away from the camera, speaking with Joe Biden on the April 21, 2014 flight to Kyiv aboard Air Force Two. Yesterday I quoted a link that referred to him as "the most influential Joe Biden adviser that most people don’t know about". His Wikipedia entry is remarkably vague, especially about what he was doing on the plane with Joe in April 2014.

After working in various roles as a congressional staffer, he went into the private sector as "a counselor and lobbyist for both domestic and international oil and gas companies" and worked in shadowy roles with, among others, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz to assist Equatorial Guinea's repressive regime "to display their political sincerity to change and to improve relations with the United States", which sounds a lot like the behind-the-scenes influence peddling we've seen more recently in Ukraine. But after this chapter,

Hochstein began working at the U.S. Department of State in 2011, joining the newly formed Bureau of Energy Resources. Serving as deputy to Special Envoy Carlos Pascual, Hochstein worked to help Ukraine find new supplies of natural gas in the wake of the 2014 Russian invasion.

He oversaw the Office of Middle East, Asia and Europe, the Western Hemisphere and Africa. Hochstein led the energy related diplomacy efforts.

So as best we can tell from this very sketchy timeline, as of April 2014, he was sora-kinda doing something or other about Ukrainian energy supplies, and he was on board Air Force Two with Joe Biden on the flight to Kyiv where Joe became Obama's point man in Ukraine, except his title of deputy special envoy doesn't really reflect anything like that.

On Thursday I linked to the transcript of a background briefing made by "a senior administration official" on that flight. Although "background" briefings are anonymous, I'm convinced that the "senior administration official" was Hochstein, as he's shown on the plane in the photo above, and no other senior figure is known to have traveled with Joe otherwise. One of Hochstein's points in the briefing was that Joe was traveling to Ukraine to present a whole US package, financial, military, and political, clearly implying an effort to address both the US-sponsored Maidan revolution and the Russian seizure of Crimea:

{I}t’s one of those conversations where it’s a little hard to say whether the President asked him or he said I want to go. It grew out of a conversation that the two of them had, and both of them agreed that it was important for the U.S. to send a high-level signal of support for all of the lines of effort that this government is undertaking.

Obviously, the most pressing and acute right now is the security situation. But these other lines of effort are also existential for Ukraine. Its politics, its economics and its energy also matter acutely, and so they felt it was important to have somebody with deep ties to and a deep passion for the U.S.-Ukraine relationship to come and send that message both privately and publicly. And there’s no better messenger for that than the Vice President.

But the odd thing is that Hunter and his partners were involved in putting this package together from the start. Via a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee report I've linked previously here,

On April 16, 2014, Vice President Biden met with his son’s business partner, Devon Archer, at the White House. Five days later, Vice President Biden visited Ukraine, and he soon after was described in the press as the “public face of the administration’s handling of Ukraine.” The day after his visit, on April 22, Archer joined the board of Burisma. . . . Fourteen days later, on May 12, Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, and over the course of the next several years, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer were paid millions of dollars from a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch for their participation on the board.

In other words, Hunter's and Devon Archer's participation on the Burisma board were being factored into the whole Biden-visit package that was being presented to Ukrainian leadership during Joe's visit on April 21 and 22, 2014. This wasn't an afterthought, it was part of the whole program, security, military, financial, and Hunter. Hochstein's exact involvement in this initial phase is unclear, but by July of 2014, his behind-the-scenes role in the deal was understood by Hunter and Burisma:

In the summer of 2014, shortly after joining the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings, Hunter and his associates at Burisma and his now-defunct Rosemont Seneca Partners discussed speaking with Hochstein for contacts who could help navigate a new tax in Ukraine on private energy companies.

On July 31, 2014, top Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi expressed frustration in an email to the group that the Ukrainian parliament had "voted in favor of the package of laws, among which is a draft law on raising the tax for private gas producers."

Minutes later, Heather King, who did crisis communications for Burisma at the time and was in frequent communication with Hunter, said she was concerned by the news.

"This news is very concerning," she wrote. "I assume you will be sending an email to the State Dept today about this? We will also get you connected with the US Embassy contact so you can hopefully meet with the guy Hochstein recommended as soon as possible."

The implication here is that Hochstein was seen as some sort of uber-fixer who could get Hunter what Burisma needed. This is the first reference we have to contacts, however indirect, between Hunter and Hochstein, as well as a reference to what seems to have been a general understanding that the US embassy in Kyiv was running the whole show, which was also rhe implication in the notorious February 2014 recorded call between Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Pyatt.

This is only the start of Hochstein's puzzling involvement in the whole Hunter-Ukraine saga, but Hochstein is a shadowy figure throughout Joe Biden's later career. Since 2022, he's served as Joe's "Special Presidential Coordinator for Global Infrastructure and Energy Security", and he is characterized, if he's characterized at all, as one of Joe's closest advisers. This 2022 piece says,

“He knows the domestic and international oil and gas issues very well, so he’s capable of speaking to them, but he’s also now a key figure in both domestic and international policy formulations,” said David Goldwyn, who served at the State Department under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and has known Hochstein for about two decades.

Hochstein, Goldwyn added, is “the person who bridges State, Treasury, the White House and Energy.”

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say he must also know where all the Ukraine bodies are buried, and that would include what Zelensky probably has on Joe, because Zelensky has it on Hochstein as well. I would say he can probably also give a good answer to why, if the Obama circle thought so little of Joe's abilities, Obama nevertheless made Joe the point man on the whole Ukraine package, likely because Hochstein would be the one actually in charge.

More tomorrow.