Joe's Interregnum And The Penn Biden Center

Joe's own classified document scandal has been off the agenda for almost a year, and with it, there's been little scrutiny of the Penn Biden Center, but I think this is a productive path of inquiry regarding Joe's finances after he left the vice presidency on January 20, 2017. My governing assumption has been that Joe and his family have expensive lifestyles, as well as several with expensive addictions, which Joe's Senate pension (the vice presidency has no pension otherwise) wasn't going to cover. Joe was going to need a continuing income flow beyond that.

But the Penn Biden Center is only the start of another set of shadowy questions. Let's start with Joe's decision not to run for president in 2016. Almost no attention has been paid to this, except to cite his own stated reasons:

According to Biden himself, the reason was personal. His son, Beau Biden, who was Delaware's attorney general and had his sights set on the governor's office, died in May 2015 after a battle with brain cancer.

"I had planned on running before Beau got sick," Biden told the Los Angeles Times last year. "I have great respect for Hillary [Clinton]. She would have made a hell of a president. But I thought I was far and away the most qualified person to finish the job Barack [Obama] and I started."

For 12 weeks before announcing his decision, Biden maintained that he was unsure if he would run. But at a press conference in the White House Rose Garden in October 2015, he announced his decision with his wife Jill by his side.

All well and good, but that's all we have, and as we've learned in the years since, Joe lies about everything. I simply doubt that's the real reason, and my sense of the dysfunctional Biden family dynamic is that Beau wasn't the golden son anyhow. Joe didn't give two flips about Beau, any more than Hunter did. Within weeks of Beau's death, Hunter was smoking crack with Beau's widow, Hallie, and Joe was always fine with this.

There had to have been a more compelling reason, and my guess is it had to do with a consensus view among the lizard people that it was Hillary's turn, and Obama told Joe how it was gonna be. To Obama, Joe was nothing but comic relief in any case, and seeing the writing on the wall, Joe dutifully dropped out.

The record we have suggests that throughout 2017, with Joe out of the vice presidency, the vice presidential payoff income stream would run down. In March, Burisma cut Hunter's director's fee in half, although he remained on the Burisma board until April 2019, apparently resigning due to Joe's decision to run in 2020. I've got to assume that other payoffs to the Biden family continued, although at a reduced rate, after Joe left the vice presidency, but among other things, Hunter's extravagant spending, which had only increased, would require new income sources for the family. So Joe couldn't stand pat.

On February 8, 2018, Joe opened the Penn Biden Center for Global Engagement. The focus up to now has mostly been on its role as a repository for classified documents that Joe wasn't authorized to have, as well as a holding pattern for Biden retainers like Antony Blinken, Susan Rice, Steve Ricchetti, Michael Carpenter, and Kathy Chung. But more important was its role in furthering the Biden family finances:

The University of Pennsylvania received more than $30 million from Chinese donors shortly after the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which functioned as an office for Joe Biden before he was elected president, was announced in 2017, according to public records.

“The Penn Biden Center is a dark-money, revolving-door nightmare where foreign competitors like China donated millions of dollars to the university so that they could have access to future high-ranking officials,” said Tom Anderson, director of the Government Integrity Project at the Virginia-based National Legal and Policy Center.

The University of Pennsylvania raked in a total of $54.6 million from 2014 through June 2019 in donations from China, including $23.1 million in anonymous gifts starting in 2016, according to public records.

Its role as a Biden income source grows in importance when we see via that link that although the Biden Center was formally opened only in February, 2018, Penn had announced its creation in 2017, soon after Joe left the vice presidency.

Most of the anonymous donations came after the university officially announced in February 2017 that it would create the academic center named for Biden, whose term as vice president under Barack Obama had just ended. In addition to leading the think tank, Biden was named a professor at the school.

But Joe, although Penn named him a professor, never taught a class there.

[W]hile Biden served from 2017 to 2019 as the Benjamin Franklin Presidential Professor of the Practice, there is no record of him teaching classes.

In fact,

US President Joe Biden apparently lived the life of his dreams after leaving the vice-president's office in 2016 as he kept getting handsomely paid by the University of Pennsylvania, for never teaching a class. Biden became an honorary professor at the Philadelphia School in 2017 and didn’t leave the position until becoming the president in 2021. However, the University of Pennsylvania granted him an unpaid leave of absence as soon as he announced the run for the presidency in 2019. As per the report, Biden was paid nearly $1 million between 2017 and 2019. He was paid $371,159 in 2017 and $540,484 in 2018 and 2019.

A few people have asked what Joe was being paid for if he didn't teach classes at Penn, or indeed, if he almost never showed up at the Penn Biden Center. It seems fairly plain that he was being paid for exactly what the family was being paid for through Joe's time as vice president, his ability to influence policy -- but if he'd left the vice presidency in 2017, why was he still worth paying?

This leads to the question of Joe's position of de facto president-in-waiting after Hillary's loss in 2017. How did this happen? As best we can surmise, Joe was continuing to collect big bucks after 2017, even after his perceived value as an influence peddler in the Obama administration had come to an end. Was this because there was some sort of consensus among the lizard people that he'd return to the White House in 2020?

It's a set of questions that nobody's asking, but it seems as if a lot of people had at least put serious money on the prospect after 2017. Everyone's concentrating on Burisma and Hunter, but Joe needed more than the Burisma money all along, and he needed just as much money after 2017 as before. What he was getting through back channels after 2017, in fact, had to be at least as much as he was getting as vice president, and that means there had to be significant sources in addition to Penn.

Nobody seems to be looking seriously at Joe's income during the interregnum, and beyond that, why Joe's future return to power was apparently such a sure thing. There'd be no other reason to pay him what he was being paid.

The Problem Of Joe's Interregnum

Ovwer the past week or so, I've tried to tackle the problem that Joe frequently seems to be intoxicated during public appearances despite claims that he doesn't drink. His normal pattern of speech carries markers like slurring, hypercorrection, sudden slowing, stuttering, and stumbling over words that suggest this, but on other limited occasions, he's able to speak clearly without any of those impediments. As an Aristotelian, I'm interested in the cause.

I also keep seeing a problem with Joe's received narrative, and this covers the interregnum between January 20, 2017 and January 20, 2021, when Joe held no public office, yet indications keep popping up here and there that agencies of the Deep State continued to act as though he was still in some type of authority during this period. One of the clearest examples has been his apparent ability to have Secret Service agents act on his behalf, even though as a former vice president during his interregnum, neither he nor his family was entitled to Secret Service protection, which resumed only after he became a candidate for the 2020 election.

There are two well-known episodes dealing with the Secret Service, neither of which has ever been fully explained. The first took place in connection with Hunter's gun purchase in October 2018, in which he lied on the paperwork that he had never been addicted to narcotics. When his then-girlfriend Hallie threw the gun away in a dumpster, the Secret Service tried to cover up the incident:

The Secret Service emails began in October 2020 when an agent, whose name was redacted, shared a link to a colleague to an article from The Blaze about the gun incident in an email chain with other agents.

Another official, whose name is redacted, responded: “Oh dear…”

A specialist in the agency’s Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division then wrote to their colleagues: “It’s kind of odd that we were involved in the missing gun investigation when neither Hunter or Joe were even receiving USSS protection at the time? Hmmm.”

. . . Local police began investigating after Hallie went back for the pistol and found it missing. That’s when the Secret Service also rep

ortedly inserted itself into the fray, contacting the gun store where Hunter purchased the piece and asked for the sale paperwork. Politico’s sources included someone “briefed by a Secret Service agent after the fact,” the Daily Mail reported.

According to the Daily Mail's own more extensive report,

In response to Politico's report in 2021, the Secret Service said: 'US Secret Service records confirm that the agency did not provide protection to any member of the Biden family in 2018, and that the Secret Service had no involvement in this alleged incident.'

Fitton told DailyMail.com he believed that the Secret Service may have intervened in the gun incident without creating official records.

In October 2018, Joe was no longer vice president, and he hadn't announced his candidacy for 2020, although there appears to have been some understanding among future appointees like Antony Blinken that he would run. It appears that this expectation may have been part of an unspoken policy of cooperation with his requests by the Secret Service. Another such episode took place earlier in 2018:

A former U.S. Secret Service agent went to check on Hunter Biden in 2018, when the future president’s son was holed up in a Los Angeles hotel room. The agent became alarmed about, and frustrated with, Hunter Biden, text messages obtained by the Washington Examiner  show.

“As your friend we need to resolve this in the immediate. Call the front desk now H or I will have to assume you are in danger and we will have to make them give us keys,” texted the former agent in the May 24, 2018 incident.

When Biden didn’t appear, the former agent tersely texted: “We’re at your door. Open it.”

Prior reports identified this "former US Secret Service agent" by name, but the story at the link was subsequently updated to say,

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been corrected to remove the name of a former Secret Service agent who was originally mistakenly identified as being involved in the reported incident.

That individual, who had left the Secret Service prior to May 24, 2018, never met nor assisted Hunter Biden in any capacity.

So who was it? We don't know. A Secret Service connection also emerged in the case of Hunter's abandoned rental car in Arizona in October 2016, while Joe was still vice presidnt, when a Secret Service business card was found in a bag of items Hunter left behind in the car.

In addition to local police, FBI and the U.S. Secret Service agents were roped into the case, as well. The FBI dispatched agents to the scene, according to the law enforcement documents, and the Secret Service communicated with the various law enforcement officials investigating and confirmed that Hunter Biden was not in harm’s way.

It's hard to avoid thinking that at minimum the Secret Service, but probably the FBI as well, continued this level of attentiveness to Joe after he left the vice presidency, possibly as a courtesy, but more likely, even as early as 2018, in anticipation that he would return to the White House. Who knew what? Who said what to whom? A more recent case raises the same questions:

The Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation and prosecution of CEFC China Energy Co. boss and Biden family associate Patrick Ho displayed “irregularities,” including concealing known connections between the Chinese Communist Party-linked entity and the Bidens, and communication between Hunter Biden and the FBI agents involved in Ho’s case, according to a memo by the Heritage Foundation Oversight Project.

Ho, infamously referred to as “the fucking spy chief of China” by Hunter Biden, was arrested in November, 2017, and convicted in December, 2018, in the Southern District of New York and sentenced to 3 years in prison for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and money laundering. Ho’s first phone call upon his arrest was to Hunter Biden, who was allegedly providing legal services to him at the time.

Now, a memo by the Heritage Foundation obtained exclusively by Breitbart News alleges that since Ho’s conviction, “significant evidence has emerged identifying concerning irregularities with the DOJ investigation and prosecution,” including that “DOJ was aware of connections between the Biden family and CEFC at least as early as 2017 and that they acted to conceal this information from the public,” as well as “contacts between Hunter Biden and FBI agents related to Ho’s arrest,” and “a leak of investigatory information in the Ho case.”

Again, there's a pattern of the organs of state security, this time the FBI, providing services to the Bidens even after Joe had left the government, and, at least in the public mind, at 75 years old in 2017, he would be unlikely to return -- unless the organs of state security had reason to believe otherwise and wanted to continue in Joe's good graces. This question continues to bother me. A recent episode reported in Franklin Foer's new book is puzzling as well:

The White House called former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was helping evacuate Afghan women amid the chaotic withdrawal, to scold her for calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office to ask for help, according to a newly released book.

. . . “Clinton called an aide to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, asking if she could board refugees on a military transport plane destined for Kyiv. Her efforts earned her a reprimand,” Foer wrote.

“‘What are you doing calling the Ukrainian government,’ Jake Sullivan asked her,” Foer wrote, referring to President Biden’s national security adviser.

“‘Well,’ she responded. ‘I wouldn’t have to call, if you guys would,'” Foer wrote.

Clinton then “assured” Sullivan she would coordinate with the Biden administration, though she had already made contact with other world leaders.

Hillary, both a former first lady and a former Secretary of State, appears to have been working on a purely humanitarian project, but her contacting Zelensky upset the White House. Let's keep in mind, this was during August 2021, prior to the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine in 2019, while Joe was out of office. Ukraine simply wasn't a high profile issue at this point, Afghanistan was, yet Joe appears to have been extremely protective of Zelensky as part of his personal turf.

And this goes back to Trump's 2019 "perfect phone call" to Zelensky as well, which led to his first impeachment. What was so sensitive about Zelensky, a B-lister if ever there was one at the time, first in 2019 and then in 2021, that Joe or the Democrats should be so agitated about two other presidential-level figures contacting him without their approval? Joe seems awfully touchy about Ukraine, doesn't he?

This feeds my suspicion that Zelensky knew, and knows, something about Joe, and whatever it was or is, it extended, or extends, past his time as vice president. Just wondering. But I surmise there's a lot we don't know about Joe's interregnum.

Mr Deep State Calls On Joe Not To Run

I've known a few people like David Ignatius, having been around the edges of those circles from time to time in both Washington and Los Angeles. His Wikipedia entry is instructive:

Ignatius was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His parents are Nancy Sharpless (née Weiser) and Paul Robert Ignatius, a former Secretary of the Navy (1967–69), president of The Washington Post, and former president of the Air Transport Association. He is of Armenian descent on his father's side, with ancestors from Harput, Elazığ, Turkey; his mother, a descendant of Puritan minister Cotton Mather, is of German and English descent.

Ignatius was raised in Washington, D.C., where he attended St. Albans School. He then attended Harvard College, where he studied political theory and graduated magna cum laude in 1973. Ignatius was awarded a Frank Knox Fellowship from Harvard University and studied at King's College, Cambridge, where he received a diploma in economics.

Like his fellow Washington Post columnist Jonathan Turley, Ignatius was born into the Establishment, and you can see the markers here: exclusive prep school, then Harvard, and this is a consequence of a cabinet-level father and a blueblood mother. The Wikipedia entry continues,

After completing his education, Ignatius was an editor at the Washington Monthly before moving to The Wall Street Journal, where he spent ten years as a reporter. At the Journal, Ignatius first covered the steel industry in Pittsburgh. He then moved to Washington, where he covered the Justice Department, the CIA, and the Senate. Ignatius was the Journal's Middle East correspondent from 1980 through 1983, during which time he covered the wars in Lebanon and Iraq. He returned to Washington in 1984, becoming chief diplomatic correspondent. In 1985 he received the Edward Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting.

This guy wins lots of prizes. He knows all the right people, and he's joined all the right clubs. All his photos show him with a confident, happy smile.

In 1986 Ignatius left the Journal for The Washington Post. From 1986 to 1990 he was the editor of the "Outlook" section. From 1990 to 1992 he was foreign editor. From 1993 to 1999 he served as assistant managing editor in charge of business news. In 1999 he began writing a twice-weekly column on global politics, economics and international affairs.

Indeed, that column won him the 2000 Gerald Loeb Award for Commentary and a 2004 Edward Weintal Prize. But there are toads in the garden:

Ignatius's coverage of the CIA has been criticized as being defensive and overly positive. Melvin A. Goodman, a 42-year CIA veteran, Johns Hopkins professor, and senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, has called Ignatius "the mainstream media's apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency," citing as examples Ignatius's criticism of the Obama administration for investigating the CIA's role in the use of torture in interrogations during the Iraq War and his charitable defense of the agency's motivations for outsourcing such activities to private contractors.

Back when I read the Journal and the Post -- in the days before the internet, when I got free copies in my hotel room when I was on travel -- I had the impression that David Ignatius simply wrote stuff that Deep State insiders told him to write, because they knew his dad, and he won prizes for it. That's because I'd known guys like that all my life. I don't think I've been wrong. But now the prizewinning David Ignatius has said Joe shouldn't run in 2024 (the actual Post column is behind a paywall):

A top Washington Post columnist has joined the fray of pundits calling on President Biden to step aside and not seek reelection.

“. . . I don’t think Biden and Vice President Harris should run for reelection. It’s painful to say that, given my admiration for much of what they have accomplished,” Ignatius continued. “But if he and Harris campaign together in 2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement — which was stopping Trump.”

The problem, of course, is that Joe hasn't actually stopped Trump. Trump is back, which has the Deep State worried. The Hill piece continues,

Ignatius suggested Biden’s age is a liability heading into 2024, citing recent polling that shows a majority of voters believe the president’s age is an issue when it comes to serving a second term. Biden is 80 and would be 86 at the end of a possible second term.

The columnist and occasional novelist argued that, as a result of Biden’s age, voters may focus more on Vice President Harris, who he noted carries a favorability rating around 40 percent.

"Age", of course, is just a convenient excuse, except insofar as it puts the focus on Harris. The biggest issue, which Ignatius doesn't mention directly at all, is the foreign payments to the Biden family.

Ignatius also said the now-president should have stopped his son, Hunter Biden, from joining the board of a Ukrainian energy company, which has become fodder for GOP attacks and investigations.

The current Democrat line is, of course, that Hunter's problems are entirely separate from Joe, poor Hunter was a victim of his tragic addictions, but Joe is just showing he's a loving father. But Ignatius thinks Joe should nevertheless bow out because of Harris? That doesn't compute.

What I think this shows is that Ignatius's sources in the Deep State are in fact worried about Trump. The congressional Democrats and those in state offices mostly have safe seats, and while they may lose majorities in 2024, it will be the moderates in swing districts who lose their jobs. Trump, on the other hand, will be coming after the higher-ups in the organs of state security. They're the ones who have the most to lose, and right now, they're talking through their mouthpiece, David Ignatius.

But the politicans right now don't see themselves in the same straits. Most of them likely have a clear picture of what will or won't happen in 2024, in particular to them specifically, and they don't see the same threat. They'll mostly still be in office, and the rivers of cash will keep on flowing -- at least for the foreseeable future. The bureaucrats are expendable.

What Nobody's Mentioned About Joe's Hanoi Presser

In last Wedneseday's post, I looked at some length into Joe's speech patterns in his address as he awarded the Medal of Honor to Cpt Larry Taylor at the White House on September 7. I concluded that the features of Joe's delivery, which included stammering, stuttering, tripping over words, sudden extra care in enunciation, sudden slowing, and slurring, are also all features of intioxicated speech, as outlined by linguistic studies, police officers' training ane experience, and simple common-sense observation, although Joe, like Speaker Emerita Pelosi, claims not to drink.

After I posted this, though, I began to notice that there have been occasional instances where Joe was able to speak quite clearly, without the markers suggesting he was intoxicated, most notably during the presidential debates with Donald Trump in the fall of 2020. In fact, I was going to link a clip from one of those at the top of today's post but then I realized I had a much more recent example, his press conference in Hanoi on September 10. The YouTube link at the top of this post contains excerpts from those remarks.

There's no question that the contents are as embarrassing as ever, from his reprise of "lying dogfaced pony soldier", to "I ain't calling on you", to "Third World, er, Global South", to "I'm going to go to bed.". But the one feature that was missing in Hanoi was the markers of intoxicated speech, stammering, stuttering, tripping over words, sudden extra care in enunciation, sudden slowing, and slurring. His enunciation was clear, and his pace, if slow, was consistent, without stuttering or hypercorrection. He was clearly tired, which led some observers to question whether he was up to the job, but he wasn't talking as though his BAC was somewhere north of the legal limit.

Rare as this is, it's an indication that he can avoid sounding like he's drunk if he wishes, or at least if his handlers can keep him away from the sauce for a brief period. But even without the evidence of the Hanoi presser, it suddenly dawned on me after last Wednesday's post that of course Joe is drunk at most of his public appearances, despite his claim to the Holy Father that he's "the only Irishman you've ever met who's never had a drink". He lies about everything, and he lies about that.

What was also notable about his performance in Hanoi was that, if you took away the intoxicated speech patterns, everything else remained. He didn't stutter, but he was still confused:

“I’ll just follow my orders here. Staff, is there anybody that hasn’t spoken yet? I ain’t calling on you,” Biden said at another point during the presser Sunday.

According to Newsweek,

Biden, who has been blasted by conservatives for the "rambling" nature of his answers to questions about his recent meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang at the G20 summit in New Delhi, India, was cut off by Karine Jean-Pierre. The president, 80, left the stage shortly afterwards.

. . . "We talked about stability," Biden said about his conversation with China's second in command. "We talked about making sure that the third world, excuse me, the southern hemisphere, had access to change and access. It wasn't confrontational at all."

I've also seen comments that it wasn't a coincidence that Joe's schedule put him in Alaska for 9/11 commemorations, since any more visible commemoration would simply have led to greater embarrassment. Unfortunatle4y, it looks as though whatever his handlers could do to keep him sober on that trip didn't help his overall performance -- even if he's sober, that just makes his dumb remarks easier to understand.

The Democrats' problem continues to be that Joe is the last nationally unifying figure who represents the old New Deal coalition, however poorly he represents it, and however poorly he does his job overall. After Joe, it's the warring leftist splinter groups who won't settle on a consensus candidate. This is one reason Joe can't leave the race, although another is simply Joe's own ego and grandiosity.

Does Joe Have A Strategy?

The usual suspects had the usual headlines just before the holiday, like NBC News's White House ramps up war room to battle expected GOP impeachment inquiry, which several outlets repeated verbatim. NBC continued,

The White House has stood up a war room of two dozen lawyers, legislative aides and communications staffers to lead an aggressive response to a likely Republican impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, a White House aide familiar with the strategy said.

The effort, as described by eight people familiar with the plans, has been taking shape for months in the White House counsel’s office as part of the response to Republican-led House investigations. Biden's aides and allies say they are preparing to vigorously push back against an impeachment inquiry and present it as an evidence-free partisan sham that shows a GOP penchant for chaos.

Insofar as the Biden camp has teased a potential strategy, it seems to go like this, father down in the story:

Biden aides have looked to 1998, when the House impeached President Bill Clinton, as a model for how to mount an effective defense — and make the GOP pay a political price for overreaching — said a source familiar with the strategy.

Clinton enjoyed his highest approval rating — 73% — in December 1998 when House Republicans were considering articles of impeachment, according to the Gallup Poll’s historical data of Clinton’s presidency. Biden’s predecessor and potential 2024 election opponent, former President Donald Trump, similarly got a boost around his first of two impeachments. Trump had the highest approval rating of his presidency — 47% — in February 2020 as the Senate prepared to acquit him.

But this isn't a strategy. I'd say it mostly just looks back at prior impeachments with an implicit recognition that it's much easier to get an impeachment vote in the House than it is to get a conviction in the Senate, while even an impeachment vote in the House will rally supporters of the current president -- but this is a short-term effect. Dubya still ran on Monica Lewinsky in 2000 to beat Clinton's designated successor in the narrowest of elections, and Biden implicitly ran on Trump's 2019 impeachment to win in 2020.

If the Biden war room's strategy is just to look at history, well then, if history is any guide, Joe will survive an impeachment by the House to be acquitted in the Senate before the 2024 election, and he may even get a temporary bump in the polls, but an impeachment hangover will linger into the election itself, and he'll lose in 2024. So that strategy isn't a strategy. So far, it looks like Joe has no plan but to react to events as they come up. For instance, over the weekend,

Unprompted, Biden approached reporters Sunday in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, after he went to Mass at St. Edmond Roman Catholic Church to say he was not on vacation.

“I have no home to go to,” said Biden, who lives at the White House on weekdays and spends most weekends in Delaware, where he has two homes.

The U.S. Secret Service has been doing work on his longtime primary residence in Wilmington, Delaware, to make it more secure “in a good way,” he said.

It has been at least a few months since he last spent a night there.

“So I have no place to go when I come to Delaware, except here, right now,” he said, speaking of his other home, in Rehoboth Beach. “I’m only here for one day.”

In fact, the Secret Service has been building enhancements at both Biden homes in Delaware, including a roughly $400,000 extension of the wall around his beach house. But all this does is call attention to the ongoing complaint that Joe's on permanent vacation simply by having him deny it, while it also raises the possibility that he's aggrandizing himself with permanent home remodel projects.

What I can only infer from this episode is that Joe's handlers were off duty for the holiday, or if they weren't, they may as well have been. What he did on Sunday, was to wander over to reporters so he could go off script and call attention, first, to the appearance that he's permanently at the beach, and second, he's having his home permanently remodeled on the taxpayers' dime. There's no plan, no goal, no discipline just Caesar's whim.

In contrast, Bill Clinton had a much clearer strategy in 1998-99. This 2019 piece by David Frum in The Atlantic describes it pretty well, I think:

1. Don’t be defined by impeachment. . . . [M]ost of the time, the president took pains to show himself as engaged in anything and everything else. Message: The Republicans are obsessed with my sex life; I am focused on my job.

2. Express contrition for proven wrongdoing. After Clinton’s early denials of a relationship with the intern Monica Lewinsky were exposed as false, he expressed contrition for his offenses while arguing that impeachment represented an excessive response. “I don’t think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned,” he declared at the White House prayer breakfast on September 11, 1998. “It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuine: first and most important, my family; also my friends, my staff, my Cabinet, Monica Lewinsky and her family, and the American people. I have asked all for their forgiveness.”

3. Leave no fingerprints on any countermeasures. Through 1998, one Clinton accuser after another was felled or tainted by damaging revelations of sexual scandal: House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his would-be successor, Robert Livingston; House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde. . . . Despite ample speculation that the White House political operation was somehow involved, nobody could ever prove a link.

4. Persuade the waverers. [T]he Clinton impeachment strategy was not focused on his superfans. . . . It was focused on that famous 1990s demographic bloc, the soccer moms: women who disapproved of Clinton’s character, but liked Clinton’s economy. The strategy for 1998 and ’99 always kept these waverers uppermost in mind, again and again offering them a middle way: Condemn Clinton and move on.

5. Never read the stage directions aloud. As the House of Representatives neared the end of its impeachment debate, December 16, Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox against Iraq. . . . Clinton skeptics wondered whether the timing was a coincidence. White House officials insisted otherwise, and not a word was ever said or written to prove them wrong.

Realize that Frum wrote this in 2019, before the idea of impeaching Joe was even a glimmer in anyone's eye. Yet so far it looks as if Joe is working hard to violate every Clinton tactic. Joe simply isn't engaged, he's either at the beach or jetting around to meet world leaders in trivial photo ops. Clinton was able to manage the Lewinsky scandal in several effective ways: once he was forced to 'fess up, he could compartmentalize it into a single past episode for which he could cloyingly beg forgiveness while insisting it was a minor transgression in the scheme of things.

Joe, on the other hand, has a repeating pattern visible over years of collecting payments from foreign entities via Hunter and his partners to enrich himself and his family in return for influencing US policy on the foreign entities' behalf. Unlike Clinton, Joe and his handlerd can't compartmentalize this pattern into a single episode and apologize for it. Instead, at least for now, they're just insisting there's no evidence, while new evidence neverthelss comes out almost daily.

And Joe's fingerprints so far are all over his countermeasures. For instance,

According to recent reporting, Jay Bratt—a Department of Justice employee and top aide to Special Counsel Jack Smith—met with White House officials multiple times, just weeks before Mr. Smith indicted former President Donald Trump.

And of course, Joe is already notorious for reading stage directions aloud off his teleprompter. For instance,

It is noteworthy that the percentage of women who register to vote and cast a ballot is consistently higher than the percentage of the men who do so – end of quote. Repeat the line.

There are differences in Clinton's and Biden's circumstances, especially since Clinton wasn't up for reelection in 2020, while Joe is up in 2024, so we simply don't know whether Clinton's tactics could have saved his electoral chances. But without the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution, which limits presidents to two terms, it's conceivable that Clinton, still young and popular, could have made it to a third term in spite of the Lewinsky scandal, which he and his handlers kept from metastisizing, and in hindsight, they did ths with some skill.

Joe, in contrast, is up for a second term with his age and condition already working against him. In addition, his potential defenses are more limited. These include continuting to insist there's no evidence that he and Hunter worked together, but that's a tougher and tougher sell. Another would be that the bribery in question occurred during his time as vice president, and he can't be impeached for that now, but that assumes Joe isn't currently on the take, which could collapse at any time.

In any case, so far, even with a White House impeachment war room ramping up, we aren't seeing any signs of an effective strategy for Joe, especially to put the whole issue behind him for 2024 even if he'll probably be acquitted in the Senate. I have a sense that the old Clinton team has been distancing themselves from Joe for quite a while.

Questions Nobody's Asked Joe

One issue that puzzles me is that the Comer committee, and probably any potential House committee that investigates impeaching Joe Biden, has been focusing almost entirely on things Joe, Hunter, and the rest of the Biden family did while Joe was vice president. So far, the most damaging set of circumstances looks to be Mykola Zlochevsky's claim to have tapes of Joe himself demanding a $5 million bribe to get Viktor Shokin removed as Ukraine's special prosecutor and end investigations into Burisma.

The potential defect in that or any similar case is simply that it all took place when Joe was vice president. But after that, Joe was out of office for four years, and now he's president. There's probably a good argument that the Burisma stuff is in the past, you need to impeach Joe for any treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors he's done as president, not back when he was vice president. At best, no matter how well you can prove that Zlochevsky or anyone else bribed Joe, it's just a political embarassment to him now, which may or may not lead him to resign, but it's not an impeachable offense -- and Joe, who thinks he's Caesar, isn't gonna just resign.

But this brings me to simple human nature. The picture we inevitably have of Joe right now, granting even the worst of the current allegations that have come to light, is that he was basically an average politician up to the time he became vice president -- sure, he put Hunter on the Amtrak board in 2006, or he got Hunter a cushy job with MBNA or got him into Yale Law, but all of these are perks that US senators from either party routinely collect. Remember that Joe used to claim he was the poorest man in Congress.

So the inescapable inference is that Joe had been an OK if mediocre guy all his life, but once he became vice president, it suddenly all went to his head, and he turned into this monstrous grafter that nobody foresaw. In 2009, at age 67, he went from the poorest man in Congress to a master influence peddler and money launderer, running a family franchise of brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, and Hunter, all with their hands out to have their palms crossed with cash. By the same token, atfer Joe left the vice presidency, all the graft suddenly came to an end. Well, maybe there were little side deals at the Penn Biden center and so forth, but weren't they just more or less wrapping up the old vice presidential frammis? Joe could withdraw to a modest but comfortable retirement.

I don't believe that. In fact, I don't believe anyone is specifically pushing that argument. A person's character is well formed by age 67, and no matter how much older they get, they just keep on keepin' on. Joe has an expensive lifestyle, and several of the family progeny have expensive addictions. There's got to be more. In fact, I'm inclined to think Burisma is just the low-hanging fruit. And let's just add what we learn from criminology: crooks have habits. They work within a comfort zone. They keep doing the things that work for them, and with which they feel comfortable. And just as important, they mostly keep doing their thing until they're dead or in jail, because life is a series of habits.

Now and then, people turn up odd tidbits about Joe that suggest the mediocre-but-honest narrative doesn't hold up, like this recent thread on X, formerly Twitter:

My first assignment as a junior editor at the Harvard Journal on Legislation (1999-2000) was to cite check an article submitted by one Sen. Joseph R. Biden. I was shocked by the plagiarism I discovered. 🧵 https://t.co/0CSqJBZR7E

— Roger Severino (@RogerSeverino_) September 4, 2023

Allegations of plagiarism have surfaced and resubmerged throughout his career, most famously during his brief 1987 presidential campaign, but he initially failed a Syracuse University Law School course for plagiarism. He was allowed to repeat the course without a permanent penalty. He's repeated other personmality traits like fabricating stories about himself throughout his life. I suspect that a detailed investigation would also uncover one or another version of under-the-table baksheesh throughout his career.

So I've got to ask if we've really looked into what Joe might be up to now. I've noted here that he can no longer do a traditional news conference with a range of questions from a variety of reporters, because too many potential questions could still come up, not just about Hunter, but about things like his own e-mail aliases or the Biden family shell companies that receive payments from overseas. But even without the ability to pose those questions in that forum, there are questions a Peter Doocy could raise with Karine Jean-Pierre in the White House press room, or a Robert Kennedy Jr could ask in a TV interview.

For instance, "Can the president assure us that there are no longer any Biden family shell companies still receiving money from foreign sources?" Remember that as homicide detectives say, a lie is as good as a confession. All it wouid take would be for an investigator or whistleblower to uncover one such company still with an income from Ukraine, China, Romania, Kazakhstan, or wherever. But this leaves aside the whole other Biden network that extends to the University of Pennsylvania and the Penn Biden Center.

Another question would be, "We've learned that while he was vice president, the president, like others in the Obama administration, used alias e-mail addresses to disguise certain of his business arrangements. Can the president assure us that neither he, nor other high-level people in his administration, are using alias e-mail addresses to disguise business arrangements now?" Again, a lie is as good as a confession. And homicide detectives know those sorts of questions are best asked when they already have the answers.

Some of the Republicans in Congress do know this trick, especially Sen Grassley, and so far, the tactic has been effective as a way of prying documents like 1023 forms loose from the Justice Department when lawmakers have made the point that they've already seen them. I can only expect that things will heat up when the House comes back into session on Tuesday, but I continue to think the real revelations will have to come over e-mail aliases and foreign payments to the Biden family now, not six years ago.

What Is Kamala Telling Us About The 2024 Campaign?

I've already cited uncertainty among some observers about the state of Joe Biden's fire in the belly as next year's presidential campaigns get under way. But another indication comes from Kamala Harris:

Vice President Kamala Harris has had 27 work days with nothing on her public schedule since the launch of the Biden-Harris reelection campaign, a Daily Caller analysis found.

On days the vice president had something on her public schedule, her schedule frequently consisted of having one event during the entire day. The events included having lunch with President Joe Biden, receiving a brief with the president, and eating with foreign leaders, the Daily Caller found using Politico Playbook records of Harris’ schedule.

The piece goes on to enumerate each of her schedule lacunae for individual months, which are pretty awful -- for instance,

The vice president spent seven weekdays with nothing on her public schedule in June. She spent one day with nothing but lunch with the president on her public schedule, one day attending a Juneteenth concert, one day receiving a briefing with the president, one day meeting the Indian prime minister on the South Lawn and eating lunch with the prime minister the next day.

But other than note the inactivity. it draws no conclusions, except to say that Joe hasn't been much busier:

Biden has also spent extended time away during the campaign. The president reached a personal record away from the Oval Office in August — going on two week-long vacations during the month.

On one hand, we might say this is almost a wise decision on the part of their handlers, since neither is articulate or especially charismatic, and if anything, Kamala's record is more consistently mediocre than Joe's. On the other hand, the Biden-Harris handlers seem at least to recognize the need to show some effort at rehabilitating Kamala. In Pollitico a couple of weeks ago:

Harris’ term has largely been marked by stilted performances at public events, at odds with the uninhibited interrogator she was known as in the Senate. They’ve fueled whispers about whether she’ll be a drag on the reelection ticket as the 2024 race heats up.

Now her political future, and quite possibly the success of the Democratic ticket in 2024, hinges on a simple question: Is it possible for Kamala Harris to make a second impression?

The story goes on to say that in her own mind, she doesn't see what the problem is:

“You could have followed me around in Iowa [ahead of 2020],” Harris told POLITICO in one of two exclusive interviews. “You would have seen the same thing four years ago. It’s always who I’ve been. So I can’t get into people’s heads about why they characterize things as being one way or another. It’s not as though I’ve just found myself. I’ve always been here and never went away.”

But the same stories were going around even then. On October 30, 2019, as Kamala's prospects for 2020 faded even before the primaries, Vanity Fair wrote:

With the Iowa caucuses only a few months away—and her poll numbers not improving—Senator Kamala Harris's 2020 campaign is changing course.

. . . News of Harris's campaign overhaul came within hours of the newest disappointing poll for the California senator, as a USA Today/Suffolk poll released Wednesday put Harris at just 3%. The senator's polling was tied with entrepreneur Andrew Yang, while Representative Tulsi Gabbard, who did not even qualify for the September debate, finished slightly ahead with 4%. (Former Vice President Joe Biden led the poll with 26%, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren followed with 17%.)

The story went on to suggest that by retargeting resources, the campaign could turn things around, but the basic problem seems to have been Kamala from the start. One puzzling thing about her as a candidate is that like Barack Obama, she has strands of African DNA, but she isn't the descendant of US African slaves. Despite that, Obama has always been able to seem authentic to African-American voters despite his privileged upbringing and elite education, while those same voters have never trusted Kamala.

Thus she had no credibility of her own to bring to the 2020 primaries, where her performance was dismal from start to her early finish. Her benefit to Biden was simply as a diversity hire to fulfill his promise to name a black woman as his running mate -- exceept she was about the least black of any black woman he could choose.

Was this a bug or a feature? We may surmise there was never any serious debate about dropping her from the 2024 ticket, notwithstanding in the absence of Joe at the top, she would be a weak candidate and a disastrous successor who could bring nothing positive with her presence -- at best, by remaining, she would forestall criticism from the people who'd put her on the ticket in 2020. I suspect the answer has something to do with what Franklin Foer in his new book calls Joe's "swaggering faith in himself".

So far, we might conclude that Joe is either firm in a belief that 2024 is a sure thing, or he just doesn't care much either way.