A Reminder: The Problem Isn't Hunter, The Problem Is Joe

It's worth noting that the discovery of Hunter's laptop is important because of what it began to reveal about Joe, not what it said about Hunter, who in the scheme of things is just a more extreme version of the standard-issue presidential relative, Donald Nixon, Billy Carter, Roger Clinton, Tony and Hugh Rodham, and Neil Bush, all of whom led less than exemplary lives and in varying degrees tried to profit from their presidential connections. Except for the extravagance of Hunter's vices, he's nothing new.

In fact, looking at allegations against figures like Donald Nixon, the Rodham brothers, and Neil Bush, there's some similarity insofar as they relied on benefactors with presidential connections to bail them out of financial crises or collected fees for influence peddling -- again, it's a matter of degree. The problem with Hunter is that the specifics of his connection to Joe have been so well concealed that we're beginning to learn only slowly and belatedly how much Joe has been on the take, indeed throughout his career -- and compared to Nixon, Carter, and even the Clintons, this is also starting to look like a matter of degree.

Thus we have a relatively minor story from last week:

A potentially devastating video from 2005 has resurfaced showing Hunter Biden socializing with then-senator Joe Biden and potential clients, discussing “the weather.” I’m just kidding. They weren’t talking about the weather; they were talking business.

I'll get into what the video reveals about the Hunter-Joe tag team below, but let's look at where it stands in the overall timeline. The dates covered in Hunter's laptop run from roughly 2010 to 2019, when he dropped it off at the Delaware computer repair shop and never retrieved it. Up to now, the earliest entries on the Hunter timeline include Dubya's appointment of Hunter to the Amtrak board in 2006 as a favor to Joe as senator, as well as his 2006 purchase of Paradigm Global Advisers with his uncle James Biden. This tape from 2005 definitely widens the picture.

According to Wikipedia, after he graduated from law school in 1996, Hunter went to work for the MBNA bank, headquartered in Wilmington, and was there until 1998. It's worth noting that during the 1990s, MBNA

became one of the most profitable companies in the United States, the world's largest independent credit card issuer, and the largest private-sector employer in Delaware.

In 1995, MBNA moved its headquarters from a suburban location to Rodney Square in downtown Wilmington, Delaware. This investment was credited with helping to revive Wilmington's downtown real estate market.

Hunter's status as an executive there would have facilitated the relationship between MBNA and his dad Joe as senator from Delaware, and it's hard to avoid thinking Joe facilitated the growth and success of MBNA in a highly regulated banking and credit card environment. From there, Hunter went to the US Department of Commerce under Bill Clinton, which looks like a run-of-the-mill patronage job.

Biden then became a lobbyist, co-founding the firm of Oldaker, Biden & Belair. According to Adam Entous of The New Yorker, Biden and his father established a relationship in which "Biden wouldn't ask Hunter about his lobbying clients, and Hunter wouldn't tell his father about them."

But the 2005 video provides an insight into their actual working relationship during this same period. According to the first link above,

[I]t captures a moment where Hunter Biden stands on the sidelines while Joe Biden interacts with attendees, “working the room,” as Kelly describes it. After waiting patiently for the right moment, Hunter eventually joins the conversation to greet a couple with whom he had apparently discussed a potential business opportunity linked to his lobbying firm.

. . . “Maybe we can work something out,” Joe Biden says to the couple in the video.

“Yeah, yeah, that is what we will do,” the woman excitedly replies.

“Hunter was just telling me about his law firm in Washington, his law firm,” replies the man next to her.

“Yeah,” Joe Biden says, clearly not surprised.

. . . At this point, the woman starts engaging with Joe, while Hunter and the man go off to the side to have a separate conversation that the camera can’t pick up.

. . . This took place while Joe Biden was a senator. He wasn’t even vice president yet, and it appears that he and Hunter had been working political events for years to make business deals.

. . . While the new impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden involves influence-peddling during his time as vice president, it’s quite clear the shady Biden family business was going on well before that.

The meeting where this was recorded was in South Carolina, when at the time, Joe was a senator from Delaware. What was pretty clearly being pitched was Joe's overall influence in Washington, something that would only grow when he became vice president. This suggests the range of Joe's marketing efforts even as a senator, when Hunter's position as Joe's agent and intermediary was in only its early stages. In addition, this meeting, as well as Hunter's career phase with Oldaker, Biden & Belair, isn't covered on his laptop, and we know little about his activities then otherwise. Nevertheless,

“Back in 2002, he filed his Form 1040 late-filing and owing over $100,000 in taxes; 2003, owed more than $100,000 dollars in taxes; 2004, late-filed and owed more than $20,000 in taxes; and then 2005, late filed his personal return and owed over $100,000 in taxes,” [an unnamed IRS] whistleblower testified.

His ex-wife Kathleen Buhle wrote in her memoir

she first began noticing Hunter's drinking might be a problem around 2001 . . . when he took a job as a partner at a lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. which led to a lot of late nights and long periods away from their home in Delaware. . . . By the fall of 2003, Hunter entered rehab for the first time[.]

What this suggests is that the working relationship between Hunter and Joe was closely coordinated well before Joe became vice president, and it worked especially well for Joe throughout the latter part of his political career -- less well, it would seem, for Hunter, since as the working relationship developed, so did his addictions. But the big question is this: Joe had a modus operandi of taking money for influence that he emplyed throughout at least his later years in the Senate, extending into his time as vice president.

So when did he stop taking these payments? Much of what we've learned about Joe has come from Hunter's laptop, which covers only the time of Joe's vice presidency and his interregnum, up to his decision to run for president in 2019. But we're slowly starting to learn Joe was on the take at least before the time of the laptop. What about after? Habits don't change. Joe's been the same guy, as far as we can tell, all his life. What's he up to now?

A Theory Of Joe's Fake E-Mail IDs

I haven't run into much by Jack Cashill recently -- he's the guy who originally proposed that 1960s SDS agitator and Weatherman Bill Ayers ghostwrote Barack Obama's Dreams From my Father, as well as other theories on TWA Flight 800 and the Oklahoma City bombing. But just this morning, I discovered a new piece at American Thinker, which frequently features his writing. He traces Joe's phony e-mail addresses like Robert L Peters, robinware456, and JRBWare to, of all people, Whittaker Chambers:

One need only look at Chambers's page in Wikipedia — the scourge of right-wing conspiracy theories — to see the likely source of the Biden code (italics added): "[Chambers's] main handler was Josef Peters, Chambers claimed that Peters introduced him to Harold Ware ... [and] that Ware was head of a communist underground cell in Washington."

It would seem far more likely than not that that the names "Peters" and "Ware" were chosen consciously. Based on his policies and performance, it seems altogether possible that "JRB [Joseph Robinette Biden] Ware" sees himself as the "head of a communist underground cell in Washington" in the spirit of his namesake.

The main objection to this theory is that Joe doesn't read books, he plagiarizes them. Cashill is postulating a level of subtlety and depth far beyond a guy who, as it suits him, will claim to have been raised in black churches, by Puerto Ricans, or by Jews.

It might be barely within the realm of credibility to propose that Barack Obama was some sort of New Left sleeper agent, but the idea that Joe Biden would somehow see himself as a Stalinist spy under deep cover doesn't pass the laugh test -- it's too much like all Joe's other tall tales. "You may think this is a joke -- I'm not kidding here, though -- I was a Soviet spy. I mean, I actually ran both Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. And Nixon didn't catch me!"

But Cashill's piece actually helped me to clarify one of the points I made in yesterday's post, that's been made by writers from Ferdinand Lundberg in The Rich and the Super-Rich to Ralph Ellson in Invisible Man, that a major factor in the original New Deal coalition was an alliance between Northern industrial money, funneled through non-profits and universities, and Southern segregationists, which in fact predated Roosevelt and extended back to Reconstruction.

And Joe Biden, rather than being a Soviet agent, made his career from this alliance. We need look no farther for substantiation of this than Ted Kaufman, Biden's longtime adviser, who was appointed to the remainder of Joe's Senate term when Joe became vice president in 2009.

Kaufman originally moved to Delaware in 1966 to work for DuPont as an engineer.

In 1972 he joined Joe Biden's U.S. Senate campaign, which was considered to be a long shot, on a volunteer basis. After Biden's surprise victory in 1972, he took a one-year leave of absence from DuPont to organize and head Senator Biden's Delaware Office. In 1976 he became Biden's Chief of Staff and administrative assistant and served until 1995, also working on Biden's subsequent Senate campaigns. After Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election, Kaufman was chosen to head Biden's transition team.

Given what we know about the Delaware Way, nobody runs for Senate and gets elected there without the DuPonts, and the DuPonts are Northern industrial money if anyone is. Not only does Ted Kaufman seem to have engineered DuPont support for Joe, but DuPont let him take a leave of absence to set up Joe's office once he was elected.

What we so far know little about is how the relationship between Ted Kaufman and Joe Biden got started, but it's hard to avoid thinking Kaufman by 1972 had become a conduit between Joe and the DuPonts, when Joe at the time was a fervent segregationist in a Southern state:

In a series of never-before-published letters from Biden, which were reviewed by CNN, the strength of his opposition to busing comes into sharper focus, particularly how he followed the lead of – and sought support from – some of the Senate’s most fervent segregationists.

. . . Biden, who at the time was 34 and serving his first term in the Senate, repeatedly asked for – and received – the support of Sen. James Eastland, a Mississippi Democrat and chairman of the Judiciary Committee and a leading symbol of Southern resistance to desegregation. Eastland frequently spoke of blacks as “an inferior race.”

Indeed, by 1974, the DuPonts were happy enough with Joe to give him a deal on a mansion that had been part of the family estate.

[I]t originally belonged to the du Ponts, a prominent family who settled in Wilmington, Delaware and made billions off of their gunpowder business, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company (which now goes by the name DuPont).

. . . [I]t was built in 1930, and it includes five bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, and three fireplaces, spread across two stories and just over 10,000 square feet. The former Vice President called this abode “The Station,” and it even acted as the headquarters for his 1988 presidential campaign.

The DuPonts let him have it for $185,000 in 1974, and he sold it for $1.2 million in 1996.

In yesterday's post, when I noted that the Democrats, having lost much of the old New Deal coalition, had nevertheless gained "African-Americans . . . gays [I should have said "queers"], radical feminists, aging hippies, and parlor socialists", I left out the greens, but it's worth noting, as Trump has pointed out, that the greens are doing the will of the Northern industrialists in agitating for tax-supported projects like solar energy and EVs that will go from government budgets to their bottom lines.

Evs will be built in whole or part in China, using Chinese raw materials. It's worth noting that up to 1957, DuPont owned 24% of General Motors, when the US Supreme Court ordered DuPont to divest its shares:

In concluding that the law had been violated, the decision noted that “the bulk of du Pont’s production of automotive finishes and fabrics has always supplied the largest part of the requirements of General Motors, the one customer in the automobile industry connected to du Pont by a stock interest, and [so] there is an overwhelming inference that du Pont’s commanding position was promoted by its stock interest, and was not gained solely on competitive merit.”

As Ferdinand Lundberg has pointed out, it's never easy to determine who owns what part of what company, with ownership concealed by street names, investment funds, and other devices -- but it's hard to avoid thinking even now that what's good for the US auto sector -- de-unionization and government subsidies, among other things -- will be good for DuPont.

For now, that's why Joe, the last relic of the old Democrat coalition, is president. He's anything but a Soviet plant.

The Dump Kamala Problem

It looks as though David Ignatius's column from earlier this week has precipitated a rush to find potential replacements for Kamala, even though this will be a feckless enterprise.

Columnists at The Washington Post, New York Magazine’s The Intelligencer and a prominent independent writer said there are "better options available" for Biden’s running mate and that he should choose one of them if he wants a shot at winning re-election.

Among the Democrats mentioned to replace Harris were Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, and Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth.

Ignatius himself recommended Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, for whatever reason. Gov Whitmer is the only one on this list who's also been named a potential replacement for Joe himself. Joe's potential replacements have included California Gov Newsom, who has since taken himself out of the running, and Illinois Gov Pritzker -- and that's about it. Besides Newsom, Whitmer, and Pritzker, this piece from just a week ago at The Hill can find only Pete Buttigieg and AOC, which illustrates the real problem, which goes well beyond either Joe or Kamala.

The whole question of whether Kamala can be dumped from the ticket is actually a question of who can replace Joe Biden, because the issue is whether Joe can make it to January 2029 without the need for a replacement, and this is a likely enough contingency that people are asking serious questions about Kamala.

But if the pundits are asking serious questions about presidential succession, shouldn't they be asking which potential replacement for Kamala would be most reassuring as a potential president? In other words, why are we even thinking about people like Karen Bass, Raphael Warnock, Tammy Duckworth, or even Gov Whitmer? Any of these would be hard to imagine as even marginally better than Kamala.

But then, if we cross the ones off the list who are just potential Dan Quayles or Spiro Agnews, who emerges as a potential Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, or Lyndon Johnson? JB Pritzker? With Newsom out of the running, that's all that's left, unless we drop down to Pete Buttigieg and AOC. Might as well stay with Kamala if those are the choices; at least she helps the ticket with blacks. And this brings us closer to the central problem:

If President Biden wants Black voters to come out in support of him in 2024, he better not be thinking of running without Kamala Harris — at least, that’s what “The View” host Sunny Hostin argued on Thursday.

. . . Hostin pointed out that, in 2020, Biden earned 91% percent of the Black vote, and swore that Black people would come out and support him again — if Kamala Harris is his running mate.

The problem has been the disappearance of the New Deal coalition, which up to Kennedy was labor; the Northern industrial upper class; Catholics, Jews, and other ethnics; and Southern segregationists. Under Nixon, the South accepted Reconstruction, and Southern whites saw Republicans as a better alternative to the old Democrat alliance between Northern industrial colonialism and Southern seregationists. Labor gradually left the coalitrion as well, and Trump is re-emphasizing this:

Trump, in an interview with CNBC, aligned himself with auto workers and warned them that the Biden administration, paired with UAW leadership, is not only not stopping China from gaining economic dominance over the EV industry but actively working to hand the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) full control of EV supply chains.

The Northern industrialists will still get rich off EVs, but they won't have to negotiate with US unions to produce them. It's all a win-win as far as they're concerned. So at this point, the New Deal coalition has lost labor, Southern whites, and Catholics. It's gained African-Americans since Johnson, gays, radical feminists, aging hippies, and parlor socialists, but the coalition at large is reduced, so that at best, the population is evenly divided, and the Democrats can't afford to lose any more of the groups it currently has.

The problem is that those remaining groups have no reason to remain in a cohesive alliance. Blacks, as Sunny Hostin pointed out, will not support Democrats unless they're made a prominent part of the coalition, especially by having a black on the presidential ticket. But this leaves gays, radical feminists, aging hippies, and parlor socialists without the same leverage, which is how Bernie Sanders was eased out of the running in 2016 and 2020; the same will happen with Marianne Williamson and Robert Kennedy Jr in 2024 -- and if either Joe or Kamala is replaced, it won't be by anyone like Buttigieg or AOC, either. It will be either a black or a cis white machine politician heavily indebted to blacks who, however, won't win.

The real problem is that Joe is the last vestige of the old New Deal coalition -- a Southern segregationist allied with Northern industrialists (although the Southern segregationists were traditionally the vice president) -- who can gloss over those differences. Given the demands that blacks will exert over the remaining coalition -- and the fact that Barack Obama was a unique phenomenon that won't repeat -- potential Democrat nominees are likely to be from a group that currently includes Karen Bass, Raphael Warnock, Hakeem Jeffries, and Kamala herself. None of these is electable in the country at large.

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.