The Synod In A Distant Mirror

As a relatively new Catholic convert, I've been reluctant to say anything about the synod recently completed in Rome, except to note what Fr James Martin himself has concludeed about it:

One of these issues was L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics, particularly since this community was explicitly mentioned in the Instrumentum Laboris twice. It was also mentioned in half of the reports submitted by episcopal conferences from around the world. Many hoped that the synod would find ways to speak explicitly about reaching out to this community in new ways. Also there were unreasonably high expectations that the synod would, for example, somehow ratify the blessings of same-sex unions.

But that second option was never going to happen on that or any other issue; the synod is consultative, not deliberative. The synod does not have the power to change any church practice; it can only suggest.

Still, the lack of any mention of the term “L.G.B.T.Q.” in the final synthesis, called “A Synodal Church on Mission,” was, for many people, including myself, a disappointment.

I have the sense that at least so far, the Catholic Church has dodged a bullet. The LGBTQ issue, along with earleir ones like women's ordination, has been destroying main line Protestant denominatins for decades. The United Methodist Church is only the most recent:

More than 6,000 United Methodist congregations — a fifth of the U.S. total — have now received permission to leave the denomination amid a schism over theology and the role of LGBTQ people in the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination.

. . . Church law forbids the marriage or ordination of “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals,” but many conservatives have chosen to leave amid a growing defiance of those bans in many U.S. churches and conferences.

Many of the departing congregations are joining the Global Methodist Church, a denomination created last year by conservatives breaking from the UMC, while others are going independent or joining different denominations.

Pope Francis in occasional offhand remarks that I haven't been able to locate specifically seems to have come close to the basic issue: Protestant denominations have liberalized on this, that, or the other throughout much of the past century, but it hasn't brought any Protestants back to church. For instance,

The General Convention Office released The Episcopal Church’s annual batch of parochial report data this week, providing a snapshot of the church in 2022 as dioceses and congregations were beginning to rebound from COVID-19 disruptions. In addition to the numbers, these parochial reports also included responses to narrative questions aimed at deepening the church’s understanding of the changes, challenges and opportunities present in parish life.

The topline numbers continue to show a church experiencing gradual long-term membership decline, much like other mainline Protestant denominations. The Episcopal Church’s tally of baptized members dropped just below 1.6 million in 2022, down 21% from 2013.

The church recorded an even sharper drop in average Sunday attendance in the past decade, down 43% to 373,000 in 2022, though that one-year total was up by 19% from the pandemic-driven low of 313,000 in 2021.

Earlier trends among Episcopalians reflect a decline that began in the 1960s and 70s, when that denomination began to embrace secular political issues and move toward ordaining women:

The Episcopal Church Annual, also known as The Red Book, includes a table that tracks Episcopal statistics from 1880 to the present. . . . If one simply finds the high point of Episcopal membership in Red Book tables (1966) and compares that figure (3,647,297) with the total members in 2002 (2,320,221), it would seem that the Episcopal Church lost well over a million members during the last 35 years.

And as of 2022, according to the first link, that number had dropped to 1.6 million, less than half the number in 1966. The Episcopalians had two periods of schism in which conservative parishes left for newly constituted Anglican denominatios, the first in the 1970s and early 1980s, the second in the 2000s. According to Wikipedia, the most important of these, the Anglican Church in North America, had 127,624 members in 2019, which can account for only a small part of the more than 2 million Episcopalian membership decline since 1966.

It appears that the likely outcome of all such schisms will be an overall loss of credibility for organized Christianity that can never be made up by organizing new, quasi-orthodox denominations. This suggests that the schism in the United Methodist Church will never produce an overall membership total among the UMC, the new Global Methodist Church, and other groups harboring other dissident UMC parishes, that ever corresponds to the pre-schism total in the UMC alone. Mostly, it will encourage more people just to drop church attendance entirely.

The increase in overall denominations leads to an increase in bishops and other key spokespeople both locally and nationally, especially when one Anglican or one Methodist leader is pro-LGBTQ and another is anti, which diminishes the prestige of both and the overall ability of religious spokesmen to affect the public dialogue.

Beyond that, when denominations break up into smaller ones, it's economically inefficient, since relatively more of individual parish tithes to their supervising bodies will go to more administrative expenses in more corporate-style offices at more denominations. This contributes to an overall death spiral.

The takeaway, from what I csn see, is that when Christian denominations cave to secular pressure, it kills them fairly quickly, especially over the LGBTQ issue. Rome must certainly be aware of these trends, which has almost certainly, if very quietly, affected the outcome of the recent synod.

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As I've been pointing out, Trump's strategy in at least two of his trials, the Washington January 6 case under Judge Chutkan and the New York civil fraud case under Judge Engoron, has been to irritate and bait the judges into overreacting, imposing gag orders and making reversible errors. As of yesterday,

A three-judge appeals court panel paused the federal gag order that partially limited former president Donald Trump's speech ahead of his federal 2020 election interference trial in Washington, D.C., according to a court ruling filed Friday.

The ruling administratively and temporarily stays Judge Tanya Chutkan's decision to bar Trump from publicly targeting court staff, potential witnesses and members of special counsel Jack Smith's prosecutorial team, a ruling Trump asked the higher court to put on hold. Friday's order is not a decision on the merits of the gag order Chutkan issued last month, but is meant to give the appeals court more time to consider the arguments in the case.

Judges Patricia Millett, an Obama appointee, Cornelia Pillard, another Obama appointee and Bradley Garcia, a Biden appointee, granted the former president's request for an emergency pause on the order less than 24 hours after Trump's attorneys filed a motion for a stay.

So far, Judge Chutkan hasn't lost her cool, but she can't be happy at the defense's continuing series of motions to stay her orders or dismiss the case entirely. Judge Engoron in New York, on the other hand, is doing exactly as the Trump team wishes:

New York County Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron on Friday gagged former President Donald Trump’s legal counsel from discussing his “confidential communications” with staff, including note-passing from clerk Allison Greenfield.

. . . “Serious sanctions” will be brought against the legal team if they violate the order, said Engoron, who is overseeing the civil lawsuit New York Attorney General Letitia James has brought against Trump and his eldest sons.

He specifically named Trump lawyers Christopher Kise, Clifford Robert, and Alina Habba, writing that they “have made, on the record, repeated, inappropriate remarks about my Principal Law Clerk, falsely accusing her of bias against them and of improperly influencing the ongoing bench trial.”

The judge certainly appears to be highly sensitive to any imputations about his close relationsip with his principal clerk. Yesterday's gag order on Trump's counsel, on top of his earlier order and fines against Trump himself, followed a kerfuffle invovling Greenfield the day before:

Proceedings at Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York grew heated on Thursday, with the presiding judge pounding the bench and threatening to expand his gag order to keep the former president’s lawyers from attacking his court staff.

. . . State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron accused attorney Chris Kise of sexism for his repeated jabs at Engoron’s law clerk, Allison Greenfield, who sat to the judge’s immediate right. Trump’s legal team had previously expressed frustrations that Greenfield was passing notes to Engoron, allegedly swaying his opinion during the trial.

“She’s a civil servant. She’s doing what I ask her to do,” the judge snapped, according to the New York Daily News. “I sometimes think there may be a bit of misogyny in you referring to my female principal law clerk.”

Greenfield was previously the target of Trump’s ire in a mocking Oct. 3 social media post that led to Engoron issuing the initial gag order. The former president, who was in court that day, posted a photo of Greenfield with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to Truth Social, calling her “Schumer’s girlfriend” and accusing her of bias.

But the judge's problems with Greenfield go beyond wisecracks from Trump. News also broke Thursday of accusations against Greenfeld of ethical violations:

The top clerk for New York Justice Arthur Engoron, Allison Greenfield, appears to have violated judicial rules preventing officers of the court from making excessive political donations, Breitbart News has learned.

What’s more, it appears Engoron was advised of Greenfield’s violations in a 72-page complaint addressed to his court via email that was also filed with the New York State Bar Association the same day he decided to issue a gag order against former President Donald Trump in his case currently playing out in Engoron’s Manhattan courtroom. Engoron has subsequently fined Trump a total of $15,000 for two alleged violations of that gag order preventing the former president from criticizing his principal law clerk.

. . . New York ethics rules prohibit court officials like Greenfield from giving in excess of $500 in the aggregate in a particular calendar year in political donations.

. . .This year and last year, Greenfield apparently exceeded that $500 threshold. Greenfield began as Justice Engoron’s principal law clerk in 2019—so she has been in this position for several years and in the two most recent years, 2022 and 2023, she violated the ethics rules for judicial staff.

. . . In 2022 alone, Greenfield gave thousands of dollars in donations. The donations, which can be found in New York’s elections database, total several thousand dollars. . . . What, if anything, becomes of these alleged violations of the ethics rules by Greenfield remains to be seen. The judge in the case for now keeps siding with her, and even as recently as Thursday afternoon’s proceedings, according to live updates from New York Times reporters in the courtroom. Greenfield’s presence at Engoron’s side has been a centerpiece of the case as the trial plays out. The judge accused one Trump lawyer of “misogyny,” according to the Times, for raising questions about Greenfield.

Trump's legal team responded to the news on Thursday,

“There’s a news story out [today]…about particular political contributions made by your court staff…it raises questions of impartiality,” Kise said, according to Law360’s Stewart Bishop.

He added the “defense will have to give serious consideration to seeking a mistrial.”

According to Pix11 reporter Henry Rosoff, Engoron — who placed a gag order on Trump regarding Greenfield and has fined him twice for gag order violations — became frustrated.

. . . Engoron said Friday, “It’s not information, it’s an allegation!” according to Rosoff.

“This idea someone has notified me, absolutely untrue, absolutely untrue,” he added.

Trump and his lawyers so far appear to be succeeding in turning at least one of the cases into a farce, with the full cooperation of Judge Engoron, who has begun to overreact and lose his temper repeatedly. The Trump team clearly has gotten under his skin. It looks like the Chicago Seven strategy is working, and it will continue.

Hunter Resurfaces

Why did Hunter Biden take this video? it screams drug-induced paranoia.pic.twitter.com/Fk6ejyqWcd

— Evan Mahoney (@EvanMahoney_) October 31, 2023

Hunter Biden resurfaced twice in the news this week, first in a video that was posted on X Tuesday, linked above, and then in a USA Today op-ed yesterday, where he claims that he is in recovery and sober, but his enemies keep dredging up old videos to make fun of him. But as far as anyone can tell, this is a new video that appears to have been taken as a selfie from his own phone, the release of which would have been entirely under his control. Somehow it got from his phone to X.

On the other hand, I suspect the USA Today piece was written for him, or was at best heavily revised from notes he provided, probably by his Hollywood lawyer friend Kevin Morris, who likely placed it via his or his wife's media network. The video could possibly support his claim that

The weaponization of my addiction by partisan and craven factions represents a real threat to those desperate to get sober but are afraid of what may await them if they do. . . . part of my living amends is to not only survive this, but to also use my experience to be a living example of the promises we are told await us in sobriety.

But if this is what sobriety promises, I'm not sure why everyone's so big on it. Comments on the video in the post note, however, that Hunter's pupils appear dilated, and his overall demeanor appears to be bizarre. (The most amusing comment, though, is from the visitor who claims it's actually Jordan Peterson.) Nobody is quite sure of the video's date, but if we compare Hunter's haircut in this photo from October 3:

with his hair in the video, it could well represent a month's regrowth plus a couple weeks of not shaving, and he has the same wiggy facial expression as in the video, so I suspect it's quite recent. The most that can be said about the October photo outside the Delaware courtroom and the video, though, is that Hunter doesn't look well at all. I suspect it was a task to get him as cleaned up as he was for his October appearance.

But isn't Hunter under Secret Service protection? Somehow he's getting into things that dilate his pupils, give him a strung-out expression, and drive him into bizarre behavior taking video selfies. I've got to ask if his Secret Service detail is enabling this, and if his current condition is why he's no longer living at the White House. The baggie near the Sit Room was probably a sign that things could be covered up only so long.

The conditons of Hunter's pretrial release include abstaining from illegal drugs. According to the link, US Magistrate Judge Christopher Burke claims Hunter had "submitted to tests for illegal drug use multiple times recently and had tested negative". I would think, though, that an independent probation officer seeing the video might order yet another test, but the repercussions for doing this would likely be severe.

Right now, nobody around Hunter is doing him any favors, unless his wife has placed herself and little Beau well out of reach, which I suspect may be the case. The difficulty for Hunter is that he's surrounded by enablers due to Joe's position as Caesar, but Hunter's continuing episodes do less damage to Hunter than they do Joe, and this is for entirely justified reasons -- Hunter is protected becasue of Joe, and any new episodes point this out.

Hunter's whole argument in the USA Today piece is that he's sober. If he isn't actually sober, which I think is the likely case, his whole argument fails -- he's continuing to make himself an exhibitionist joke without any assistance from Republicans. Why on earth did he make that video at all, much less allow it to get out?

What We Know About Jim Biden So Far

Jim Biden has operated under the radar, as I commented yesterday, largely because no trove of documents equivalent to Hunter's laptop has surfaced over his own business dealings. Instead, so far, the best we've had is a series of anecdotes.

The earliest was covered in 2019 by Politico as Joe's initial 2020 campaign began to falter -- once he gained momentum, though, corporate media dropped these stories. But before then, they covered Jim's and Hunter's acquisition of Paradigm Global Advisers:

In the late summer of 2006 Joe Biden’s son Hunter and Joe’s younger brother, James, purchased the firm. On their first day on the job, they showed up with Joe’s other son, Beau, and two large men and ordered the hedge fund’s chief of compliance to fire its president, according to a Paradigm executive who was present.

After the firing, the two large men escorted the fund’s president out of the firm’s midtown Manhattan office, and James Biden laid out his vision for the fund’s future. “Don’t worry about investors,” he said, according to the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation. “We've got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.”

At the time, the senator was just months away from both assuming the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launching his second presidential bid. According to the executive, James Biden made it clear he viewed the fund as a way to take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money to his older brother or his campaign account. “We've got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” the executive remembers James Biden saying.

At this, the executive recalled, Beau Biden, who was then running for attorney general of Delaware, turned bright red. He told his uncle, “This can never leave this room, and if you ever say it again, I will have nothing to do with this.”

It does appear that after that time, Beau concentrated on his own political career separately from other family interests. The story continued,

Three former Paradigm executives said James and Hunter Biden also sought to capitalize on Joe’s strong ties to labor unions in the hopes of landing investments from them; Charles Provini, who briefly served as Paradigm’s president, said both James and Hunter repeatedly cited Joe’s political ties when they recruited him to work for the fund. “I was told because of his relationships with the unions that they felt as though it would be favorably looked upon to invest in the fund as long as it was a good fund,” Provini recalled.

. . . There is no indication the Bidens ever succeeded in bringing new foreign money into the fund, but their involvement with Paradigm, which spanned the final two years of Joe’s Senate career and first two years of his vice presidency, was troubled for other reasons: In James and Hunter’s five-year tenure, Paradigm became associated with a number of alleged and confirmed frauds, including Allen Stanford’s multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, while seeking to draw on their powerful relative’s political allies for financing.

The story then briefly memtions Jim's involvement with Hill International, the Philadelphia construction company that in 2011 tried to use Joe's influence to get a $1.5 billion contract to build affordable housing in Iraq, which I covered here. In that post, I linked to the account of a separate episode, also in 2011, in which Hill International hired Jim to use Joe's influence to negotiate a secret deal with the Saudis to settle a dispute over a desalinization plant and get out of paying a law firm the 40% cut outlined in their contract.

The record is silent until the 2017 $40,000 "loan repayment" check from Jim's wide Sara to Joe that the Comer committee revealed this week. According to the chairman,

It all began with a shakedown in the summer of 2017 when Hunter Biden sent a message to his CEFC associate demanding a $10 million capital payment. As Hunter Biden extorted this associate, Hunter claimed he was sitting with his father, and that the Biden network would turn on his associate if he didn’t pony up the money. The extortion scheme worked. Days later, $5 million flowed in from a Chinese affiliate of CEFC. Over the following three weeks, Biden family members made a series of complicated financial transactions to hide the source of the China money.

. . . First, Northern International Capital, a Chinese company associated with CEFC, wired $5,000,000 to Hudson West III, a joint venture established by Hunter Biden and a CEFC associate.

Then, Hudson West III sent $400,000 to an entity owned and controlled by Hunter Biden.

Next, Hunter Biden wired $150,000 to Lion Hall Group, a company owned by Joe Biden’s brother James and sister-in-law Sara Biden.

Sara Biden then withdrew $50,000 in cash from Lion Hall Group. Later the same day, she deposited it into her and James Biden’s personal checking account.

A few days later, Sara Biden cut a check to Joe Biden for $40,000. The memo line of the check said, “loan repayment.”

After that, we have the story of the 2018 check for $200,000 from Jim to Joe, also characterized as a "loan repayment", which I covered in this post. Jim secured $600,000 in loans from a failing health care company, Americore, on the basis that he could use Joe's influence to secure new investors to Americore from the Middle East. However, as seems to be typical with Jim's various schemes, the investments never materialized, and Americore declared bankruptcy.

[A] Chapter 11 trustee sued James Biden alleging that the company loaned him $600,000 while it was struggling to stay afloat.

"Instead, of complying with his fiduciary responsibilities, Defendant helped Debtors procure an ill-advised bridge loan from a hedge fund that had a deleterious impact on the financial affairs of the Debtor and ultimately forced Debtors into bankruptcy, as he never delivered the promised the large investment from the Middle East," the bankruptcy court document reads. "And worse, Defendant never repaid the Loans to Americore Health, including during the time that Debtors were strapped for cash."

Jim eventually settled the suit for $350,000. So what we have are five data points in Jim's career, which is likely much more extensive than the record currently shows:

1. The 2006 takeover with Hunter of Paradigm Global advisers, in which Jim claimed to be able to use Joe's influence to get union pension fund investments, which never materialized
2. The 2011 effort to use Joe's influence to secure a $1.5 billion contract for Hill International to build affordable housing in Iraq, which never materialized
3. The 2011 effort to use Joe's influence to secure Saudi reimbursement to Hill International for a desalinization plant, in an effort to stiff a law firm out of its fee for that work
4. The 2017 laundering of a $5 million payment to the Bidens from CEFC, some of which wound up in a $40,000 check to Joe from Jim's wife, Sara
5. The 2018 check for $200,000 from Jim to Joe, apparently financed by loans to Jim from Americore on the expectation that Jim would use Joe's invluence to get Middle Eastern money for Americore, which never materialized.

Looking at this pattern from 30,000 feet, I have a few impressions. One is that Jim is a con artist -- at least in these examples, he claims to be able to use Joe's influence to get investments that never take place, and he gets money up front for doing this, which he never repays when the deals fall through. The second is that, whether or not the deals fall through, he's also able to get money from the marks on the basis that if he doesn't, Joe will be angry at the marks.

The third is that Joe is aware of the scam and in fact collects some type of commission or franchise fee for the use of his name, disguised as "loan repayments".

Or at least, that's how it looks to me. My surmise is that as new instances come up, they'll tend to fit this overall pattern, a promise of financial gain via payments to Jim for Joe's influence, which never quite pans out. Then Jim either doubles down on the scam, demanding more money, or he skedaddles under the threat that Joe will be angry if the mark complains. All of this is enabled via franchise fees to Joe for the use of his name.

My guess is this has been going on for much of Joe's political career, and Hunter is just the next generation of a family business.

Joe As Barack's "Point Man"

It's generally acknowledged that Joe was designated Barack Obama's "point man" for Ukraine. For instance, per Axios,

True: Joe Biden was the Obama administration's point man on Ukraine while his son was working for Burisma, visiting the country several times from 2014 to 2016.

On the other hand, I have yet to see any sort of job description for "point man", except that as Axios implies, it seemed to involve whirlwind visits on Air Force Two and meetings with top people. But just recently, poking around for background on Joe's bother Jim, I found this at NBC News from April 2016:

Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Iraq Thursday for a visit intended to help resolve a political crisis that's hindering efforts to defeat the Islamic State group.

Biden flew overnight from Washington to the Iraqi capital. The White House isn't publicly disclosing his itinerary due to security concerns, but Biden is expected to meet with Iraqi leaders.

. . . Though the trip was scheduled months ago, the vice president is “arriving at a moment of a lot of turbulence,” the official told reporters.

“The vice president has been the point person on Iraq for the administration since the beginning,” a senior administration official told reporters traveling with the vice president. “He’s been itching to get back for a while; looking for an opportunity. This seemed like a good moment to do it.”

We don't know who the "senior administration official" was with Joe on the plane -- it could even have been Amos Hochstein, who was with Joe on various flights to Ukraine and conducted similar briefings then. But whoever it may have been, he appears to have had the authority to reveal Joe's "point man" or "point person" status, which had, as far as anyone can tell, previously been unknown except to insiders.

But here's an even more intriguing piece in the New York Post from October 2012:

James Biden isn’t a big name in the business of residential housing development, so what exactly qualifies him to work at a construction company and share in the winnings of a $1.5 billion project to build affordable homes in Iraq?

If you said it has something to do with his last name, the one shared by his older brother Vice President Joe Biden, you wouldn’t be far off. At least that’s the guess of some Wall Street analysts who cover the Marlton, NJ-based company Hill International and think they’ve seen yet another sordid tale of crony capitalism.

. . . {I]t got some good news not long after its housing subsidiary hired James Biden as an executive vice president in late 2010. Just six months later, Hill won one of its biggest contracts ever, a $1.5 billion deal to build at least 100,000 affordable homes in Iraq.

A good deal for Hill, a relative newcomer to building homes — and for James Biden, who as one partner will get a good share of that $1.5 billion.

The deal is contingent on the Iraqi government providing financing, which it has yet to do, but Hill execs tell analysts the money could start flowing by the end of the year. That’s when everyone involved, James Biden included, will start collecting on tens of millions of dollars in profits.

One friend of James Biden’s estimates his net worth at around $7 million, yet he seems to have a remarkable lack of concrete business experience. An attorney who’s done work for him called him a “serial entrepreneur,” but didn’t name the startups he was responsible for.

However, the deal never went through:

The founder of US construction management company Hill International has admitted he “was wrong” to invest in the failed HillStone housing project in Iraq.

Irvin Richter says both Hill and its partner in the doomed project, South Korean developer TRAC Development Group, lacked experience in what was an ambitious deal.

Hill signed two contracts with TRAC Development Group in 2011, along with its majority-owned subsidiary HillStone International (the minority share is owned by a group of minority partners including US vice-president Joe Biden’s brother James, an executive with Hill’s housing division) to build 100,000 units in an overall 500,000 housing unit project in Iraq.

However, the project never eventuated and Hill was eventually forced to concede an estimated $1.5bn from its backlog in 2013.

Jim Biden appears elsewhere in Hill International's history:

Now-first brother James Biden was hired to help a Philadelphia construction company resolve a decades-old dispute with the Saudi government because he was the sibling of then-Vice President Joe Biden, court documents reveal.

. . . The affidavit, first obtained by DailyMail.com, was filed in a dispute between the construction company, Hill International, and one of three law firms it hired to help claw back approximately $140 million the Saudis owed for a desalinization plant built by a Hill subsidiary in the 1980s.

That firm, Lankford & Reed, claims that Hill International also hired James Biden, now 73, in 2011 to negotiate a secret deal with the Saudis to settle the dispute – and get out of paying Lankford the 40% cut outlined in their contract.

In July 2017, Thomas Sullivan, a former Treasury Department official-turned-private investigator hired by Lankford, drove to James Biden’s home in suburban Philadelphia to discuss his role with Hill.

. . . The first brother added that he was often tapped to represent Hill in meetings “because, of course, the name didn’t hurt,” Sullivan recalled.

James Biden also told Sullivan he had attended a February 2012 meeting with Saudi officials at which Hill would receive “final payment” for the desalination plant. Biden added that he had attended the meeting “because of his position and relationship” with his older brother, then Barack Obama’s No. 2.

According to the president’s sibling, Hill’s payment for its subsidiary’s work “would be made in both cash and ‘a very large amount'” of future business, Sullivan said.

After the meeting, Sullivan alleged, James Biden’s wife Sara walked him to his car and revealed that her husband and his older brother Joe were very close, and that they told each other everything.”

So what we're starting to see is a set of business relationships between Jim Biden and various other parties, including what looks like a long-term deal with Hill International, to use Joe's influence to make deals in places like Iraq and Saudi Arabia, with payments to Jim on an implicit understanding that he'll talk to Joe, who will get the client what's needed.

We have a lengthy and detailed timeline on Hunter, largely courtesy of his laptop. But I'm beginning to wonder if we don't now have a potential equivalent long list of deals -- some done, some not -- involving Jim. And oddly, whie Joe was Obama's point man for Ukraine, he traveled there only six times as vice president. But according to James Jeffrey, US ambassador to Iraq while Joe was vice president,

During my 20-month tenure in Iraq, Obama called [Prime Minister Nouri al-]Maliki just three times and met with him only once. Biden has been to Iraq 24 times. In Obama’s first term, Biden was at the center of all the Iraq decisions[.]

So Joe as vice president was in a position to influence far more in Iraq than he could influence in Ukraine, and it looks like he did far more meddling in Iraq's affairs. What other business was brother Jim doing there? But maybe more important, what did Barack Obama know? As we began to see yesterday, he had the FBI on Joe's case. And from what we hear, Barack never thought all that highly of Joe. Why did he give Joe such free rein in Ukraine and Iraq? Look at Barack's expression in the photo at the top of this post, as opposed to Joe's.

Which guy do you think is smarter?

This Strains Credulity

A Breitbart story gives an account of two Biden experts from Conservative Inc trading scuttlebutt:

Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow said that his new New York Times bestselling book Breaking Biden includes a number of forgotten biographical details about Joe Biden, including the fact that he was tapped as former President Barack Obama’s running mate “specifically for being bad with money.”

Marlow recounted this detail during an interview about Breaking Biden on the Drill Down Podcast with seven-time New York Times bestselling investigative author Peter Schweizer.

. . . “One of the reasons why Barack Obama picked Joe Biden was specifically because he was poor,” Marlow continued. “[Obama] actually liked the optics of having one of the poorest guys in the Senate. And this is so crazy to me because we were just in an era recently where if someone made money and someone made it in America, we pointed to those people as the example—like, ‘Wow, that person really has what it takes. They know what they’re doing.’ Joe Biden’s family has made money and lost it so many times you lose count. And that was a virtue for Barack Obama["].

The information that's been coming out is that Joe has always been Joe. People don't suddently change their characters at age 65, which is when Obama put Joe on the ticket. Yet that's the claim:

“What’s remarkable about that story, by the way, is Barack Obama says, ‘I’m going to get this guy who’s poor, who they would argue hasn’t cashed in.’ And what does Joe Biden do? ‘I’m Vice President now. Now’s the opportunity to really make bank!’ I mean, it’s shocking,” Schweizer said.

Stories about Joe back in the day are starting to emerge, for instance at the UK Daily Mail:

Joe Biden sold a house to a supporter for $1.2 million in 1996 - but it is only worth an estimated $1.65 million 27 years later, DailyMail.com can reveal.

. . . Biden bought the 10,000 square-foot mansion in Greenville, Delaware for $185,000 in 1974.

At the time he had recently become a senator on a salary of $42,500.

He went on to sell the house for $1.2 million - more than six times what he paid for it - in 1996.

. . . Since 1996 the Delaware housing market has nearly tripled, according to data from the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency.

That would indicate, if the house was worth $1.2 million in 1996, it should be well over $3 million now.

The story provides details of the purchaser and his links to MBNA:

He sold it for his asking price of $1.2 million to the vice chairman of credit-card company MBNA, at the time the largest employer in Delaware.

In the same year, MBNA employees contributed $62,850 to Biden for his Senate re-election campaign, and the house buyer donated the maximum $2,000.

Also that year, Biden's son Hunter was hired by MBNA and went on to become a senior vice president.

Later, between 2001 and 2005, Hunter was re-hired as a consultant by the company on a monthly retainer.

I posted on a related story in which Joe and Hunter sold Biden family influence together as early as 2005 here. In general, members of the Biden family haven't had careers separate from Joe's ability to garner political appointments for them, sinecures connected to his own campaigns, or jobs as Biden family hustlers -- Beau has always been the chief exception. For instance, his sister Valerie says on her own website:

Valerie Biden Owens is the first woman in U.S. history to have run a presidential campaign — that of her brother, Joseph R. Biden, Jr. She also led his seven straight U.S. Senate victories and has been his principal surrogate on the campaign trail.

Valerie is Chair of the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware and a partner at Owens Patrick Leadership Seminars. Valerie sits on the Advisory Board of the Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children.

Joe's brother Jim appears to have worked with Joe to peddle family influence throughout his own sketchy business career. Via a 2019 story in Politico,

In the 1970s, as Joe was entering the Senate and taking a seat on the Banking Committee, James obtained unusually generous loans from lenders who later faced federal regulatory issues. Joe Biden was in touch with two of those banks about his brother’s loans, once to scold a bank executive about invoking his name in attempts to collect on overdue payments.

. . . During the Obama years, several months after James joined a construction firm as an executive, the firm received a contract worth more than a billion dollars to build houses in Iraq while Joe oversaw the U.S.-led occupation of that country.Along the way, James partnered with his nephew Hunter, the younger of Joe’s two sons. A graduate of Georgetown University and Yale Law School, Hunter, 49, has struggled with substance abuse while hopscotching between endeavors in law, business and politics.

Joe's brother Frank is harder to trace. Via the UK Daily Mail,

According to a memoir written by Joe's second wife Jill Biden, Frank was a student at the University of Delaware - who played Cupid for the couple in 1974, as his older brother raised his two sons alone.

But in Frank's marriage announcement in 1985, he is described as having studied at San Francisco State University.

In other places, he is described as having attended Cornell University and Pepperdine Law School in Malibu, California, where he claimed that he had developed a love of surfing.

None of the schools would confirm Frank's attendance to DailyMail.com.

He appears to have worked on Joe's Senate staff following Joe's election, and he later obtained a patronage job in the Clinton administration:

In 1993, as Bill Clinton started his first term, he obtained a $78,000-a-year political appointment as director of congressional and legislative affairs at the Government Printing Office - now the Government Publishing Office - which he held until June 1997.

In effect its chief lobbyist, he defended his appointment in June 1996 to The Wilmington News, saying that its work was outside his brother's responsibilities in the Senate and that he had been alerted to the role by a friend, not by his brother.

After that job, he apparently worked again in Joe's Senate office. The Daily Mail continues,

According to a recent ABC News investigation into the business dealings of the younger Biden, in 2009 he became involved with the Florida based for profit charity Mavericks in Education after meeting the company's founder. Asked what he role was, he said: 'I'm the big cheese.'

. . . According to ABC News a person familiar with Frank's role at Mavericks told them he was paid $70,000 per year over the course of five years – a salary that amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Over the years, ABC claims, Frank touted his famous last name and Washington connections to help land the company a series of charter contracts from local officials in Florida to open charter schools. There were private jet trips to Tallahassee to lobby lawmakers; a far cry from 2008 when his brother Joe's chief of staff said Frank had 'no assets.'

. . . His time with Mavericks was blighted by claims of mismanagement, however.

Many of the schools, which focused on educating teens with troubled backgrounds, were mired in controversy, badly under performed, suffered low graduation rates, and in lawsuits and state audits, were hit with allegations of fraud.

According to ABC News Mavericks was hit with at least two lawsuits over allegations of inflating enrollment as part of a scheme to garner more government funding. The charters were eventually sold off in 2017 to EdisonLearning.

The Biden family pattern has been that Joe's siblings, as well as Hunter, have little talent but extravagant lifestyles, along with extensive problems with substance abuse that would not normally set them up for high-flying careers, and this has been the case since Joe's election to the Senate in 1972. If they're rich -- and as of now, they're all doing quite well -- it hasn't been through their own hard work and ability. Several of the links above date from 2019, early in Joe's 2020 campaign for president, when his efort seemed to be faltering. As his prospects improved, media generally dropped these stories, but they strongly suggest the Biden family boodle has been in place for some decades.

I've never thought Barack Obama was (or is) a dummy. To think he believed Joe was the poorest man in congress suggests he was naive, which I don't believe. The mere task of vetting someone to serve on his ticket as vice president would uncover a lot in Joe's background, leaving aside that both Barack and Joe had been in the Senate together, and Barack would have heard an earful just from gossip -- but this leaves out the FBI.

Fox News’ Jesse Watters shed light on explosive revelations about the FBI’s involvement with the Biden family Wednesday night. Earlier on in the day, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) disclosed that bureau documents show the FBI had placed 40 informants within the Biden family over the past 15 years, effectively having them “wired.” The intelligence operation is reported to have been active since Joe Biden’s tenure as Vice President.

“Everything ‘Primetime’ has been saying about the FBI and the Biden family has just been confirmed,” Watters started. “For years, we’ve told you the FBI knew everything the Bidens were up to. The cash, the Chinese diamonds, American policy for sale.”

I've thought all along that Barack Obama knew everything about Joe, Valerie, Frank, Jim, and Hunter, before, during, and after -- and if anything, the FBI knows more now than it did then. It strains credulity to think otherwise.

Every Time They Do This, Trump Goes Up In The Polls

Yesterday I suggested Trump is following a Chicago Seven strategy of baiting his trial judges into overreacting, committing reversible errors, and allowing themselves to be characterized as political hacks in the public narrative. This strategy is succeeding.

A federal judge on Sunday reinstated a gag order she imposed on Donald Trump in the Washington case accusing him of trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat, denying his bid for a stay pending appeal.

The order prohibited Trump from targeting the special counsel prosecuting his case or witnesses who might be called to testify about his efforts to upend his election loss.

US District Judge Tanya Chutkan imposed the gag order at the Justice Department’s request.

She temporarily lifted it on Oct. 20 after Trump’s lawyers appealed.

And she reversed that decision on Sunday evening, according to the court’s docket.

A member of the former Obama administration outlined the thinking that likely drove Judge Chutkan's change of direction:

Former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said Sunday on MSNBC’s “Inside” that it was likely former President Donald Trump would be jailed for violating a gag order.

Katyal said, “There are two different gag orders. One, Trump has already violated, the one in New York state, in which he has been now find twice. And then there’s a swarm that you’re talking about the federal level with Jack Smith. And that one has been put on pause.”

He continued, “I think Donald Trump has made the best case of anyone. He is witnessing for why you need the gag order in effect. Because the moment that gag order was put on pause, he started developing and attacking people left and right.”

Katyal added, “So I think that there is no doubt in my mind that there will be a gag order imposed on Donald Trump. And there also is no doubt in my mind that he is going to violate it repeatedly. Repeatedly to the point where a judge is going to have to confront the ultimate question, are we going to put the former president in jail? and i think there is only one answer to that.”

Anchor Jen Psaki said, “What is your answer?”

Katyal said, “Which is you have to. If he continues this behavior, no other litigant in this country would ever be able to do what he is doing. Judges, I don’t care what your politics are, the one thing you understand when you put out that robe is that it is about the legitimacy of the court and about the judicial process.”

But the Chicago Seven case makes it plain that there are limits to the legitimacy of the court. Judge Hoffman, if we follow Katyal's logic, had no choice but to have Bobby Seale bound and gagged in the courtroom and impose draconian sentences on the defendants and their counsel for contempt -- that is, he had no choice until the higher court reversed him. And it's likely that Judge Chutkan's order will eventually be reversed. In an amicus brief, the American Civil Liberties Union argued,

Chutkan imposed a limited gag order on Trump earlier this month that forbids him from targeting any criticism at Special Counsel Jack Smith, court staff, or witnesses on his case that involves allegations related to the Jan. 6 riots.

But the ACLU argued the term "targeting" was unconstitutionally vague.

“The First Amendment rights of the accused require any court order restraining their speech to be both clearly defined and narrowly framed,” the group argued. "The order’s prohibition on speech that “targets” certain named and unnamed individuals is neither.

"Reading the order, Defendant cannot possibly know what he is permitted to say, and what he is not," it added.

It isn't hard to surmise that Trump is almost begging either Judge Chutkan or Judge Engoron to jail him for contempt -- over the weekend, he called Judge Engoron a "nut job", “Trump hating,” and “unhinged.” Regarding Judge Chutkan's reinstatement of her order, he posted As of this morning, he added,

“I have just learned that the very Biased, Trump Hating Judge in D.C., who should have RECUSED herself due to her blatant and open loathing of your favorite President, ME, has reimposed a GAG ORDER which will put me at a disadvantage against my prosecutorial and political opponents,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday morning. “This order, according to many legal scholars, is unthinkable! It illegally and unconstitutionally takes away my First Amendment Right of Free Speech, in the middle of my campaign for President, where I am leading against BOTH Parties in the Polls.”

The problem for the judges is that anything that happens now is going to become news, and at that point, it's out of their control and into Trump's field of expertise -- it's generally understood that Trump is a master at leveraging media coverage into free publicity. A judge who orders Trump to jail is going to open the door to unanticipated consequences for the whole process. I don't think either Judge Engoron or Judge Chutkan is remotely up to the task here, any more than Judge Hoffman was in Chicago.