He Won't Make It To November

There were several articles last week that noted the White House has changed tactics for Joe's 2024 campaign appearances, minimizing situations where he appears on stage to avoid scenes where he wanders around looking for the exit and switching to the low stairs for Air Force One to reduce the potential for stumbles and falls. The formal on-stage events are to be replaced by smaller gatherings in places like retail stores that give the impression of spontaneity, but of course, any such venues must be thoroughly vetted and precisely scheduled both by Joe's handlers and the Secret Service.

As of this past weekend, the shift doesn't seem to have worked out as hoped. In Emmaus, PA on Friday and in Philadelphia yesterday, we saw a new aspect to Joe's appearances: the aimless departures trying to find the exit offstage have been replaced by a vacant expression that suggests he may not be fully aware of his surroundings, or he may be heavily medicated. At about 2:20 in the video below, Megyn Kelly notes a vignette of Joe's confusion in Emmaus, while the photo at the top of this post is from a Martin Luther King Day event at a Philadelphia food bank.

One question I have is that in both Emmaus and Philadelpia, Joe was nevertheless able to evade his handlers and try to chat up underage girls.

Look how far this girl moves away from Biden...☠️ pic.twitter.com/cUK0gxwLkH

— Woke Societies (@wokesocieties) January 12, 2024

There was a similar episode in Philadelphia yesterday:

What's disturbing is that he seems generally checked out, but he seems to have retained one dominant compulsion, to impose himself on preteen girls. His expressions are vacant and affectless until he spots one, at which point he suddenly becomes animated and aware of his surroundings.

The continuing leaks and direct statements from Democrats expressing discomfort with Joe's campaign have an oddly disconnected tone. For instance,

"Obama has raised questions about the structure of President Biden’s re-election campaign, discussing the matter directly with Biden and telling the president’s aides and allies the campaign needs to be empowered to make decisions without clearing them with the White House," the Washington Post reported.

How will empowering lower-level campaign staff fix Joe himself, when Joe seems to be the real problem? The same applies to remarks Sunday from Sen Sanders:

“So I think people will end up rallying around Biden. But there is no question, it is very hard for young people, I think for most Americans, to be excited about what is going on right now. [The] president has got to change course,” he said.

Change course? Precisely how? If anything, Joe doesn't seem to have any particular course, and as I noted last week, the episode of Secretary Austin being in intensive care and nobody in the White House knowing about it suggests Joe is checked out, and nobody is interested in doing much beyond keeping that bit of news covered up. But even the expressions of discomfort from prominent Democrats look like they're in a kind of code -- Joe needs to empower his staff, he needs to change course.

The problem is simply Joe himself, but so far, there's no Plan B.

Leon Panetta On Biden's Cabinet

An interview with Leon Panetta, who had been Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff and Barack Obama's Defense Secretary, in yesterday's Politico confirms my surmise about the state of Joe Biden's cabinet:

There’s been a gradual deterioration here with regards to the role of the Cabinet. Because so much authority is centralized in the White House these days, the Cabinet really only comes together usually for a press briefing by the president.

Normally, what should be the case is there’s a secretary to the Cabinet, and there should be regular meetings with the Cabinet to not only inform them about issues going on but also to stay in touch with them, so that they feel like they’re part of the team. As that relationship generally has been strained in the last number of years, I think everybody kind of operates on their own. You saw a little bit of that happen here.

To reword this slightly, it seems like what Panetta, who's had plenty of high-level experience in government, is saying is that Biden has centralized authority in the White House at the expense of the cabinet, except that Biden basically isn't doing anything. Thus the cabinet gets no guidance, although they can bungle issues like Ukraine or border security on their own authority. But they were appointed primarily to satisgfy particular constituencies that would get Joe elected, and beyond that, Joe has no particular expectations for them.

This is consistent with reported concerns that Barack Obama transmitted to Joe in a recent White House lunch:

Barack Obama recently had an off-the-books White House lunch with President Joe Biden to share his concerns and advice about his former running mate's campaign, according to a new report.

Obama grew 'animated' as he discussed the 2024 election and Donald Trump's bid to return to the presidency, and suggested Biden should restructure his campaign to be more agile, the Washington Post reported on Saturday, citing people familiar with the matter.

. . . According to the Post, Obama suggested that Biden's campaign, which is headquartered in Delaware, needed to grow more nimble and be empowered to act without sign-off from the White House, where many of Biden's top advisors remain.

This was pretty clearly leaked from sources close to Obama, and the impression was reinforced when the Biden campaign responded a day later:

Quentin Fulks, principal deputy campaign manager for President Biden’s reelection bid, on Sunday defended the campaign’s approach and stressed that Obama and Biden are aligned in their position that Trump needs to be defeated.

. . . Fulks’s defense of the president and his reelection bid comes after The Washington Post reported a story about concerns Obama expressed to Biden at a lunch at the White House in December. Obama reportedly told Biden that it’s important to have more top-level decisionmakers in the campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., or that he needs to empower those already there.

Fulks did not respond to a specific follow-up question on whether the campaign plans to make any structural changes to the campaign.

The implicit complaint from both Panetta and Obama is that Joe wants to reserve decisions to himself, but he doesn't want to be bothered to make decisions, so nobody knows what to do. Thus the whole organization is pretty much out to lunch.

There's more to say about how this is reflected in Joe's campaign.

Working Hard Or Hardly Working?

The biggest issue that's struck me about the Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ICU kerfuffle is that he didn't show up for work for almost two weeks, and nobody noticed. I simply don't know how you get around that. This normally doesn't happen at lower levels, at least when I was working, although COVID's lasting effect may have changed some things -- but even there, the current consensus seems to be that "working from home" hasn't worked out, and employers have reimposed some level of required attendance. And of course, there were and are some jobs for which you simply have to show up. You can't drive a bus and work from home.

This might even apply to a job like US Secretary of Defense, who is in the military chain of command. Even in the December holiday period, issues like Ukraine, Gaza, and Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping didn't go away. But the Secretary was gone, nobody noticed, and nobody knew why. Beyond that, his deputy, who would be his understudy in such a case, was on vacation and was also unaware of his absence:

After being admitted to the hospital last week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin transferred responsibility to Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks on Tuesday. But Hicks, who was on vacation in Puerto Rico at the time, was not informed about his hospitalization until Thursday, a senior defense official told NBC News.

Again, this doesn't happen at lower levels. Everybody knows about out-of-the-office phone mail or e-mail messages that explain how long you'll be gone and whom to contact while you're away. This didn't happen at the highest levels of the Biden administration, and nobody noticed. But the problems don't stop there.

Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said over the weekend that Austin went into the hospital for an elective procedure on December 22 when he was on leave, went home the following day and “continued to work from home through the holidays.” The secretary, Ryder said, began experiencing “severe pain” and was transported from his home to Walter Reed by an ambulance on January 1, where he was admitted to the intensive care unit.

We're really back to the whole "working from home" charade here.

Late Friday afternoon [January 5], the Department of Defense released a statement saying that Austin was in the intensive care unit at Walter Reed NMC due to "complications" from an unspecified "elective" surgical procedure. The statement revealed that he'd been admitted to the ICU on New Year's Day. As happens with these things, more facts started dribbling out. . . .The service chiefs, service secretaries, and other senior Pentagon staff found out two hours before the public announcement. We were told that Austin's deputy, Kathleen Hicks, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Joe Biden got the news on Thursday (keep this sentence in mind because we're going to talk more about that later). Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman C. Q. Brown was told on Tuesday. Supposedly, Austin's chief of staff, Kelly Magsamen, found out on Tuesday, but she was home with the "flu" and decided to wait until she got back to work on Thursday before telling anyone.

At some point, Austin's personal staff started telling people that he was "working from home."

It gradually emerged that Austin's original surgery had been under general anesthesia for prostate cancer treatment. Any type of surgery under general anesthesia is a big deal, and based on my own recent experience, you're generally put on some kind of restricted activity regimen afterward. Beyond that, Secretary Austin is reported to be a devout Roman Catholic, for whom it is generally felt appropriate that someone undergoing surgery under general anesthesia, especially at Austin's age, receive the sacrament of anointing of the sick. In other words, major surgery is a big deal. Recovery from such surgery is not "working from home", but of course, "working from home" isn't really working from home in any case.

I will say that I've occasionally been in jobs where nobody cared whether you showed up or not. They were in organizations that gave new meaning to the word "dysfunctional", and by the nature of things, they never lasted long. This says more about what working in the Biden administration is actually like than it says about Secretary Austin, although there are reasonable questions about whether he should have made the reason for his initial hospitalization, and his subsequent return to the ICU, much clearer than he did.

The big question isn't that Austin didn't show up for work for almost two weeks without anyone noticing. The big question is that Joe Biden was also gone for even longer, and apparently so little work was getting done by anyone else that nobody noticed the Defense Secretary was in the ICU. That reflects much more on Joe and his handlers than on Austin. As I say, I've been in jobs where that sort of thing could happen, but they never lasted very long, and that's the real point.

A Possible Answer To Yesterday's Question About Jack Smith

The big thing that struck me yesterday about Jack Smith's petition to the Supreme Court for a near-immediate ruling on Trump's presidential immunity was its apparent urgency, and I posited that there must be someone in the background (for convenience, a lizard person) who's able to prod Mr Smith into that level of haste. As I said, this plays into the Trump team's Chicago Seven strategy of forcing hasty actions on the judge and prosecution that play out badly in front of the public and eventually result in appellate reversals.

Oddly enough, Larry Johnson at the Gateway Pundit may have an explanation. But keeping him in context, he's the same Larry Johnson who, as a PBS News Hour talking head a generation ago, discounted Al Qaida and Osama bin Laden as terrorist threats, something that's hurt his credibility ever since, although more recently, he's been an important contrarian voice on the Ukraine war who's proven correct on that issue so far. Here's his allegation:

My old friend and business partner, John Moynihan, filed a whistleblower complaint with the Department of Justice Inspector General’s Office on November 28 alleging that Jack Smith, the Special Prosecutor pursuing Donald Trump, was engaged in an extortion scheme while he was working at the International Court of Justice. . . . It is no coincidence that Jack Smith, in the wake of that complaint, made an impromptu move on Monday (December 11) asking the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether Donald Trump had immunity to the charges filed by Smith. Moynihan’s complaint was filed on November 28, 2023 and Smith, 13 days later decides to bypass the Appeals Courts. Smells like politics.

The Moynihan complaint is political dynamite because it provides circumstantial evidence to support Donald Trump’s belief that Jack Smith is not only politically motivated but corrupt. The Trump team wisely has refrained from piling on this news in order to avoid accusations that this was a manufactured hit job.

The complaint alleges in brief that Smith, while serving as chief prosecutor for the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague from 2018 to 2022, engaged in bribery and extortion. In one instance, his job was to track down Kosovo war criminals, but in the process, he solicited bribes to avoid prosecution:

In August 2020, Imeri contacted Halit and tasked him with contacting three “war criminals” in Kosovo. Imeri said that Jack Smith’s office was going to leak dossiers on the three individuals and that Halit’s job was to contact them and solicit a bribe. Halit did as instructed and incurred the wrath of the three targets. His next conversation with Imeri was unpleasant, with Imeri accusing him of botching the bribe request. To earn the trust of Smith’s operation, Halit was asked to “donate” more than $400,000 to a black fund used by the Prosecutor’s office. Halit did as instructed.

Another source reported that Smith was interested in tracking down Russians who may have been aware of corruption by Hillary Clinton. Johnson asks,

How did Jack Smith know that the Russian Potanin possessed incriminating evidence about Hillary Clinton? And why was a prosecutor with the International Court of Justice meddling in that area? Legitimate questions that merit an investigation.

Another article makes the point that the information in the Moynihan November 28, 2023 complaint had already been provided to the Justice Department in April 2022. That author surmises,

Attorney General Merick [sic] Garland learned about this material 18 months ago, and he (or Lisa Monaco, the Littlefinger of Garland’s DOJ) summoned Jack Smith back to Washington, DC to tell him something along the following lines: Listen you SOB, we know that you have been blackmailing people over in Europe and we are going to put you away for 30 years…. or you are going to come home and prosecute Donald Trump. We don’t care how far-fetched the legal theories, you are going to indict him and hound him to thwart his return to office.

Thisis at least a potential explanation for the impression I get that the urgency in Smith's request to the Supreme Court comes from someone well above his paygrade. But we'll have to see what shakes out.

Yeah, It's Still The Chicago Seven Strategy

All I can conclude is some very serious lizard people have told Jack Smith that Trump's DC trial must start on March 4, or else. Alan Dershowitz hasn't commented on Smith's move to take Trump's appeal based on presidential immunity directly to the Supreme Court, but Dershowitz has already noted that Trump's strategy is essentially the same as the Chicago Seven defense: force the judge and prosecutors into errors the defense can get reversed on appeal.

The stakes are high:

The outcome of this fight may determine whether Trump faces any of his four pending criminal trials in 2024. His other three remain in flux or unscheduled. And if the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court consider the former president’s immunity claims on their typical timelines, that may force Chutkan to slow down her own.

While lawyers from special counsel Jack Smith’s team pleaded with Chutkan not to alter the March 4 date, they appeared to concede that Trump’s defense won’t be obliged to respond to most legal issues in the case while his appeal claiming presidential immunity is pending at the D.C. Circuit.

Trump has argued that the entire case must be halted while his immunity appeal is pending because a ruling in his favor would shut down the prosecution. His lawyers also say he shouldn’t be subject to the “burdens of litigation” while his appeal is live.

The problem is that Joe Biden hasn't been adjusting his campaign strategy as the polls gradually turn against him. Instead, he remains focused on a strategy from last year or earlier, to put Trump on trial through the primary and general campaigns and present Joe as the less-bad alternative. But this isn't aging well:

The media are full of stories that cite Democratic Party sources and contributors suggesting that the 81-year-old president, who has shown signs of age-related mental impairment in recent years, should drop out of the running. The complaints have become increasingly urgent as Biden’s presidential favorability readings have plunged sharply.

Meanwhile, Trump faces an unprecedented legal assault, with four separate indictments covering 91 allegations of criminal behavior on his part. In normal times, that would be a political disaster.

. . . . [Based on a recent poll] Among all voters, 60% agreed that the unprecedented legal charges against Trump were politically driven by the Democratic Party, while 31% disagreed.

What’s surprising isn’t that majorities of Republicans (81% “agree,” 13% “disagree”) and independents (53% “agree,” 35% “disagree”) see eye-to-eye, but that a plurality of Democrats (49% “agree,” 44% “disagree”) also believe the prosecutions are politically motivated.

The Trump campaign jumped on the news of Smith's motion:

Smith asked the high court to quickly take up the issue of whether Trump can be prosecuted for trying to overturn the 2020 election, a move that attempted to bypass the appeals court. Smith beseeched SCOTUS that Trump's "trial proceed as promptly as possible if his claim of immunity is rejected."

The Supreme Court agreed to take up Smith's petition, directing Trump's team to submit a response by Dec. 20. The court made clear its "response does not mean the court will take up the case — only that it will consider the request in an expedited fashion."

"Crooked Joe Biden's henchman, Deranged Jack Smith, is so obsessed with interfering in the 2024 Presidential Election with the goal of preventing President Trump from retaking the Oval Office, as the President is poised to do, that Smith is willing to try for a Hail Mary by racing to the Supreme Court and attempting to bypass the appellate process," a spokesperson for Trump's campaign said in a statement prior to SCOTUS' answer.

I suspect the Trump defense strtagy had something like this in mind from the start -- file an appeal that could result in a delay of the DC trial past March 4, which would threaten to move the whole trial timing away from the election season. Someone -- and I think it was someone who gives Jack Smith de facto orders -- decided this was unacceptable, even though the Biden reelection strategy based on putting Trump in prison by November has alrweady been overtaken by events. Nevertheless, the lizard people are in full panic mode.

The Trump defense has been fully aware that putting Smith into appellate territory puts Smith at a major disadvatage:

Special counsel Jack Smith, who has brought federal charges against former President Donald Trump, is an “overzealous” prosecutor who relies on ethically dubious tactics, including media leaks and enticing witnesses, say those who have been caught in his snare.

Other reviews of his record come to conclusions like this one:

Special Counsel Jack Smith, tapped by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate former President Donald Trump for allegedly wrongfully maintaining classified documents in his residence – a fairly common practice other U.S. Attorneys General have refused to prosecute – has a troubling record of failed, botched, and/or suspect prosecutions against prominent public figures.

This record suggests the Trump team deliberately forced a bad choice on Smith -- either allow an appeal that would delay the trial, unacceptable to the lizard people, or attempt to get a quick ruling in his favor from the Supreme Court, which, given his appellate track record, is itself an iffy proposition. The Trump team's strategy all along has been to get both the judge and prosecutor rattled and force them into panic-driven decisions, and it looks like it's working.

Here's A Question Nobody's Asked

It dawned on me in the middle of last night that normally, for the person indicted, a federal indictment is never a surprise. I did a quick search and discovered that pre-indictment is a legal specialty. For instance, at the Hedding Law Firm, which specializes in federal criminal defense,

If you feel that you are under investigation by the feds, you definitely want to get an attorney involved with your case immediately. Never a good idea to try to handle it yourself. Now's not the time to pinch pennies and not hire an attorney immediately.

Basically, pre-indictment intervention has to do with before the feds indict you, which is their filing document where they're filing criminal federal charges against you. You can intervene and you can use an attorney to either investigate the case to show that you're innocent or to investigate the case to try to get information on your behalf to either mitigate or reduce the charges.

We must assume that Hunter hired Abbe Lowell, one of the most prominent federal criminal defense attorneys, to oversee his whole case, and up to this past Thursday, this would have included extensive pre-indictment discussions with the prosecutors over the past six months. Neither the date of the indictment nor the specific charges would have been any sort of surprise to Hunter or his legal team, but this leaves aside what must also have been a heads-up from Attorney General Garland to the White House.

But if the indictment wasn't a surprise to the White House, why have they been unable to issue much of a statement? They've had weeks or months to prepare, but they're simply repeating what they've been saying when the charges against Hunter were likely to result in just a diversion agreement:

The White House reiterated President Biden’s pledge that he would not pardon his son, Hunter Biden, if he is convicted amid his ongoing legal battles.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the president had not changed his mind on the statement in the wake of new tax crime charges brought against the younger Biden in California, when reporters asked.

. . . “Nothing has changed,” Jean-Pierre said Friday during a gaggle aboard Air Force One en route to Las Vegas. “That is still the case.”

. . . “I’m going to be really careful and not comment on this and refer you to Department of Justice or my colleagues at the White House Counsel,” she added.

Except that neither the Justice Department nor the White House Counsel will have anything to say, either. On the other hand, Hunter's own remarks, made on a podcast prior to Thursday's indictment, likely indicate, first, that the indictment wasn't a surprise, and second, the actual level of concern, if not panic, among the Bidens:

"What they're trying to do is they're trying to kill me, knowing that it will be a pain greater than my father could be able to handle, and so therefore destroying a presidency in that way," he said, adding that they want him to relapse to drug abuse.

"It's not about me," he continued, adding that "these people are just sad, very, very sick people that have most likely just faced traumas in their lives that they've decided that they are going to turn into an evil that they decide that they're going to inflict on the rest of the world".

. . . Mr Biden added: "I'm gonna survive it clean and sober, is because I am not gonna let these [expletive], OK, use me as just another example of why people in recovery are never gonna be OK, never to be trusted, they're all degenerates."

Let's recall, though, that every indication is that Hunter, who had been living in the White House for nearly a year, was eased out over this past summer after the incident of the baggie in a cubby. My surmise is that the Secret Service laid it out to Joe that there were simply limits to its ability to cover for Hunter's drug use there. There's been an ongoing subtext for quite some time that nearly everyone has been refusing to recognize -- evidence that Hunter is nowhere near clean and sober has been lurking in the wings all along, and any new episode will further damage the family's credibility.

Hunter's assessment that the indictment, in the wake of Beau's death, is something Joe will be unable to handle, especially in the context of a troubled reelection campaign, a bad economy, an open border, and two wars, is almost certainly correct. Something is going to have to be worked out, but Joe is currently in denial about it.

It seems to me that the clearest option will be for Joe to withdraw from candidacy in 2024 while pardoning Hunter, although further revelations from the House investigations may either hasten this or add other complications to a whole separate deal for Joe that could even include resignation.

Tip Of The Iceberg

I'm headinbg into a period over coming weeks where, due to personal issues, posting will have to be sporadic, which is just as well, since all we can say about current developments over Hunter and Joe is that much more is likely to come out. Jonathan Turley is one of the few asking the right questions:

The steps taken by Hunter to evade taxes are impressive, but not nearly as impressive as the efforts of the Justice Department to evade any direct implications for his father, President Biden.

In that sense, the indictment itself is a marvel of evasion.

. . . [T]his recent indictment keeps the focus squarely on taxes not paid, not how the money was “earned” in the first place.

Also missing in the indictment is any charge against Hunter Biden as an unregistered foreign agent.

. . . The problem with charging Hunter with FARA is obvious.

It opens up questions about the millions of dollars going to the Biden family from foreign sources, a topic that Attorney General Merrick Garland has spent years avoiding.

In the second indictment, Weiss spends more time detailing the salacious use of this money rather than how and why it was given to the Bidens.

He just matter-of-factly describes millions flowing through these accounts from China, Romania, Ukraine, Russia and other countries.

. . . Weiss indicts the failure to pay taxes on the proceeds of these dealings without addressing that underlying corruption.

It is akin to arresting a bank robber for speeding away from the crime scene without mentioning the reason for his flight.

In a scandal with dozens of references to the presidents [sic] and millions sent for influence and access, it took a steady hand for Weiss to avoid ever touching on President Biden’s role.

Chairman Comer said the same thing last night:

Comer said, “What he got charged with, with that indictment last night, that had nothing to do with all of the so-called loans that the Bidens have taken. We’ve identified, it appears, with the president’s son and brother, over $14 million in loans where it doesn’t look like they made any payments on, principal or interest. And what point do those loans, if you’re not going to pay ’em back, become income?

Comer added, “So, we think this is just the tip of the iceberg. We think there’s many more crimes. and my concern is that Weiss may have indicted Hunter Biden to protect him from having to be deposed in the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.”

This takes me back to the 1970s yet again -- I can only think of the Nixon White House term modified limited hangout:

What do you do when you get caught in a lie or trying to cover up something? Like the kid who gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar? You offer a little bit of the truth. Yes, my hand was in the cookie jar, but I wasn’t looking for cookies, just checking to see if it was clean so I could put some more cookies in the jar.

That’s called a limited hangout. It’s a phrase coined by the spy trade to refer to a strategy for when a veil of secrecy or a phony cover story to misinform the public is no longer reliable. In that case, they resort to admitting some of the truth while still managing to withhold the damaging facts in the case. When used successfully, the public can be so intrigued by the new information that it is distracted from pursuing the matter further.

There are too many open questions at this point for the whole matter to go away, and what makes this delicious is that the leaks and revelations about how, for instance, the Justice Department totally reversed course on the potential charges against Hunter are only going to start now. I suspect we'll be learning a great deal more in coming weeks, so it's just as well I'm in a position where I can't comment day to day.