More Questions About The Lawfare Strategy

I posted yet again yesterday about my reservations on the White House Lawfare strategy over Trump and the 2024 election, if for no other reason than timing. The plan, as best we can tell, was to indict Trump on several highly complex cases in mid-2023 with the aim of bringing him to trial, ideally with convictions, before the 2024 general election. In fact, the Fulton County RICO case was to start on March 4, the day before the Super Tuesday primaries.

A new report gives more insight into the White House's apparent intent in timing the indictments.

The first indictment [the New York Stormy Daniels case] occurred on April 4, 2023. . . .

On March 17, 2023, Bragg asked for a meeting with federal law enforcement ahead of the Trump indictment Trump, a court source told Fox News. A year earlier, Bragg’s office hired a former senior Department of Justice (DOJ) official Matthew Colangelo, who spent years targeting Trump at the Justice Department. He also attacked Trump in his role in the New York Attorney General’s office.

The second indictment was the Florida federal classified documents case:

Smith filed the second indictment on June 8, 2023. . . .

Months prior, in March, a member of Biden’s counsel’s office met with a top member of Smith’s team, just nine weeks before he indicted Trump in the classified document case, Breitbart News reported.

The third case is the Fulton County RICO case:

Willis filed the third indictment against Trump on August 14, 2023. The official court website of Fulton County, Georgia, published what appeared to be an indictment against Trump before deleting it.

Months before the indictment, Willis’ top county prosecutor met twice with Biden’s White House counsel on May 23 and November 18, 2022, a year before Trump’s August indictment, Breitbart News reported.

The Breitbart report has no information on any White House meetings prior to the fourth indictment, the District of Columbia federal January 6 case, although Jack Smith is the prosecutor in both federal cases.

What strikes me is how little thought, planning, or coordination seems actually to have taken place in the White House regarding these cases. In particular, the ability of any defense to delay any trial, much less highly complex cases of first impression involving issues like presidential immunity on which higher courts have never ruled, makes these proposed schedules absurdly short.

The Breitbart report takes the position that these meetings were improper, but proper or not, they seem to reflect rank incompetence among both White House counsel and the prosecutors in planning out how quickly these cases would proceed and the various appeals, contingencies, and opportunities for delay available to the defense.

The most advance planning that seems to have taken place between White House meeting and indictment in the cases above is the Fulton County RICO case, from May 2022 and August 2023, a little over a year -- but the prosecutor who did the meetings was Nathan Wade, the least experienced of any, and his case is quickly collapsing as we speak.

The federal cases, although they aren't collapsing quite as decisively as the Fulton County case, seem likely to be delayed past their intended schedules. Jack Smith is insisting in the appeals of both cases that the dalays are damaging the government's case:

Smith said Trump’s emergency appeal of the D.C. Circuit’s decision “fails for two interrelated reasons.”

First, Trump “cannot show the requisite likelihood that this Court would reverse the judgment and sustain his extraordinary claim of absolute immunity; and, second, the serious harm to the government — and to the public — of postponing the resolution of the criminal charges against applicant outweighs any equities he can assert to preclude further pre-trial proceedings while he seeks certiorari,” Smith wrote.

I'm having a harder and harder time thinking the lawfare strategy was ever carefully thought out, and the increasing desperation from Jack Smith to keep the slapdash preparations on track strongly suggests this.

And it's hard for me to imagine a lawyer with any sort of experience who wouldn't anticipate Trump's motions to delay the trials.

Indeed, given that, what sort of advice might such a lawyer give his client on the potential schedule for bringing the matter to trial? It looks to me as if the White House simply expected Trump and his attorneys to roll over and cooperate with the schedule they came up with on a truly slapdash and overoptimistic basis.

Reversal Of Fortune

For whatever reason, Alan Dershowitz neglected to put the best possible title on the YouTube post above -- he should have borrowed it from his 1986 book Reversal of Fortune: Inside the Von Bulow Case, on wbhich the 1990 film Reversal of Fortune was based. Think about it: some big part of the Democrat 2024 strategy was to use a series of indictments to focus on Trump, yet by the middle of February, the trials under the federal indictments are likely to be delayed past the election, while at least in Dershowitz's view, the Fulton County RICO trial is on life support, with national attention focused on the DA and Nathan's Famous Hot Dog.

At 16:30, he says,

I think this case sounds like it's -- it's beyond repair and redemption. And, um, you can say who's the beneficiary of it, is it Donald Trump? Well, if he's guilty, it's Donald Trump, if he's innocent, uh, he's not the beneficiary, um, Fulton County is largely Democrat but not as overewhelmingly, for example, as New York and the District of Columbia, so it's possible he and his codefendants could get a fair trial.

Already they have been prejudiced by the fact that some of the codefendants have pleaded guilty, including lawyers. They're going to withdraw their pleas if the judge finds there was, um, a disqualification here or a violation of ethical rules. So, Fani Willis may lose her guilty pleas as well. Now, with the guilty pleas often comes a promise to cooperate, so does that weaken the case even more if she loses not only her convictions that she's already obtained through her guilty pleas? But if she loses the willingness of codefendants to cooperate, they're usually the best or among the best, uh, witnesses, although their credibility can be questioned too if they were given a benefit for their testimony.

But what a mess, what a mess! And a mess based solely on, on, on -- you know, what's going on, CNN is about to do a series, i don't know if it's been on yet, I'm not big watcher of CNN, about scandals in America, the United States of Scandal with Jake Tapper. Obviously they include all the obvious ones of elected officials who've had to leave office based on scandal -- wow, what about this one? . . . I can tell you one thing, I have never seen a DA, uh, screw up as badly as Fani Willis . . . there's no way she comes out of this thing looking like a legitimate prosecutor.

The problem for Joe and the Democrats is that now, with the holidays pretty much over, the big news stories are focusing on Joe's mental state, Fani Willis, and Nathan's Hot Dog, building nevertheless on last year's background of Judge Engoron and E Jean Carroll. The electorate, after eight years of repetitious attempts to dig up new dirt on Trump, is desensitized to Trump scandal reruns -- after E Jean, we're supposed to get Stormy Daniels yet again this spring:

Trump last April pleaded not guilty to a 34-count indictment charging him with falsifying business records in connection with a hush money payment made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels days before the 2016 presidential election.

If last year's patterns hold true, all this will do is drive Trump higher in the polls, while it appears that the classified documents case in Florida is also likely to be delayed along with the January 6 trial in Washington:

What’s also unclear is when this case will go to trial. While Judge Cannon has set a date for May, she has indicated that it is likely to be delayed.

The former president’s legal team has requested that some deadlines in the case be postponed indefinitely.

On Thursday, prosecutors also asked Judge Cannon to reject that request, writing that: “The defendants move this Court to indefinitely postpone their deadline for unspecified legal motions—their fourth attempt to adjourn different pretrial trial deadlines or the trial itself. Their objective is plain—to delay trial as long as possible”.

Jack Smith is clearly working to get Judge Cannon removed from the case, but it's hard to imagine how this would speed things along. The difficulty overall is that the lawfare strategy wasn't fully rolled out until the indictments in the middle of last year, which left Trump's attorneys ample opportunity to use ordinary legal procedure to delay the highly complex trials until after the election. Face it, ordinary murder trials are routinely delayed for years.

Meanwhile, the headlines are focused on the 25th Amendment and Joe's financial deals. Nobody at the White House seems able to turn this around, but the staff is apparently preoccupied with its internal squabbles:

Amidst reports of internal tension, John Kirby is said to be frustrated with White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s involvement in his press briefings, particularly her role in selecting reporters for questions.

The New York Times reported, citing sources, that “Mr. Kirby had privately acknowledged, when asked, that he would one day like to be named press secretary, and he has expressed frustration that Ms. Jean-Pierre picked the reporters who ask him questions at briefings,” a role currently filled by Karine Jean-Pierre.

Recently promoted to White House national security advisor, Kirby’s new position elevates his responsibility in coordinating communications across several agencies, marking a significant step up from his previous role.

Joe's handlers will never allow a cis white male to get into a position where he could actually help Joe out. Somebody else has been calling the shots all along -- as Dershowitz says, what a mess.

Am I Missing Something Here?

Recent headlines have the New York Times and other Democrat outlets starting to suggest Joe step aside in favor of another Democrat candidate and decline to run in the fall. What seems to go unmentioned so far is the possibility of him relinquishing the presidency, or being forced out, under the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution. The big problem with either scenario is Kamala Harris.

Although she poses a potential problem if all Joe does is withdraw from the race but continue as president for the rest of his term, Kamala is a bigger problem under the 25th Amendment. She herself sees no obstacle to this contingency:

Vice President Harris said she’s ready for the presidency in an interview last week, amid concerns about President Biden’s age.

“I am ready to serve. There’s no question about that,” Harris told the Wall Street Journal when asked about the challenge of convincing voters she’s up for the job.

Those who see her work are “fully aware” of her “capacity to lead,” Harris said in the interview, just days before a special counsel report stoked renewed questions about Biden’s age and mental aptitude.

The particular difficulty if Biden were to be forced out of the presidency before January 20, as opposed to simply declaring he wouldn't run in the fall but remaining in office, would be the vice presidential provision in the 25th Amendment:

SECTION 1. In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.

SECTION 2. Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

The difficulty this year would be timing as it relates to the potential for Kamala succeeding to the office. The opinion has already been put out that Kamala is so visibly inept that she amounts to 25th Amendment insurance for Joe: she's even less popular than Joe, so she'd almost certainly lose to any Republican in November, but even if she were to succeed to the presidency before then, there's a general perception that she'd be no more effective than a severely limited Joe in the office.

The people who actually ran the country had an equivalent problem with Spiro Agnew in 1973, although Agnew as vice president was certainly no worse than many of his predecessors or successors, like John Garner, Alben Barkley, or Dan Quayle. Nevertheless, it was apparently felt necessary to remove Agnew as potential 25th Amendment insurance and replace him with a figure who had more gravitas -- who turned out to be Gerald Ford -- before the real job of removing Nixon could be undertaken.

But even there, as I noted Sunday, it took from October 10 to December 6, 1973 to nominate Ford and secure his confirmation, more than two months. It took even longer for Ford to secure confirmatiom for Nelson Rockefeller, his own nominee for vice president, from August 20, 1974 to December 19, 1974, four months. According to Wikipedia at the link,

Rockefeller underwent extended hearings before Congress, suffering embarrassment when it was revealed he made massive gifts to senior aides, such as Henry Kissinger, and used his personal fortune to finance a scurrilous biography of political opponent Arthur Goldberg. He had also taken debatable deductions on his federal income taxes, and ultimately agreed to pay nearly one million dollars to settle the issue, but no illegalities were uncovered, and he was confirmed.

It's worth noting that Agnew resigned, setting the vice presidential succession procedures into motion, with more than three years left in his second term. When Nixon resigned a year later, there were still more than two years left in his term. Even so, in both cases, it took two to four months to confirm the vice presidential successors. This year, if Biden were to leave the presidency after the primary season but before the Democrat convention, there likely wouldn't be time to confirm a successor before the election.

Not only that, but it's hard right now to imagine the House under Speaker Johnson confirming anyone nominated for the vice presidency by a President Harris, especially since Johnson as House Speaker would, without a sitting vice president, be next directly in line to succeed Harris should she herself leave the office. This would, if Harris were to leave, put a Republican in the presidency before the election.

Thus the current consitutional crisis, in which there's steadily declining confidence in the president's ability to function in office, extends beyond Biden himself to his successor. Any deal that involved Joe's resignation would also need in some way to encompass Kamala, because otherwise there's no realistic path to filling the office of vice president before the election, and there's no more confidence in Kamala's ability to function in the office than Joe's.

Even if we invoke names like John Garner, Alben Barkley, Spiro Agnew, or Dan Quayle, Kamala Harris doesn't seem to fit in even that group. We need to pray there's no national crisis between now and next January so great that it would require Biden's removal, because removing Biden wouldn't solve the bigger problem. Right now, the problem of timing alone makes a solution unlikely, but also at least for now, any deal equivalent to replacing Agnew before replacing Nixon in 1973-4 is almost certainly beyond the ability of the current movers and shakers.

Another "Diagnosis"

Over the weekend I ran into another quasi-medical diagnosis of Joe's condition, this one from a rabbi, of all people. We must recognize that, while rabbis are capable of deep insight into the human condition, Rabbi Barclay in this case adds the necessary disclaimer that he's not a medical professional. But his remarks do indirectly explain one major point I've observed, which is why Joe is always squinting, as he is in the photo above.

In watching Biden’s speech the other day, I was disgusted by his words, attitudes, lies, anger, and abandonment of Israel. I usually listen to him without actually watching his speeches, but seeing him this time made me do a little research about his eyes…

It is said that the eyes are the windows to the soul, and Biden’s pupils were so dilated that his eyes were solid black while he was reinterpreting the words of the special prosecutor. Looking at previous speeches, it seems that all of his “big” speeches have the same image: significantly dilated pupils. Since I don’t actually believe that he is the anti-Christ, I started doing some research about what that could mean. I am not a doctor, but there are enough studies easily available that it isn’t hard to integrate the data with the images of Biden’s eyes when he speaks.

Rabbi Barclay's vision must be a lot better than mine, because I've never noticed his pupils. What I see much more often is squinting, which could well be a version of the same thing -- if your pupils are dilated, you've got to squint to limit the light in your eyes. But others have in fact noticed the pupils:

I thought I was the only person that noticed how Joe Biden's eyes seem to consist entirely of a large black pupil. I think I noticed this during one of the debates. I thought was the only one that noticed until I saw a Reddit post on it. A lot of that post dealt with less than likely (or even sane) explanations like body doubles and deep fakes all the way to lizard people. While I won't dismiss the deep fakes as a possibility, I'm not ready to go to body doubles and certainly not lizard people lol!

But take a minute to go back and look at his photos from the 1980s up to the present. Without a doubt his eyes are blue and you can distinguish the pupils from the other areas of the eyes.

Reuters went so far as to fact check the issue in 2020 after posts on social media pointed out Joe's black pupils during a debate:

Social media users have been sharing an image online that shows Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden with his irises black and claiming that he is “on drugs.” This image was likely edited, as video and photographs from the night show Biden’s eyes to be their usual blue color.

But clearly the dilated pupils question hasn't been fact-checked away. Rabbi Barclay continues,

We all recognize Biden demonstrates the behavior of a man who is suffering with the fifth level of dementia: moderately severe cognitive decline. Some of the symptoms of this stage (there are 7 stages) include: inability to recall names; challenges with organization; verbal repetition; mood swings; denial of symptoms; wandering; aggression; and pronounced memory loss of familiar people, events, and personal details. All of these symptoms were clearly visible during his Thursday night speech.

But much of the media that supports him claim that those of us who believe he has this terribly sad disease of dementia are only looking at his words and actions through a filter that already despises the man, and maybe they are accurate. But his physiological symptoms, which are undeniable, demonstrate a similar conclusion.

Again, we've got to keep in mind he's a rabbi, not a gerontologist. But his next inference isn't completely unreasonable:

In looking at Biden’s eyes, his pupils are severely dilated. While he still has crystal blue eyes much of the time in candid photos, the pupils are so dilated in his speeches that they look black. Discounting the idea of him being possessed by a demon, there are only a few things that could cause that physiological reaction, the simplest being a reaction to a dark room. Given the bright lights, this is obviously not the cause. LSD, heroin, and cocaine also can cause dilated pupils, but again it is probably a safe assumption that Biden is not dropping acid prior to speaking publicly.

The other causes are related to dementia, and specifically to Alzheimer’s. The National Institute of Health has identified that pupil dilation while under cognitive stress is a marker for Alzheimer’s. Additionally, the most common drugs used to treat Alzheimer’s also create dilation of the pupils, whether they are anti-psychotics or other typical medications such as Rivastigmine.

Simply put, the significant dilation of Biden’s pupils during intense speaking are a definitive sign that he is suffering from Alzheimer's and/or he is taking medication for Alzheimer’s. Another side effect of the drugs is blurry vision, which would also explain his random wandering and not knowing where to go, as well as his tripping over large items or while walking up stairs.

Barclay suggests there are enough doctors in congress to demand additional information on Joe's meds, which likely won't be forthcoming. But I would say there's no necessary contradiction between people who think Joe's dilated pupils are a symptom of Alzheimer's or Alzheimer's meds, and people like me, who see other problems like slurring, hypercorrection, and vacant pauses while answering questions as symptoms of alcohol impairment. In fact, I would assume that what we could be seeing is the effect of mixing alcohol with meds.

One thing that was noticeable last Thursday night was that, if the drugs he allegedly takes to minimize his symptoms for major speeches and debates can explain his dialted pupils, they don't last as long as they did in the debates with Trump in the 2020 election. Back then, Joe was able to last through whole debates despite the viewers who questioned his dilated pupils. Last Thursday, he was able to keep up the facade for maybe ten minutes -- there was a consensus that had he ended the presser when he said he would, without taking questions, he might have brought things off.

His downfall came when he changed his mind as he was walking off the stage, turned around, and took questions, when he promptly called Sisi the president of Mexico. I don't think this can be fixed going forward, it's just going to keep happening. His handlers already know he can't do pressers, he can't do interviews, and he certainly can't do debates.

It Begins

I thought Trump was actually a little slow to roll out what looks like it's going to be his interim campaign theme:

Former President Donald Trump said on Saturday that if President Joe Biden “is too mentally incompetent to convict at a trial,” as laid out in Special Counsel Robert Hur’s damning report of the Biden classified documents probe, then he is unfit to serve as president.

. . . “Crooked Joe got off scot-free,” Trump said before quipping, “and I don’t know if you call it scot-free; they said he was a mental basket case.”

. . . “Now, I’m not looking for anything to happen to this guy. He wouldn’t know the difference,” Trump said, vowing there would be “no revenge” if he was elected as the 47th president.

This could potentially be Trump's theme for the next eight months until the election, but so far, events have unfolded much more quickly than that. The current conventional wisdom at NBC goes like this:

Washington is abuzz with fresh concerns about President Joe Biden’s fitness after a special counsel report released Thursday raised questions about his memory.

But Democrats have rallied around Biden and despite the fantasies of some pundits and anxious Democrats, the president is almost certain to be the Democratic Party’s nominee as long as he wants.

. . . No prominent Democrats have called for Biden to step aside and there's no known serious conservations about it.

“The Democratic Party is united in supporting President Biden, who will be his party’s nominee this fall and will make Donald Trump a loser a second time this November,” said Biden campaign spokesperson Daniel Wessel in a statement to NBC News.

But that doesn't make the problem go away. In the New York Post,

We need to talk about Kamala Harris.

. . . Biden could be pressured to resign.

He could be removed from office under the 25th Amendment on the grounds that he’s “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

All well and good, but his constitutional successor is no better, and conceivably worse.

What could Democrats possibly offer Harris to get her to step aside gracefully?

Biden won’t go, and his age and mental decline only make him more stubborn.

Harris won’t go, because there’s nowhere for her to go but down.

Nobody in the party — not even Bill Clinton or Barack Obama — seems to have the pull to make either of them step aside.

Democrats know what they need to do.

That doesn’t make it any easier to do it.

In other words, the lizard people aren't too far from the problem they had with Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew. Nixon faced impeachment, but nobody seems to have been comfortable with the idea of Agnew becoming president, so they forced him out with an old bribery scandal, quickly replacing him with Gerald Ford. This prevented a Democrat House speaker from succeeding to the presidency, and the establishment appeared to be satisified with that temporary measure until the 1976 election. But this all took place with more than three years left in Nixon's term, nearly a year before Nixon himself resigned in August 1974:

On October 10th, 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew, resigned after being indicted on charges of accepting bribes and evading income taxes while Governor of Maryland. Two days after Agnew's resignation, Nixon nominates Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan, who at the time is House Minority Leader, as Vice President. . . . Confirmation hearings by the Senate and House begin, soon leading to votes by both chambers to approve the nomination. Ford is sworn in as the 40th Vice President on December 6, 1973.

For Harris to resign and be replaced in an election year, unlike Agnew-Ford in 1973, would be far more contentious and unlikely to be resolved as quickly. This would increase the likelihood that if Harris were to be forced into resigning before Biden, the vice presidential slot wouldn't be filled, and the next in succession would be the House speaker, currently Republican Mike Johnson. The lizard people would find this distasteful indeed.

On the other hand, I feel certain that the deep state does have something on Harris already, likely even more effective than bribery was for Agnew. My guess is it could well involve last summer's baggie of cocaine outside the Situation Room, or any number of equivalent circumstances, and she could be eased out quickly if the need arose.

What we don't have yet is a national crisis that would actually force invocation of the 25th Amendment against Biden, but given his truly bad luck over the past several months, we simply can't rule it out. Nor can the lizard people. Contra NBC, I've simply got to assume conversations are beginning to take place.

The Hur Report And The "Stop The Steal" Subtext

A largely unspoken takeaway from Joe's Thursday night press conference has been that establishment media and government figures have conspired to conceal the reality of Joe's mental condition from the public. Democrat presidential candidate Dean Phillips said as much in his post on X earlier in the week when he apostrophized just those people:

But shame on all of you pretending everything is ok. You are leading us - and him - into a disaster, and you damn well know it.

Another post on X refers to a "gentleman's agreement" not to cover the issue:

Biden’s age is very clearly the most impt non-Trump issue in this elec. polling says so. Voters say so. It’s just the WH/DC have had a sorta gentleman’s agreement for the last year to pretend like it’s not. Maybe that ends now https://t.co/W7d6BPK9SW

— Astead (@AsteadWH) February 8, 2024

One of the movements most consistently derided in the wake of the 2020 election was "Stop the Steal". Here's the transcript of an NPR interview from 2022:

[New York Times reporter Charles] Homans says scores of groups at the state and local levels, with the help of right-wing media figures and activists, are taking aim at the electoral system. He also tells the backstory of Stop the Steal and traces its roots in the Tea Party movement that started after President Obama's election. Some Tea Party leaders were active in trying to overturn the 2020 election. The Stop the Steal movement didn't succeed in reinstating Trump, but it did succeed on another level. Homans cites polls showing that only about one-fifth to one-quarter of the Republican electorate considers Biden's presidency legitimate.

Here's commentary from The Telegraph following Joe's Thursday press conference:

Many of us had suspected it, but now we appear to have proof: Joe Biden’s presidency is an irresponsible con, perpetrated against the free world.

. . . The US establishment media largely turned a blind eye to Biden’s obvious deficiencies because they didn’t want Donald Trump to occupy the Oval Office for another four years. They glossed over Biden’s occasional incoherence and ineptitude because “no one could be worse” than the orange neanderthal who had pledged to Make America Great Again.

In other words, people who consider themselves responsible adults are starting to come over to the position that was previously held only by MAGA Republicans, that the 2020 election was a con, with the press and the elites enabling Biden's strategy of minimizing the public exposure he would otherwise have had in a traditional campaign. In short, the election was "stolen". I've already argued here that there was never anyhing improper about using the word "steal" in connection with the 2020 election:

The connotation of the word goes far beyond any literal definition of a property crime; definition 3 for "steal" in this on line dictionary is "to take or gain insidiously or artfully", as in "he stole her heart" or "she stole the spotlight".

. . . But even absent proof of electoral fraud sufficient to overturn ballot results, the use of the word "stolen" outside a specific legal context isn't a conspiracy theory; it's no more of a big lie than to claim an umpire is blind or someone can't organize a two-car funeral, when after all, if we check the facts, he quite possibly can, and for that matter, the umpire can see perfecly well.

This is one factor that's leading to Trump's quasi-incumbent status in 2024. In some measure, it explains the failure of any never-Trump candidate to gain traction in the abbreviated primary season, as well as the tendency of the electorate to discount the Democrat-driven Trump indictments. If the 2020 election was metaphorically but nevertheless in some credible way stolen, Trump ought to be the incumbent, and he's running in some part on the record of his first term.

Stop the Steal is moving to the mainstream, and it's a major, if unacknowledged, issue of the 2024 election, derived from the now fully acknowledged issue of Biden's mental capacity.

Constitutional Crisis

In light of Dean Phillips's truth-telling blurt that I talked about yesterday, Special Counsel Hur's remarks on Joe's mental state in his report on Biden's handling of classified documents suggests Washington insiders have been concealing a crisis for some time. In fact, it's beginning to shape up as a full-blown constitutional crisis.

The closest parallel I can think of is the crisis in the UK over Edward VIII's wish to marry Wallis Simpson, which came to a head throughout 1936. According to Wikipedia,

It is generally accepted that Wallis Simpson and Edward became lovers in 1934, while Lady Furness (who was also in a relationship with the prince) was visiting relatives in the United States. However, Edward adamantly insisted to his father, King George V, that he was not physically intimate with Simpson and that it was inappropriate to describe her as his mistress. . . . Edward and Simpson were secretly followed by members of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, who produced reports on the nature of their relationship and their investigations into Wallis Simpson's private life that included the "pursuit of vicious gossip" and the identification of a "secret lover". The prospect of having an American divorcée with a questionable past having such sway over the heir apparent led to anxiety among government and establishment figures.

In the summer of [1936], the King eschewed the traditional prolonged stay at Balmoral in favour of a holiday with Simpson in the eastern Mediterranean that was widely covered in the American and continental European press, but not by the British press, which maintained a self-imposed silence. Nevertheless, Canadians and expatriate Britons, who had access to the foreign reports, were largely scandalised by the coverage.

By October, it was rumoured in high society and abroad that Edward intended to marry Simpson as soon as she was free to do so. At the end of that month, the crisis came to a head when she filed for divorce and the American press announced that marriage between her and the King was imminent. The King's private secretary, Alec Hardinge, wrote to him on 13 November, warning: "The silence in the British Press on the subject of Your Majesty's friendship with Mrs Simpson is not going to be maintained ... Judging by the letters from British subjects living in foreign countries where the Press has been outspoken, the effect will be calamitous."

In other words, the UK press kept the whole issue quiet, despite it being general knowledge among the elites and widely reported in the foreign press. Back to Wikipedia,

[T]he British press remained quiet on the subject until Alfred Blunt, Bishop of Bradford, gave a speech to his diocesan conference on 1 December, which alluded to the King's need of divine grace: "We hope that he is aware of his need. Some of us wish that he gave more positive signs of his awareness." The press took this for the first public comment by a notable person on the crisis and it became front-page news on 3 December. When asked about it later, however, the bishop claimed he had not heard of Simpson at the time he wrote the speech, and that it was an expression of disappointment at the King's conspicuous failure to attend church services regularly [cough, cough]. Acting on the advice of Edward's staff, Simpson left Britain for the south of France two days later in an attempt to escape intense press attention.

Events unrolled quickly thereafter, with Edward abdicating a week afer Simpson's departure, on December 10. If nothing else, this is an indication of how important it was for the establishment to keep the secret, and how quickly the crisis had to be solved when it was revealed. The combination of Rep Phillips, a Democrat stalwart, tweeting, "But shame on all of you pretending everything is ok. You are leading us - and him - into a disaster, and you damn well know it," followed two days later by the revelations in the Hur report, strikes me as very close to the bishop's invocation of Edward's need for divine grace -- both seem to have blown the lid off the secret.

At this point, the reaction in the establishment press has been stunned silence. YouTube seems to be throttling comments on the issue as well. Only on the right, at least so far, have we been getting intelligent assessments of what these revelations mean. For instance, at Front Page Magazine:

If there are any two things that a man ought to remember, it’s when his son died and when he ascended to the vice presidency and when he became a private citizen again.

Now a man so far gone that he does not know either one has his finger on the nuclear button.

There have been many defenses of Biden’s state made in the past. We have been told that he misspeaks because he has a problem with stuttering or that he’s prone to making up stories, but neither one explains the sheer scale and persistence of the problem which extends well beyond confusing deceased former German chancellor Helmut Kohl and former chancellor Angela Merkel or former French president François Mitterrand and Emmanuel Macron, the sitting president, as he did this week, which might be understandable if that was all there was to it.

Biden is forgetting things that no normal person in their right state of mind loses track of.

Republican Rep Rep. Claudia Tenney wrote to Attorney General Garland, arguing in part,

“It is incumbent upon you to explore proceedings to remove the President pursuant to the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution,” she wrote. “President Biden needs to be charged, or he needs to be removed. There is no middle ground.”

NBC reported,

The Hur report strips away the defenses that Biden’s press operation has used to protect him and raises fresh doubts about whether Biden is up to the rigors of the presidency, Democratic strategists said in interviews.

“This is beyond devastating,” said another Democratic operative, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk candidly about Biden’s shortcomings. “It confirms every doubt and concern that voters have. If the only reason they didn’t charge him is because he’s too old to be charged, then how can he be president of the United States?”

Asked if Hur’s report changes the calculus for Democrats who expect Biden to be the party’s nominee, this person said: “How the f--- does it not?”

Another Biden ally called it “the worst day of his presidency.”

Speaker Johnson remarked after Joe's impromptu press conference,

"The President’s press conference this evening further confirmed on live television what the Special Counsel report outlined. He is not fit to be President," House Speaker Mike Johnson declared in response to the episode. The Speaker of the House is third in line for the presidency, positioned only behind the vice president in the order of precedence.

It's hard to avoid thinking this is a constitutional crisis on the order of the one in the UK over Edward VIII. My current estimate is that it will hasten Joe's withdrawal from the 2024 race in fairly short order, but there will be other developments as well.