Let's Revisit Joe's July 17, 2024 "COVID Diagnosis"

Yesterday I briefly referred to the July 17, 2024 health episode in Las Vegas that brought about a sudden change in Joe's schedule and a swift return via Air Force One to his Rehoboth Beach house. The White House's version, then and afterward, was that there was no medical emerency, Joe had simply tested positive for COVID, as outlined in the exchange embedded above between Fox reporter Peter Doocy and Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Thursday, July 18:

Peter Doocy: There's this new Las Vegas police radio traffic that's published by The Daily Beast where officers were racing to secure a hospital emergency room on July 17th. They were under the impression thwt President Biden was having a medical enmergency. What was It?

Karine Jean-Pierre: He was not. As you know, the president when we were in Vegas tested positive for COVID. We let you all know, and then we flew back here. Outside of that, there was no medical emergency. People are still testing positive for COVID, but because of this president, he was able to put forth a comprehensive, a comprehensive way to move forward with this pandemic, and now we have vaccines. . .

In light of the new revelation that Joe has stage 4 prostate cancer, it's worth delving again into the reports of his medical episode in Las Vegas on July 17 and putting it into the context of his withdrawal from the presidential race less than a week later, while he was still recovering from whatever it was in Rehoboth the following weekend. Here is one report of a hospital being placed on alert in connection with the episode:

A Las Vegas hospital was on standby after being alerted about a possible medical issue with President Joe Biden Wednesday afternoon while he was visiting Southern Nevada.

Law enforcement and medical teams gathered outside the University Medical Center trauma room entrance on Wellness Way in case the President of the United States arrived after he canceled an appearance at the Unidos US Convention in Las Vegas due to testing positive for COVID-19.

. . . "I'm happy that commander-in-chief is safe and doing well," Mason Van Houweling, CEO of UMC, said. "We prepare the perimeter set, lots of security measures, lots of training with our staff."

Due to the hospital being the only Level 1 Trauma Center in Nevada, that's where the president will go during a medical emergency.

Van Houweling said the hospital was alerted around 2:15 p.m. about a possible medical issue with the president.

The UK Daily Mail reported the actual radio traffic mentioned by Peter Doocy in his question to Karine Jean-Pierre:

[P]olice recordings from July 17th, obtained by DailyMail.com, show the hospital was ready to receive the president as law enforcement noted: 'POTUS is 421,' which is police code for a sick or injured person.

'For everyone on the radio. Right now POTUS is 421. He's being seen so we're kind of waiting to see how this is shaping out,' the dispatcher said. 'He's 421 right now. We're just trying to figure out what is going on and we're going to go from there.'

. . . Calling for 'any available units to come down to Valley Hospital,' a police officer says on the recording.

'I have four units,' is a response.

'That's not enough,' the dispatcher responds.

Additional officers were asked to meet at the 'Valley Hospital ER parking lot.'

'We're going to meet behind the ER entrances, where the ambulances go. There's a little cul-du-sac back there,' is the order given.

At the time of the episode, Biden was at the Lindo Michoacan restaurant, where he greeted patrons and conducted a radio interview -- not the sort of place you'd get COVID test results. But then something happened, about which we've never been told. The Daily Mail continues,

But then he stayed for another 90 minutes. His next event - speaking at UnidosUS - was canceled.

From about 1:40 pm PT - when Biden wrapped his radio interview - to shortly after 3 pm - when the motorcade left, it was unclear why the president remained inside the restaurant.

Mason Van Houweling, CEO of the hospital, told local media they was alerted around 2:15 p.m. about a possible medical issue with the president.

Apparently while the Biden party was still at the restaurant, a decision was made not to go to the hospital, but to return immediately to Rehoboth Beach, and the motorcade, including reporters, went to the airport. Another Daily Mail story carries an account from a reporter on the return flight:

Air Force One was flying so fast that I was shaking in my seat.

Less than 30 minutes ago, my colleagues in the White House press corps and I had received word – just before the rest of the world – that President Biden had been diagnosed with COVID.

Now we were joining him on a mad rush back from Las Vegas to the Bidens' Rehoboth Beach getaway in Delaware.

Moments after fastening my seatbelt, the massive engines of the presidential Boeing 747 roared to life.

The flight attendants, in their custom blue uniforms, stumbled in the aisles as the jet's nose pointed skyward.

Tray tables shook. Reporters held up their water glasses so they wouldn't spill.

A doctor always travels with the President, but no word came on the type of care he was receiving or how ill he was.

Twice, we asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who was also onboard, to give us an update on Biden's condition.

Twice, we were denied.

Even if she had spoken to us, there would have been no way to know what was coming.

That the president wouldn't be seen again in public for nearly a week.

The reporter also described the scene at the Lindo Michoacan restaurant when Joe arrived for his visit:

Biden would enter through the kitchen, we were told. Photographers had their cameras ready, wanting to capture a stylish photo of the president framed in the glass window of the door between the kitchen and dining room.

But suddenly, the Secret Service covered the window with a towel.

'Hey,' we yelled at the agents. But they didn't listen. Why they wanted to block that specific shot, when Biden would be pictured moments later in the dining room regardless, we still don't know.

When he finally stepped through the door, his appearance was shocking.

He looked pale, weak, exhausted and shuffled slowly across the room.

'He looks bad,' one reporter muttered.

The scene at his arrival at Dover Air Force Base later that night was similar:

Touching down, we rushed into position once more on the tarmac to watch the president deplane. And as the steps of Air Force One were lowered, we waited anxiously under the wing.

He began his exit at 10:29pm (EST), still looking pale and frail. He stepped down gingerly, then paused and waved.

Half way down, and for a few seconds, he stared off into space, until a Secret Service agent gently tapped his shoulder.

The touch seemed to rouse him and he continued down, appearing so unsteady that I was worried he would fall.

But he sluggishly made it to his SUV and shakily climbed inside for the hour-long ride to Rehoboth.

And this is the sum total of what we know, other than Ms Jean-Pierre insisting that none of it actually happened. I'm a medical layman and can draw no conclusions, except to note that the 90-minute delay before leaving the Lindo Michoacan restaurant after alerting the hospital must certainly have involved anxiety about the risks of putting Joe in a hospital where the doctors weren't under White House control. We don't know directly, but I think we csn assume that the White House physician, Dr Kevin O'Connor, a member of the Biden inner circle and Joe's personal doctor since 2009, was with the party and would want to be in charge.

The problem would be, however, that O'Connor would not have had hospital privileges at Valley Hospital, which would mean that Joe's diagnosis and treatment would be in the hands of hospital staff and the hospital's public relations department, not O'Connor and the White House press staff. O'Connor, as I understand this, could basically remain in the room, answer questions, and offer background information and advice, but it would be Valley Hospital doctors and nurses who would be examining and treating Joe, with the hospital determining what news would be released.

Since the news of Joe's prostate cancer came out, my working theory has been that Kevin O'Connor's task was to prevent Joe from being formally diagnosed with anything at all. This is confirmed in the latest Biden press statement:

In a statement to NBC News, Reuters and CBS News on Tuesday, May 20, a spokesperson for the former president, 82, said he received his last Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) test in 2014, when he would've been in his early 70s. The spokesperson confirmed that Biden was not diagnosed with cancer until Friday, May 16.

“President Biden’s last known PSA was in 2014. Prior to Friday, President Biden had never been diagnosed with prostate cancer,” the spokesperson said.

This is almnost certainly weasel-worded, up there with Bill Clinton's what the meaning of is is. O'Connor and the Bidens must certainly have recognized that Joe had symptoms consistent with prostate cancer -- as represented by occasional slips of the tongue from brother Frank and Joe himself -- but no doctor had formally diagnosed it, and the White House physician's job was to make sure no reputable doctor ever got close enough to make a diagnosis.

This would also apply to the symptoms of dementia, possible ministrokes, or even Dr Drew Pinsky's suggestion that there's something like Parkinson's involved. If no doctor makes a formal diagnosis, Joe's in perfect health. But if he goes to Valley Hospital, reputable doctors outside White House control are going to insist on taking blood pressure, oxygen saturation, EKG, CAT scans, MRI, and the whole game will be up -- or if O'Connor refuses to let them do it, the whole game will be up. Best hop on Air Force One and bundle Joe back to Rehoboth Beach.

Which brings me to the inevitable question: the calls with Schumer, Pelosi, Jeffries, and so forth started within days of Joe's return to Rehoboth Beach. We've been told they were about the polls. What was really said? I'll bet the calls were much more about Joe's medical condition than the state of the polls.

Way Too Many Unanswered Questions

There are too many unanswered questions about Joe Biden's presidential peregrinations: we saw yesterday, for instance, that Barack Obama prevailed on Joe not to run in 2016. Some sources claim that Obama had a private deal with Hillary that she would get the nomination that year, while yesterday's version was that Obama simply thought Joe wasn't up to it, especially after Beau's death. Certainly both could be true, and as information about Joe's true health after 2015 gradually leaks out, it seems entirely possible that Obama knew things we didn't. He was the president, after all.

We also know that after the June 2024 debate, Nancy Pelosi was able to force Joe to withdraw from the race. The reason must certainly be not that she or anyone else at that level was at all surprised by Joe's performance, but instead that the charade could no longer be maintained. This is just another way of saying that senior Democrats were forced to acknowledge what they'd known more or less since Joe's time as vice president, likely not that he was just soft in the head, but that he was sick with cancer and quite possibly Parkinson's as well.

Nor should we neglect, in the context of the latest revelations, the July 17, 2024 health episode that Joe allegedly suffered in Las Vegas, only days after the Butler assassination attempt on Trump. Snopes couldn't quite debunk this, despite trying:

In the months leading up to the November 2024 U.S. presidential election, an online rumor claimed U.S. President Joe Biden suffered a serious, undisclosed medical emergency during his stay in Las Vegas between July 15 and 17.

The timeline for this rumor began on July 17, when White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre announced a COVID-19 diagnosis for Biden — the reason given for why the White House cut his trip short and canceled one of his planned speeches in Las Vegas.

Four days later, on July 21, Biden announced he would drop his reelection bid — a U.S. presidential decision not seen in decades.

. . . The rumor about Biden suffering an undisclosed medical emergency originated the following day — July 22 — on the X account for Charlie Kirk, the founder and president of conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA. Kirk's post featured mentions of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, the U.S. Secret Service, University Medical Center Southern Nevada and the White House.

By email we contacted Kirk and all four of the aforementioned organizations or institutions named in the post but did not receive any details in response within several hours. The Secret Service simply responded, "We refer you to White House communication for this query."

So, given that both Obama and Pelosi demonstrably had the veto power over a Joe Biden candidacy, why did they allow him to run in 2020, much less 2024? We know almost nothing about any decision making process on this issue, except that we're beginning to learn that as of 2023, contingency planning had begun for Biden's death in office:

Democratic officials staged “hush-hush talks” to plan for Joe Biden’s withdrawal as the party’s presidential nominee as early as 2023, says a new book.

Citing two unnamed sources, authors Jonathan Allen’s and Amie Parnes’s account [in Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House] adds another twist to the torturous saga over the then president’s age and fitness that was not resolved until a disastrous debate against Donald Trump precipitated his exit in July 2024.

More startlingly still, the book also reports that aides to Kamala Harris, the vice-president who assumed the nomination then lost to Trump, “strategized around the possibility that Biden might die in office”.

Such planning was led by Jamal Simmons, Harris’s White House communications director, Parnes and Allen report, and went as far as the drawing up of a “death-pool roster” of federal judges who might swear Harris in.

Simmons “never told the vice president about the death-pool roster before leaving her camp in January 2023,” the authors write, “but he advised colleagues that he should be notified immediately if something happened to Biden, because he had worked out an entire communications strategy. And he left the spreadsheet with another Harris aide.”

Nevertheless, even with these behind-the-scenes concerns, Biden was somehow able to convince the people who could have vetoed a 2024 candidacy that he should run, despite the fact that he'd sold himself to those same people in 2020 as a one-termer:

President Biden's insistence on staying in the 2024 race has seemingly defied his own pledge to serve as a transitional president to a younger generation of Democratic leaders.

. . . Biden's disastrous debate performance and his team's handling of the fallout have churned anxiety among Democrats and angered White House and campaign staff as questions swirl about whether he should step aside.

. . . Biden acknowledged during an interview with BET News that aired July 17 that he had originally run for president as a "transitional candidate" and that he had expected to "pass it on to somebody else."

What changed? A possible answer has been suggested by Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers in The Drill Down podcast:

As Schweizer and Eggers note, the Democratic hierarchy realized early in Biden’s term that Harris was inadequate and would lose to virtually any Republican candidate, let alone the juggernaut of another Trump candidacy.

Democrats had realized Biden “would have to run for a second term because of the fear that Harris could not win a race against Donald Trump or against any Republican,” Schweizer says. The authors of The Truce “write that ‘Democrat after Democrat we interviewed, including members of Biden and Harris’s own teams, said Kamala’s not ready for prime time. She ain’t ready for this.’ They also said she has a lack of discipline, lack of focus or decisiveness.”

Some, he notes, even called her a “shallow narcissist.”

“It’s crazy to think that among the legacies of the summer of BLM and George Floyd is that that’s what locks in Kamala Harris’s position as the vice-presidential nominee, even though Joe Biden wanted to go in a different direction,” says Eggers. “The sort of identity politics that they want to impose on the rest of us is what ends up really biting them in the end.”

Nevertheless, it was those same "centrist" party leaders who ensured that potential centrist candidates like Dean Phillips and Robert Kennedy Jr couldn't be put on enough primary ballots to challenge the 2024 Biden-Harris ticket. They were also able to veto even the prospect of a quasi-prmary process after Joe withdrew, settling on Harris as the consensus choice. And the cabal that was in charge was in fact fully prepared for Harris to succeed to the presidency should Joe be unable to continue:

Was Joe Biden really unaware that he had metastatic prostate cancer and unlikely to survive when his team announced his reelection?

Or is it more likely the plan was for Joe Biden to win in 2024, then reveal the cancer, step down and Kamala Harris would be installed.

The problem that cropped up in their ‘best laid plans’ was not the cancer in 2024, but rather the scale of the cognitive decline becoming more obvious…. and that led to a quick change in approach.

Everyone in DC knew.

No one in Washington DC did not know.

So several things had to change to bring us to the state of affairs in July 2024: Obama had to withdraw his 2016 opposition to Joe running in 2020. Then Obama-Pelosi had to decide it was OK for Joe to run again in 2024, when he'd originally sold himself on the basis he wouldn't -- and this against the backdrop of the certainty that he wouldn't live out a second term, if indeed he could even finish his first. They were finally forced to change their minds only when they had to give up the whole game -- but then, couldn't they also have forced Joe to step down as president and let Kamala succeed to the office before the convention? Why didn't they?

There are still too many questions.

"SUBPOENA BIDEN'S DOCTOR!"

🚨 #BREAKING: The Biden team says the last time Joe Biden received a PSA test for prostate cancer was 2014

Absolute BULLSHT, and even CNN is calling it out!

"He was President of the United States and didn't get tested? I find this very surprising."

SUBPOENA BIDEN'S DOCTOR! pic.twitter.com/ImrPm7Wj1t

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) May 20, 2025

All I can say to that is good luck.

The real meat here that goes to the story arc is at the top of the tweet, "The Biden team says the last time Joe Biden received a PSA test for prostate cancer was 2014." Let's recall that for days, oncologists nad urologists have been saying on the news that the PSA test is "the gold standard in prostate cancer screening". On Megyn Kelly's podcast, urologist Dr David Samadi said "it is either medical malpractice or a lie that the former president did not know he had cancer".

But let's look at the timeline. We know, especially from various references on Hunter's laptop, that at least as of early 2015, Joe was weighing a run for president in 2016, but Barack Obama put that idea to rest later in the year, at least after Beau's death on May 30. The Hill reported in 2019,

Former President Obama in 2015 pushed former Vice President Joe Biden not to run for president in 2015, The New York Times reported Sunday.

According to the Times, Obama “gently pressed” Biden on his 2016 presidential ambitions over several weeks. He then ultimately had a strategist deliver a discouraging assessment to Biden of his odds in the race against then-front runner Hillary Clinton.

“The president was not encouraging,” Biden later said, according to the Times.

Obama believed at the time that Clinton, who would become the Democratic presidential nominee and lose to President Trump in the general election, had the best chance to win, according to the Times. Obama also didn’t think Biden was in the right state of mind to campaign for president following the death of his son, Beau, the newspaper reported.

Nevertheless, we now hear that, for whatever reason, Joe's doctor stopped doing PSA tests the prior year. It's hard to avoid thinking the numbers were already concerning, even for a 2016 presidential run, and if Joe decided, which he must have done, that he'd run in 2020 instead, there'd be only a downside to resuming them. But Joe would have to convince doctor after doctor not to run PSA tests, right, when it would be somethng verging on malpractice not to run them? Well, no. Joe has had the same doctor ever since he started as vice president in 2009:

Dr. Kevin O’Connor served as the 82-year-old’s official physician during his White House stint — and repeatedly insisted for years that Biden was in top mental shape despite his obvious cognitive decline.

O’Connor worked with Biden during his vice presidency, too.

After more than two decades in the Army, O’Connor joined the White House Medical Unit under then-President George W. Bush. He was only supposed to serve six months with the new vice president, Biden, but ended up staying on for years.

“That didn’t work out and, so, I ended up doing the whole eight years with him,” O’Connor joked in a rare 2023 interview with the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine.

He retired when Obama and Biden left office, but remained on as Biden’s personal physician. He was brought back as the top White House doctor when Biden was elected president.

The link continues,

Critics have, in the past, criticized the close relationship between the doctor and former prez — with Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) telling The Post just last month that “he’s part of the Biden family.”

“He would do or say anything to cover up and protect that family, regardless of what it meant professionally for him,” Jackson said at the time.

President Trump, for his part, honed in on O’Connor’s prior positive health assessments just after the cancer diagnosis came to light.

. . . “I think someone is going to have to speak to his doctor.”

This seems to be a pattern: Joe discovered during his time as vice president which people he could trust and brought them with him, or back into the fold, once he became president. Another was his Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle:

In the wake of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, the U.S. Secret Service has faced mounting scrutiny for its failure to prevent the attack.

Much of the criticism has been aimed at the agency's director, Kimberly Cheatle. Cheatle, who was appointed to the role by President Joe Biden in 2022, had previously been the senior director in global security at PepsiCo.

Prior to her time at PepsiCo, she had served with the Secret Service for more than 25 years, including on Biden's security detail while he was vice president.

. . . "When Kim served on my security detail when I was Vice President, we came to trust her judgement and counsel," Biden said. "She is a distinguished law enforcement professional with exceptional leadership skills, and was easily the best choice to lead the agency at a critical moment for the Secret Service."

Cheatle resigned in disgrace a little over a week after the Butler assassination attempt. There seems to be an impression, rightly or wrongly, that Joe could trust her to be competent when it involved protecting Joe's secrets but incompetent when it really counted. But back to why Joe needed Dr O'Connor:

A top Parkinson’s disease specialist held a meeting with President Joe Biden’s physician at the White House earlier this year, according to records, though the circumstances of the meeting are unclear.

Dr. Kevin Cannard, a neurologist at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, met with White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor at the White House in mid-January, according to White House visitor logs.

Cannard has visited the White House three times this year, according to the visitor logs: A January 17 meeting with O’Connor, and with another staffer on January 26 and March 28. Cannard has visited the White House at least eight times over the past year, according to the logs, beginning late July 2023 and ending with the March 28 meeting. Only the January 17 meeting lists O’Connor as the person who was visited.

O’Connor took the unusual step Monday night of releasing a letter offering some details about Cannard’s visits to the White House, following days of speculation about the president’s health, writing that “President Biden has not seen a neurologist outside of his annual physical.”

This was briefly picked up by the media after Biden's June 2024 debate performance, but so far, only Dr Drew Pinsky has raised the issue in the context of Joe's recent diagnosis, on the Viva Frei podcast below:

At 8:29:

If you have someone who's already Parkinsonian, which he was, that's not a debatable point, any medical student looking at a video of Joe Biden three years ago, if they could not diagnose Parkinsonism, they would be remediated. It's, it's, look, if I saw a picture of a rash I could tell you wnat it's likely to be, same thing is true in certain neurological conditions, you look at the video the way you would look at them across the room, it's the same thing. And Parkinsonism is what he has. Why does he have it? They never told us.

According to the Cleveland Clinic,

Parkinsonism is an umbrella term that refers to brain conditions that cause slowed movements, rigidity (stiffness) and tremors. These conditions can happen for many reasons, including genetic mutations, reactions to medications and infections.

Parkinsonism refers to several conditions — including Parkinson’s disease — that have similar symptoms and features. However, Parkinson’s disease makes up about 80% of all cases of parkinsonism, making it the most common form by far.

Parkinson's may also be a cause of Joe's generally observed "cognitive decline". According to the Alzheimer's Association:

Parkinson’s disease dementia is a decline in thinking and reasoning skills that develops in some people living with Parkinson’s at least a year after diagnosis. The brain changes caused by Parkinson’s disease begin in a region that plays a key role in movement, leading to early symptoms that include tremors and shakiness, muscle stiffness, a shuffling step, stooped posture, difficulty initiating movement and lack of facial expression.

It's hard to avoid thinking that Dr O'Connor was in his position as White House Physician specifically to prevent any formal diagnoses of dementia, prostate cancer, or even Parkinson's, and to discredit even informed questions about such conditions. That conditions like Stage 4 cancer or Parkinson's are incurable would inevitably raise the question of whether Joe was fit for office -- and in fact, if the public had been aware of them in 2020, it might well have changed the outcome of the election.

If nothing else, Joe's 2020 basement campaign was likely intended to prevent his medical conditions, which must have existed at the time, from coming to light.

But let's ask what might happen if Dr O'Connor is subpoenaed, per the demand in the tweet above. He'll likely cite medical confidentiality as a reason not to answer questions, but if it comes to that, he can even invoke the Fifth Amendment. I'm by no means sure we'll ever get good answers to necessary questions, at least from Dr O'Connor. Nor will we get them from Dr Jill, Hunter, or anyone else in the family.

What Was The Real Story Arc?

Over less than a week, we've had the release of the Hur tapes, the runup to the Jake Tapper book launch on the coverup of Joe's decline, the reemergence of James Comey, and the astonishing news of Joe Biden's Stage IV prostate cancer. Somehow all these strike me as being tied together, although I'm not completely sure how. Let's start with Comey, who was a key figure in the 2016 election and the first few months of Trump's first term. How did he figure in those events?

The original agreement between Clinton and Obama going back to 2008 was for Obama to take the nomination, the presidency and then eventually support Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election bid. Obama would appoint Clinton to Secretary of State, Hillary would then use her office to build wealth for herself and her family, and then HRC would exit the Dept of State to begin her presidential run.

. . . The FBI [i e, James Comey] was aware of the plan for transition from Obama to Clinton, hence their role in eliminating the threat later presented by the Clinton, as Secretary of State, laptop scandal and the subsequent issues of classified information. Remember, Clinton’s motive as Secretary of State was to sell her position for material wealth; that’s why she used a personal email, maintained her own servers, and generally controlled how her activity could be monitored and tracked.

The problem was that Comey is generally regarded as tilting the 2016 election away from Hillary at a key inflecion point:

Before becoming secretary of state in 2009, Mrs Clinton set up an email server at her home in Chappaqua, New York, that she used for all work and personal emails during her four years in office.

She did not use, or even activate, a state.gov email account, which would have been hosted on servers owned and managed by the US government.

. . . A State Department investigation said her arrangement violated government policy, and FBI boss James Comey said in July 2016 that it was careless but not criminal.

So far, so good, Comey was doing as expected. But then, he went all wobbly:

In a bombshell announcement on 28 October, the FBI said it had found new emails that "appeared to be pertinent" to its investigation.

The emails, including some from top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, were found on a laptop belonging to her estranged husband, former congressman Anthony Weiner.

The revelation angered the Clinton campaign, and Mr Comey came under fire from some Democrats for allegedly interfering in the election.

. . . But in the final days of a heated election campaign, Mr Comey said that after reviewing the newly discovered emails, the FBI had not changed its position that Mrs Clinton should not face criminal charges.

Mr Trump changed his tune, saying Mrs Clinton was "being protected by a rigged system".

According to the link, Hillary thought Comey's dithering cost her the election, although others dispute that this was the factor. Meanwhile, the Trump Russia Collusion hoax, originally developed by the Hillary team for the unsuccessful 2016 campaign, threatened to come back to bite the Democrats once Trump got into the White House. According to the first link above,

President Obama did not orchestrate the Russia Collusion hoax; he facilitated it by not interfering with his administration officials who were assisting Hillary Clinton. This is a very key distinction. President Obama knew what was going on, he was willfully blind as it was carried out. However, the mess and fallout from the extreme lengths his FBI and DOJ officials went eventually represented a threat to Obama.

Robert Mueller and all 19 of his Clinton-aligned Lawfare operatives, were put into place to cover-up the entire mess created within the Russia Collusion operation. Mueller [in 2019] continued the Crossfire Hurricane operation, while the extreme Lawfare strategy was deployed against the Trump administration.

But Comey turned out to be the first victim of the Russia Collusion hoax, primarily due to his continuing tendency to dither:

The FBI director, James Comey, had privately reassured [Trump] that he was not personally under investigation. But on May 3, 2017, when Comey was summoned to Capitol Hill to explain his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, he denied the president the public vindication he’d sought.

Facing curious lawmakers and a captivated American audience, Comey pointedly refused to say whether any members of the Trump campaign were or were not under criminal investigation — including the president himself.

“The Department of Justice has authorized me to confirm” the existence of a broader investigation into potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, Comey said. “We’re not going to say another word about it until we’re done.”

. . . Comey was a show-boater, a grandstander, Trump complained to aide Steve Bannon. Three times, Trump lamented, Comey had told him he wasn’t under investigation. And now this.

By that weekend, Trump was at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, crafting a plan to dismiss Comey and dictating language for a draft termination letter to aide Stephen Miller.

Comey's reemergence with the 8647 flap, apparently connected with his own upcoming book launch, reinforces how wrapped up he was in the events of 2016-17, which on one hand brought down the plan for Hillary to succeed Obama in a seamless transition, and on the other set in motion the so-far utterly misguided Lawfare plan to thwart Trump and secure a renewed Democrat presidential dynasty.

One thing that's puzzled me about Comey is although he was only 56 when Trump fired him as FBI Director, his subsequent career has been at best undistinguished. According to Wikipedia,

In the summer of 2017, Comey gave the convocation speech and a series of lectures at Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, D.C., In the fall of 2018, Comey returned to his alma mater, the College of William & Mary, to teach a course on ethical leadership. He became an executive professor in education, a non-tenured position at the College. Comey joined assistant professor Drew Stelljes to teach the course during the 2018–2019 academic year.

. . . Comey is a senior fellow at the Kettering Foundation, an American non-partisan research foundation.

This contrasts with the post-FBI careers of his predecessors Robert Mueller and Louis Freeh, who became partners at law firms, while Freeh consulted extensively as well. Comey appears to rely now on his writing, a notoriously unstable income source. He also gives speeches for pay; he's represented by the Washington Speakers Bureau. But it doesn't seem as though anyone is interested in hiring him as an attorney or a consultant; his reputation for showboating and his track record of unreliability must prevent this.

Consider how his reemergence with the shell message on the beach has brought him lots of publicity but little or no money -- and in fact, it will almost certainly force him to spend money on attorneys. The guy just doesn't seem to be very smart or very competent at handling his own affairs or those of other important people. But he was in many ways present at the creation of the current Democrat strategy. I'll continue with the overall story arc in subsequent posts.

The Biden Story Is Turning Into A Hydra-Headed Monster

Over the course of a weekend, we've moved from the Hur tapes to a remarkably hinky cancer diagnosis for Joe Biden:

Former President Joe Biden was diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer, according to a statement from his personal office Sunday, and it has spread to his bones.

“Last week, President Joe Biden was seen for a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increasing urinary symptoms. On Friday, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, characterized by a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone,” the statement said.

Now, I'm just an old guy who in my own interest has acquired a general layman's knowledge of geriatric medical conditions. Prostate cancer, as I understand this, is the most common for men. I've been told it's actually slow to develop, so as soon as I heard this, I coudn't understand how a US president, who has a full-time physician right in the White House, could have prostate cancer metastasize to the bone and not have anyone notice. By this morning, I discovered it wasn't just me scratching my head:

Medical professionals are sounding the alarm and saying there is no way Joe Biden was diagnosed with Gleason 9 and metastasis as his initial diagnosis.

. . . Biden likely knew he had cancer while he was running for president in 2020 and lied about his health.

It appears White House physician Dr. O’Connor also repeatedly lied about Joe Biden’s health.

This is the Most Dangerous Cover-up in the History of the Presidency:

Last summer, White House Physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor swore to the American people that Joe Biden was “completely fit for the Presidency” — no issues, nothing to see.

Now we learn Biden has “advanced”prostate… pic.twitter.com/JryrV92wXv

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) May 18, 2025

Via The New York Post:

Dr. Steven Quay flagged similar concerns, saying Biden’s type of cancer is the easiest to diagnose when it first starts and progresses.

“The PSA blood test shows the rate of cancer cell growth. For even with the most aggressive form, it is a 5-7 year journey without treatment before it becomes metastatic,” he said.

“Meaning, it would be malpractice for this patient to show up and be first diagnosed with metastatic disease in May 2025,” he continued.

“It is highly likely he was carrying a diagnosis of prostate cancer throughout his White House tenure and the American people were uninformed.”

This also raises suspicions that Joe's brother Frank knew more than the family would otherwise admit at the time Joe dropped out of the presidential race last summer:

Biden’s brother, however, said following Sunday’s announcement that the president’s health "absolutely" played a role in his decision not to seek re-election just weeks ahead of the Democratic National Convention.

"I'm incredibly proud of my brother. Selfishly, I will have him back to enjoy whatever time we have left. He is a genuine hero. Country over self. Sounds corny in our cynical political environment, but he nor I are cynical. The goal remains the same, defeat Trump and continue the work that Joe has done. My hope is that our party rallies around this heroic act," Frank Biden told CBS News on Sunday.

"In my humble opinion, absolutely," he said when asked if his brother's health played a role in him bowing out.

Following Frank Biden’s comment, a source close to the Biden family told CBS that the president’s brother is an alcoholic and his claims were "completely untrue."

"Frank Biden suffers from alcoholism and hasn’t spoken to his brother, the president, in weeks. What he said about President Biden’s health being a factor in his decision is completely untrue," the source told the outlet.

For the poor guy's own family to contradict what he said and engage in character assassination is pretty low, but it suggests how eager they were to stop any speculation about Joe's health.

What seems to be gradually emerging is a scandal with many heads. Joe's mental decline appears to be just one part of it, and if anything, a modified limited hangout:

Coined on the fly by Nixon lawyer John Ehrlichman in 1973, it's a very [sic] unique phrase. A modified limited hangout is the public admission of a wrong in an attempt to hide a more serious wrong, while the media and prosecutors are investigating related crimes. It's a defensive tool in trying to cover-up a conspiracy.

So far, the limited admission by legacy media is that Joe was kinda soft in the head around maybe mid-2024, when he nevertheless heroically decided to withdraw from the race. If people saw any coverup, well, OK, for a couple months anyhow. But now we're beginning to see the Biden family and the White House physician must have been aware of Joe's cancer for 5-7 years at minimum -- otherwise, informed medical opinion suggests Biden's doctors were guilty of malpractice.

And we're just starting to see investigation of how the White House autopen may have been misused:

🚨BREAKING🚨

Who was really running the Biden White House?

I’m bringing in Joe Biden’s senior staff for transcribed interviews. Here’s who we are starting with:

Neera Tanden
Annie Tomasini
Anthony Bernal
Ashley Williams

They propped up a man who was unfit to lead. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/vjMJumzGd7

— Rep. James Comer (@RepJamesComer) May 17, 2025

And renewed investigations into Crossfire Hurricane:

JUST IN: FBI Director Kash Patel obliterates former FBI leadership including James Comey, suggests hidden documents will be released in the next week.

Patel: “Not only did they bastardize the FISA process in Latin American public, they withheld and hid documentation and put it… pic.twitter.com/5gn5TJBOIr

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) May 18, 2025

Just now, I see that Dr Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm's brother, is confirming the White House was aware of Joe's cancer in 2021:

🚨 HOLY SMOKES! Dr. Zeke Emanuel just went on MSNBC and told Morning Joe that Biden DEFINITELY had cancer during his presidency - IN 2021!

In other words - IT WAS HIDDEN. Scarborough is SHOCKED.

JOE: "This is NOT speculation [right?] He had it when he was president?"

EMANUEL:… pic.twitter.com/wqCZjslNlU

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 19, 2025

If they're now doing a modified limited hangout over this, what on earth are they still covering up? Michael LeBron, who posts as Lionel on his YouTube channel, thinks the cancer diagnosis revelation is there to distract attention from the autopen investigation -- people will demand this be dropped now that poor Joe is trying to recover from stage 4 cancer.

Jake Tapper Hires Crisis Management Team

In yesterday's post, I advanced the thesis that AI doesn't make people smart, and it doesn't make up for people not being smart, either. After I posted that, I heard that Jake Tapper's publisher (or Tapper himself) had felt the need to hire a crisis management team in the runup to the release of the book by him and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up and His Disastrous Choice, this coming Tuesday.

If Penguin Random House had fired Tapper and replaced him with an AI bot, they couldn't have made a worse decision. According to PR Week,

Tapper, who co-authored the book with Thompson, confirmed to outlets that Risa Heller, founder and CEO of Heller Co., was hired to offer advice as the authors plan to roll out the book “as smart as possible,” per reports. It is set for release on May 20.

. . . Some commenters in President Donald Trump's party were critical of Tapper and Thompson, saying Tapper and Thompson were complicit in a “media cabal” that protected Biden from public scrutiny of his age. Meanwhile, some defenders of Biden said the two authors have a vendetta against the former president and are focusing too much on his age and health.

Heller Co. did not respond to a request for comment.

Heller Co., previously known as Risa Heller & Co., represented former CNN chief Jeff Zucker, convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and former Rep. Anthony Weiner D-NY). The consultancy has offices in New York and Los Angeles.

Representatives of neither Axios nor CNN were available for comment.

Heller's website says it does crisis and reputation management:

We are trusted advisors to clients confronting and navigating complicated issues that risk long-term reputational harm. From high-profile institutions facing a daily onslaught of media attention to private citizens tackling problems that require narrowly targeted and bespoke communications, our clients value our proactive strategies and tactical advice.

Well, according to the PR Week link, Jeff Zucker, then-President of CNN Worldwide, was a client of Heller. His reputational crisis appears to have come from an office affair that led to his resignation:

On February 2, 2022, Zucker resigned from CNN. In his resignation letter, Zucker acknowledged that he did not disclose a consensual relationship he had with CNN's Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Allison Gollust, when it began. The relationship was made public in early January 2022 during the network's investigation into Chris Cuomo. Following his resignation from CNN, Zucker also resigned from his position as chief of WarnerMedia News & Sports.

A quick web search shows that Zucker's name is irretrievably attached to the MeToo phenomenon. This story concludes,

Since the modern #MeToo movement exploded in 2017 with the assault allegations against movie producer Harvey Weinstein, many observers have expressed fears that the attempts to root out sexual harassment in professional settings might devolve into a witch hunt. That's a fair concern. But it's also striking how fast the careers of Jeff Zucker, Andrew Cuomo, and Chris Cuomo unraveled once anybody subjected them to even a small bit of scrutiny. It makes you wonder how many other dominoes might yet fall.

So I'm wondering, if Zucker hired Heller to "navigate complicated issues that risk long-term reputational harm", whether hiring Heller did Zucker the least bit of good. But that's just one case. How about Elizabeth Holmes, also listed as a Heller client at the PR Week link? Holmes is now best known for her federal criminal conviction and prison sentence for fraud in the Theranos case, and her public image is connected with her phony baritone imitation of Apple folunder Steve Jobs, delivered wearing a Jobs-style black turtleneck . As to her current reputation,

The case of Holmes is said to have created a stigma for other female entrepreneurs, particularly in the sciences and health care industries, who are often compared to her. Writing in The New York Times, technology journalist Erin Griffith commented that "Holmes continues to loom large across the start-up world because of the audacity of her story, which has permeated popular culture", with female entrepreneurs reporting that "the frequent comparisons [to Holmes] are pernicious".

If Holmes had hired nobody at all to "navigate complicated issues that risk long-term reputational harm", could her reputation have turned out any worse? But how about Anthony Weiner, who only now is fading as a national dirty joke? PR Week lists him as another Heller client:

Our subject is Anthony Weiner, whose surname was a burden long before it became a curse—so fused with his disgrace that you can’t say it without triggering an avalanche of cringe. Weiner, who was caught texting pictures of his penis, first denied it, then admitted it, then resigned from Congress, then ran for mayor of New York City, at which point he sexted again under the alias Carlos Danger, was caught again, lost the election, sexted a photo with his young son in the background, sexted a minor, and forfeited a laptop with emails from his estranged wife that caused the FBI to reopen its Hillary Clinton email investigation, greasing the way for Donald Trump’s 2016 victory and hastening the possible end of the republic and democracy as we know it.

Why did he even bother to hire a crisis managment team? An ordinary cheap lawyer with a second-story office above a deli would have told him to stay off social media, drop his e-mail account, keep his mouth shut, and maybe not run for office for a while until it all blows over. As far as anyone can tell, Heller must not have even told him to do that, or if they did, they couldn't make it stick. Yet Heller apparently allows Anthony Weiner to be listed as a client whom they helped "navigate complicated issues that risk long-term reputational harm". How could Anthony Weiner possibly have emerged with any greater long-term reputational harm than he got with Heller's help?

This is why I think an AI bot came up with Tapper's strategy. He typed in, "It looks like my book launch is in crisis. What should I do?" The bot did a masssive search of all records everywhere, condensed it all, and replied, "Hire a crisis management consultant". Tapper tapped, "Which one?" The bot went back and reviewed all the people who'd had the worst crises for their reputation and hired a crisis management consultant. It came up with Jeff Zucker, Elizabeth Holmes, and Anthony Weiner.

I'm sure the bot checked but found out Hunter Biden never hired a crisis management consultant, but of all he ones who'd had the worst crises and hired a consultant, they all hired the same one -- Heller! So the bot replied, "Hire the Heller Company." I'm sorry, folks. That's how AI works. It won't make stupid people smart, and if you fire all the smart people, it won't replace them. I hope one day I can provide this insight to Pope Leo.

Pope Leo, AI, And Cheating Your Way Through College

I've ventured into AI now and then here, mostly with a certain amount of skepticism. Late last year, I asked, "If AI Is So Great, Why Do I Get So Much Spanish- And Chinese-Language Spam?" Theoretically, AI should have been able to identify what languages I speak and direct ads in those languages to my e-mail, YouTube, and Facebook feeds, while avoiding the unnecessary waste of sending me ads in languages I don't speak.

I post frequently on Facebook in German and have several German and Austrian Facebook friends. So far, I haven't received a single German-language ad, but I get lots in Chinese and Spanish, neither of which I speak. The basic problem is that AI doesn't make people smart, and it doesn't make up for people not being smart, either. I think there's a misunderstanding of AI in the public imagination, and so far, It appears that remarks from our new Holy Father reflect this. Via the National Review:

Leo XIV views the current challenges posed by AI as analogous to those his predecessor faced 134 years ago. “In our own day,” our new Pope declared in one of his first public addresses, “the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.”

Cardinal Fernando Chomalí, the Archbishop of Santiago, Chile, elaborated on the new Pope’s vision by sharing what Leo XIV had told him the evening after the election: “He told me he is very concerned about the cultural shifts we are living through, a Copernican revolution really — artificial intelligence, robotics, human relationships. . . . There is a revolution happening, and it must be addressed seriously. The Church can contribute through its moral authority and also its academic strength.”

Pope Leo has a great deal of time to develop and refine his thinking on AI, and if he chooses to write an encyclical on the problems it poses for the human conditon, I'm confident that it will be incisive and well-reasoned. But I don't think AI will either make people smart or replace smart people, whatever else it may do, and it won't create any new set of moral problems. An article came out in New York Magazine last week, Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College:

In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. In its first year of existence, ChatGPT’s total monthly visits steadily increased month-over-month until June, when schools let out for the summer. . . . Two and a half years later, students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education. Generative-AI chatbots — ChatGPT but also Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and others — take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays.

But sometime in the late 1970s, I ran into an op-ed by Gerald Seib at The Wall Street Journal entitled "Why Are They Cheating?" that covered exactly the same ground, except that since this was the late 1970s, there was no AI, no desktops, no laptops, no pocket phones, no online search, no word processing apps, not even any online text that could be copied and pasted. I was so taken by Seib's insight that I did the old fashioned thing, cut it out from that issue of the paper and saved it into a manila folder, which is long since gone. It's probably never been on line, and I'm sorry I can't quote from it now.

But there was just as much cheating, take it from me. In the early 1970s, still unsure of a career, I found myself studying Eng Lit in graduate school and teaching sections of English Comp as a teaching assistant. At the start of my first semester, the more senior TAs laid it out to me and the other new people: plagiarism was through the roof. No need for ChatGPT, the Greek houses had files of old essays that could just be retyped and resubmitted, there was Cliff's Notes, or heck, just Time magazine or the LA Times. The more industrious students could go to the library and find a book that they could copy half a dozen paragraphs from.

If anything, all ChatGPT does is save the need to retype manually what students had available in the 1970s and before. And it was nearly impossible to do anything about it then. You could find suspicious wording in a student paper -- archaic diction or phraseology, or just British spelling from a kid who'd grown up in Garden Grove, but to trace the actual source would have required hours in the library, if it could even be found there, time nobody could spend.

And to bring a case on the honor code, if that was what they called it, required "proof beyond a reasonable doubt", but nobody wanted to be on any board or committee that ruled on anything like that, so there were no real penalties, which is how everyone wanted it. The students and parents felt entitled to good grades and a degree -- that was what they paid for. The department knew that if anyone enforced plagiarism rules, any course that beecame known for doing so would instantly lose enrollment.

The New York Magazine piece pays lip service to the fact that this is old stuff:

It isn’t as if cheating is new. But now, as one student put it, “the ceiling has been blown off.” Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences? After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”

Oh, no! Generations of students will now emerge from university who are historically and culturally illiterate? O tempora! O mores! It wasn't that way when I was in school! I fell into that trap when I was a TA -- they might do this at USC, but I went to an Ivy, where that sort of thing is just not done. I was unbelievably naive; academic culture has tolerated this sort of corruption since time immemorial.

For that matter, of the two women I dated seriously in graduate school, both were also having affairs with their professors. Both eventually became full professors. Surely this was just a random coincdence?

There's an IT truism that predates AI by a couple of generations: garbage in, garbage out. All ChatGPT does is go to Cliff's Noes, which are now on line anyhow, and build clumsy essays that read every bit as badly as the students who turned in equivalent papers in the 1970s and surely long before that. AI will never make people smarter, and it will never replace smart people. In particular, I don't think it represents any moral problem that hasn't existed already, especially in the universities.