Catch Me If You Can
We’ve been hearing a lot these days about the Biden administration’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better (BBB) plan that has been tangled up in Congress with uncertain prospects of success.
However, there’s one Biden plan that’s going along nicely.
That would be the BHBBB plan, which stands for Building Hunter Biden Back Bigger. Bigger as in bigger bank account.
As Breitbart News reported recently, “Hunter Biden, the president’s son, reportedly sold at least five pieces of art for $75,000 each at his Los Angeles exhibit on October 1.” To put that another way, that’s $375,000—at least. How much of that goes to Hunter? How much for middlemen? And how much for anyone else?
These are all important questions, but unfortunately we don’t have any answers because Hunter’s not telling. As he said recently of the critical and the curious, “F*ck ‘em.”
In response, ethics experts have stated the obvious, namely that there should be full transparency about Hunter’s financial affairs. And yet the White House is having none of that full disclosure stuff.
Just on October 12, when asked about Hunter’s art sales, White House press secretary Jen Psaki answered, “We still do not know and will not know who purchases any paintings, and the president remains proud of his son.”
Got that? With apologies to Sergeant Schultz of Hogan’s Heroes, “We see nothing! We know nothing!” (This at the same time when the Biden administration wants the IRS to track every American’s transactions over $600.)
In the meantime, we are supposed to trust Hunter, his art dealer, and his art purchasers—whoever they might be.
We have no idea if Hunter is making thousands or hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions from his art gig. It’s all a giant question mark. And yet at the same time, lots of money from who knows where is hiding in plain sight.
But there’s one thing we can be sure of: Hunter has needed money. Yes, he’s made millions in a three-decade career basking in the golden aura of his famous father, and yet he’s also spent money like a drunken sailor—or most specifically, like a crack addict.
For more insight into Hunter’s high life and high times, we might consider the candid assessment rendered by one of his business contacts. Back in January 2015, when Joe Biden was vice president, one wheeler-dealer wrote an email to another wheeler-dealer laying out the upsides and downsides of hiring Hunter to work on a Libya deal.
The upside was that Hunter “has access to highest level in PRC.” That is, the People’s Republic of China. Yet there were were downsides too: “His negatives are that he is alcoholic, drug addict – kicked [out] of U.S. Army for cocaine, chasing low class hookers, constantly needs money-liquidity problems and many more headaches.” (Correction: Hunter was kicked out of the U.S. Navy.)
Hunter did not get that gig.
We can also look to another close observer, Hunter’s now-ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle Biden, who declared in a 2017 court filing, “Mr. Biden has created financial concerns for the family by spending extravagantly on his own interests (including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations) while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills.”
Such bad-boy behavior culminated in the notorious case of Hunter’s laptop. Reports on that wayward machine—and of all those juicy files and videos—first appeared in the New York Post in October 2020, just three weeks prior to the presidential election. And yet as we all remember, the Post’s reports were suppressed not only by the Main Stream Media, but also by Silicon Valley social media. And this suppressing seems to have had a substantial effect on the election. A poll taken a few days after the voting revealed that if Americans had known the full story of Hunter’s laptop–and that its contents were true and not Russian forgeries–Donald Trump would have been re-elected. (A year later, the Post recalled ruefully of the story-suppressors, “None of them has learned any lesson except that it worked: Big Tech and Big Media got their way, at the expense of our democracy.”)
Okay, so back to Hunter. After all this trouble, one might have assumed that Hunter would want to fade into obscurity. But anyone who thought that did not know Hunter!
The son was prominent at his father’s inaugural, being seen frequently in the company of the new 46th president. What Russian or Chinese billionaire—to say nothing of every other billionaire around the world, the kind that has hired Hunter in the past—could have failed to notice this proximity? One might even say that it’s as if Hunter was standing there next to his father with a giant neon sign proclaiming, “I’M WITH HIM! I CAN GET TO HIM!!”
During this time, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) wondered aloud whether Hunter should have registered with the Justice Department under the legal requirements of the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). In fact, no member of the Biden family—and many of them became international political operators—has ever registered under FARA.
We should note that Politico reported in June that the Justice Department was investigating possible FARA violations by a firm connected to Hunter, and so we’ll have to see where, if anywhere, that goes.
Yet in the meantime, Hunter, being always a Biden, was putting himself even more on display. This spring he published a memoir, in which he wrote of himself, “I was smoking crack every 15 minutes.”
And just like Joe Biden, Hunter was talking plenty. As he said during his book tour in April, “Yeah, I went one time for 13 days without sleeping, and smoking crack, and drinking vodka exclusively throughout that entire time.”
Yet interestingly enough, his past wastrel ways notwithstanding, Hunter still seems to be doing fine. Last July, it was reported that he lives in a 3,000-square-foot house in Malibu overlooking the Pacific Ocean that rents for $20,000 a month.
So where is his money coming from? Might he, for instance, have received some sort of advance payment for his art or for anything else? In recent months, this author has speculated on these and other possibilities, here, and here, although it’s hard to keep up with all the possible sources and suspicions. There always seems to be more. For example, on October 15, we learned of yet another of Hunter’s Chinese business deals when the Washington Free Beacon revealed a new trove of his emails from a decade ago, in which Hunter conceded (or bragged?) that his value to the Chinese “had everything to do with my last name.”
We can step back and see: All during his time as a cocaine addict with shady business dealings with the Chinese and other foreign entities (remember Burisma?), Hunter has been playing an extended game of Catch Me If You Can. And yet official Washington and all those media watchdogs have shown little interest in even reporting on him, let alone catching him. Maybe that’s why there’s been no Robert Mueller-style special counsel investigation.
But this lack of interest could finally be changing. The establishment media might finally be catching up.
The Delaware Way and the Maryland Way
A reporter named Ben Schreckinger at Politico has been on the Biden family beat for some time now, and his impact is being felt. Back in July 2020, Schreckinger published an article on the Biden family’s financial dealings, national and international.
Notably, the Politico man took note of the “Delaware Way,” which the journalist defined as “a culture of favor trading and cronyism.” Schreckinger added that local prosecutors, pursuing a case that overlapped with (but did not implicate) the Biden family, further defined the Delaware Way as “a form of soft corruption, intersecting business and political interests, which has existed in this State for years.”
At the time, Schreckinger’s article caused a ripple, but only a ripple; as we know, the Main Stream Media’s big push last year was getting rid of Trump.
Yet just last month, Schreckinger published a not-so-flattering book, The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power. Among the book’s assertions was that the Hunter Biden laptop is for real, and that at least some of the contents of that machine are substantially what the New York Post reported them to be last year.
One reporter’s confirmation of an earlier report might not seem to be that big a deal, and yet unlike the New York Post, Politico is a member in good standing of the MSM club—and so MSM types couldn’t ignore Schreckinger’s work. And we should add that Schreckinger has done a great deal of digging into the Delaware Way, such that the whole Biden family—which has done well for themselves thanks to Joe—now perhaps has reason to be concerned.
So now, who knows where the Hunter trail could lead. And yet some twists are already evident. For instance, on October 8, the Biden White House rejected Trump’s claims of executive privilege in regard to his attempt to shield former aides from subpoenas concerning the January 6 investigation.
Okay, so it wasn’t too surprising that the Biden White House would do that, and yet as Trump himself pointed out, a rejection of the 45th president’s claim of executive privilege could lead to the future rejection of the 46th president’s claim of privilege in re: Hunter. As they say, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. And Hunter and his enablers could yet be in the soup.
And just on October 12, Schreckinger published a piece in Politico in which he reported that “Hunter Biden had in fact received an email containing the ’10 held by H for the big guy?’ language.”
As they say about explosive news stories, ka-boom. That “10 being held by H” language appears to be a reference to 10 percent of the equity in a Chinese company, and “H” of course, is Hunter, and the “big guy” is thought to be . . . Joe Biden.
It should be noted that the New York Post reported on this exact same email on October 15, 2020. But now that Politico is reporting it, the rest of the MSM must pay heed. In fact, Schreckinger’s story was retweeted by a New York Times reporter—and that’s MSM royalty.
Hmm. Ten percent for the big guy. Let that rattle around for a while.
So now our thoughts must turn darker: What if the real story isn’t Hunter, but Joe?
If so, then our thoughts on the 47th vice president, Joe Biden, might beg comparison to the 39th vice president. That would be Spiro Agnew, the onetime governor of Maryland who became Richard Nixon’s vice president in 1969. Four years later, he was implicated in a home-state corruption investigation and forced to resign.
We’ve already learned about the “Delaware Way,” defined by a prosecutor as “a form of soft corruption.” Well, any resident of Maryland, which adjoins Delaware, knows that there’s also a Maryland Way. Indeed, surveying the long history of crookedness in the state’s politics—including Agnew, another recent governor, and two mayors of Baltimore—one political analyst said in 2019, “It’s almost like corruption is part of American political DNA in the state of Maryland.”
Of course, we shouldn’t pick on either Maryland or Delaware, because as we know, corruption is a blight on every region of the country. Still, corruption does seem to be worse in big cities. And so just as Maryland has Baltimore, so Delaware has Wilmington—which is, of course, a part of greater Philadelphia.
And so if someone—a whole family, in fact—has flourished in that sort of grey-zone for decades, well, it’s reasonable to ask: What could be discovered about such a family if reporters and other investigators go digging?
Could Joe Biden really be another Spiro Agnew? As of now, there’s no way to know. However, one thing we do know: Spiro Agnew never had a son like Hunter Biden.