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Notes -
Slow morning, eh?
For some time now, we've been discussing the implications of Hunter Biden's laptop, and whether the information it contained was relevant to our political system. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we know that the FBI knew about the laptop's contents roughly a year in advance of the 2020 election, and used its official access with the major social media companies to prepare their censors to perceive the story as Russian disinformation. Then when the story actually broke in the press, the FBI successfully pushed the social media companies to censor it.
From the laptop information itself, we know that for quite a while now, Hunter Biden has been engaged in various grifts, selling purported access to his father in exchange for lucrative sinecures with various foreign corporations, selling "art" for amusingly inflated values, and so on. The supposition on the Red side has been that this grift implicated Biden as well, and Trump's attempts to have that theory investigated led directly to his first impeachment. The laptop emails backed this story with evidence, with Hunter referencing how "the big guy" was getting a significant cut of his grift money, and one of his associates confirming that "the big guy" was in fact Joe Biden.
Blues on the other hand claimed that there was no reason to suppose any corruption was happening. While Hunter was obviously a junkie fuckup grifter, and was obviously making his money claiming to peddle influence, there was no evidence of actual payments going to Joe, so this was all meaningless. My impression of the previous threads is that even those here who thought Hunter was paying Joe, assumed that there would be no formal exchange of money, but rather quid-pro-quo.
Now it appears that Hunter Biden has been paying rent to live in his father's residence in Delaware, to the tune of $49,901 per month. For completeness' sake, it must be mentioned that this is the same residence where Joe was found to be improperly storing classified documents, alongside his Corvette. While it seems doubtful that the files would be of interest to a junkie who prospers by peddling influence for foreign corporations, it's a detail that does add a touch of piquancy to the overall narrative.
So this appears to me to be pretty open-and-shut. Joe Biden is corrupt, selling influence to foreign corporations in China and Eastern Europe through his son Hunter. Hunter collects the money, then kicks a large slice back to Joe through rent, and quite possibly other, yet undiscovered "repayments". Trump was impeached when he attempted to have these activities investigated, while the FBI sat on the information they were given, and engaged in a protracted disinformation and censorship campaign to keep that information from leaking elsewhere. That information does in fact lead to provable direct payments from Hunter to Biden.
Impeachment when?
[EDIT] - ...Or perhaps not! @firmamenti points out that while Hunter is apparently living in the residence and renting an office space for 50k, the office space is not specified to be in the residence, and very well could be an entirely separate location entirely unconnected to Biden. The hunt continues...
I think pet of the issue here is that the prior on Joe Biden being corrupt is low, so you need more than circumstantial evidence to make people who are not already anti-Biden partisans care.
The theory that the MAGA crowd are pushing is that Joe Biden decided to run a large scale influence peddling operation, employed his junkie failson as a key fixer in it when he could have hired a professional, and then didn’t spend the money. That is possible, but it is not likely compared to a junkie failson ripping off clueless foreigners by selling influence with Dad he didn’t have and spending the money on blow and hookers.
Biden seems to say whatever is most convenient at the time, whether that be flip-flopping on policies or just making up stories about his own life. My prior is that Biden can't stay bought. So some interest might funnel him some money and get a meeting, but as soon as they are out of the room Biden will be playing to whoever is in front of him next. It's also just generally difficult for a President to have that much discretionary power to personally significantly damage the realm by selling out to some pecuniary interest. The worst things his administration has done seems to involve selling out the realm to some activist/ideological interest. Although if Ukrainian money getting to Joe Biden is the reason USG is involving itself in the Ukraine war, that would be big deal and potentially catastrophically bad. But I'm not sure that is the case, Biden might actually be more of a voice of sanity in his own administration, with the meddling in the Ukraine really being driven by the overall Zeitgeist.
There are many influential groups in and around Washington strongly in favor of supporting Ukraine and opposing Russia. Foreign service lifers like the Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland wing who are neoliberal interventionists, and folks working for the military industrial complex that had to delay buying a second vacation home or remodeling their mansion in northern Virginia when the Afghanistan tap got cut off, to name two of the more powerful. The likelihood that Biden is the primary advocate for the U.S.’s involvement seems slim.
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