The ignominious end of this administration suggests that Joe Biden may be lucky if historians only remember him as a man who suffered from cognitive decline. Unfortunately character problems that date back to the days when he was mentally sound continue to haunt America’s 46th president.
Steven Nelson reports for the New York Post:
The National Archives has finally released photos showing then-Vice President Biden meeting with two of first son Hunter Biden’s Chinese government-linked business partners — again proving that the president lied about not interacting with his family’s foreign patrons.
The cache of photos, released long after their potential political salience and days before Biden retires on Jan. 20, also show Chinese President Xi Jinping grinning as then-Vice President Biden introduced his son during the same December 2013 trip to Beijing.
The Xi-Hunter Biden encounter, which had not previously garnered much attention, appears to have been at a meal Hunter described in an email to his former associate Devon Archer as “pretty amazing” because his dad and China’s powerful authoritarian leader “were supposed to spend 2hrs together [but it] stretched to 7hrs. I think they are in love.”
Xi was about two months into his ambitious “Belt and Road” foreign-influence and investment campaign — and a Chinese state-backed company aligned with that vision, BHR Partners, was in the process [of] being co-launched by Hunter.
Regular readers will recall BHR as the outfit that seemed to have a hard time explaining what exactly Hunter Biden did for the firm.
***
Speaking of disturbing Biden news related to China and a lack of transparency, there seems to be a rather stubborn effort among senior government officials to avoid reaching a rather plausible conclusion about the origins of Covid. Over time much evidence has bolstered the theory that the virus escaped from a Chinese lab, yet much of official Washington has continued to embrace a zoonotic origin, holding that the virus jumped naturally from animals to humans.
Government researchers who deemed the lab leak the most plausible of the theories were not always welcome to share their findings. Michael Gordon and Warren Strobel report for the Journal on former FBI scientist Jason Bannan, who while in government was not included in a briefing for Mr. Biden on the subject in 2021. The Journal report notes:
The dominant view within the intelligence community was clear when Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, and a couple of her senior analysts, briefed Biden and his top aides on Aug. 24. The National Intelligence Council, a body of senior intelligence officers who reported to Haines and that organized the intelligence review, had concluded with “low confidence” that Covid-19 had emerged when the virus leapt from an animal to a human. So did four intelligence agencies.
At the time, the FBI was the only agency that concluded a lab leak was likely, a judgment it had rendered with “moderate confidence.” But neither Bannan nor any other FBI officials were at the briefing to make their case first hand to the president.
“Being the only agency that assessed that a laboratory origin was more likely, and the agency that expressed the highest level of confidence in its analysis of the source of the pandemic, we anticipated the FBI would be asked to attend the briefing,” Bannan recalled in his first on-the-record interview on the subject. “I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”
A spokeswoman for the Director of National Intelligence’s office said that it wasn’t standard practice to invite representatives from individual agencies to briefings for the president and that divergent views within the intelligence community were fairly represented.
The Journal reporters note that Mr. Bannan wasn’t the only one who doubted the zoonotic theory embraced by senior officials:
Three scientists at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, part of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, conducted a scientific study that concluded that Covid-19 was manipulated in a laboratory in a risky research effort. But that analysis was at odds with the assessment of their parent agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and wasn’t incorporated in the report presented to Biden.
The Journal reporters elaborate on the work of the three scientists:
Specifically they concluded that a segment of the “spike protein” that enables the virus to gain entry into human cells was constructed using techniques developed in the Wuhan lab that were described in a 2008 Chinese scientific paper. That was an indication, they argued, that the Chinese scientists were conducting “gain of function” research to see if the virus could infect humans…
But in July 2021 they were instructed by a superior at the medical intelligence center not to continue sharing their work with the FBI, which they were told was “off the reservation,” according to people familiar with the matter. That order was earlier reported by The Australian.
Nor were all of their proposed edits to the National Intelligence Council report accepted.
Nor would Mr. Biden necessarily have been able to comprehend the report even if it had been wisely prepared. But the disturbing resistance to the plausibility of a lab leak is one of many issues demanding further inquiry and explanation. Did officials believe that Mr. Biden wouldn’t want to hear it or did they have their own reasons for downplaying an obvious possibility for pandemic origin?
***
Lessons of the 2024 Elections
Losing political parties often resist coming to the conclusion that they’ve been substantively wrong on policy. Rather than acknowledging that they’ve been peddling bad ideas, politicos are often tempted to say that their product is fine and they just have a marketing problem. But this doesn’t mean that promoters of flawed ideas don’t also have a marketing problem.
Interviewed by Jonathan Martin in Politico, Sen. Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii) seems as resistant as most elected Democrats to acknowledging the failure of the progressive agenda, but he does have a point about flawed communications:
I think Kamala did a really good job on focusing on middle-class concerns. But I remember her saying, ‘I’m going to center the needs of the working class.’ And I thought to myself, I don’t know anyone in the world who says center. I know people in politics who say center. I know people in academia. I know people in advocacy who say center. But centering the needs, or making space for, or all of that, is a clear indication that you are not normal. And I put myself in that category. By definition, I am a coastal progressive.
Looking forward to the 2028 presidential campaign, Mr. Schatz adds:
I think whomever we nominate has to talk like a normal person. That is to me the most important thing. Normal doesn’t mean that they have an affect that is identifiable midwestern or southern or some sort of regional — But this person is real. If you had them over for dinner, you could understand what the hell they were talking about. And so I think we are looking for someone who can plausibly fit in as a human being all across the country. I don’t know who that’s going to be. But the challenge is going to be, how do you maintain your progressive values and not sound like you just got your post-doctoral thesis in sociology.
Maybe Democrats will also consider looking outside the progressive movement for candidates whose sensible ideas allow them to effortlessly fit in as human beings without any challenge at all.
***
Sad Milestone
Meryl Kornfield reports for the Washington Post:
Homelessness in the United States surged by 18 percent from January 2023 to January 2024, reaching the highest level on record, according to an estimate published Friday by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is based on an annual one-night count.
The assessment provides a snapshot of the number of people living in shelters, temporary housing or outside in tents or cars on a single night in January. In the latest tally, a total of 771,480 people – about 23 of every 10,000 people in the United States – experienced homelessness.
***
James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival” and also the co-author of “Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts and Bailouts at Citi.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.