Catching Up on the Hunter Biden Story 

“I’m not really interested in the money accusations,” MM said to me. “What really bothers me is this story about him turning his back on one of his children.”

Not interested in the “money accusations”? Really?

If you get your news from the mainstream media, you would not have heard about Navy Joan, the four-year-old child that Hunter and the Biden family have been trying to ignore since August of 2018, when Hunter fathered her with an Arkansas woman named Lunden Roberts, who was working as an exotic dancer at the time.

The following year, Roberts sued Hunter for paternity and child support. He denied her claims, both in court and publicly. DNA testing confirmed Hunter as the father, but a motion was filed to keep the child’s identity private in order to “protect her” during the 2020 presidential election campaign.

The story was followed in the conservative media, but as far as the mainstream press was concerned, it didn’t exist. Nor did the child. The first time it was even mentioned by the NYT was on June 29, 2023, when the suit ended and the settlement made its way into the public record. And even then, you might have missed it, since it was reported in the Sunday edition of the paper, on the bottom of the first page.

That article, written by a Katie Rogers, presented Hunter and the Biden family as “victims of the politics of paternity in the public glare.” And she reported that there was no evidence that the White House was involved in negotiations with the child’s mother. (You can read the article here.)

Screech to a stop! What?

Joe and Jill Biden aren’t interested in the fact that their drug-addicted son knocked up a stripper and gave them their seventh grandchild? And they weren’t at all involved in that paternity suit that lasted four years?

When Biden announced that he had won the election in 2020, he had six grandchildren on stage with him. And in 2021 and 2022, the White House protocol supervisor, ever diligent about presenting the right image of the family, hung Christmas stockings for six grandchildren, not seven.

By that time, the cat was well out of the bag. “Remarkable that Joe Biden hangs a Christmas stocking for his dog, but won’t acknowledge his granddaughter,” tweeted Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, where Navy Joan lives with her mother.

The president and his wife refused to acknowledge the existence of one of their grandchildren? And the father of the child was suing the mother in an attempt to bar the child from having her father’s name?

How could any media outlet NOT want to run with this story the moment it broke and for as long as it lasted? I mean, this is a drama worthy of Shakespeare. No, Aeschylus!

Millions of Dollars of Questionable Income

Back to the subject that didn’t bother MM – Hunter Biden’s questionable financial transactions during the time his father was vice president under Obama…

Here are the facts: In 2017 and 2018, Hunter failed to report more than $1.5 million in income that he and his various shell companies received from unnamed foreign sources. Somehow, he discovered that the IRS was coming after him, and coughed up the money to pay the taxes.

Still, he was guilty of at least two felony tax crimes that would have landed any ordinary person in jail, not to mention the huge fines. But somehow, in negotiating a settlement, the charges against Hunter were dropped to misdemeanors. For which, instead of going to jail, he was going to have to take some sort of tax ethics course.

That was crazy enough. But there was another term in the settlement that caught the judge’s eye. It was an agreement by the government that, after finishing his “course,” he would have immunity from all further charges related to tax frauds that might pop up in the future. (Can you imagine?!!)

When the judge saw that, she asked the IRS if there were any other ongoing investigations of that type. The answer was yes. “How can I agree to this settlement when there are other charges, about which I know nothing, that are still in process,” she said. (I’m paraphrasing.)

So, the judge denied the settlement and Hunter pleaded not guilty to the charges and the saga continues, with Hunter still being liable for tax and other crimes he might have committed then, or since then.

And there are plenty more. For example:

* In one deal, a representative of Hunter’s company received more than $3 million from November 2015 to May 2017 and wired approximately $1 million in installments to Hunter, his business associate James Gillian, and Hallie Biden, the widow of the president’s oldest son, Beau Biden, who died in May 2015.

* The investigation into Hunter expanded to include potential violations of foreign lobbying and money laundering rules as he reportedly “cashed in” on his father’s name to close lucrative business deals. In 2014, for example, he served on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, where he was paid about $50,000 a month. And between 2013 and 2018, Hunter and his firm took in about $11 million in payments from China and Ukraine.

* IRS special agent Joseph Ziegler told the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday that Hunter’s overseas influence-peddling operations have enriched the First Family and their business associates to the tune of more than $17 million. The funds were raked in through various multimillion-dollar payments made by foreign nationals to Biden-family-linked corporations between 2014 to 2019. Click here.

And even that cannot possibly be the end of it. As I said in the April 18 issue, Hunter Biden, this kid who was kicked out of the military because of bad behavior and spent years addicted to drugs and whoring around, this kid that had no previous education in any of the businesses he was getting paid to consult with, has somehow acquired a net worth of $160 million.

It’s impossible to end up with a net worth of more than $100 million unless you have earned at least $300 million. So, are we supposed to believe that he earned that money legally? What could he possibly have offered Russia, or China, or the Ukraine, except his father’s influence?

This is not going to go away. There is just too much documentation of Hunter’s malfeasance in the hands of the Republican-dominated House. It’s going to come out. What’s more, there is mounting evidence that Biden was involved in Hunter’s activities, including recordings when he talks about “10% to the big guy,” and a recording of him threatening an official to pay up, saying that his father was sitting right next to him.

That’s why I’m standing by my prediction in that same April 18 issue that, for one official reason or another, Joe Biden will not be running for president next year.

Are Big Cities Dying?

I’ve been writing a lot about the demise of America’s big cities: Chicago, LA, New York, San Francisco, Houston, etc. Crime is up. Property values are down. COVID lockdowns taught corporations and their employees that they don’t really need to be downtown to make things happen.

It feels to me that we are five to 10 years away from the end of multimillion-person urban centers. I wouldn’t be surprised if, by 2030, the US would have only two cities (LA and NYC) with populations above a million. NYC would be down from 8.6 million to… hmmm… 3.6 million. And LA would drop from 4 million to about 2.5 million. (LA will retain more on a percentage basis because it is already a sprawling suburb.)

In the last three years, we’ve seen big, scary changes. On top of the list are the hysteria-fueled, power-grabbing government lockdowns, which unintentionally revolutionized the way businesses and employees think about work. Nobody wants to commute 30 or 40 minutes to work in a nondescript cubby in a nondescript city tower anymore. The future is two- or three-day in-office workweeks. And that is probably optimistic.

BLM riots, which destroyed blocks and blocks of formerly healthy retail businesses, including hundreds of Black- and Brown-owned businesses, are gone and don’t seem to be coming back. And there are stretches of formerly upscale retail streets that are eerily half boarded up.

The rise in violent crime in the big cities isn’t of much interest to anyone because it is mostly drug-related and Black-on-Black crime. What’s scaring businesses away is the huge increase in all forms of theft effectively allowed by city mayors and their DAs that believe there are too many people of color in jails.

On top of that, you have big inventories and higher interest rates that have a greatly negative impact on commercial real estate. In New York, San Francisco, London, Hong Kong, and Madrid, luxury office towers are only half-filled. And some landlords are walking away from their debt rather than pouring good money after bad. In San Francisco, for example, the owners of the largest shopping mall have abandoned it.

Even as stock markets rally and interest rates ebb, the problem for commercial real estate in cities is getting worse every week. The center will not hold.

Click here and here and here.