February 13, 2024: The Biden Brand

New details on Lakewood shooter; Aid bill passes Senate; Gantz endorses Rafah operation

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The Big Story

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden categorically stated, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” While that story has long seemed implausible, recent testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Responsibility from two of Hunter Biden’s former business associates is making the president’s denials even more difficult to believe. 

The first revelation comes from Biden family associate Rob Walker’s Jan. 26 closed-door testimony, a transcript of which was released this morning. Although Walker said Joe Biden “was never involved in any business activities,” he confirmed that Joe Biden “stopped by” a 2017 meeting at the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C., between Hunter Biden and “9 or 10” representatives of the Chinese energy company CEFC, including CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming. Walker said that Joe Biden merely exchanged “pleasantries” and did not discuss business, but a few days later, a CEFC subsidiary paid $3 million to Walker’s firm, Robinson Walker LLC—about $1 million of which was then transferred to bank accounts linked to various members of the Biden family, including Hunter, James (Joe’s brother), and Hallie (Beau’s widow and Hunter’s then lover). 

Walker’s testimony also confirmed that he and Hunter had been preparing their deals with CEFC as early as February 2016, when Biden was still serving as vice president, but that they were not paid until after Biden left office. Walker and his partners in the CEFC venture jointly agreed to use Hunter’s letterhead to set up the business deals because, Walker testified, Hunter’s last name would “probably get people in the door.” CEFC ultimately paid out $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and James Biden. 

Walker also confirmed that Robinson Walker LLC received about $180,000 per month—split between himself, Hunter Biden, and a third associate, James Gilliar—from a Romanian businessman named Gabriel Popoviciu, who was under investigation for corruption at the same time that Joe Biden was pressing for anti-corruption reforms in Romania. Those payments started in November 2015 and took place every month until January 2017—exactly when Joe Biden left office. Asked why the payments stopped then, Walker said, “I really don’t recall.”

Even if Joe Biden did not explicitly discuss business with the CEFC associates or with any of Hunter’s other foreign business partners that he met with (including Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and Burisma executive Vadym Pozharsky), the arrangement is a classic example of what journalist Peter Schweizer describes as “corruption by proxy,” in which foreign businessmen (often tied to foreign governments) buy influence through American politicians’ family members. As Schweizer writes in his book Secret Empires:

It is essentially a form of ‘political arbitrage,’ where friends and family members of powerful political figures have positioned themselves to serve as conduits or middle men between those seeking influence and those who possess political power. 

Indeed, as another of Hunter’s business associates, Devon Archer, testified in 2023, the Biden family name was “the brand” in the deals that he and Hunter cut with foreign oligarchs. 

However, it is also possible that Joe Biden’s involvement was more direct. Another former Hunter Biden business associate, Tony Bobulinski, testified Tuesday in a closed-door hearing, and his opening statement was published by the committee. Bobulinski repeated his claims that he, personally, had met with Joe Biden “multiple times” in May 2017 and “to discuss the broad contours of our business dealings” with CEFC. That’s the same month that James Gilliar sent an email about a deal with CEFC referring to “10 held by H for the big guy.”

Bobulinski has long identified Joe Biden as the “big guy,” while Gilliar referred to Joe Biden as “the big guy” in separate messages obtained by the New York Post. IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler has also testified that he believed Joe Biden to be the “the big guy.” He and fellow whistleblower Gary Shapley, however, claim that Justice Department prosecutors blocked IRS and FBI agents from asking Walker about “the big guy” during their investigation of Hunter Biden’s tax records. In his opening statement Tuesday, Bobulinski echoed those allegations, stating that in Oct. 2020, he turned over to FBI investigators “several phones” containing “multiple years” of encrypted communications with Biden family members and their business associates, but that no one in government or law enforcement ever “followed up in any way.” Among the encrypted communications he has shared publicly is a May 20, 2017 WhatsApp message from Gilliar, telling Bobulinski, shortly after his meetings with Joe Biden: “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u [sic] are face to face.”

We’ll leave you with this, from Bobulinski’s opening statement today: 

I want to be crystal clear: from my direct personal experience and what I have subsequently come to learn, it is clear to me that Joe Biden was ‘the Brand’ being sold by the Biden family. His family’s foreign influence-peddling operation—from China to Ukraine and elsewhere—sold out to foreign actors who were seeking to gain influence and access to Joe Biden and the United States government. Joe Biden was more than a participant in and beneficiary of his family’s business: he was an enabler, despite being buffeted by a complex scheme to maintain plausible deniability. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Gadi Taub on why there is no two-state solution

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The Rest

→Correction: Yesterday, amid conflicting media reports, we wrote that the person who shot up a church in Lakewood, Texas, with a “Free Palestine”-emblazoned AR-15 was a biological male, Jeffrey Escalante, who identified as a woman and went by the name Genesse Yvonne Moreno. Apparently it was the other way around: The shooter was a biological woman, Genesse Yvonne Moreno, who identified as a female but, according to her ex-husband, was a diagnosed schizophrenic who had used several male and female “aliases” in the past, including “Jeffrey Escalante.” The child she brought with her to the shooting was her 7-year-old biological son. Houston police said they discovered “antisemitic writings” by Moreno, which they attributed to a dispute with members of her ex-husband’s family, some of whom are Jewish. 

It gets worse. Searching public records, X user @houston_cf discovered that Moreno was an illegal immigrant—she had been subject to an ICE detainer in 2010—but had nonetheless registered as a Republican and voted in the 2020 general election. As Moreno is a noncitizen with multiple criminal convictions who had been subject to involuntary psychiatric commitment at least four times, it is unclear how she obtained her gun (or registered to vote), but an ABC News review of her divorce records found that she had successfully filed a fraudulent birth certificate for her son, which falsely listed his father as “dead.” So, despite her troubles, she clearly had a flair for bureaucratic fraud.

→Opposition leader Benny Gantz publicly threw his support behind the impending Israeli ground operation in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, on Monday, Jewish Insider reports. In remarks delivered shortly after the return of two rescued hostages to Israel, Gantz declared that “there is no question about the need to act in any place in which there is terror. Broad action in Rafah, as we said in the past, is not in question.” As we reported yesterday, the White House recently leaked that Biden had repeatedly referred to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an “asshole” and declared that he was only refusing to come to terms with Hamas to preserve his hold on power. Gantz’s remarks suggest that this is simply one more subject on which our elderly president is confused.

→On Tuesday morning, the Senate voted 70-29 to pass a $95.3 billion spending package that includes $60 billion in aid for Ukraine and $14.1 billion for Israel. The bill passed with the votes of nearly all Democrats and 22 Republicans, with 26 Republicans, two Democrats, and Independent Bernie Sanders voting against it. The bill now faces an uncertain future in the House, where it is likely to face GOP opposition over Ukraine aid and Democratic opposition over aid to Israel.

→Stat of the Day: 19.3%

That’s how much consumer prices increased between January 2020 and January 2024, according to Labor Department statistics quoted in today’s Wall Street Journal. Inflation in January fell to 3.1% year over year, down from 3.4% in December but higher than the predicted rate of 2.9%, likely delaying further cuts in interest rates. Core inflation, which excludes food and energy, was 3.9% in January.

→All employment growth in the United States since 2019 has gone to the foreign-born, according to a new report from Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler of the Center for Immigration Studies. In the fourth quarter of 2023, 2.7 million more people were working in the United States than in the fourth quarter of 2019, but that top-line number concealed an increase of 2.9 million immigrant workers (legal and illegal) and a decrease of 183,000 native-born workers. Among those immigrant workers, the majority, 1.7 million, do not have a bachelor’s degree. Labor-force participation among U.S.-born men without a bachelor’s degree, meanwhile, has been in steady decline for more than two decades:

Read the rest of the report here: https://cis.org/Report/Employment-Situation-Immigrants-and-USborn-Fourth-Quarter-2023 

→Image of the Day: 

That’s from a new New York Times focus group with 13 voters discussing the 2024 election. Here are some more of their answers:

On their feelings about the election: “Lost,” “disaster,” “abyss,” “bullshit” 

On Trump: “conceited,” “narcissist,” “disastrous,” “crazy”

On Biden: “senile,” “puppet,” “disingenuous,” “unfit for the presidency”

Read the rest here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/13/opinion/independents-biden-focus-group.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes 

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Sorry, but There Is No Two-State Solution

Pretending there is a deal to be done with the Palestinian leadership only opens the door to another October 7. Israelis won’t be fooled.

By Gadi Taub

I don’t fault any Zionist or ally of Israel for having embraced the two-state solution, as I did for many years. No other peace plan could reconcile self-interest and lofty principles so seamlessly. No other plan could offer a better way to transcend the contradictions that reality imposed on Israelis, by making a Zionist argument, no less, for Palestinian statehood. Far more powerful than a mere solution to a problem, the idea of two states was, for many of us, an irresistible form of seduction—a promise that partition could make Israel whole.

The seduction came from our core Zionist beliefs. Our own Declaration of Independence says that “It is the natural right of the Jewish people to be, like all peoples, masters of their own fate, in their own sovereign state.” Partition would make that stance internally coherent, validating our own right by fighting for theirs. It would also reconcile liberalism with nationalism. After all, the occupation threatens both, because it not only violates the human rights of Palestinians, it also endangers the Jewish majority. Partition would solve both problems in one fell swoop.

The two-state solution was also naturally appealing to Israel's friends in the West, especially liberal Jews: Faced with attempts to paint Zionism as colonialism, Judaism as fundamentalist messianism, the IDF as an army of occupation, or Israel as an apartheid state, the two-state solution would dissolve such smears with a single flourish.

But compelling as it is as a debating strategy, or a form of self-therapy, the two-state solution is, sadly, no solution at all. Rather, it is a big step down the road to another Lebanon. It would doom the Zionist project, not save it, while producing much greater misery and more bloodshed for Israelis and Palestinians alike. By now most of us in Israel understand this dreadful math. If there was still a substantial minority among us who clung to the two-state promise against the evidence of the Second Intifada and everything that followed, that minority has shrunk considerably since Oct. 7.

We now know exactly what our would-be neighbors have in mind for us. We see that a majority of Palestinians support Hamas and are well pleased by its massacres. Most of us therefore believe that turning Judea and Samaria into another Hamastan to satisfy those who see the massacre as an inspiration and its perpetrators as role models would be suicidal. Who in their right mind would inflict the ensuing bloodshed on their partners, children, friends, and parents? If one is determined to feel overwhelming sympathy for one of the many stateless peoples of the world, why not start with the Kurds, or the Catalans, or the Basques, or the Rohingya, or the Baluchis, or any of one of dozens of subnational groups—none of whom seem likely to attain their longed-for goals of statehood anytime soon. After all, it took nearly 2,000 years for the Jews to succeed in refounding their state. If the Palestinians are determined to kill us on the road to replacing us, then presumably they can wait, too.

Those Israelis who do still yearn for a Palestinian state are now a very small, yet well-positioned minority: far left politicians, academics, progressive journalists, and some members of the IDF brass. Not surprisingly, many of these were educated in American universities. But they no longer carry any real electoral weight.

They know it, too. Which is why even they, the men and women of Oct. 6, rarely dare to tell their Israeli audiences that they still support a two-state solution. They mostly allude to it with vague insinuations that often invoke, or even parrot, Washington talking points, such as exhortations about an as-of-yet unspecified “political horizon,” as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan put it, for “the day after.” Get any more specific and you're bound to lose much of your audience. And, it goes without saying, any attempt to translate “revitalized Palestinian Authority” into Hebrew would make you a laughingstock.

To be sure, the two-state solution was a noble dream. But it turns out it always was just that—a dream. What enabled those who clung to it long enough to continue sleepwalking through the wrecks of exploding buses, the bodies of slain civilians, the constant wild calls for violence against us, the massive efforts to build terror infrastructures under our noses and on our borders, was our own tendency to imagine Palestinians in our own image. For all the fashionable talk of diversity, we too find it hard to imagine a people that is not like ourselves. Knowing our own striving for self-determination, we assumed that the Palestinians, too, want above all to be masters of their own fate in their own sovereign state.

But that is not what they want. The huge amount of international aid Palestinians have received since 1948 was never used for nation-building. It wasn't used for building houses and roads or for planting orange groves. It was harnessed to one overarching cause: the destruction of the Jewish state. This is what the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) does: subsidize and shield Palestinian terror infrastructure. This is what the PA does with its pay-for-slay salaries—underwritten by the U.S.—to the families of terrorists. And this is what Hamas was able to do as a result of the billions invested in Gaza: It bought weapons, trained terrorists, and built a sprawling network of terror tunnels—and not one bomb shelter for civilians.

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As Einat Wilf and Adi Schwarz demonstrate in their bestselling book The War of Return, the Palestinian national movement has built its ethos and identity around the so-called “right of return” of the Palestinian “refugees”—by which they mean the destruction of Israel through the resettlement of the Palestinian diaspora, the so-called refugees that UNRWA numbers at 5.9 million, within Israel's borders. But there's no such thing as the right of return: First, it is not an internationally recognized right; second, if implemented it would not be a return, since almost all of those who demand it have never been to Israel themselves. And finally, of those who fled or were expelled from the land of Israel in 1948, only an estimated 30,000 are still alive today.

No other group of people on Earth is considered to be refugees decades after so many of its members have resettled as passport-holding citizens of other countries. No other group has its refugee status conferred automatically on its offspring. And no group of actual refugees is excluded from the purview of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), entrusted instead to the care of a special agency, UNRWA, whose mandate is to perpetuate the problem rather than solve it. UNRWA cultivates Palestinian hopes for a “free” Palestine “from the river to the sea,” allows for weapons to be stored inside its facilities and schools, and for a Hamas intelligence and communications center to be built under its headquarters, indoctrinates children to glorify terrorists—whom it also employs—and disseminates wild antisemitism, while still steering clear of what it should have been doing all along: resettling those who were, or still are, actual refugees.

What the centrality of the “right of return” to the Palestinian ethos means, of course, is that Palestinian identity itself is structured as a rejection of the two-state solution, and denies the legitimacy of any form of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the land of Israel. The two-state solution presupposes mutual recognition between both peoples. Each would affirm the right of the other to national self-determination. If you demand partition but also insist on the right of return then what you are really asking for is a two-Palestinian-states solution: one state in the West Bank and Gaza, ethnically cleansed of Jewish settlers, and one in Israel, where the Jews would eventually become a minority, and would consequently suffer the fate of the Jewish communities in every other Arab state. There has never been a Palestinian leadership ready to give up the right of return, which means that they have always manipulated their Israeli counterparts, as well as all mediators (including, of course, American mediators) with fake negotiations intended to extract temporary benefits, and to buy time, in preparation for the larger goal of eradicating all traces of Jewish sovereignty between the river and the sea. Fortunately, they have failed each time. But failure hardly keeps them from trying.

There never was a Palestinian leadership ready to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish nation-state. That is a constant fact of life in the conflict. The Arab side has rejected any and all partition plans starting with the Peel Commission in 1937, the United Nations partition resolution of 1947, and all the way through the various American mediation plans and Israeli offers, and those offered by Israeli leaders, including the Camp David 2000 offer, in which Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed to the partition of Jerusalem, and the further concessions offered later by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. All have crashed on the nonnegotiable demand for the right of return. Even Salam Fayyad, the technocrat former Palestinian prime minister, a figurehead with no popular support at home but beloved by Western peace processors—and who's receiving renewed attention in administration-friendly media—insisted on the right of return in an article he wrote mere days after the Oct. 7 pogrom.

Luckily, the Palestinians were never patient enough to even temporarily put a stop to terrorism or defer their demand for return until they could muster better-organized forces. It seems that the cult of death and the worship of martyrs make for an addiction to terror, and a need for violent venting. If you bring your children from kindergarten to stage plays where they pretend to kill Jews, you cannot also tell them to hold back forever on acting them out once they've grown up. The tree of Palestinian identity, it seems, must be constantly watered with the blood of Jews to sustain it through the many sacrifices required for a nonproductive life of permanent victimhood.

Had our neighbors been able to restrain themselves for a time, our seduction by the two-state illusion, the game we played with ourselves to relieve our moral pangs from the imperative to rule over another people, could easily have been fatal. Had the Palestinians launched a mega Oct. 7, not only from tiny Gaza, but also from Judea and Samaria, a territory 15 times larger, perched above Israel’s major metropolitan centers and international airport, Israel would have been in a far more precarious place right now. With no buffer between the West Bank and the Arab states to Israel's east there would be a land bridge from Tehran all the way to the outskirts of Tel Aviv. This is not a risk Israel can ever afford to take, and Oct. 7 only served to make the real-world dangers we face more vivid.

The Biden administration, as well as the mainstream American media, may be seduced by Israel’s Bibi-hating press into believing that it's Netanyahu who stands in the way of an agreement establishing a Palestinian state. But it is not Netanyahu who is the obstacle on the Israeli side. It is the vast majority of Israelis, who may or may not vote for Netanyahu but will certainly never again vote for anyone who admits to favoring a two-state solution. The allegedly moderate Benny Gantz retains his high polling numbers only because he avoids any talk of two states. He knows that if he mentioned the two-state solution, he'd sink in the polls faster than he can say “Palestinian state.”

But if the Biden team can be forgiven for misunderstanding the Israeli mood, it cannot be forgiven for imagining it can make Palestinian recalcitrance and violent intentions disappear by papering over their national ethos with fake Western jargon. There is no such thing as a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority, because there is no one who wants to “revitalize” it in such a way as to make it conform to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s sales pitch. Even for a group of progressive wishful-thinkers, this silly coinage is a new low in the language of political narcissism.

Israel is a strong country, but it is also a small country surrounded by enemies. It is important for Israel to mark the difference between embracing folly and being polite. It is time that Israel and her leaders be more vocal about the folly of America’s misguided Middle East policy. We can afford to continue limping along with the burdens of the occupation for another generation or two, by which point many unforeseen things will have come to pass that may make a solution either more or less obvious. But we will not live that long if we are once again seduced by the two-state siren song.