What Happened Today: June 13, 2023

Grassley says there are recordings of Hunter, Joe, and Burisma; AI preachers in Germany; Animals roamed free during lockdowns

Jun 13, 2023

The Big Story

On Monday, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley revealed that an FBI informant who had reported an alleged bribery scheme involving the president, his son Hunter Biden, and an Ukrainian energy company executive also said that the executive claimed to have 17 recordings of his conversations with the Bidens. According to Grassley, the FBI had redacted the relevant piece of the FD-1023 form where the agency’s confidential source reported that the “foreign national”—now identified as Ukrainian energy company Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky—had kept the recordings as an “insurance policy.” The reports about Joe and Hunter Biden’s dealings with Burisma have been accumulating for years, but recent pressure by House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer has brought them back under the spotlight.

Grassley and Comer have been requesting to see the FBI form since last October but were only provided the redacted FD-1023 last Thursday after threatening to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress.

So far the House Oversight Committee’s investigation has revealed that (primarily) during Joe Biden’s vice presidency, the Bidens created more than 20 companies that “received over $10 million from foreign nationals’ [sic] and their related companies.” The payments to these companies were deposited into a large number of accounts “to conceal the source of the funds and reduce the conspicuousness of the total amounts made into the Biden bank accounts,” according to the committee.

In the Back Pages: What Does Vladimir Putin Have on Joe Biden?

The Rest

→ American novelist Cormac McCarthy died at his home in New Mexico on Tuesday. He was 89. McCarthy was born in Rhode Island in 1933 to an Irish Catholic family but grew up mostly in Tennessee, near abject poverty. His early books, including The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), and Suttree (1979), were lauded but didn’t sell. McCarthy kept writing. His masterpiece, Blood Meridian, came in 1985 and, according to literary critic Harold Bloom, was “the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.” But, still, McCarthy didn’t have a bestseller until 1992’s All the Pretty Horses, which made him a household name and gave him a measure of financial security. He rarely gave interviews, and spent his later years surrounded by physicists and biologists at the Santa Fe Institute because, as he said, “I like being around smart, interesting people, and the people who come here are among the smartest, most interesting people on the planet.” He wasn’t much for his fellow writers or the affectations of the literati class, which, as far as he was concerned, retreated from the real hard and mysterious stuff of life in favor of small-minded parochialism like the kind that motivated the writer of today’s New York Times obit, to include this au courant complaint: “Some critics found his novels portentous and self-consciously masculine. There are few notable women in his work.” McCarthy wouldn’t have cared.

→ Number of the Day: 31%

That’s the favorability rating shared by both President Joseph Biden and ex-president Donald Trump, according to a new poll by ABC News. Trump’s unfavorability rating is slightly above Biden’s, at 56-52. While this may be disappointing news for the incumbent Biden, Trump seems to be gaining steam from the charges being brought against him, at least among his base. A CBS/YouGov poll shows that the majority of Republican voters’ views on Trump haven’t changed since his indictment for taking classified documents with him from the White House, and in fact, 14% said it changed their view of Trump “for the better.” Of those polled by ABC, 47% said they believe the charges against Trump were politically motivated.

→ In a real-life game of Succession, multibillionaire investor George Soros has passed on his crown to his son Alex, 37, The Wall Street Journal announced on Sunday. For years, insiders assumed that the Soros dynasty would be bequeathed to Soros’ elder son Jonathan, who has more relevant experience in law and finance. But Jonathan and his father had a falling-out over management styles when they worked together at the Soros hedge fund and Open Society Foundations. Now the eldest Soros says it’s Alex, and he has “earned it.” The biggest question is: What is Alex going to do with the $25 billion empire? He told the WSJ he’s “more political” than his father and is of an explicitly left-wing persuasion—which doesn’t sound much different than what Soros has already established as his philanthropic brand. He wants to help the Democratic Party appeal to Latino voters and get out the vote in the Black community, but also says Democrats need to be more “patriotic and inclusive.”

→ Georgia’s notorious Fulton County Jail system is installing a monitoring system for inmates that can track not only prisoners’ exact location but their heart rates as well. The system—produced by Georgia-based firm Talitrix, which was hired by the prison—uses an intertwined array of monitoring bracelets and wall sensors to provide the information, which the sheriff’s office hopes will eventually be able to “maintain spacing between designated inmates.” The total surveillance lockdown emulates what’s already being pioneered in China. In 2021, Chinese company Taigusys told The Guardian that its AI facial-recognition software was under contract with 300 prisons in China and had been useful in keeping the populations “more docile” by predicting negative emotions.

→ Last week at Germany’s largest Christian convention, the Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag, one service was conducted entirely by artificial intelligence. Jonas Simmerlein, a theologian at the University of Vienna, used ChatGPT to create the 40-minute service, which at times drew laughter and at others awkward silence from the worshippers. Simmerlein says that the bot created a “pretty solid church service” from minimal instructions, complete with a sermon about overcoming your fear of death and putting your faith in Jesus Christ, delivered by four human “avatars” projected onto a large screen. One of the congregants, Heiderose Schmidt, told Dublin-based The Journal that for her, the experience started out well but soured because “there was no heart and no soul.”

→ Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center released its 2022 hate group report. With its raison d’etre threatened by a trend of decreasing numbers of hate groups in 2020 and 2021, the SPLC has innovated a new way to strike fear into the hearts of good people everywhere. In the 2022 report, the center has added a category, antigovernment groups, which has boosted the total numbers back to an impressive 1,225. The only problem is, dozens of those belong to one group of moms. The group Moms for Liberty, which promotes family over government, gender education limitations, and the removal of mask and vaccine mandates for COVID-19, was labeled as one of the antigovernment groups—and the SPLC counts each chapter as a separate group. For example, there are 28 chapters in Florida and 10 in Texas; all of them help boost the SPLC’s flagging numbers.

→ Brazilian explorer and filmmaker Yuri Sanada is setting out to explore the Amazon—all of it. Sanada’s mission is to try and get an up-to-date, accurate measurement of the world’s (currently second) longest river to find out once and for all if it’s actually the world’s longest. That title still belongs to the African Nile, which, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, is 4,132 miles long, with its source in Lake Victoria—unless, of course, the source of the Nile is in Uganda, Burundi, or Rwanda, which all the countries claim. The science of river measurement is an inexact one, and a key problem in answering the question is determining the rivers’ source. For the Amazon, the conventional wisdom was that it began in the waters of Peru’s Marañón River, but that has changed at least twice since 1971, adding length.

→ The Israeli Knesset recently overturned a 2017 law that allowed new olim (immigrants) to receive a passport immediately upon arrival in the Jewish State. The current coalition wants to revert to the pre-2017 rules for new immigrants, which would require them to spend the majority of their first year in Israel before being eligible for a passport. They can receive an alternative travel document called a Teudat Ma’avar if they don’t qualify. This move is part of a larger debate over who will be allowed to immigrate in the first place, sparked by fears among Orthodox parties that too many Jews by heritage are coming to Israel just for the passport. Shas MK Yosef Taieb wants to get rid of the clause that allows grandchildren of at least one Jewish grandparent to immigrate. “It will be done,” Taieb told Israeli media in January.

→ On Friday, four children of the Huitoto tribe in Colombia were found following 40 days alone in the jungle after surviving a plane crash that killed their mother, Magdalena Mucutuy. The eldest, Lesly, managed to keep her younger siblings alive, using her indigenous knowledge of edible plants, seeds, and fruits, according to Luis Acosta of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia. Now, it appears that the joy of their return may be marred by a custody battle between the father of the two youngest children, Manuel Ranoque, and their maternal grandparents, who allege that Ranoque was abusive to their mother. Ranoque told Colombian media, “Verbally, sometimes, yes. Physically, very little. We had more verbal fights.” The Colombian Institute of Family Welfare is investigating the accusations.

→ A group of researchers published a very interesting study on Thursday in the journal Science, showing the collected results of a massive wildlife location-tracking project, specifically during the days of COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. The researchers compared animal movements between Feb. 1 and April 28 of both 2019 and 2020. Although there was some variability in the results, they found that animals’ long-distance movements increased by 73% over a given 10-day period, though in any one hour, they moved less. The animals also approached roadways 36% more during lockdowns in heavily populated areas. Since the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, a partner of the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, has already written of the potential need for climate lockdowns in which government would “limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures,” it’s probably only a matter of time before they add “animal freedom of movement” to the list of justifications.

TODAY IN TABLET:

The Jenny Lewis Show by David Yaffe

The indie star’s latest is a Bakersfield sound-drenched ode to self-destruction. Don’t say she didn’t warn you.

You Gotta Have Hearts by Paola Gavin

The delicious history of the artichoke

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

This piece was originally published in Tablet, January 2022

What Does Vladimir Putin Have on Joe Biden?

Joe and Hunter Biden’s seedy involvements in Ukraine may have given the Russian leader all the ‘kompromat’ he needs to keep America at bay

By Lee Smith

Vladimir Putin didn’t need the green light that Joe Biden gave Russian forces during his marathon press conference last Thursday for a “minor incursion” into Ukraine. The Russian president already knew the U.S. commander in chief couldn’t stop him even if he wanted to. Sure, Putin has seen the polling and knows foreign entanglements won’t help a Democrat hemorrhaging support from his own party.

But that doesn’t seem to be all. You don’t need a secret dossier authored by a British ex-spy for hire like Christopher Steele to understand the possible weird real-world mirror version of Russiagate. This time, it’s basically all out in the open—or at least it was, until the press and social media scrubbed reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop from the internet in the run-up to the 2020 election. The laptop, whose provenance and contents have both since checked out beyond any shadow of doubt, give evidence of Hunter’s financial relationships with foreign officials and businesses, like the more than $50,000 per month he got for sitting on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, starting in the spring of 2014.

The reason that a company like Burisma was willing to pay the drug-addled son of the vice president of the United States so much money for a no-show job wasn’t to buy his expertise in natural gas exploration and drilling, of course. Hunter Biden’s sordid memoir, Beautiful Things, published last year, makes it clear that, during the period in question, he was a wreck of a human being who spent lavishly on crack and methamphetamine, which he consumed in expensive hotel rooms in the company of prostitutes. It would seem that the obvious point of paying Hunter Biden was to buy protection from the American official in charge of Ukraine policy—Joe Biden.

Did it work? Well, according to the now president, yes. As Biden told a 2018 audience, he threatened to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee to Ukraine unless the government in Kyiv fired a prosecutor investigating the company that was paying his son a princely retainer to fuel his drug habit.

At the time Hunter Biden’s laptop first surfaced, U.S. media and spy services claimed it was “Russian disinformation”—a fake, aimed at harming his father’s election prospects. It wasn’t, of course, as Hunter’s subsequent memoir and former business associates have confirmed. The effort to cast aspersions on the origins of the laptop, censor reports about it, and/or label reporting on its contents “disinformation” was itself a “disinformation” operation waged by American media and tech platforms in a real-world example of “election interference,” as well as a massive in-kind contribution to Joe Biden’s election campaign.

But the Hunter Biden laptop—and the cries of “Russian disinformation” that followed—raise a timely question: Given the Bidens’ Ukraine-related activities, what additional information does Moscow have on the first family?

Hunter Biden’s problems with substance abuse, prostitutes, and money would have made the vice president’s son an ideal target for foreign intelligence services. Worse, Joe Biden seems to have eagerly promoted his son’s shakedown efforts, even boasting publicly about using his office to interfere in Ukraine’s political and judicial systems, in ways that directly benefited his son’s employer. There is surely no shortage of oligarchs, Ukrainian and Russian, who are eager to share information about their dealings with the Bidens in order to gain influence with Putin and undo rival billionaires. One can assume that all of that information has made its way by now to Putin’s table.

The likelihood that Russia is sitting on a wealth of compromising Ukraine-related material on Joe Biden and his family may come as a shock to media that pushed the Trump-Russia collusion narrative for four years. But the Biden-Russia kompromat story may be more than a political funhouse mirror. It may explain the president’s curious passivity toward Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline and why, almost as soon as Biden took office, Putin seized the opportunity to move more than 100,000 troops to Ukraine’s border.

What’s more, it may also provide new insight into the Russiagate conspiracy theory that poisoned America’s public sphere and made people lose their collective minds.

Given the amount of genuinely compromising material tying Joe Biden and his son to shady dealings involving Ukraine and Russia, including a $3.5 million payment Hunter received from the widow of the former mayor of Moscow in 2014, it’s worth asking if the 46th president of the United States was the initial target of the Hillary Clinton-funded Russia dossier? In fact, allegations about the Bidens’ activities in Ukraine, sourced in part, it seems, to the Clinton campaign, made their way into The New York Times in 2015, encouraging Biden to dispel second thoughts about reentering the 2016 race.

The Steele dossier has long since been revealed as nothing but utter nonsense, but with the Bidens as a target rather than Trump, it’s at least easier to make sense of its contents, especially the notorious “pee tape.” Trump is a well-known germaphobe; it was always hard to imagine him agreeing to being micturated upon by hookers on a hotel bed in Moscow. Nor would Republican primary voters likely care about ladies of the night soiling a bed that Barack Obama once slept in. But Democrats would think it sacrilegious. And by his own admission, Hunter Biden seems to have spent plenty of nights in hotel rooms with prostitutes. If it seems hard to imagine Donald Trump walking into a hotel in Moscow and asking for the Obama suite, a scenario in which Hunter Biden demanded such lodgings doesn’t take much imagination at all.

With Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders, now is a good time to revisit Tablet’s October 2020 report on the Biden-Ukraine scandals: both for what it says about the Biden-Ukraine connection, and for what it says about the systematic distortion and censorship of the public record by tech platforms and media verticals that have themselves become active agents of disinformation, targeting the American public.

The Scroll

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