This week, as accounts of the whistleblowers who blew the lid off the hampered investigations of the President’s crackhead son Hunter were made public, I imagined a writer making a pitch to producers for a dramatic program called Wilmington, a political version, if you will, of Dallas with more than a hint of the Godfather. Clearly, my proposed dramatization covers so much ground, it will have to be serialized.

For one thing, there’s a very sordid background to the story. The family  has a long history of corruption and drug use unhampered by legal prosecution.

Informed by writers like Jonathan Turley, Julie Kelly, Miranda Devine, Margot Cleveland, and Paul Sperry, this week the story reads like the sleaziest of television series. There’s incest, the president showering with his young daughter per her diary which she left behind in a hotel room; tax cheating and sexual peccadillos -- Hunter writing off payments to prostitutes and sex clubs as business expenses; millions in undisclosed bribes by Chinese and Ukrainian figures, often seemingly as part of a Mafia-type Biden muscling in which benefits and/or consequences are promised and/or threatened for non-payment.

There are more than a few hints of lawfare vendettas: Attorney General Merrick Garland, embittered at having been denied a seat on the Supreme Court, appears to have helped shove under the carpet extensive evidence of the Biden corruption. The newest revelations from whistleblowers to Congress follow on the Durham Report, which can provide the series with a female villain always a necessary subplot for noir tales: 

“Former President Barack Obama and his director of national intelligence, James Clapper, were both briefed in 2016 on reports that then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton planned to vilify Donald Trump by claiming he was colluding with Russia to win the election in 2016.”

Intelligence and FBI heads -- Brennan, Clapper and Comey -- fabricated Russiagate to tie up President Trump and prevent him from exercising fully his rightful office.

The Hunter Biden laptop by itself, which the FBI knew in 2019 was authentic despite 51 former intelligence officials publicly suggesting  it was “likely “Russian disinformation” details multiple business, sex, and drug crimes. You can download it for free.

How could the government not know after having obtained a copy of this, that Hunter was a security risk?

There was evidence received this week that a credible account of the family’s receipt of foreign bribes was kept hidden from investigators by DoJ officials. Professor Margot Cleveland summarizes:

The Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office hid an FBI report that the Ukrainian oil and gas company Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden each $5 million bribes, documents released by the House Ways and Means Committee reveal. [snip] “Most recently, former Attorney General Bill Barr provided an interview in which he stated that information provided by a Confidential Human Source (‘CHS’) concerning an alleged bribery scheme by President Joe Biden was received through the Pittsburgh [U.S. Attorney Office] and was determined it was not likely to have been disinformation,” Shapley said in his affidavit. Barr noted the FD-1023 “was provided to the ongoing investigation in Delaware to follow up on and to check out,” the affidavit continued.

But according to the IRS whistleblower, the CHS information Barr referenced was never provided to Shapley, nor to any of the IRS agents acting under his supervision, nor to the FBI agents working with the IRS investigators. 

Shapley added that he and other IRS criminal investigators had asked to participate in the briefings the Pittsburgh U.S. Attorney’s Office was providing Delaware, but their requests were denied. Had they participated in those briefings, Shapley stressed, they would have undertaken proper investigative steps to determine the veracity of the CHS’s claims. According to Shapley’s affidavit, however, because the information was never provided to the investigators, the agents involved took no steps to determine if the CHS’s allegations could be substantiated.

Someone in the DoJ is not telling the truth about who hid this.

Every successful series needs some humor, and this week we also got that. The Bidens obviously find most damning an email in 2017 from Hunter demanding payment or else from a corrupt Chinese businessman and threatening that his father, who was sitting there with him, would retaliate if the promise to pay was not kept.  Just days following these inducements, millions of dollars flowed into the coffers of the family members through a series of LLCs and a bank in Malta. (I’m not sure how to show the money channeling.  I keep seeing an old timey movie technique on the order of Flash Gordon -- a map of the world with flying dollars flitting from one account to another.)

In any event, the response by Hunter’s lawyer seems particularly laughable. “Any verifiable words or actions of my client, in the midst of a horrible addiction, are solely his own and have no connection to anyone in the family.”  Of course, the defense -- he’s a crackhead and you can’t believe anything he says -- conflicts with Hunter’s claim that the millions he received for “consulting,” “legal,” and “board fees” were for some expertise and good judgement. David Burge (Iowahawk to his legion of fans, of which I am part) hits the satirical nail on the head: “Your honor, did I mention that the alleged event took place during a full moon and my client is a werewolf.”

The Washington Post finally got around to covering the story in a few graphs, in my hard copy on p. 15, highlighting instead, almost two full pages on the effects of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Maybe because the paper’s CEO has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats, including the head of this corruptocrat clan, “Big Guy” Joe. In any event, for those of us who are older and have still retained some of our mental faculties, it is a sharp contrast to the paper’s coverage of the far less scandalous Watergate which, as I recall, ran on the front page day after day after day, made Woodward and Bernstein (stenographers for a bitter Associate FBI Director Mark Felt who had been passed over for FBI head) into make-believe heroes in press and film.

For any remaining movie producers who like to pretend we have a free press, we might do a shot of CNN and the New York Times belatedly covering the story. Or this week’s presser where for a couple of minutes the press gallery got off its duffs and started asking real questions. For all that has been revealed so far, it’s clear the Department of Justice whiffed over and again, but Congress can and probably will subpoena a number of witnesses the attorney general’s troops chose not to or were kept from, and in time the press may be forced into doing its job more assiduously. In the meantime Hunter and Garland were both guests at a White House dinner Thursday night, where Hunter, due to be sentenced this week on seriously watered-down charges, can be seen smiling and chatting with guests. Optics, but for what message? To suggest the government has nothing on Hunter, that Garland is not corrupt, or happy faces to disguise concern over what is coming? It certainly doesn’t help Garland to have attended.

To be continued....