For those of you who can afford it, please consider becoming a voluntary paying subscriber or contributor to this newsletter, which relies on the generous support of readers like you.
You can subscribe at fixed monthly, annual, or Founding Member rates here:
Or make a contribution in the amount of your choice via
• PayPal. markhalperinnyc@gmail.com
• Venmo. Mark-Halperin-4 (telephone number ends in x3226)
• Zelle. markhalperinnyc@gmail.com
* Buy me a cocktail (at Capitol Hill prices….), tax and server tip included, by clicking here.
* Buy me a cup of coffee (or a week’s worth) by clicking here.
You can also send an email to markhalperintalk@gmail.com and ask how you can send a WWoN gratuity by check.
Thank you, millionaires, billionaires, and folks.
Mark
****
Here are two scenarios:
Watch the first one (again):
Ask yourself three questions:
1. Where, then, is the incentive to lose weight?
2. Who shot and edited this thing?
3. Better shooter or passer? (The answer is: passer.)
****
Here are two scenarios:
SCENARIO “A”:
Some Biden aide (or maybe more than one) in packing up his stuff as he left the vice presidency, shoved some documents with classified markings into boxes with other stuff with no such markings, which is what often happens. Wherever those boxes went between the time they left the White House during the transition to Trump-Pence until they reached their “final” resting places at the Penn Biden Center and the Delaware home, they were never opened – until they were. The documents were not taken for any reason but what Hardy called “hap” and Joe Biden neither accessed them nor knew they were there until they were discovered late last year. All the publicly unanswered questions have reasonable answers and the behavior and actions of Team Biden since late last year that have raised suspicious and inflamed the White House press corps were the product of trying to do the right thing by way of the Department of Justice, rather than anything suspicious at all. Errors have been made, but they have nothing to do with any underlying crime or attempted coverup.
SCENARIO “B”:
Joe Biden smuggled China and Ukraine documents with classified markings out of the White House in order to protect Hunter and himself from criminal prosecution.
Sure, there are SCENARIOS “C,” “D,” etc. that exist somewhere along a continuum between “A” and “B,” but among congressional Republicans, Red Media, and the Dominant Media, there’s pretty much a feeling that it’s SCENARIO “B” (or something close to it….) or bust.
Which is a little strange, since history, common sense, and the word of a Biden suggests that there is, to quote the president, no there there.
Look (to quote the president again), there is a long tradition of presidents (and those who work for them) engaging in crimes and coverups. The role of the media is to ask tough questions to hold powerful people accountable and safeguard the public interest. That includes the FBI and DOJ, per the essential reading column of Kim Strassel.
I stand second to no person in believing that more information is needed to understand what happened here. Reporters should press hard. The New York Times this morning published its tick tock of why the White House has handled the matter the way it has, with some fresh process reporting and a “it’s the coverup and bad PR strategy not the crime” flavor.
This reflects the Dominant Media’s actual point of view, which causes great agita at the White House: President Biden didn't do anything wrong regarding the documents themselves probably, but he must be punished for bad PR and for the carping about incompetence by anonymous congressional Democrats and political strategists.
But let’s be open to the reality that the most likely scenario at this point, based on the known facts (and even taking into account the known unknowns and unknown uknowns) is the exact one that Team Biden has suggested occurred.
Let it all play out, please. But please spare the universe your conspiracy theories. Go with the facts.
(Or go with Jonathan Alter’s remarkable New York Times op-ed piece, which basically spins out it’s own scenario, suggesting this could/should all mean the end of Joe Biden’s political career…)
****
Amazingly, Politico assigned Josh Gerstein to write not one but two stories about the failure of the Supreme Court investigation to find the leaker of the Dobbs draft opinion.
“Amazingly,” because Mr. Gerstein is one of the two reporters who broke the original story and presumably knows who the leaker was.
One of his two stories says this:
Despite the court’s assurances, questions about the rigor of the investigation are likely to linger. Neither the report nor Chertoff’s statement indicates whether the justices themselves were interviewed or whether they disclosed the draft or the vote count to their spouses. A Supreme Court spokesperson did not respond to a query about whether the justices were questioned.
I should say that I normally really dislike speculation about who the leaker of anything was, because people just make stuff up with no basis.
I found the whole investigation to be a waste of time from start to finish because anyone who leaked the draft was almost certainly someone who was wicked smart, and thus smart enough to not leak it in a manner that would leave any trail whatsoever.
Stipulating that I have no reporting on this (and, stipulating, truthfully, that I played Clue last night), I believe the answer is one of two scenarios:
SCENARIO “A”: Professor Plum in the Conservatory with the candlestick.
SCENARIO “B”: Justice Kagan in her home with the iPhone taking photos off of a flickering computer screen.
****
THE NEW NIKKI HALEY SECTION
Politico: “Former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina on Thursday dismissed a story from former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about her ambitions as ‘lies and gossip to sell a book.’”
****
ESSENTIAL READING
* Where goes Bill Burns goes news, per the Washington Post:
CIA Director William J. Burns traveled in secret to Ukraine’s capital at the end of last week to brief President Volodymyr Zelensky on his expectations for what Russia is planning militarily in the coming weeks and months, said a U.S. official and other people familiar with the visit.
In a scathing ruling, a federal judge in Florida on Thursday ordered Donald J. Trump and one of his lawyers together to pay nearly a million dollars in sanctions for filing a frivolous lawsuit against nearly three dozen of Mr. Trump’s perceived political enemies, including Hillary Clinton and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey.