Getting there

Today’s New York Post takes up the Biden classified documents matter in an editorial and in Miranda Devine’s column. The editorial makes a few basic points that I have omitted to make in following the matter:

The available evidence now suggests he was carting off government secrets at least since he was a spry 68. To us, that looks more like “incredibly reckless.”

By the way, we also still don’t know why Biden sent lawyers to go through his old office late last year, the move that produced the initial discovery. Did he perhaps have some memory that maybe something was there that shouldn’t be?

At a minimum, the FBI plainly needs to go through all his old offices and all his homes, as well as the hundreds of boxes he’s stored at the University of Delaware — plus, we guess, anywhere he’s vacationed since 2008, given his “inadvertent mishandling” track record.

Miranda Devine traces the possible thread from the documents to the Biden family business manifested in Hunter Biden’s laptop and concludes “there is a hell of a lot of there there.” She writes:

One striking email during this period [of Biden’s vice presidency] stands out. It was from Hunter to Archer on April 13, 2014, a week before Joe Biden visited Ukraine to meet the then Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and refers to “my guys upcoming travels.”

For Hunter, it was an uncharacteristically lengthy email, listing 22 points about Ukraine’s political situation, with detailed information about the upcoming election and predicting an escalation of Russia’s “destabilization campaign, which could lead to a full scale takeover of the eastern region, most critically Donetsk.

“The strategic value is to create a land bridge for RU to Crimea. That won’t directly affect Burisma holdings but it will limit future UK exploration and utilization of offshore opportunities in particular,” Hunter wrote.

“It will also result in further destabilization of UK nationally and for whatever govt is in power. And the US will respond with even stronger sanctions. Those sanctions will threaten the tenuous support of the EU which does not have the political will to incur steep energy price increases.”

In point 22, Hunter instructed Archer to buy a “burner phone,” presumably to keep their conversations private. “Buy a cell phone from a 7/11 or CVS tmrw and ill do the same.”

It’s a prescient and very well-informed email, unlike anything else Hunter wrote in the nine years covered in the laptop, and it has the distinct flavor of an official briefing, perhaps even a classified one.

The column obviously draws on Devine’s previous work on Hunter Biden and the Biden family business. She is optimistic that something will come of it all. That is my only quibble with her excellent column.

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