Ukraine

Devon Archer, a former friend and business partner to Hunter Biden, testified Monday as part of the House Oversight Committee's investigation into the Biden family business dealings and alleged foreign corruption. Archer made several key claims, including that Hunter was brought on to the board of Ukranian energy company Burisma because of his familial connections and that Hunter put then-Vice President Joe Biden on the phone his business associates at least twenty times to demonstrate his access to US government power. Archer's testimony complicates the insistence from President Joe Biden, the White House and their friends in the media that President Biden was oblivious to his son's business dealings taking place abroad in places like Ukraine and China.

A famous clip from recent history: “I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.” That was Joe Biden in 2016. He was relaxing among friends at a chummy event at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ha, ha, ha, tittered the appreciative audience. What a lark! Here was a former vice president of the United States bragging about how he (naughty word) blackmailed an official from a foreign government who was investigating the company on whose board Joe Biden’s son sat. This is old news, of course.

Here comes everybody. With former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former vice president Mike Pence and, er... North Dakota governor Doug Burgum set to announce their presidential bids this week, the 2024 GOP primary is starting to feel a little crowded. Maybe too crowded, according to Chris Sununu. The New Hampshire governor had been weighing a run but today told CNN’s Dana Bash that he will not seek his party’s nomination.

We've come a long way in the two and a half years since the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop were unleashed on the world. In addition to the splashy, X-rated photos and videos of Hunter surrounded by drugs and prostitutes, the New York Post's reporting honed in on a set of emails that suggested Hunter's foreign business dealings involved his father, President Joe Biden. In one email, an official for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma thanks Hunter for the "opportunity" to meet then-Vice President Biden. In another, Hunter's business partner alludes to setting aside 10 percent of a deal with a Chinese firm for "the Big Guy." These bombshells served as the flashpoint for a series of investigations that are finally nearing their conclusion.

The tacit alliance between operatives of the national security state and corporate media burst into view last week when the New York Times and the Washington Post did the FBI’s job for it by tracking down the leaker of documents that detailed, among other things, the extent of American and allied involvement in the Ukraine war.  That Bellingcat, the shadowy, government-funded open-source intelligence group, played a role in helping to identify the twenty-one-year-old Air National Guardsmen Jack Teixeira proves (once again) that many media outlets are now de facto agents of the national security state.

What’d I miss? The week I chose to take off (thanks to my colleagues for keeping the DC Diary show on the road) was the worst for Republicans in a while. The last Republican president and the party’s 2024 frontrunner was arrested and charged in Manhattan. In a high-stakes, big-spending Wisconsin Supreme Court race, voters delivered a thumping progressive victory and a clear thumbs down to the Republican stance on abortion in the Dobbs era.  Meanwhile, GOP donors are reportedly going wobbly on the man many hoped would swoop in and save the party. Ron DeSantis is struggling to make himself heard over the Trump-arrest cacophony.

Some moderately clever people, reflecting on the confusing morass of current events, knowingly quote George Santayana’s most famous observation: that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Since the past is largely an almanac of unfortunate (not to say horrific) events, the idea that we are “condemned to repeat it” concentrates the mind in approximately the way Dr. Johnson said the prospect of hanging in a fortnight tends to do. But of course the past never really repeats itself. When it comes to history, Heraclitus rules: you cannot step into the same river twice, mon brave. Moreover, as that sage of Ionia said, “the true nature of things loves to conceal itself.