As our aged president appears to be slipping cognitively, as well as slipping literally on the stairs of Air Force One, as he did again Wednesday, the whole world is wondering who really is in charge at the White House.
Is it exhausted chief of staff Ron Klain calling the shots behind the scenes?
Is it Biden’s “Sherpa,” White House counselor Steve Ricchetti? Is it first lady Jill Biden?
But there is another alarming prospect: the “smartest man” Joe Biden knows, his son, the crack addict-turned-blowpipe artist Hunter Biden.
Friends of Hunter say he discusses the finer points of Ukraine policy and other matters of state around the dinner table with his father on his regular weekend visits home to Delaware or Camp David.
One former friend describes him as his father’s “closest adviser.”
Hunter also boasted to his former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, by the pool of the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood in May 2017, that he had his father’s ear and got him to do what he wanted by bypassing his gatekeepers and speaking to him directly.
It is no coincidence that Hunter’s new “sugar brother,” LA entertainment lawyer Kevin Morris, formerly represented Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey, who played a starring role at the White House podium this week to urge gun control in the wake of the school massacre in his hometown of Uvalde, Texas.
Morris, a close McConaughey friend and adviser, has lent Hunter more than $2 million to pay overdue tax bills and pays his $20,000 rent in Malibu. Morris also acts as a sort of life coach, advising Hunter on everything from how to respond to the Delaware grand jury investigation into his overseas business dealings and how to structure his art sales to how to rehabilitate his reputation and retaliate against his detractors.
Boasting of influence
Now, in a hitherto unpublished voice recording from an iPhone backup on Hunter’s abandoned laptop, the president’s son is heard boasting in detail about his political influence over his father.
“He’s going to talk about drug reform and any other thing that I want him to. [Joe Biden] thinks I’m a god.”
Recorded in Newburyport, Mass., on Dec. 3, 2018, at a time when Hunter was undergoing an unusual addiction treatment program with therapist Keith Ablow, involving daily intravenous infusions of the horse tranquilizer ketamine, the audio file was provided to The Post by nonprofit research group Marco Polo, which is preparing a detailed report into the laptop.
Amid the sound of clinking glasses and his bubbling crack pipe, Hunter waxes philosophical for more than an hour with Phillipa Horan, a British artist he met at a dinner in LA in mid-2018 through his girlfriend Zoe Kestan, a lingerie designer who goes by the online handle “weed slut 420” and who appeared before the Delaware grand jury in February.
Hunter tells Horan that his father will “talk about anything that I want him to that he believes in. If I say this is important to me, then he will work a way in which to make it a part of his platform.
“My dad respects me more than he respects anyone in the world, and I know that to be certain, so it’s not going to be about whether it affects his politics.”
Hunter boasts about how he plans to capitalize on the notoriety “if my dad becomes president …
“I was on the front page of every f–king newspaper including the Wall Street Journal and New York Times …
“I believe that’s an opportunity to say the things and show the things and reveal the things through this project that we want to reveal … because you will have attention.
“I have figured out if you are going to be involved in politics the way that I am, which is to choose to engage with my father in that life because I believe in what he does … then one of your obligations is to use that platform with intent, is to not allow the platform to sit on top of you.”
‘Artistic’ conversation
The conversation, recorded on Hunter’s iPhone XS, is in the form of an interview, in which Horan poses personal questions to Hunter about his addiction and his family for an artistic project they are planning.
Hunter previously had described the project to another friend in a text message: “We have been collaborating for the past four months on a work of art for lack of a better term … I had an idea for a book, series of books, a zine, it was a pretty loose concept with a very focused intent … about the universal truth of our … need to be, remain, feel, desire, achieve connection … through words, written, spoken, felt across and through a multiple of mediums.”
At one point in the recording, Hunter tells Horan not to worry about his being in the shadow of his famous father.
“All the concerns you have with all the people you know that are the ‘children of,’ I have none of them, not a single one …
“Everyone else talks about, ‘How can you be as good as your dad?’
“I’m better than my dad … because my dad tells me I’m better than him since I was 2 years old.
“All those fears you think that I have of people not liking me or that I don’t love myself … I don’t fear that because the man I most admire in the world that is God to me thinks I’m a god.
“I had the support to know I can do anything.”
Horan asks him what Joe says about his crack use.
“He says f–king stop,” replies Hunter. “He’s scared to death.”
Hunter embraced sobriety in 2019, after marrying his second wife, South African divorcée Melissa Cohen.
He spends his time painting and awaiting the outcome of the grand jury investigation into alleged money laundering, tax evasion and foreign-agent violations.
And for a side hustle, he advises the president. Whether anyone listens is another matter.
Dems incite violence vs. Supremes
This is what Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the steps of the Supreme Court to a rally of baying anti-abortion protesters.
“I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you.”
Is anyone surprised that some unhinged glory seeker understood those words as a call to violence against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh?
There will always be some unhinged person out there who answers the call, but Dems don’t care. It serves their purpose, and they know they will never be held to account because they control the narrative.
It is illegal to protest outside the homes of judges. Yet Attorney General Merrick Garland allowed illegal protests for weeks outside the homes of Supreme Court justices.
The president never denounced the harassment of the judges or the publication of their home addresses.
Then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki was specifically asked about the protests outside judges’ homes and refused to condemn any of it, saying, “I don’t have an official US government position on where people protest.”
The only plausible explanation is that the government wanted the judges to be intimidated. They wanted them to fear for their lives. They wanted them to know that the president and the DOJ would not protect them or their families. They wanted to create a deterrence so frightening that the judges would think twice before defying the regime again.
