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What Happened: September 23, 2021

Tablet’s afternoon news digest: The Hunter Biden racket; 2020 murders set record; Angelo Codevilla

by
The Scroll
September 23, 2021

The Big Story

Newly released emails suggest that before Joe Biden was elected president, his son Hunter Biden asked for millions of dollars to help businessmen with ties to the Democratic Party recover frozen Libyan assets worth billions. The previously unpublished emails were sent by Hunter Biden’s business associates starting on Jan. 15, 2015, when Joe Biden was serving as vice president, and through February 2016, according to a new report at Insider. Though nothing came of the proposal, the emails appear to show Hunter Biden trading on access to his father and future president as well as touting his ties to the Chinese Communist Party leadership. In one email, Hunter Biden’s associate Sam Jauhari lists his value to potential business partners (note: the use of “#2” is an apparent reference to then-VP Joe Biden): “Son of #2 who has Libya file, access to State, Treasury, business partner SofS [Secretary of State] J. [John] Forbes K [Kerry] son and since he travels with dad he is connected everywhere in Europe and Asia where M. Q. [Muammar Qaddafi] and LIA [Libya Investment Authority] had money frozen. He said he has access to highest level in PRC [China], he can help there.” Both President Biden and Hunter Biden have repeatedly denied that Joe was involved in his son’s business deals.

These new emails are unrelated to the information derived from laptops that Hunter Biden left at a repair shop—but, separately, new information has emerged in recent days that corroborates the authenticity of information on the laptops and offers evidence of Hunter Biden involving his father directly in his business deals. “A person who had independent access to Hunter Biden’s emails confirmed he did receive a 2015 email from a Ukrainian businessman thanking him for the chance to meet Joe Biden,” Politico reported Tuesday based on information contained in a new book, The Bidens by Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger. In October 2020, reporting by the New York Post on Hunter Biden’s influence peddling with Ukrainian businessmen was labeled “disinformation” and censored by tech platforms such as Twitter and Facebook weeks before the presidential election.

Read more here: https://www.businessinsider.com/new-emails-reveal-that-hunter-biden-wanted-2-million-for-libya-deal-2021-9
And here: https://nypost.com/2021/09/21/the-hunter-biden-laptop-is-confirmed-color-us-shocked/

Today’s Back Pages: Angelo Codevilla and Tablet

The Rest

The U.S. murder rate experienced the largest single-year rise in 60 years in 2020, according to early data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. The final report won’t be published until Monday, but the stats available now show there was a 29% increase in the number of murders last year compared to 2019—the biggest one-year jump since the bureau started keeping national records in 1960. 

Progressive members of Congress, reportedly led by Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, refused to fund Israel’s Iron Dome, killing an emergency budget measure Tuesday with roughly $1 billion earmarked for the missile defense system that protects Israel’s civilian population. By late Wednesday, Democrats in the House had bypassed the veto of the party’s Progressive faction and introduced a standalone piece of legislation, the Iron Dome Supplemental Appropriations Act, that passed in a vote on the floor Thursday.

The Google empire expands again. The new masters of reality just announced plans to purchase a two-block parcel of land on the West Side of Manhattan for $2.1 billion, which overnight will turn the tech giant into one of the city’s largest landowners. Google had been leasing the 1.3-million-square-foot property known as the St. John’s Terminal. But flush with the record-setting profits earned during the pandemic, a boom time for the tech sector in general, the company decided to purchase the site and make it the center of an expanding New York campus. The purchase will follow Google’s other big property buys in New York City in recent years, including the 2018 acquisition of the Chelsea Market building for $2.4 billion.

Authorities in Sudan have seized assets belonging to Hamas that the Gaza-based terrorist group used to fund its operations. Ranging from real estate holdings to a TV station, the assets provided Hamas with “a foreign base where members and supporters could live, raise money, and channel Iranian weapons and funds to the Gaza Strip, Sudanese and Palestinian analysts said,” Reuters reports. The move comes as Sudan’s government is attempting to repair relations with the West following the 2019 overthrow of the former Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, who was friendly to Hamas.
Read more here: https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/after-fall-bashir-sudan-closes-door-support-hamas-2021-09-23/

Imprisoned Russian dissident Alexei Navalny describes how tech companies such as Apple and Google aided the Putin government in suppressing participation by Navalny’s supporters ahead of Russia’s parliamentary elections.​​

Thread.

(1/14) If something surprised me in the latest elections, it was not how Putin forged the results, but how obediently the almighty Big Tech turned into his accomplices.

— Alexey Navalny (@navalny) September 23, 2021

China’s government is reportedly preparing for the possibility that Chinese property giant Evergrande might collapse due to its enormous debt burden. The Economist reports Evergrande is “the world’s most indebted property company,” owing an estimated $310 billion. But that business model is coming to an end after Beijing tightened regulations on the level of debt that developer’s can accrue. The Financial Times quotes a fund manager “famous for predicting the collapse of energy group Enron” as saying that the ramifications of an Evegrande implosion could be “far worse” than Lehman Brothers for China.

A senior U.S. diplomat, Special Envoy to Haiti Daniel Foote, has resigned in protest over the deportation of Haitian migrants seeking refugee status. In a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken that was obtained by PBS, Foote wrote, “I will not be associated with the United States’ inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs to daily life.” 

Wanda Lattes and Albert (Aaron) Nirenstein met in Italy as anti-Nazi partisans and married after the war. In Florence, where they settled, the two became doyens of the intellectual scene. Lattes would go on to a career as a famous journalist and Nirenstein as a scholar of the Holocaust, in which his father, brother, stepmother, and stepsisters were killed. On Monday, with the mayor of Florence presiding and trumpeters in uniform scoring the ceremony, a park in the Northern Italian city was named for the couple.

More than 3 million baby pillows made by the company Boppy are being recalled after eight infants died from suffocation while using the pillows over a five-year period, between December 2015 and June 2020. The recall affects three different pillows: the Boppy Original Newborn Lounger, the Boppy Preferred Newborn Lounger, and the Pottery Barn Kids Boppy Newborn Lounger.

The Back Pages

Angelo Codevilla and Tablet

When I discovered, not long after joining Tablet full-time in 2018, that other people at the magazine were also readers of Angelo Codevilla, I experienced a brief flash of surprise that was gradually overtaken by a slower, deeper sense of recognition. By then, Codevilla was well known as one of the most brilliant minds in American letters, but he belonged to what I regarded as a somewhat alien culture. He lived in California, was a classicist and a Christian, and developed his ideas and work within a school of stately intellectual conservatism that I could admire but that nonetheless felt very distant from my New York City, Jewish, Cold War liberal, high-low American modernism.

Codevilla died this week, too soon, at a still intellectually vigorous 78, in a car accident near his California vineyards. You can find a tribute to him on Tablet’s homepage that features links to an essay he wrote for us this year, along with a David Samuels’ interview from 2019 that serves as a kind of essay in conversation. The notice describes Codevilla as “one of America’s preeminent political philosophers and analysts of the rise of the American security state.”

Which brings me back to what it is in Codevilla that I found so powerful despite any superficial differences of cultural temperament and outlook.

Codevilla, an immigrant and Navy intelligence veteran, who once worked for the great liberal Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, combined a scholarly understanding of this country, derived from an intense reading of the American founders and their sources in the ancient world, with an insider’s understanding of modern governmental institutions. He knew what American government was supposed to be and what traps it was supposed to avoid to preserve the liberties of the American people and so could recognize, from both the right and the left, the betrayals of that ideal, whether they came from the Patriot Act or a Progressive American oligarchy.

Trying to use the crude lens of politics to understand the radical transformations now remaking American life is worse than a mistake—it’s a trap suggesting false answers where an honest ignorance would be more helpful. Codevilla relied instead on trustier guides: history and experience.

When others championed the War on Terror, he warned that nation building in countries like Afghanistan would take decades and fail to achieve anything of lasting value. Where others declared victory an outmoded concept in postmodern wars, he warned that the avoidance of victory was a recipe for endless conflict. His warnings about the future of the American experiment have been equally prescient. We are wiser for having the record of his thoughts.

An interview:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/angelo-codevilla
An essay:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-exodus-angelo-codevilla-oligarchy
A roundtable:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/authority-blob-roundtable


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Tablet’s afternoon newsletter edited by Jacob Siegel and Park MacDougald.