Monthly Archives: November 2019

Father Rale.

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By the middle of the 17th Century the fires of the Counter-Reformation had begun to cool.  New ways of thinking emphasized skepticism and tolerance and not fighting over religious issues.  Father Sebastien Rale (1657-1724) belonged to another era than the one in which he lived.  He grew up on the eastern fringe of France, then joined the Jesuits when young.  He taught for a stretch in southern France, but reciting “amo, amas, amat” to blubbering school-boys didn’t hold his attention.  So he volunteered for the New World and the Jesuits shipped him off to a place better suited to his commitments.  In 1689 he went to Canada.  The Jesuit Superior in New France sent him to an Abenaki village near Quebec to learn the language, then to a mission in Kaskaskia in the Illinois country for two years, and then (1694) to Norridgewock on the Kennebec River.  Today, that’s in central Maine; then it was the frontier between Catholic New France and Protestant New England.

In Norridgewock, Father Rale both served the spiritual needs of his parishioners and wound-up the local Indians against the English-speaking Protestants moving up relentlessly from the southwest.  When Queen Anne’s War (1703-1713) broke out Father Rale’s parishioners joined in a Fall 1703 raid that killed 150 English settlers.  This raid fell within a larger pattern.  For example a raid on York, Maine in 1692 had left 100 people—men, women, and children—dead and many others taken captive.  Among the captives carried off to Canada and later ransomed, was Jeremiah Moulton (1688-1765).  English settlers—understandably—became obsessed about the danger.[1]  The governor of Massachusetts put a price on Rale’s head and New England militia were inclined to a literal interpretation.  Ten years of unsuccessful man-hunting and border war followed.  In 1713 “peace” broke out.

It wasn’t much of a peace in Maine, whatever it was in Europe.  The exact border between New England and “Acadia” hadn’t been defined in the peace treaty.  The French said it ran along the Kennebec.  The Indians—the Wabanaki Confederation—didn’t agree that they were under British authority.  The government of Massachusetts (which then owned Maine) built some forts on Wabanaki land and settlers moved north and east.  Father Rale urged the Indians to attack the English settlers, although they didn’t need any encouragement to defend their lands from outsiders.  Small raids went on until, in January 1722, the governor of Massachusetts launched an Indian war on the frontier of the province.

Massachusetts militia troops just missed capturing Father Rale, but did get a strong-box full of papers that seemed to show that he acted on behalf of France.  “Father Rale’s War” then began in earnest.  The Wabanaki retaliated with attacks on the frontier forts and settlements.

During 1723, Indian attacks had a devastating effect.  Spring 1724 began as 1723 had ended.  Wabanaki raiders killed farmers and loggers, fishermen (they captured a bunch of fishing boats), and soldiers sent to fight them.  The governor of Massachusetts ordered all settlers to move to the forts or to fortified houses.[2]

In August 1724, a group of militia—now much experienced at Indian fighting–surprised the Indians at Norridgewock.  Afterwards, a scalped Father Rale lay among the dead.  The English burned the village and the crops in the field.  The Indians then moved north out of reach of the English.[3]  The commander of the English attack was Jeremiah Moulton, who had been kidnapped in York many years before.  There is something Biblical in that.

[1] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wgkpfa5HMw  and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV2JPv1EFww

[2] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrison_(architecture) for the architectural style.

[3] British colonists settled the now-empty site of the village only in 1773.

The Devil’s Backbone.

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Who made the first roads in America?  Animals did, mostly bison and deer.  They migrated from place to place and then returned.  Often, they preferred to travel on ridge-lines.  Vegetation was less dense there and height gave them what soldiers today call “observation”: they could see danger coming.  Native Americans then followed these paths for many centuries, either migrating or hunting or bound for war.  The trails became more distinct.  Then came the European-Americans.  These travelers had horses and cattle, vehicles and tools.  The pathways became rough-and-ready roads.  European-Americans called any such path-to-road a “trace.”

The “Natchez Trace” was a somewhat improved dirt road connecting Nashville, on the Tennessee River, with Natchez, on the Mississippi River.  The lands between Nashville and Natchez remained thinly-settled for a long time.  Weary travelers looked forward to sight of isolated inns, called “stands,” where they could eat and sleep.[1]  It being only “somewhat improved,” 450 miles long, and lawless, most travelers referred to it as “the Devil’s Backbone.”

All sorts of people of people flowed along the Natchez Trace in the early 1800s.  Presbyterian and Methodist preachers of the “Second Great Awakening,” an emotionally powerful revival movement, were all over the place like a duck on a June-bug.[2]  Westward migrants hoped for better cotton lands in the Mississippi valley.  With the white planters went their African-American slaves.  Merchants from Nashville and elsewhere used the Trace as a river of commerce.  The Mississippi Valley blossomed from the combination of cotton, and the north-south trade between New Orleans and the “Old Northwest.”  “Kaintucks” manned the flatboats that carried the river’s trade.  They walked home along the Trace.

Because money flowed in both directions along the “Trace,” so did crime.[3]  The little U.S. Army was stretched thin, so there weren’t many soldiers to provide protection.  Sheriffs were few and far between.  On the Western end of the Trace, merchants, “Kaintucks,” and slaves all congregated in the wide-open town of Natchez-under-the-Hill, where gambling, girls, and drink abounded.  So did fights.  When crime got bad enough, a posse of “Regulators” would go hunting outlaws.  Court trials did not always follow captures.

For example, Samuel Mason (1739-1803) served on the frontier in the American Revolution, then he turned to river piracy in Ohio, Illinois, and Arkansas (which then belonged to Spanish America).  (This isn’t the sort of thing that the Daughters of the American Revolution like to play up.)  He fell in with a family of serial killers named Harpe until the Spanish arrested him in 1803 in what would later become Missouri.[4]  He didn’t have any good explanation for the twenty scalps found in his luggage (but really, who could?), so the Spanish turned him over to the Americans.  They would have hanged him, but he escaped for just long enough for two of his confederates to kill him in hopes of collecting a reward.  Instead the confederates met their own grim fates on a tree limb.

In the 1820s, the steamboat (which could carry goods and people upstream against the river currents) and other roads made the Trace irrelevant.

[1] In one of these inns, Meriwether Lewis— burdened by debts, drinking hard, and depressed–shot himself in 1809.

[2] Revivalist preachers stressed that individuals had to repent their sins to be saved.  Thousands of enthusiasts attended camp meetings like the one at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801.  The emotional, salvation-is-at-hand message of the revivalist movement had a profound effect on slaves, perhaps helping to inspire Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia in 1831.

[3] There’s a B-movie called “The Natchez Trace” (dir. Alan Crosland, 1960).

[4] The Louisiana Purchase was at hand, but had not yet taken place.  So, Missouri remained part of the Spanish empire.

Squanto.

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The Native Americans of New England had been in contact with Europeans—French, Dutch, and English—since the early 1500s.  This contact began to transform Native American society.  On the one hand, the Europeans unintentionally introduced Old World diseases to which the Native Americans had no resistance.  Native American tribes did not live in isolation from other tribes.  The diseases spread like wild-fire from people near the coast to places much farther inland.  The toll could be horrific: 90 percent mortality in some cases, often as much as two-thirds.  On the other hand, the Native Americans were a Stone Age people.  The Iron Age Europeans had things—knives, axes, cooking pots, muskets—that would make the lives of the Native Americans much easier.  The Europeans would trade these things, and alcohol, for furs.

Beginning in 1605, English explorers—at the least—began occasional kidnappings of Native Americans.  Sometimes they sold them as slaves.  Sometimes they took them home to England and later returned them.  The catch-and-release effort may have been a crude attempt to create future intermediaries between the English and the Native Americans.  The English aimed at eventual settlement of colonies.  In 1614, an English explorer named Thomas Hunt grabbed 27 Native Americans from the shores of Cape Cod Bay.  He then sailed for the Spanish port of Malaga, where he sold them as slaves.

One captive called himself Tisquantum.  The Pilgrims later came to call him “Squanto.”  At a reasonable guess, “Squanto” was born about 1585 on the western shore of Cape Cod Bay.   His tribe, the Patuxet, were farmers, not hunters-and-gatherers.  Most of his life story is lost, with only occasional known facts.  He spent some time (probably years) in Spain (and probably at Malaga).  Somehow, he reached England.  He may have escaped to an English ship in the harbor.  He may have been bought or stolen by an English ship captain who knew of his employer’s interest in American colonization.  In any event, he spent enough time in London to learn English and see something of English society.

In 1618, the English merchant and colonizer Richard Slaney sent Squanto with an expedition to Newfoundland.  In 1619, Squanto talked an English captain into making an exploring voyage to Cape Cod Bay.  Home again, Squanto found himself virtually the “last of the Patuxets”: disease had destroyed his tribe.  Homeless and rootless, he declined to return with the captain.  However, he served as a translator and honest intermediary between his own people and the English.[1]

Then, in December 1620, the “Mayflower,” with the Pilgrims aboard, hove into sight on the western shore of Cape Cod Bay.  Having lost tribe and family, having learned English and met many Englishmen, Squanto soon moved into the Plymouth colony itself for almost two years.  He taught the colonists the rudiments of the fur trade.  This helped repay the debt to the company that had paid their passage—Plymouth was an “indentured colony.”  He taught them about Native American farming and crops.  Many of the seeds brought from England didn’t thrive in American soil.  He helped negotiate peace with surrounding tribes.  This minimized—for a time—“unfortunate incidents.”

Squanto died of what William Bradford described as an “Indian fever” in 1622.

[1] Some days later, a different group of Native Americans captured the English captain.  Eventually, he managed to escape and return home.  HA!

Zion Island 18.

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“Shipping News,” Dar es Salaam newspaper, September 1950.  Extract.

The large dhow “Simba,” Mohammad Atif captain, has failed to return to port and is presumed to have been lost at sea.  “Simba” sailed from Dar es Salaam in July, bound for Lourenco Marques in Mozambique.  Captain Atif had been active in the coastal trade for forty years, carrying every sort of cargo, and was well-known in East African ports.

Zion Island 17.

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Reichsarchiv.  Nachlasse Bach-Zalewski.  Private files–Miscellaneous.

 

Sipo-SD IV-B-4.

Partial transcript of a recorded conversation, Theresienstadt, Madagascar, 12 February 1951.

MA: He’s falling apart!  The staring, the crying, the puking!  How long can he go on?  It isn’t possible.  Everything will be ruined!

MB: He can hold on.  Don’t worry.  He’s a remarkable man.  It’s this other one[1] we have to think about.

MA: Don’t think too long.  Handle it.

MB: Easy to say.

MA: We need the cover.

[1] Reference unclear.

Zion Island 16.

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The Encyclopedia Germanica.  (Extract.)

“Europe since 1945”

III. Europe’s international relations.

  1. The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem in Europe.

The Treaty of Berlin (11 November 1940) included among its provisions the transfer from France to Germany of sovereignty over the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar.  A meeting of principals (q.v. First Wannsee Conference) decided that Madagascar should be denominated as the “national home for the Jewish people,” with appropriate safeguards for the people of Europe.  These safeguards included the presence of a German peacekeeping force on the island, the appointment of a German governor-general with full powers, and strict controls on travel to and from Madagascar.

The Jewish population of German Europe (Germany and Austria, the General Gouvernement, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Slovakia, France, Holland, Belgium, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece) was evacuated to its new home in the course of 1941.  In light of the looming Judeo-Bolshevik attack on the Reich (q.v. War of the Bolshevik Succession), this transfer of populations had to be carried out with dispatch.  The Fuhrer appointed General of the SS Erich von dem Bach-Zalewski to implement the evacuation.  Subsequently, the Jewish populations of Western Russia and the Baltic territories also were evacuated.  Unexpectedly, the British declared their desire to evacuate the Jewish immigrant population in Palestine in order to pacify the Arab population.  The general pattern was for rural populations to be concentrated in urban transit facilities; the urban transit facilities were evacuated as rail transit facilities to ports of embarkation (Odessa, Salonika, Marseilles) became available; and the evacuees were transferred to such shipping as could be made available to complete the journey through the Suez Canal.

The unanticipated expansion in the number of Jews to be evacuated, the difficult straits in which many of the Jews had been left by military operations in eastern Poland and western Russia, and the disruptions of rail and ship transportation by war all created immense problems for those administering the evacuation.  Under these conditions, the transfer did not go as easily as might have been desired by all those involved.  Nevertheless, it represented a remarkable achievement.  In light of his success in managing the evacuation, General Bach-Zalewski was appointed as the first Higher SS and Police Leader and Governor-General for Madagascar.

 

A Contrarian Spirit 20 November 2019.

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Edward M. House (1858-1938), called by courtesy “Colonel House,” served as a diplomatic advisor and personal representative for President Woodrow Wilson.  He came to the fore during the First World War.  America began as a neutral, no different in name than Switzerland or Venezuela.  However. America’s economic and human resources made it a country of the first rank.  It could decide the outcome of the war.

Bypassing the State Department, House spent much of 1915 and 1916 in Europe.  He sought to broker a peace between the “Entente” powers (Britain, France, Tsarist Russia) and the “Central” powers (Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire).  When that effort failed, House came to believe that a victory for Britain (and its so-called allies), followed by a “moderate” peace, offered the best path forward from that awful war.

At war’s end and afterward, House played key roles.  He helped define the terms of the Armistice of 11 November 1918.  He played an important part in the creation of the League of Nations (antecedent to the United Nations).  He urged moderation on President Wilson in the campaign for Senate ratification of the Versailles Treaty. Wilson would hear none of it.  Eventually, the two men broke, ending a deep friendship of many years.

Harry Hopkins (1890-1946), after long service in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” domestic reform programs, served as Roosevelt’s personal diplomatic representative in the Second World War.  Hopkins never belonged to the Foreign Service or was an employees of the State Department.  Still, he was Roosevelt’s “man in Havana”—well, London and Moscow.

The United States had hoped to remain neutral in the Second World War.  If the Germans and the western Europeans wanted to kill each other over ancient quarrels, well, that was OK with the US.  Germany’s astonishing victories in Western Europe in 1940 quickly changed many minds.  On the one hand, the United States needed to launch a rapid build-up of it military power.  On the other hand, the United States had to keep Britain in the war against Germany.  A British surrender Roosevelt used Hopkins as a direct connection to British prime minister Winston Chamberlain and, more fitfully, to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.  Hopkins also played an important role in the allocation of Lend-Lease aid—lethal weapons and many other supplies—to countries opposing Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

So, American presidents sometimes use non-State Department people as their official emissaries to vital foreign powers.  People in the State Department often don’t like these “unofficial” back-channel lines of communication.  Tough luck.

However, all depends upon the president and the circumstances.  It is easy to believe that Wilson would have done better to listen to House.  It is possible to believe that Hopkins served merely as a mechanical arm to FDR, for good or ill.

It seems to me that former mayor Rudy Giuliani was an instrument of President Trump in an effort to smear a future domestic political opponent—Joe Biden–in the presidential campaign of 2020.  That seems to me an impeachable offense.

Yes, a Ukrainian oligarch hired Hunter Biden to keep the Ukrainian anti-corruption people at bay.  Yes, the Obama administration delayed providing any “lethal” aid to the Ukrainians for about four years, while the Trump administration delayed providing some “lethal” aid to Ukraine for about four weeks.  Yes, Kenneth Vogel’s articles in Politico and the New York Times, raise interesting questions about Ukrainian interference in the election of 2016.  All of these deserve to be investigated at length.  But Donald Trump should be impeached.

Some Ukrainian Background.

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The first “Russian” state was Kievan Rus, created by conquering Vikings.[1]  In the 13th Century the Mongols showed up and put a stop to that.  “Independent” Russia came to mean a small territory around Moscow.  Over the following centuries, Ukraine became a contested ground between empires: the “Golden Horde” of the Mongols, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the rising Austrian Empire, and an expanding Romanov Russia.  By the end of the 18th Century, the Austrians held Galicia, while the rest of the Ukraine belonged to Russia.

As was the case elsewhere in Eastern Europe in the second half of the 19th Century, local nationalism began to burn.  Tsarist Russia repressed this just as it did every other form of non-Russian nationalism.  Still, Ukrainian nationalism survived.  When the First World War wrecked the Austrian and Russian Empires, Ukraine declared its independence (1917).

Tragedy followed for Ukrainians: the territory and its people were savaged by Poles with an expansive definition of “historical” Poland; and by “Whites,” “Reds,” and a variety of crazy people like the Anarchist anti-semite Nestor Makhno during the Russian Civil War and the Russo-Polish War.  Then Ukraine fell under the hammer during Josef Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s.  About 3.5 million Ukrainians were starved to death during this “Harvest of Sorrow.”[2]

During the drive for industrialization that followed close on the heels of the “terror famine,” Stalin moved in millions of Russians to eastern Ukraine.  Their descendants still form a large part of the population of Ukraine.  Then the Second World War brought both massive suffering and deep divisions, as Ukrainians fought on both side.

In 1954, possibly trying to make amends to the Ukraine for the whole unfortunate “terror famine” thing, the Soviet Union transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine.  This remained something of a sore spot for the ethnic Russians of Crimea.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine held a referendum on independence.  Overall, 90 percent of those who voted supported independence.   However, voter participation varied a good deal throughout Ukraine.  The Russians weren’t happy with this secession, but there wasn’t much they could do about it because Russia itself was in massive turmoil.

The post-independence history of Ukraine has not been a happy one.[3]  Corruption is endemic.  Mismanagement is widespread.  Bureaucracy is pervasive and stifling.  Investment in productive capacity fell far short of needs.  Where banks did lend, they often made bad loans.  Business law and an incompetent (or corrupt) judiciary make property insecure.  Investors don’t want to risk their capital.  By 2014, Ukrainians were among Europe’s poorest people.

In 2004, Viktor Yanukovych won election as president amidst charges of massive fraud and interference by the Soviet Union.  An “Orange Revolution” turned him out of office.  His “Orange” successors then mismanaged things on a grand scale.  Eventually, in 2010, Yanukovych managed to win election as president without charges of massive fraud.  In late 2013 he suddenly rejected a long-prepared economic agreement with the European Union.  This act sparked a new round of demonstrations that ended with Yanukovych chased from office once again (February 2014).

After that, things got even worse.  By 2015, the conflict with Russia cut Ukrainian-Russian trade by half.  Inflation and unemployment both rose.  Foreign-exchanges reserves at the central bank sank to their lowest point in a decade.  Experts estimated that the country would need $40 billion in financial assistance over the next four years.  In early February 2015, the International Monetary Fund granted Ukraine a $17.5 billion credit.

It was against this background that the Obama administration, the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund began pressuring Ukraine to root out corruption and address a host of other problems.

[1] “In Russia’s shadow,” The Week, 14 March 2014, p. 11.

[2] Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986); Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on the Ukraine (2017).

[3] David M. Herszenhorn, “Economic Woes Will Test Kiev, Even if Truce Holds,” NYT, 14 February 2015

JMO 3 November 2019.

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“Donald Trump is a terrible person.”—Mick Mulvaney.  Agreed.  I voted against him the last time and I plan to vote against him the next time.   (Unless Elizabeth Warren is the Democratic nominee.  I don’t care to have my hard-earned retirement savings destroyed.)

Donald Trump was right to confront China in a forceful way over its trade practices.  Some Americans had suffered from those practices for many years.  Many of them lost jobs.  No one else cared very much.  “Capitalism is creative destruction.  Lump it.”  It’s ludicrous now to say that Trump’s tariff policies are illegitimate because they are forcing up prices of some consumer goods.  Lump it.

Donald Trump was right to open negotiations with North Korea over the nuclear weapons issue, and he was right to meet with Kim Jong-loon.  Severe economic sanctions have been imposed on North Korea for a long time without any sign that they of forcing North Korea to abandon its nuclear programs.  If we’re willing to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear weapons program, then why shouldn’t we negotiate with North Korea?  Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Joseph Stalin and Richard Nixon met with Mao Zedong.  Why shouldn’t Donald Trump meet with an arguably less evil and less insane foreign leader?

Donald Trump was right to support cutting the corporate tax.  The American tax was much higher than international norms.  It deterred foreign companies from investing in America and it encouraged American companies to keep their foreign earnings over-seas, where they paid a lower tax rate.

Donald Trump is right to try to end the “endless wars” and to avoid becoming involved in new ones.  The invasion of Afghanistan had to take place.  It was the only fast way of getting hold of Osama bin Laden in revenge for 9/11. Having missed our punch in 2003-2004, the United States made the fatal error of staying in Afghanistan in hopes of transforming a primitive society into a modern democracy.  Endless disaster have followed.  Nothing—Nothing–can justify the attack on Iraq in 2003, let alone the botched occupation policy that followed.  A long chain of human and foreign policy disasters have unspooled from that crime a decade and a half ago.

Recognizing the destructive futility of these wars, President Barack Obama claimed he wanted to get out of them.  He did reduce the American presence in Afghanistan—over the resistance of the Pentagon—but he didn’t end American participation in a war that the Taliban is fated to win.  President Obama did manage to end the American military presence in Iraq.  He then allowed the country to be partially sucked back in to prevent Iran—our “enemy” in all things other than the nuclear agreement—from crushing ISIS and expanding its influence.  President Obama, at the price of considerable personal humiliation, managed to keep the United States from being drawn directly into the Syrian civil war.

Donald Trump has done some important things right.  Yes, he’s done them in a ham-handed way.  He has done them in violation of long-standing policies, bureaucratic procedures, and norms.  Those policies, procedures, and norms were the very things that got the country into these messes in the first place.

Even if he is impeached, it is unlikely that Trump’s successors will reverse course.  They’ll just try to break less china while criticizing Trump as a terrible person.

An Innocent Abroad 2 November 2019.

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After graduating from Yale Law School in 1996, Hunter Biden[1] went to work for MBNA.  MBNA is a bank-holding company based in Wilmington Delaware.  It was reportedly a major contributor to the political campaigns of Joe Biden.  Within two years, Hunter Biden had become an executive vice president.  From 1998 to 2001, he worked for the Department of Commerce during the second Clinton administration.  From 2001 to 2009, he worked as a lobbyist, and served for two years on the board of Amtrak.  From 2009 to 2019, Hunter Biden was busy on several fronts.  He worked for the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner; he founded an investment firm with Christopher Heinz, the step-son of John Kerry; and he formed an investment firm focused on China (2013-2019).

In April 2014, Hunter Biden was recruited to a five year term on the board of Burisma Holdings, a major Ukrainian natural gas company.  The company is run by Mykola Zlochevsky.

It is fair to ask why Hunter Biden was invited to join the board.

In 2014, the prosecutor general for Ukraine began investigating Burisma.

It has been reported that Hunter Biden himself never was under investigation, let alone charged with anything.  Similarly, the investigations of Burisma were wound up after the payment of back taxes and penalties.

Nevertheless, then and later, Hunter Biden’s position raised eyebrows.  Reportedly, Christopher Heinz opposed his business partner joining the board because of the risk to their firm’s reputation.[2]  Biden went ahead.  Heinz then ended his business relationship with Biden.[3]

Others also questioned the decision.  In June 2014, the Associated Press wrote that “Hunter Biden’s employment means he will be working as a director and top lawyer for a Ukrainian energy company during the period when his father and others in the Obama administration attempt to influence the policies of Ukraine’s new government, especially on energy issues.”[4]

In December 2015, Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, told the Wall Street Journal that “If an investigator sees the son of the vice president of the United States is part of the management of a company … that investigator will be uncomfortable pushing the case forward.”

In late 2014, Mykola Zlochevsky hastily left Ukraine after it was alleged that he had illegally enriched himself during his time as Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources in 2010-2012.  In December 2017, the government’s investigation of Burisma ended with no charges filed against Zlochevsky.  In February 2018, he returned to Ukraine.

Did Burisma bring Hunter Biden on board not to entangle him personally in corrupt acts, but rather to put up a shield against prosecution by Zlochevsky’s Ukrainian enemies?

It would be useful to know what–if anything—the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the Central Intelligence Agencies reported on Hunter Biden’s time with Burisma.  Or, like Joe Biden and his son, did they also have a “don’t ask-don’t tell” relationship?

[1] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden

[2] Paul Sonne, Michael Kranish, and Matt Viser, “The gas tycoon and the vice president’s son: The story of Hunter Biden’s foray into Ukraine,” The Washington Post, 28 September 2019.

[3] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7519043/Chris-Heinz-split-business-partner-Hunter-Biden-board-seat-Ukrainian-energy-company.html

[4] https://www.factcheck.org/2019/09/trump-twists-facts-on-biden-and-ukraine/