Last Thursday was the warmest day for Planet Earth in the last one hundred and twenty-five thousand years. Friday was warmer than that, and Saturday warmer still, each day breaking the previous one’s record, and today seems well on its way to surpassing them all. The geologic period that transpired one hundred and twenty-five thousand years ago was part of the late Pleistocene epoch, and it goes by many names. Dutch scientists call it the Eemian, Russian scientists call it the Mikulin. In England, it’s the Ipswichian, in Chile it’s the Valdivia and in the countries around the Alps, it’s the Riss-Wuerm. In America, it’s Marine Isotope Stage 5. Whatever it’s called, it started about one hundred and thirty thousand years ago and lasted about fifteen thousand years, which is roughly twice the length human civilization. About five thousand years in, approximately the age of the Pyramids of Giza, Planet Earth got as warm as it was the last three days of last week.
What was it like? Are you ready for hippopotami in the Thames River? Water buffalo herds on the banks of the Rhein? How about sea levels thirty feet (or ten meters, if you like) higher than they are now? If it keeps up like this – which, of course, given the legendary failings of human nature, it will – only another decade or two need pass before the planetary climate is such that in certain places, for example, East Texas, the Ganges Valley and the Arabian / Persian Gulf, it will become impossible for a person to live outside of an air conditioned building for more than four hours between July and September. And furthermore, I might observe, during the week that ended Saturday, there were twenty-nine mass shootings in the United States, resulting in twenty-five deaths and an additional one hundred and sixty-five injuries, the fatality of most of which, thanks to the medical science and technology of the twenty-first century, remains to be seen. So it looks like America is off to a long, hot summer in grand style this year.
Now, you’d think, with problems like that going around, I’d be dispensing advice to people concerned about solving them, but not one single client this week mentioned global warming or gun violence. As a matter of fact, neither subject has come up in a consultation for so long, I can’t remember the last time there was discussion in my office of either one. And today being Sunday, I wasn’t in my office. I was at home, in Great Falls, Virginia, enjoying some frosty air conditioning, and reading the New York Times while watching the humidity outside in the blazing heat condense lightly on the living room windows, my cat Twinkle snoozing peacefully beside me on the couch. Then my landline rang.
Caller ID said it was Slade, a private detective I know by virtue of his numerous engagements by several of my clients. But while we have spent countless hours together over the years, analyzing his findings and research, he had never contacted me at home before. Naturally, I picked up.
Tom: Slade?
Slade: Tom! Good thing I caught you at home! This is urgent!
Tom: At ten-thirty on a Sunday morning, it had better be. What’s up?
Slade: Ah… yeah… well, Tom, this is a little bit embarrassing, having to call you, but I’m really, really jammed up here and you’re the only person I could think of to ask for advice.
Tom: So this isn’t about one of… our… mutual clients?
Slade: No, no, it’s about me. Oh, [expletive], I forgot how expensive your rates are! Do you mind if…
Tom: Given the circumstances, I’ll consider this consultation to be a mutual professional courtesy. After all, maybe someday I’ll need the assistance of a top-notch Washington private detective.
Slade: Oh, thanks, thanks, Tom, that’s terrific!
Tom: No problem. Now, like I said, what’s up?
Slade: Uh, yeah, um… I… I’m going through this divorce, see, and…
Tom: A private detective going through a divorce? Pardon me while I go out to the garage – I’m going to need a chain saw to slice through irony that thick.
Slade: Okay, okay, don’t think I haven’t heard it all by now. And all right, I deserve it – she was young and so good in the sack I didn’t notice how greedy and dishonest she is. But long story short, Tom, I needed the money.
Tom: Money you got for what?
Slade: For Operation Snowflake.
Tom: Which is?
Slade: A caper out of the Republican National Committee here in DC. The Trump campaign slipped them a huge wad of Jacksons in an attaché case up front just to get it running, and pledged a suitcase full of Benjamins deposited in a Cook Islands trust bank account for FOB delivery, if you know what I mean.
Tom: What’s it about?
Slade: Trump wants to destroy Biden. It’s part of his strategy to beat all these indictments for all the crimes he committed. If he can discredit Biden, any way he can, then that increases his chances of being re-elected president in 2024. And the way Trump sees it, that’s the only way he can stay out of prison. At this point, even he can figure out that the best he’s ever going to do in the felony business fraud, national security violation, federal insurrection and Georgia election tampering trials is four hung juries. So he wants to delay the trials until after November 2024 while doing everything he can to smear Biden in order to make sure Biden loses to him.
Tom: And Trump thinks getting elected president will keep him out of prison?
Slade: Hey, it worked for Mussolini, didn’t it?
Tom: True. So how does Operation Snowflake fit into that scheme?
Slade: Trump’s people sold it to the RNC as a win-win proposition: on one hand, it trashes Biden’s image, which helps Trump’s presidential campaign, and on the other, it gives James Comer’s House Oversight Committee a fantastic subject for an investigation of the Biden administration.
Tom: Understood. And what, pray tell, is this Operation Snowflake all about?
Slade: Okay, so I used some of the money the RNC fronted me to get the goods on one of Hunter Biden’s old… liaisons – enough to send her away for a nice, long time – and to convince her…
Tom: You mean, blackmail her?
Slade: Call it what you will, Tom, she caved in really quick and spontaneously added a couple of juicy remarks about what a [expletive] Hunter Biden is, I might add.
Tom: She caved in to what?
Slade: To providing Operation Snowflake with a plastic cocaine bag covered with Hunter Biden’s fingerprints.
Tom: Hunter Biden’s been clean for years, allegedly. She’d been holding on to it for all that time?
Slade: And Monica Lewinsky kept that semen-spattered dress for how long?
Tom: Yeah. Point taken.
Slade: The ladies do love their little keepsakes, don’ t they?
Tom: Particularly when they involve guys like Bill Clinton and Hunter Biden.
Slade: Some might say it serves them right, the way they behave.
Tom: And remind me here, who’s going broke at the moment, divorcing a gold-digging bimbo?
Slade: Yeah. Point taken.
Tom: Pensa con la testa più vicina alle tue spalle, non con l’altra.
Slade: What’s that mean?
Tom: It’s what my grandmother used to tell me when I was a teenager in Little Italy. “Think with the head closest to your shoulders, not the other one.”
Slade: Smart woman. If only guys could manage to do that, I guess.
Tom: Some of us actually can.
Slade: Aw, come one, don’t rub it in.
Tom: All right, so, you obtained a small plastic bag with Hunter Biden’s fingerprints on it; as if we couldn’t guess there had been plenty of those lying around in the past, not to mention plenty of women collecting them for posterity. Then what?
Slade: Then I… expanded the investigation… of some young White House staffers I already knew a little bit about as a result of my… previous work… for some of our mutual clients.
Tom: And found what?
Slade: Which ones frequent the nightclubs in Adams Morgan to score coke, of course.
Tom: And then?
Slade: Then I picked one with some other… baggage… I had also uncovered.
Tom: Baggage?
Slade: Opioid abuse she lied about during her federal security clearance interview.
Tom: What, specifically?
Slade: Nothing that bad, really. She broke her leg skiing and all they would prescribe for the pain was Tylenol. So she sneaked a few of her mother’s Vicodin during the first week or two. But her Mom ran out before she should have, and then made the mistake of texting the girl about her suspicions. The girl confessed, texting back an explanation, an apology and a promise never to do it again. And I found the DMs; QED.
Tom: How the hell did you find DMs between two private individuals that were, probably, years old by the time you located them?
Slade: There are huge databases of that stuff on the Dark Web, Tom, all available for a price. Particularly Twitter, which has absolutely lousy security. Let me tell you, a reasonably bright middle-schooler could crack it. And her Mom used Twitter for the DM – lucky for the girl her mother was hip enough to know the difference between a DM and a Tweet, or who knows what would have happened?
Tom: And you had managed to access her SF-86, too, and that’s how you knew she had lied?
Slade: Of course.
Tom: Remind me not to ever get on the bad side of you.
Slade: That wouldn’t be possible, Tom. You’re one of the best people I know.
Tom: Thank God for that. Then what did you do, for Christ’s sake?
Slade: I… convinced…
Tom: Blackmailed?
Slade: There goes that annoying word again. Come on, Tom, is it blackmail when a district attorney shows the driver of the getaway car a surveillance tape of them sitting at the wheel and makes an offer of immunity to testify against the gunman who robbed the liquor store?
Tom: False moral equivalency. It’s obvious you’ve been hanging out with way too many Republicans for way too long.
Slade: Whatever. Look, Tom, this is Washington. You know how the sausage gets made, gimme a break here, willya?
Tom: Okay, okay, I’ll stop busting your chops. But I gotta tell ya, guy, this whole thing stinks to high heaven so far.
Slade: Show me a Republican political deal these days that doesn’t.
Tom: Okay, point taken. What next?
Slade: So then, Don Junior… um… donated… about a gram… and I… put two and two together.
Tom: You mean, you put Don Junior’s cocaine in the little plastic bag covered with Hunter Biden’s fingerprints and gave it to the girl to smuggle into the White House with instructions as to where to place it so it would be readily found?
Slade: Gee, you know, Tom, I got to say, when you put it that way, it does sound awfully sleazy, but at the time…
Tom: You needed the money.
Slade: Yeah, I did.
Tom: Okay, so the stench could knock a buzzard off a honey wagon, but as another great Republican once said, “mission accomplished,” right? There are scandal headlines everywhere about coke in the White House; numerous opportunities, each carefully and completely exploited, for Donald Trump, not to mention practically every Republican politician above the rank of dog catcher to rant and rave about the corruption, iniquity and depravity of Joe Biden and his family; Jimmy Comer is writing Congressional subpoenas for his great big White House cocaine investigation to the head of every federal agency he can spell the name of; and Republican shill reporters have been peppering Karine Jean-Pierre with cocaine-in-the-White-House questions to the point where she has become delightfully testy and acid in her replies, making the Biden administration look guilty. What’s not to like?
Slade: What they don’t like, Tom, is the timing.
Tom: Who’s “they?”
Slade: The Trump campaign.
Tom: And what’s their beef with the situation?
Slade: The girl put the coke in the White House when the Biden family was at Camp David!
Tom: So?
Slade: So, not only is the Trump campaign refusing to pay the rest of the money – which includes my entire fee – they have told the RNC they want all the money they have fronted the RNC for my expenses to set up Operation Snowflake returned! With interest!
Tom: Um… you are familiar with Donald Trump’s payment history, aren’t you?
Slade: What? You mean, how he wouldn’t pay the contractors that worked on building his hotels and stuff like that? This is totally different!
Tom: How?
Slade: What do you mean, “how?”
Tom: Think about it – if that’s the problem you’re calling me about on a Sunday morning – and it is, isn’t it? That you did all this dirty work for Donald Trump and now he’s not going to pay you because the results aren’t exactly what he wanted, that is, the planted cocaine can’t be plausibly linked to Hunter Biden because Hunter Biden has an airtight alibi for when the coke was brought into the White House?
Slade: Yeah, okay, that is the problem, actually.
Tom: Well, let me play Devil’s advocate here for a moment and ask: was it an implicit part of the agreement underlying this conspiracy that Hunter Biden be falsely implicated as the person who brought cocaine into the White House?
Slade: Ah… well… um… now that you mention it, I guess it was.
Tom: Then, although I hate to say this, it seems to me that Donald Trump had a reasonable expectation that the coke would be planted in the White House at a time that Hunter Biden was there, and that, consequently, he has a very good argument for not paying you your fee and also demanding a refund of the money he gave you to set Hunter Biden up in the first place.
Slade: Tom! How can you say that? I’m up [expletive] creek with no [expletive] paddle here!
Tom: Just… pointing out the wages of sin. That’s often what the Devil’s advocate ends up doing, you know. So now, let’s answer that question I asked you a couple of minutes ago. Because within that answer is the solution to your problem.
Slade: It is?
Tom: Absolutely. How is what you did for Donald Trump, the things that he is now refusing to pay you for, different from what some hotel drywall contractor whom he would refuse to pay might have done?
Slade: Were you, by any chance, an English major?
Tom: No.
Slade: You could have fooled me. I bet a diagram of that sentence would cover an entire [expletive] whiteboard. Okay, lemme see if I can unpack that. You’re asking me, hey, you did this stuff for Donald Trump and now he won’t pay you, and here’s this contractor that hung some drywall in one of his hotels, and Trump won’t pay him, and… what’s the difference in what me and the drywall guy agreed to do for Trump?
Tom: Correct.
Slade: That would be… Oh, [expletive]! Tom, you’re a [expletive] genius! All the stuff I did for Donald Trump is like, totally illegal! And Donald Trump doesn’t give a flying [expletive] if the whole [expletive] world knows if that other guy hung some drywall for him! All I have to do is…
Tom: Blackmail Trump.
Slade: He has no choice! He was bluffing!
Tom: And you bought it, didn’t you?
Slade: Yeah, I guess I did.
Tom: One thing you have to realize about Donald Trump, my friend: when he’s not lying, he’s most likely bluffing. Because, aside from bragging, tax evasion, sexual predation, grifting his supporters, espousing fascism and amusing himself humiliating other people, those two things comprise almost his entire behavior set.
Slade: And I didn’t realize it! Oh, thanks! Thanks, Tom! I’m calling Trump’s undercover flunky back right now and telling him Trump can pay up or go [expletive] himself!
Tom: Enjoy.
Slade: I will! And thanks, Tom, thanks so much! I’ll never forget this!
Tom: And neither will I, no matter how hard I try. Ciao, bubbeleh.