March 7, 2024 / by emptywheel

 

Fresh Off an Interview with Vladimir Putin, Tucker Carlson Repeats the Trick with Keith Ablow

“I settled a few cases,” onetime Hunter Biden shrink Keith Ablow said, just over ten minutes into an interview with Tucker Carlson. “Because, I don’t know. Maybe God saying ‘you didn’t have the quijones [sic],’ I don’t know. But I wanted some safety for my family.”

It was the only explanation he gave for why Massachusetts stripped his license in the wake of multiple claims he sexually abused patients. For the bulk of the interview, Ablow carried on, as if he were still a shrink.

Ablow similarly claimed to be ignorant of why the DEA searched his office.

“I can’t explain why these things were ever taken or why I would be raided. … I never figured out why the DEA would come to my office. ”

In fact, Ablow provided an anachronistic claim suggesting he got “raided” for the same reason Roger Stone and Donald Trump did — politics, he insinuates.

A: I texted Roger Stone, Man, you, me, and Trump get raided. Who doesn’t get raided. And he, because he’s Roger Stone, he texted right back, “The bad guys.”

T: He’s right. Unfortunately, he’s right.

This exchange couldn’t have been a response to the search of Ablow’s office; rather, it could only have been a response to Trump’s search for stealing classified documents.

This conversation could have occurred no earlier than August 2022 — 30 months after the search of Ablow and 43 months after the search of Roger Stone. It’s an interesting comparison. After all, one of those searches sought notes Roger Stone took of all the conversations he had with Trump in 2016. Another found documents recording a grant of clemency for Roger Stone that has some unknown tie to a French President — possibly Macron, whom in 2017, Stone’s buddies colluded with GRU to target in a hack-and-leak.

Are you really suggesting there’s a similarity between the Stone and Trump searches and your own, Keith? Because that’s a whole lot of rat-fuckery you’re tying this search to.

Having endorsed Ablow’s claim that he, Trump, and Trump’s rat-fucker are really the good guys, Tucker predictably never pointed out that Ablow might learn why he was searched by looking at the warrant, nor did he ask what the warrant said.

Ultimately, after more babbling and blaming an assistant, though, Ablow offered up that if you call in prescriptions to pharmacies around the country, you might get in trouble for doing so.

A: Right. And so no idea, as to motive, agenda, again, I mean, I did have a disgruntled former employee. One who thinks the laptop had nothing to do with it, well maybe that person told them that you were selling drugs. They raided a pharmacy in my town, at the same time, in Newburyport, Mass. Again, no charges. it’s run by a very nice guy, Louis, he’s about 85.

T: Did anyone apologize to you?

A: No. And it’s not necessarily over. They never say, sorry, and by the way, you have a clean bill.

T: Wait. So they can just show up with guns at your house, not explain why they’re there,

A: That’s right.

T: Steal all your stuff. And then never charge you, much less convict you. And that just kind of hangs over your head.

A: It hangs over your head and if I had called my lawyer prior to this, he would have said, absolutely not. You are not going on Tucker Carlson’s show, because, as you know, you’re still under Federal investigation. Any doctor — any doctor in America, if you said, did you ever have to wonder if you could call in prescriptions around the country for pharmacies, would say, I don’t know. I’ve done it. Is that a bad thing, if they fill it? But, if they find out that any single doctor did that, for instance, they can make a beef about it. So this is a way to shut people up. Right. Because anybody can be messed with.

[snip]

The reason I’m here … is I don’t like being shut up. It’s safer not to. Really safer. [my emphasis]

That’s important context to the interview: Slightly more than four years after the DEA search and more than five after Hunter Biden left his care, Ablow is claiming that if anything were to happen to him, it would be because he opened his mouth. The timing of this is important.

Unless someone were charged with a continuing conspiracy through the time Rudy Giuliani started disseminating the laptop, the statute of limitations on Ablow’s hypothetical role would have expired. They would not have, though, on any drug-related crimes that continued through February 2020. “You’re still under federal investigation,” Ablow’s lawyer would say to him.

It as if he’s saying that if he were charged with drug-related crimes, it would be because of his role in the Hunter Biden caper.

That claim came even as Ablow falsely claimed to have protected Hunter’s privacy. He did so, several times, when describing how he came to sit on Hunter’s laptop for a year. In the first instance, he described that, generally, he has no interest in someone’s private life.

T: How did Hunter Biden’s laptop end up in your office or your house?

A: Well, I think that texts and emails that exist would prove out that, you know, he leaves laptops places.

T: Yeah?

A: Despite my saying to him, pick it up, dude, along with your Loro Piana clothes, because they’re my size and I might wear them [laughs], or keep them, he didn’t. And so there it was. And it was taken.

T: You knew it was in your house.

A: Oh yeah. It was … locked up.

T: And you told him, you left your laptop at my place, pick it up, and he didn’t?

A: Correct. Multiple times. [Funny mouth gesture]

T: And so, what happened next? I mean, did you look at the laptop?

A: No. That’s why this theory from Hunter’s pal and benefactor — his lawyer — Kevin Morris is absurd. Cause they could open it up. He has it back! And they could do some sort of forensic look at it. Not only did I never open the lid, I never turned it on, I have no interest in looking at somebody’s private stuff. [my emphasis]

But then prodded by Tucker, he claimed to have Hunter’s secrets independent of the laptop and then shared what he claims Hunter’s diagnosis was — cocaine dependency.

T: But you were his shrink. So you would know his secrets anyway.

A; Exactly.

[Cackling from Tucker.]

A And I don’t have to look at his laptop to know his secrets and his secrets are safe with me, which is why if you have a lawyer, I’ve said this before, if you have a lawyer who represents you, and you allow that lawyer to suggest that your shrink is a scumbag, then I give you a diagnosis, additionally, besides, cocaine dependence, which is scumbag.

T; Yeah.

A: Because that, I made clear to a few people, who suggested, you should have turned it over. Look what you had! You could have helped America! No no no. You don’t understand. This is sacred. This is like a blood oath. If you think I’m gonna be on my death bed, and look my kids in the eyes and say, well I was the one who made it kind of confidential, when you go to a psychiatrist. Uh uh. Like I’m willing to die for that. I’m not breaking confidentiality with a patient, ever. That’s, like, one of those tripwires. [my emphasis]

He has no interest in looking at private stuff, Hunter’s secrets are safe with him, and he wouldn’t break confidentiality, he said, after claiming to repeat a diagnosis that would be useful for prosecutors in the gun case.

The most telling example of Ablow violating Hunter’s privacy, though, is Ablow’s thinly veiled description of his opinion regarding Hunter Biden’s ills. As Ablow explained to Tucker how he (used to, when he had a license, which again he doesn’t mention) helps clients reclaim their own story, he spoke about a hypothetical patient who exactly matches Hunter Biden. His description pitched a claim that Hunter was ordered to earn money for the family by the Bidens — something Hunter expressed when complaining about his financial woes, but something that had far more to do with his divorce than his father. Which is how he insinuated Joe Biden doesn’t love his son.

They suffer depression, anxiety, all manner of things, when their stories are not known to them. When they think of people, let’s say, in the family, or others or events that unfolded as beneficial to them when they were, let’s say, very bad for them. They need to recast the characters that they thought were the heroes in their lives and say, maybe not. Maybe when I abandoned my self, my interest, to take a common example, maybe when I allowed myself to not pursue that real passion of mine because I wanted to satisfy people around me, maybe that means that those people didn’t love me as much as I thought they did. Right? Now, that’s an incredible epiphany, when that happens. If a man, for instance, is supposed to be an artist, and he goes around the globe doing deals, to create wealth for his family, because he’s not sure what else to do because that was assigned to him? That man needs to embrace his art again and reevaluate everyone around him who suggested he not do that. [my emphasis]

We’ve seen this — Ablow minimizing Joe Biden’s love for his son — before. As I showed in this post, Ablow completely rewrote a statement Hunter wrote for a Vanity Fair piece and took out all the love. Ablow replaced this fairly amazing paragraph about Joe Biden … [I’ve left all typos, including the charming, “iOS” instead of “is.”]

The reason people love my Dad Chris iOS because he’s the son they hope to raise he’s the parent they hope to be he’s the brother and friend we all look up to. They love him Chris because he is as real an American as they are and they all want to be. He’s not perfect’ he’s got a horrible temper, he spoils his grandkids, he loves my Mom almost too much and he still thinks he can still make me angrier than anyone on earth sometimes. There’s nobody I want to make more proud of me than my Dad and there’s no-one that I know can ever be more proud of me and my whole family. May Dad never has asked anyone of us to be less human he’s just taught us all what it means to be a good man in hard world. He taught me what his mom and dad taught him “Always remember no man is better than you and you are no better than you.”if er to break I m certain they would all say —no one will ever know you better than your brothers and your sisters you always take their side no matter how badly they screwed up. Every Biden kid knows there’s nothing that they could do to make anyone in this family to stop loving you. And finally always be kind to the people in pain (unless they hurt your grandmother your mom your aunt or your sister- then you’re free to beat the shit out of them if your sister hasn’t beat you to it.) [my emphasis]

With a paragraph that turned Trump’s opponent into a fighter, stripped of his love.

I believe that my father has become an ongoing symbol of what it means to keep on fighting for what is good in oneself, in others and in our country. I can tell you that I wouldn’t be alive today, if my dad hadn’t kept fighting for me, too, through my darkest days. So the idea that tragedy or tough times or any number of trials would dissuade a Biden from serving his fellow man—whether a friend or a fellow citizen—could not be more misguided. My dad has proven, ag ain and again, that he is (as Teddy Roosevelt once said of himself) “as strong as a bull moose” and that America “can use [him] to the limit.”

In an interview in which Ablow advised Tucker to get a dog so he can experience unconditional love, Ablow stole the love Joe has for Hunter, one of the things that has sustained Hunter in sobriety.

Given Ablow’s inconsistent claims about confidentiality and his attack on Joe Biden’s love for his son, take a look at Ablow’s claims about why he got the DEA to give the laptop back to Hunter. As Ablow described it, after the raid he moved immediately to inform the DEA that the Hunter laptop was not his own.

T: So, and then, how did they get Hunter Biden’s laptop?

[describes seizure]

A: And then I immediately called my lawyer and said, look, a patient’s item was taken amongst the things that were mine. It has a sticker on it. It looks different than mine. It’s messy. Mine are clean. His was messy. We have to get it back to him because that’s not okay. And uh, that’s what we did.

[snip]

T: They returned it to him. How did that happen?

A: Well, I did suggest that that would be the right thing for them to do. They made a — they could have made a different decision given that he was under investigation, federally. They didn’t. That’s their business, as to why not. You know it sure put me in a funny position because I had guys like Garrett Ziegler, who’s a far right guy, saying, Keith Ablow must be in business selling drugs with Hunter Biden. He wouldn’t turn over that laptop — he had it all this time. Well, no. It’s patient confidentiality.

He again cited patient confidentiality, the same confidentiality that didn’t prevent him from repeating his diagnosis of Hunter or describing generally what he told Hunter to malign his father’s love. The exclusion of a laptop from a warranted search has nothing to do with patient confidentiality: Ablow has already said that he didn’t look at the laptop. The laptop, at that point, had more to do with Ablow’s rental than with his psychiatric care.

Importantly, Ablow pointed to the fact that he got the DEA to return the laptop to Hunter as proof that he had no role in compromising the other laptop.

I [effected?] the return of Mr. Biden’s laptop to him through my attorney, interacting with the DEA, because that’s the responsible thing to do. Which is, by the way, why Kevin Morris’ theory that Keith Ablow is the source of the laptop originally — he’s the leak — is absurd.

Is it, though? Or did Ablow rush to get the laptop back to Hunter to prevent them from doing a search, to prevent the Feds from seeing the Hunter Biden laptop?

There are two more details of interest. First, note that Ablow is equivocating about what building was — is — next to the cottage Hunter occupied when his digital life got picked up. Yes, that building is currently (as far as I understand it) Ablow’s house. It wasn’t then. It was his office (note Tucker’s reference to house or office above, as if he knows this detail).

It’s an open network of people who have descended in my town. I have a cottage next to mine. They’ve made use of that at times. In order to heal!

It’s very private, etcetera. Of course, not so private if you end up going to dinner many times as we did, in our town, and if you’re a person — [my emphasis]

But in the course of offering up what a private place that cottage is, Ablow let it be known that he and Hunter repeatedly were outside the cottage, in public, at which point the rental cottage would be vacant.

He had nothing to do with the compromise of Hunter’s digital life that occurred while he was staying in the cottage next door to his office, Ablow says. But if it was compromised then and there, he had an alibi: he was out to dinner with Hunter!

Copyright © 2024 emptywheel. All rights reserved.
Originally Posted @ https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/03/07/fresh-off-an-interview-with-vladimir-putin-tucker-carlson-repeats-the-trick-with-keith-ablow/