The serious ramifications of Hunter Biden’s pardon

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Three weeks before the 2020 US election, a very big and very strange story broke in the papers.

We've just learned through explosive documents published by a very fine newspaper, the New York Post.

Donald Trump thought that these documents found on an apparently abandoned laptop belonging to Joe Biden's son Hunter proved that Joe Biden was involved in corrupt business dealings in Ukraine and China.

These emails show that Biden's repeated claim that he has never spoken to Hunter about his business dealings were a complete lie.

It was a total lie.

Trump had been waiting for this story for years.

And this is a big smoking gun.

But this New York Post article seemed suspicious.

The concern is, well, that it's simply bunkum, the result of a Russian hack and misinformation campaign.

The FBI now has the laptop and is investigating possible links to foreign intelligence agencies.

Accusing Western politicians of hypocrisy is the central plank of Russian disinformation campaigns.

And that's what this story did.

Joe Biden was accusing Donald Trump of corruption and being under the influence of foreign governments.

And this story indicated that Biden was doing the exact same thing.

Most global news outlets and social media companies were suspicious too.

The FBI had put everyone on high alert for Russian disinformation.

In the frenzy of that news cycle, I also wrote an article expressing skepticism about the provenance of those emails.

It was not my best work.

And right on queue.

Facebook and Twitter have taken the rather extraordinary step of blocking any link to the New York Post story.

Of course, in the United States of America, land of free speech, this move was like dynamite.

Now big tech, you see what's going on with big tech?

is censoring these stories to try and get Biden out of this impossible jam.

He's in a big jab.

Trump's team accused the U.S.

intelligence community, big tech companies, and the mainstream media of acting like a cabal to protect the Biden family from criticism.

And the thing is, this time, they actually did have a point.

Because these documents weren't leaked as a result of hacking or misinformation.

In fact, they had nothing to do with Russia at all.

This laptop, which was real, has put Hunter Biden at the center of multiple conspiracy theories and criminal investigations.

Those investigations led to prosecutions, which proceeded without interference from Hunter's daddy, I mean, President Biden.

And have you ruled out a pardon for your son?

Yes.

Biden was making an effort to wipe away the conspiracies and restore confidence in the American judicial system after years of turmoil.

But then...

The outgoing President Joe Biden issuing a statement saying he had signed a pardon for his son, alleging Hunter Biden was a victim of political persecution.

It was an extraordinary act.

Call it shocking, hypocritical, compassionate, or whatever, but if your aim is to protect the reputation of the American justice system, this ain't how you do it.

Today I want to look at the potential ramifications of Joe Biden's decision and

why we should have seen it coming all along.

I'm Matt Bevan and this is If You're Listening.

On the 27th of August 2020, just under 10 weeks before the 2020 election, an email came into Rudy Giuliani's inbox that looked very interesting.

It was from someone called John Paul Mac Isaac,

and it said, For almost a year, I have been trying to get the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop to the proper authorities.

Now, for Rudy Giuliani, this was extremely interesting.

Wow!

Because for years, he'd been running a quote-unquote investigation into Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden's family business dealings.

And who knows what they've done.

I mean, it is a crime family.

He was particularly interested in Joe Biden's son Hunter, who had made a whole lot of money trading off the family name in Ukraine and China.

Giuliani's investigation had not gone well at all.

It actually triggered Donald Trump's first impeachment, which we talked about at length in season three of this podcast, I think.

But the email was very enticing, even though the story behind it was odd.

Yeah, well, I mean, it all started when Hunter didn't pay his $85 bill.

That's John Paul Mac Isaac, the guy who sent that email.

He's a Trump-supporting conspiracy theorist who owns a computer shop in Wilmington, Delaware, home of the Biden family.

The world is a blur to him.

He is legally blind.

But with the help of magnification, he's able to operate and repair computers.

On the 12th of April, 2019, a Friday, just before closing time, A man Isaac thought was drunk entered the shop.

You got to remember, he came in, he was a mess.

He He had three laptops.

One of them said Bo Biden Foundation.

This is from a conversation with Isaac on Rudy Giuliani's Common Sense podcast from last year, by the way.

I just thought he was trying to get his dead brother's memories off the laptop.

I felt bad for the guy.

That's why I only charged him 85 bucks.

Due to his vision impairment, Isaac couldn't definitively say that the man dropping off the laptops was Hunter Biden.

But the man did sign the invoice with a scribbly signature that looks remarkably similar to the scribbly signature that Hunter Biden uses on other official documents.

So this apparently drunk man with Hunter Biden's exact signature dropped these broken laptops off, but then never came back to get them.

He never paid his bill and he never answered Isaac's calls.

Oops.

At the bottom of the receipt he signed, it says, equipment left with the Mac shop after 90 days of notification of completed service will be treated as abandoned.

So Isaac treated the laptops as abandoned and started snooping through them.

What he found was 217 gigabytes of Hunter Biden's deepest, darkest secrets.

Bank statements, emails, texts, photos, videos, thousands of them.

You've probably seen some of the stuff that's on this laptop.

The photos of Hunter Biden smoking crack cocaine naked in motel rooms.

But that's really just the tip of the iceberg.

This is the data of a man who decided inexplicably to meticulously document his self-destruction.

You look at it all and go, geez, a lot of this has got to be illegal.

I've read about this stuff a lot before, but It's one thing reading about it and another thing seeing the pictures, the emails, the

texts, and it's honestly way worse than I imagined.

It's clearly genuine too.

This wasn't some AI-generated stuff cooked up in a Russian troll farm.

Unless the reanimated corpse of Dostoevsky or Chekhov is in there calling the shots, I don't think that the Russian cyber squads are capable of coming up with something this desperately sad.

The first memory I have is of lying in a hospital bed next to my brother.

I was almost three years old.

This is Hunter Biden speaking at his brother Beau Biden's funeral in 2015.

I remember my brother, who was one year and one day older than me,

holding my hand,

staring into my eyes, saying,

I love you.

I love you.

I love you

over

and over and over again.

They were in the hospital because they had been in a terrible car accident that killed their mother and their baby sister.

It was 1972.

And in the 42 years since, he never stopped holding my hand.

He never stopped telling me just how much he loves me.

Just before the accident, their father, Joe Biden, had been elected as a U.S.

Senator.

But at their bedside in the hospital, he promised he would resign if necessary.

If in six months or so there's a conflict between my being a good father and being a good senator, which I hope will not occur, I thought it would, but I hope it won't.

I promise you that I will

contact Governor-elect Tribbett, as I had earlier, and tell him that

we can always get another senator, but they can't get another father.

Joe, Bo, and Hunter were very close.

Hunter calls the relationship between the three of them the most profound love I've ever known.

Both Bo and Hunter got married and had kids.

Hunter got into corporate law and consulting.

Bo became Attorney General of Delaware.

But then he died of brain cancer.

Beau's was the hand everyone reached for in their time of need.

Bose was the hand that was reaching for yours before you even had to ask.

Bose's death unmoored Hunter.

Within months, he was separated from his wife, abusing alcohol and crack cocaine, and had started a relationship with Beau's widow, Hallie.

He would disappear for weeks at a time on drug-fueled benders, some of which produced strange voice memos.

I am Theimos.

You think that you know me,

but you do not.

You think that you see me,

but you cannot.

He was living in motel rooms, cooking his own crack and smoking it every 15 to 20 minutes.

He was partying with sex workers and basically didn't sleep.

You think

that you love me, but you do not.

I am Deimos.

He wouldn't answer phone calls, even from his father.

Joe left a series of voicemails begging his son to get help.

Gotta get some help.

I don't know what to do.

I know you don't either, but

I'm here no matter what you need.

No matter what you need.

I love you.

Despite the drugs and the partying, Hunter was being paid millions of dollars consulting for companies in China and Ukraine.

But he'd never actually got around to paying the tax on that income.

He insists that he was qualified for the work he was doing for these companies, but admitted to ABC America that his qualifications probably weren't the reason he got the gig.

If your last name wasn't Biden, do you think he would have been asked to be on the board of Burisma?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Probably not.

Three years after Bo's death, Hunter was asleep in Hallie's house in Delaware.

Hunter had got her into drugs as well, but she had been sober for a couple of months.

She decided to search his truck to make sure that there were no drugs in it, but what she found was a.38 caliber revolver.

Panicking, she put the gun in a bag and decided to get rid of it.

CCTV footage from a nearby supermarket shows Hallie Biden arrive, get the gun out of her car and put it in a dumpster.

When Hunter found out, he was furious.

Hallie went back to retrieve the gun, frantically searching through the dumpsters.

But the gun was gone.

Someone had found it and handed it in to the police.

Basically the only good decision anyone in this entire story made.

Now the police had the gun.

And that was a problem because when Hunter bought the gun 11 days earlier, he had signed a legally binding form saying that he was not a drug user or a drug addict.

But he was.

He wrote about it in his memoir.

Smoking crack cocaine every three days soon became smoking every two days, then every other day, then every hour of every day.

In March 2019, his family tried to stage an intervention.

His father, the former vice president, said, I don't know what else to do.

Please tell me what to do, as he clutched his only living son in the dark driveway of his Delaware home.

Anything, please, Joe cried.

The next month and a half is a drug-befuddled blur.

And then, a couple of weeks later, a man smelling of alcohol, who was almost certainly Hunter Biden, handed in three laptops to a repair shop owned by John Paul Mac Isaac.

Now, if you found all this stuff on a laptop belonging to the son of a major party candidate for president of the United States, what would you do?

I mean, it's weapons-grade, highly enriched gossip, for sure, but is it anything other than that?

John Paul MacIsak was convinced that it was.

So a lot of the sensationalized stuff, a lot of the porn and the drugs and whatnot.

But I also saw some financial documents and I saw the name Burisma come up a lot related to a lot of money.

Burisma is the Ukrainian company which Hunter worked for and which Rudy Giuliani was convinced was connected to Joe Biden in some corrupt way.

You start seeing that Joe did meet with the foreign people from Bereth

and he was lying about that.

You can see that they set up meetings with the Ukrainians, with the Chinese.

The thing is, though, you really have to make a few logical leaps to get to evidence of Joe Biden being corrupt.

You have to really want to see it in between the lines of what's actually on the laptop.

But Isaac was exactly the kind of guy who would see that stuff.

First, he handed the laptop to the FBI, hoping that it would be used to help Trump and prosecute the Bidens.

But then when the FBI seemingly didn't do anything with the laptop at all, he became worried that he was at risk of being killed if Joe Biden won the election.

The FBI knew.

How long do you think the FBI would have taken to brief in the inquiry?

Hey, boss, what do you want us to do with this guy?

Yeah, yeah.

And who knows?

I would have been hit by a car and nobody would have done it.

And who knows what they've done?

I mean, it is a crime family.

So he became determined to make the information public, which is why he looked up how to send an email to Rudy Giuliani.

By the time the story came out, just before the U.S.

election, Hunter Biden was sober.

He'd met a woman in California, detoxed, and married her all within a week.

Yes, Hunter Biden seemingly got his entire life back together in less than the time it takes to play two cricket tests.

My son

and my son,

my son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people we know at home, had a drug problem.

He's overtaken it.

He's fixed it.

He's worked on it.

And I'm proud of him.

Unfortunately for Hunter, getting sober is great, but it's not enough to get you out of trouble.

The U.S.

US president-elect's son, Hunter Biden, has revealed his tax affairs are being investigated.

Just after the 2020 election, news came out that the tax man was interested in exactly what the deal was with all that Ukrainian and Chinese income.

It comes at an awkward time for Joe Biden as he assembles his cabinet, including appointing an attorney general who could oversee the investigation.

Now, theoretically, Joe Biden could have pardoned his son on the first day of his presidency, in the car on the way home from the inauguration ceremony.

But he didn't.

And there's a good reason for that.

Donald Trump had been the subject of multiple investigations throughout his presidency, all of which he described as politically motivated witch hunts.

After he left office, it was assumed that he would face further investigation and potentially criminal prosecution.

By allowing the parallel investigation and potential prosecution of his son to proceed, Joe Biden was able to make the case that the system was fair.

The pursuit of Trump was legitimate, not a witch hunt.

But this investigation was hugely damaging for Joe Biden, both personally and politically.

There's no evidence to support the allegations that my father was financially involved in my business because it did not happen.

This is Hunter speaking to the press outside a congressional hearing.

The contents of his laptop were being used as the basis for wild conspiracy theories about the president.

Cherry-picking lines from a bank statement, manipulating texts I sent, editing the testimony of my friends and former business partners,

and misstating personal information that was stolen from me.

Eventually, these conspiracy theories led to an impeachment inquiry, alleging that the president's Ukraine and China policies were shaped by corruption.

No matter how many times it is debunked, they continue to insist that my father's support of Ukraine against Russia is the result of a non-existent bribe.

After years of investigation by Congress and the Justice Department, the only person prosecuted was Hunter for not paying taxes during his years-long bender and lying about being sober while buying the gun that Halle subsequently chucked in that dumpster.

Throughout the process, Joe Biden was asked repeatedly if he would pardon his son.

He repeatedly ruled it out.

And this is something that left-wing commentators repeatedly praised him for.

Because the justice system that convicted his only surviving son is the same justice system he's vowed to protect.

And if that doesn't tell you who Joe Biden is, I don't really know what does.

But Donald Trump told Fox News that he was convinced that if push came to shove, Biden would cave in.

And I'll bet you the father probably pardons him.

Let's see what happens.

And he was right.

On the 1st of December, Joe Biden pardoned his son and, in doing so, took a pot shot at the justice system he had just spent years trying to defend.

Joe Biden issuing a statement saying he had signed a pardon for his son, alleging Hunter Biden was a victim of political persecution.

No reasonable person can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son.

Maybe.

But Hunter also made millions of dollars from foreign companies because he is your son.

He just doesn't like reaping what he sowed.

Trump knew this would happen.

We

probably should have too.

I don't know what to do.

I know you don't either, but

I'm here no matter what you need.

No matter what you need, I love you.

Look, I've got to be honest.

I would probably do the same thing for my son, but I, thankfully, don't have that kind of power at the tip of my pen.

Maybe nobody should.

Joe Biden's term ends in six weeks.

And while he's only been president for four years, he has been in the game a very long time.

He knew this decision would fuel conspiracy theories.

He knew it would give Donald Trump the political license to pardon whoever he likes.

And perhaps most importantly, he knew that it would make people think the system was rigged to benefit the powerful.

Imagine that.

If you're listening, is written by me, Matt Bevan.

This episode was produced by Cara Jensen-McKinnon.

Supervising producer is Jess O'Callaghan.

Audio production is by Anna John.

Next week, Vladimir Putin has suffered a catastrophic setback in his quest for global domination.

The Assad regime, he's propped up for years in Syria, has collapsed.

Meanwhile, he's been forced to recruit North Koreans to support his war effort in Ukraine.

As his global influence seems to recede, there is a fierce political battle underway in the nation of Georgia, just to Russia's south.

The key question at the center of this is: how scary is Vladimir Putin, really?

That's next on if you're listening.

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