Ep 141 | Will Hunter's 'Laptop from Hell' END Joe Biden? | Miranda Devine | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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We are currently in the middle of a scandal of biblical proportions, and yet it's pretty quiet on the Western Front.

The Watergate of our time is happening right now, and like most scandals, it began with a mundane event, a MacBook Pro computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware.

Had a computer that just wasn't being picked up.

On that waterlogged computer, there were 11 gigabytes of damning information, 22,000 emails ranging from 2009 to 2019.

In October of 2020, mere weeks weeks before the presidential election between Trump and Biden, the New York Post published a smoking gun article exposing the whole scandal.

Almost immediately, within a couple of days, 51 former senior intelligence officials, including John Brennan, released a statement saying that the New York Post reporting had all of the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation operation.

The only problem with that statement is it's reversed.

The 51 people were the disinformation.

Big tech platforms blocked people from sharing the story,

citing that it was hacked material, even though it wasn't.

It led to a coordinated suppression of the story, brushing it off as a conspiracy theory in Russian disinformation campaign.

Twitter locked New York Post's account for two weeks before the election.

NPR proudly told their audience they didn't want to waste their time on stories that aren't really stories.

Really?

The entire media parroted this.

This looks like your classic disinformation campaign.

Could actually be part of Russia's latest and very massive disinformation campaign in the U.S.

presidential election.

A Russian hack and dump operation.

A Russian operation.

That is Russian misinformation.

U.S.

authorities are seeing if those emails we just talked about are connected to an ongoing Russian disinformation effort.

This is a Russian misinformation campaign.

A classic example of the right-wing media machine.

The right-wing is going crazy with all sorts of allegations about Biden and his family.

Too disgusting to even repeat here.

Unbelievable.

So that's what they did.

And then last month, I think it was on paragraph 24, the New York Times quietly admitted, oh yeah, that laptop thing is real.

Except they're reframing the story now to have nothing to do with the president.

Another lie.

As a reporter and columnist for the New York Post, today's guest found herself in the middle of all of it.

She's written a book, Laptop from Hell, Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide.

It documents the entire scandal, and it is

gross in multiple ways.

Today on the Glenn Beck podcast, welcome Miranda Devine.

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Hi, Miranda.

Hi, Glenn.

Great to talk to you.

Good to talk to you.

Thank you for

actually doing the work on all of this.

Your book is

tough to read at times.

Well worth it, but it's hard to read.

I got to imagine it was difficult to write and research.

Look, it really was.

I mean, there's so much disgusting material on there, for one thing, all of Hunter's porn and porn videos and so on.

But also, it's just a complete mess.

And so to try and dig down and find the gems, you know, it really was like rock mining.

You know, you might toil for hours and then there's the diamond that you find that kind of is the key to a lot of other issues.

But in fact, that laptops are not enough.

You need other material to add to it.

So

let me start kind of where you started in a way.

You start very at the beginning with compassion, and I'd like to kind of go there.

Can you tell me who

what happened to Hunter?

I know he, you know, his brother died.

They were in a car accident.

He was about three.

You outline that very well in the book, but when does he really become,

which is it, cane?

to the able or able to the cane when does he go when does he go dark

Look,

I think you have to really go back to that car crash when he was two, his brother Bo was three, they were quite badly injured, and their mother was killed and their baby sister.

And at that moment, I guess Joe Biden had a choice.

He could

stay behind in Delaware and be the father to his now motherless boys, or he could continue on to Washington to this glittering career that he'd dreamed of and

just sort of fluked by a few thousand votes to become the senator for Delaware.

And he made the choice to go to Washington.

And he says that he used to come home every night and

see his kids on the train on the Amtrak.

And his two boys were looked after well, it seems, by his sister, who really worshipped, hero-worshipped,

this is Val Biden, hero-worshipped Joe, and gave up her career.

And in fact, her first marriage broke up, I assume, because of this.

She moved into his house and was played mother to the two boys.

And from what Hunter says, he was very happy and he loved her very much.

And also Joe's mother cared for them as well.

But Joe basically did abandon them.

I mean, it's a big career.

Even if he did come back every night, he was only back in time to kiss them, I'm told, you know, while they were sleeping.

So they didn't really see much of their father basically lost their mother pretty much lost their father but the real crunch for Hunter seemed to come when he was about seven and Joe married Jill Biden this younger divorced school teacher

one little anecdote I'll tell you about Jill Biden she wore a full-length fur coat into a pizza joint in Delaware in Wilmington when she was dating Joe and that was remarked upon and remembered by the the locals for a long time anyway she was a sort of a younger glamorous blonde and she didn't really have any

knowledge about bringing up two who were at that stage quite rambunctious little boys, as boys are at, you know, seven and eight.

And

Hunter was particularly rambunctious.

His older brother, Beau, just one year and one day older than him, was the golden boy, literally the golden boy, blonde hair, sunny.

features, a very easygoing and easy boy to look after.

Hunter was a rather darker figure.

He was, you know, maybe a bit ADHD.

He was much more impetuous and his older brother really, Bo looked after him.

But I think from what Hunter says, his relationship with Jill never really got off to a great start.

She just didn't know how to manage him and she and Bo had a good relationship and Hunter says that he always felt excluded.

And he also talks bitterly about how she would spend, you know, go off to the golf course and ignore him.

And that that little enclave, that very wealthy enclave, a Greenville, Delaware, sort of just outside of Wilmington, there were a lot of kids, teenagers, when they were growing up, who got into drugs.

And I'm told by people who went to school with

the Bidens that Hunter and his sister Ashley hung out with the sort of druggy group, the cool group, I guess.

And drugs were just rife in that era so Hunter talks in his own memoir about at a very young age six or so

going to some function with his father some electoral function and scooting under a table and drinking vodka I think it was or some sort of alcohol that was his first drunken moment when he was 18 he was arrested by police for I think it was just I think it was smoking weed anyway and that might have been weed or it might have been some other drug but anyway he was busted for drugs by the local police when he he was still at school that

that

record was sort of expunged later on

and I think that he was sort of dabbling but he married a very nice woman

another Catholic Kathleen

and they had three young daughters and he seemed to be in in that era

as a young married man in Washington DC working as a lobbyist.

He seemed to be okay.

He seemed to be sober.

I know people who were friends of his at that time, and they thought he was just a normal family guy.

But

at some point, he fell off the wagon, started drinking a bottle of vodka a day, frequenting strip joints around Washington, D.C., cheating on his wife, left, right, and center, and then got into crack.

And then his marriage disintegrated and so on.

But he's always had this

streak.

So, so

when you're looking

at him,

how does he view his relationship?

You know, in reading some of the emails from the laptop,

he seems to be crying out for love and attention, which would make sense with what you just said.

But he also seems to resent his father, maybe, and

what he says, the role he's had to play for the family

in making the money for the family, and then dad taking 50% of that.

Can you go into that at all, the relationship with the family and the brother and how this,

I mean, I really, to me, it looks like a crime family.

How does this work?

What roles does everybody play?

Well, that's insightful of you because he really, Hunter was very ambivalent about his father and his brother.

He hero-worshipped his father and his brother.

He really does love them, but by the same token, he really resents the fact that

he's always been seen as the little brother trailing along behind the golden boy.

Joe Biden has this sort of old-fashioned idea of the firstborn son.

He was the firstborn son.

Joe Biden was put on a pedestal by his family.

And so he put Beau on a pedestal.

And, you know, everybody else's role in Joe Biden's own family was to serve the great number one son.

And it was the same way with Hunter Biden.

He was expected to, you know, be at Beau's service.

And the way it worked was Joe Biden and Beau Biden were political.

Joe had great hopes as a you know, a guy who was trying to imitate the Kennedy clan without the money.

He saw Beau Biden as his, you know, JFK, his golden boy, the president who would carry the Biden legacy.

And

so Beau Biden and Joe were supposed to stay squeaky clean when it came to money.

And Hunter Biden was assigned the role as the bagman of the family, as the earner.

So straight out of college,

I mean, basically, Joe got him into Yale, law school.

You know, strings were pulled.

Straight out of there, he got him into a grace and favor job with one of his big donors in Delaware, MBNA, a big credit card company that had benefited a lot from Joe Biden's favours that he did them in the Senate.

And so, you know, Hunter was getting these jobs at wildly inflated salaries.

And with that money, he was expected to pay and did pay, and was bitterly resented that he had to pay bills for the family.

He paid his tuition and his brother Bo's tuition, for instance.

And

entire extended Biden family,

Hunter was the rainmaker.

And

he got these jobs not through anything.

I mean, his entire CV is built on jobs and deals that he only got through his father.

And so that was...

That was the scheme.

Joe would manipulate

his power and influence and do favors, a lot of Tammany Hall style favor trading that he's been doing for decades, four decades in Delaware from his earliest days.

And the money, the bribes, let's call them, the favors

went to Hunter, also his brother Jim Biden, Joe's younger brother Jim Biden, who also was very much at Joe's service all his adult life.

And also,

it wasn't always cash.

I mean, it was just the Biden extended family lived a life of immense privilege.

Everything that, you know,

entry into Ivy League colleges,

you know, judge clerkships,

you know, overseas postings, government sinecures, you name it, whatever was there for the taking,

they just were like in a candy shop.

They would have whatever they wanted.

And it's ironic then, you know, hearing Joe Biden rail against white privilege on his family was the very embodiment of it.

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When you look at Joe Biden, because I want to come come back to Hunter, but I want to look at his brother and Joe first, Joe and Jim.

Did they grow up corrupt?

I mean,

where did this

seeming

lack of any kind of integrity

and

familial enrichment come from?

Do you have any idea?

Yeah, look,

there is so much mythology that Joe Biden has built around his family origins.

And in fact, his entire life is a myth.

And you see, he lives in a fantasy world.

The lies and the plagiarism are all symptoms of that.

But

he's done this from an early age.

And I think in part it's because

his father, he talks about as, you know, this very rich man who rode with the hounds and played polo.

And apparently he did.

I mean, he lived in in Long Island and

this is Joe Sr.

and

mixed with the sort of

like the great Gatsby style families then but but lived in modest circumstances and was aspirationally a social climber and that was very important to him he dressed very well just as Joe Biden dresses very well now now something happened I haven't quite got to the bottom of it something happened to Joe Biden senior many lies have been told about it.

It's been hidden from family folklore, but I'm told that it was something that reflected poorly on his integrity.

This was a great blow to the family.

They had to move back in with Joe's mother's family in Scranton.

This were the Finnegans.

And there's a fabulous black and white photo that I found of

Joe's parents

and his mother's parents outside this house, you know, quite nice house in Scranton.

And they're dressed up in their sort of Sunday finest, looking quite somber and respectable,

very lace curtain Irish, respectable.

And then, but there's this very handsome, devil-may care,

dark, tall, dark, and handsome man there, and that's Joe's father.

And he's got a cheeky grin on his face, and he's holding a high ball.

You know, he's holding a drink in his hand.

So

he obviously,

you know, he was a mischief maker.

He was in all sorts of trouble, but I guess fun and an adventure.

He tried all sorts of different jobs.

He had a very good job.

His father got him at the local

DuPont, one of the DuPont businesses.

And his father was a quite senior manager.

And so he got his son this job.

But obviously, Joe Sr.

thought this was a boring job and

basically uprooted his wife and

young child and tried a few different jobs.

He went into business with a relative who had a really lucrative job during the war

spray painting some sort of epoxy or some sort of coating onto marine ships.

And so Joe Sr.

could have made money there, but he wanted to move on.

He started a crop dusting business in Long Island and various other things, furniture business.

They all collapsed.

And so.

With an exception of his dad's success,

this sounds very Kennedy.

Yeah, yeah, except that his father never made anything with himself.

And he ended up, tail between his legs, you know, I guess wanting to get out of the in-laws' house.

It was quite cramped because there were other relatives there.

And they moved away then to Delaware, and he got a job as a used car salesman.

But the mythology that he built up around his own life, that I guess his wife did, Joe imbibed that from an early age, that you tell tall tales to make yourself look better.

And you have him, in some ways, Joe Biden being

Joe P.

Kennedy, right?

Isn't that the father, Joe Kennedy?

And then

the chosen son dies.

And then the next son is John F.

Kennedy, and he's known as a screw-off in the family, but he pulls it together and they build this empire.

That's kind of what happened, except Joe just became the president instead, which Joe P.

Kennedy would have done, I think, if he would have run out of sons.

Yeah.

I mean, look, I think you're looking at Hunter, you're saying Hunter is Ted Kennedy, really.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But really.

But with a crack habit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I mean, Joe would love our talking about him and the Kennedys in the same breath because really he was obsessed by them, I guess, as you would be growing up in his era and as an Irish Catholic.

So

we now have

the death of Bo,

and that's 2017, right?

Something like that.

2015, I think.

2015.

2015, I think.

So Hunter's marriage is falling apart.

He's doing drugs, everything else.

Is he a good lawyer even or good business?

When he's sober, was he good at anything other than graft?

No, not really.

I mean, look, every job he had was through his father, and he didn't like doing this stuff.

He wanted to be an artist, he wanted to be an author.

I mean, he was, when he first met his wife, he was, you know, reading Kerouac and sort of being a poet.

And he sort of had this romantic notion of himself like that.

And, but, you know, family loyalty, or I mean, he had a role within the family and he had to fulfill it and

he

look I've seen no evidence that he ever did anything that was useful and his partners that I've talked to have said that he was useless.

He was just the halo effect.

It was just the Biden name.

He barely answered his emails

and and look he was off his face for most of the nine years that the laptop covers

He was pretty much continually on drugs with rehab stints in between.

So you have him

his marriage is breaking up.

He's on crack.

he's cheating on his wife, they break up with

his sister-in-law.

Oh, that happened while

Beau was alive?

Look, I'm not going to say that because I haven't got evidence for it.

Some people say that.

Kathleen,

Hunter's ex-wife, believes

that they were on, Hunter and Hallie,

the widow of Beau, were on within days of the funeral.

And they certainly were very familiar with each other

early on.

And

so

he kind of wrecks her life.

She ends up doing crack, right?

Yeah.

And how does that one end?

Well, look,

she was quite sensible.

Their relationship was almost entirely stormy and tormented.

There's, you know, so many.

He's like a little girl in his text exchanges with her.

He's endlessly talking about his emotions and how aggrieved he is.

Whereas he's cheating on her, he's doing drugs, he's lying to her, and yet he's acting aggrieved with her.

The women in Hunter's life are boundlessly forgiving because I guess everybody falls for or believes or, I mean, it's true really, that he's a lost little boy,

lost his mother.

he's sort of arrested development obsessed with his penis always photographing it

and

so women I mean you you can't help but feel that kind of maternal love for some a real broken boy who's who's in in some ways

you know a very affectionate I guess you know there are things about him that are appealing so Hallie loved him but you know it was obviously I mean there was guilt involved

the drugs the drugs were terrible I mean, there's one email exchange, or I think text exchange between Ashley Biden, who's Hunter's stepsister, who's Jill's daughter,

and the sister of Hallie Biden, who he was having the affair with.

And she's gone and visited Hallie and Hunter at a house they were living in in Delaware with Hallie's children.

And she's just disgusted by how open their drug use is.

She said, I went in there, their drug paraphernalia is everywhere.

The place is a mess.

You know,

the drug dealers are outside.

What if the cops run

a license plate search on it?

She's the widow of the Attorney General of Delaware, which was Beau.

Oh my gosh.

He's the son of the vice president.

This could be a scandal.

You've got to do something about it.

And Ashley herself had drug issues.

She was in rehab a lot, but she could recognize this sort of open recklessness of the life that Hallie and Hunter were living at that stage.

And they were living a few miles from Joe and Jill Biden.

And that's what Ashley was saying.

You know, mom and dad come over to the house and their drug paraphernalia is in open sight.

So,

what triggers

how does this get so far out of control?

So far, it seems like local Delaware and some banks and everything else.

But then to

graduate to oligarchs and China and

Moscow, you are in a different world.

How do you know how does that happen?

How do they go from, yeah, I got my son a job and he's going to get some graft over here to

an international crime family?

Well, I mean, Joe became vice president.

That's what changed.

I mean, he just internationalized this influence peddling scheme that he and his family had perfected for four decades in Delaware.

And, you know, now you had, instead of, you know, credit card companies in Delaware, you had oligarchs in Russia and you had President Xi Jinping in China and all his state-owned enterprises.

And I feel like the Chinese had been cultivating Joe Biden from early days.

He went over to China as one of the first senators to go there on sort of an official trip and was whined and dined and came back and was waxing lyrical about how wonderful the Chinese were to the point where the Weekly Standard mocked him and just said, you know, what a joke it was that he was, you know,

basically, you know, a

bought-up spokesman for the Chinese, for the CCP.

So

he was ripe for the plucking.

And so when President Xi Jinping became vice president,

he sort of sought out, there were many meetings and President Obama, Joe Biden claims, said to him that he should get friendly with the vice president when he was vice president, the two vice presidents who get together.

So that's why Joe Biden boasts a lot about all the hundreds of hours he's had face to face with Xi Jinping.

And they have known each other for a long time.

And Xi Jinping is a chemical engineer, highly intelligent.

And

what he made of Joe Biden's tall tales and babbling, who knows?

But obviously he saw a weakness here.

And

so there's a lot of conversation, sort of coded speeches and so on, both of them that are on the public record, where Joe Biden talks often about the personal relationship and how we show each other our fealty by our personal relationships.

And

all this stuff, which is, and then President Xi saying, well...

we're going to open up China to foreign investors.

And, you know, this is a time when Joe Biden is vice president with carriage for

China and obviously Russia and Ukraine as well.

And Obama really kind of stepped out and relinquished his responsibility to Joe Biden.

And so Joe was representing the United States of America.

He was, you know, the second most powerful man in the world.

And he was out of his depth and easily led and also very venal.

So when he flew his son Hunter, the bagman,

into Beijing in 2013

for these high-level meetings with President Xi Jinping and the top CCP members.

Joe Biden, when Hunter walked down the steps of Air Force Two, it was crystal clear to the Chinese what was happening.

You know, I've said this before, but it was this was, you know, American power come to do private business.

Hunter Biden was recognised by the Chinese as what they call a princeling because, you know, in these countries, you don't pay the bribe to the top official, you pay it to their son or their daughter.

And so Hunter came with the imprimatur of Joe.

Joe went into a private meeting and shook hands with his

new business partner who was tipping him into 10% of this private equity fund, BHR,

that ended up having $2.5 billion of funds under management.

It's important, I think, to point out that Even Goldman Sachs didn't have this.

No one had a deal like Hunter Biden did.

No one did.

And he had no experience in this.

No.

Very good point.

Exactly.

So what is the

first of all?

Well, let me ask this first.

What did the Chinese get out of this?

Is there anything?

Because this is

the word game I'm hearing now.

A,

Joe didn't know anything about it.

And there's no record of any tit for tat.

There's no record of any favors being done for the Chinese.

Well, I mean, it's just corruption.

You know, you corrupt the future president of the United States

and you have blackmail opportunities.

You don't even have to outright blackmail, just gently, you know, press your case.

You know, if you, if you, you own the guy that you have corrupted effectively.

Right.

And so I don't know.

I can't read inside Joe Biden's mind whether he is compromised.

But, I mean, certainly, you know, any reading of corruption anywhere in the world,

when

the son of a top official is given millions of dollars, that person is compromised.

I mean, that's why there are rules against it.

Right.

So

I don't know.

And it's the same thing with Russia and Ukraine.

Also, millions of dollars went from those countries and oligarchs there into the coffers of the Biden family and their associates.

I mean, we have the receipts for those, and Senators Johnson and Grasley have been like posting them up in Congress for the last few weeks.

And their inquiry was, their investigation was brilliant.

They had, you know, the financial trail, the money trail that only they could get from the Treasury Department of these suspicious activity reports.

Again, millions of dollars flowing into Biden and associate bank accounts.

So it's just, it's not a question of whether the money came in, and it's not a question of whether Joe Biden is implicated

because it's his son.

But there is also evidence on the laptop that he financially benefited, that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden's finances were commingled in extraordinary ways.

The extraordinary

email that always hits me, and I don't know if it's true or not, but he said, you know, you guys haven't had to do all this dirty work of dad.

I'm the one doing it.

And then I'm the one who has to pay 50% or whatever the percent was to dad.

Is that true?

Or is that just the writings of a drug addict?

Well,

I couldn't find evidence that he paid 50% to dad, which is what he said.

But I did find evidence of payments to dad, but also just they had shared bank accounts, they had shared

debit accounts,

which is

money.

Yeah.

And money would come in to,

you know, like there's a tax refund check for Joe that went into one of their shared bank accounts and there's discussion there about what to do with it.

You know, Hunter's business partner, Eric Schwarren, kind of ran all his tax and covered for him when he was off on a vendor.

He was also helping Joe Biden with his mortgage and had access to his accounts.

And, you know, I mean, there's just just this, the Delaware grand jury

and the investigators there,

you know, all they have to do is pull on some threads.

They've got access to those bank accounts.

I know they've subpoenaed bank accounts to do with

Hunter Biden and Jim Biden and some of their partners, including Eric Schwarren.

So they know all this.

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Tell me the most disturbing non-sexual.

I mean, I think that says a lot about him, but it's not the important stuff.

Tell me the most disturbing thing you saw from the son of the president of the United States.

What's the one thing that...

People could hang their hat on and go, yeah,

this family should not be anywhere near power.

Well, look, I think the most shocking, the most shocked I was, and then I had to actually push myself away from the computer and just go for a walk and clear my head because I could not believe it.

And, you know, I verified it with other people outside the laptop because a laptop is not enough to put this jigsaw puzzle together.

You need Tony Bobolinski's material, Chuck Grasley's,

and Ron Johnson's material, and so on.

But what I was shocked by was

the final deal that they were doing in this joint venture with CEFC, this Chinese energy company, which is not just a company, it is the capitalist arm of the CCP's Belt and Road Initiative, President Xi's PEP project, which is basically for world domination.

This Belt and Road project moves in, buys up infrastructure in

poor countries, lends them huge amounts of money.

That they could never pay back.

Right.

No.

So China then owes them.

And that's all about China

superseding America as the world's economic superpower.

So this is a, you know, this is a an like, this is an act of war, really, economic war against the United States.

And the Biden family,

Hunter, Jim, and Joe are joint venture partners with CEFC.

Now, to be fair, this is after Joe Biden has left the vice presidency.

But also for the last two years of his vice presidency,

Hunter and his partners have been doing work,

opening doors using his name for the Belt and Road Initiative for CEFC around the world, Romania and Kazakhstan and places.

And so the payments they got were made after Joe stepped down as vice president, but they were for work they did while he was vice president.

So, you know, they were canny like that.

But anyway, the shocking thing was when I found that there was a deal that was being done between President Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin for China to buy a big chunk of Rosneft, which is the Russian state-owned energy company.

And that was a deal that was being brokered by CEFC on behalf of President Xi.

This would have shaken the geopolitical power structure.

It would have been terribly damaging for the United States.

This was China and Russia getting into bed together reluctantly on Putin's part.

He didn't really want to do that, but he was forced to because there were some really punitive sanctions placed on Russia after the downing of MH17 over Ukraine.

Remember, I mean,

these countries all come back again.

And that was the roots of the problem.

And so he was forced into the arms of President Xi, who's obviously his country is energy poor.

He's desperate for energy.

And so this deal, the biggest deal China had ever done, you know, I can't remember the value, but it was over a billion dollars.

And,

you know, Hunter Biden knew about it and was talking, gossiping about it with people with, you know, Bob Linsky and so on on WhatsApp messages.

He knew that Putin and

Xi were going to meet.

One of their business partners at CEFC, Director Zhang,

posted a photograph of himself negotiating part of this deal with Vladimir Putin and a judo competition in Japan

and this was all Jim Biden who's this bumbling fool Hunter Biden who's his crackhead they are right in the middle of this just mind-blowing power deal between Russia and China that would have affected our national security unbelievably and so that was bad enough but also when you realize that Joe Biden's intention was to

go into business as

part of CEFC America, they were starting up a branch of this Belt and Road initiative in

Hunter's office in Georgetown, and he got name plates made for his father.

and for him and it was guy and also one of the Chinese guys and it the name plate said CFC America he got keys made for his dad his mother and various other people for this office.

Now the only reason CEFC America never got off the ground was because CEFC collapsed when the Southern District of New York arrested one of the CEFC people, Patrick Ho,

at JFK.

And that led to President Xi obviously panicking.

So the chairman of CEFC, Hunter's great mate, Chairman Yi,

who had an apartment penthouse in Limestone Jesus here in Manhattan that Hunter used to go over to all the time and Chairman Yi would cook him dinner and

he was, Chairman Yi was in China, summoned to China, disappeared, believed murdered.

Hunter certainly believes he was murdered.

CFC collapsed.

China had to pay Russia $200 million compensation for that Rosnev deal that blew up.

And that was it.

And this was all, I think, because the Trumps were in, you know, Donald Trump was in.

His Attorney General at the time, Jeff Sessions, had issued this memo to

all the DAs, including the Southern District, that

they had to concentrate now on stopping

Chinese corruption of business and so on in America.

So

whether that was wrapped into the Southern District's desire to go and wrap up Patrick Hove,

he was corrupting United Nations people,

who knows?

But the fact is that that thing collapsed and so the deal never went ahead.

But Hunter still got,

you know, there's evidence of about $13 million that came into the coffers of Hunter and his various business partners.

You know, I've learned something dealing with the left a lot of times, not always, but a lot of times.

They self-diagnose what they accuse someone of doing.

It's usually like, oh, okay, that's what you're doing.

Yeah.

And

the Trump allegations, especially that they go back to Ukraine, is mind-boggling

because

everyone seemed to be using that as a piggy bank money laundering machine.

I don't know, but

it was the corruption from the United States there was big business.

And Joe and his son were a big part of it.

Yeah, and the Clintons.

And the Clintons.

Yeah, I mean.

Yeah, the chutzpah of the Democrats to turn around the corruption that was going on with the Bidens in Ukraine and turn it back on Donald Trump, who, you know, sure, I mean, he was clumsy in the way he went about asking the questions of Zelensky to try and dig into the corruption.

But, you know, so what?

That wasn't anywhere near the malfeasance that was going on.

And

people in the State Department who actually testified

against Donald Trump in his

impeachment,

They had previously, behind the scenes, been voicing their concerns about Hunter earning a million dollars a year from this corrupt energy company, Burisma, while Joe, as vice president, is flying frequently into Kiev and giving these thundering speeches about corruption, lecturing them about getting rid of corruption.

A guy called Amos Hochstein, who is a mid-level guy at the State Department, actually went to Joe in his office and said to him face to face, this is a problem and the Russians are using the fact your son is on this board to just undermine the U.S.

attempts at corruption and to paint us as

bad as everyone else.

And he also, nothing happened.

He also buttonholed the vice president on Air Force 2 on the way to Kiev one time.

Again, nothing happened except that Joe told Hunter to contact Amos Hochstein and have a cup of coffee with him, which he did.

They went and had a cup of coffee near the White House.

Amos Hochstein testified to the Johnson-Grasley inquiry that he didn't say to Hunter that he should step off the board of Burisma because he didn't think it was his role to do that.

But he made it crystal clear that this was a problem for the United States and our interests.

But Hunter did not step off the board until the very last minute of his father's campaign.

So he earned $4 million.

And, you know, it was, I mean, I always come back to, in terms of what Joe Biden is like as a father, because he's always portraying himself as this great father, a great family man.

What father puts his drug-addicted son in front of an unaccountable torrent of cash?

You know, that was when, Hunter even says in his memoir that when the barisma money started coming in, $83,000 a month plus,

that was when the temptation to get back, fall off the wagon, got overwhelming for him.

I have to tell you, I think

one of my problems with the Biden family is,

A, as an alcoholic,

you just destroyed your son.

Okay.

You did everything wrong.

Okay.

And then on top of it, the family, when dad, I mean, I don't mean this with any malice.

Honestly, I don't.

Dad is embarrassed, embarrassing right now.

He is not up to the task.

And, you know, let's say there's no corruption.

The guy had a distinguished career.

And you're going to let him go out like this.

And it doesn't seem like the family has even had a speed bump on that idea.

Or I'd be ashamed if my family, when I got to that point in my life, take the keys away from dad.

Okay, it's time.

It's time.

Does that make sense to you?

There doesn't seem to be any real familial protection

of anything other than money or name.

Yeah, money and power, all the perks that offer spreads, which they all sucked at that

generous tub.

Yeah, but look, Joe Biden was desperate to be president again.

You know,

there were sort of family conferences about it.

And,

you know, I mean, Hunter and a few of the others were

worried because it was going to put the pressure on them.

But they supported his father.

I think Jill Biden is the one.

I mean, where was she when Obama came to the White House and Joe is wandering around being snubbed by the mean girls, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris?

Where was she?

Because Kamala Harris's husband was there, the second gentleman.

He was trailing around ready to rescue Kamala if she needed it.

No one was there.

Where were Joe's staff?

I mean, you know, I'm a great critic of Joe Biden for everything that he's done.

I mean, I think he's compromised America's national security.

He's hopelessly venal.

But

I felt sorry for him.

And also, you don't treat the President of the United States like this.

This is a humiliation for the whole country.

So, you know, I look at, as an alcoholic,

you look back at things that you've done.

And

if you were honest, you would look back and say, okay, did I do that kind of subconsciously to sabotage myself?

Because

subconsciously, I know I'm completely out of control and I want to stop.

Is that why, I mean, is there a chance that's why that laptop was left?

I mean, it was,

was there ever any cry for help on this?

Or is it just the guy is completely out of control and the Secret Service aren't going to stop him?

The government's not going to stop it.

It's just do it until it burns itself to the ground.

Well, look, I...

You know, if you take a Freudian reading of Hunter abandoning his laptop in that MacBook Repair shop in Delaware in April of 2019, just a few days before his father announces his last-ditch attempt to run for president.

You know, the timing itself is suspect, but also if you know, as I do,

the events leading up to that, Hunter was raging against his father and the entire family.

He felt they were disrespecting him.

Here he had spent 30 years earning money for them.

He was now in dire straits.

His business had collapsed.

He was broke.

his life was just a disaster and they were treating him like he was an embarrassment and trying to airbrush him out of the picture.

He was particularly incensed by a Maureen Dowd column that had obviously been backgrounded by, if not Joe, but I mean Maureen's his favorite columnist, as Hunter said, or at least his staff, basically saying that Hunter's just a hopeless mess.

We just need to, you know, ignore him.

Hunter was infuriated by that and

you know, really

kind of was manipulating his father.

And now that there was no bow around, manipulating his father to get his attention and get him under his control, really.

Hunter is very intelligent, much more intelligent than Joe Biden.

So

if you had to, and I know this is a pure guess, but

I've never seen a president be this compromised going in, and everybody knows it.

Everybody knew that that laptop was at least partially true.

Everybody

covered it up, covered for it.

Even Hunter, though, knew

this is going to explode in our face, I think.

So if they go after Hunter and he's facing real prison time,

I don't have the sense that

he's not going to squeal on his dad.

He'll pull, he seems to be the kind of guy that will pull all these people in that have been right alongside him.

So

does Joe ever face justice?

Does Hunter face justice?

And what do the family dynamics tell you on how they're going to handle that?

I don't really see Hunter shocking his father, to tell you the truth.

I think he'll rely on his father using what power he has, which is a lot, to pardon him and to just pull strings and make sure that he's okay.

I think that, yes, there's so much evidence,

you know, whether it be tax evasion, money laundering, foreign lobbying violations

that the grand jury is looking at.

We know that the grand jury has been asking witnesses who is the big guy

and we know that the big guy is Joe Biden.

So they are pulling the threads that would lead them to the president.

Whether they stop before they get there,

you know, who knows.

But I feel that Hunter is going to rely on a pardon, and Joe

will wait, will try and push it out as long as he can to the end of his presidency, whether that be at the 24 election or before.

Let me switch topics.

I saw a video today of Joe Scarborough, who I was shocked that he still had his own show, but apparently it's still on MSNBC.

And

he was saying how horrible this is about Facebook and Twitter and how they buried this story.

Well,

we went back in the archives.

and found him ranting and raving about how evil the post is and how how all of these conservatives knew exactly what they were doing.

And this is all Russian propaganda.

The media is,

I mean, shocking how brazen they are and how stupid they must think we are.

But let's go into the media a bit.

You were there.

You were pulled into this.

What did you think when you first saw that the laptop existed?

How skeptical?

What happened?

Tell me the back story.

Well, I was just at home in Manhattan late one night, and I get a text message from Bob Costello, who's Rudy Giuliani's lawyer, and a serious lawyer.

I mean, he was deputy criminal, head of the criminal division of the Southern District of New York.

So this guy has a mind like a steel trap and very credible.

So he sends me,

I think it was four or five photographs from the laptop and he says

I have something to talk to you about.

This is just to show you he said there's tens of thousands of images and documents.

You know would you be interested in some of course

the next day have a conversation with him and also with Rudy Giuliani.

At that stage they had had the hard drive since end of August and we're talking now the beginning of October and they had done their due diligence on the material as far as they could

on on the hard drive had satisfied themselves both hardcore investigators themselves forensic lawyers and they had satisfied themselves that it was real

sort of at the end of their process they brought Steve Bannon in and asked him for some help on the Chinese side of it but they had enough and they had found what they believed to be a number of crimes and so they sort of itemized them in these long conversations they itemized about the the top five emails, evidence of Joe Biden being involved in Hunter Biden's business dealing, something he'd been telling the American public throughout the campaign that he knew nothing about,

and various other things.

So, and then my excellent colleague, Emma Joy Morris, just did the reporting on it and, you know, basically fact-checked it,

contacting other recipients of the emails to verify they're true.

We sent a reporter down to Delaware to the MacBook Repair shop where John Paul Mac Isaac,

you know, we interviewed him and unfortunately his name got,

or his address or something was leaked out.

And so sad, right?

So sad.

Yeah, but he'll be okay.

He's got a book coming out now.

So that'll, that'll, yeah, and he's, he's just a wonderful man, a real hero, one of the great heroes of this story.

And so,

so anyway, then,

you know, Emma Joe did all her work and the editors and the lawyers were satisfied that we could go with it.

And so, Kaboom,

we hit the button and on October 14, the first story, which was basically around an email that we'd verified, you know, every which way,

which was from a barisma executive to Hunter, thanking him for introducing him to his father in Washington, D.C.

the night before.

And,

you know, that's all we knew at the time.

But the White House just pretended that this hadn't happened.

Joe Biden went to ground.

Immediately within hours of that story

going up online, Facebook and Twitter censored it.

And Twitter, in fact, locked down the New York Post account for the next two weeks until a few days before the election.

Yeah.

And the rest of the media ignored it.

And then five days later came the dirty 51 letter from the 51 top former intelligence people.

Without looking at the laptop, they declared it was Russian disinformation.

Two days after that, obviously, it was designed specifically as a partisan political document for Joe Biden to take into his final debate against Donald Trump and use it to rebut the obvious attack Trump was going to make.

And that's exactly what happened.

And Joe Biden just waved this letter around and said, you know, this is basically the intelligence community is saying that that's just garbage, it's Russian disinformation.

You're making it up.

Can you help me, Miranda?

If I'm lied to

and I put my name out there,

I'm really pissed off as a journalist.

If my sources are telling me something and I realize

you knew the whole time,

I'm really pissed off.

But it doesn't seem like any journalist that was involved in this is upset by what

they did.

and how they covered for this guy.

So I'm left with they all knew they just, they wanted Joe Biden to win, and so they would do whatever they wanted.

Is there any journalist that you have met that is like,

you know what?

I'm pissed and I want this settled.

I want the truth to come out.

No, and they're not acting like it anyway, because the stories that they're writing now say, oh, yeah, you know, we verified the laptop, the emails and so on.

And so now they're just saying saying laptop's real.

But at the same time, they're shaping the narrative again according to the White House line.

And they're saying, yeah, Hunter was a bad guy.

Maybe, you know, maybe Jim was a bad guy, but it's got nothing to do with Joe Biden.

You saw Ron Klain run that line with...

you know, Stephanopoulos on ABC on Sunday.

And it's curious that he would make that statement because it is such an intervention in the U.S.

Attorney in Delaware's investigation.

Because what Ron Klain is saying straight from the White House, straight from the U.S.

Attorney David Weiss's boss or his boss's boss in the White House is

that guy that you're investigating, Hunter Biden, he's innocent.

And oh, don't even think about going near Joe Biden because he had nothing to do with it.

Like, you know, it's just wrong.

And so that's the line that Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and everyone else is running as well.

So

are we really that void of

people

in positions, the Secret Service, the Justice Department?

I mean, they had the laptop long before you saw the laptop.

There was no one that came out and said, even anonymously, that would be willing to come out and say, this is a lie or this is very dangerous.

There was, are we that void of honor in the Secret Service and in justice?

Look, I don't know.

It is really curious.

Obviously, we know of the malfeasance at the top of the FBI.

We know that people like John Brennan, Leon Panetta, you know, James Clapper, Michael Hayden, these people signed that letter.

Every one of those 51 intelligence people who signed that letter is suspect.

I mean, they use the authority of their former high office to wade in and interfere with the election, basically, on behalf of Joe Biden, because it was this existential threat.

Donald Trump was a threat to everything.

They felt that they could traduce their own standards, destroy the credibility of the CIA and the FBI, the NSA and so on,

because that was an it was so important to make sure that Trump didn't win the election.

Everybody corrupted themselves over Donald Trump.

They went mad.

Can you give me some hope?

You know, then again,

let me just make up my own hope and not have you answer that question.

I'm not sure I want the response.

Thank you so much for being on with us.

I really appreciate it, Miranda.

The name of the book is The Laptop from Hell.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

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