Katie Porter's Interview Meltdown, AOC's "Body-Shaming," and the Truth About Biden Corruption, with Link Lauren and Ken Vogel | Ep. 1167

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Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Channel 111 every weekday at Noon East.

Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.

Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.

The leading candidate to be the next governor of California is a nightmare.

It's so fun.

This is the best story.

Have you seen this?

She completely imploded in a spectacular fashion in a new interview simply because she was asked what she would say to voters who supported President Trump to try to get them to vote for her in this gubernatorial race.

I mean, is that so hard?

It's basically like,

what do you say to people on the other side of the aisle whose votes might be helpful to you?

That's it.

This is very foreseeable.

And really not that hard.

You know,

I understand your complaints.

I know there are a lot of of disaffected California Republicans who haven't been at whatever.

That's so easy.

That is a softball question.

We're talking about former Congresswoman Katie Porter, who could not handle the thought of talking directly to Republicans at all.

I mean, it completely froze her brain.

Instead, she tried to shut down the interview because she only wanted to have a quote positive conversation.

I just want a positive conversation.

I'm here for a pleasant experience.

That's actually what she said.

Meantime, former Vice President Kamala Harris is out there on her book tour calling Republicans motherfuckers.

So it's come to that.

Joining me now on all this news and more, Link Lauren, host of Spot On with Link Lauren on the MK Media Podcast Network.

Link will be joining me on the MK Live tour in Fort Worth, Texas, his home state.

That's October 25th at Dickie's Arena.

It's going to be so much fun.

So go get your tickets right now before they sell out.

MeganKelly.com.

If you want to see me and Link together and meet us behind the scenes, too.

You can find all of the 10 stops we'll be making on the tour there at megankelly.com.

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Link, great to see you.

How's it going?

Cannot wait to see you in person.

I know.

I'm so excited to be back in my hometown being from Dallas.

I was just talking to some folks last night who are getting their tickets.

They're coming to the show.

My pitch to everyone listening, come out and have a good girls' night in Fort Worth.

I have so many groups of girls who are coming to Billy Bob's.

They're going to see the stockyards.

They're going to go get drinks, make their way over to the show, nestle in.

And then the last thing I wanted to say is, I know there are a lot of folks who live alone, right?

There might be someone who hasn't gotten off the couch in a week or months.

Come to the show.

Okay, come to the show.

You're going to make friends in line going through security, sitting around you.

Very seldom can you get this many like-minded individuals for a fun night out, okay?

People who have common sense.

So come to the show.

And I'm so excited.

That is my pitch.

I love your pitch.

It's a great pitch.

That's how I feel.

It's like, you know, originally when we were doing the tour, they asked, do you want to just do like two weeks straight where you just go night after night?

And the more we thought about it, the more we're like, people don't want to leave their house on a Sunday night or a Monday night.

You know, like you want to go out a Thursday, Friday, Saturday.

So we're like, let's, let's, let's move it so that it's like a few weekends over the course of a couple of months so that people want to go.

So that's the whole goal.

So like, make it an event.

Come out like a party.

We're going to have a great time.

We're going to have a lot of laughs.

We're going to have smart discussions.

It's like we will make it worthwhile for you to actually get up off your couch, get dressed, and go through security and get in there.

I get it because I am a homebody too.

I don't love to do that kind of thing.

So believe me.

Between the link and yours, truly, we'll make sure it's.

I will do my Jasmine Crockett impression during the show, I promise, in Dallas.

Something tells me, yeah, something tells me the crowd in Dallas might want the Jasmine Crockett impression.

I will do it for you guys.

I'm a martyr.

So get your dance tickets, okay?

Aura

Now, if only we could book Katie Porter, because I think she'd be better than either one of us.

I had no idea she was this entertaining.

None.

I

love everything about this interview.

I don't remember the last time I went and bothered Doug, my husband,

like after seeing something on my phone, like and said, you need to sit down next to me and we need to watch this together next to one another.

And that's what you and I are about to do with this audience,

who, unlike us, have lives and probably are not sitting around watching every minute of Katie Porter because why would you unless you were in this business?

But we're going to do it today because it's our gift to you.

It's our gift.

We screen all the nonsense hits so that you only get the gold ones, members of the audience.

And Link and I would like to bring you the Katie Porter interview.

But here, I'm going to set it up first, okay?

So she's running for governor of California.

She's got the inside track.

And she sits down with this journalist from the local CBS, who's an investigative journalist, who's been doing a series of interviews of all the candidates and asking the same, I don't know, like 10 questions of them.

And it's been going fine.

This is not new in politics.

This is a time-tested way of doing a candidate comparison.

And so she starts off with the other candidates and then eventually she gets to Porter.

Here is a sampling of how it went when she sat down with the other candidates asking the same questions that caused Katie Porter to self-immolate.

Here's Sat two.

6 million voters who voted for Trump is a lot of votes.

Are you going to need those votes in order to win if you're a top two?

I need every vote.

What do you say to those 40% who you may need in a top two California primary?

I think them specifically, I think they're tired of politicians just talking at them.

And I feel like they just want to be heard and they want to listen.

When it comes to redistricting,

are you alienating those Republicans by saying, yes, I support what Gavin Newsom is doing?

You know, look, I would look at the polls of the state.

Right now, the polls say protect California.

Whatever the California customers want, I will be their leader and represent.

Okay, it's not hard.

Literally, you can pivot to something.

You can put whatever you want in there.

Just say something resembling anything.

It's so good.

Okay.

So then sits down Katie Porter.

And the audience, you guys, you need to know, she's long suffered under reports that she's a bully, that she's extremely nasty to her staff and people around her, like not just like a tough boss, but abusive.

She had this crazy thing with her ex-husband where he, he said she was abusive toward him and was like controlled whether or not he could have a phone and was verbally abusive to him.

And like, so like, that's what we knew about Katie Porter before this interview.

The lady seems to have a temper, a temper, temperament problem.

So glad we get to do this together.

Here is the interview that went round the world.

We're going to air these three and a half minutes in full, and you can see for yourselves how it went.

What do you say to the 40% of California voters who you'll need in order to win who voted for Trump?

How would I need them in order to win, man?

Well, unless you think you're going to get 60% of the vote.

You think you'll get 60%.

Everybody who did not vote for Trump will vote for you.

That's what you're saying.

In a general election?

Yes.

If it is me versus a a Republican, I think that I will win the people who did not vote for Trump.

What if it's you versus another Democrat?

I don't intend that to be the case.

So how do you not intend that to be the case?

Are you going to ask them not to run?

No, no, I'm saying I'm going to build the support.

I have the support already in terms of name recognition.

And so I'm going to do the very best I can to make sure that we get through this primary in a really strong position.

But let me be clear with you.

I represented Orange County.

I represented a purple area.

I have stood on my own two feet and won Republican votes before.

That's not something every candidate in this race can say.

If you're from a deep blue area, if you're from L.A., or you're from Oakland,

you don't have an experience.

And you just said you don't need those Trump voters.

But you asked me if I needed them to win.

You don't need to.

I feel like this is unnecessarily argumentative.

What is your question?

The question is, the same thing I asked everybody, that this is being called the Empowering Voters to Stop Trump's Power Grab.

Every other candidate has answered this question.

This is not.

Correct.

I said I support it.

So, and the question is, what do you say to the 40% 40% of voters who voted for Trump?

Oh, I'm happy to say that.

It's the do you need them to win part that I don't understand.

I'm happy to answer the question as you have it written and I'll answer it.

And we've also asked the other candidates, do you think you need any of those 40% of California voters to win?

And you're saying, no, you don't.

No, I'm saying I'm going to try to win every vote I can.

And what I'm saying to you is that...

Well, to those voters.

Okay, so you.

I don't want to keep doing this.

I'm going to call it.

Oh.

Thank you.

You're not going to do the interview with us.

Nope, not like this.

I'm not.

Not with seven follow-ups to every single question you ask.

Every other candidate has answered.

I don't care.

I don't care.

I want to have a pleasant, positive conversation with you ask me about every issue on this list.

And if every question, you're going to make up a follow-up question, then we're never going to get there.

And we're just going to circle around.

I am going to say that.

I have never had to do this before, ever.

Oh.

You've never had to have a conversation with me.

To end an interview.

Okay, but every other candidate has done this.

What part of, I'm me, I'm running for governor because I'm a leader.

So I am going to make.

So you're not going to answer questions from reporters?

Okay, why don't we go through?

I will continue to ask follow-up questions because that's my job as a journalist, but I will go through and ask these.

And if you don't want to answer, you don't want to answer.

So nearly every legislative body.

I don't want to have an unhappy experience with you.

And I don't want this on camera.

I don't want to have an unhappy experience with you either.

I would love to continue to ask these questions so that we can show our viewers what every candidate feels about every one of these issues that they care about.

And redistricting, it's a massive issue.

We're going to do an entire story just on the responses to that question.

And I've asked everybody the same follow-up questions.

It's so good.

I will tell the audience that reporter is Julie Watts, CBS News.

And my own take on it is...

Katie Border's not ready for primetime.

That's obvious.

You could tell from the dress she was wearing, the lighting she accepted, and her absolute meltdown on being asked follow-up questions.

I mean, pretty basic follow-up questions.

But I will say there was something mildly antagonistic about this Julie Watts that I loved.

It was like everything she said was so by the book.

And her tone wasn't bad either.

There was just something very needling about it that it was absolutely delicious.

And Katie Porter,

she was responding a bit to that and also to her own ineptitude mostly.

But that's what made it so compelling is that the reporter didn't give one inch and clearly was like, fuck off, this is happening.

And Katie Porter knew she had humiliated herself and kept looking for the moral high ground, but couldn't get there.

She was desperately trying to get there and just never could.

She obviously ended her campaign.

I mean,

what Californian would vote for that?

I mean, it's going to be tough to come back from.

It honestly felt like a scene from that show, Homeland, when they're doing an interrogation, like one light, one overhead light interrogation.

But Katie Porter, this is what it's like being a Democrat, right?

Joe Biden, people would ask him what his favorite ice cream flavor was.

So I think they've gotten so spoiled, they're not used to actually having real questions.

But none of those were tough questions.

It was like, hey, how are you going to reach the other side of the aisle?

This isn't rocket science, okay?

You don't have to be in Minsa to answer that question.

But Katie Porter, I think she probably has anger issues from the stories we've heard and the rumors we've heard around California.

I also just feel like Katie Porter, I thought she was transgender.

Until today, I thought Katie Porter was transgender.

From the way that she looked, apparently she is not.

But I don't know who has more testosterone, Michelle Obama, Brigitte Macrone, or Katie Porter, okay?

Because Katie Porter, she looked like one of those people, you know, like back in the day, like the bearded ladies at the circus, like the people who could like lift 500 pounds and stuff.

That's how I felt about Katie Porter.

Like her poor husband, when he doesn't give her the TV remote, does he get a black eye or something?

So no, I would not want to be with her in private if that's how she's acting.

and public.

And my last thing I'll say is, if you're going to do a walk-off, okay, you guys need to watch Andy Cohen.

If you're going to do do a walk-off, you've got to walk off.

You can't like kind of walk off and then you stay.

You can either walk off or you don't do the BS and the theatrics of it all.

Yeah.

I love, my favorite part is, I'm me.

I'm me.

I don't want to have it.

I don't want to have an unhappy experience.

You know,

Dan, I'm not going to be ignored, Dan.

I don't want to have an unhappy experience.

And the reporter's like, I don't want to have an unhappy experience either.

But like, she kept shaming her with the, every candidate has answered these questions.

Every candidate has answered these questions.

And it paralyzed Katie Porter because she's not actually just me.

She was not able to say, fuck off.

I don't really care.

You're annoying.

I'm getting up and leaving.

Which actually would have been the power move.

She tried to do the power move without putting the power behind it and just demanding to have a pleasant, positive, and happy experience, which is, ma'am, this is politics and news.

That none of those adjectives apply.

Also, I will say, it's hard to look like a badass getting up and walking out of a broom closet.

Okay, that looked like where Harry Potter lived under the stairs, like this dark, dingy broom closet they were in.

They couldn't find a better set.

Like, I'm such a stickler for lighting.

If I am not like blown out like the sun, I won't be in there.

You know what I'm saying?

I will go Mariah Carey.

So for Katie Porter to be sitting in there with like one little candle light a thousand yards away, it's hard to look badass walking out of a broom closet.

It's amazing that the reporter allowed it.

Like I'm surprised.

Can we roll the tape without running the sound for a second?

Because I want to show something on Katie Porter's shot.

Um, I, the reporter, honestly, CBS should have done a more professional job in lighting the scene and picking.

Like, a lot of times you do a newsroom interview.

It's exciting here in the newsroom, but like, this was not it.

And on the single shot of Katie, look how it looks like there's something blue sticking out of her neck.

Hold on, it looks like she's got like a blue flag coming out of the right side of her neck.

We'll get back there.

Stand by.

Um,

they never should have allowed that.

Like, Katie Porter should have sat down.

She needed, look, right there.

It's so weird.

It was there the whole time.

It's clearly like a piece of tape or a light.

I couldn't tell the difference on something behind Katie.

It looked terrible.

It was so distracting.

This is why Trump does so well, Link.

You sit down in any interview with a monitor to Steve, thanks.

And he'll say, the light needs to come up, pet up with the camera, this vase needs to go.

Like, that's what a lifetime in television will do.

Clearly, this woman is not focused enough on how

one should appear.

She's in what we call a rough lighting.

but my family and friends know I travel with full lighting.

I am ready to go at all times.

Katie Porter, you need some gay interns.

Katie Porter has no gay men around her because she's being sabotaged.

But yeah, no, also, it's like the sleeveless dress and then kind of like the Helga Oktoberfest haircut.

Like, I don't know.

I think she's a calamity, and we won't be hearing from her a year from now.

What did you make of the reporter?

Because I also found her very entertaining.

I mean, respect.

She handles herself like a pro.

But do you see what I mean?

There was something just mildly antagonistic antagonistic about like somewhat mocking and like she wouldn't get off.

There were seven follow-ups to that first question because Katie Porter wouldn't answer it.

And she just tried to go seven ways from Sunday to make her answer it because Katie Porter was pretending she didn't understand anything instead of playing dumb and like she wouldn't drop it.

And that is something that you don't often see when they're, when they're talking to Democrats, like if they can find, if they can see this Democrat target is uncomfortable, 99% of reporters move on.

They do not want to make them uncomfortable.

No, what's interesting is that Katie Porter said, I've never had this happen before.

I'm like, you've never been asked a follow-up question or second or third question.

And like I said, I know I keep coming back to this like a broken record.

These were very easy questions.

And I feel like when you're running for office, I'm always shocked when politicians aren't ready for questions because there aren't really that many tough questions.

It's like, hey, what are you going to do for the voters?

How are you going to reach people?

How are you going to solve this issue in your state that you live in?

I don't know why she's acting like she's caught off guard, but I think there might be a more underlying mental health issue like anger management or some type of personality disorder, which means she's actually perfect for California politics.

If she has severe narcissism and a personality disorder, she can join Gavin Newsom in that.

But no, Katie Porter, we wish you well.

Sort of.

She,

here's why I think it happened.

Because it's a Democrat primary.

That is the only time the media asks tough questions of Democrats or is in any way relentless in questioning a Democrat.

That's why.

Because it's demon-dem violence.

It's like normally they steer clear of it.

If Katie Porter were already the nominee up against a Republican, I'm sorry, I don't know this particular reporter, but the vast majority of the media would not lay a glove on her.

There would be no follow-up.

It would have been a lot more gentle from most reporters.

But it's demon-dem contest now.

So that's when you see the media.

actually

actually lean into being good journalists.

Like that's great.

They actually do want the strongest candidate to emerge so that they can beat the Republican.

I think, also, from a ratings perspective, this journalist is probably thinking: okay, it's my job to be a conduit from, let's say, all Californians.

California has been shifting to the right.

In this last election, President Trump was able to shift so many counties to the right.

They thought Connello was going to win in this massive landslide because she's from California.

She didn't.

She won California, obviously.

But I think California has been shifting red.

People want voter ID.

They want common sense.

They want to clean up the homelessness.

So I actually don't blame this journalist for pressing Katie Porter a little bit.

What are you going to do?

Because it's a fallacy to think that everyone in California is a die-hard liberal.

I don't think that's the case.

I think about 40-some percent are red.

Right.

And you can't just ignore them when you're asking to be governor of the whole state.

Eventually, you heard her kind of stumble into what should have been the first answer, which is like, I represented a purple area and orange county, so I understand.

Yes, that's your answer, madam.

That's where you should have gone.

I understand those people.

I know what their concerns are.

Then articulate their concerns and say, and my policies on X, Y, and Z are much better than this other guy's.

That's why I should get the red vote too.

Okay, let's keep going because there's other clips of Katie that I do want to get to.

Okay, she's super fun, this lady.

Here is

the

Katie Porter comparing herself.

Well, I'll let this SOP play for itself, but she's being asked about those toxic workplace allegations and whether she's a bully.

Listen here, SOT3.

And I saw this as a professor, certainly.

Female professors, particularly women of color, get much worse teaching evaluations.

And even when all the professional evaluations are the same.

And so we see this again and again.

Lots of the so-called bad bosses are women and disproportionately people of color.

I think it's really unfortunate because those are the very voices we need more of in our government.

So I'm proud of my stuff.

I'm proud of the relationship we've built.

Okay, so she's like a woman of color who was discriminated against.

when asked about whether she's a bully.

This is just April of 2023.

That's okay.

She's Rosa Parks now.

She's not a bully.

She's always been bullied.

Democrats get very uncomfortable when you put them in the role of like the victimizer.

They're much more comfortable being the victim.

Much.

No, absolutely.

It's funny.

She says she's a woman of color or something.

I'm like, no, you're just wearing pink.

You're not a woman of color because you're wearing color.

But no, it's interesting because

there's so many up-and-coming Democrats right now who have bullying allegations.

Look at Jasmine Crockett.

She was accused of bullying and having people, you know, open the car door for her and snapping at them and making male aides carry her purse and carry a pillow.

I think these Democrats are just divas and they're used to everything going their way.

That is what is so clear about Katie Porter and every single clip.

They're used to nobody pressing them.

It's not like President Trump where he gets 99% negative coverage from the mainstream media.

Katie Porter knows going on the view.

They're going to be pretty positive and nice to her.

And then even Kamala Harris.

Kamala Harris had tons of bullying allegations.

She had 92% staff turnover the four years she was in DC as vice president.

The media didn't even want to cover that.

They didn't want to cover any of that.

And so Katie Porter, we are going to bring your stuff out into the open now because we have new media, we have podcasts, and these Democrats can't hide their horrific behavior any longer.

All right, and put a pin in that because we will get to Megan Markle before the end of this hour when we're talking about badly behaving Democrats who appear to be psychopaths.

Listen to her when she, she, Fox's Hillary Vaughan, uh, asked her in April of 2024.

That first SOT, I think I said was April 2023.

Here's a year after, April 2024, asking her about some of the chants we're hearing

that are anti-Israel and anti-America, SAT 5.

Protesters blocking the Brooklyn Bridge burned the American flag and chanted death to America.

Do you

condemn this type of rhetoric?

We've got to get her on to her next event here.

Are you okay with people burning the American flag?

If you'd like to follow up with us, are you okay with people chanting death to America?

She's walking.

She's walking.

Congresswoman Porter, are you okay with people chanting death to America?

Is it okay?

Do you not have a problem with it?

Happy to reach out here.

I mean, that guy does seem a little gay to me, Link.

I don't know.

She has one gay assistant, but he's

honestly, the people around you might be sabotaging you.

I'm happy she was getting some exercise in that clip, though.

She was getting sunlight, vitamin D, exercise.

These are things I think Democrats need more of.

But the reason she won't answer is because the Democrats are perfectly fine with Americans chanting, you know, death to America, burning the American flag.

As we just saw in Portland with Nick Sorter, who's an independent journalist, he was trying to put out an American flag that they were burning.

There is this radical Marxist

faction on the left that's growing and growing.

And folks like Katie Porter are so scared of turning them off, they won't condemn that behavior.

That's what we're seeing with Chuck Schumer and Aukeen Jeffries.

They're not radical far left, but they're just capitulating to those folks because they don't want to scare that progressive wing of their party.

So the reason Katie Porter didn't answer is not because she had to go to an event.

It's because she thinks that's fine.

Yeah,

she had no problem with it.

Here she is behaving dishonestly and as an extremist on the subject of women's rights versus trans rights.

She was on with Bill Maher.

Thank God Piers Morgan was there.

And here's a snippet of what happened in 5B.

We should be able to have a civil debate.

Nobody, including Riley Gaines, who I disagree with strongly, should be a very important thing.

What do you disagree with out of interest?

I think that it should be up to sporting bodies to make their decisions about who would be.

What has she said that's actually wrong?

I think that what she has done is try to turn this.

We talked about people, you know, becoming using things to kind of get likes and get clicks.

That's not what she's doing.

I mean, I've got no choke for right against personally, but all I've seen her do is stand up for women's rights to fairness and equality.

She actually competed against Leah Thomas, and it was obviously unfair.

Leah Thomas won one of the races in the NCAA championships by 50 seconds against a bunch of biological females who simply couldn't keep up.

That cannot be right.

It cannot be fair.

That is something.

I'm here for a pleasant experience.

I was told this would be positive and I would be happy.

Bill Maher.

She was a show up on a first date.

I was told this was going to go well.

What is happening?

I feel bamboozled.

But no, this is really what it's like.

The women on the left, they purport themselves to be, you know, feminist and we're going to protect and uplift our girls.

They're perfectly fine with men coming into their locker rooms and to their sports teams.

For folks like Katie Porter, Kamala Harris, all of these elite women Democrats, they think women's rights begin and end with abortion, right?

That's it.

They think women's rights is abortion.

Kamala Harris showed us that on the campaign trail for 107 days, what did Kamala Harris talk about?

Bringing abortion.

She would go to black colleges and tell young girls, we're going to get you the right to abortion.

We're going to do this abortion.

The girls are like, okay, but women's rights rights is also like, how do we pay our bills?

How do we have health care?

How do we not have criminals on the streets so we can walk home from work?

And so for Katie Porter, of course, she doesn't know about women's rights and she thinks it's fine for guys to come in to women's sports teams, but this is going to continue to be the losing issue for Democrats and they keep trying to minimize it.

One more and then we'll move off of Katie Porter.

But here she is talking about her 12-year-old after Trump won last November.

So on election night,

I went to pick up my daughter from Waterpolo practice, and she's 12, and she got in the car and she was crying.

And I said, did someone punch you?

Like, water polo polo is a rough sport.

I was like, Did someone hit you?

Did the coach yell at you?

What happened?

And she said,

Mom, Trump won.

Trump's gonna win.

And what if I get raped and I need to have an abortion?

This is from a 12-year-old, my 12-year-old daughter.

And so it was really a reminder of how scary this time is for people and how important it is for Democrats to have strategies, both at the state level and the federal level, to make sure that we can continue to protect people's rights.

It's really a reminder of how sick you are as her mother to be filling a 12-year-old's head full of worries about getting raped and needing abortions and having that be, of course, your next available option.

I'll have something hideous happen to me.

By the way, if it does, it will be at the hands of a Democrat DA who lets some criminal come in and go out like it's a revolving door.

And then, of course, what I'll do is I'll kill my baby because I'm Katie Porter's daughter.

This reveals so much about her.

No, she's absolutely a radical.

And folks like Katie Porter and Pete Budajudge, these folks who think they're sort of the next generation of the Democratic Party, they always want to portray themselves as very moderate, middle of the road.

We're just like moderate Democrats.

When push comes to shove and you really press them, they are just as radical as everybody else, right?

They want abortion until the end.

They want open borders.

They want criminals on the street.

They want men and women's sports.

They want the transing of children.

And they might say, oh, we don't want these things, right?

But it's sort of like lying by omission.

If you won't condemn something that's absolutely horrific, right, absolutely disgusting, like a 16-year-old girl getting a mastectomy, which should never happen in the United States of America.

If you won't condemn that, then that makes me see you as a sick and disgusting person yourself.

And I hate that we even have to have this conversation, you know what I'm saying, about people who are seeking high offices in the United States of America.

But that's who Katie Porter is.

And she's kind of on par with this next generation of Democrats.

Mm-hmm.

Well, it's like AOC.

She wants you to believe that she's super woke and she's really into like uplifting people.

And we don't put people down for their immutable characteristics.

But she's in the news this week for mocking Stephen Miller, basically calling him a dwarf.

Meanwhile, Stephen Miller is a normal height man.

I think the average height in America, the average height of a man, is about five, nine and a half,

which is shorter than you might think, but that is the average height of an American male.

Stephen Miller says he's 5'10 and a half, so not the tallest guy, but not short.

And here's AOC talking about him in SOT 15.

Point is that they are scrapping and grasping at straws because they have nothing else.

Laugh at them.

Stephen Miller is a clown.

I've never seen that guy in real life, but he looks like he's like 410.

And he looks like he is angry about the fact that he's 410.

And he looks like he is so mad that he is 410 that he's taking that anger out

at

any other population possible.

Like,

laugh at them.

But one of the most powerful cultural things that you can do to a political movement that is predicated on the puffery

of

insecure, insecure masculinity.

That's what this is about.

This isn't, people talk about toxic masculinity.

And one of the best ways that you can dismantle a movement of insecure men is by making fun of them.

Okay, first of all, that is not an AOC thought.

That is an Elizabeth Bennett thought penned by Jane Austen.

It's a classic line from Pride and Prejudice.

We've all read the book a million times and seen the many movies.

Elizabeth Bennett is the one who said, You laugh at him.

That's what you do to a man who intimidates you or by whom you feel put down in any way, shape, or form.

She cribs it to make it her own.

And then she body shames him, Link.

That's not allowed by leftists.

I'm reliably told you're not allowed to do that by the woke left.

Well, that was my first thought when I saw this clip going viral of AOC.

They preach about diversity and love everybody and kumbaya and braid each other's hair.

But of course, the first thing they do is go into attacking people's looks and height and the way they look.

And we do that here and there, okay?

Yeah, but we don't lecture anybody on when they do it.

Exactly.

That's my whole point.

It's like, I don't act holier than now.

It's like, I'm going to break down Lauren Sanchez and Megan Markle at Fashion Week.

You know what I'm saying?

But AOC, these folks on the left, are all about kumbaya diversity.

I also think this is rich coming from AOC because part of the reason AOC has been so successful is because of her looks.

People talk about this all the time in private.

Let's talk about it in public.

AOC is not excellent.

She's not a genius.

Ted Kennedy didn't just hire her years ago to be his intern because she was so brilliant and top of the class.

She's beautiful.

She has big breasts, cute face.

She's Latina.

That has helped her advance herself in her career.

So she's hating on someone for his looks.

And yeah, the last thing I'll say is actually sort of a more dramatic point.

She says we have to laugh at these Republicans.

We have to laugh at them and scoff at them.

I would rather you laugh at us than pick up guns and try to shoot us as we have seen recently, right?

With Charlie Burton, with the assassination attempts on President Trump and so many other Republicans, Kavanaugh.

I would rather you laugh at us than tell your supporters that we're fascists and dictators and Hitler and Nazis to where they come and try to kill us in our own homes.

That I would actually prefer, AOC.

If we're going to get seriously, sorry.

She doesn't mean it.

You're right.

She's a complete hypocrite because she's running around there dropping the fascist word like it's going out of style.

So she doesn't mean that either.

You know, like she doesn't actually mean laugh at them because that's not what she's been doing.

And she doesn't actually mean her woke messaging about not shaming people and celebrating whatever immutable characteristics because she doesn't do that if it's a Republican.

And then you got to love the self-flagellation because a little too late in the game, she realized, oh shit, I'm not supposed to be doing that.

I guess I'm getting blowback on this.

So she tried to follow it up.

That original video was on Sunday.

The next day, she goes back on camera to offer this.

I want to express my love for the short king community.

I don't believe in body shaming.

I am talking about how big or small someone is on the inside.

Like, for example, I have no idea how tall Andrew Tate is.

No idea at all.

But that guy looks to me

like

5'3.

Now she's back at 5'3 ⁇ , 5'4.

Whereas physically, men of smaller stature can come across.

They are spiritually

six foot.

If you're a good dad is

short women, if you're not belittling immigrants, you're like, you know, 6'3 spiritually.

I don't know.

Am I being problematic?

Yes, you're being problematic and dishonest and a hypocrite.

Do you,

I was talking about how tall or short they are

on the inside.

Yeah, that's what I used to think when I was dating.

Yeah, I'd go on a date and the guy would be, you know, 5'2 on his profile.

He'd say he's 5'10.

He's tall on the inside, okay?

He's tall in his brain.

But yeah, no, AOC, I don't think anybody should be taking her seriously.

God, she's really just such a joke.

I don't know.

AOC to me is just such a joke.

I don't know why she's even, you know, put on this pedestal as this leader of the Democratic Party.

She has no accomplishments, right?

I remember when she first got in, remember she was doing those sit-ins in Nancy Pelosi's office and causing all this trouble.

That AOC, I respected a little bit more because at least she was trying to buck the system and sort of take on the system.

Now, you know, she was out campaigning with Joe Biden, wearing the aviator.

She's just another member of the swamp.

She doesn't have that cool factor.

She's not taking on the system anymore.

So AOC can sit there and do her little Instagram videos.

Why doesn't she actually go have some legislative achievements?

That would be sort of a first for her.

Well, I look forward to taking her advice and making lots of fun of her.

The internet right now is commenting on how she's gained a bunch of weight and they're calling her Abu Alita.

So, okay,

let's do that.

Okay.

That's what she wants done.

Okay.

And it's because AOC has been able to coast on her looks for a long time.

And people talk about this in DC privately.

I'm just bringing it out in the open.

AOC, the fact that she's very beautiful and voluptuous and has a little waist, that has helped her in her career.

I just have to be honest and say it.

And so now when she looks at me, going a different direction, you're going to get called out.

You're going to get called out.

Yes.

Yeah.

The internet is pretty clever, I have to say.

A-O-C and the O is for O-Class.

Okay.

So we got to keep going with terrible people and hypocritical left.

I'll get to Megan in a second.

We got to go to the view.

Your relatives?

No.

And Whoopee Goldberg.

Okay.

I have heard.

from in certain circles, you know, I don't want to get specific, that you're not allowed to darken your skin as any sort of a costume or it's racist.

I heard that.

I'm trying to remember where I heard that, but I definitely heard from many, many leftists.

You are not allowed to do that.

It's racist.

It's always been racist.

Don't pay any attention to the fact that Billy Crystal opened the Oscars wearing blackface.

The point is, it's always been racist, and everybody always knew that.

Enter Whoopi Goldberg with a solution

to

how to handle ICE being at the Super Bowl looking for illegals.

She's threatening to go to the Super Bowl when Bad Bunny is there and round up all these people that are illegal immigrants.

Do you think that she would go if it was Garth Brooks or Eminem or Taylor Swift or any other white person?

I understand what you're saying because she's going to go to the Super Bowl

and round up.

How's she going to know who's who?

Because the Supreme Court has given permission to question anyone who has a Spanish accent or has a dark skin.

Yeah.

So that's why.

Here's the thing.

Everybody

get a little cocoa butter, sit in the sun.

That's the first thing.

And then, and this is the only time you can probably ever do this, give yourself a Latin accent.

You know, Whoopie, that is such a good idea.

And see

if she can tell who's who.

Okay, you get the cocoa butter and you go in, you tan your face with it, and then you speak in a Spanish accent, and that's fine.

And you know what?

At least Whoopee is consistent because Whoopi actually was fine with Ted Danson wearing actual minstrel face, black face, like the deeply offensive stuff from like the 40s films.

She stood right next to him when he did that at a roast.

She thought it was hilarious.

And then she sat there as Joy Behar celebrated her own wearing of black face.

On Halloween, she went as a beautiful black woman.

There's joy with her dark face and her afro, which will be also celebrated.

So at least she's not totally hypocritical, but the left is hypocritical.

And you tell me whether they on the view would be celebrating it, Link, if you and I went to the Super Bowl wearing brown face and big hoop earrings and lip liner outside the lips and speaking in a Spanish accent.

Well, you know, I was actually going to go as Diana Ross for Halloween this year.

I'll have to throw the afro in the trash, unfortunately.

But, you know, inside joke here, I think it's good.

You're allowed to talk about Blackface on ABC, just not NBC, I think.

I think they're allowed to talk about it on NBC, apparently.

But no, I think on ABC as well, it wasn't Jimmy Kimmel in a Blackface scandal.

Maybe we can find a picture, but Jimmy Kimmel, who's, you know, one of the things

over at ABC.

Yeah, he's done Blackface for sure.

But no, this is just...

part and parcel of the hypocrisy of the women of the view.

As I always say, none of these women are in Minsa either.

They've kind of found the worst five women you can put in the middle of the moment.

They can't spell and just have them go at it.

Yeah,

they can't spell mom backwards.

But yeah, no, Whoopi Goldberg, I'm not shocked to see this, but there's also been such an increase in attacks on ICE and sort of vitriol against ICE agents, people having their families threatened and them being attacked and punched and shot at.

And so as much fun as it is to laugh about how ridiculous these women of the view are, there are serious repercussions when you vilify law enforcement, right?

When you vilify our men and women in uniform, cops, ICE agents, they're real repercussions.

People go out in the street and shoot at them and try to attack them.

And so, of course, that doesn't affect these women on the view because they make millions of dollars and they live in penthouse apartments with chefs and security and their only job is to come to a nice studio each day and get driven home.

They don't really understand the immigration crisis, right?

They're in this liberal bubble.

So Whoopee Goldberg, I wasn't shocked by any of this, but she's been cosplaying a comedian for years.

So she's been a comedian for a long time.

It was a time.

It was a long time.

A long time ago when she was funny.

It's really a long time ago.

A word on what Joy Behart,

noted legal expert, not

purported to represent as the Supreme Court ruling.

That's not what happened.

The Supreme Court, the ICE criteria for deciding whether somebody might be the illegal they're looking for is long.

There's a long list of factors that they said that they look at.

And one of them is skin color.

So if they know they're looking for a guy from Venezuela, they're probably going to rule out a super white guy who has an Irish accent.

And that has been upheld by courts for decades now as an acceptable one criterion of many.

It cannot be the sole criterion, but it's one of many that they are allowed to factor in, not represented accurately by legal scholar Joy Behar.

All right.

Stick to fake comedy, Joy.

Please stay in your lane.

You know, Joy Behar, I think she's a drunk Italian.

She's not an expert, you know, legal analyst, but I think they could also do like a sequel of My Cousin Vinny with Joy Behar.

Maybe she can play the attorney in like a My Cousin Vinny sequel, but no, I don't take her seriously for her legal prowess whatsoever.

Don't even talk about her ruining yet another of my favorite movies.

Another comedy.

It's bad enough.

She was in Manhattan Murder Mystery, which I absolutely freaking love.

If you haven't seen it, Run Don't Walk, starring Woody Allen and Diane Keaton and Joy Beher.

I can't have her in another one of my favorite movies, my cousin Vinny, which really is one of the top 10 of all time.

One more thing before we leave the view, and that is Joy Beher, back to our local resident legal expert, on why Trump is so determined to put the National Guard troops in various cities.

Watch this, SOP 29.

There is crime in American cities, but the way to deal with it is get the funding that you need for police, get the training that you need, and work with local officials.

This is a pretext to stop the next election.

That's what I think it is.

I would say it might also be a distraction from the hearing that's going on right now about the Epstein filing.

Some things have come up, and A.G.

Pambondi was

dodging questions and attacking back.

Do you not think maybe the whole civil unrest storyline is maybe overblown?

This is in order to make the case.

Because in their minds, in all of their minds, they now believe they have carte blanche to do whatever they want to.

That's right, yes.

That's what the feeling is.

And if they stop us from voting, that's the one thing people have.

Well, I mean, it's the one, it's the one thing that makes us very different from lots of other countries.

Our votes

do count.

I do know that they count.

If we can't vote,

okay.

So

it's back to the Bill Maher, He said he believes this.

Then Gavin Newsom repeated Maher.

And now the ladies of the View think Trump's going to have a permanent state of National Guard in all these blue cities.

So they can't vote at all because he's worried about people like Joy Behar actually voting.

No, I actually, anytime I see clips of The View, I can feel my IQ cells just disintegrating.

I can feel my brain atrophying watching these women try to form a coherent thought.

Like if reaching was a sport you're honor, they are reaching, okay?

They're reaching and forming conclusions and they are absolutely ridiculous.

So no, I don't take any of these women seriously.

It's also funny.

Alyssa Farah Griffin is supposed to be the conservative on the panel.

There's really not much conservative about her.

I would love for them to bring in a real conservative on the view.

I dare them to bring in a real conservative for one hour and 10 minutes.

They had Megan McCain for years, who is conservative, but a Trump hater.

The whole time she was there, I was like, so that's why she was acceptable because as long as you're going to dump on Trump, we can take you.

And this, this, same with Alyssa Farrah Griffin.

She's a a disgruntled former Trumper.

She hates Trump.

Sarah Haynes was the other one commenting.

She also hates Trump.

She was the one like, oh, you know, why is he bringing in these National Guard troops?

And elsewhere, she tried to claim that there's been no violence against ICE, no threat she's ever seen against ICE.

These are the conservatives on the show.

Whatever.

It's a hot mess.

We know that.

We can't get too exercised about the view.

It's just fun to sometimes check in on what they're doing.

Okay, I want to keep with it.

I do want to get to Megan Markle, but before we go there, we've got to spend a minute on Greta Turnberg, who has moved on from her climate activism, as you know, to being a pro-Palestinian warrior.

She got, she joined this flotilla, which actually is like a normal thing from Sweden.

I guess they've been doing these flotillas for like 20 years.

This is just the latest one.

And apparently, it's always a collection of C-list stars who are just looking for attention.

It's basically like their big brother or their real housewives that you join the flotilla to get your name back in the news.

And that's Greta Turnberg.

And there's actually a really interesting piece in National Review

that is dated today, October 8th, by John Gustavsson that gets really into Greta's background and how I didn't know this.

She's the child of two celebrities over there in Sweden.

And she was somebody who was probably obviously ignored for a while because her parents were busy building these big couriers.

And then she decided to make like a name for herself through climate activism.

And

she has Asperger's and severe mental health problems.

So those are two different things.

But she's, according to John, got actual severe mental health problems so bad that her mother had to take a leave of absence and be home with her.

So, this is a girl who needs parental attention more than the mother's short leave of absence and has decided to get it first from climate activists.

And now, by joining the sea lister flotillas to make Gaza her cause,

she's been out there railing about Palestine and Israel and all of that.

And finally, we have seen,

well, I'll give you the montage of Greta first, and then I'll show you what Trump is saying about her.

SOT 24.

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet I'm one of the lucky ones.

People are suffering.

People are dying.

Entire ecosystems are collapsing.

We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.

How dare you?

Why is it so important to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius?

Because even at one degree, people are dying from climate change.

Because that is what the United Science calls for, to avoid destabilizing the climate so that we have the best possible chance to avoid setting off irreversible chain reactions.

Every fraction of a degree matches.

Okay, so none of that was right, and you shouldn't take your climate advice from somebody who has to go home and put benzoyl peroxide on their skin in the evenings.

Now, Trump has finally decided to weigh in on Greta, and here's what he said.

She's just a troublemaker.

You know, I mean, she's, you mean, she's no longer into the environment.

Now she's into this.

She's a troublemaker.

She has an anger management problem.

I think she should see a doctor.

She needs anger.

If you ever watch her, she's a young person.

She's so angry.

She's so crazy.

Now you can have her.

You can have her.

She's just a troublemaker.

How is he wrong?

He's not wrong at all.

Maybe no Katie Porter was talking about her daughter.

Maybe the daughter is Greta Thunberg, and we've never seen them in the same room at the same time.

It all comes together.

It's all coming together.

Okay, we're analyzing it here.

But yeah, no, with Greta Thunberg, she's just a professional activist, which is why I don't take almost any activists seriously.

And shout out to the people who open doors for all of us and yada, yada, yada.

But I don't take a lot of these new activists seriously because they just go from one grift to the next.

First, it's climate.

That didn't work for a few years.

Now they went on to Ukraine.

Then it's going to be something else.

Then it's oil and drilling and everything in between.

But these folks are such professional activists.

They will go out there.

They'll do like a sit-in or they'll lock arms on a freeway.

Then they'll go back to like a five-star hotel and be eating crumpets and scones.

So I don't take Greta Thunberg seriously at all.

And when it comes to this flotilla, I don't even know what a flotilla is.

It sounds like something you could get at like Chipotle, like a flotilla, like a broad day flotilla.

Like I don't know.

I mean, it sounds like what they, what they put together in JAWS 2, which did not end well.

for most of those high school students.

It's like contiki or something.

Like, I don't want to get on a flotilla.

Also, I don't share bathrooms and I really like my creature comforts and my amenities.

You know what I'm saying?

And my bath salts.

So, I am not going to be on a flat.

What would the water pressure be like on the flotilla?

Probably not so great.

Not good.

Not good.

Like, I am such a creature cover person.

I will change hotel rooms if there's like a faint noise.

Okay.

I am that person.

So I'm not going to be on a flotilla with a bunch of like stinky little liberal, you know, kids on the spectrum.

Sorry, I'm going to get canceled for saying that.

But I don't want to do that and be on the flotilla and like sailing to Gaza.

Who wants to sail to Gaza?

You just remember they smell good on the inside.

That's what's important.

All right.

Now here we go.

Megan Markle.

She is not a well person.

She was over in

Paris for the Balenciaga fashion show

and she filmed herself, herself

going by the location where Princess Diana died.

And here's the video.

Her feet are up in the car.

She's having a grand old time.

She's showing you out the window where she is.

And then you see her naked feet crisscrossed in front of her, like, the world is at my feet.

Ha ha.

This is so fun.

This is where my children's grandmother died.

Good times.

Let me put this online.

No, it's interesting is Megan Markle, she will try to plead ignorance and say, it was just a video.

I didn't know what I was doing.

Her team will put out statements.

Everything is a deliberate choice with Megan Markle.

In my opinion, she's sociopathic.

She's a narcissist.

She's a malignant narcissist.

And for her to act like she didn't know where Princess Diana died in that famous car crash is just absolute malarkey, buffoonery, tomfoolery.

It's like when she said she didn't even know who Prince Harry was in the documentary, she's like, I don't know much about Prince Harry.

Is he nice?

Then we find pictures of her out in front of Buckingham Palace.

It's like if I say I don't know a guy and then there are pictures of me driving around his neighborhood.

Megan Markle knew exactly who Prince Harry was.

She knew exactly where Princess Diana died, but she's doing this for intention.

I have a theory.

There was some reporting recently that we covered on Spot On that they're doing a Diana documentary to commemorate the anniversary, I believe in 2027.

So this could maybe be part of that.

I thought maybe Megan Markle is out doing research for the documentary.

I'm sorry for laughing, but she's going to go drive around and take the exact route to sort of, you know, manifest and put herself in that position.

But the last thing I'll say about Megan Markle.

She's gone on the Drew Barrymore show and talked about how she'll FaceTime her kids when she's on the road.

She'll send videos to whoever is watching her kids while she's traveling.

Instead of going to these fashion shows, you left the royal family because you guys wanted privacy, you wanted to be low-key.

Go be with your kids and raise your kids.

You know, you don't need to go to Balenciaga, who's been accused of grooming children, had pedophilia scandals.

Then you're out partying with, you know, your friend who's in charge of membership at Soho House.

Go be a mom and be with your kids.

If that was the reason you left the royal family, go do it.

She doesn't want it.

That video of her walking into Balenciaga, it was ridiculous.

She looks like she's part of the fashion show in all white, walking out, like, all eyes are on me.

I am the model I've always wanted to be.

But no, she doesn't want to be with the children.

That's why she keeps doing these things.

The same way Hoda Coppi doesn't want to be with her children, and you can't get her off the set of the Today Show.

She's there every two weeks launching a new business venture because now she's a CEO.

Pow, pow, pow.

None of these women actually wants to be at home with their children.

And it's fine.

Look, if you want to be a working mom and you know, do them both, just own it.

Don't try to like build yourself up as as some fake stay-at-home mom because you're obviously not.

And Megan Markle, you used the word

earlier

in a post I read that you made that she's a disaster tourist.

That's exactly right.

Uvaldi, and now this.

She's never seen a tragedy that she doesn't want to exploit for her own PR, which is sick.

All right, we got to run.

Link, great to see you.

Subscribe to Spot On with Link Lauren on Apple Spotify YouTube.

Go to spotonwithlink.com and that'll show you all the places you can get more of Link.

And who does not want more of Link Lauren, coming up, Ken Vogel of the New York Times on Hunter Biden.

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We absolutely have to keep talking.

It's more important now than ever.

To cower, to hide, to go silent is not the answer.

And all I can tell you is there is no fucking way I am canceling One Stop on this tour.

Not one stop.

I'm going.

I'm going to stand on these stages and I'm going to say all the things that we say all the time on this show.

We're going to make it safe for me.

We're gonna make it safe for my team and my guests and you.

We're going coast to coast and do something really important, which is say what's true and what's real to honor him.

I really now more than ever would love to see you all face to face.

God, I would love to see you face to face.

I need to see you face to face.

I am doing this tour and I would love for you to join me.

MeganKelly.com for the tickets.

We've been reporting for years on the conflicts of interest and alleged corruption related to Hunter Biden's overseas business dealings, especially his position as a board member of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, a job for which he had absolutely no qualifications.

The corporate media mostly ignored or downplayed this story, but there was one notable exception: Ken Vogel of the New York Times.

And boy, was he shamed for it.

Here he is back in September of 2019, when the left was all excited about possibly impeaching Donald Trump for his phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky when he urged him to find out exactly what Hunter Biden was up to in his country.

Vogel pointed out on MSNBC that Joe Biden might have a big problem in Ukraine as well due to Hunter's, quote, work there.

Watch.

This situation involving Joe Biden's sons work for this Ukrainian oligarch-owned gas company, which is, I have to quibble with some of what your previous guest said, is a significant liability for Joe Biden.

Like, there is a story here.

We've told some of it.

There's more to be told.

We're going to continue to sort of pull that back.

That said, the way that Rudy is inserting himself into it

is both not helpful, I think, to Rudy and to Trump because it kind of jumbles it.

He's getting the facts wrong, and he is making it appear as if this is just a partisan hit job.

Whereas, if he would just kind of leave the reporters to do the work on it, I think that potentially this story might be taken more seriously.

Well, that went over like a lead balloon with Team Biden.

In fact, just two days later, they put out a digital ad featuring pundits attacking Vogel by name.

Watch.

Trump invited foreign interference in our election in 2016, and he's doing it again.

Will media see through Trump's sleazy playbook?

What do you think?

Or call for Paul said is false.

It's not simply what about ism or equalism.

It's false.

And when he does that, and when, for example, Politico has a whole bunch of headlines today doing the same thing, they need to be taken on.

They need to be taken on by the candidates and responsible people in the media.

The New York Times is obsessed.

You know, it may market itself as part of the resistance.

It's obsessed with Kind being right down in the middle.

You know, with this Ukraine story, a a lot of people say, well, this is

2016, and the press hasn't learned anything.

At some point, we have to ask if a lot of journalists don't want to learn anything.

That was the Biden campaign that put that out.

They could not have the story being told about the Biden family corruption over in Ukraine.

And it turns out there is more of the story to be told.

And Ken Vogel is telling it in his new book titled Devil's Advocates: The Hidden Story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden, and the Washington Insiders on the payrolls of corrupt foreign interests.

The book hits stores on October 14th.

You can pre-order it right now.

And Ken joins me today for an exclusive interview.

Ken, welcome to the show.

Hey, it's great to be with you, Megan.

This is crazy.

I read this.

It was making my blood boil.

And I don't care.

I don't.

I have never run cover for Rudy Giuliani or anybody else who may have their hand in the till.

And I certainly haven't for Hunter Biden.

So I applaud you for writing this book.

Can you first set it up why this is an area that is just so ripe for exploitation by foreign governments trying to find some, I'm sorry, weakling here connected to whatever president, could be a right-wing one, could be a left-wing one,

for exploitation to try to gain access to power.

Yeah, I mean, there's this sort of mindset in a lot of the developing world, really a lot of the rest of the world, that,

you know, you can get what you want from government by by essentially paying the government or the people around the government, the families of the elected officials.

And we in the U.S.

like to think that we're above that.

We're different than that.

We have all these ethics laws and conflicts of interest laws and disclosure laws that prevent that kind of thing.

But it turns out that in the rest of the world,

when they sort of get crosswise with the United States or other international bodies, they apply this same mindset and they look for Americans who are close to the government and the top officials in the government to put on their payrolls to be able to at least create the perception that they are gaining some kind of favor or effectively navigating their way out of trouble.

And it turns out that there are plenty of well-connected Americans who are willing to take those paydays, including Hunter Biden, including Rudy Giuliani, but also many others who I profile in detail in the book.

Yeah, this is a grift because you have some access to power and you run around around to deep-pocketed foreigners touting it, trying to seem important like you can change policy.

And certainly when you are the son of the sitting vice president, that carries a lot of weight because what you're zeroing in on with Hunter really all started when Joe Biden was vice president.

That's when he joined the board of burizma in Ukraine.

Before we get to that, I just want to start with a headline that just came out on Tuesday, thanks to our pal John Solomon over at Just the News.

And the headline is: Joe Biden's team blocked the CIA from distributing report on Sun Hunter's Ukraine business dealings.

And what Solomon is reporting that back when Joe Biden was vice president, it was February of 16,

his team intervened, his vice presidential team intervened to prevent the CIA from disseminating an intelligence report to policymakers about the senior Ukrainian officials' perceptions regarding Hunter Biden and his dealings in Ukraine.

In other words, they were going to tell policymakers in the United States, the CIA was, that the Ukrainians think Hunter Biden is a joke and are rolling their eyes at these professions by Joe Biden that we're not corrupt, but foreign countries like Ukraine are, while his own son was on the take.

He, Joe Biden, his team intervened saying the VP would, quote, strongly prefer this report not be disseminated.

And it looks like it wasn't.

It was withheld.

Just so we have this, here is vice president, then Vice President Biden, on his infamous anti-corruption speech he gave in Ukraine.

This happened in 2015.

But listen to the holier-than-thou attitude he was espousing while his son was essentially on the takes, SOP 51.

But I can tell you,

you cannot name me a single democracy in the world

where the cancer of corruption is prevalent.

You cannot name me one.

They are thoroughly inconsistent.

And it's not enough to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and establish a special prosecutor fighting corruption.

The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform.

The judiciary should be overhauled.

The energy sector needs to be competitive, ruled by market principles, not sweetheart deals.

It's not enough to push through laws to increase transparency with regard to official sources of income.

Senior elected officials have to remove all conflicts between their business interest and their government responsibilities.

Lecture, lecture, lecture.

Democracy in the world.

That system pertains.

Just the news reporting that these Ukrainian officials, quote, viewed the alleged ties of the U.S.

Vice president's family to corruption in Ukraine as evidence of a double standard within the United States government toward matters of corruption and political power, according to the CIA.

And there it is in a nutshell, Ken.

I mean, there it is in a nutshell.

That's what was happening.

Yeah, and it's not just that it's a double standard, though I think certainly it is.

And we saw this pattern play out where Hunter Biden was working for

individuals and companies that were targeted by U.S.-backed, not just U.S.-backed,

but anti-corruption initiatives that were backed by his own father around the world.

It wasn't just in Ukraine.

But this also gets at this other theme that like the perception is important here.

It's not just that you're paying Hunter Biden to effectuate some change in U.S.

policy to get the U.S.

to back away from a given prosecution or to enact energy policies that were more favorable to the Ukrainian gas company for which he was working, but rather that there's an importance that there's a weight that is associated with having Hunter Biden on your payroll in Ukraine.

So the Ukrainian prosecutors who are being encouraged by Joe Biden to pursue corruption kind of look at it and say, wait a minute, here is the son of the vice president who is telling us to pursue corruption.

The vice president is the son is working for one of the targets of

this anti-corruption campaign.

that's certainly a mixed message.

The most charitable way to perceive it, the more cynical way to perceive it.

And not qualified to be there.

Protection.

You know, it's one thing, if Hunter had had a lifetime in the oil and gas industry, still wouldn't have been great.

But at least you'd say, all right, I mean, on paper, at least you can sell it.

He didn't.

There was absolutely no basis for him to be there other than to curry favor with his father.

And your reporting is that's exactly why Burisma put him there.

Yeah, and it is something where they,

you know, the prosecutors are going to think twice when they see that a very, the son of a very important,

a U.S.

public official who is very important to the U.S.

policy towards Ukraine is essentially sitting on the board of this entity that the U.S.

is targeting.

It's, you know, again, it's like a mixed message at best, but it could be seen as...

protection, like that they are paying for protection from this prosecution that the U.S.

is encouraging.

And I think that very much comports with the post-Soviet mindset that prevailed in Ukraine at the time and still.

And so you could see where the motivation would be for the Ukrainians or for anyone else who was in a similar position where they were being targeted by a U.S.-backed anti-corruption initiative to look for that kind of protection and see Hunter Biden as the type of person who could provide it.

Right.

What an opportunity for Hunter, whether it was with the Chinese or the Ukrainians or the Romanians.

The opportunity abounded for him to line his own pockets, never mind what it would cost the United States or his father.

Now, there is reason to believe that Joe Biden paved the way for him.

You've got a quote from Devin Archer, who I did not realize was previously an Abercrombie and Fitch model.

You taught me that.

But Devin Archer was his business partner and best friend.

And

those two, plus a guy named Chris Hines of Heinz Ketchup Fame and Fortune, originally formed this business venture,

Rosemont Seneca.

Eventually, Chris Hines got a touch of like

morality where he looked at these other two and said, I'm not sure I want this association or whether this is going to a good place.

And he peaced out.

But Devin Archer and Hunter stayed in business together.

And you point out in the book that Devin Archer says Joe Biden used to call people and he said,

You do something for me, you're a friend.

You do something for my son, you're a friend for life.

Yeah, so even if we accept the argument at face value that the Bidens have made and Joe Biden has made himself and Karine Jean-Pierre made from the White House podium that Joe Biden never specifically talked with Hunter or Hunter's business partners about these foreign business ventures, you see right there that the message is communicated.

It's the same sort of wink and nod that we're talking about the Ukrainians wanting to avail themselves of by putting him on this board.

That Joe Biden is

telling these foreign business partners that like he sort of endorses their whatever it is that they're doing with Hunter so that even if he doesn't know the specifics of it, it is certainly sending the message to these foreigners that, hey, you're getting what you're paying for.

Okay, so clearly that was the deal where Joe Biden kind of blessed it.

Hunter went over there and worked it and sold it.

And ultimately, Joe Biden pardoned Hunter Biden for all of it.

And you do point out in the book that there's a reason that pardon, that sweeping pardon he gave his son, after all the protestations, I will never pardon Hunter.

I'm not pardoning Hunter.

And then all the Democrats saying, we believe him, we believe him, it's not going to happen.

He did

pardon Hunter.

And you say there's a reason it went back to January 1st, 2014.

Yeah, that's when he was really ramping up his foreign business dealings, including with Burisma.

That arrangement started in early 2014 and was made official in about April or May when Hunter Biden was added to the board after Devin Archer, the business partner, sort of paved the way and got on the board first and brokered the introduction.

And it's notable, it's not just like, you know, at the time that I wrote the book, it was sort of like it was just me connecting dots.

But eventually the prosecutors in the Hunter Biden case

essentially suggested that there is a potential charge for violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, interestingly not connected to his work in Ukraine, but rather to his work in Romania for a different oligarch that they could bring.

They, of course, did not bring that, but they were sort of hinting at that, I think, probably to extract a guilty plea.

But it's hard to ignore that when you look at the way that the pardon was framed.

It's hard to ignore that the prosecutors are suggesting that there might be a potential Farah charge and that the pardon was sort of chronologically situated to cover the activity that would be the basis for such a foreign agent's registration.

They went back to the earliest foreign interference that he was doing back to when Joe Biden was VP.

And we'll get to Romania because you've broken some news there too, which is kind of shocking.

But let's just stay with Ukraine since we started with it.

You report Ukrainian prosecutors.

Now, people generally know this story, but just as a refresher for those who haven't been thinking about Hunter Biden in Ukraine blissfully for the past year or so.

Ukraine was corrupt, is corrupt.

And at one point when Joe Biden was vice president, he went over there and said, and he bragged publicly that he said, you better fire this corrupt prosecutor, or I'm not giving you this billion dollars that we committed to give you.

And remember, he said at the Council on Foreign Relations, son of a bitch, they did it.

So they fired this allegedly corrupt prosecutor.

Well, it stunk to high heaven because we would later find out that prosecutor was investigating corruption in Ukraine, including at Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Joe Biden's son, Hunter, sat for this do-nothing position for which he wasn't qualified.

So it was like, wait a minute, are you doing this because you want to clean up corruption in Ukraine?

Are you doing this because you want to do your son a solid?

And he's already introduced you to some of the officials running Burisma.

And the connections between the Bidens and this company have gotten uncomfortably close.

You point out in the book, Ukrainian prosecutors were investigating Zlochevsky.

the founder of Burisma for corruption and bribery.

Zlochevsky started paying prominent foreign politicians to try to diffuse those investigations and clean up his reputation, not only in Ukraine, but internationally.

Zlachevsky's top American recruit was Hunter Biden, while then VP Joe Biden was overseeing Ukraine policy.

Buying Hunter's loyalty, according to this thinking, would mean buying favor from his father's government.

Hunter Biden was offered a seat on the Burisma board for $1 million a year in salary.

He then joined the board in the spring of 2014.

And you write about how he had an expensive cocaine problem, mostly private schools for his daughters, expensive tastes, and he needed to fund the Hunter Biden lifestyle.

But this whole business of cleaning up Zlachevsky's reputation and thus Burisma's reputation would have tentacles throughout America.

Like

Hunter, the vice president's office, law firms, PR firms, all of which Hunter was connected to and seems to have unleashed on cleaning up the reputation of Barisma so Hunter could get his cool mill.

Yeah, I mean, it was a very sophisticated reputation laundering campaign and sort of protection campaign where they were seeking to get out of trouble from Ukrainian prosecutors as well as U.S.

Justice Department officials and State Department officials who were encouraging Ukrainian prosecutors and British prosecutors at one point to investigate Zelchevsky.

And what's most interesting, at least the important and interesting bit of context here, is like what Zolchevsky was being charged with, or Zolchevsky's background.

He was a part of this

authoritarian government in Ukraine before 2014 that

was toppled by mass street protests and with the encouragement of the U.S.

government.

And Zolchevsky had been a minister in that government and ended up, he was a minister in the agency that oversaw gas and

gas and oil licensing.

And lo and behold, a company that he started was awarded all these very lucrative licenses.

And so he leaves the government and becomes a billionaire rather quickly as a result of being able to essentially privatize some of these state assets.

That is like a quintessential oligarchic corruption pattern of the sort that the U.S.

government and Joe Biden, both when he was vice president, before that as a senator, and then when he was president, decried as anathema to democracy.

So, you know, they would have reason to be, they, Burisma, would have reason to be concerned that this would be something over which they would be targeted.

And in fact, they were.

And Hunter Biden was in the middle of this campaign to get them out of trouble.

Now, on the prosecutor, there is, I think, still some debate about the reasoning for both the prosecutor, you know, know, the U.S.

wanting the prosecutor to be gone and Joe Biden pushing for it.

You know,

there's question about whether he was actually investigating Burisma or whether he was just using the threat of an investigation to essentially elicit bribes from Burisma.

I can say based on that.

He actually may have been corrupt.

He was.

Yeah.

I mean,

and, you know, big surprise that someone in the Ukrainian government would be corrupt.

But either way, Burisma was happy when he was fired

under pressure from Joe Biden because they thought correctly that they would be able to deal in a more open, transparent way with his successor.

And in fact, they were able initially to do so and they ended up getting what they wanted, which is the dropping of these cases

by the subsequent prosecutor.

Can you speak to these

like the PR group and the law firms?

You talk about, write about this group, a consulting firm called Blue Star Strategies.

Now, this is a Democrat Party-linked consulting firm here in America.

These are both former Hillary people, the Sally Painter and Karen Tramantano.

These are, you tell me, who are they?

And why is some American consulting firm called Blue Star Strategies at all getting involved with Burisma?

Well, yeah, they are a Democratic consulting firm.

They worked in the Clinton administration, actually, at the same time that Hunter Biden worked in the Clinton administration and the Commerce Department.

And they set up this firm that essentially worked with

international interest,

oftentimes that were sort of being targeted by prosecutors in their own countries or sometimes international prosecutors and sometimes by the U.S.

And that's what happened here with Burisma.

They were brought in by one of Hunter's partners with assistance from Hunter Biden.

He was involved in the recruitment of Blue Star and the signing of that deal between Burisma and Blue Star.

And what they did was both on the PR front, trying to essentially cleanse Zolchewski's reputation, but they also importantly reached out to their contacts in the U.S.

government during the Obama-Biden administration to try to get them to back off of Zolchewski and back off of U.S.

support for this prosecution.

Now, that would seem to be the kind of thing that would trigger a requirement to register under this Foreign Agents Registration Act as a foreign lobbyist.

They did not do that in real time, despite questions from me and others in the press and Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson about why they hadn't done so.

Ultimately, at the same time that Hunter Biden was being investigated by the Justice Department for his foreign business, Blue Star was also investigated and they retroactively registered as foreign agents, which to me seems like sort of a tacit admission that they skirted the law in the first place, but they got a deal deal under which the prosecution was dropped.

There would be no charges as long as they filed this registration, which they did.

But even the name, like Blue Star, it just reminds me of the Blue Horseshoe Loves whatever from Wall Street.

You know, it just has this feel to it of like, oh, it's

meaningless and therefore it's hiding something they don't want us to know.

Do they deny any of this, Ken?

Do these two gals deny that they were, you know, taking money

after having been hooked up with Burisma through Hunter and his pal to cleanse Burisma's reputation so that it could get this prosecutor off of its back and you know smooth sailing with the U.S.

government.

They don't exactly deny it.

The way they frame it is that they were just seeking information.

They wanted to know why the U.S.

government had this negative view of Zolchewski and of Burisma, and they wanted to help correct the misperceptions in Washington about this guy.

So that's the way that they would frame it.

Very, very benevolent.

So now it wasn't just Blue Star, this consulting firm that Hunter brought in to cleanse barisma.

Again, this is how he was actually earning his million dollars a year.

It was not for any oil and gas expertise.

It was to work as dad, to bring in this consulting firm to work the American public's perceptions and the perceptions of the Obama-Biden government.

And then this law firm, which is just everywhere,

David Boyce's firm, he also brought in and he was of counsel to that that firm.

And you actually point out, I mean, talk about your other conflicts of interest.

Hunter Biden had a couple of roles in connection with Burisma, and one was as a lawyer, right?

Was that the Burisma deal?

Initially, he was sort of brought in through Boyce Schiller, but when he joined the board, he sort of handed off the legal portfolio from Boyce Schiller to another lawyer there.

And ultimately, a different firm was brought in to sort of run the effort effort to try to get the Ukrainian prosecutors to back off.

And that firm

was Cravath.

I'm forgetting the rest of the names there, but Cravath is the first name.

Yeah, there you go.

And the lawyer who they had,

who, again, is very, it's like very symbolic and important that they're choosing this particular lawyer.

It was a guy by the name of John Beretta, who had worked in the justice, in the Obama Justice Department in a rather senior role.

And so he comes in and

he's basically like advertising to the Ukrainian prosecutors:

I worked in the Justice Department and now I am here on behalf of this company to

help resolve this situation.

And so, again, it's like the signaling that carries so much weight in, I mean, it carries so much weight everywhere, but particularly in these foreign countries where there's like less of a clear line between like the government and the allies of the government who are on the outside.

And John Beretta and Hunter and Blue Star, they all sort of like take advantage of this perception that they are kind of unofficially carrying the implementer of the government and that gets them taken seriously and helps their clients.

I mean, I know, I hear you on we may have had a couple of motivations for getting this prosecutor fired, right?

He may actually have been corrupt and the Biden, the Obama Biden administration may have actually wanted him gone.

But it sure does seem convenient that after Hunter Biden worked very hard, he didn't work very hard for many things, but he did work very hard to clean up Burisma's reputation and get this prosecutor fired with an outside consulting firm in the States, with lawyers in the States, Cravas Swain, you don't hire them unless you're really willing to pay for good results.

Like that's a huge, very well-respected firm.

And through working his own dad, suddenly the prosecutor was fired while they're lecturing the whole world about corruption.

I mean, Joe Biden, like he,

we could spend all day playing soundbites of him saying Ukraine really needs to root out

corruption.

They really need to root out corruption.

And he was the point person for the Obama administration on making sure that happened.

Meanwhile, his son is running around trying to run cover for one of the most apparently corrupt organizations there.

Yeah, and you know, their argument at the time, not at the time, but because at the time, this, as you noted, was not really covered with the sort of degree of intensity that you would typically think that, like, a high-level

conflict of interest scandal involving a top U.S.

official would be.

But after the fact, when this became an issue, the Biden folks' argument was, you know, Joe Biden wasn't aware of this.

He wasn't aware of what his son was doing beyond saying, you know, beyond being alerted by news stories that he had joined the board and telling him, I hope you know what you're doing.

Well, we see from this CIA,

this memo where the

Biden folks are telling the CIA not to disseminate a memo that really does point out this sort of conflict of interest here, or at least the double standard and the perception of a double standard that, like, no, in fact, they were aware of this.

And Joe Biden was aware of this, and he didn't want others in his government to be made aware of it.

So,

you know, whether or not he was actively involved in pushing out a prosecutor because it would benefit his son or his son's client, or whether it just so happened that it benefited

the burisma.

You can't argue that he wasn't aware of this potential conflict of interest.

And even if you could argue it.

He did.

Wait, hold that thought.

He did argue it many times.

Just as a refresher for the audience, Hannity Show put together this montage back in the day, SOT 55.

Mr.

Vice President, how many times have you ever spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings?

I've I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.

I have never discussed with my son or my brother or anyone else anything having to do with their businesses, period.

And what I will do is the same thing we did in our administration.

There will be an absolute wall between personal and private

and the government.

Do you stand by your statement that you did not discuss any of your son's overseas business dealings?

I stand by that statement.

I did not know he was on the board of that company.

I've never discussed my business or their business, my sons or daughters.

I never discussed a single thing with my son about anything having to do with Ukraine.

Did you lie about never speaking with Hunter?

No, I didn't.

Go ahead, Ken.

Yeah, I mean, so clearly he did know that Hunter was on the board of this company and

the people around him knew and the people around him and possibly him himself did not want others in the government to be sort of aware of this and

sort of focused on it as a potential problem that undercut the U.S.'s effort to fight corruption around the world.

You know,

the other thing that's

sort of notable on that front is like

this memo that was circulated or that they attempted to circulate that the Biden folks blocked from circulating came right as

this effort by Biden to force out the prosecutor was heating up and as Blue Star's effort to kind of

get the U.S.

to back away from the prosecution was really at its apex.

So, like, this was the moment when people in the government should have been aware of this.

And in fact, we do know that there were some people in the government who were aware of it and were deeply troubled by it and tried to flag it for the vice president himself.

And we're told that he just doesn't want to hear it right now.

At the time, I mean, this is, I'm not making light of this.

At the time, his other son, his older son, Bo was fighting brain cancer that ultimately cost him his life.

And so, you know, there is, I guess, a human argument, and you could understand why he wouldn't want to be troubled with like what his other son was doing.

But it implicated U.S.

foreign policy and the ability of the U.S.

to take the moral high ground in calling out and fighting corruption, which was, again, a key part of like the Biden doctrine in foreign policy.

Yeah, you have to do your job.

You're the vice president of the United States.

It's very sad, the personal tragedy that happened with Bo Biden, but you have to do your job.

That's not a job you can phone in.

So, if you need to take a leave of absence because of a massive health problem in your family, then that's what you do.

But you don't just say, don't bother me with massive corruption my other son is engaged in that's compromising the United States of America.

Do you think this is why, when you started to report this story more aggressively or at all, because a few were in 2019, they came at you so hard?

It's very normal to see hip pieces like that on MSNBC against people like me.

It's not normal to see it against people like you.

But obviously, you struck a nerve.

Yeah, I think that they recognized that this was a real issue and one that they wanted to get ahead of.

And it wasn't just them coming after me or other reporters.

I mean, we saw it most acutely with the Hunter Biden laptop and when the New York Post wrote about it in the run-up to the 2020 election, the way that the Biden campaign was able to marshal all these former intelligence officials to essentially shout it down and encourage successfully the social media companies to suppress the spread of the link to the New York Post story and any other reporting or commentary about the Hunter Biden laptop really does show the degree to which they recognized that this was a problem, even as they sort of pretended and tried to brush it off as like, oh, no, this is either Russian disinformation or this is like a Rudy Giuliani spin.

And, you know, to the point that I was trying to make, maybe not super articulately in that clip that you played from MSNBC, was that Rudy was, in fact,

kind of muddying the waters in a way that made it more difficult to discern what the facts were and what the real problems were with having

a close family member of the former vice president and potential future president

working for corrupt, I mean,

interests that the U.S.

government had determined were corrupt in places that were of critical geopolitical importance to U.S.

national security priorities.

Okay, but now I am, I have it on very good authority that it's only the current president who targets his media foes and folks in the media who make him unhappy.

I seem to be gleaning that he wasn't the very first to do this, Ken.

I mean, it's a different approach.

I take your point.

But yes, the Bidens were effective.

And, you know, maybe there is something to be said for the idea that they were, you know, the Democrats are more accustomed to being able to work with the media and therefore taking a less adversarial, publicly adversarial approach and sort of working the back channels.

But here was an example where the effort to work the back channels, because they did, you know, work to sort of shape our coverage and maybe discourage our coverage before it ran.

And then after it ran, they reacted in this very aggressive way that you saw play out there with that digital ad.

Did you ever get rattled?

Like, did you ever think, oh, God, because the book reports that, what's her name, Kate Bettingfield, she wrote a separate letter to the executive editor of the New York Times accusing you of an egregious act of journalistic malpractice, spreading Russian propaganda.

That's their favorite go-to.

Then the Biden team provided the letter to a CNN reporter who published it, Andrew Bates, who literally lied every other sentence.

Another Biden aide blasted your reporting on Hunter's work for burisma as historic malpractice and then called you a coward.

Then we saw that Biden campaign produced that video that we just played impugning you by name.

You write in the book, this is the type of media targeting for which Trump rightly drew criticism lately.

You, I mean,

to me, as a reporter, this would tell you you're right over the target.

But I don't know.

Was the New York Times rattled at all by this?

The New York Times definitely had my back, and the executive editor at the time, Dean Backe, publicly defended my reporting and me and sort of justified or validated the reporting as being like significant and something that we were going to continue.

And we did continue it.

And it was interesting because it did not,

you know, I think much of the, I can say like much of the mainstream media either sort sort of shied away from it or was like more measured

in their approach to it.

And of course, that's changed quite a bit after Biden dropped out of the race.

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And now it seems as if there's much more of an appetite to scrutinize the Bidens.

Well, I mean, good for you for doing exactly that.

I want to talk about what happened in Romania, but let's just take a quick break first and we'll be back with Ken Vogel.

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Back with me now is Ken Vogel.

This is his first interview for his brand new book, Devil's Advocates: The Hidden Story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden, and the Washington Insiders on the payrolls of corrupt foreign interests.

The book is out next week.

You can pre-order it right now and be in on the know.

Ken, what happened with Hunter Biden and Romania?

Yeah, this is one that is a pretty similar fact pattern, actually, with what happened in Ukraine, which is that there was a Romanian oligarch, a real estate developer, extremely wealthy,

who was being prosecuted by prosecutors in Romania in connection with what they allege was a corrupt land deal in which he had, again, bought land from the state.

You know, Romania was a communist.

Sensing a pattern.

Right.

And so he was able to get what prosecutors allege was a real sweetheart deal from the state to

buy this like very coveted land.

And he built a massive development on it, including

a mall and offices and commercial, other commercial properties.

And he ended up renting under a long-term lease part of the land to the U.S.

government to build the U.S.

Embassy in Bucharest here.

So he's being prosecuted.

And who does he reach out to to hire to help him navigate this prosecution, but Boyce Schiller and Hunter Biden.

And Hunter Biden goes over to Bucharest with a partner at Boyce Schiller, and he meets with the U.S.

ambassador under the Obama-Biden administration to Romania.

And they talk about this case and they sort of eventually follow up about, you know, their concerns with it, essentially seeking the help of the U.S.

government in backing away Romanian prosecutors from this case.

Well, as if that wasn't enough, Hunter Biden is also working to develop a land deal with this Romanian developer and a Chinese-linked company, not just linked, but a company that was regarded as like a pivotal cog in the Chinese Belt and Road economic influence campaign to essentially create this joint venture that would include Hunter, his partners, the Romanian developer, and the Chinese that would own this land.

So you would have, and in so doing, they thought that this might sort of diminish the appetite of the Romanian prosecutors to pursue this case because

the real estate developer would have less interest in the land and they would cut a deal with the state that would pay them.

But the end result, if this were to have gone through, which it didn't,

was that would have been that Hunter, the Romanian, and the Chinese would

co-own the land around the U.S.

Embassy, if not the land itself on which the U.S.

Embassy was built.

You could see why that could cause national security concerns.

And it did.

One of Hunter's partners at the time, Tony Bobolinski, actually raised this concern to the Romanian real estate developer and said, hey, we need to make sure that the embassy is not included in this transaction.

It never got far enough for that to actually be an issue where they were spelling out which specific parcels were involved and which weren't.

But again,

a concerning fact pattern that just shows how his pursuit, Hunter Biden's pursuit of foreign

was in some ways at odds with the foreign policy of the United States that his father, as vice president, was pushing.

We're talking with Ken Vogel.

The brand new book out by Ken next week, you can pre-order it right now, is called Devil's Advocates.

One of those advocates is Rudy Giuliani.

And

how widespread was his behavior, and what was it?

Yeah, I mean, the thing that's so interesting about Rudy is he, you know, he went after Hunter Biden.

in fact he encouraged trump to go after hunter biden to highlight hunter biden's foreign business dealings uh to as a political cudgel and and in some ways effectively in some ways ineffectively as we discussed but the the reason why he was so well versed in the in sort of the way that this foreign influence business worked is because he himself had worked in the same space.

In fact, he had worked at it in ways that directly overlapped with the ways that Hunter Biden had worked in it, including on behalf of this same Romanian real estate developer.

So the story there is that Hunter Biden eventually sort of passes off this

legal work for the Romanian real estate developer to Louis Free, a family friend, the former FBI director, a family friend of the Biden,

and also a close friend of Rudy Giuliani.

So Louis Free is working this case on behalf of the Romanian developer.

And when Trump gets into office, Louis Free brings in Rudy Giuliani to write a letter to the Romanians calling out some of the elements of this anti-corruption prosecution.

So it's sort of, it's more than a little ironic then that Rudy would sort of come after Hunter Biden over his work in the foreign space when he himself had worked at the same space, in some cases on behalf of, on behalf of or with some of the same people.

No, it does remind me of how, like, if you want to figure out how a hacker is likely to get into your network, you've got to go work with a hacker and have somebody explain it to you.

And that's how some of these like hacker criminals keep themselves out of jail.

They cut a deal to like work with the FBI to show them how it's done.

Not suggesting it's exactly a parallel, but yeah, it makes sense to me.

How widespread is this?

I mean, like,

is it just these guys or is it not just these guys?

No, I mean, it's very widespread.

And in fact, like the point about the parallels or the points of connective tissue between Hunter and Rudy in this case are

important because it shows that this is a very bipartisan thing.

Sure, the foreign interests are looking for people who have connections to the party in power, but they're also looking for connections like across the government.

So you see these strange bedfellows types of situations like in Ukraine, where Paul Manafort is working on behalf of the authoritarian president who employed the guy Zolchevsky who started Burisma, who hired Hunter Biden.

That was the pro-Russian, the pro-Russian Ukrainian president who got ousted thanks to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's State Department.

Yeah, I mean, the U.S.

was certainly behind.

It was certainly supportive of the street protests that led to his ouster.

But Paul Manafort was trying to keep him in power.

And so how does Paul Manafort go about doing that?

Well, he brings in Tony Podesta, a prominent Democrat with close ties to

the Obama administration through his brother John Podesta.

He brings in Tad Devine, a Democratic operative who would work for John Kerry and would go on to work for Bernie Sanders.

He brings in Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman with close ties to Mitt Romney.

So you see like all these people who in the U.S.

are on opposite sides of some of the most heated political fights between the red side and the blue side.

But when they're going abroad and looking to pad their pockets, they're all in alignment on the green side.

That is the side that's able to like pay them the most money.

And so what country does pay the most?

I mean, it's usually there's this dynamic where the ones, the foreign interests that are sort of most toxic and therefore like most,

you know, face the most problems from prosecutors at home and in the U.S.

and the U.S.

State Department and U.S.

sanctions, they oftentimes have the most money, often ill-begotten funds, or at least the prosecutors would say would ill-begotten funds,

and have the most incentive to try to protect themselves.

And also, they're the ones who like, there's the real reputational cost for the well-connected Americans who are going to go on their payroll.

And so they're eyeing it and they're saying, like,

I don't know.

This is like a real, a client that might look really bad.

So the payday better be worthwhile.

And so you see,

you know, dictators in Africa, Joseph Kabila was one.

He was the former president, strongman, president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, launched a huge lobbying campaign in 2018 that I write about in the book that brought in people from across the political spectrum and was paying you know millions of dollars because like that's a tough client to take and it could better be worth your while

what was there anything that really shocked you when you were researching this book

i mean i think it was the willingness of of americans to sort of try to

frame a political argument in the U.S.

where they would say, look, this person looks really, really bad.

And sure, they've done some terrible things, but like, they are kind of, it's kind of in the best interest of like U.S.

foreign policy for the U.S.

to like turn a blind eye to the bad things that they're doing in their country, whether they're human rights violations or corruption or what have you.

We're still doing that.

We're still doing that.

Like, we all buy Apple phones and we deal with China on a corporate level and a presidential level under both presidents, you know, most the most recent ones, notwithstanding what we know what they're doing, the Uyghurs and all that, the human rights abuses over there.

So I find that easy to believe.

I do wonder,

you know, like the Hunter Biden laptop and how willing the media was to go along with Russian disinformation, Russian disinformation.

How much do you think that kind of thing, like the censoring of that reporting by X, then Twitter?

Well, how much of an effect do you think that had on like the American media and understanding that we're just not going to go there?

We're not going to talk about things like that.

Yeah, it's tough to know.

I mean, I think it was troubling from the perspective of someone who like is whose whole job is transparency and enforcing transparency in places where it's not, where it's not comfortable for the, the ruling class.

And I think there were stories in there.

But, you know, I think they did ultimately get told.

Most of them, I mean, maybe I should check myself a little bit.

Yeah.

That's thanks to my side of the aisle.

I should check myself a little bit because I'm still like in this, with this Romania story with the land around the U.S.

Embassy.

Like I found out about that in reporting my book.

So this was well after Biden was

already

or

Biden had already been elected in 2020.

So

yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of interesting information out there about this industry and it doesn't make either side look particularly good.

No, but they should be outed, even if it doesn't make them look good.

I appreciate written the book, Ken.

I love this kind of stuff.

It's the granular detail is very appealing to me because that's evidence.

Again, it's called Devil's Advocates: The Hidden Story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden, and the Washington Insiders on the Payrolls of Corrupt Foreign Interests by Ken Vogel of the New York Times.

Thank you so much for being here.

All the best.

It was a pleasure.

Thank you, Megan.

All right, we're back tomorrow, everybody.

We will see you then.

Don't miss that.

Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show: No BS, No Agenda, and No Fear.

Hey everyone, it's Nikki and Bree, and we're here to let you know that we have a podcast, the Nikki and Bree Show.

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