Hunter Biden is the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, who served as a vice president from 1987 to 2017. He s been accused of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, and conspiracy to wire money to a foreign government, but Joe Biden says he knew nothing of it. But NBC News reports that while on a trip to China with his father in 2013, Hunter Biden received a $100,000 payment from a Chinese businessman. Did he get the money through his father? Or did he get it through a Chinese government official? And what was Joe Biden's role in the deal? And did he know anything about it? Alex Blumberg takes a look at Hunter Biden s business dealings, and examines the timeline of events leading up to the $100k he received from his father, Joe Biden in 2013. Guests: Former FBI Director John Cornyn, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, former Justice Department Director Robert B. Loretta Lynch, and former CIA Director John F. Conley. Thanks to our sponsor, Procter & Gamble, for sponsoring this episode of Proctor & Gamble s new podcast, Proctor and Gamble's new book, "The Dark Side of Politics: Inside the White House: The Secret Life of the Billionaire's New York Times" and other sponsors like VaynerSpeaker, which you can get a copy of the book for only $99.99! Subscribe to Proctor + Gamble's newest book, The Devil Next Door: The Inside Story. Subscribe to our new podcast on Amazon Prime and Vimeo, wherever you re listening to the podcast. Subscribe on Audible.co/The Devil Wanna support us? Subscribe? Subscribe? Subscribe on iTunes? Learn more about your ad choices? Become a supporter? We re giving away $5,000 and get 10% off your first month, and get 20% off the first month of a new episode starting on Prime Video + 7 other places get 5,000 miles and 7,000 PODCASTING PRODUCING FREE on Prime + 7, PROMO Subscribe for 7 days for 7GB and 7 GBPC? Learn more like $99,000 gets better than $99 a month, plus 7GB is also getting a course starting in the Proctor+ Vimeo membership starts starting in January 1st, and they get 7GB gets 4GB and 5GB gets 5 GBPROMO + 7GB becomes VIP access?
00:00:00.000So Joe Biden, the President of the United States, continues to claim that he knew nothing whatsoever about Hunter Biden's businesses.
00:00:06.000This is not only unconvincing, it's pretty obviously a lie.
00:00:08.000Yesterday, the President of the United States was asked by a reporter about Hunter's business dealings.
00:00:13.000Obviously, he spent literally decades picking up bags of cash in far-flung countries ranging from China to Ukraine.
00:00:20.000And Joe said the whole time he had no idea any of that was going on.
00:00:23.000In fact, he had said until five minutes ago that Hunter never did anything wrong.
00:00:26.000Then Hunter had to plead guilty on a couple of misdemeanor charges.
00:00:29.000He should have been hit with a felony gun charge as well.
00:00:31.000He probably should have been hit with, as we'll examine, felony tax charges, violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and all of the rest.
00:00:37.000He didn't get hit with that, possibly because Merrick Garland, the attorney general for Joe Biden, basically said to prosecutors, do not go forward with any attempt to investigate my son in full or prosecute him.
00:00:47.000Joe Biden, how involved were you in your son's Chinese shakedown text message?
00:01:12.000Those questions involve, like, actual dates and times and timelines and texts.
00:01:17.000Because the evidence is very, very strong that Joe Biden actually was receiving money through Hunter's foreign connections.
00:01:23.000Let's look at the timeline for a second.
00:01:25.000So, in 2013, when Joe Biden was Vice President of the United States, this is NBC News reporting, Hunter Biden joined Joe Biden on a trip to China via Air Force Two So, says one of the NBC News reporters.
00:01:38.000daughter, Finnegan, in tow, the Biden men sipped tea in a Confucian style tea house,
00:01:42.000leafed through books at local shops and treated themselves to mid-afternoon ice cream.
00:01:45.000But almost six years later, Biden's trip to Beijing is coming under scrutiny amid revelations
00:01:49.000about Donald Trump's efforts to dig up information to corroborate his corruption allegations
00:01:54.000So says one of the NBC News reporters.
00:01:58.000He was with Joe Biden, apparently, during this trip.
00:02:02.000He was one of four reporters who traveled aboard Air Force Two with Biden and his son
00:02:05.000to China, a visit that was sandwiched between stops in Japan and South Korea.
00:02:09.000When we got on the plane on a bright Sunday afternoon and joined Base Andrews, the Bidens were already on board, having just flown in from a family Thanksgiving gathering in Nantucket.
00:02:16.000What wasn't known then was that as he accompanied his father to China, Hunter Biden was forming a Chinese private equity fund that associates said at the time was planning to raise big money, including from China.
00:02:26.000Hunter Biden has acknowledged meeting with Jonathan Lee, a Chinese banker, and his partner in the fund during the trip, although his spokesman said it was just a social visit.
00:02:33.000The Chinese business license that brought the new fund into existence was issued by Shanghai authorities 10 days after the trip with Hunter Biden, a member of the board.
00:03:05.000Hunter Biden's spokesperson, George Macias, told NBC News that Hunter Biden wasn't initially an owner of the company and has never gotten paid for serving on the board.
00:03:11.000He said Hunter didn't acquire an equity interest in the fund until 2017, after his father had left office, which means that it was a delayed payoff.
00:03:37.000And of course, that's not the only open business conversation that was happening in the immediate proximity of Joe Biden.
00:03:44.000According to Miranda Devine reporting for the New York Post in 2021, Joe invited Hunter's foreign associates to breakfast meetings at his vice presidential residence and to his office in the White House, according to Hunter Biden's laptop.
00:03:56.000He took his son on Air Force Two to countries where Hunter was doing business deals on at least one occasion, including one of Hunter's business partners on the trip itself.
00:04:03.000Among the more than 100 events scheduled in Hunter's diary at the VP's residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., there are meetings which appear to overlap with Hunter's business interests.
00:04:13.000According to the laptop, quote, Breakfast with Dad at Nav Ops, that's one such meeting, recorded for 8.30 a.m., November 19, 2015.
00:04:20.000Five photographs, date stamped on that day, taken at 10.03 and 10.04 a.m., appear on the laptop showing Joe posing with four of Hunter's business associates, including Mexican billionaires Carlos Slim and Miguel Aleman Velasco.
00:04:33.000Hunter, Joe, and a bunch of Mexican business people.
00:04:36.000One photo also features Velasco's son, Miguel Aleman Magnani, the founder of budget airline Interjet, at whose Acapulco mansion Hunter and wife Kathleen had stayed that March.
00:04:44.000Jeff Cooper, a longtime Biden family benefactor who ran one of the largest asbestos litigation firms in the country, also appears, along with Hunter.
00:04:52.000Cooper and Hunter had been working on energy deals in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.
00:04:56.000A 2013 email from Cooper demonstrates their high expectations of the association with the Aleman dynasty.
00:05:02.000Cooper's association with the Bidens began in 2005 when he started filing multi-million dollar lawsuits in Delaware in connection with Joe's late son Beau Biden's firm, Bifurato Gentilotti & Biden.
00:05:11.000When Joe became vice president, Cooper then put Hunter on the board of his venture capital firm, Eudora Global, and gave him shares in the business, netting Hunter about 80 grand a year, according to documents on the laptop.
00:05:21.000In 2015, Hunter also received a one-time payment of $300,000 from Eudora.
00:05:25.000So why exactly was Hunter Biden on the board?
00:05:27.000Well, to use his dad's name in order to obviously trump up business for Cooper.
00:05:32.000Simmons Cooper put up a $1 million investment in investment capital for Hunter and his uncle Jim's abortive attempt to run a hedge fund in 2009.
00:05:39.000When the venture ended, the Bidens returned the cash.
00:05:41.000Cooper joined the VP's entourage on Air Force Two to Mexico in 2016, where he and Hunter were trying to negotiate an ill-fated petroleum deal with Aleman Magnani.
00:05:51.000So, again, fairly obvious that Joe knew about all this.
00:05:55.000He was squiring around Hunter's business partners.
00:05:58.000And that's, of course, not the only evidence.
00:06:00.000We'll get to more evidence of what exactly Hunter Biden was doing and the fact that Joe pretty obviously knew about it in one second first.
00:06:06.000It takes a special kind of company to want to partner with our company here at Daily Wire.
00:07:15.000On May 23rd, 2017, Hunter's business associate suggested a deal in which 10% of a Chinese business venture should be held by H for the big guy.
00:07:38.000Well, I mean, it turns out that the same business associate who is calling, who says held by H for the big guy in his email, also happened to be the same person who in other email exchanges and text exchanges calls Joe Biden the big guy.
00:07:52.000So that question was already answered.
00:07:55.000So what does it mean held by H, 10% for the big guy, this Chinese business deal?
00:08:02.000Fast forward just about two months, July 30, 2017.
00:08:06.000Joe Biden, his son, Hunter, has a WhatsApp to the head of CEFC China Energy Company.
00:08:12.000Quote, I'm sitting here with my father.
00:08:14.000We would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.
00:08:18.000Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight.
00:08:22.000And Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows, and my ability to forever hold a grudge, you will regret not following my direction.
00:08:32.000I am sitting here, waiting for the call.
00:08:36.000Again, note the proximity of these particular texts.
00:08:38.000May 23rd, 2017, Hunter's business associate sends him an email concerning, I believe, this particular deal.
00:08:44.000Saying the 10% may be held by H for the big guy.
00:08:48.000We have contemporaneous texts and emails from this particular person suggesting that the big guy is, in fact, Joe Biden.
00:08:58.000The Washington Post was able to authenticate that particular email.
00:09:03.000And so now we know that this deal is something that probably involved Joe Biden, obviously.
00:09:09.000The person who sent that email, 10% for the big guy, was a person named James Gilear, who was a business associate of Hunter Biden's.
00:09:14.000And apparently, in other emails, the same person, Gilear, had called Joe Biden, the big guy.
00:09:20.000This, of course, is not the only sort of association that we have between Hunter's business friends and Joe Biden.
00:09:26.000We also know that there are members of the Burisma board who are thanking Hunter Biden for brokering meetings between them and Joe Biden.
00:09:33.000Okay, so back to this particular CEFC deal.
00:09:36.000Right, again, May 23rd, 2017, Hunter's business associate, James Gillilary, suggests a deal in which 10% is held for the big guy.
00:09:42.000July 30th, 2017, Hunter WhatsApps the head of CEFC China Energy and says, my dad is sitting right here and we are going to break you on the wheel of pain if you don't send us our money.
00:09:53.000And on August, in August of 2017, just like a few days later, Hunter receives a $5.1 million wire.
00:10:01.000This is according to Fox News, a bank account linked to President Biden's son Hunter received more than $5 million in August of 2017, shortly after his threatening messages in which he said he was sitting here with his father to a Chinese associate were were sent, according to documents released by congressional investigators.
00:10:18.000On August 4th, 2017, CEFC Infrastructure Investment — that, by the way, would be approximately five days after that WhatsApp exchange — they wired $100,000 to Hunter Biden's law firm, Awosco, according to a 2020 report.
00:10:30.000Then, just a few days later, on August 8th, 2017, CEFC Infrastructure Investment sent $5 million to Hudson West III, a firm that Hunter Biden opened with Chinese associates.
00:10:41.000The two transactions, totaling $5.1 million, came within 10 days of messages uncovered on Thursday by the House Ways and Means Committee.
00:10:49.000And by the way, we still have no idea why exactly Joe Biden, Joe, had $5.2 million in unexplained income according to the UK Daily Mail.
00:10:58.000That is a report dating back to April of 2022.
00:11:02.000Apparently, the president's financial filings reveal he declared almost $7 million more in income on his tax returns than he did on his government transparency reports, and $5.2 million of those dollars are completely unexplained.
00:11:16.000Now, what if we had, you know, like a text message from Hunter fully explaining that he was a bad man for his dad?
00:12:15.000But you know what else is not credible?
00:12:16.000Do you think that Hunter was texting his daughter about giving money to his dad?
00:12:19.000Like, how often have you texted your kids or your friends about paying your parents' bills when you weren't actually paying your parents' bills?
00:12:28.000How often have you had correspondences with other people in which you threaten, as a 50-year-old man, Hunter Biden is not 20, he is 50, as a 50-year-old man, that your daddy is sitting next to you, and they need to shake you down together.
00:12:41.000Do we really think that Hunter was off freelancing this on his own?
00:12:44.000Does that sound anything remotely plausible?
00:12:46.000That Joe had no clue what exactly was happening here?
00:12:54.000And if he knew exactly what was happening, the chances that there was money that was actually funneled to Joe through all of these shell companies is really high.
00:13:02.000Because I really doubt that Joe Biden is just the kind of guy who's sitting around waiting for all of his friends and family members to freelance off his name, but nothing was coming back to him, especially not when you have full-on text messages from Hunter saying, I'm paying dad's bills.
00:13:17.000Is it possible this is a mutually enabling relationship?
00:13:19.000This isn't just a loving relationship from Joe to Hunter?
00:13:23.000That maybe this is an enabling relationship where Joe, yeah, he loves his son.
00:13:26.000Yeah, he wants to take care of his son.
00:13:27.000Yeah, he wants his son not to be a drug addict.
00:13:29.000But also, one of the reasons for that is because his son also happens to be picking up bags of cash for him.
00:13:35.000Why exactly was this investigation stopped?
00:13:38.000I mean, all of this is impeachable, by the way.
00:13:41.000There are two areas of this that are clearly impeachable.
00:13:43.000Area number one, if Joe Biden was clearing money, While he was vice president or making deals while he was vice president via his son, where he'd pick up the cash on the other end after he left office.
00:13:56.000Two, if he in fact exerted pressure on Attorney General Merrick Garland, which is the only reason Merrick Garland would do this, for Merrick Garland to exert pressure in turn on U.S.
00:14:04.000Attorney David Weiss to prevent him from prosecuting Hunter Biden or investigating Hunter Biden or going up the chain to the big guy.
00:14:12.000If that sort of pressure was exerted, that also is impeachable.
00:14:15.000And right now, we have a lot more solid evidence connecting Joe Biden to actual corruption activity than we have to anything remotely like Donald Trump and the Russians.
00:14:23.000All the Donald Trump Russian crap was all speculative nonsense.
00:14:27.000Here you have actual texts from Hunter Biden to his own daughter saying, I was picking up cash on behalf of dad.
00:14:32.000You have exact timelines in which Joe is personally squaring around his son to make deals in these places.
00:14:39.000And Hunter, again, is saying in these deals, I mean, there are multiple places in these emails between Hunter and his business partners where they're talking explicitly about kickbacks to Dad.
00:14:48.000Should a full-scale investigation have been done here?
00:14:52.000Subpoenas should be going out, like, right now, if they haven't already.
00:14:57.000And I'll get to the kicker in just a second because it turns out that all this talk about how loving the Biden family is, how it's all just about the love and about the giving and the altruism and Joe just loving his son so much.
00:16:22.000Well, it turns out that if you have the Biden last name, it's not about loyalty to the Biden last name or people who are blood relatives, because if it turns out that your son nailed a stripper and then impregnated her, and you have a granddaughter that you didn't know about, and you are Joe Biden, you just pretend she doesn't exist.
00:16:37.000In fact, the same week that the DOJ settled with Hunter Biden on a couple of guilty pleas and misdemeanor cases that were like the least of his concerns, that same week, Hunter Biden and London Roberts, the mother of his four-year-old child, reached a settlement in their explosive child support dispute.
00:16:52.000It prohibits the first son's daughter from using the Biden family name.
00:16:56.000Only Hunter and Joe are able to- I mean, presumably, Navy Joan, who's the four-year-old, doesn't have the capacity yet to, you know, fly off to Ukraine or Romania and pick up bags of cash on behalf of grandpa.
00:17:24.000She petitioned the court to rename her daughter Navy Joan Biden after a paternity test confirmed that Hunter Biden is the biological dad.
00:17:31.000Roberts reportedly wanted to change their daughter's surname so that Navy could benefit from carrying the Biden family name, according to the UK Daily Mail, which makes sense.
00:17:38.000Everybody else with the Biden family name has been making bank off of that thing.
00:17:40.000However, Hunter, who has never met Navy, he has literally never met his own biological daughter, and refuses to acknowledge her existence, submitted court filings, according to the Post Millennial, that opposed Navy Joan Roberts changing her surname to Biden, claiming he wants her to have a peaceful existence and to live a life free of public scrutiny associated with the Biden family.
00:17:57.000You knocked up a stripper and you had a baby out of wedlock, definitely what's going to keep her out of the headlines if you prohibit her from using your last name.
00:18:04.000Roberts was initially receiving $20,000 in monthly child support payments from Hunter, but she agreed to have the monthly payments cut to $5,000 after she showed up to Biden's deposition per the New York Post.
00:18:12.000You gotta wonder what exactly was on the other end of this.
00:18:14.000This is the worst custody deal I've ever heard.
00:18:17.000She was getting $20,000 a month, $240,000 a year from Hunter, and she reduced that to $60,000 a year, and she can't use Biden's last name for the daughter who is in fact Biden's.
00:18:30.000Again, if you're talking about familial love, it turns out one aspect of familial love is not disowning a grandchild who is four years old for no reason other than Hunter Biden is a derelict.
00:18:39.000But that's precisely where we stand right now.
00:18:42.000So I ask you again, is this about Joe Biden's unbelievable unmitigated love for his son?
00:18:50.000Or is there something deeper going on here?
00:18:52.000A sort of perverse dependency between Joe and Hunter, in which Hunter is the bag man,
00:18:58.000and Joe is clearing money on the other end.
00:19:00.000And yeah, of course Joe loves his son, and Joe doesn't want his son to be a drug addict,
00:19:03.000but he's also willing to enable his son in some of his worst activities,
00:19:08.000because you know it's a really terrible thing to do.
00:19:10.000Knock up a lady, have a baby with her, never meet that baby, not take care of that baby, and then bar that baby from using the family name that has made you rich despite your own lack of any semblance of a functional brain.
00:19:24.000In just a second, we'll get to the other half of this scandal, which is the possibility that the DOJ was militarized by Joe Biden in order to protect his son, with whom he is almost certainly in business.
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00:20:39.000Gary Shapley is the IRS whistleblower who's been on all the meetings in terms of the investigation into Hunter Biden.
00:20:45.000And he was on Bret Baier's show last night and he had some rather shocking revelations.
00:20:49.000He pointed out that Hunter's income between 2014 and 2019, remember, this is for a career drug addict, derelict loser with no discernible qualities whatsoever.
00:20:59.000His income from 2014 to 2019 was about $8.3 million.
00:21:04.000When prosecutors don't allow you to put the subject's name on document requests or on search warrants, then it raises the possibility that there's more information out there we didn't find, but based on all of the financial records that we did find, they've been analyzed.
00:21:22.000It was around $8.3 million he received.
00:22:21.000I mean, wouldn't that seem to be a worthwhile line of questioning is where is some of this money going?
00:22:27.000Especially when, again, we know that the person who used the term the big guy also referred to Joe Biden as the big guy.
00:22:33.000Also, says Shapley, there were no steps taken to investigate whether, in fact, Joe was sitting next to Hunter when he was sending those WhatsApp messages.
00:22:39.000Wouldn't that be relevant in any way, shape, or form?
00:22:42.000Because, again, you could be influence peddling back in 2013 and you just say the payoff comes in 2017.
00:22:47.000And, by the way, that might lead to some disputes.
00:23:19.000And so here is Shapley saying there were no steps to investigate if Joe was even with Hunter during the 2017 tax.
00:23:25.000By the way, we know that Hunter was in Joe's house at the time because the Washington Free Beacon actually examined the photographs on Hunter Biden's laptop and there are contemporaneous photos like on that day of Hunter with Joe next to the Corvette.
00:23:38.000This WhatsApp message, I mean, it obviously raised the most eyebrows in Washington because it seems to go directly to this.
00:23:46.000Do you know if there was an effort to authenticate that or to make sure that that had been followed?
00:23:53.000Sure, and that was the reason why that was included in my testimony was because when we received the attorney-client filter-reviewed copy of information from the search warrant to Apple, which produced that document, We went back to the prosecutors and we requested to take various investigative steps, and they were not supported.
00:24:16.000And when they weren't supported, they said, well, maybe he wasn't co-located with them.
00:24:20.000So, well, we can take investigative steps to see if that happened, and they didn't support anything in relation to that effort.
00:24:32.000Meanwhile, says Shapley, the prosecutors were basically working hand-in-glove with Hunter Biden's team.
00:24:36.000Apparently, there was a storage unit that may have had documents that were relevant to this investigation.
00:24:41.000And instead of just going and raiding the storage unit, because, you know, he was a suspected criminal, in the same way that the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, instead of doing any of that, they simply just told Hunter's people about it.
00:24:53.000Transitioning into another search warrant was on a storage unit in Northern Virginia.
00:24:59.000And during the day of action on December 8th of 2020, we got updated information that said that records were in that location that would be evidence in this particular investigation.
00:25:13.000And the prosecutors initially were supportive of it and an affidavit was drafted the night of December 8th, 2020 to go forward for approval.
00:25:23.000Eventually the prosecutors decided they didn't support it so I called U.S.
00:25:29.000Attorney David Weiss with my senior executive on the phone and we said we need to execute this search warrant.
00:25:36.000He responded that the prosecutors didn't want to and I asked if in 30 days if that storage unit wasn't accessed and that was the deadline for the document request that was served on that day then we can execute the search warrant and he agreed to that.
00:25:51.000Okay, and obviously it would be beyond Hunter Biden, one of the most upstanding moral people, to just go to the storage unit and destroy anything incriminating.
00:26:10.000Meanwhile, Shapley says that the Delaware U.S.
00:26:12.000Attorney David Weiss, who's the one who charged Hunter with these couple of misdemeanors and the gun felony that he ended up essentially being sent to a spa for, Shapley says that the U.S.
00:26:22.000Attorney David Weiss said that he was denied special counsel status.
00:26:25.000By the way, the New York Times backs this up.
00:26:27.000The New York Times buried it in paragraph 21 of a story yesterday, but it turns out that there are multiple witnesses to a conversation in which David Weiss openly suggested that he was asking for special counsel status and was denied it by the DOJ.
00:27:33.000According to Shapley, all of the most felonious charges were left off the table because, of course, it was Hunter and Hunter had to be protected at all costs.
00:27:40.000By the way, think to yourself for a second.
00:27:41.000If you're Joe Biden and you think that Hunter can get a plea deal anyway, why do you intervene this way?
00:27:51.000Obviously, it was fair and upstanding and all the rest.
00:27:53.000Or why not let Hunter get clocked by the law?
00:27:56.000I mean, after all, some tough love for your lifelong criminal son might not be the worst thing that ever happened to him.
00:28:03.000Or maybe there's the possibility that this is not about tough love or any sort of love, that maybe actually a lot of this is just about protecting your own ass because you're a lot richer than you should be having been a lifetime government employee.
00:28:13.000Are there criminal implications in what you were investigating when it comes to Hunter Biden?
00:28:30.000Which would have been evasion for 14, false return for 18, and 2019.
00:28:36.000So as of right now in the information that's been out there in the public, it uses a term in excess of $100,000 for 2017 and separately for 2018.
00:28:43.000The true number is $580,000 of failure to pay for 2017 is $620,000 for 2018.
00:28:45.0002018. The true number is $580,000 of failure to pay for 2017 is $620,000 for 2018. Yet
00:28:55.000this document puts it close to $100,000.
00:29:06.000Either David Weiss is lying to his own investigators, or Merrick Garland is lying when he says that he had nothing to do whatsoever with whether special counsel status was given to David Weiss.
00:29:16.000And then there needs to be a full-scale investigation of all these threads.
00:29:20.000Where exactly was Joe Biden on the day that Hunter was asking the Chinese for the cash?
00:29:25.000What exactly did Joe Biden know, and when did he know all of it?
00:29:40.000If you were writing off hookers on your tax returns, which is apparently what Hunter Biden did, you would be in jail, and you would have been in jail a long time ago.
00:29:48.000If your parents were involved in what appears to be a low-level, actually not a low-level, a fairly high-level money laundering scheme, that is, like, you and your dad would be sharing a cell.
00:30:01.000But if you're Joe Biden, then you get away with it.
00:30:02.000And one of the reasons you get away with it is because right now, not only are you the president of the United States, but you're a babbling old fool.
00:30:08.000And because you're a babbling old fool, you're unthreatening.
00:30:11.000One of the great, I've said this for a while, one of the great assets that Joe Biden has is that he appears to be in a state of cognitive decline.
00:30:18.000In the same way that you watch a mafia movie and you will see somebody in a mafia movie who is under investigation pretend to be crazy or pretend to be in a state of cognitive decline so that prosecutor's like, oh, he couldn't have done it.
00:30:31.000That is basically Joe Biden at this point.
00:30:33.000I don't think he's pretending, but I certainly think that his decline in his cognitive faculties make him a more sympathetic figure than he otherwise would be.
00:30:40.000Joe Biden of 2008 was not in any way sympathetic.
00:30:42.000Now he seems sympathetic mainly because you're afraid that he's going to literally keel over and die at any moment.
00:30:48.000It makes every speech that he gives now feels like Evel Knievel jumping Snake Canyon.
00:31:37.000And he has become a bit of a friar around the world.
00:31:42.000I believe this is the second time in two weeks that Joe Biden has referred to the war in Ukraine as the war in Iraq because he no longer has a functioning brain.
00:31:50.000In other Joe Biden health news, apparently he's begun using a CPAP machine to help deal with sleep apnea.
00:31:56.000There are a lot of younger people who have it, but it's a little bit different when the person who's using a CPAP machine.
00:32:00.000The reason you use a CPAP machine, by the way, is because sleep apnea can kill you because, you know, you're basically it's your throat closes up.
00:32:07.000While you are while you're sleeping so you're snoring really heavily and theoretically it can cut off your air supply and so a CPAP machine essentially forces open your air supply.
00:32:15.000It's a little bit different when you're 40 than it is when you are 80.
00:32:18.000So that is indeed a matter of some public concern.
00:32:20.000It became public when Joe Biden was wandering around and he had the actual lines from the straps on his face.
00:32:26.000Now do I think that any of that is going to hurt him?
00:32:28.000I actually think in some ways a lot of this helps him.
00:32:31.000Because, again, it turns us away from the simple fact, which is that Joe Biden is a terrible president.
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00:34:55.000Here was Joe Biden trying to push this yesterday, but man, it's hard to watch him.
00:34:59.000I mean, honest to God, it's difficult to watch the man these days.
00:35:01.000I got asked by a press person this morning, getting on a helicopter in Washington, why, when I asked about Bidenomics a long time ago, you said you didn't know what it was.
00:35:30.000Dionne over at the Washington Post thinks it does.
00:35:32.000Here's how he describes what Bidenomics is, quote, So they're taking your money and they're investing it in a bunch of stuff where you don't get any of the money back because it's not their money, it's your money.
00:36:20.000Real hourly wages under Joe Biden have fallen 3.16%, and Joe Biden's people are out there lying.
00:36:27.000So Biden's OMB director was out there lying yesterday, suggesting that Shalanda Young, that they are in a period of massive wage growth.
00:36:34.000Literally every month of Joe Biden's presidency, wages, with inflation taken into account, have gone down.
00:36:40.000Real wages are down every month of Joe Biden's presidency, and here they are just lying about it.
00:36:44.000Do you see a mild recession as possible at the first part of next year?
00:36:48.000Not when you see jobs numbers like this.
00:36:51.000Not when you see wage growth like this.
00:36:53.000That is just not consistent with a recession.
00:36:56.000You know, for two years I've been asked the same question or told prosnosticators say a recession is coming and we continue to see a strong labor market in this country.
00:37:09.000Well, just like they said inflation isn't coming.
00:37:27.000Everyone who's an investor is holding out on the side.
00:37:29.000They got all their cash out of the markets.
00:37:31.000They're attempting right now to essentially get as liquid as humanly possible because they do not want to be invested in these markets when it goes down.
00:37:39.000I mean, people are really, really... I talk with business people every day.
00:38:12.000According to the New York Times, New York City passed a woeful milestone this week spurred by an influx of migrants from the nation's southern border.
00:38:18.000For the first time, there are now over 100,000 people in homeless shelters, city officials said on Wednesday.
00:38:23.000Days earlier, the city said the number of migrants in shelters had passed 50,000, that they now make up the majority of people in homeless shelters in the city.
00:38:34.000The city, under Mayor Eric Adams, has spent over a billion dollars to house the migrants since they started arriving in large numbers in the spring of 2022.
00:38:40.000It expects to spend over four billion dollars by next year.
00:38:44.000But it's not just migrants who are the problem.
00:38:46.000Obviously, you have a massive embedded homeless problem in New York City, where they refuse to put people who are severely mentally ill or drug addicted off the streets.
00:38:53.000They leave them on the streets to commit horrifying crimes.
00:38:55.000And then when you defend yourself, and when you defend others, then they throw you in jail.
00:38:59.000Which brings us to the case of Daniel Penney.
00:39:01.000Yesterday, Daniel Penney, who's of course the military veteran, Who put Jordan Neely in a fatal submission hold.
00:39:12.000Jordan Neely was of course a career violent criminal who had something like 42 prior arrests and he was threatening people and screaming at them on a subway when Daniel Penny, a Marine Corps veteran, came up behind him and put him in a submission hold.
00:39:26.000He was accompanied by two other men of a diverse race.
00:39:29.000He's still been charged now with second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide.
00:39:36.000He entered the plea during his arraignment in a state court in Manhattan, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:39:40.000Apparently, he will remain released on $100,000 bail.
00:39:43.000His next appearance in court is set for October 25th.
00:39:46.000And, of course, the media continued to They continue to call Neely a 30-year-old Michael Jackson impersonator, as opposed to, you know, a career homeless person who was basically panhandling on the subways while simultaneously threatening people.
00:40:01.000At the same time that Daniel Penney was charged, in a piece of better news, another person who had been accused of a stabbing aboard a New York City subway has now been let go.
00:40:13.000According to the New York Post, the Big Apple strap hanger charged with stabbing a rowdy ex-con to death on a Brooklyn J train was found to have acted in self-defense, leading to his manslaughter charge being dismissed on Wednesday, according to the New York Post.
00:40:23.000The grand jury declined to indict 20-year-old Jordan Williams, who had been charged with manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon in the June 13th melee that left another man dead.
00:40:32.000His self-defense claim was bolstered by video footage presented at the grand jury, which allegedly showed the person who died choking Williams and slugging his girlfriend before Williams stabbed him, according to sources.
00:40:43.000So the question is, why exactly this guy is off?
00:40:46.000Well, Daniel Penny is going to be tried for criminally negligent homicide.
00:40:52.000It couldn't have anything to do with race, could it?
00:40:53.000The person who was just let go, as he should have been, is black.
00:40:56.000Daniel Penney is, of course, a white person, and Jordan Neely is a black person.
00:41:00.000Prosecutors are now saying that they plan to use more footage and statements from Jordan Neely's New York City subway death in the upcoming trial, according to current reports.
00:41:07.000They said they have additional cell phone video from witnesses of the incident.
00:41:11.000Court documents said prosecutors claim they obtained at least five other cell phone videos from three separate witnesses in the deadly incident, and they plan to use that as evidence in the upcoming trial.
00:41:18.000The documents also state the prosecutors have two witnesses' videotaped statements, two MTA surveillance videos, and police body cam footage.
00:41:25.000Other disclosures in the documents from prosecutors include a videotaped statement Penny made to police the day of the incident before authorities released him without charges.
00:41:31.000Penny told police, quote, he came on, threw all his bleep down, was very aggressive, going crazy.
00:41:37.000He said Neely was acting irate, dropping things on the floor, saying he doesn't care if he goes to jail.
00:41:42.000So, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is here to prosecute Donald Trump for non-crimes, and apparently also Daniel Penney for non-crimes.
00:41:50.000He continues to move forward on this one.
00:41:52.000Penney faces up to 19 years in prison if he is convicted on both counts in this particular case.
00:41:58.000Meanwhile, people are fleeing the big cities as well they should.
00:42:01.000Portland has now lost 3% of its population between 2020 and 2022.
00:42:06.000Maybe it's because you guys decided that you're not going to police crime ever again.
00:42:10.000The drop of about 17,400 people was the sixth largest decline among 50 of the largest cities in America.
00:42:17.000Mayor Ted Wheeler, Democrat, who has basically given the city over to lawlessness, has come under increasing pressure to address rising violent crime and sprawling homeless encampments.
00:42:26.000Bad blue state governance is what creates these sorts of problems.
00:42:34.000We'll get to the latest in Russia, where Vladimir Putin is settling all family business.
00:42:38.000First, are you exhausted with woke corporate America trying to push messaging that further alienates conservative Americans?
00:42:43.000It's happening all over the country, obviously.
00:42:45.000Family retailers are selling tuck-friendly bathing suits and coffee shops are strong-arming customers to support abortion and beer companies.
00:42:51.000Are forcing gender ideology on you when all you really wanted to do was just have a very watered-down beer?
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00:43:42.000Okay, meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is now settling all family business.
00:43:46.000According to the Wall Street Journal, he's moving to seize control of the Wagner global empire.
00:43:51.000The Kremlin is assuring nations in Africa and the Middle East that it's going to continue to manage the Wagner forces, which would spread Russian power at little cost to Putin.
00:43:57.000So, Wagner is a mercenary group that has been used by Vladimir Putin since basically 2014 to do his dirty work everywhere from Ukraine to Syria.
00:44:05.000And then, apparently, he attempted to essentially override the head of the Wagner group Yevgeny Prigozhin and then take control of it.
00:44:13.000And that is why Prigozhin tried to lead a revolt against Putin.
00:44:16.000And that went sideways very, very quickly.
00:44:17.000And he is now in Belarus awaiting his suicide.
00:44:21.000But Wagner is apparently now in the crosshairs of Putin.
00:44:24.000He's going to sort of vertically integrate these mercenary forces directly into the Russian armed forces.
00:44:29.000Russia's deputy foreign minister, according to the Wall Street Journal, flew to Damascus to personally deliver a message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
00:44:35.000Wagner group forces would no longer operate there independently.
00:44:37.000Senior Russian Foreign Ministry officials phoned the President of the Central African Republic, whose personal bodyguards include Wagner mercenaries, offering assurances that Saturday's crisis would not derail Russia's expansion into Africa.
00:44:48.000Government jets from Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations shuttled from Syria to Mali, another of Wagner's key foreign outposts.
00:44:55.000The rush of diplomatic activity reflected Putin's attempt to play down the chaos at home and ensure Russia's partners in Africa and the Middle East that they are not going anywhere because these mercenaries have basically been used as shock troops by a bunch of bad foreign regimes.
00:45:07.000Jay Peter Pham, former special envoy for the West African Sahel region, said Wagner helped Russia build its influence and the government is loathe to give it up.
00:45:15.000The question is whether they can manage its complexity and deal with additional scrutiny.
00:45:18.000I mean, the answer now is that Russia doesn't care.
00:45:20.000I mean, right now, what Wagner originally offered to Putin is they could commit whatever human rights violations they wanted to commit, and Putin couldn't be directly blamed because he didn't run them.
00:45:30.000He was connected to them, but he wasn't in direct control.
00:45:32.000Well, now I'm not sure that Putin cares, considering he's been firing rockets at apartment buildings in Kiev.
00:45:36.000So, you know, I think that at this point, what is the harm of vertically integrating?
00:45:41.000The big break between Wagner and the Russian government came over Defense Secretary Viktor Shoigu, who's done apparently a terrible job in the Ukraine war.
00:45:49.000And the Wagner group's head was like, guys, you're doing a horrible job.
00:45:53.000And the response from the Russian government was to essentially try to take control of the entire Wagner group itself.
00:45:59.000So now Russia's deploying all of its top diplomats to various foreign regions to try to convince them that Wagner is not going away, so that this entire battle does not change the face of Russian sort of footprint across the world.
00:46:11.000Meanwhile, Putin, it sounds like, is just getting rid of top people who may have been involved in the attempted coup.
00:46:17.000According to The Guardian, a Russian general who previously led the invasion force in Ukraine has not been seen in public since Saturday, with U.S.
00:46:22.000intelligence reportedly claiming he had prior knowledge of the uprising led by Prigozhin.
00:46:27.000General Sergei Serovikin is the head of the Russian Aerospace Forces and formerly Moscow's Supreme Commander in Ukraine.
00:46:32.000Prigozhin had welcomed his appointment to that post in 2022, calling him a legendary figure and born to serve his motherland.
00:46:37.000Those well-publicized links led to rumors that Serovikin may be purged or put under investigation for supporting the mutiny.
00:46:44.000So his suicide notice, I'm sure, will be issued in the near future sometime.
00:46:49.000Again, if you're going to come for Vladimir Putin, it turns out that you had best make sure that you're not drinking any plutonium-laced coffee anytime in the near future, because Putin is fond of assassinating his political opposition.
00:47:02.000And meanwhile, controversy over at the Vatican.
00:47:04.000Still unclear what the full story here is, but there are a lot of suspicions that the Vatican is now investigating one particular bishop named Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, because he was critical of Pope Francis.
00:47:15.000His critique of Pope Francis is because he thinks that Pope Francis is too socially liberal, an assessment of which I, who have no dog in this particular fight, have... I fully agree with that.
00:47:23.000I think Pope Francis is a disaster area of a pope.
00:47:28.000But, apparently the Vatican is now investigating Bishop Joseph Strickland.
00:47:33.000This was led off, at least allegedly, by Strickland leading a protest against the LA Dodgers for them honoring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a gay hate group that hates Catholics and makes fun of Catholic iconography and all the rest of this.
00:47:50.000According to the Catholic News Agency, it's unclear how many of his tweets are related to the investigation.
00:47:54.000One directly addresses his supporters, in which he thanked an organization for its support.
00:47:57.000Other than that, his Twitter feed appears to be on par for the widely popular Firebrand Bishop, who is admired by many Catholics for his outspokenness against prominent modern-day issues like abortion, gender ideology, and the political agendas of elected officials who blatantly disregard the sanctity of the unborn.
00:48:11.000The cause of the investigation from Rome is unclear, and it comes following his participation in that Eucharistic procession and prayer rally in L.A.
00:48:20.000Dodgers honoring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
00:48:25.000So, it could be that this is just him overstepping his boundaries when it comes to the critique of the Pope, because it's still a hierarchical structure in the Catholic Church, or it could be that the Pope is, again, standing forward In attempting to quash people who are insufficiently liberal for his taste.
00:48:42.000Whatever it is, I would say that it's fairly obvious from all the Catholics that I talk to that a schism is arising inside the Catholic Church, and that schism is growing wider, not narrower, and that it's largely due to the vagaries in leadership of the current Pope.
00:48:54.000Okay, time for a couple of things I like.
00:48:56.000There's a series on FX called The Bear, and I'm not sure why I was reluctant to watch it.
00:49:01.000I think maybe just I had no idea what the hell it was.
00:49:18.000You know, Chicago White Sox area, which is my team, and it's a terrific series about a guy who was a top chef at Nobu, which is widely ranked as the best restaurant in the world, and his brother committed suicide and was running a beef eatery, essentially, in Chicago, and now he has to go back home to Chicago, and he decides to take up where his brother left off at the restaurant and try to fix the restaurant.
00:50:24.000And again, one of the things that I like about this show is that what it really is mostly about is a guy who is very good at a thing trying to make a place better.