Miranda Devine's new book, The Laptop from Hell, tells the story of how one of the most powerful men in American history, former Vice President Joe Biden, conspired with the Deep State to keep a secret from the American people about his own personal laptop and the secrets he was keeping from the press and the public. It s a story that should be old news by now, but hasn t been well covered enough to be fully explored. Today, we re taking a look at what happened to Biden s laptop, and why it s so important to know what s on it. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and offers a roadmap towards healing. In his new series, he provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that, while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you re suffering, please know you are not alone. There s hope, and there s a path to feeling better. Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson s new series on Depression and Anxiety. Let s take the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Today s episode is the first episode in her new series. Enjoyed this episode? Please share it on social media and tell a friend about this episode! and let us know what you think of it! and what you're struggling with depression and/or anxiety. or are struggling with something similar in a tweet us or if you re struggling with Depression and/are struggling about what you d like to help us reach out to someone else. We ll be listening to this episode. Thank you! . - Dr. J.B. Peterson - Jordan - @ Daily Wire + & #DailyWire Plus (featuring: (linktr.ee ) (c) (referenced=a&t=. (tr. ) (c_t=1_a&q=1&q&a&a=2&q_c&qid=3&c_a=8&qx&c=1A&qtr=1)
00:00:00.940Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420Hello everyone watching and listening.
00:01:12.100Today I'm discussing something truly explosive, I would say, with columnist and writer Miranda Devine.
00:01:18.680We're talking about her 2021 book, which should be old news by now, but hasn't been well covered enough to be that.
00:01:29.120Hunter Biden, big tech, and the dirty secrets the president tried to hide.
00:01:33.320We delve into what Hunter Biden inadvertently, unconsciously, or purposefully revealed about his family's business dealings.
00:01:43.040How they built and maintained the regime, how they built and maintained the regime, the surreal but comprehensive cover-up by the so-called deep state in forced and willing collusion with the legacy and social media companies.
00:01:59.820Not just for those directly involved, not just American citizens, but for innocent people all across the world who find themselves in the midst of political, psychological, and physical warfare.
00:03:39.480He can just give him a new keyboard, separate keyboard, and that will work.
00:03:43.760And he figured out something with another one of them.
00:03:47.080And the third one, he decided he would have to upload the contents onto his big server and then, you know, give the contents to Hunter on a hard drive.
00:04:00.660He called Hunter and he said, can you come in and bring in, he told him particularly what the hard drive was he wanted.
00:04:09.200And sure enough, the next day, Hunter brings the hard drive that he'd asked him to bring.
00:04:14.380And John Paul MacIsaac gives him the other two laptops.
00:05:37.380And so, 90 days later, as per the work order, the property became his, he owned it now.
00:05:46.380And he just put it on a shelf and didn't think about it anymore.
00:05:49.820And then, so we're talking about April 2019, and Hunter dropped off this laptop just about a week before his father announced that he would be a candidate for president.
00:06:02.880And Hunter, at the time, was in a rage against his family, absolutely furious with them at the end of his tether.
00:06:12.600He felt that Joe's staff that he'd amassed in his campaign were disrespecting him and his father was allowing them to disrespect him.
00:06:25.000And, you know, there were stories being briefed to friendly media that Hunter is a basket case.
00:06:32.980You know, he's just a burden his father has to put up with.
00:06:35.820And as far as Hunter was concerned, how dare they treat him like this and shame him when he felt that he'd supported the entire family, the extended family, for decades.
00:06:51.280And he'd given half his money to Pop as he raged to his daughter one day.
00:06:57.880He said, unlike Pop, I would expect you to give me half your salary.
00:07:01.960So, that's the context that Hunter dropped off the laptop and never returned to pick it up, despite all the incriminating evidence on it, incriminating of his father as much as him.
00:07:14.920Okay, so what are we supposed to make of that?
00:07:19.540So, first of all, I'm thinking about it the way I would think about it if I heard this story from a client.
00:07:26.440So, the first thing I'd wonder is, the timing is suspect.
00:07:32.220Like, why would you drop off those laptops a week before your father announces his run for president?
00:07:37.980It seems, it seems, to call it careless is to barely scrape the surface.
00:07:43.300Especially when you know perfectly well what's on those laptops, not only this treasure trove of homemade pornography, which is like a highly questionable enterprise in and of itself.
00:07:55.860You have to wonder exactly what motivates someone to continually film himself engaging in sexual activity with all the various hookers that he was consorting with and strippers and so forth.
00:08:05.900And there's a narcissism about that that's quite remarkable.
00:08:10.220But also, there's a vindictive carelessness about it that's also marked.
00:08:15.800Because it's not one laptop, it's three, and three is a lot.
00:08:20.120And they're rife with information that's devastating personally, right?
00:08:25.480I mean, you wouldn't think you'd be sharing your homemade pornography with the world.
00:08:28.780And also, there's this immense amount of detail about all of these business enterprises that have been accumulating for decades.
00:08:43.760What is it of an observer to make of that?
00:08:47.500Now, is he that addled that he didn't even notice that this was foolish?
00:08:55.300Because that's certainly a possibility.
00:08:56.660Or is there revenge against his whole family, including his father?
00:09:00.880I mean, I don't know how to make heads or tails of this because it's so utterly preposterous.
00:09:06.100It's not surprising in some ways, I suppose, that one of the reactions of the broader media was to assume that this couldn't possibly be real.
00:09:15.900Because when you read it, and I mean, I'm still recovering from reading your book.
00:09:20.060And I want to delve into that as deeply as possible to establish, let's say, its credibility.
00:09:24.400But I really, I'm taken aback by the material that you reported in Laptop from Hell.
00:10:13.960And the first thing I would think, if I had any sense, is, well, how about I don't put him in a situation where he has more money than God?
00:10:22.360Because that's the last thing you want to do with someone who's addicted, let's say, especially to something like cocaine.
00:10:29.480Because an unlimited supply of money means an unlimited supply of drugs.
00:10:34.180Then you might think, well, I'm also president, and my son is behaving in a way that, well, doesn't exactly shed a positive light on the family, but also is dangerous in all sorts of ways.
00:10:45.860Maybe I shouldn't be taking him on my business trips.
00:10:49.780Maybe I shouldn't be introducing him to world leaders all over the planet, especially in Russia and China and Ukraine, for example, or in any number of other corrupt countries that we might mention.
00:11:02.180Maybe I should have him, for his own good, supervised, you know, and for the country's good,
00:11:09.480so that he straightens himself out and doesn't get in a tremendous amount of trouble instead of enabling him at every turn.
00:13:29.900You know, he posed as the poorest man in Congress while living a champagne lifestyle, while not really having any bills to pay.
00:13:39.800The usual bills that normal middle-class families worry about, like, you know, helping their children get through, get to the, you know, the best college they can and somehow paying the bills, getting them to private schools, getting their grandkids into the same thing.
00:13:56.240You know, internships, judgeships, fellowships, cushy government jobs, you name it.
00:14:04.240All of these things were there for the taking for Joe's extended family.
00:14:10.540And, you know, I know that Joe Biden spent his entire life building this mythology around himself, that he's a good family man, a devout Catholic, modest Joe, working class Joe, lunch pail Joe.
00:14:29.260He's the family part, I think, is intriguing because Joe Biden's always had a, you know, a fascination or a desire to be like the Kennedy clan.
00:14:43.560And so he's constructed a life and a family sort of image that's very similar to that.
00:14:49.720And there was a fascinating interview that he did with Kitty Kelly when he was just newly in the Senate, newly widowed.
00:15:02.020And he was very cocky and would talk about, she said he dressed like Great Gatsby, you know, Gatsby-esque, very well-dressed.
00:15:11.420And he would talk about himself as, you know, having had the greatest wife that any man could have had and their sex life was just brilliant and no man's ever experienced that.
00:15:23.880And not in a sort of a maudlin way, but in a boastful way, and just talking about himself in a way that, you know, like he said, Rose Kennedy, the Kennedy matriarch, keeps on inviting him over for dinner, but he's too busy.
00:15:38.900And, you know, sort of boasting that the Kennedys are his friends and that they're throwing themselves at him.
00:15:46.120But, you know, he sort of fobs them off.
00:16:04.160He's always lived in this kind of delusional fantasy world where he sort of self-aggrandizes and creates these stories about himself as the conquering hero, even if he never was in the place.
00:16:18.740Like he was never with Nelson Mandela or he was never at Ground Zero or all these places that he puts himself in.
00:16:27.260And going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:16:32.980Most of the time, you'll probably be fine.
00:16:35.540But what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:16:41.220In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:16:46.340Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:16:55.660And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:16:58.540With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:17:06.300Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:18:03.160I don't even know if he really understands what he's doing, but it's a pathology.
00:18:11.880And so I think to myself about someone like Hunter, you know, this little motherless boy who's a bit ADHD, a bit hyperactive, very smart.
00:18:23.520And he has this father who's mercurial and not there very often and has this huge job that's obviously more important.
00:18:32.520And the entire family revolves around Joe and it always has.
00:18:36.580His mother put Joe on a pedestal and all the siblings' roles were to serve Joe.
00:18:43.820And so Joe, as an adult, that's the way his own family behaves.
00:18:48.360And then there's the stepmother, Jill Biden, who comes in when Hunter's around about eight or nine, who Hunter anyway feels doesn't like him.
00:18:59.240She loves Bo, his older brother, by one year, but Hunter feels that she just doesn't like him.
00:21:23.400I want to talk about Mac Isaac and his attempts to bring the laptop to the attention of the FBI and then the eventual press response.
00:21:30.220But before we do that, I want to talk about, delve a little bit more into Hunter and his business acumen.
00:21:36.220So, you know, I've had a lot more economic opportunities put in front of me in the last four or five years.
00:21:42.520And that makes interacting with my family, it allows us a lot more opportunities.
00:21:48.460But it's also complex because once you have a lot of opportunities personally, it's hard to know exactly how many opportunities to offer your family members,
00:21:57.380let's say your children, because you want to offer them opportunity, but you want them to stand up on their own two feet and to do things for themselves.
00:22:06.440And so when I was reading your book, I was thinking, OK, well, Joe is in a position to offer Hunter opportunities.
00:22:13.100And people do that for their children.
00:22:15.960And as your opportunities multiply, it gets harder to draw exactly the lines.
00:22:20.720But you don't want to put your kids in a position where their opportunities exceed their capabilities.
00:22:27.860And so what I kept wondering when I was reading the book was, well, Hunter's being put in front of all these international leaders, let's say, and business people.
00:22:36.320Well, if you were going to make a case for Hunter's business acumen and ability, how would you do that?
00:22:44.180Because it looked to me like the opportunities were not proportionate to the ability.
00:22:50.080I couldn't tell what it was that Hunter had to offer apart from access to his father.
00:22:55.040And if you were trying to defend him, you know, in good faith, he has a legal degree.
00:23:27.980It was, you know, at one point, his uncle, Jim, Joe Biden's younger brother, decided that they were going to go into the business of selling gas from Louisiana, from Monkey Island to the Chinese.
00:23:47.620And so there was something it's all it's all sort of business deals.
00:23:50.840And there were always other people, Hunter's business partners who took care of the sort of pesky details, like setting up a business and doing the due diligence for it and so on.
00:24:02.360That was something Tony Bobulinski was brought in to try and legitimize what they were doing.
00:24:07.060But the fact is that Hunter was not interested in business.
00:24:50.820I mean, you know, and he's the reason I feel sorry for him is I think that this is someone who has been utterly crushed.
00:24:58.340And, you know, by his father, not really crushed, but sort of manipulated by his father.
00:25:06.740And I guess it's to his credit that he really hasn't been crushed.
00:25:10.000I mean, it's his freedom is expressed itself in this sort of malevolent way that he's just so destructive to everybody around him and into his addictions and his utter selfishness.
00:25:22.480But, you know, this is someone whose father just treated him as a spare, as, you know, the bag man, as just for utility, because the oldest son, Beau, was the golden child who also was being treated as an object, you know, in a way, as sort of the apple of his father's eye, who was going to continue the sort of dynasty,
00:25:48.380the dynastic ambitions of Joe Biden and become president after Joe.
00:25:53.940So, OK, so you pointed to something fairly specific there, you know, because I said, well, you know, how do you if you're trying to offer your children opportunities, how do you justify that?
00:26:05.180And one of the things you alluded to was, well, you look for where their talents genuinely lie and try to ally the opportunities with those talents.
00:26:14.200And you pointed out that Hunter can write and maybe he's got some artistic ability.
00:26:18.060I've looked at his paintings and they could be a lot worse than they are.
00:26:23.220The prices that are being commanded for them are, well, the art world's a very strange place, so we won't say too much about that.
00:26:29.760But the prices are certainly a hell of a lot higher than 99% of artists would ever receive for doing anything, no matter how spectacular, in the course of their entire lifetime.
00:26:38.820So, but you point out that, as far as you can tell, on the business front, which is what we're speaking about, there is actually no business there.
00:26:49.440And so I have my children involved in my business affairs.
00:26:52.340My daughter is running this new enterprise that we hope to turn into an online university.
00:26:58.000And my son runs a software company, but they've done the bulk of the work on both of those projects.
00:27:15.560And I don't feel that I've smoothed the road for them in an appropriate way, because all of these opportunities would have been sitting there languishing if they wouldn't have taken the ball and seriously run with it.
00:27:31.020And so that's what you want to do if you have opportunities at hand for your kids, is you try to figure out a situation where if they work hard and act appropriately, then they're going to benefit and hopefully bring benefit to other people at the same time.
00:27:45.340And then there's no cost in that to anyone.
00:27:49.800And I'm, when I was reading your book, I was trying to give Hunter the benefit of the doubt, partly for the reasons that you described.
00:27:56.240You know, he's had, the whole family's had their fair share of tragedies, and you have to write that into the story.
00:28:01.780But for the life of me, I couldn't figure out what in the world he could have possibly been selling, except for alliance with the family name.
00:28:10.220And Joe should have regarded that as an extreme moral hazard.
00:28:13.900And we should all regard that at the moment, as I said earlier, as a bloody extreme moral hazard, given that we're at war with Russia for all intents and purposes.
00:28:23.660You know, and you said you feel sorry for Hunter, and I can understand that, too.
00:28:27.540And I think the family has capitalized on that sympathy.
00:28:31.580But by the same token, at some point, you cross the line from victim to perpetrator.
00:28:36.800And it seems to me, you know, maybe this is just my judgmental self, but his behavior on the sexual front in particular, like, veers into perpetrator rather than victim.
00:28:48.260Now, you go out of your way in your book to point out there's absolutely no evidence, as far as you can tell, that he veered into, say, underage sexual activity.
00:28:56.100And so that's a very important thing to point out.
00:28:57.960But what he's doing with his hookers and his strippers and his homemade porn is hardly wholesome, family-friendly affair.
00:29:08.280And that, in itself, apart from the business dealings, might have been enough so that an intelligent father, who was also simultaneously president, would have put some damn serious walls between him and his son, and maybe also around his son.
00:29:25.060So, at best, we have a situation where the father is enabling.
00:29:28.760And at worst, we have a situation where he's, where what?
00:29:33.540He's benefiting from the position that he put his son in, in the same way, perhaps, that he benefited by having those photographs taken when he was confirmed for Senate.
00:29:45.100I mean, it's a damn ugly story, right?
00:29:51.780But, as I said, going through your book, why should people believe you?
00:29:55.580Like, why shouldn't they just think, well, here's, you know, Miranda Devine, muckraking journalist, and she's taking this laptop and doing everything she possibly can to, you know, to portray it in the worst possible light for her own self-aggrandizement?
00:30:36.880And I verified the material that I used by talking to various of Hunter Biden's associates and former partners who, whose names are on the laptop, who were CC'd into, into emails and were part of businesses and, you know, their names appear on documents.
00:30:59.560For instance, I mean, one I can name is Tony Bobulinski, who was Hunter's business partner in the final sort of Chinese deal with CEFC.
00:31:10.700And he, Tony Bobulinski, I have the contents of his three devices that he also handed over to the FBI just before the 2020 election.
00:31:22.100And, um, that overlaps with and corroborates, um, that Chinese section of the, of the laptop.
00:31:30.260Um, and I mean, recently, Devon Archer has, uh, come, come out of the shadows.
00:31:35.840He's another of Hunter, of Hunter's sort of former business partners, but also Hunter called him his best friend in business.
00:31:42.540And in fact, Devon, um, he's quite a wholesome person, didn't, didn't share any of Hunter's, um, Hunter's vices.
00:31:52.300Um, he was doing the lion's share of, uh, you know, setting up businesses and, um, you know, organizing things so that all that Hunter had to do was fly into some town and, uh, and, you know, get into a suit and stop smoking crack for a couple of hours and just go and meet these Chinese or whoever.
00:32:12.540Um, and so Devon Archer also has testified, um, before this congressional, um, committee and, um, verified a lot of the material, um, that I've written about.
00:32:25.580Um, and I think just as time has gone on, it's now, you know, almost three years, um, there's nothing in the book that hasn't been, um, you know, verified over and over or corroborated or, um, proven.
00:32:41.860And the laptop, even though Hunter's still being coy about, you know, it's, oh, maybe it's my laptop or, you know, maybe it's not my laptop.
00:32:53.380Um, he, he, he's, he's, you know, his lawyers are suing, um, people for breach of privacy, John Paul MacIsaac, for instance, for breach of privacy, for exposing his material, which he admits is his material.
00:33:06.420So it's a, it's a confusing sort of position to take.
00:33:13.640So, well, and, and, well, and you're still standing and you're not like tied up in court for defamation, et cetera.
00:33:19.340And it has been quite a while since you published the book.
00:33:21.700Let's go back to MacIsaac for a minute and continue the laptop story.
00:33:25.220Okay, now in your book, you said that, and you, and you just elaborated on that now, because, you know, one of the things people might be wondering is, well, what the hell is this laptop shop owner combing through this hard drive for to begin with?
00:33:40.160You said that that was partly a fluke on the technical side, that because he had to keep rebooting the laptop and monitoring the upload, he was, he was, uh, confronted with the material.
00:33:53.020And then that started to make him nervous.
00:33:54.920Now, you detail this in your book, that MacIsaac actually got extremely nervous once he realized what was on the laptop and he went to the FBI.
00:34:04.840And then the FBI did pick up the laptop.
00:34:07.080And so let's lay, lay that out, let's lay that out to the point where the contents of the laptop start to be made public by the New York Post, because the next absolutely hideous and despicable sequence of events that occurs is that the New York Post breaks the story essentially.
00:34:24.280And then the powers that be shut it down in all sorts of ways, right?
00:34:31.860Um, but even more, stunningly, you have dozens of.
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00:35:45.460Security personnel working for the government attributing the contents of the laptop to Russian disinformation, and this is just prior to the election.
00:36:12.320Well, firstly, what happens is that in the background here, you have the impeachment, the sort of prelude to the impeachment of Donald Trump.
00:36:21.820Donald Trump's made a phone call with the Ukrainian president, Zelensky, the new Ukrainian president, and during that public phone call, he says, you know, can you do me a favour and investigate what's been going on with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and Burisma, basically.
00:36:40.020And because this had been talked about, I mean, it was very unseemly at the time.
00:36:46.380The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, those sort of mainstream organisations, media organisations that are now trying to explain away these problems were actually reporting that it was pretty untoward that Joe Biden's son was, you know, on the board of this corrupt Ukrainian energy company.
00:37:07.240And what they didn't know was that he was making a million dollars a year.
00:37:11.000So this was sort of the buzz in the background.
00:38:58.060And one of the FBI agents, he claims, said to him, well, in our experience, nothing happens to people who don't talk, you know, who don't open their mouth.
00:39:07.300So he took that when he told me that, I thought, well, you know, I can understand you being paranoid, but that sounds very far fetched.
00:39:14.400But as the sort of cover up and the FBI involvement in it has has come to light, I look back on that conversation and think, well, maybe he wasn't so off base.
00:39:31.020I mean, what he was what he was what he said to the FBI, what he was hoping was he felt this was exculpatory information for Donald Trump to use in the upcoming impeachment.
00:40:45.800And lo and behold, Rudy Giuliani's lawyer, a guy called Bob Costello, who served with him at the Southern District of New York, a very buttoned up, very sharp lawyer, was intercepting Rudy's mail at that time.
00:41:01.360I don't know why, security reasons or something.
00:41:04.340And he saw this letter and it was a very email.
00:41:08.320It was a very well-written email, very detailed, very precise.
00:41:12.980And he thought, well, this guy might be something.
00:41:15.340He called him, ascertained that he seemed on the up and up and got him to FedEx, a copy of the hard drive to his home in Long Island.
00:41:25.880And then when he opened it up, he just saw evidence.
00:41:33.320Bob Costello was the, I think, deputy head of the criminal division of the Southern District of New York.
00:41:41.140So he knows the crimes when he sees them.
00:41:43.320And he said he saw a lot of crimes on this laptop.
00:41:45.920So he calls Rudy and they then, this is sort of August, late August of 2020.
00:41:54.280And so they then spend the next six weeks or so just doing their due diligence on this, trying to figure out if it's, you know, legit, if it's real, if it's so on.
00:42:04.640And they satisfied themselves up to a point where they felt they could hand it to the media without looking like fools.
00:42:11.980They brought Steve Bannon in at the last minute to help with some of the Chinese names because Steve's got a lot of connections there.
00:42:21.360But Steve Bannon did not get a copy of the hard drive.
00:42:26.080They were very close with that information.
00:42:29.080And then Steve Bannon started sort of alluding to it in the media and he started, you know, and Rudy did as well, trying to get various media to pay attention to it.
00:42:46.940Okay, so one side venture here and then back to the story breaking in the New York Post.
00:42:54.540So Trump is being hauled over the coals at this point for Russian collusion.
00:43:02.460And when is it that Biden is in contact with the Ukrainian authorities to get the prosecutor who's going after Burisma fired?
00:43:16.880He first tied the $1 billion in USAID to the firing of Victor Shokin.
00:43:25.560And he did that pretty much off his own bat.
00:43:30.440I mean, it was U.S. policy, State Department policy to clean up corruption in the prosecutor general's office.
00:43:41.100Victor Shokin had been brought in just about a year before, actually less than a year before.
00:43:48.700He'd been brought in in February 2015 as a kind of a clean skin by Poroshenko, who was the American-backed president of Ukraine, to clean things up.
00:44:00.200Because there had been a huge scandal with his predecessor.
00:44:04.140Do you want me to go back into the details of that?
00:44:08.260Well, yeah, well, there's a loose end here, I guess, for me.
00:44:12.800And that is, well, Trump is being accused of collaborating inappropriately with members of a foreign country, Russia in this case.
00:44:22.940But we also have, at the same time, Biden, who's made reference to this on the world stage, getting a prosecutor fired.
00:44:30.040And my understanding is that that prosecutor was going after Burisma.
00:44:41.400So Burisma was owned by a guy called Zlachevsky, who was a, you know, a mini-gark, they call him, a billionaire.
00:44:50.860And it was, but behind Zlachevsky was a really odious oligarch called Igor Kolomoisky, who would have people's eyeballs gouged out.
00:45:04.960But he was, and Zlachevsky had been a minister in the previous Yanukovych government, which had been sort of Russia-aligned and the Americans wanted him out.
00:45:18.100And, I mean, I don't, I don't think it's controversial or incorrect to say that the CIA was involved in the coup.
00:45:27.720You know, how much they were involved, whether they nudged or whether they were more involved, who knows, but they certainly were involved.
00:45:34.580And so Yanukovych was thrown out and he's sort of corrupt, I mean, Ukraine's the most corrupt country in Europe, one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
00:45:46.320And all the ministers fled from that government, taking billions of dollars of Ukrainian people's money, except for one, a guy called Mikhail Zlachevsky, who owned Burisma.
00:46:00.040While he did flee to Russia initially and then to Dubai, he was allowed to keep his business, his oil and gas business, Burisma, and to continue to make money from it, which I think is a curious point.
00:46:12.360Everybody, every other person involved with that Yanukovych government was forced out and had to flee.
00:46:19.420But Zlachevsky, while he wasn't allowed back in the country, could continue to earn money and, in fact, could put Americans like Hunter Biden and his friend Devin Archer onto the board of his company to try and legitimise it and keep the Americans sweet and to put pressure on Ukrainian authorities not to investigate him.
00:46:42.460And, you know, Victor Shokin was brought in, as I said, after a scandal.
00:46:49.980And the scandal was that his predecessor, who ran the Prosecutor General's office, a guy called Urema, had presided over the collapse of a case that had been brought by the British Serious Fraud Squad in conjunction with the FBI against Zlachevsky.
00:47:07.160They had frozen $24 million of Zlachevsky's money in a London bank account.
00:47:13.340And this was a very important case for the Serious Fraud Squad because it was the showpiece that the government was boasting about and the head of the Serious Fraud Squad had a whole conference about that they were going to claw back the ill-gotten gains of the Ukrainian oligarchs that had been banished from that country because they were aligned with Russia.
00:47:40.120So this was a really important case and a bribe was paid to the Prosecutor General's office, people in the Prosecutor General's office, and the case collapsed.
00:47:54.440And the money, a British judge, unfree, froze that money and Zlachevsky could take it back.
00:48:01.920And so this was hugely embarrassing to the U.S. Embassy, which really was running things in Ukraine, and they were being pressured.
00:48:12.240The ambassador, Jeffrey Pyatt, was getting a lot of grief from the British, who were completely furious about the fact that, you know, they blamed the Americans for this happening.
00:48:21.360Well, why didn't you have control over this corrupt Prosecutor General's office?
00:48:25.740And Poroshenko, the president, was under pressure as well.
00:48:28.780So he brought in this guy, reluctantly, Victor Shokin, who was sort of a, you know, kind of a superstar.
00:48:39.320He was always a line prosecutor, had never wanted to be a boss.
00:48:42.620And he had been responsible for some very high-profile convictions.
00:48:48.420And, you know, he was quite flamboyant in the way, for instance, one time he busted a corrupt politician and he went into the Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, and he played video to all the parliamentarians of this guy's sort of clandestine video of this politician accepting a bribe or asking for a bribe and getting one.
00:49:10.320And, you know, that was a major story.
00:49:13.940And he'd also arrested the killers of this journalist who'd been beheaded and his body trussed up and left in a forest.
00:49:24.460And that was seen as, you know, he'd been writing stories that were damaging to the previous regime and various oligarchs.
00:49:33.620So he also busted that story and that case open and arrested those people.
00:49:41.960And he was still pursuing the people behind them, the powerful people behind them.
00:49:46.140So he was kind of a without fear or favour prosecutor.
00:49:49.140He'd already suffered one assassination attempt when a sniper fired through a window in a meeting he was at.
00:49:57.360And so he was a sort of a good choice for Poroshenko to appoint as the prosecutor general.
00:50:05.160And Shokin says that he didn't want to do it, but he agreed.
00:50:09.600He knows it's political and, you know, politics in Ukraine is very ugly.
00:50:15.780And so but anyway, he reluctantly took it because he said Poroshenko appealed to his patriotism.
00:50:22.160And, you know, I've spent a lot of time talking to Shokin and I mean, not in his I can't speak Ukrainian and he can't speak English,
00:50:30.460but through translators and and through Google Translate.
00:50:34.240And he does strike me as a very patriotic, proud Ukrainian and proud of his record as a prosecutor.
00:50:41.460And there's evidence that he's given me to show that he was a very successful prosecutor.
00:50:45.700And as prosecutor general, every year, I mean, there's a lot of bureaucracy there and a lot imposed by the Americans and Europeans on the prosecutor general's office.
00:50:56.580So there was a lot of reporting going on.
00:50:58.720And he's shown me reports where his, you know, he had three times as many prosecutions of corrupt people as either of his two predecessors.
00:51:09.000So, you know, there is some evidence and I've also seen kind of in the background where he lives and he doesn't seem to live lavishly.
00:51:18.540And so, you know, I can't see any evidence that he's corrupt and no one has ever brought forward any evidence that he's corrupt.
00:51:26.060So how did Biden how did Biden have him fired?
00:51:30.400Well, well, Shokin says that he was investigating Zlachevsky and Burisma at the time.
00:51:40.300And there is evidence for that because in February of 2016, about six weeks before he was removed, Shokin issued a warrant for seizing all of Zlachevsky's property in Kiev.
00:51:54.140And that was, you know, a couple of mansions, three plots of land, a Rolls-Royce silver phantom car.
00:52:01.440That's, you know, that was reported in the Ukrainian media and but in other European media as well.
00:52:08.080And so that's established that that happened and no one has ever denied that.
00:52:12.620And so, you know, that's evidence that what Shokin is saying is true, is that he was he said he had more than one case.
00:52:20.420He had several cases afoot of against Zlachevsky for money laundering and corruption and and so on.
00:52:27.800And and so, you know, therefore, I come at this from, well, why are these lies being told by Joe Biden, by his allies, also by people at the Atlantic Council, people who are sort of affiliated with that, that sort of with sort of the Atlantic Council is sort of the NATO front.
00:52:52.720So with NATO people and the sort of Russia hawks that abound in American academia, they all backed Joe Biden.
00:53:04.160Also, there were some Europeans as well.
00:53:06.100But again, I've, you know, interviewed, for instance, a guy called Jan Tombinski, who was the EU ambassador to Ukraine at that time.
00:53:16.700He was quoted as welcoming, you know, Shokin's removal.
00:53:21.700And there was always anonymous sources quoted by The Washington Post and New York Times and the and so on, Bloomberg and Financial Times, all saying that the Europeans, the EU wanted Shokin gone because he was corrupt.
00:53:40.540But Jan Tombinski, when I interviewed him, said, no, look, I knew there were problems in the prosecutor general's office.
00:53:47.380And it all comes back to that bribe that was paid in the Zlachevsky serious fraud squad case in London falling apart.
00:53:59.540And and Tabinsky says, I didn't make any comment about Shokin because that wasn't those kind of details were up to the Ukrainians, which is the proper way to behave.
00:54:09.460And not only that, I mean, you know, I found a European Commission report from 20 December of 2016.
00:54:18.000In fact, it was about a week after Joe Biden traveled to Ukraine on December 9 and gave that ultimatum to Poroshenko that you fire Shokin or you don't get the billion dollars in aid.
00:54:31.140This European Commission report was the final report of their sort of investigation and sort of riding Ukraine to do various things, including very importantly, to clean up corruption in order to qualify for visa free travel, which was very important to Ukraine.
00:54:52.280And this report said, yes, they've satisfied everything.
00:54:56.100And in fact, they can they now can qualify for visa free travel.
00:54:59.740And on the corruption front, they've done very well.
00:55:03.360And they actually identified Shokin's office as having made strides, including setting up a new anti-corruption office inside the prosecutor general's office and that Shokin had just appointed someone to that.
00:55:19.020And, you know, there are letters as well from from the summer, you know, August, September of 2015 from John Kerry and Victoria Nuland.
00:55:31.460John Kerry, who was then the Secretary of State, and Victoria Nuland was a senior State Department person, congratulating Shokin to Victor Shokin.
00:55:39.520I've seen them saying, you know, good on you for your progress and your good work that you're doing.
00:55:45.220That's that's comprehensively dealt with, I would say.
00:55:47.700Let's go back to the emergence of the laptop story in the New York Post.
00:55:52.340So why did the Post decide to move ahead with the story?
00:55:55.900What did they initially report and what was the consequences?
00:56:00.320Well, so unbeknownst to me, I didn't really know anything until I get a phone call from sorry, text message from it was late on a Friday night from Bob Costello.
00:56:12.740And I had been doing stories with Rudy Julian.
00:56:17.380I just arrived in July of 2019 in America to do an 18 month stint cover the election because my former editor, Cole Allen in Australia, was editor of the editor in chief of had been editor in chief of the New York Post.
00:56:36.060He asked me to come and do this 18 month stint, which I thought would be a lot of fun.
00:56:42.340And the first thing I did was befriend Rudy Giuliani, because when I lived in New York with my family in earlier times when it was crime ridden, you know, I had a lot of admiration for what Rudy Giuliani had done as mayor of New York, cleaning it up.
00:57:01.360And I knew that he was close to Donald Trump.
00:57:04.580So I figured if I wanted to cover Donald Trump, I would ingratiate myself with Rudy Giuliani, which I did.
00:57:11.020And I had just written a story about Rudy, who'd been the first person to talk to Donald Trump after he'd gotten out of hospital, recovered from COVID.
00:57:24.420He'd been trying to shop this story around to other media and he had no nobody biting and time was running out, you know, and he felt that he wanted to get this out in the media before Trump had to do a debate against the first debate against Biden.
00:57:43.400Anyway, so Bob Costello sends me this text and he says, look, there are four photographs in it from the laptop.
00:57:51.180And he says, this is a really good story.
00:57:55.200And so next day we had a long conversation about, you know, the email from John Paul Mac Isaac, the crimes that were on the laptop.
00:58:05.500And he talked me through it and convinced me that, and he's a very serious person, and he convinced me that he'd done due diligence on it enough to satisfy him that he wasn't selling me a bill of goods.
00:58:19.440But obviously we would have to do our own due diligence, but it was enough to make me think this is pretty big.
00:58:25.620And so I texted my editor on the Saturday night, Cole Allen, and sent him the photos.
00:58:34.200And then we had a conversation and then he just decided, well, let's just put the entire, you know, newsroom on this.
00:58:49.300A reporter went down to Delaware, interviewed John Paul Mac Isaac, picked up the subpoena that the FBI had given him when they collected the laptop, picked up the work order with Hunter Biden's signature on it.
00:59:01.220And, you know, we contacted people who appeared on the laptop.
00:59:07.700I didn't, I wasn't doing this reporting.
00:59:09.880This was my colleague, Emma-Jo Morris, and other people in the paper were doing this.
00:59:14.280And, look, there was trepidation in the newsroom, let's put it that way, about this story, because Steve Bannon, who had a bad reputation for being, you know, loose with the truth, was involved, although he was much less involved than, you know, our competitors in the media claimed.
00:59:37.560And he certainly wasn't involved with anything I was doing.
00:59:41.240And Rudy Giuliani's reputation already had suffered somewhat.
00:59:45.840And he'd already been smeared as being sort of an agent of Russian influence or, you know, a victim of Russian influence.
00:59:54.080And so, you know, and Ukraine was sort of a dirty word.
00:59:58.580I mean, everyone was nervous about it.
01:00:00.260But to his very great credit, my, and I don't think any other, any other editor in America would have done this, but Colin Allen did it.
01:00:16.120And our first story was, you know, Biden's secret emails on the front page.
01:00:22.060And it mainly was about an email from a Burisma executive to Hunter saying, you know, thanks very much for introducing me to your father.
01:00:33.020And, you know, the peculiar behaviour of the Biden campaign, too, raised our suspicions because it was like, to us, they were saying, oh, you know, maybe there was a meeting.
01:00:54.100And there were all sorts of other strange things.
01:00:56.960But strangest of all, we sort of expected, obviously, in the middle of a very tough election campaign to get pushback from that side and from other media, but not from social media.
01:01:11.800Immediately, we held the story until 5 a.m.
01:01:14.800Normally, it would go out at 10 o'clock the previous night.
01:01:19.600And within three or four hours, it had been shut down and censored by Facebook and Twitter.
01:01:30.160And the first we knew of it was a Facebook executive who also happens to be very plugged into the Democrats.
01:01:37.880It just tweeted that Facebook was now going to, I can't remember his exact words, but it was basically throttle the reach of our story pending fact checking, right?
01:01:49.500Which they still haven't done the fact checking, as far as I can tell, because the first thing you would do, which is what we did, if you're fact checking, is you would go to the other people who appeared on the emails that we were publishing and say, hey, did you get this email?
01:02:05.420And Tony Bobulinski was already out there.
01:02:25.260But the story of the cover-up, I think, is bigger than the story of corruption, which is an age-old Washington story.
01:02:32.280At Twitter were embedded various FBI and CIA ex-operatives, including in a very important role was a guy called James Baker, who had been the chief lawyer at the FBI.
01:02:48.120And he'd been parachuted eight months before the election into Twitter as their deputy chief lawyer, deputy counsel.
01:02:54.440And he was involved, as we now know from the Twitter files, in discussions that morning, October 14, 2020, of whether or not to basically shut down our story.
01:03:08.120And the excuse that Twitter used was that we had violated their hacked materials policy.
01:03:16.660It seems bizarre to us because nothing about the story was hacked.
01:03:20.360But now we understand that for weeks beforehand, the FBI had been briefing Twitter and Facebook, although we don't know as much about what they were telling Facebook, but I assume it was the same thing.
01:03:34.720They'd been briefing Twitter to look out in October, likely in October, to look out for a hack and leak operation, hack and dump operation of Russian disinformation, likely about Hunter Biden.
01:03:49.440So, and you think that was a consequence of them knowing what was on the laptop contents because it had already been turned over to them by MacIsaac?
01:03:56.760So, partly, partly, partly that was, they had had the laptop since December 2019, but also there's a hidden part of the story, which fits in, which is that the FBI had been spying on Rudy Giuliani since November of 2019.
01:04:14.600And which was about the time that John Paul MacIsaac was contacting the FBI and saying he had this laptop, right?
01:04:22.740So, and Rudy Giuliani was the president's private lawyer.
01:04:28.480So, there was this covert surveillance warrant on his cloud.
01:04:33.200And that meant that in August of 2020, when John Paul MacIsaac sent that voluminous detailed email to Rudy Giuliani, the FBI, if they were doing their job, would have had access to it.
01:04:47.340So, they would have known the cat's out of the bag, right?
01:04:50.020And then they also would have had access to his iMessages with me.
01:04:58.520We mostly spoke on the phone, but there were a couple of messages, enough when I looked back to see that it was obvious that the New York Post was interested, was going to publish.
01:05:09.900I mean, one of them, I said, don't give it to anyone else, right?
01:05:12.320We, you know, it's all systems go here.
01:05:16.080Well, you know, you just skipped over something, you know, about five minutes ago saying, you know, oh, well, by the way, this is probably as big a scandal as the Hunter laptop, Hunter Biden laptop itself.
01:05:28.380And it's like, well, yeah, I would say so, as the FBI is conspiring with Facebook and Twitter to suppress the story about the president's son being in cahoots with a Ukrainian energy company three weeks before the election.
01:05:44.580Yeah, I would say that's like, that's, that, that makes Watergate look like nothing, like seriously.
01:05:50.100Part of the reason I think that this story hasn't got traction is that there's, there's so much explosive material in it that you can't even keep track of it.
01:05:58.400It's just one preposterous scandal after another.
01:06:02.240And now, the New York Post got kicked off Twitter entirely, right?
01:06:20.440So, let me add, throw something else in here.
01:06:22.680So, of course, I've been watching your country from outside since I'm a Canadian, and I've been watching Trump play the stolen election song for, well, since the election, you know.
01:06:35.340And I've thought a couple of things about that.
01:06:37.020I thought it was off-brand for him to claim victimization because Trump is the guy who tromps around and says, I always win.
01:06:45.060And then I've talked to many people who've been analyzing the court cases where corruption in the election has been alleged, and Trump has come out on the losing side of the vast majority of those.
01:06:57.060And then I think, well, he's got the details wrong with regards to the election, but he's got the meta-narrative right.
01:07:03.860And because I can't help, and this isn't, I'm not speaking as a Trump admirer here, by the way, be that as it may, one way or another.
01:07:12.780His notion that, see, my sense is if the bloody laptop story hadn't been suppressed, the election wouldn't have gone the way it went because it was a pretty narrow margin, and this is a pretty vicious story.
01:07:24.740And so the fact that the FBI conspired with Facebook and Twitter to collapse this story, to limit its reach, and then to attribute it to Russian disinformation, and then to have the security community come out.
01:07:37.580Now, you detail this in your book, too. There's dozens of people from the security and intelligence community that come out and say, oh, this is definitely Russian disinformation.
01:07:45.960And one of the things you point out in your book is they had absolutely no evidence whatsoever to be making that claim.
01:07:51.620And so now all of a sudden your story disappears, and the New York Post is off Twitter, and it's three weeks before the election, and it's a very narrow election, and it turns out that Biden wins.
01:07:59.800It's like, well, to call that a scandal is to say almost nothing, and it's no wonder that Trump's story that the election was stolen resonates with his base, even if it's not stolen in the detailed way that he describes.
01:08:12.980There's certainly something unbelievably rotten going on at the highest possible levels of essentially fascist collusion, right?
01:08:21.480Government, the presidency, the White House itself, the FBI, the CIA, Facebook, and Twitter, all colluding to take down the New York Post for reporting on the corruption of Hunter Biden.
01:08:33.340Yeah, you'd kind of think that would be front-page story on a place like the New York Times, for example, if it wasn't corrupt beyond comprehension.
01:08:39.660Yeah, not just corrupt, but I also wonder, you know, since I've been investigating this story, I see, you know, the intelligence community as so embedded in social media, you know, in Facebook and Twitter, and manipulating behind the scenes and censoring.
01:09:04.140It's not just the Twitter files, it's this incredible court case called Missouri versus Biden, where the charge is that, and a judge actually did find that the Biden administration is appealing that, but found that the Biden administration, the government, was putting enormous pressure on these social media companies to censor anything that went against their narrative.
01:09:29.980I mean, whether it was on COVID, on vaccines, on the Ukraine war, memes about Jill Biden, you know, anything that was detrimental to the government was verboten.
01:09:43.880And the government was holding over these social media companies, the threat that the Republicans are into as well, that ought to be followed through on, actually, that they would break them up and use Section 230, which allows them to escape the normal legal constraints that a normal publisher like the New York Post has.
01:10:05.300But, so that was the threat hanging over them.
01:10:35.280A direct assault on the First Amendment actually, well, let's say, threatens their livelihood insofar as they're actually acting as journalists.
01:10:42.400So, how do you make sense out of the FBI-CIA collusion with the White House?
01:10:48.540And then, what's going on with the journalists?
01:10:51.060Like, this is something that just makes my jaw drop.
01:10:53.880It's like, of all the things that you would think would light a fire underneath journalists, it would be the assault by politicians on the First Amendment.
01:11:06.680So, on the journalism, my feeling is that if the social media companies are basically controlled by intelligence operatives, so, too, must be the New York Times and the Washington Post, the so-called prestige brands.
01:11:23.640They wouldn't bother with the New York Times, for instance, is an incredibly powerful entity.
01:11:32.080It dictates, it sets the agenda for newsrooms across the world.
01:11:36.200I've worked in, you know, in Australia as a journalist and in Britain, and the New York Times is incredibly influential, and it's sort of all the news that's fit to print.
01:11:47.920If it's in the New York Times, you can take it to the bank.
01:11:50.000That has been the, you know, its brand.
01:11:54.200And I've just seen through the Russia collusion stories and the stories that I have done deep dives on, particularly the laptop story, that they peddle lies, outright lies.
01:12:11.800You know, when you actually go back and look, the Shokin thing, I know I spent a long time talking about it, but there is layer upon layer of so many lies.
01:12:20.720And it's not just lies, it's documents disappeared internationally.
01:12:29.440It's not just journalists being sloppy or one corrupt journalist.
01:12:33.780This is a concerted operation, the likes of which you would get from, you know, spies.
01:12:40.860So I don't know exactly how it works, but a rule of thumb that someone told me is the State Department these days is about 50% CIA.
01:12:48.820So, you know, and there's various ways you can tell who's CIA and who isn't, and these spies operate as diplomats.
01:12:59.300So why are they so aligned with the Biden administration?
01:13:04.400Like, I wouldn't think that necessarily that the natural allies of the security slash intelligence community would necessarily be the left-wing Democrats.
01:13:19.240It's about, well, I mean, partly it may be, but because Washington, you know, they're all from the swamp and in Washington, 90% of people vote Democrat.
01:13:29.400And I think this is why Trump was perceived as an existential threat, because actually, when you look at his presidency, he just, you know, he didn't do any, he didn't start any wars.
01:13:47.480He really, for all his rhetoric, he was a pretty conventional conservative, apart from he didn't buy the neocon worldview, this sort of imperialist American worldview, where, you know, it's not only, you know, in 9-11 it was,
01:14:05.720and I mean, I regret myself, I fell for all of that, and I was all rah-rah for Iraq, which I bitterly regret, and now I'm very cynical about the lies that I was told and bought then and I hear now from the same people.
01:14:22.240And so I think that Trump just didn't buy into that whole project.
01:14:29.040It's America first, it's more the isolationist streak.
01:14:32.540And, you know, he would ask NATO, why aren't you pulling your weight?
01:14:37.180Why aren't the Europeans paying for their own military?
01:14:39.760Why are we having to be the policemen of the world?
01:14:43.180Why can't we have a decent relationship with Russia?
01:14:46.020I mean, he's just upending, you know, decades of sort of Cold War mentality, which has never gone away.
01:14:53.000I mean, like he upended the Palestine narrative with regards to the Abraham Accords.
01:15:05.160And so I think that is why he's an existential threat, because those people who were the deepest of the neocon deep state really loathed him.
01:15:17.200And you see that in, I mean, the CIA letter by the 51 former intelligence officials is very, very instructive.
01:15:26.140That was the letter that was written just a few days after our story came out and was suppressed.
01:15:32.400And it was designed, we know, to help Joe Biden in the second debate against Donald Trump, in which obviously the laptop from hell is going to come up.
01:15:43.080And we now know, thanks to the Oversight Committee, now the Republicans are in control, that that letter was organized by Mike Morrell, who had been a former acting CIA director and was on a promise to be Biden's CIA director.
01:16:02.240So when you say it was organized, in what way?
01:16:04.880What does that mean exactly, that letter?
01:16:06.600So what we also find is that Antony Blinken, now the Secretary of State and a member of Joe Biden's inner circle, was working for the Biden campaign.
01:16:17.980He phoned Mike Morrell a day or two, or maybe the same day, Morrell's vague on it, that our story came out.
01:16:26.900And Morrell said, oh, he didn't tell me to write the letter.
01:16:29.620But he would not have written the letter if he hadn't had the phone call from Antony Blinken.
01:16:36.600And if Antony Blinken hadn't sent him a USA Today story, which I have no doubt was seeded by the intelligence community, which said that the laptop was Russian disinformation.
01:16:47.640And so Mike Morrell then set about calling, getting 51 former, most of them CIA people, some like James Clapper, who's lied before Congress, not exactly an honest broker.
01:17:22.300Weaselly, they used a language like has all the earmarks, which is a word of a Russian information operation.
01:17:32.140They used the weight of their previous high careers in the CIA to basically sign, seal and deliver this letter.
01:17:44.140And Mike Morrell says in his emails to other people when he's trying to recruit them to sign the letter that he wants to get, in fact, he tells John Brennan, former CIA director under Obama, who had a lot to do with the destabilization of Ukraine.
01:17:59.180He tells John Brennan, you know, I want to give Joe Biden a talking point at the debate, you know, a way to.
01:18:08.880Well, the thing that struck me is so preposterous about that.
01:18:12.880So, you know, when that broke, I thought, well, that's a lot of former intelligence officials.
01:18:16.680And, you know, it's hard to imagine that they're all colluding.
01:18:20.280But on the other hand, why in the world would the Russians be so thrilled with Trump?
01:18:25.960I mean, you had to buy that story, right?
01:18:27.640You had to believe that Trump was somehow a natural ally of Russia and Putin.
01:18:32.080And I mean, I know that Trump got along with Putin the same way he got along with the preposterous leader of North Korea.
01:18:39.240But it certainly didn't seem to me that there was any evidence to suggest that Trump was the natural ally of Russia.
01:18:45.680And so you had to buy that to believe that the Russians would be so interested in Trump that they would go to all this work to produce this, you know, complex form of unbelievably sophisticated disinformation in the form of a fake laptop from Hunter dropped off in some no-account place in Delaware.
01:19:02.980I mean, none of that makes any sense unless, you know, you attribute like super spy capabilities to some genius on the Russian front, which strikes me as, you know, somewhat preposterous.
01:19:13.400And yet, well, all 51 of these people signed this document.
01:20:48.720But they, you know, and I have spoken to someone who should have signed it, had the credentials to sign it and didn't sign it because he felt that it just, there was no basis for it.
01:21:04.020He didn't want to be involved in some political, he just saw it as a political hit.
01:21:08.260And so that would have been, these people are very savvy.
01:21:23.500But as you said, they felt there was this sort of, this illness that had, was afflicting the intelligence community and all the formers, which was that Trump is an existential threat.
01:21:39.120You see that, you see that in the reaction of people like Harris, is that Trump is such a threat that no matter, see, it's so interesting to me to see this happening.
01:21:46.740Because it's happening on multiple fronts.
01:21:48.520Like, we're told by people continually that we face existential threats that are such that all the normal rules should be upended by moral people.
01:21:58.800And those normal rules could mean every single one of your constitutional rights, which is, of course, what happened in the COVID lockdown, which is now a disease that the doctors, according to MSNBC, are having a difficult time distinguishing from the common cold.
01:22:11.540You know, so that's kind of a problem.
01:22:13.620And so we have emergency, emergency, emergency.
01:22:20.080It's like climate change is such an emergency that every right-thinking person is terrified into apocalyptic panic.
01:22:26.740And so you don't get to fly and you don't get to have a car and you don't get to leave your city and you don't get to eat meat.
01:22:32.360And, and, well, you know, quote, we get all the power.
01:22:36.280And, of course, that has nothing to do with any of this.
01:22:38.360And so, you know, one of the things that I've come to conclude is that if you're listening to someone who says the crisis is such that your fear justifies my suspension of your civil liberties,
01:22:49.740then you're talking not to your ally in crisis and an appropriate leader, but to a tyrant in sheep's clothing.
01:22:56.460And this is exactly what's happening with the, on the Trump front too.
01:22:59.340It's like, oh my God, he's so dangerous, just like climate change and COVID, that anything goes no matter what.
01:23:05.400Because no matter what we do on our side, and we're the good guys, it can't be nearly as bad as Trump might do at some unspecified point in the future.
01:23:14.820It's like, well, just about enough of this.
01:23:16.380I mean, the story that you unfold, and, you know, we touched on the collusion part of it here at the end.
01:23:22.280It's right, again, FBI, CIA, Facebook, Twitter, conspiring with the Washington Post and the New York Times to subvert what I would say is the,
01:23:32.000is the story of the biggest political scandal in my lifetime.
01:23:35.080Like, I was around, I was young during the Watergate hearings and, and the Nixon collapse.
01:23:39.780And that was nothing compared to this, as far as I can tell.
01:23:43.200Well, first of all, it was, you know, Nixon had his, his hands in a variety of relatively unseemly places,
01:23:50.720but not in his most spectacularly multidimensional manner as this, especially not when you factor in
01:23:58.460the post hoc Hunter Biden collusion to silence the people who brought it to public attention.