The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 386. The Laptop From Hell ｜ Miranda Devine

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone watching and listening.

00:01:12.100 Today I'm discussing something truly explosive, I would say, with columnist and writer Miranda Devine.

00:01:18.680 We're talking about her 2021 book, which should be old news by now, but hasn't been well covered enough to be that.

00:01:27.000 Laptop from hell.

00:01:29.120 Hunter Biden, big tech, and the dirty secrets the president tried to hide.

00:01:33.320 We delve into what Hunter Biden inadvertently, unconsciously, or purposefully revealed about his family's business dealings.

00:01:43.040 How 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.

00:01:55.780 And the aftermath.

00:01:57.640 Yeah, we're not done with that yet.

00:01:59.820 Not 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.

00:02:10.320 It's quite the episode.

00:02:13.300 I thought maybe we'd open up with actually the story of the laptop itself, and we might as well walk through this in chronological order.

00:02:21.880 And so Hunter brought three laptops, as I understand it, into this laptop shop.

00:02:27.160 Do you want to pick the story up there?

00:02:29.080 And we'll wander right through to the point where the New York Post is publishing it, and then the story isn't covered.

00:02:35.360 We can set the stage for everyone just so they remember exactly what's going on.

00:02:39.300 So do you want to walk us through that story?

00:02:42.300 Sure.

00:02:42.880 So it's April 2019, and late at night, Hunter Biden goes into John Paul MacIsaac's little computer repair shop in Wilmington.

00:02:55.520 And Hunter's been at a cigar shop nearby.

00:02:58.600 He smells of booze.

00:02:59.940 And initially, John Paul MacIsaac didn't recognise him.

00:03:05.680 He just felt a bit of irritation that someone was coming in with three waterlogged laptops right on closing time.

00:03:13.440 And he booked them in and pretty quickly ascertained he couldn't immediately fix any of them.

00:03:21.380 And then Hunter signed a work order and gave his contact details and went away.

00:03:30.540 And the next day or two, John Paul MacIsaac is looking at three laptops.

00:03:38.440 He's figured out one of them.

00:03:39.480 He can just give him a new keyboard, separate keyboard, and that will work.

00:03:43.760 And he figured out something with another one of them.

00:03:47.080 And 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.

00:04:00.660 He called Hunter and he said, can you come in and bring in, he told him particularly what the hard drive was he wanted.

00:04:09.200 And sure enough, the next day, Hunter brings the hard drive that he'd asked him to bring.

00:04:14.380 And John Paul MacIsaac gives him the other two laptops.

00:04:17.540 One is a write-off.

00:04:18.600 One, he's given him a keyboard with it.

00:04:21.800 And then Hunter goes away.

00:04:24.300 And John Paul MacIsaac continues to, it's a very slow process.

00:04:28.760 He said to upload all this information because the battery kept on running out on the laptop.

00:04:35.640 So he had to keep on charging it and then restart.

00:04:39.400 And every time he restarted, he would have to look on at the material to see where he was up to.

00:04:44.980 And that was why he sort of had such a kind of intimate understanding of what was on the laptop.

00:04:50.620 And, you know, what initially struck him was just there was so much porn on the laptop.

00:04:55.580 So, I mean, it's homemade porn. 0.99

00:04:57.880 And it's Hunter filming himself having sex with various women, filming himself naked, and so on. 0.94

00:05:07.220 But John Paul MacIsaac also noticed, you know, a lot of business documents, invoices, and a company called Burisma, which popped up a lot.

00:05:18.800 So, he completed his work and he called Hunter to come pick up his laptop and got no response.

00:05:26.520 He was texting him and emailing him.

00:05:28.980 And he wanted Hunter to pick up his property and to also pay his $85 bill.

00:05:35.700 And that didn't happen.

00:05:37.380 And so, 90 days later, as per the work order, the property became his, he owned it now.

00:05:46.380 And he just put it on a shelf and didn't think about it anymore.

00:05:49.820 And 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.

00:06:02.880 And Hunter, at the time, was in a rage against his family, absolutely furious with them at the end of his tether.

00:06:12.600 He felt that Joe's staff that he'd amassed in his campaign were disrespecting him and his father was allowing them to disrespect him.

00:06:25.000 And, you know, there were stories being briefed to friendly media that Hunter is a basket case. 0.99

00:06:31.480 He's a drug addict. 0.89

00:06:32.980 You know, he's just a burden his father has to put up with.

00:06:35.820 And 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.

00:06:51.280 And he'd given half his money to Pop as he raged to his daughter one day.

00:06:57.880 He said, unlike Pop, I would expect you to give me half your salary.

00:07:01.960 So, 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.

00:07:14.920 Okay, so what are we supposed to make of that?

00:07:18.020 Like, I'm trying to understand this.

00:07:19.540 So, first of all, I'm thinking about it the way I would think about it if I heard this story from a client.

00:07:26.440 So, the first thing I'd wonder is, the timing is suspect.

00:07:32.220 Like, why would you drop off those laptops a week before your father announces his run for president?

00:07:37.980 It seems, it seems, to call it careless is to barely scrape the surface.

00:07:43.300 Especially 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.

00:07:55.860 You 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.

00:08:05.900 And there's a narcissism about that that's quite remarkable.

00:08:10.220 But also, there's a vindictive carelessness about it that's also marked.

00:08:15.800 Because it's not one laptop, it's three, and three is a lot.

00:08:20.120 And they're rife with information that's devastating personally, right?

00:08:25.480 I mean, you wouldn't think you'd be sharing your homemade pornography with the world.

00:08:28.780 And also, there's this immense amount of detail about all of these business enterprises that have been accumulating for decades.

00:08:43.760 What is it of an observer to make of that? 0.97

00:08:47.500 Now, is he that addled that he didn't even notice that this was foolish? 0.92

00:08:52.340 Or is there a desire to be caught? 0.91

00:08:55.300 Because that's certainly a possibility.

00:08:56.660 Or is there revenge against his whole family, including his father?

00:09:00.880 I mean, I don't know how to make heads or tails of this because it's so utterly preposterous.

00:09:06.100 It'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.

00:09:15.900 Because when you read it, and I mean, I'm still recovering from reading your book.

00:09:20.060 And I want to delve into that as deeply as possible to establish, let's say, its credibility.

00:09:24.400 But I really, I'm taken aback by the material that you reported in Laptop from Hell.

00:09:32.480 I don't know what to make of it.

00:09:34.080 I was thinking about what I would do in Joe's position insofar as I'm able to do that.

00:09:39.380 So now I have a son, and he's, I'm speaking as Joe here.

00:09:43.100 I have a son, and he's, he's a bit of a juvenile delinquent, let's say, except he's not a juvenile.

00:09:48.440 He's 50.

00:09:49.180 And so he's about 30 years past the due date on juvenile delinquency.

00:09:55.440 And he's racking up a fair, fairly high financial bill on the hooker and cocaine front and the penthouse in Las Vegas. 0.86

00:10:05.660 He's acting like the evil son of a Hollywood villain in every possible way. 0.83

00:10:11.500 What am I supposed to do with him?

00:10:13.960 And 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?

00:10:22.360 Because that's the last thing you want to do with someone who's addicted, let's say, especially to something like cocaine.

00:10:29.480 Because an unlimited supply of money means an unlimited supply of drugs.

00:10:34.180 Then 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.

00:10:45.860 Maybe I shouldn't be taking him on my business trips.

00:10:49.000 There is a plan.

00:10:49.780 Maybe 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.

00:11:02.180 Maybe I should have him, for his own good, supervised, you know, and for the country's good,

00:11:09.480 so that he straightens himself out and doesn't get in a tremendous amount of trouble instead of enabling him at every turn.

00:11:16.640 And then what?

00:11:18.380 And then what?

00:11:18.820 Tangling us up in Ukraine?

00:11:21.840 In a way that's morally hazardous, to say the least?

00:11:24.520 Like, I look at the situation in Ukraine.

00:11:26.140 I read your book.

00:11:26.860 I looked at Hunter Biden's dealings with Burisma.

00:11:29.560 I think, well, is there a 5% overlap between the Biden's financial interests and the fact that we're in a bloody war?

00:11:37.940 Or a 1% overlap?

00:11:40.420 Because the right amount of overlap is absolutely zero when we're talking about war with Russia.

00:11:46.900 So, you went through this.

00:11:49.760 You've been living it for a long time.

00:11:51.880 Like, what position did you start with when you started assessing the laptop material?

00:11:58.240 And what happened to you and the way you were looking at things as you walked through it?

00:12:02.400 Yeah, look, I sort of came to it disgusted, I guess, because, you know, opening up the laptop, there's just so much sordid material there.

00:12:15.480 I ended feeling sorry for Hunter and feeling utter contempt for Joe Biden and also feeling that Joe Biden is a really bad person.

00:12:28.000 As you said, what kind of a loving father puts his addicted son in front of a torrent of unaccountable cash?

00:12:36.280 And that's what he did.

00:12:38.560 You know, it wasn't that he was just enabling Hunter.

00:12:41.700 Hunter was an integral part of the family influence peddling business.

00:12:46.500 Hunter was the bag man.

00:12:49.040 You know, there's a video where you can see, taken quite some time ago, Hunter's quite young.

00:12:54.980 And he, every job that Hunter had, every, you know, university position that he had was due to his father.

00:13:04.000 He didn't have the marks to get into Yale Law School.

00:13:07.660 And so favours were done.

00:13:10.140 His first job out of college was at a wildly inflated salary for one of Joe's donors in Delaware.

00:13:17.920 And from his salary, he complained that he had to pay not just his college fees off, but also his brothers.

00:13:27.780 That was the way Joe worked it.

00:13:29.900 You know, he posed as the poorest man in Congress while living a champagne lifestyle, while not really having any bills to pay.

00:13:39.800 The 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.

00:13:56.240 You know, internships, judgeships, fellowships, cushy government jobs, you name it.

00:14:04.240 All of these things were there for the taking for Joe's extended family.

00:14:10.540 And, 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.

00:14:27.580 And it's all a lie.

00:14:29.260 He'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.

00:14:43.560 And so he's constructed a life and a family sort of image that's very similar to that.

00:14:49.720 And there was a fascinating interview that he did with Kitty Kelly when he was just newly in the Senate, newly widowed.

00:15:02.020 And he was very cocky and would talk about, she said he dressed like Great Gatsby, you know, Gatsby-esque, very well-dressed.

00:15:11.420 And 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.

00:15:23.880 And 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.

00:15:38.900 And, you know, sort of boasting that the Kennedys are his friends and that they're throwing themselves at him.

00:15:46.120 But, you know, he sort of fobs them off.

00:15:49.660 So he's a very peculiar person.

00:15:52.760 And I think, and he also has always, it's not just that he's cognitively challenged now and he tells lies and tall stories.

00:16:02.500 He's always been a fabulous.

00:16:04.160 He'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.

00:16:18.740 Like he was never with Nelson Mandela or he was never at Ground Zero or all these places that he puts himself in.

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00:18:03.160 I don't even know if he really understands what he's doing, but it's a pathology.

00:18:11.880 And 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.

00:18:23.520 And he has this father who's mercurial and not there very often and has this huge job that's obviously more important.

00:18:32.520 And the entire family revolves around Joe and it always has.

00:18:36.580 His mother put Joe on a pedestal and all the siblings' roles were to serve Joe.

00:18:43.820 And so Joe, as an adult, that's the way his own family behaves.

00:18:48.360 And 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.

00:18:59.240 She loves Bo, his older brother, by one year, but Hunter feels that she just doesn't like him.

00:19:08.060 And so that's a huge burden.

00:19:09.440 And if a father that lies all the time, I'm sure broke promises all the time, is very destabilizing.

00:19:17.040 And, you know, another example of Joe's cynical exploitation of his family is that he had just won an election to be a senator, right?

00:19:32.220 This was the biggest thing in his life and his family's life.

00:19:35.440 He was only 29 years old.

00:19:37.160 He was 30 by the time he was sworn in, the youngest senator.

00:19:42.260 And his wife dies in a car crash, tragically, just a few days before Christmas while he's away in Washington.

00:19:51.260 And their baby daughter is also killed.

00:19:55.540 And Hunter and his brother Bo are like two and three years old.

00:19:59.620 And they're very badly injured.

00:20:01.280 And so this is just a devastating blow for this young senator-elect.

00:20:08.180 And so he ends up being sworn in at the hospital bed of his children.

00:20:16.240 And so he invites all the, you know, the world's photographers into this hospital room.

00:20:22.500 And he sets up a podium there and he's sworn in.

00:20:25.340 And all the photographs show in the foreground, these poor, wan, little motherless boys, bandaged.

00:20:31.640 Hunter has a brain injury.

00:20:33.800 His brother Bo has a broken leg.

00:20:36.240 And they're just listlessly lying in bed while in the background their father is being sworn in.

00:20:42.240 And I just, you know, that photograph touched the heart of everybody.

00:20:47.240 I mean, you would have to be completely heartless not to feel great sympathy for this poor widower and his poor little boys.

00:20:54.540 Right.

00:20:54.760 But you also might be wondering why that photo op is staged that way, if you were particularly cynical and curious.

00:21:01.680 Exactly.

00:21:02.380 And that's what I came to think afterwards, how cynical it was of him to do that.

00:21:08.080 And he's used that photograph in every campaign since.

00:21:11.820 And so it takes on a new, very sinister light, I think.

00:21:18.300 Well, OK, so I want to go two directions.

00:21:21.760 I want to return to the laptop.

00:21:23.400 I 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.

00:21:30.220 But before we do that, I want to talk about, delve a little bit more into Hunter and his business acumen.

00:21:36.220 So, you know, I've had a lot more economic opportunities put in front of me in the last four or five years.

00:21:42.520 And that makes interacting with my family, it allows us a lot more opportunities.

00:21:48.460 But 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,

00:21:57.380 let'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.

00:22:06.440 And so when I was reading your book, I was thinking, OK, well, Joe is in a position to offer Hunter opportunities.

00:22:13.100 And people do that for their children.

00:22:15.960 And as your opportunities multiply, it gets harder to draw exactly the lines.

00:22:20.720 But you don't want to put your kids in a position where their opportunities exceed their capabilities.

00:22:27.860 And 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.

00:22:36.320 Well, if you were going to make a case for Hunter's business acumen and ability, how would you do that?

00:22:44.180 Because it looked to me like the opportunities were not proportionate to the ability.

00:22:50.080 I couldn't tell what it was that Hunter had to offer apart from access to his father.

00:22:55.040 And if you were trying to defend him, you know, in good faith, he has a legal degree.

00:23:00.560 He has a legal degree from Yale.

00:23:02.440 He's intelligent by your own admission.

00:23:04.400 It's like, why isn't the story that Hunter is running his business affairs as an independent individual?

00:23:11.120 Why isn't that an acceptable story if it's not?

00:23:14.640 Look, I mean, I think that the business really wasn't a business.

00:23:19.740 I mean, they didn't have a product.

00:23:21.260 They weren't manufacturing anything.

00:23:23.740 The business was influenced.

00:23:26.040 It was contact with his father.

00:23:27.980 It 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.

00:23:47.620 And so there was something it's all it's all sort of business deals.

00:23:50.840 And 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.

00:24:02.360 That was something Tony Bobulinski was brought in to try and legitimize what they were doing.

00:24:07.060 But the fact is that Hunter was not interested in business.

00:24:12.300 He found it incredibly boring.

00:24:14.480 What he had always wanted to be was an artist or a writer.

00:24:19.520 And look, I mean, he's now both, you know, he's written his memoir and he's also doing paintings.

00:24:26.980 And I know that's a grift in itself.

00:24:29.560 And the way the White House has handled that has been appalling and the art world is known for money laundering and so on.

00:24:38.620 So it's not the wisest choice.

00:24:41.480 But still, I mean, my sister's a good artist and she looked at Hunter's art and she said it's good.

00:24:48.620 So there is something there.

00:24:50.820 I 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.

00:24:58.340 And, you know, by his father, not really crushed, but sort of manipulated by his father.

00:25:06.740 And I guess it's to his credit that he really hasn't been crushed.

00:25:10.000 I 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.

00:25:22.480 But, 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,

00:25:48.380 the dynastic ambitions of Joe Biden and become president after Joe.

00:25:53.940 So, 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?

00:26:05.180 And 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.

00:26:14.200 And you pointed out that Hunter can write and maybe he's got some artistic ability.

00:26:18.060 I've looked at his paintings and they could be a lot worse than they are.

00:26:21.600 Like, I see some talent there.

00:26:23.220 The 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.

00:26:29.760 But 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.

00:26:38.820 So, 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.

00:26:49.440 And so I have my children involved in my business affairs.

00:26:52.340 My daughter is running this new enterprise that we hope to turn into an online university.

00:26:58.000 And my son runs a software company, but they've done the bulk of the work on both of those projects.

00:27:05.220 And they're actual projects.

00:27:07.000 They have an actual, there's an actual, there's an actual product there.

00:27:12.020 We have actual customers.

00:27:13.580 We, right, they're actual businesses.

00:27:15.560 And 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.

00:27:31.020 And 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.

00:27:45.340 And then there's no cost in that to anyone.

00:27:49.800 And 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.

00:27:56.240 You know, he's had, the whole family's had their fair share of tragedies, and you have to write that into the story.

00:28:01.780 But 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.

00:28:10.220 And Joe should have regarded that as an extreme moral hazard.

00:28:13.900 And 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. 0.84

00:28:21.840 And so this just isn't acceptable.

00:28:23.660 You know, and you said you feel sorry for Hunter, and I can understand that, too.

00:28:27.540 And I think the family has capitalized on that sympathy.

00:28:31.580 But by the same token, at some point, you cross the line from victim to perpetrator.

00:28:36.800 And 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.

00:28:48.260 Now, 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.

00:28:56.100 And so that's a very important thing to point out. 0.95

00:28:57.960 But what he's doing with his hookers and his strippers and his homemade porn is hardly wholesome, family-friendly affair. 0.97

00:29:08.280 And 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. 0.96

00:29:23.140 And that clearly failed to happen.

00:29:25.060 So, at best, we have a situation where the father is enabling.

00:29:28.760 And at worst, we have a situation where he's, where what?

00:29:33.540 He'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. 0.84

00:29:45.100 I mean, it's a damn ugly story, right? 0.98

00:29:46.640 Those are vicious accusations. 0.98

00:29:49.040 And so, they're rough things to levy.

00:29:51.780 But, as I said, going through your book, why should people believe you?

00:29:55.580 Like, 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?

00:30:08.260 Journalists certainly do that.

00:30:09.760 So, why do, why should people listening and watching regard you as a credible figure, do you think?

00:30:17.180 Well, I guess, I mean, it's not me.

00:30:19.300 It's, it's the evidence.

00:30:21.320 That's, that's what the, the book is.

00:30:24.000 I mean, it's just laying out and trying to distill and order this mess of a laptop.

00:30:30.440 And, you know, every, every part of it is straight from the laptop.

00:30:35.440 I haven't invented anything.

00:30:36.880 And 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.

00:30:59.560 For 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.

00:31:10.700 And he, Tony Bobulinski, I have the contents of his three devices that he also handed over to the FBI just before the 2020 election.

00:31:22.100 And, um, that overlaps with and corroborates, um, that Chinese section of the, of the laptop.

00:31:30.260 Um, and I mean, recently, Devon Archer has, uh, come, come out of the shadows.

00:31:35.840 He's another of Hunter, of Hunter's sort of former business partners, but also Hunter called him his best friend in business.

00:31:42.540 And in fact, Devon, um, he's quite a wholesome person, didn't, didn't share any of Hunter's, um, Hunter's vices.

00:31:52.300 Um, 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. 0.86

00:32:12.540 Um, 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.

00:32:25.580 Um, 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.

00:32:39.440 No one has proven anything wrong.

00:32:41.860 And 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.

00:32:50.760 Maybe it's Russian disinformation, uh, whatever.

00:32:53.380 Um, 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.

00:33:06.420 So it's a, it's a confusing sort of position to take.

00:33:12.720 Let, okay.

00:33:13.640 So, well, and, and, well, and you're still standing and you're not like tied up in court for defamation, et cetera.

00:33:19.340 And it has been quite a while since you published the book.

00:33:21.700 Let's go back to MacIsaac for a minute and continue the laptop story.

00:33:25.220 Okay, 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?

00:33:37.740 That's really not his business.

00:33:38.860 But you accounted for that.

00:33:40.160 You 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.

00:33:53.020 And then that started to make him nervous.

00:33:54.920 Now, 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.

00:34:02.280 Is that correct?

00:34:03.180 Have I got that right?

00:34:04.840 And then the FBI did pick up the laptop.

00:34:07.080 And 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.

00:34:24.280 And then the powers that be shut it down in all sorts of ways, right?

00:34:30.180 Facebook does, Twitter does.

00:34:31.860 Um, but even more, stunningly, you have dozens of.

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00:35:45.460 Security personnel working for the government attributing the contents of the laptop to Russian disinformation, and this is just prior to the election.

00:35:55.760 Okay, so let's go back to Mac Isaac.

00:35:57.620 He's looking through this laptop.

00:35:59.360 He's starting to short out.

00:36:00.780 He just runs this little shop, and a bomb is being dropped into his lap.

00:36:04.900 He goes to the FBI.

00:36:05.960 That's correct.

00:36:07.320 What does the FBI do?

00:36:08.580 And then how does the story break?

00:36:10.120 Giuliani gets involved.

00:36:11.280 How does the story break?

00:36:12.320 Well, firstly, what happens is that in the background here, you have the impeachment, the sort of prelude to the impeachment of Donald Trump.

00:36:21.820 Donald 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.

00:36:40.020 And because this had been talked about, I mean, it was very unseemly at the time.

00:36:46.380 The 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.

00:37:07.240 And what they didn't know was that he was making a million dollars a year.

00:37:11.000 So this was sort of the buzz in the background.

00:37:13.840 And the word Burisma came up.

00:37:16.360 And John Paul MacIsaac was a Trump supporter.

00:37:20.560 No crime in that.

00:37:22.180 And he was alert to the sort of details of this looming impeachment.

00:37:29.040 And he remembered the name Burisma.

00:37:31.440 So he went back and he scoured through the laptop and he found all these documents.

00:37:35.300 And that that was really what made him scared because he's in Delaware.

00:37:39.960 The way he explains it is the Biden's own Delaware.

00:37:43.200 He was afraid that something would happen to him.

00:37:45.680 So he he in fact, he made several copies.

00:37:49.580 He put one in an envelope and sent it to a friend and said, don't open this, only open it if something happens to me.

00:37:57.500 That was how frightened he was.

00:37:58.840 And he contacted the FBI, but he did it through a circuitous route through his father and uncle or something in New Mexico.

00:38:07.060 And they got rebuffed and really quite rudely.

00:38:11.600 And he made a couple of efforts and nothing, nothing happened.

00:38:17.460 This is from sort of like September and then November of 2019.

00:38:22.140 He finally gets a phone call and he's asked about this laptop.

00:38:27.180 And in December, December 9, two FBI agents turn up at his doorstep, question him.

00:38:33.560 He tells them he's got a very forensic mind.

00:38:37.140 So he's really had figured out what he felt were the most problematic things on the laptop and what he thought were crimes.

00:38:47.460 And so he laid it all out for them.

00:38:49.720 And and then he was frightened because he said as one of the FBI agents left, he said because he was worried about his own safety.

00:38:56.680 And he said, what will I do?

00:38:58.060 And 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.

00:39:07.300 So 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.

00:39:14.400 But 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.

00:39:25.780 So.

00:39:27.220 So what the hell did he have to gain?

00:39:30.060 Well, exactly.

00:39:31.020 I 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.

00:39:42.560 And he wanted the FBI to know that.

00:39:45.480 And he's a very you know, his father was in the in the military.

00:39:51.040 His uncle was in the military.

00:39:52.680 He's a very law and order sort of guy.

00:39:55.200 And he really had faith that the FBI would do the right thing.

00:39:58.920 And that's why he was so desperate for them to take it.

00:40:01.960 And he thought, good, well, I've gotten that off my conscience.

00:40:05.420 I'm now protected.

00:40:06.720 And no one will come and try and kill me for this, which is really what he was worried about.

00:40:11.740 And but then the months ticked by and nothing happened and the impeachment was going on. 0.91

00:40:17.200 And he just thought this is ridiculous.

00:40:19.320 You know, why does no one know? 0.54

00:40:20.540 So he tried to contact various Republicans.

00:40:23.300 He tried Jim Jordan and Lindsey Graham and, you know, sent faxes and emails and phone calls.

00:40:29.900 And no one ever got back to him.

00:40:32.280 And then he saw Rudy Giuliani, who was then President Trump's lawyer on television and talking about Burisma in Ukraine.

00:40:39.860 And so he tried him as a kind of a last ditch effort.

00:40:44.100 He sent an email.

00:40:45.800 And 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.

00:41:01.360 I don't know why, security reasons or something.

00:41:04.340 And he saw this letter and it was a very email.

00:41:08.320 It was a very well-written email, very detailed, very precise.

00:41:12.980 And he thought, well, this guy might be something.

00:41:15.340 He 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.

00:41:25.880 And then when he opened it up, he just saw evidence.

00:41:33.320 Bob Costello was the, I think, deputy head of the criminal division of the Southern District of New York.

00:41:41.140 So he knows the crimes when he sees them.

00:41:43.320 And he said he saw a lot of crimes on this laptop.

00:41:45.920 So he calls Rudy and they then, this is sort of August, late August of 2020.

00:41:54.280 And 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. 0.83

00:42:04.640 And they satisfied themselves up to a point where they felt they could hand it to the media without looking like fools.

00:42:11.980 They 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.

00:42:21.360 But Steve Bannon did not get a copy of the hard drive.

00:42:24.860 They did not give him one.

00:42:26.080 They were very close with that information.

00:42:29.080 And 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.

00:42:46.940 Okay, so one side venture here and then back to the story breaking in the New York Post.

00:42:54.540 So Trump is being hauled over the coals at this point for Russian collusion.

00:43:02.460 And when is it that Biden is in contact with the Ukrainian authorities to get the prosecutor who's going after Burisma fired?

00:43:13.740 So that was in December of 2015.

00:43:16.880 He first tied the $1 billion in USAID to the firing of Victor Shokin.

00:43:25.560 And he did that pretty much off his own bat.

00:43:30.440 I mean, it was U.S. policy, State Department policy to clean up corruption in the prosecutor general's office.

00:43:41.100 Victor Shokin had been brought in just about a year before, actually less than a year before.

00:43:48.700 He'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.

00:44:00.200 Because there had been a huge scandal with his predecessor.

00:44:04.140 Do you want me to go back into the details of that?

00:44:08.260 Well, yeah, well, there's a loose end here, I guess, for me.

00:44:12.800 And that is, well, Trump is being accused of collaborating inappropriately with members of a foreign country, Russia in this case.

00:44:22.940 But we also have, at the same time, Biden, who's made reference to this on the world stage, getting a prosecutor fired.

00:44:30.040 And my understanding is that that prosecutor was going after Burisma.

00:44:33.680 And have I got that right?

00:44:35.040 Right. Okay. And it's the same Burisma that Hunter is involved in and that's paying him a million dollars a year.

00:44:40.580 Yeah.

00:44:41.400 So Burisma was owned by a guy called Zlachevsky, who was a, you know, a mini-gark, they call him, a billionaire.

00:44:50.860 And it was, but behind Zlachevsky was a really odious oligarch called Igor Kolomoisky, who would have people's eyeballs gouged out.

00:45:04.960 But 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.

00:45:18.100 And, I mean, I don't, I don't think it's controversial or incorrect to say that the CIA was involved in the coup.

00:45:27.720 You know, how much they were involved, whether they nudged or whether they were more involved, who knows, but they certainly were involved.

00:45:34.580 And 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.

00:45:46.320 And 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.

00:46:00.040 While 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.

00:46:12.360 Everybody, every other person involved with that Yanukovych government was forced out and had to flee.

00:46:19.420 But 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.

00:46:42.460 And, you know, Victor Shokin was brought in, as I said, after a scandal.

00:46:49.980 And 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.

00:47:07.160 They had frozen $24 million of Zlachevsky's money in a London bank account.

00:47:13.340 And 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.

00:47:40.120 So 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.

00:47:54.440 And the money, a British judge, unfree, froze that money and Zlachevsky could take it back.

00:48:01.920 And so this was hugely embarrassing to the U.S. Embassy, which really was running things in Ukraine, and they were being pressured.

00:48:12.240 The 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.

00:48:21.360 Well, why didn't you have control over this corrupt Prosecutor General's office?

00:48:25.740 And Poroshenko, the president, was under pressure as well.

00:48:28.780 So he brought in this guy, reluctantly, Victor Shokin, who was sort of a, you know, kind of a superstar.

00:48:37.000 He was a very popular prosecutor.

00:48:39.320 He was always a line prosecutor, had never wanted to be a boss.

00:48:42.620 And he had been responsible for some very high-profile convictions.

00:48:48.420 And, 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.

00:49:10.320 And, you know, that was a major story.

00:49:13.940 And he'd also arrested the killers of this journalist who'd been beheaded and his body trussed up and left in a forest.

00:49:24.460 And that was seen as, you know, he'd been writing stories that were damaging to the previous regime and various oligarchs.

00:49:33.620 So he also busted that story and that case open and arrested those people.

00:49:41.960 And he was still pursuing the people behind them, the powerful people behind them.

00:49:46.140 So he was kind of a without fear or favour prosecutor.

00:49:49.140 He'd already suffered one assassination attempt when a sniper fired through a window in a meeting he was at.

00:49:57.360 And so he was a sort of a good choice for Poroshenko to appoint as the prosecutor general.

00:50:05.160 And Shokin says that he didn't want to do it, but he agreed.

00:50:09.600 He knows it's political and, you know, politics in Ukraine is very ugly.

00:50:15.780 And so but anyway, he reluctantly took it because he said Poroshenko appealed to his patriotism.

00:50:22.160 And, 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,

00:50:30.460 but through translators and and through Google Translate.

00:50:34.240 And he does strike me as a very patriotic, proud Ukrainian and proud of his record as a prosecutor.

00:50:41.460 And there's evidence that he's given me to show that he was a very successful prosecutor.

00:50:45.700 And 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.

00:50:56.580 So there was a lot of reporting going on.

00:50:58.720 And 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.

00:51:09.000 So, 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.

00:51:18.540 And 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.

00:51:26.060 So how did Biden how did Biden have him fired?

00:51:29.580 And why?

00:51:30.400 Well, well, Shokin says that he was investigating Zlachevsky and Burisma at the time.

00:51:40.300 And 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.

00:51:54.140 And that was, you know, a couple of mansions, three plots of land, a Rolls-Royce silver phantom car.

00:52:01.440 That's, you know, that was reported in the Ukrainian media and but in other European media as well.

00:52:08.080 And so that's established that that happened and no one has ever denied that.

00:52:12.620 And 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.

00:52:20.420 He had several cases afoot of against Zlachevsky for money laundering and corruption and and so on.

00:52:27.800 And 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.

00:52:52.720 So with NATO people and the sort of Russia hawks that abound in American academia, they all backed Joe Biden.

00:53:04.160 Also, there were some Europeans as well.

00:53:06.100 But again, I've, you know, interviewed, for instance, a guy called Jan Tombinski, who was the EU ambassador to Ukraine at that time.

00:53:16.700 He was quoted as welcoming, you know, Shokin's removal. 0.99

00:53:21.700 And 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.

00:53:40.540 But Jan Tombinski, when I interviewed him, said, no, look, I knew there were problems in the prosecutor general's office.

00:53:47.380 And it all comes back to that bribe that was paid in the Zlachevsky serious fraud squad case in London falling apart.

00:53:56.580 Everybody was up in arms about that.

00:53:58.320 But that was not Shokin.

00:53:59.540 And 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. 0.93

00:54:09.460 And not only that, I mean, you know, I found a European Commission report from 20 December of 2016.

00:54:18.000 In 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. 0.85

00:54:31.140 This 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.

00:54:52.280 And this report said, yes, they've satisfied everything.

00:54:56.100 And in fact, they can they now can qualify for visa free travel.

00:54:59.740 And on the corruption front, they've done very well.

00:55:02.240 There's been a lot of progress.

00:55:03.360 And 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.

00:55:19.020 And, you know, there are letters as well from from the summer, you know, August, September of 2015 from John Kerry and Victoria Nuland.

00:55:31.460 John Kerry, who was then the Secretary of State, and Victoria Nuland was a senior State Department person, congratulating Shokin to Victor Shokin.

00:55:39.520 I've seen them saying, you know, good on you for your progress and your good work that you're doing.

00:55:45.220 That's that's comprehensively dealt with, I would say.

00:55:47.700 Let's go back to the emergence of the laptop story in the New York Post.

00:55:52.340 So why did the Post decide to move ahead with the story?

00:55:55.900 What did they initially report and what was the consequences?

00:56:00.320 Well, 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.

00:56:12.740 And I had been doing stories with Rudy Julian.

00:56:17.380 I 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.

00:56:36.060 He asked me to come and do this 18 month stint, which I thought would be a lot of fun.

00:56:42.340 And 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.

00:57:01.360 And I knew that he was close to Donald Trump.

00:57:04.580 So I figured if I wanted to cover Donald Trump, I would ingratiate myself with Rudy Giuliani, which I did.

00:57:11.020 And 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.

00:57:21.480 And Rudy loved that story.

00:57:23.000 So I guess I was top of mind.

00:57:24.420 He'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.

00:57:43.400 Anyway, so Bob Costello sends me this text and he says, look, there are four photographs in it from the laptop.

00:57:51.180 And he says, this is a really good story.

00:57:54.020 Let's talk.

00:57:55.200 And 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.

00:58:05.500 And 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.

00:58:19.440 But obviously we would have to do our own due diligence, but it was enough to make me think this is pretty big.

00:58:25.620 And so I texted my editor on the Saturday night, Cole Allen, and sent him the photos.

00:58:34.200 And then we had a conversation and then he just decided, well, let's just put the entire, you know, newsroom on this.

00:58:46.540 And it was all guns blazing.

00:58:49.300 A 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.

00:59:01.220 And, you know, we contacted people who appeared on the laptop.

00:59:07.700 I didn't, I wasn't doing this reporting.

00:59:09.880 This was my colleague, Emma-Jo Morris, and other people in the paper were doing this.

00:59:14.280 And, 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.

00:59:37.560 And he certainly wasn't involved with anything I was doing.

00:59:41.240 And Rudy Giuliani's reputation already had suffered somewhat.

00:59:45.840 And he'd already been smeared as being sort of an agent of Russian influence or, you know, a victim of Russian influence.

00:59:54.080 And so, you know, and Ukraine was sort of a dirty word.

00:59:58.580 I mean, everyone was nervous about it.

01:00:00.260 But 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.

01:00:07.740 And he said, no, I'm satisfied.

01:00:09.880 This is a great story.

01:00:11.020 And remember, this is three weeks before the election.

01:00:13.340 Yes.

01:00:13.620 And he pulled the ripcord.

01:00:16.120 And our first story was, you know, Biden's secret emails on the front page.

01:00:22.060 And it mainly was about an email from a Burisma executive to Hunter saying, you know, thanks very much for introducing me to your father.

01:00:33.020 And, 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.

01:00:46.960 It's not on his official schedule.

01:00:48.600 You know, he meets a lot of people to the Washington Post, et cetera.

01:00:51.600 No, no meeting ever occurred.

01:00:54.100 And there were all sorts of other strange things.

01:00:56.960 But 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.

01:01:11.800 Immediately, we held the story until 5 a.m.

01:01:14.800 Normally, it would go out at 10 o'clock the previous night.

01:01:17.560 But online, we held it till 5 a.m.

01:01:19.600 And within three or four hours, it had been shut down and censored by Facebook and Twitter.

01:01:30.160 And the first we knew of it was a Facebook executive who also happens to be very plugged into the Democrats.

01:01:37.880 It 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?

01:01:49.500 Which 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?

01:02:05.420 And Tony Bobulinski was already out there.

01:02:07.340 It wasn't hard to find.

01:02:09.020 He was on the emails.

01:02:10.980 You could have asked him, but they have never contacted him.

01:02:14.300 So some fact check.

01:02:16.180 And then Twitter followed suit.

01:02:18.100 And who had Twitter?

01:02:19.500 Who had Twitter?

01:02:20.480 Do we know?

01:02:21.820 Yes.

01:02:22.420 So now we know.

01:02:23.980 I didn't know when I wrote the book.

01:02:25.260 But the story of the cover-up, I think, is bigger than the story of corruption, which is an age-old Washington story.

01:02:32.280 At 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.

01:02:47.580 Did I say that?

01:02:48.120 And he'd been parachuted eight months before the election into Twitter as their deputy chief lawyer, deputy counsel.

01:02:54.440 And 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.

01:03:08.120 And the excuse that Twitter used was that we had violated their hacked materials policy.

01:03:15.440 And that's important.

01:03:16.660 It seems bizarre to us because nothing about the story was hacked.

01:03:20.360 But 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.

01:03:34.720 They'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.

01:03:49.440 So, 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?

01:03:56.760 So, 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.

01:04:14.600 And which was about the time that John Paul MacIsaac was contacting the FBI and saying he had this laptop, right?

01:04:22.740 So, and Rudy Giuliani was the president's private lawyer.

01:04:28.480 So, there was this covert surveillance warrant on his cloud.

01:04:33.200 And 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.

01:04:47.340 So, they would have known the cat's out of the bag, right?

01:04:50.020 And then they also would have had access to his iMessages with me.

01:04:56.680 Now, there wasn't a lot.

01:04:58.520 We 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.

01:05:09.900 I mean, one of them, I said, don't give it to anyone else, right?

01:05:12.320 We, you know, it's all systems go here.

01:05:14.560 So, they knew it was coming.

01:05:16.080 Well, 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.

01:05:28.380 And 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.

01:05:44.580 Yeah, I would say that's like, that's, that, that makes Watergate look like nothing, like seriously.

01:05:50.100 Part 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.

01:05:58.400 It's just one preposterous scandal after another.

01:06:02.240 And now, the New York Post got kicked off Twitter entirely, right?

01:06:06.700 Wasn't that the case?

01:06:07.460 I think I got kicked off Twitter around the same time.

01:06:09.620 But you guys were gone from Twitter, right?

01:06:12.200 And now, the New York Post is the oldest newspaper in the United States, if I got that right.

01:06:16.400 Very influential newspaper.

01:06:18.140 But Twitter shut you down completely.

01:06:20.440 So, let me add, throw something else in here.

01:06:22.680 So, 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.

01:06:35.340 And I've thought a couple of things about that.

01:06:37.020 I thought it was off-brand for him to claim victimization because Trump is the guy who tromps around and says, I always win.

01:06:43.300 And in this case, he didn't win.

01:06:45.060 And 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.

01:06:57.060 And then I think, well, he's got the details wrong with regards to the election, but he's got the meta-narrative right.

01:07:03.860 And 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.

01:07:12.780 His 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.

01:07:24.740 And 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.

01:07:37.580 Now, 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.

01:07:45.960 And one of the things you point out in your book is they had absolutely no evidence whatsoever to be making that claim.

01:07:51.620 And 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.

01:07:59.800 It'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.

01:08:12.980 There's certainly something unbelievably rotten going on at the highest possible levels of essentially fascist collusion, right?

01:08:21.480 Government, 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.

01:08:33.340 Yeah, 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.

01:08:39.660 Yeah, 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.

01:09:04.140 It'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.

01:09:29.980 I 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.

01:09:43.880 And 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.

01:10:05.300 But, so that was the threat hanging over them.

01:10:35.280 A direct assault on the First Amendment actually, well, let's say, threatens their livelihood insofar as they're actually acting as journalists.

01:10:42.400 So, how do you make sense out of the FBI-CIA collusion with the White House?

01:10:47.380 Why the hell would they do that?

01:10:48.540 And then, what's going on with the journalists?

01:10:51.060 Like, this is something that just makes my jaw drop.

01:10:53.880 It'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.

01:11:01.740 So, like, what the hell?

01:11:02.900 Why is this happening?

01:11:05.280 Well, there's two things there.

01:11:06.680 So, 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.

01:11:23.640 They wouldn't bother with the New York Times, for instance, is an incredibly powerful entity.

01:11:32.080 It dictates, it sets the agenda for newsrooms across the world.

01:11:36.200 I'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.

01:11:47.920 If it's in the New York Times, you can take it to the bank.

01:11:50.000 That has been the, you know, its brand.

01:11:54.200 And 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.

01:12:08.100 And the Washington Post as well.

01:12:10.900 They do fact-checking.

01:12:11.800 You 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. 0.99

01:12:20.720 And it's not just lies, it's documents disappeared internationally.

01:12:27.120 It's an operation.

01:12:29.440 It's not just journalists being sloppy or one corrupt journalist.

01:12:33.780 This is a concerted operation, the likes of which you would get from, you know, spies.

01:12:40.860 So 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.

01:12:48.820 So, you know, and there's various ways you can tell who's CIA and who isn't, and these spies operate as diplomats.

01:12:59.300 So why are they so aligned with the Biden administration?

01:13:04.400 Like, I wouldn't think that necessarily that the natural allies of the security slash intelligence community would necessarily be the left-wing Democrats.

01:13:14.300 Like, so how do you account for that?

01:13:17.460 It's not really about that.

01:13:19.240 It'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.

01:13:27.680 But I think it's something more.

01:13:29.400 And 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.

01:13:40.880 He didn't do anything dangerous.

01:13:43.960 He, you know, the economy was ticking along.

01:13:46.000 There was nothing outrageous he did.

01:13:47.480 He 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,

01:14:05.720 and 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.

01:14:22.240 And so I think that Trump just didn't buy into that whole project.

01:14:29.040 It's America first, it's more the isolationist streak.

01:14:32.540 And, you know, he would ask NATO, why aren't you pulling your weight?

01:14:37.180 Why aren't the Europeans paying for their own military? 0.87

01:14:39.760 Why are we having to be the policemen of the world?

01:14:43.180 Why can't we have a decent relationship with Russia? 0.98

01:14:46.020 I mean, he's just upending, you know, decades of sort of Cold War mentality, which has never gone away.

01:14:53.000 I mean, like he upended the Palestine narrative with regards to the Abraham Accords.

01:14:58.140 Exactly.

01:14:59.240 You know, and all for the good, really.

01:15:01.900 Well, that was something, yes.

01:15:04.020 Fresh thinking there.

01:15:05.160 And 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.

01:15:17.200 And you see that in, I mean, the CIA letter by the 51 former intelligence officials is very, very instructive.

01:15:26.140 That was the letter that was written just a few days after our story came out and was suppressed.

01:15:32.400 And 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.

01:15:43.080 And 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.

01:15:59.900 So he had a personal motive.

01:16:02.240 So when you say it was organized, in what way?

01:16:04.880 What does that mean exactly, that letter?

01:16:06.600 So 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.

01:16:17.980 He phoned Mike Morrell a day or two, or maybe the same day, Morrell's vague on it, that our story came out.

01:16:26.900 And Morrell said, oh, he didn't tell me to write the letter.

01:16:29.620 But he would not have written the letter if he hadn't had the phone call from Antony Blinken.

01:16:36.600 And 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.

01:16:47.640 And 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.

01:17:00.980 He was also pulled in.

01:17:02.960 But there were five former CIA directors or acting CIA directors who signed that letter.

01:17:08.500 This was a heavy duty letter.

01:17:10.140 And what they said was, well, the message that it sent was that the laptop and our story, therefore, were Russian disinformation.

01:17:18.600 Right, right.

01:17:19.020 They wrote the letter and they tried to get out of.

01:17:21.620 Now it was very weaselly.

01:17:22.300 Weaselly, they used a language like has all the earmarks, which is a word of a Russian information operation.

01:17:32.140 They used the weight of their previous high careers in the CIA to basically sign, seal and deliver this letter.

01:17:44.140 And 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.

01:17:59.180 He tells John Brennan, you know, I want to give Joe Biden a talking point at the debate, you know, a way to.

01:18:08.200 Oh, how nice of.

01:18:08.880 Well, the thing that struck me is so preposterous about that.

01:18:12.880 So, you know, when that broke, I thought, well, that's a lot of former intelligence officials.

01:18:16.680 And, you know, it's hard to imagine that they're all colluding.

01:18:20.280 But on the other hand, why in the world would the Russians be so thrilled with Trump?

01:18:25.960 I mean, you had to buy that story, right?

01:18:27.640 You had to believe that Trump was somehow a natural ally of Russia and Putin.

01:18:32.080 And I mean, I know that Trump got along with Putin the same way he got along with the preposterous leader of North Korea. 0.78

01:18:39.240 But it certainly didn't seem to me that there was any evidence to suggest that Trump was the natural ally of Russia.

01:18:45.680 And 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.

01:19:02.980 I 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.

01:19:13.400 And yet, well, all 51 of these people signed this document.

01:19:17.380 And so everyone thought...

01:19:18.360 They signed it without looking at the laptop, without asking to have a look at the hard drive, without any due diligence.

01:19:26.980 I mean, they had no evidence to say this.

01:19:30.620 None.

01:19:31.400 And they just, they, in fact, admitted in the letter.

01:19:34.320 They say, you know, from our vast experience, we've asked a change.

01:19:38.180 You know, this is exactly, this has the whole earmarks of a Russian information operation.

01:19:42.100 So they abused their authority.

01:19:46.740 They abused the trust that the American people would have in that authority.

01:19:51.700 And, you know, it's extraordinary to me that they haven't apologised.

01:19:57.560 They've, you know, we have tried numerous times.

01:20:00.580 I've tried, you know, I've sent emails, I've phoned, I've called their bosses.

01:20:07.680 I've called the think tanks, they've, the bosses of the think tanks that they're aligned to, you know, every which way.

01:20:15.220 We've had other reporters do the same thing.

01:20:17.340 And there's just nothing from them.

01:20:19.380 It's just, just dead.

01:20:21.180 One guy called David Priest, who was a CIA something or other, he went on Fox News and he said he's happy that he did it.

01:20:29.880 You know, it was the right thing to do.

01:20:32.220 By what standard?

01:20:33.800 Because Trump is so evil that every possible weapon used against him is justifiable no matter what? 0.88

01:20:41.660 Is that the rationale? 0.97

01:20:42.780 Well, that's the subtext.

01:20:43.880 But no, he had some, he had some bogus excuse.

01:20:47.100 I can't even remember.

01:20:47.580 It was so flimsy.

01:20:48.720 But 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.

01:21:04.020 He didn't want to be involved in some political, he just saw it as a political hit.

01:21:08.260 And so that would have been, these people are very savvy.

01:21:11.520 I mean, you'd expect them to be.

01:21:13.260 They're high level CIA analysts and directors.

01:21:16.780 You would expect that they would sniff a rat and know that this was political.

01:21:21.920 Of course they knew.

01:21:23.500 But 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.

01:21:38.320 Sure, that's right.

01:21:39.120 You 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.

01:21:46.740 Because it's happening on multiple fronts.

01:21:48.520 Like, 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.

01:21:58.800 And 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.

01:22:11.540 You know, so that's kind of a problem.

01:22:13.620 And so we have emergency, emergency, emergency.

01:22:16.840 Climate change.

01:22:17.700 Well, that's the, that's the next one.

01:22:19.320 That's the next one.

01:22:20.080 It's like climate change is such an emergency that every right-thinking person is terrified into apocalyptic panic.

01:22:26.740 And 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.

01:22:32.360 And, and, well, you know, quote, we get all the power.

01:22:36.280 And, of course, that has nothing to do with any of this.

01:22:38.360 And 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,

01:22:49.740 then you're talking not to your ally in crisis and an appropriate leader, but to a tyrant in sheep's clothing.

01:22:56.460 And this is exactly what's happening with the, on the Trump front too.

01:22:59.340 It's like, oh my God, he's so dangerous, just like climate change and COVID, that anything goes no matter what.

01:23:05.400 Because 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.

01:23:14.820 It's like, well, just about enough of this.

01:23:16.380 I mean, the story that you unfold, and, you know, we touched on the collusion part of it here at the end.

01:23:22.280 It'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,

01:23:32.000 is the story of the biggest political scandal in my lifetime.

01:23:35.080 Like, I was around, I was young during the Watergate hearings and, and the Nixon collapse.

01:23:39.780 And that was nothing compared to this, as far as I can tell.

01:23:43.200 Well, first of all, it was, you know, Nixon had his, his hands in a variety of relatively unseemly places,

01:23:50.720 but not in his most spectacularly multidimensional manner as this, especially not when you factor in

01:23:58.460 the post hoc Hunter Biden collusion to silence the people who brought it to public attention.

01:24:04.320 It's absolutely beyond comprehension.

01:24:07.240 So how has your book done, by the way?

01:24:09.200 How many copies has it sold?

01:24:10.440 Um, it's done very well.

01:24:12.500 It's sold in hardcover, um, 200, like, oh, I can't remember.

01:24:18.400 Okay, so it's in the hundreds of thousands, though.

01:24:20.700 Yeah, yeah.

01:24:21.640 Oh, yeah.

01:24:22.060 Right.

01:24:22.700 No, it's done very well.

01:24:23.640 And then, you know, there's audiobook and, um, uh, ebook has done very well as.

01:24:29.940 Right.

01:24:30.120 So, so are there newspapers other than the New York Post that have carried the banner

01:24:34.660 forward in the, in the Biden laptop investigation?

01:24:38.200 Or, or?

01:24:39.500 No.

01:24:40.080 I mean, there have been, obviously, Fox News and conservative, um, you know, online publications.

01:24:45.960 But no, um, you know, I, I kept on hoping, because I know that there are, at least, I

01:24:52.300 don't know, Washington Post, but I know at the New York Times that there are honest journalists.

01:24:56.680 Um, and, and some of them have covered aspects of this.

01:25:00.680 And so you get glimmers of truth coming out.

01:25:04.460 But, um, you know, for instance, it took, uh, it was about, oh, March or April, um, well

01:25:11.600 after Joe Biden was ensconced in the Oval Office in 2021, that the New York Times finally

01:25:17.900 came out and admitted that, yeah, you know, the laptop was real, or they indicated some

01:25:22.400 of these emails.

01:25:23.720 Um, that was, that was.

01:25:25.140 Oh, by the way.

01:25:26.200 Oh, by the way, it was the 23rd paragraph of a story that was buried somewhere.

01:25:30.700 And, and, and then, and then, and then after that, of course, because the New York Times

01:25:35.600 sets the agenda, Washington Post, everyone else just tripped over themselves to do similar.

01:25:40.240 And they all had this boilerplate paragraph.

01:25:42.860 And it was, uh, there is no evidence that Joe Biden, you know, was involved or knew anything

01:25:48.180 about what was going on.

01:25:49.640 Okay.

01:25:49.900 Okay.

01:25:50.120 So, so let's go, let's go down that because we're running out of time here and there's so

01:25:53.440 much more to cover.

01:25:54.120 We haven't even covered the details of the business involvement, but, but let's do that.

01:25:59.300 Okay.

01:25:59.760 So, so I'll play devil's advocate.

01:26:02.900 So, so Hunter has been along for the ride with his father, but his father is concerned

01:26:07.740 about him and is keeping an eye on him.

01:26:09.380 And why not, you know, offer him a spot on the jet since it's sitting there anyways,

01:26:12.940 we get to catch up and, you know, do family things together.

01:26:16.080 And Hunter, I like to have Hunter along in my meetings is he gives, brings another set

01:26:20.640 of eyes to the situation.

01:26:21.960 And if he happens to be doing some business on the side, well, you know, what's the problem

01:26:27.000 with that?

01:26:28.080 Okay.

01:26:28.520 And, and I'm arm's length from that completely.

01:26:31.240 I don't have a clue what's going on.

01:26:33.020 And I'm certainly not benefiting from this in any financial manner.

01:26:36.100 And so like, what's the big fuss here, everyone?

01:26:38.800 I'm just being a good father and, you know, opening some doors for my son.

01:26:42.780 Okay.

01:26:43.020 So what's wrong with that story?

01:26:44.940 What does, how is Joe involved?

01:26:47.280 And what's the evidence for that as far as you're concerned?

01:26:51.120 Well, first of all, I mean, this is Joe Biden's business.

01:26:54.060 This is how he has supported his family in a lavish way, lived in DuPont mansions and,

01:27:02.500 you know, put all his kids through schools and all his nephews and nieces and so on.

01:27:08.600 He's run an influence peddling operation that his family, first of all, his brothers ran for

01:27:14.140 him out of Delaware.

01:27:15.080 Delaware is a very peculiar state.

01:27:17.440 It's like the Liechtenstein of America. 0.87

01:27:19.360 It has the most opaque corporate laws, you know, rules.

01:27:25.580 And, and practically every corporation in America is headquartered in Delaware.

01:27:29.940 That gives a tiny state that gives the senator from Delaware this enormous power because he

01:27:35.400 has all these very wealthy companies wanting favors from him.

01:27:38.260 And also because when he came into the Senate, he was clay to be molded by the older senators

01:27:46.000 there and they felt sorry for him because he was newly widowed.

01:27:49.880 And so they took him under his wing.

01:27:51.620 He doesn't like to admit this, but it was the sort of racist, sort of Dixiecrat senators

01:27:57.420 who did that, Democrats.

01:27:59.060 And he got these very highfalutin jobs, powerful jobs.

01:28:04.140 He was for many years chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chair of the Senate Judiciary

01:28:11.840 Committee.

01:28:12.800 Therefore, Judiciary Committee had power over who became judges.

01:28:15.940 And also in the Foreign Relations Committee, he was wooed very early on by China.

01:28:22.460 He went over there as a young senator, was taken to the equivalent of Martha's Vineyard

01:28:28.680 for a weekend and they filled his head with, you know, propaganda.

01:28:33.820 He came back and he was so embarrassingly pro-China that the Weekly Standard had a front page 0.89

01:28:40.120 just excoriating him and saying he's an embarrassment.

01:28:43.480 And Joe Biden, as this very influential head of the Foreign Relations Committee, in 2001

01:28:52.580 was instrumental in getting China into the WTO, which was a disaster for American manufacturing,

01:28:59.420 for the very American working class that Joe Biden purports to care about.

01:29:05.500 You know, he was very influential with his reluctant Democrat colleagues.

01:29:09.760 I think the Republicans were into it, but the Democrats weren't.

01:29:12.220 Bill Clinton wasn't into it.

01:29:14.600 So that was, you know, Joe Biden. 0.97

01:29:17.320 For all his nonsense and his clownish behaviour and his lies and the fact that he's laughed 0.97

01:29:24.280 at by people as sort of harmless silly Joe, he did carry a lot of clout and he did make 0.96

01:29:30.580 things, get legislation through for those donors, those credit card donors in Delaware

01:29:36.980 that were, again, to the detriment of the little people.

01:29:41.720 And in return, he, you know, got cheap houses and his previous less good houses were bought

01:29:50.600 at an inflated price.

01:29:53.100 As I said, his son got jobs at inflated salary and who knows what else.

01:29:57.160 It worked for him.

01:29:58.960 So he had this influence peddling operation going on.

01:30:02.580 It was in his DNA in Delaware.

01:30:05.480 And then when he became vice president and Hunter now comes into the family business,

01:30:10.540 he was already a lobbyist in Washington.

01:30:13.100 So that was working.

01:30:14.320 And now Joe starts flying him around the world with him, flew him famously to China in 2013

01:30:22.080 to when Joe was going to China to do America's important business, like stop China from aggressing 0.97

01:30:30.080 in the South China Sea, militarising those islands, stop China stealing America's intellectual

01:30:36.180 property and so on.

01:30:38.020 And Joe walked away from that meeting with, you know, the Chinese CCP leaders with nothing

01:30:44.160 on behalf of America.

01:30:45.460 But Hunter walked away with a 10% stake in a Chinese firm that had two and a half billion

01:30:52.900 dollars.

01:30:53.180 OK, so let's focus on that for a minute.

01:30:55.660 So you just laid out, you know, three concerns of international importance, particularly in relationship

01:31:02.000 to the US with regard to China.

01:31:04.200 China, you said Biden came home from that trip empty handed, but his son came home with a

01:31:08.540 substantial business victory.

01:31:11.000 OK, so now it seems to me, now tell me if I'm wrong.

01:31:14.780 Well, I would say, first of all, well, that shouldn't have happened.

01:31:20.780 Regardless of its legal, regardless of its legality, it's a clear moral hazard, right?

01:31:28.180 Is that, well, Biden is negotiating with the Chinese on these important affairs.

01:31:32.380 His son shouldn't be negotiating business deals on the same trip, especially business deals

01:31:38.420 that benefit the Bidens.

01:31:40.400 OK, so now how, if you're a Democrat, how do you argue against that proposition?

01:31:46.900 Like, am I missing something here?

01:31:48.820 How is that not inappropriate?

01:31:51.960 Well, this is how Joe Biden does it.

01:31:54.460 He uses the grief card again.

01:31:56.860 It's always about, you know, because his oldest son, the apple of his eye, tragically died of

01:32:04.200 brain cancer.

01:32:05.300 Yeah.

01:32:05.580 That is overlaid.

01:32:08.680 You know, we're told always that Joe was so devastated that his aides didn't dare bring

01:32:15.260 up the case about Burisma, for instance, because that was around that time.

01:32:18.920 You know, any time Joe is in hot water, you just see this throughout his career, they bring

01:32:27.180 up the tragedy of his wife and daughter dying, the tragedy of his son dying later on.

01:32:33.760 And, you know, Joe, when he's in trouble, I mean, I hate to say this because it sounds

01:32:37.860 so awful and maybe I am being too cynical, but he will manage to get himself photographed

01:32:43.740 at church, walking through the graveyard with tombstones in the back.

01:32:48.740 Honestly, I don't want to see that, but I see it.

01:32:53.100 It just pops up.

01:32:54.440 It's so cynical and awful.

01:32:56.480 I think it must be perhaps just muscle memory for him now.

01:33:01.380 You know, he doesn't really mean to do it.

01:33:03.280 He just, that's the way it works.

01:33:05.080 Yeah, well, be careful what you practice.

01:33:09.540 Yes.

01:33:10.320 Right.

01:33:10.860 Yeah, right, right.

01:33:11.780 Because, you know, what's first a plan becomes a habit and then it just becomes second nature.

01:33:16.500 And then you say, well, I didn't know.

01:33:17.880 It's like, yeah, you knew once.

01:33:19.620 You just forgot.

01:33:21.060 There's one more thing I want to delve into, I think, and I think we should take the time

01:33:24.820 to do it.

01:33:25.420 And so, and then, of course, I would also like to ask you what you've learned since you

01:33:29.980 wrote the book.

01:33:30.620 So maybe we'll end with that.

01:33:31.900 But can you briefly, relatively briefly, go through the business dealings that you detail

01:33:38.800 in the book?

01:33:39.320 I mean, that takes up like two thirds of the book.

01:33:41.960 I mean, I know we talked about the excess volume of homemade pornography that's on the

01:33:47.020 laptop.

01:33:47.360 But, and I would say that's relevant in the moral domain, but not in the political domain.

01:33:54.280 There's dealings with China.

01:33:55.720 There's dealings with Russia.

01:33:57.040 There's dealings with Ukraine.

01:33:58.060 And that's not all.

01:33:59.000 So do you want to walk through some of that or just hit the highlights, let's say?

01:34:03.400 That's mainly it.

01:34:04.180 It's also Kazakhstan, Romania.

01:34:05.900 The pattern is always the same. 0.50

01:34:08.000 It's these sort of corrupt countries.

01:34:11.640 They would like to have, for whatever reason, it's either oligarchs that need the sort of Joe

01:34:17.820 Biden imprimatur so that they can pressure their own governments to stop investigating them.

01:34:24.960 That's happened in Romania and in Ukraine.

01:34:27.800 In Russia, it's more there's an oligarch who paid money to, it was sort of, I think it was

01:34:34.780 a money laundering operation.

01:34:36.020 I mean, it was like $200 million to buy parts of real estate in America.

01:34:42.560 And that was through one of the businesses that actually Devon Archer was organising, but

01:34:47.120 there was $3.5 million that seemed to get skimmed off that and put into an account of

01:34:52.180 Hunter and Devon's.

01:34:55.200 And so, and it's just sort of, you know, the Burisma deal.

01:34:58.800 They had a couple of China deals that fell over.

01:35:01.780 There was, there always seemed to be, whenever they were really with very unsavoury people,

01:35:08.140 whenever Hunter was, you know, mixing with these unsavoury, particularly in China, those 1.00

01:35:15.000 people tended to get like arrested or disappear.

01:35:19.820 And I wondered, I thought throughout the laptop, as I thought about it, there always seemed,

01:35:25.660 Hunter seemed to have a guardian angel, you know, he's Houdini.

01:35:28.740 I mean, he's still Houdini, watching over him.

01:35:31.180 And of course, it would make sense.

01:35:32.400 People have told me that the vice president's son would have CIA or intelligence anyway.

01:35:38.420 Keeping an eye on what he's doing, especially when he's a crack addict and, you know, has

01:35:43.540 a hooker problem, that they would be keeping an eye on him and pulling him out of scrapes 1.00

01:35:48.520 to save him.

01:35:49.880 And we saw that happening in America.

01:35:52.140 God knows what happened overseas.

01:35:54.460 And one thing I should say is about Joe's benefiting.

01:35:58.320 I didn't find a lot on the laptop, but, you know, it's like being a little bit pregnant.

01:36:03.420 And I'm sure there is more.

01:36:05.360 And this is what James Comer and the Oversight Committee is looking for and why they're trying

01:36:09.220 to subpoena Joe Biden's personal bank records and Hunter's and the rest of the families.

01:36:14.520 So I found some evidence that Hunter was paying for Joe's household bills.

01:36:20.260 So there was, you know, painting of his house in Delaware.

01:36:28.140 There was air conditioning, new air conditioning for a cottage on the estate.

01:36:32.860 There was a retaining wall, you know, new shutters.

01:36:36.580 Why is it so relevant, just out of curiosity, that there is documented evidence that Joe

01:36:46.040 directly benefited financially?

01:36:49.100 I mean, there's overwhelming evidence that Joe's son, who he travels with, benefited overwhelmingly

01:36:56.120 financially.

01:36:57.080 It's like, are we supposed to make the presumption that there's no moral hazard there for the president?

01:37:02.240 That because it's his son and not him, that means it has absolutely nothing to do with him.

01:37:08.680 I mean, and yet this is a very close-knit family that spend a lot of time together and

01:37:12.700 that parade that around to a substantial degree.

01:37:15.140 I mean, I would regard, at least to some degree, a favor done for my son as touching on me in a

01:37:23.640 positive manner, you know?

01:37:25.060 I mean, I'm wondering if I've got something wrong there.

01:37:30.140 Because, of course, there's the legal issue, and it's not like that's irrelevant, but it

01:37:34.060 would seem to me that, given that it's the presidency, that there's a broader moral hazard

01:37:39.060 issue here, too, especially given that we're at war with Russia because of Ukraine.

01:37:45.180 I mean, that's not a little thing, the fact that the Biden family was tangled up in Ukraine

01:37:49.260 in all sorts of interesting ways, let's put it that way, and that we're now at war, and

01:37:53.500 also an extremely expensive war, I might add, where tens of billions of dollars are being

01:37:57.700 dumped into an unbelievably corrupt country with, like, virtually no oversight.

01:38:02.000 Because if you think there's oversight in Ukraine, there's something wrong with your 0.97

01:38:04.600 head.

01:38:05.260 Everyone's known forever that that's a remarkably corrupt country, even by Eastern European 1.00

01:38:09.300 standards, which is really saying something.

01:38:12.280 And so why is it that, why is it, do you think, that in order for there to be a real scandal,

01:38:18.180 there has to be absolutely documented evidence that some of the money that was definitely paid

01:38:23.060 to Hunter by foreign agents had to be funneled directly to Joe.

01:38:26.780 Otherwise, he's completely innocent.

01:38:28.260 We can just go on as if nothing's happening.

01:38:30.460 That doesn't strike me as reasonable.

01:38:32.800 Totally agree.

01:38:33.440 I mean, it's one of the narratives that's being crafted to protect him.

01:38:39.480 And that is, you know, the White House has changed from Joe saying, you know, I knew

01:38:45.200 nothing about my son's overseas business dealings, to now they're saying, oh, well, Joe wasn't

01:38:51.280 in business with his son.

01:38:53.220 This was after Devin Archer testified.

01:38:57.480 And Devin had to be very, very careful because he's facing jail himself.

01:39:01.860 And he has a lawyer, pro bono lawyer, who's very close with the Bidens.

01:39:06.560 So he had to be careful in what he said.

01:39:09.400 But what he said was that the brand was Joe Biden and that Joe was on the speakerphone

01:39:14.500 with Hunter at least 20 times when they were having these meetings, you know, trying to

01:39:20.160 Well, if the brand wasn't Joe Biden, then what the hell was the brand?

01:39:28.120 Because I don't see any evidence that Hunter Biden had a brand.

01:39:31.800 What the New York Times and the Washington Post, et cetera, want is they saying, oh, there

01:39:36.180 has to be a check with Joe's name on it signed by a corrupt oligarch for anybody to even open

01:39:42.780 their eyes and say that Joe did something wrong.

01:39:45.740 I mean, yeah, I don't think so.

01:39:46.780 No, that's not something that the people who are investigating, that's not a road that

01:39:50.240 the people who are investigating this should walk down.

01:39:52.420 The right road, as far as I can tell, is to say, hey, look, folks, we're in a really dangerous

01:39:58.480 war with Russia.

01:40:00.060 And no one will say we are because we're all winking and nodding and pretending that it's

01:40:03.820 Ukraine.

01:40:04.340 But we know what the hell's going on fundamentally.

01:40:06.940 And there's some chance that part of the reason that we're in this war is because things

01:40:12.460 that weren't exactly straight were going on with the president's son.

01:40:16.280 Yeah.

01:40:17.080 And, you know, Victor Shokin.

01:40:18.920 That's a problem.

01:40:20.240 He blames Joe Biden.

01:40:21.980 For some reason, Obama outsourced foreign policy to Joe Biden.

01:40:27.040 No idea why.

01:40:28.320 But that's what he did.

01:40:30.020 Joe Biden was the guy standing in the tarmac when Xi Jinping arrived in America.

01:40:35.560 Joe Biden was the guy who went to Ukraine, you know, I don't know, seven or eight times.

01:40:42.740 And I mean, the Ukrainians even were a bit insulted that Obama didn't bother ever going

01:40:47.120 to Ukraine.

01:40:48.360 So Victor Shokin blames Joe Biden, the vice president, for Ukraine not being able to defend

01:40:55.900 itself when Russia invaded Crimea.

01:40:58.140 And, of course, Russia invaded Crimea as a direct result in retaliation for that, you

01:41:06.580 know, alleged CIA coup that threw out Yanukovych, who was kind of moderately friendly to the

01:41:14.120 Russians, but wasn't kind of in their pocket.

01:41:17.320 Yanukovych had been talking about doing a deal with Europe, which obviously the Russians 0.98

01:41:22.380 didn't like and he pulled out of and the Russians gave him a big bribe, blah, blah, blah.

01:41:25.920 But the fact is that a lot of Ukrainians, Victor Shokin being one of them, say that they were

01:41:33.680 told at that time, and Poroshenko told Shokin this, that the Americans, and that means Biden,

01:41:39.760 said, look, don't do anything.

01:41:41.900 We are going to deal with this diplomatically.

01:41:44.480 Well, they didn't deal with it diplomatically.

01:41:46.800 I don't know what, whether, I mean, Bob Gates, the previous, you know, high-ranking Bush

01:41:54.880 and then Obama Secretary of Defence said that Joe Biden's been wrong about every foreign

01:42:01.140 policy issue ever. 0.99

01:42:03.280 And I don't know whether that's because he's a bumbling fool or whether it's because he's 0.99

01:42:07.380 compromised in some fashion. 0.99

01:42:08.900 He always puts his own interests first.

01:42:10.860 And so now we have a situation where Russia was so demonised and completely falsely during

01:42:21.020 the Trump administration, where the whole Russia, Russia, Russia hoax was happening and people

01:42:26.160 like Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat head of the Intelligence Committee, was boldly saying

01:42:31.600 that Donald Trump was an agent of Vladimir Putin.

01:42:35.700 He was a Russian agent.

01:42:36.800 None of that was true, but it sort of does a job of demonising Russia in the eyes of the

01:42:43.960 American people.

01:42:45.500 And, you know, I mean, Russia is completely to blame for having invaded Ukraine this time.

01:42:50.300 But Putin would have seen an opportunity because, of course, the last time Joe Biden was in charge

01:42:56.320 of policy for Ukraine, they invaded Crimea and nothing happened.

01:43:01.480 So I just think it's a very dangerous situation where you have this guy who has to be compromised

01:43:10.580 considering all the pies that his family was in and all the millions of dollars that flowed

01:43:15.880 through to his son and his brother and various other family members from all these different

01:43:21.480 countries that are our adversaries.

01:43:23.240 You know, how can Joe Biden not be compromised?

01:43:28.480 Well, that's a good place to end.

01:43:31.240 I would say we're going to do another half an hour, everyone who's watching and listening

01:43:35.500 on the Daily Wire Plus platform.

01:43:37.220 I don't know exactly what I'm what I'm going to talk to Miranda about when we get there,

01:43:41.640 but you can come over there and find out.

01:43:43.280 And for all of you who are watching and listening, you know, thank you very much for that, Miranda.

01:43:47.460 That's quite the book, Laptop from Hell.

01:43:51.500 For those of you, again, who are watching and listening, you might want to go read that

01:43:54.560 and, you know, draw your own conclusions because this is something you should be investigating

01:44:00.900 and thinking about, especially because there's an election upcoming in, you know, about a year

01:44:05.020 and it's going to be an important one because things are quite the mess and they could easily

01:44:09.040 get worse and you might want to know what the hell's going on.

01:44:13.000 So let's sum up.

01:44:14.160 Well, what do we see here?

01:44:15.120 Well, Hunter left his laptop very carelessly a week before his father announced his run

01:44:22.360 for presidency, three waterlogged laptops just in case one wasn't enough. 0.57

01:44:26.420 And so that's three is quite a lot, actually.

01:44:28.560 And then a guy who really had no public exposure at all and no desire for it caught on to what

01:44:36.300 was on the laptop and tried to get it to the relevant authorities.

01:44:40.000 And that was difficult, as it turned out, even though he went to the press and you'd think

01:44:44.120 they'd be all over it.

01:44:45.140 And he finally got Giuliani interested and Giuliani got the New York Post interested.

01:44:51.020 And then that story broke soon before the previous election date.

01:44:55.340 And then it was shut down.

01:44:57.260 And it was shut down because of fascist collusion between Facebook, Twitter and the deep state,

01:45:02.540 fundamentally.

01:45:02.980 And it was blamed on Russia collusion.

01:45:06.080 And then 51 former security and intelligence officials wrote a letter stating that this

01:45:13.720 had all the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.

01:45:16.260 Even though they'd never seen it, they didn't investigate it.

01:45:18.560 And that was all a lie.

01:45:19.640 And that was just before the election, which was decided by a hair.

01:45:25.980 And after that, Trump claimed that the election was stolen.

01:45:29.300 He claimed it at a level of detail.

01:45:31.420 But I don't know what a sensible person is supposed to think about the fact that the two

01:45:35.320 biggest social media empires in the world shut down the New York Post story, devastating

01:45:39.560 the Biden family on the grounds of the laptop that Hunter himself left at a Delaware computer

01:45:45.800 repair shop.

01:45:46.540 That's where we're at.

01:45:49.240 All right.

01:45:49.680 We'll see everybody on the Daily Wire side.

01:45:51.700 Thank you very much, Miranda.

01:45:52.820 Much appreciated.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - October 05, 2023

386. The Laptop From Hell ｜ Miranda Devine

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