The Megyn Kelly Show - Hunter Biden's Business Connections to Joe, and the Future of the Right, with Peter Schweizer and Matt Continetti ｜ Ep. 303

00:00:00.440 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.620 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. 25 minutes over 18 months.

00:00:18.720 That's the amount of time the mainstream media covered the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

00:00:22.560 Think about that. 25 minutes over 18 months.

00:00:26.880 Yes. It's no surprise that the media continues to run cover for the Biden administration.

00:00:31.000 And we're going to get into the very latest with the president of the Government Accountability Institute, Peter Schweitzer, who's been on this from the beginning.

00:00:39.360 I mean, from four years ago and also discuss the latest on what's happening in China.

00:00:44.720 By the way, I'm wearing my lighter shades today because I'm having some light sensitivity in the wake of my LASIK.

00:00:50.340 It's not uncommon when you have dry eye like me.

00:00:52.800 So I found a happy medium on my eye approach today.

00:00:58.000 Anyway, we're going to begin the show today, however, with journalist Matt Continetti on the past, the future of the Republican Party.

00:01:05.860 And they're related. And it's actually sort of a roadmap, he argues.

00:01:09.400 If you look, you look at the past, it'll show you where the GOP is going and what to expect.

00:01:13.920 He has literally written the book on the right. His book is called The Right, The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism.

00:01:22.020 And it is out as of today.

00:01:28.180 Welcome back. Great to have you here.

00:01:29.840 Thanks for having me, Megan. It's great to be here.

00:01:32.080 So I love this because we always approach our lives, I think, whether it comes to the covid pandemic, whether it comes to politics, as if we're the first people to ever be here.

00:01:40.680 You know, like there's there's no past from which we can learn.

00:01:43.700 We're just going to have to forge our own path.

00:01:45.460 And yet somebody like you takes the time to actually study, for example, in this case, the history of the GOP.

00:01:51.140 And you say it kind of explains exactly where the GOP is going.

00:01:55.540 And one of the most interesting things I thought from it was how you argue Trump was not an aberration.

00:02:04.080 Trump actually may have been the normal for the GOP, not necessarily the tweeting, but policies and his approach and what was appealing to him.

00:02:14.980 And Ronald Reagan may have been the aberration.

00:02:18.680 So let's just start with that. You look back at 100 years and what gave us the top line conclusion there.

00:02:25.780 Why did you why did you reach that assertion?

00:02:29.400 Well, Megan, most histories of the American right, they begin at the end of World War Two and they culminate with the election of Ronald Reagan.

00:02:37.700 Or sometimes if they take the tragic view, they have a coda with Barack Obama in 2008.

00:02:44.220 What I wanted to do was I wanted to kind of widen the lens to take in a greater picture of American history and the history of the right and also include the prehistory of the American right.

00:02:55.860 What the right looked like before the Cold War, before America's victory in World War Two and take up the story basically until today.

00:03:05.440 So my story begins in 1921 and it ends in 2021.

00:03:10.220 And when I told the story that way, I found that the Republican Party of 2020 resembles in many ways the Republican Party of 1920, especially in its attitude toward immigration and its attitude toward international economic competition and trade and its attitude toward overseas entanglements and foreign intervention.

00:03:34.420 Hmm. All right. So you start way, way back with the Harding administration, then into the Coolidge administration and then and conservatives are sort of going along, pushing these ideals that you talk about.

00:03:47.600 And then FDR, I mean, comes along and things change dramatically.

00:03:53.580 The pendulum shifts in the country toward progressivism for many, many years.

00:03:58.380 So how did that happen? How were the Republicans out of power for some 20 years after Harding and Coolidge?

00:04:05.240 Well, the answer is pretty simple. The Great Depression and the Great Depression really delegitimized the Republican economic record.

00:04:16.600 The Republicans of the 1920s really benefited from the public perception that their policies were responsible for the extraordinary growth of the period.

00:04:26.980 But when the Great Depression happened, that really kind of delegitimized, discredited the Republican economic policies, and it allowed FDR to fundamentally transform the social contract in the United States and expand the size and scope of the federal government really in a way that America had never known.

00:04:49.580 And so the right in the 1930s defines itself in opposition to FDR and his New Deal.

00:04:57.800 And this is an interesting development because most conservatives in other countries are defenders of the established order.

00:05:08.360 That's basically what we mean when we talk about conservative.

00:05:12.420 But for America, the established order beginning with the New Deal is liberal.

00:05:17.140 And so conservatives were on the outside, and it took a long time for conservatives to work their way back in to the center of power and the center of American politics.

00:05:28.180 Was the electorate right to blame Republican policies, conservative policies, for the Great Depression?

00:05:36.460 I don't know.

00:05:37.820 I mean, the cause of the Great Depression wasn't necessarily the fault of the banks or the stock market.

00:05:46.140 I think the studies of Milton Friedman, the great libertarian economist, pretty much to prove that the Great Depression was worsened by the policies of government, by the policies of the Federal Reserve that led to the credit contraction and the banking crisis and prolonged the Great Depression.

00:06:02.060 For whatever reason, the American electorate thought that FDR was handling the Depression well, not only in his pragmatic attitude of experimentation, but also his personality.

00:06:16.880 You know, one of the lessons of this history that I wrote is that personality counts for a lot in American politics.

00:06:23.660 The quality of candidate matters a lot.

00:06:27.180 In fact, the personality of a candidate probably matters more than his or her policies.

00:06:33.100 And I think that applied to FDR.

00:06:34.980 His charm was evident.

00:06:38.220 He had charisma.

00:06:40.360 He had presence.

00:06:42.580 And so the American public invested a lot in him.

00:06:45.640 And then by the end of his presidency, of course, America had entered World War II and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor delegitimized the rights foreign policy of non-intervention and no overseas entanglements in the same way that the Great Depression had delegitimized its economic policy of laissez-faire.

00:07:07.740 So really, by the end of the Second World War, the right is out of power, and it's also on kind of the margins of intellectual and cultural life in the United States.

00:07:20.780 And so there my story starts charting how they got back in, got back into the mainstream.

00:07:28.060 Right.

00:07:28.260 And it's fascinating to talk about William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review and so on.

00:07:32.660 But before we before we go there, a word on personality of presidents, because there is there was a piece.

00:07:40.120 It was yesterday, I think, in The New York Times by Charles Blow.

00:07:43.820 I mean, not exactly a conservative guy.

00:07:45.460 And he was talking about Biden's problems and this devastating Quinnipiac poll that shows his approval rating at 33 percent.

00:07:53.960 Maybe it's an outlier.

00:07:54.880 But as he points out, there have been four major national polls released last week.

00:07:58.320 And in three of them, Biden has the lowest showing of his presidency.

00:08:02.540 So he he's struggling.

00:08:04.320 There's no getting around that for the White House.

00:08:06.280 And it comes on the heels of a Politico interview, as as Blow also notes, with Biden's pollster, in which he's very blunt and says there's really no one who would deny this is a really sour environment for Democrats.

00:08:21.740 And Blow is asking the question about what if the issue here is not the messaging, right, because the White House and the pollster, they all say we got to do better on the messaging.

00:08:33.500 If we could just get the message out.

00:08:35.500 They said Biden on a two city tour to bring the message to the American people like, oh, wow.

00:08:43.280 OK, but he says, what if it's not the messaging, but the messenger?

00:08:49.080 And he he makes the point, Charles Blow does that, that that voters have a void of emotional connection to him, that they can't cheer him on.

00:08:59.920 And if they can't cheer you, they will chide you and talks about how he's just not resonating, even with the people on his side, to the point that you are just making,

00:09:09.480 which is even if his people like his policies, and I don't know that they do, they feel nothing for him.

00:09:15.980 Right. And if they felt more strongly about Biden, then perhaps they would kind of overlook some of the awful consequences of his of his policies.

00:09:25.120 And I think one of the more revealing poll results in recent weeks was Gallup asked the public what their concerns are.

00:09:32.800 Of course, the number one is the economy, cost of living, the inflation.

00:09:36.560 It's devastating America.

00:09:37.900 Number two, though, was poor leadership in government.

00:09:41.900 And I think that the electorate has made a come to a conclusion about Joe Biden, and it is a negative one.

00:09:50.380 And the conclusion really began with our withdrawal from Afghanistan.

00:09:56.400 It's carried on through the mixed messaging on COVID during the Omicron wave.

00:10:03.440 It's gone through the inflation.

00:10:05.280 Again, the public is not giving Biden the benefit of the doubt.

00:10:11.280 And that's because we have to remember why Biden is in the Oval Office.

00:10:15.520 He didn't win the Democratic nomination because he had a grip over a core constituency or was able to

00:10:23.840 have everybody swoon over his words.

00:10:26.500 He won the Democratic nomination basically because Democratic bigwigs realized that he was the only plausible candidate to take on Trump in the general election,

00:10:36.820 that the alternative was Bernie Sanders and the Sanders nomination might mean a total collapse of the Democrats.

00:10:43.000 And then he won the general election, in my view, mainly because he wasn't Donald Trump and that it was it wasn't a mandate he received from the public.

00:10:52.840 It was an anti mandate.

00:10:53.740 It was don't be Donald Trump and otherwise don't do anything else.

00:10:58.320 And that's why the Republicans performed better than expected at the congressional level in order to even check Biden there.

00:11:07.880 But, of course, Biden, with not realizing that he received an anti mandate, not realizing that he had the smallest margin in the House of Representatives for Democrats in 100 years,

00:11:19.960 decided, you know what, I will be FDR without the charm.

00:11:23.440 And that has not worked out well for him at all.

00:11:27.320 Right. And not only going hard left on economic policy, but going hard left on social issues, which many believe is why his he's seeing such a precipitous drop with Hispanics.

00:11:39.300 Those those two issues, Hispanics tend to be more conservative socially and he hasn't been.

00:11:45.540 And they're getting hit by these pocketbook issues in a way they weren't under the Trump administration.

00:11:50.860 And so, you know, the White House is in a panic.

00:11:54.680 There's no question they understand what's coming their way in these midterms.

00:11:58.140 And the only real question is, do they lose the Senate and the House or just the House?

00:12:02.620 And do they even try to pivot?

00:12:04.860 You know, they tried to pivot away from from covid.

00:12:07.000 But do they try to pivot away from anything else right now, Matt?

00:12:10.280 They're not right now.

00:12:11.420 There's talk in the news today.

00:12:13.360 You've seen it before of the new plan to bring back, build back better.

00:12:18.960 Remember, the two trillion dollar additional spending plan that was already rejected because they couldn't get their own party, namely Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to sign on to it.

00:12:29.040 And they're going to revive it right now with record inflation.

00:12:32.040 They're going to spend more if their party allows it.

00:12:34.700 Now, this is a night of the living dead when it comes to legislation.

00:12:39.620 I don't see much of a chance for build back better precisely, as you say, Megan, because of the inflation.

00:12:45.280 That was Joe Biden's main concern in December when he came out against the bill.

00:12:49.240 Inflation has gotten only worse with time.

00:12:51.780 Look, the window is closing on this Democratic majority.

00:12:55.620 And I don't think they really know what to do.

00:12:59.080 And it's because they're so beholden to their progressive left wing base that they're unable to pivot to the center.

00:13:08.540 You mentioned the Hispanic vote and the realignment of the Hispanic vote, just this epical development in American politics.

00:13:16.780 Another issue there is schools.

00:13:18.220 You know, I think we still haven't internalized the anger and frustration and grief, in many cases, among American parents because of the way that the schools handled COVID, the way that they continue to handle issues like masking.

00:13:36.020 And then, of course, COVID provided this moment of radical transparency into what is being taught in the schools.

00:13:42.580 And there are two parents are up in arms.

00:13:45.380 So, when you think of the education issue, for example, historically, that has been to the benefit of the Democratic Party.

00:13:53.840 Not anymore.

00:13:55.160 Not anymore.

00:13:55.880 And so, too, with the economy.

00:13:58.940 You know, Democrats have often benefited from coming into office after a recession, right?

00:14:06.340 And so, they take credit for the natural recovery of the economy after a recession.

00:14:11.660 In many ways, that's what Barack Obama did.

00:14:13.540 That's what Bill Clinton did. 0.99

00:14:16.560 Biden doesn't have that luxury because of his very policies, because of that stimulus bill he put in place a year ago, despite the warnings of Democratic economists that it would unleash inflation.

00:14:28.480 He did it anyway.

00:14:29.780 The inflation came.

00:14:31.160 And now, not only is education not a Democratic advantage, the economy is no longer a Democratic advantage.

00:14:38.120 And that, I think, spells victory for Republicans in November.

00:14:41.700 Well, something else has happened to the parties in this country over the past 10, 15 years.

00:14:48.580 And that is this shift in who is the party of elites.

00:14:54.280 And I don't know, maybe 15 isn't the number of years.

00:14:56.820 Maybe we go back to Bill Clinton.

00:14:57.900 But you're the expert in this.

00:15:00.900 Where it used to be the Republicans were sort of the Chamber of Commerce Party and they sort of had the working class.

00:15:07.760 They didn't care about the working class, right? 0.92

00:15:09.180 It was like they were worried more about the white shoe class and, you know, Wall Street and people who make the money and pay the paychecks.

00:15:18.120 And now that seems to have done a complete 180, you know, over the course of Bill Clinton's warming up to Wall Street.

00:15:23.900 And then Barack Obama's doubling down on it, not caring at all about the working class and its problems, which led to Trump and this migration of voters over to the GOP side.

00:15:34.140 And you write about this, too, about this internal conflict and also coordination within the Republican Party when it comes to elites versus populists.

00:15:47.820 Can you educate us a bit on that?

00:15:49.800 Well, it's, as you say, a major theme of my book, this competition and sometimes coordination, cooperation between populists and conservative elites, intellectual elites primarily.

00:16:04.760 And it starts really at that moment where the right after World War II is delegitimized, is out of power, doesn't even have a foothold in the Republican Party.

00:16:16.760 And what the conservatives of that time in the mid-20th century discovered, Megan, was that their arguments weren't convincing the elites in our society who were primarily liberal elites, but they were resonating with the working class, with white Americans without college degrees, with the basically the descendants of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.

00:16:43.460 And so when William F. Buckley Jr. runs for mayor of New York City in 1965, he does it in order to knock off the Republican candidate, who was a liberal, a congressman named John Lindsay.

00:16:55.820 He doesn't do that.

00:16:57.580 Instead, what happens is Buckley's votes come from the Democrat.

00:17:02.680 They come from the Democratic candidate Abe Beam.

00:17:05.200 And it's because Buckley's arguments for economic dynamism, for law and order in particular, they resonate most in the outer boroughs of New York, the same places that would go on to put Rudy Giuliani in power in the 1990s.

00:17:22.800 And a place like Staten Island, of course, voted heavily for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.

00:17:28.700 So we can see, even in the mid-1960s, that the working class is going to move out of the Democratic column.

00:17:38.900 And this happens with Richard Nixon and his hard hats, right, the construction workers that was one of his most devoted constituencies.

00:17:49.260 It starts with the Reagan Democrats in 1980, and it just carries on through to the point where we have today, where the Republican Party is, I think, a populist party.

00:18:02.000 And it's become a unique situation for conservatives because conservatives who appreciate populism and its power also need to be able to figure out, well, how can we inject populism with our ideas and our policies in order to address some of those very real concerns that the electorate has today?

00:18:27.880 Yeah. So define populism for this, for the purposes of this discussion.

00:18:32.780 Sure. For me, populism is a confidence in the ability of everyday people to make decisions and a lack of confidence in what the experts or the elites in our society are saying and doing and the decisions they make.

00:18:51.640 So that's how I define populism. And when you look at the history of the United States, you find that populism is a feature, not a bug in American politics.

00:19:03.480 From the original Tea Party to today's Tea Party and the Trump movement. Populism has always kind of risen up at moments in American history where elites, the people in power, are not responding to changing social and economic conditions, or they're responding in the wrong way.

00:19:24.940 And so, well, I date this latest populist upsurge really toward the end of George W. Bush's administration when George W. tried twice to pass a comprehensive immigration reform that included an amnesty for illegal immigrants residing in the country.

00:19:42.960 And that, I think, really created a fissure between conservative elites in Washington who were for the Bush bill and for the populist grassroots, which were living through what was happening on the border.

00:19:56.200 And they said that amnesty would only incentivize more border crossings, more lawbreaking, and that distrust between the populist grassroots and the conservative elites in Washington that began, I think, circa 2006 with the fight over immigration only grew worse over time.

00:20:21.080 So how does it wind up that they elect Barack Obama out of George W. Bush, right?

00:20:26.880 I mean, there just weren't enough Republicans to whom immigration was important, because you certainly wouldn't have gone that route if your main concern was immigration.

00:20:36.580 Right, right. Well, many people stayed home for when the nominee is John McCain, right?

00:20:43.080 And there's also simmering distrust and discontent with George W. Bush's Iraq war.

00:20:52.120 And that's another element of the populist upsurge as well.

00:20:57.040 By 2007, when Bush finally changed his strategy and sent more troops to Iraq to pacify the insurgency and secure the population,

00:21:08.320 a lot of Americans and even many Republicans were beginning to believe that the war had been a mistake.

00:21:16.460 And so you saw kind of the phenomenon of the Ron Paul campaigns in 2008 as an expression of this discontent with the way that Republican elites were running things.

00:21:29.780 And so Barack Obama in 2008 benefited from, I think, disillusionment with the war.

00:21:38.700 He benefited from a lack of Republican enthusiasm precisely because Republicans were not on board with the Bush administration's immigration plan.

00:21:48.000 And then, of course, he benefited from the financial crisis and Great Recession, which the Great Recession had started even earlier.

00:21:56.320 But the financial crisis kicks in in September 2008.

00:21:59.800 And that was kind of all she wrote, as they say.

00:22:03.520 The Great Recession did for Obama what COVID did for Biden, right?

00:22:07.560 Exactly, right.

00:22:08.600 Or the Great Depression did for FDR.

00:22:12.140 Yeah, wobbled the party in power.

00:22:13.240 Exactly.

00:22:14.620 And Obama, though, was able, when he ran for re-election, to say, well, look, unemployment's coming down.

00:22:23.300 Things are headed in the right direction.

00:22:25.220 And Mitt Romney's not really in touch with the people.

00:22:28.660 I don't know if Joe Biden will even be in a position where he can make similar arguments in 2024.

00:22:36.300 It is interesting.

00:22:37.300 Remember when there was the big push to draft Chris Christie and instead it was Romney that year?

00:22:40.880 And everybody's like, oh, you know, he missed his window, which he clearly did miss his window.

00:22:46.540 But one of the things people liked about Chris Christie, this is before Donald Trump, is he's a fighter.

00:22:51.360 He used to yell at the teachers' unions.

00:22:52.840 He didn't let anybody push him around.

00:22:54.620 We weren't used to seeing politicians like that.

00:22:56.820 And he was scrappy.

00:22:58.500 He was from Jersey.

00:22:59.820 Jersey, yeah, I like Jersey.

00:23:01.580 Everybody's known as like a fighter.

00:23:02.860 You don't mess with somebody from Jersey, you know? 1.00

00:23:04.760 And my husband has jokes because we have a we have a we spend our summers there and he's like, you just wanted to buy the property in Jersey so you could make the Jersey jokes.

00:23:13.580 But anyway, my point is, everybody loved him, but he missed his window.

00:23:17.540 And I wonder whether in retrospect, he really would he might have gotten it done.

00:23:22.700 He might have beat he might have beaten Barack Obama because Mitt Romney was completely the anti Chris Christie of that year and the anti Trump, you know, the elite, religious, you know, corporate raider, perfectly quaffed.

00:23:38.460 You know, I mean, if you want to look at Republican elite, look it up in the encyclopedia.

00:23:42.420 There he is.

00:23:43.060 There's Mitt Romney.

00:23:44.060 What do you make of that?

00:23:44.740 Well, I think there's something to it.

00:23:48.340 I think Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, really were the best that the conservative elites in Washington had to offer in 2012.

00:23:59.060 Obviously, they're well spoken, intelligent.

00:24:03.060 They had plans.

00:24:04.240 They had big ideas.

00:24:06.080 But they failed.

00:24:07.540 And why did they fail?

00:24:08.660 Well, I think primarily it was because Romney did not connect with those working class voters that had been so important to successful Republican coalitions in the past.

00:24:21.980 And in particular, I think of an ad that the Obama campaign used very effectively, which was simply a testimonial from a worker who had been laid off at one of the factories, which Romney's company had turned around.

00:24:38.000 Basically, by laying off people and it was direct to the camera and he talked about how devastating that was for him and his family when he was laid off and in the Rust Belt, an ad like that really went a long way.

00:24:53.200 So Romney couldn't capture that, couldn't connect on that level.

00:24:57.820 And then a second reason is that there was a feeling among many conservatives and especially the populist grassroots that Romney was, you know, he played by the rules which had been rigged in the liberals' favor.

00:25:12.140 So, of course, he didn't challenge Candy Crowley during that presidential debate when the CNN anchor who was moderating the debate, Crowley, basically lied about what Barack Obama had said after the Benghazi terrorist attack.

00:25:29.940 Did he call it a terrorist attack?

00:25:31.300 And he got out on an act of terror.

00:25:33.200 He got away with him referring to that.

00:25:35.340 No act of terror will be tolerated was the same as him saying we've been attacked by terrorists.

00:25:39.600 This is a terrorist attack.

00:25:40.680 It's not the same.

00:25:42.140 Right.

00:25:42.680 And Crowley basically just shut Romney down and Romney didn't fight back.

00:25:46.920 And so there was this building sense among a lot of conservatives and especially among the populist grassroots that they wanted someone who would fight back against these institutions, primarily the media, that they felt were so anti-conservative that had been captured by the progressives.

00:26:08.260 And so you see how that would attract this group to someone like Donald Trump, who didn't care, didn't care what anyone thought about anything.

00:26:17.700 And even today, you see how they're attracted to someone like Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, because he also is willing to challenge the press and he's also willing to challenge liberal corporate elites.

00:26:32.880 I mean, look at Disney.

00:26:33.880 I mean, look at Disney.

00:26:33.900 He's going up against the House of Mouse, right?

00:26:36.740 So I think there's a lot of conservatives who admire that quality.

00:26:40.640 The question is, though, does that fighting spirit repel some of the voters who are independents and who are more moderates who live in the suburbs, but who are also key to having a Republican victory?

00:26:56.760 You can't have one or the other.

00:26:59.320 It has to be both the populist grassroots and the suburban independent moderates.

00:27:05.620 And pulling off that trick is very difficult.

00:27:08.780 But we do know we can see, for example, Glenn Youngkin was able to do it in Virginia, of all places.

00:27:14.560 Well, and Trump did it.

00:27:16.000 I mean, Trump did win.

00:27:17.460 In 2016, he was able to.

00:27:19.560 Yes.

00:27:20.040 He won independents by about seven points in 2016, and then he lost them by double digits in 2020.

00:27:25.740 And that's the whole story right there.

00:27:28.480 There's so much.

00:27:29.300 I want to go back to that moment you referenced, you know, mid-60s and the Republican Party is asking itself, now what?

00:27:36.200 And the birth of National Review and the effort to sort of fight the elite capture of all these institutions and how the Republicans did.

00:27:44.220 How well did they do?

00:27:45.520 Because that's something, obviously, Republicans are dealing with today on a mass scale.

00:27:51.060 I don't think you can argue they've captured any of these industries, at least as of 2022.

00:27:55.980 So what happened?

00:27:57.340 And can they be recaptured?

00:27:59.320 More with the guy who has become an expert on all of this, thanks to self-study, tons of reading, and a lifetime devoted to these causes.

00:28:06.540 In the introduction, you refer to 1150 17th Street.

00:28:15.960 And there's a reason you start here, because it sort of shines a window on the effort by the right to start fighting back and trying to recapture the national narrative and these cultural institutions.

00:28:28.520 And why?

00:28:29.240 Why does 1150 17th Street give us a window into that?

00:28:32.140 Absolutely, Megan.

00:28:33.740 Well, one of the strategies that the conservatives used to fight back was to create what they called counter-institutions.

00:28:42.660 So if the media was too liberal, we were going to have an alternative conservative media.

00:28:48.440 And talk radio is the greatest expression of this.

00:28:51.060 If the universities are captured by the radical left, we're going to have to find think tanks where right-leaning scholars can work and have a home where they can formulate their own ideas.

00:29:05.420 And so the address in Washington, 1150 17th Street, was a hub of these sorts of counter-institutions.

00:29:13.240 It was the headquarters for many years of the American Enterprise Institute, where I work today.

00:29:19.560 And it also housed the magazine where I worked for many years, The Weekly Standard.

00:29:25.040 And in addition, it even had a small think tank also associated with The Weekly Standard called The Project for a New America Century.

00:29:33.440 So 1150 17th Street was kind of the main hub of the American right for a period of basically the turn of the 21st century and throughout the George W. Bush administration.

00:29:50.020 And it was there that I showed up for work one day in July of 2003 as a recent graduate of Columbia University and to begin a job at The Weekly Standard.

00:30:00.840 And I think it was meaningful because now, today, if you go to 1150 17th Street, you see nothing.

00:30:10.600 The building was knocked down in 2016.

00:30:13.720 And those institutions that were once housed there, some have moved.

00:30:17.860 So AEI, where I work, is in another building a few blocks away.

00:30:22.140 But The Weekly Standard, for example, is no more.

00:30:24.780 It was shut down in 2018.

00:30:26.080 The world of the American right has changed in the 20 years that I've been working in Washington as a journalist and commentator.

00:30:34.340 Big time.

00:30:35.500 It's crazy to think.

00:30:36.740 When The Weekly Standard shut down, I can't say it was a surprise because at that point, Bill Kristol, who's, you know, mainly associated with it, had so alienated the Republican base, the Trump-loving Republican base.

00:30:48.980 He's a never-Trumper. 0.85

00:30:50.320 I mean, he's basically like a Lincoln Project guy now, you know, just completely blew up his own audience.

00:30:57.220 Steve Hayes was also a never-Trumper, but I think more reasonable. 0.99

00:31:01.340 He never went Lincoln Project crazy.

00:31:02.900 He just was like, Trump's not my thing.

00:31:05.160 But it was held against him.

00:31:06.920 And all these guys who were on the Bret Baier special report panel slowly got removed because as Trump captured the Republican Party, people didn't want to hear from the never-Trumpers all the time.

00:31:17.240 I was like, look, he won.

00:31:18.700 You know, let's keep in mind who the political enemy is.

00:31:21.740 It's not the Trump supporters within the GOP.

00:31:25.680 It's the Democrats.

00:31:26.940 And so those publications started to fall and falter.

00:31:30.180 And it wasn't, you know, you could have predicted Weekly Standard was not going to withstand the Trump era.

00:31:37.340 Well, I think that in many cases there was a fixation on Trump, which wasn't helpful for the pundits we're talking about.

00:31:54.800 But did the Weekly Standard have to close?

00:31:58.100 I'm not so sure it had to, but it did.

00:32:02.640 Well, I mean, it could have been more like National Review, which I had Rich Lowry on my show, The Kelly File, the night they published Never Trump.

00:32:12.320 I mean, I believe that's where the phrase Never Trump came from, the Never Trumpers.

00:32:16.760 But National Review, while quick to criticize Trump if they disagreed with him on various issues, once he won, started to sound more like a normal conservative publication that had its issues with him, but understood the Republicans were not the enemy.

00:32:33.580 On these culture wars, on these political battles, on these economic tests.

00:32:37.580 And so, you know, Charles C.W. Cook is one of my favorite commentators there is.

00:32:40.900 He can't stand Trump.

00:32:41.960 But I love listening to him on Trump or not Trump related issues because he's an honest broker and he'll tell you what he really thinks.

00:32:48.820 And he understands who he's really fighting.

00:32:50.600 And it's it's not Donald Trump.

00:32:52.740 So he would he would criticize him, but he would understand what Donald Trump did a good thing, that that that was an appropriate thing to praise.

00:32:59.080 Right. Not like these blinded left wing commentators are never Trumpers who just couldn't see any good the man did.

00:33:07.020 Yeah, I think that it speaks to the change that happened, not only on the right and how Trump kind of forced the issue for a lot of people where you stood and what you were willing to defend and to and to and to, you know, overlook or just also to say that, you know, the the goal was the policies and not the personality.

00:33:32.320 And it basically forced a realignment within the Republican Party and the conservative movement, made it much more populist, made it much more based on outsiders.

00:33:45.080 The people who were in the periphery of the conservative movement 25 years ago are now at the center of it, are now in charge of it.

00:33:53.380 And that also coincides with this larger trend we were talking about, which was the return in many ways of the ideas of the old right of non intervention of no overseas entanglements of insulating the American economy from global economic pressures, especially vis a vis China.

00:34:17.040 And of course, and an attitude toward immigration, illegal immigration in particular, that wants to secure the borders.

00:34:27.060 So the American right is a very different place than when I showed up 20 years ago in Washington.

00:34:32.700 And that's one of the reasons that I wrote this book, because I wanted to not find out from how it happened.

00:34:38.820 Right. Not that not that different from the Coolidge administration, which we open the the Harding and Coolidge, which we open the discussion on and you spend time on the book.

00:34:47.840 So it's interesting. We have been here before, not within our lifetime, but we as a country have seen a Republican Party that looks very much the way it looks now, at least on paper.

00:34:58.060 You ask the following question. Is the American right, the party of insiders or outsiders?

00:35:03.780 Is the right the elites dash the men and women in charge of America's political, economic, social and cultural institutions? 0.83

00:35:13.200 Or is it the people? And I made a note because in no if that's the definition of the elites, the people who are in charge of our political, economic, social and cultural institutions.

00:35:26.940 Then, no, there's no question the right is not is not the elites because the right doesn't control any of those.

00:35:35.340 I mean, they've all been seated to the left. The left is taken over.

00:35:38.760 I mean, it depends on the day, but certainly political institutions today, they control the White House. 0.99

00:35:43.940 They control the Congress. They can the House and the Senate economic policies being driven by Joe Biden.

00:35:48.980 Social. I mean, name me a social institution that the Republicans control cultural all the university systems, not to mention it's expanded media, completely controlled by the left sports, not to mention corporate America.

00:36:02.940 Now, more and more aligning itself with leftist causes.

00:36:06.320 If that's the definition, then the then the right cannot be the elites.

00:36:10.880 Right. Then the American then the American right has to be the party of outsiders slash the people. 0.71

00:36:16.520 I think that's where it is right now. I think that's where the right is now.

00:36:22.300 It wasn't always that way, you know, and again, we're going back to the 1920s is one difference, actually, between today and the 1920s is that the right was in charge and it was self-confident.

00:36:33.380 And it was more than just the people at that time.

00:36:38.720 But when you look at the institutions you mentioned today, for sure, the right is locked out of them.

00:36:45.940 That's not to say that the right is completely powerless.

00:36:49.600 You know, they're they don't have a majority in Washington, but there are many governors throughout the country.

00:36:54.920 Many states. Yeah. And, you know, there are alternative media.

00:37:00.220 Right. There's podcasts like this.

00:37:04.180 There's there's the Fox News channel there.

00:37:08.240 You know, there are other institutions, but you're right that they are outweighed.

00:37:12.960 The cultural mass is certainly on the progressive left.

00:37:17.920 And so I would just say that this is a situation that the right has faced throughout its history ever since that New Deal and that transformation of American government.

00:37:30.340 The conservatives have had to find a way.

00:37:32.680 Well, how do we maneuver in this new situation?

00:37:36.640 And there have been many successes.

00:37:39.120 There have also been some failures.

00:37:41.300 I think right now the momentum is with the conservatives.

00:37:44.360 It's with the right precisely because the the larger electorate is encountering the results of progressivism and not liking what they see.

00:37:55.740 I mean, people want to have, you know, to afford their grocery bill.

00:38:00.540 They want to send their kids to good schools and they want to live in neighborhoods with safe streets and they don't have any of that now.

00:38:09.820 And so they're going to they're going to turn to the out party, which is the Republican Party.

00:38:15.120 And the question then becomes, will Republicans and conservatives have solutions that they will be able to implement and that will effectively address these major concerns of the public?

00:38:27.380 And I worry sometimes that while the right today is very good at capturing the frustration, very good at pointing out what's going wrong.

00:38:37.580 I worry that they're not doing enough work to figure out what they have to do or what they're going to be able to do when they when they have Congress in, I believe, next year.

00:38:49.580 Well, I mean, is your argument that they should come up with a plan to do more because we've had a lot of conservative commentators on this show from all different walks of life.

00:39:00.740 Peter Schiff was just on economist talking about how what we what do we need from government?

00:39:06.100 Nothing. Get them out of the way. Get them out. 0.99

00:39:09.180 The politician left or right will be part of the problem in the in the Reagan-esque way.

00:39:13.800 So what we need is a shrinking of government in every department.

00:39:16.760 But could that realistically happen?

00:39:19.580 Well, I mean, it's very hard, of course, in divided government.

00:39:22.220 But I do think that the Republicans should be ready to say, well, this is going to be our budget.

00:39:27.020 This is what we're going to want to propose that government spend.

00:39:31.180 Not necessarily rush to have a fight over the debt ceiling, but have an alternative and say this is what we want to do.

00:39:37.560 Because if we know one thing about the spending is that it's driving the inflation.

00:39:42.120 And so cut the spending in addition to kind of making sure that the Fed does its job.

00:39:48.340 But I also think there is a broader agenda that needs to be done.

00:39:52.020 How do how can the Republicans at the at the federal level give parents the tools they need to to to have successful education for their children?

00:40:03.140 How do we address the deaths of despair that are still devastating this country that were made worse by the pandemic, the fentanyl that's flowing over the border?

00:40:13.080 And I think the Republicans need to spend more time talking about their solutions.

00:40:20.940 And in the past, as I go through my book, conservatives have had the solutions.

00:40:27.080 They had solutions to the stagflation of the 1970s.

00:40:30.680 They had solutions to the crime wave that began in the 1960s.

00:40:34.980 They had solutions to the growing welfare dependency that was also a feature of the second half of the 20th century.

00:40:43.160 So I think in some cases, they're the same solutions that we can apply today.

00:40:47.340 But I would like to see more conservatives and more Republicans talking about the solutions.

00:40:53.820 I think they will.

00:40:54.720 I think Kevin McCarthy is doing a lot of work in forming these attack task groups, task forces to look to look into policy solutions, because if if they don't have the solutions, they don't have an affirmative policy agenda.

00:41:10.820 I think people will get frustrated very quickly and that no none of these problems will be solved anytime soon.

00:41:19.480 What is what is your look back tell you about how the culture wars are likely to play out?

00:41:24.800 You know, right now, the left is so focused on identity politics, skin color, gender, sexuality and so on.

00:41:32.600 And the right is finally starting to push back on it.

00:41:35.500 It's gone so hard left.

00:41:38.260 Right.

00:41:38.460 This race essentialism, this radical trans ideology, this forcing kink on five year olds in their classroom as if it's somehow illuminating or beneficial to them in any way. 0.71

00:41:51.780 I don't know.

00:41:52.700 I've been talking about this with somebody recently.

00:41:54.520 Have we ever gone back?

00:41:56.160 Has the pendulum ever swung hard left only to come back?

00:41:59.300 Or once it edges leftward, are we just stuck there?

00:42:03.480 And, you know, we have dissenters, but but that's where we are for better or for worse.

00:42:08.480 Can you look around in American society today and take a look at let me just take one thing because it's going to make me sound like an old lady.

00:42:13.740 But who cares?

00:42:15.680 Look at the nudity that's acceptable on television or at public events.

00:42:19.280 Right. 0.62

00:42:19.500 Look at how women walk around dressed these days, whether it's the Oscars or just on the street, you know, with literally their butt cheeks hanging out wherever you go. 1.00

00:42:27.200 You can't avoid it. I have a little boy.

00:42:29.160 I have three little kids, but one's eight.

00:42:30.820 You know, I don't want him seeing that.

00:42:32.940 There's no way you turn on the Super Bowl.

00:42:35.180 You turn on the Oscars.

00:42:36.600 You turn on anything you're going to see raunchy.

00:42:38.820 You're going to see somebody smack another actor right across.

00:42:40.500 You're going to see just the lowering of our cultural standards when it comes to class, just a sort of a genteel manner, respect for one's self and others.

00:42:55.500 What have you learned?

00:42:57.600 What if what if anything did you learn on on that front?

00:43:01.320 Well, I think if we're talking about manners and mores, there hasn't been much success in kind of stopping that lowering of standards that you're discussing.

00:43:11.340 And it's caused a lot of frustration among conservatives over the years.

00:43:15.300 It's caused a lot of disillusionment and even despair about the state of America.

00:43:21.520 And I think that's a danger for the American right to become so frustrated with the condition of American society that they lose all hope in it.

00:43:32.080 They neglect to see the more positive aspects of America.

00:43:36.260 I think that on the culture wars, it depends on what issues you're talking about.

00:43:43.200 So we discussed manners and mores.

00:43:45.460 And for there, there's no denying, I think, the degradation throughout American society.

00:43:52.360 But if you look at an issue, say abortion, right, well, the pro-life movement, which began in the aftermath of the Roe decision in 1973, is on the verge of perhaps having an amazing victory, depending on what the Supreme Court rules in the Dobbs case in June.

00:44:12.860 If you look at guns, gun rights, the transformation of the gun debate over the last 30 years, much less 60 years, is remarkable.

00:44:27.380 Americans are much more protective of their Second Amendment rights.

00:44:32.780 And whether it's concealed carry or constitutional carry, we offer much more liberty to gun owners than we have before.

00:44:40.760 If we think of the role of affirmative action, here too, there's the potential for a Supreme Court case in the next term to really roll back affirmative action.

00:44:55.600 So I do think that there are some green shoots, but I do think that there are also signs of decay and things to be worried about.

00:45:07.000 I worry about the collapse in religious attendance and religious affiliation.

00:45:12.660 I want to see that come back, and I worry that it might not for a long time.

00:45:19.580 One thing I do take from my history is that Ecclesiastes is right.

00:45:25.240 There's nothing new under the sun.

00:45:27.740 And you can find precedent for almost every fight we're having in America today.

00:45:32.800 You can find precedent for various situations and conditions in America today.

00:45:39.700 And on one hand, that means that we don't make much progress.

00:45:44.240 But I'm a conservative, and I don't really believe in progress anyway.

00:45:48.260 On the other hand, it means that we've been here before, and we've gotten through it.

00:45:53.640 And we'll get through it again, because this is the United States of America.

00:45:57.020 And what I worry so much about is parts of the right losing the faith in the United States of America and its constitution and its political principles.

00:46:07.320 And I think that's what we need to anchor conservatives and the right now and forever.

00:46:15.400 Matt, thank you so much.

00:46:16.520 Well said.

00:46:17.220 Well written.

00:46:17.920 I'm so glad you wrote this book.

00:46:19.820 It would make a great gift to yourself or to somebody else.

00:46:23.420 I got it just for myself, and I recommend you do the same.

00:46:26.220 It's called The Right, and it's out today.

00:46:29.040 Matt Continetti, all the best.

00:46:30.880 Thank you.

00:46:31.780 Coming up, the latest on the Hunter Biden investigation.

00:46:34.740 Will it reach the White House?

00:46:36.180 The man who's been on this from the start, Peter Schweitzer, is here next.

00:46:42.860 Since 2018, author Peter Schweitzer has been looking into the Biden family's overseas business deals.

00:46:50.020 Can you imagine what a morass that has been and his fortitude to even take it on, never mind actually understand it?

00:46:59.340 No one knows more about these investigations or explains them better than Peter.

00:47:03.980 Not Ron Johnson, not Chuck Grassley.

00:47:06.700 No one.

00:47:08.100 Peter firmly believes that criminal charges are heading Hunter's way.

00:47:11.780 Peter's president of the Government Accountability Institute and author of Red-Handed, How American Elites Get Right, Helping China Win.

00:47:21.340 Welcome, Peter.

00:47:21.900 Great to have you here.

00:47:23.060 Great to be with you, Megan.

00:47:23.980 Thanks so much for having me.

00:47:25.060 Okay, so I really enjoy your podcast and listening to you, and you are very good at explaining such a dense subject matter.

00:47:32.640 It's like, I don't know how you've done it for years.

00:47:36.160 And I heard you joking recently that, you know, the good news is four years after you got onto this, the mainstream media has finally come along.

00:47:44.120 So maybe four years from now, they'll finally come along on China, right? 0.98

00:47:47.340 Which is what you put your other book on.

00:47:50.360 We can always hope, Megan, right?

00:47:52.020 We can always hope.

00:47:53.080 Yes, hope springs eternal.

00:47:55.060 So I think one of the fascinating things you've been talking about lately is, because I had Ron Johnson on the show, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and he, I'm like, let's talk about the tie, the evidence that Joe Biden's tied to any of this.

00:48:07.520 And it was pretty weak sauce.

00:48:09.020 You know, it was mostly opinion.

00:48:10.500 You know, he gave a few things.

00:48:12.420 You're, I think, a lot stronger on the specifics.

00:48:16.180 You know, I'm a lawyer.

00:48:16.880 I don't want opinion.

00:48:17.960 I don't want, like, rhetoric.

00:48:19.440 Rick, I want, show me actual evidence that he knew about any of Hunter's dealings or benefited from it.

00:48:24.980 And that's where you come in.

00:48:26.580 But let me just start with a broader picture, because I know you do believe, given the New York Times reporting on this, finally, the Washington Post finally coming on board, that they did that for a very good reason.

00:48:39.080 And what is that reason?

00:48:41.260 Yeah, I think the reason is that Team Biden wants to get ahead of the story.

00:48:45.340 Think about it, Megan.

00:48:46.320 We first started reporting on this in 2018.

00:48:48.560 And the Biden team has ignored this story from the beginning, and they've obscured it, or they've said that first there were no deals.

00:48:57.600 Then they said there were deals, but Hunter made no money.

00:49:00.300 Then they said that Hunter didn't talk to his dad about it.

00:49:03.300 Then they shifted to, well, his dad didn't make any money on it.

00:49:06.760 The bottom line is that they have ignored this story.

00:49:09.820 So suddenly, about four or five weeks ago now, the New York Times runs a piece that has the fingerprints of the Biden legal team all over it.

00:49:19.140 The big revelation there, of course, was that the laptop was real.

00:49:23.220 They admitted and acknowledged that.

00:49:24.900 But if you read the story, the story is all framed in the context of, yes, he didn't pay his taxes.

00:49:32.060 Yes, there are these other legal concerns.

00:49:34.320 But, you know, Hunter has paid back the taxes that he owed, and judges usually don't send people to jail for a very long time if they've paid their back taxes.

00:49:44.980 That, to me, all stinks of just getting ahead of the story.

00:49:48.720 They're commenting on it.

00:49:49.900 They're working with the New York Times on it.

00:49:51.680 And they're trying to frame it now, the fallback position, is that Hunter may have done some illegal things, including failing to pay millions of dollars in taxes.

00:50:00.800 But it's going to be OK because they are messaging it accordingly.

00:50:05.940 So that, to me, is squarely evidence that they are very concerned that Hunter is, in fact, going to be indicted on some of these charges.

00:50:13.840 Much better for them if they're like, you know, he's just like you.

00:50:17.660 He may not have paid every dollar owed in tax, but don't we all hate the IRS?

00:50:22.180 And look, he made good on it.

00:50:23.800 So move along.

00:50:25.040 And you've been arguing that's not the story at all.

00:50:28.480 That is a head fake. 0.98

00:50:29.940 And we'll get into why, why you say it matters so much more than whether he paid his damn taxes or not. 0.97

00:50:35.400 Let me just show the audience the evidence of what you just said. 0.72

00:50:40.100 Joe Biden's evolving story on his son's overseas roles.

00:50:45.160 And people should keep in mind they did not just take place when Joe Biden was, quote, a private citizen in between the vice presidency and the presidency.

00:50:52.500 A lot of the China stuff goes back in Ukraine, too, to when he was the sitting vice president.

00:51:00.420 And so and if the mainstream media would do its job and cover this, everyone would know this.

00:51:04.340 But let's just talk about his evolving story, because there was Biden in 2019, Joe Biden in 2019, claiming, despite the fact that he had a 12 to 16 hour ride over to Asia, to China with his son on Air Force Two.

00:51:20.340 Like, what did they talk about?

00:51:21.500 Oh, have you seen the new whatever Avengers movie?

00:51:24.620 No, he said he's never discussed Hunter's business dealings overseas.

00:51:28.440 Never.

00:51:28.800 OK, he said that in 2019.

00:51:30.340 Here it is.

00:51:31.400 Vice President, how many times have you ever spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings?

00:51:37.200 I've never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.

00:51:39.780 I have never discussed with my son or my brother or anyone else anything having to do with their business.

00:51:46.960 Period.

00:51:47.960 Do you stand by your statement that you did not discuss any of your son's overseas business dealings?

00:51:52.820 Yes, I stand by that statement.

00:51:54.440 Honestly, Peter, it's like they were sitting next to each other on Air Force Two.

00:51:56.960 And he's like, what are you doing here?

00:51:58.020 Hunter, who let you on board?

00:52:01.320 Why are you coming?

00:52:03.260 Yeah.

00:52:03.760 Why are you on this plane, Hunter, with me on Air Force Two? 0.82

00:52:06.620 Yeah, no, it's it's ridiculous on the surface of it.

00:52:09.600 And the problem with Hunter with Joe Biden's denials is that Hunter Biden himself admitted

00:52:15.100 to the New Yorker that he had discussed his business dealings, at least the Ukraine ones

00:52:19.680 with his father.

00:52:20.580 And then, Megan, you start looking at the Hunter Biden laptop and you look at the email

00:52:25.640 collection from one of Hunter Biden's business partners, a guy, Evan Cooney, who went to jail,

00:52:31.620 gave us access to his Gmail account, just went into the Gmail account and were able to look

00:52:37.440 around.

00:52:38.200 And you find that there are numerous examples of Joe Biden as vice president of the United

00:52:43.160 States at the time meeting with Hunter Biden's business partners.

00:52:46.520 And so the question is, Megan, you know, Hunter Biden shows up in the White House with these

00:52:51.960 foreign nationals from China or from Ukraine and his father doesn't ask them who they are

00:52:57.640 or why they're there.

00:52:58.820 I mean, it's absurd.

00:53:00.200 It's patently absurd.

00:53:01.620 And this is part of the problem, I think, is that the media was not on this story.

00:53:07.280 Joe Biden continually I mean, I hate to use it, but it's true.

00:53:10.440 He continually lied about the relationships that his son had and the fact that he did not

00:53:16.120 discuss them with his son.

00:53:17.440 And now we're at a point where the media is trying to play catch up.

00:53:20.780 But the sitting president of the United States does have these entanglements.

00:53:25.680 His family has these financial entanglements that include some, you know, very troublesome

00:53:30.200 figures in China and elsewhere.

00:53:32.460 Like everybody is a troublesome figure.

00:53:34.560 You you've talked about that and written about that, too.

00:53:36.720 Everyone around Hunter Biden is a troublesome figure.

00:53:40.500 I know you guys played on your podcast the game criminal or spy.

00:53:44.540 Right.

00:53:44.760 Was that it?

00:53:45.220 Criminal or spy?

00:53:45.840 Right, right, right.

00:53:47.280 Exactly.

00:53:48.040 And yeah, I mean, it just that you look at the China deals and think about this in the

00:53:52.840 context of the Cold War, Megan.

00:53:54.340 And I'm certainly old enough to remember the Cold War.

00:53:56.980 And imagine if Jimmy Carter's family or Ronald Reagan's family had done business deals with

00:54:03.260 Russian businessmen linked to the KGB.

00:54:05.860 I mean, there'd be alarm bells going off everywhere.

00:54:08.320 If you look at the deals that we know that Hunter Biden and the Biden family got based on

00:54:13.360 the laptop, based on the material Senator Johnson's committee got from the Treasury Department,

00:54:18.680 you know, which shows the actual transference of money, you're looking at thirty one million

00:54:23.140 dollars.

00:54:23.640 But the real troublesome factor is not just the money.

00:54:26.600 Who made those deals happen? 0.58

00:54:28.640 Or as my kids would say, who made it rain for the Bidens in China?

00:54:32.440 And it becomes very clear these were not just random deals that Hunter stumbled on in Shanghai

00:54:37.860 or Beijing.

00:54:39.780 There were four businessmen that feature prominently in the in the email.

00:54:44.220 And when you look at those businessmen, who they are, you look at public source information

00:54:49.140 in China, in Hong Kong and in the United States, you find out that all four of those

00:54:53.680 businessmen in China who made the Biden deals happen have links to the highest levels of Chinese

00:54:59.620 intelligence. That's not a random act that indicates to me that this was an effort by

00:55:07.000 Beijing and what they call elite capture.

00:55:09.580 They're trying to forge these financial bonds with prominent American politicians, including

00:55:14.840 the Bidens. And once they form that bond, it gives them leverage.

00:55:19.540 And those politicians end up doing a lot of things that Beijing wants because of that leverage.

00:55:25.360 OK, so we're going to get into all that because it's fascinating.

00:55:27.460 But before we leave the Joe Biden denials, lies, as you say, I've never discussed the Hunter

00:55:33.700 business deals. No one believes that.

00:55:35.900 Then flash forward to the twenty twenty one of the twenty twenty debates and his he couldn't

00:55:40.180 even get his messaging straight there.

00:55:42.340 First, he claimed it had changed from I've never discussed it to.

00:55:46.720 Well, I have never taken a penny.

00:55:49.060 I mean, as for look at me, I'm fine.

00:55:50.820 I'm clean.

00:55:51.320 Here's that soundbite for I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my

00:55:58.740 life. I have not taken a single penny from any country whatsoever.

00:56:04.820 OK, so then we went back to see, well, what did he say about Hunter and the lies continued?

00:56:10.980 Listen to what he said about Hunter.

00:56:12.300 My son has not made money in terms of this thing about what are you talking about?

00:56:21.100 China. I have not had it. 0.99

00:56:23.280 The only guy made money from China is this guy is the only one.

00:56:27.460 Nobody else has made money from China.

00:56:30.040 My son has not made money from China.

00:56:33.860 Let's start with that one.

00:56:35.160 Yeah, the money doesn't lie.

00:56:39.280 This is, I think, the importance of what Senator Johnson's committee did because he has subpoena

00:56:44.740 power and he used it.

00:56:46.500 And by the way, he deserves a lot of credit.

00:56:48.260 This is kind of a thankless job in D.C.

00:56:51.400 Nobody likes to pursue these kinds of issues because they're afraid it's going to blow back

00:56:56.540 on somebody on their own side.

00:56:58.320 But what they showed very clearly is based on the U.S. Treasury Department suspicious

00:57:03.960 activity reports, which was money going into Hunter Biden's account, is that he was taking

00:57:09.340 in millions of dollars from Chinese interests.

00:57:11.980 So Joe Biden is flat out lying when he says that.

00:57:16.640 When was when was Hunter taking in the millions from China?

00:57:20.400 Well, we know based on the SARS that they started coming in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

00:57:26.060 He also had a deal in place on that famous ride on Air Force Two in December of 2013.

00:57:34.540 He was given a 10 percent ownership stake in a Chinese financial management company that

00:57:39.880 was funded by the Chinese government.

00:57:42.160 We know that stake was worth 20 million dollars.

00:57:44.560 Now, he sold that stake in 2021 after his father became president.

00:57:49.340 But that's him receiving money in compensation as well.

00:57:53.480 And here's the other thing, Megan, when Joe Biden says, I've never taken a dime of foreign

00:57:58.560 money in a legal way, that's technically true.

00:58:02.620 But he's also being deceptive here because what the emails show is that Hunter Biden was

00:58:07.960 taking foreign money and Hunter Biden was paying some of his father's bills while he was vice

00:58:14.120 president of the United States.

00:58:15.220 He was paying some monthly bills and he was also paying for things like renovations on his

00:58:19.700 home in Delaware.

00:58:20.340 So he may not have directly taken foreign money, but he was a beneficiary, a direct beneficiary

00:58:26.460 of foreign money that his son was receiving while he was vice president of the United States.

00:58:31.680 So this is fascinating because you gleaned that, yes, in part from what Ron Johnson got,

00:58:36.100 but also from the laptop, the laptop in which the press had absolutely no interest other than

00:58:41.720 to tell us to look away, to shield our eyes.

00:58:44.280 It would be suppressed on Twitter, any discussion of it.

00:58:47.500 And had the media been doing its job prior to the election, they would have seen what

00:58:51.040 you've seen on the laptop, which proves there is a connection between the money hunters taking

00:58:56.520 in and the way Joe Biden, the man who wanted to be president and won the election, was living.

00:59:03.200 Who was paying his bills?

00:59:04.820 Was it dirty money?

00:59:06.220 Was it money from China?

00:59:07.400 Was it money meant to exert influence?

00:59:09.580 And so to walk us through, you just referenced them in passing, but like what's on there that

00:59:14.460 suggests Biden, the elder, was benefiting from the monies Hunter was taking in?

00:59:20.080 Well, Megan, it comes in a couple of levels.

00:59:22.460 First of all, there are some of the comments that Hunter makes.

00:59:26.160 There's a message exchange that he has with his daughter.

00:59:29.040 His daughter at the time is in her early 20s and she's asking her father for money.

00:59:33.760 Most parents are experiencing this when they have kids that age.

00:59:37.440 And Hunter says to him, you know, I don't have a lot of money to send you right now,

00:59:42.420 but don't worry when you get older.

00:59:45.040 I'm not going to do to you what pop, meaning Joe Biden, has me do, which is to give me give

00:59:52.260 him half of my paycheck.

00:59:54.900 That's a pretty blunt statement.

00:59:56.620 It's probably a little bit of hyperbole, but there's evidence to show that that's actually

01:00:01.940 true.

01:00:02.340 I don't know that he's actually giving him half of his paycheck, but we know that there are

01:00:06.900 monthly bills that he is paying.

01:00:09.080 It's clear in the emails and we know that there are renovations done to the home in

01:00:14.740 Delaware.

01:00:15.640 What we've been able to calculate, Megan, based on sort of very explicit, non-cryptic financial

01:00:21.780 transactions, you're talking about tens of thousands of dollars that we can confirm.

01:00:28.120 There's undoubtedly more.

01:00:29.580 The emails also indicate that Joe and Hunter Biden, again, while Joe Biden is vice president

01:00:34.780 of the United States, had a joint bank account.

01:00:38.360 And the man that is handling Joe Biden's bank account, finances, taxes, et cetera, is a guy

01:00:45.460 named Eric Schwerin, who is who?

01:00:48.540 He's Hunter Biden's business partner.

01:00:50.860 So you've got this merging of financial interests that's taking place.

01:00:55.360 And of course, let's remember also, Megan, that Hunter Biden's taking in money from China.

01:01:00.460 He takes about two million of that and sends that to James Biden, who is Joe Biden's brother.

01:01:06.940 We don't know if James Biden is also paying some of Joe Biden's bills.

01:01:11.220 So this is crying out for attention.

01:01:14.900 It is illegal, by the way, fundamentally illegal, according to federal law, for a politician to

01:01:20.340 have their lifestyle subsidized by family members.

01:01:22.940 They can buy them the occasional birthday gift or Christmas gift, but you cannot be paying

01:01:28.240 their monthly bills with your business.

01:01:29.800 That is flat out illegal.

01:01:32.040 And that's what the Bidens were engaging in.

01:01:34.620 Yeah, because for this very reason, I mean, in part, they don't want foreign adversaries 1.00

01:01:40.340 trying to curry favor with or get blackmail info on a sitting politician through the family

01:01:47.640 member.

01:01:48.100 Right.

01:01:48.300 And that's exactly what we have to worry about here.

01:01:50.160 By the way, what an ingrate Hunter Biden is.

01:01:52.280 He should give half of his money over.

01:01:54.340 I realize it's against the law, but not a penny of that would have originated with him if

01:01:58.660 it hadn't been for the old man.

01:02:00.640 Well, that that that is absolutely true.

01:02:03.140 And by the way, let me just say, you know, when the media says, oh, well, we couldn't verify

01:02:07.160 the laptop, they could have verified the laptop.

01:02:10.520 They chose not to.

01:02:11.660 I mean, the New York Post, of course, brought in forensic scientists that showed that the

01:02:15.920 laptop was accurate and real.

01:02:18.160 Well, when we got the laptop, Megan, what we did is we took the laptop and we measured

01:02:24.500 it up against existing bodies of information that we knew were true.

01:02:28.760 So, for example, Senator Johnson's committee at about the same time the laptop became public,

01:02:33.720 released Hunter Biden's Secret Service travel records, which, of course, are secret.

01:02:39.460 Only the Secret Service had them at the time.

01:02:41.440 We said, well, we wonder, does the Hunter Biden laptop actually match what the Secret Service

01:02:46.960 is telling us?

01:02:47.920 So when the laptop says, you know, Hunter's in Dubai or going to Dubai or came from Dubai,

01:02:53.840 is that actually reflected in the Secret Service travel records?

01:02:58.020 It lined up 100 percent.

01:03:01.060 So in other words, you can't fake that or make that up.

01:03:03.800 Same thing with the financial transactions that Senator Johnson's committee.

01:03:08.460 We looked at the laptop when the laptop said, you know, five million dollars was wired by

01:03:13.600 Mr. Zhao in Beijing to Hunter Biden.

01:03:16.920 Sure enough, it shows up on the SAR.

01:03:18.560 So the point is, they could have done this.

01:03:21.120 We did it.

01:03:22.100 They chose not to.

01:03:23.440 It was an active choice they made because they did not want this story to come out.

01:03:27.940 And you're talking about they were not talking about like daily rags.

01:03:31.520 You're talking about 60 minutes.

01:03:33.540 Leslie Stahl directly to the sitting president.

01:03:35.920 It can't be verified.

01:03:37.280 Trump's saying, what do you mean it can't be?

01:03:38.740 Yes, it can be verified.

01:03:40.280 She was just too lazy or disinterested or, more accurately,

01:03:43.600 interested in the outcome of the election going her way to do it.

01:03:48.020 The New York Times, The Washington Post, the same.

01:03:50.440 These are the country's most revered, respected news organizations who this is why people say

01:03:56.360 the election was rigged.

01:03:57.840 I mean, there was a massive story brewing in that laptop.

01:04:01.640 It wasn't Russian disinformation.

01:04:03.580 And the media worked collectively to suppress all of it. 0.97

01:04:07.540 It's not just Hunter's a loser that we knew.

01:04:10.020 It's so much bigger than that. 0.97

01:04:12.200 So let me ask you this.

01:04:13.080 So much to get through.

01:04:14.080 Can you give us and I know you're so neck deep in it, but can you give us an overview?

01:04:18.780 Because I know it's Ukraine.

01:04:20.260 It's China. 0.90

01:04:21.200 It's Russia. 0.81

01:04:22.140 Yeah.

01:04:23.000 What Hunter was doing in each place.

01:04:25.460 And let's start with what I think is the easiest, which is Russia has to do with the 0.90

01:04:29.080 the mayor of Moscow's widow, who's herself an oligarch worth over a billion bucks. 0.99

01:04:36.260 And yes, I heard it alleged she gave him three point five million dollars, Hunter's organization,

01:04:42.000 his corporation.

01:04:42.940 They never give it to him directly.

01:04:44.180 And then they denied that, you know, the Biden team denied that.

01:04:49.280 But that appears to be true.

01:04:50.900 And in addition to that, you you mentioned it earlier, but you found papers suggesting

01:04:55.900 he may have been somehow laundering.

01:05:00.140 Maybe that's too strong a term.

01:05:02.300 Tens of millions for this woman.

01:05:03.920 The connection in Russia may be a lot deeper than was first reported.

01:05:08.200 Yeah, that's right, Megan.

01:05:10.840 I mean, let's remember this grand jury that's meeting in Delaware is looking at Hunter Biden

01:05:15.300 on tax evasion.

01:05:17.220 They're also said to be investigating money laundering.

01:05:20.560 And this is very interesting, because if you look at the trial of Hunter Biden's business

01:05:26.560 partner, Devin Archer, that was held in 2016, there was a lot of corporate records and information

01:05:32.380 that came out from that trial.

01:05:33.800 We had a researcher there that pulled all those records.

01:05:36.020 And one of the things that shows is this this company, Burnham Asset Management, that Hunter

01:05:41.120 Biden and Devin Archer co-founded together.

01:05:43.880 This is where the three and a half million dollars was wired by Yelena Baturina. 0.94

01:05:48.500 Yelena Baturina is the ex-wife of the former mayor of Moscow.

01:05:52.700 Our State Department under Barack Obama declared that she has links to overnight organized crime.

01:05:59.460 So, I mean, this is not, you know, a typical ordinary businesswoman.

01:06:03.460 But these records in the court trial, according to Burnham, you have Devin Archer saying that they

01:06:10.860 are handling, in his words, handling hundreds of millions of dollars for Yelena Baturina.

01:06:17.000 That's in the corporate records.

01:06:18.400 Now, you know, is he lying?

01:06:20.060 I mean, we don't know.

01:06:21.100 But these are the corporate records of the company.

01:06:23.840 We also know, as it relates to Russia in the emails, that Hunter Biden was seeking to do

01:06:28.980 business with other pro-Putin oligarchs.

01:06:32.300 Oleg Deripaska, he reached out to him and say, hey, we would love to do business together.

01:06:37.660 So the point is, and I try to make this, you know, point rich, large.

01:06:41.620 When Team Biden says, well, Hunter is an international businessman, you know, he's not doing business

01:06:47.240 in London or Tokyo or Seoul, South Korea, he is going to the most corrupt, far reaches

01:06:53.920 of the planet, where, by the way, his father has enormous sway on foreign policy, places

01:06:59.460 like Russia, Ukraine and China.

01:07:02.020 And let's remember, under Barack Obama, President Obama anointed explicitly and publicly Joe Biden

01:07:08.720 as the point person on U.S. policy towards Ukraine and China.

01:07:12.920 That is not a coincidence.

01:07:14.100 And before we get to the dealings in Ukraine and China, there's a reason for that.

01:07:18.900 There's a reason why Hunter was suddenly a cause celeb in Ukraine, in Russia, in China.

01:07:27.260 And I've heard you make this point, too, that there are a lot of legitimate business deals

01:07:32.480 to be had with foreign companies and with, you know, foreign executives from foreign countries.

01:07:39.720 However, there's a reason that all of the ones Hunter was involved in were so sketchy.

01:07:46.080 What is it?

01:07:46.780 Yeah.

01:07:47.580 Yeah.

01:07:48.120 They're so sketchy because they are either linked to organized crime, corrupt foreign oligarchs

01:07:54.800 or foreign intelligence services.

01:07:56.780 And all you have to look at, Megan, is, again, they're people, American business thing, go

01:08:00.880 around the world.

01:08:01.640 They're doing deals all the time.

01:08:03.360 They bring something to the table.

01:08:04.920 Hunter Biden and the Biden family brings nothing to the table other than Joe Biden and Joe Biden's

01:08:11.100 position of political power.

01:08:13.060 So in these emails, whether it's Ukraine, China or Russia, you never see a discussion

01:08:18.760 of, frankly, legitimate business services that they're going to provide.

01:08:23.620 They're not bringing any expertise.

01:08:25.640 They're not bringing any of their own capital to these deals.

01:08:28.560 They're basically taking this foreign money and talking about the fact that Joe Biden is

01:08:34.440 at some time vice president of the United States or maybe president of the United States

01:08:39.400 at some future time.

01:08:40.520 So what they're selling is Joe Biden.

01:08:44.040 Exactly right, because you can get legitimate access if you're, you know, some respected foreign

01:08:48.400 bank through the front door.

01:08:50.020 You don't have to go to the back door. 0.99

01:08:51.120 You don't have to deal with Hunter Biden, the loser kid who everybody knew is addicted to 1.00

01:08:54.540 drugs and prostitutes and all sorts of problems. 0.99

01:08:56.520 They did that because that was a potential opening to get access to, quote, the big guy

01:09:02.040 and then even better possibly to get financial leverage over the big guy.

01:09:07.740 If I mean, what a dream for the Chinese if you can get the son taking your money and then 1.00

01:09:13.260 giving it to the dad.

01:09:15.420 I mean, that's a dream while he's the sitting vice president or possibly about to run for

01:09:20.240 president, which is, in fact, what happened that he was doing this stuff while he was gearing

01:09:24.900 up to run for president and then he would win.

01:09:26.700 So we need to know what what leverage, if any, do they have over him?

01:09:31.520 Yeah, they have enormous leverage.

01:09:32.940 And part of that is because we know several things about Hunter's relationship with his

01:09:37.980 dad.

01:09:38.420 One is they're very close.

01:09:40.320 And I think that's very admirable in a lot of respects.

01:09:43.200 But that means Joe Biden really cares about his son and his reputation and his standing.

01:09:49.220 That's part of where the leverage comes from for Beijing.

01:09:53.260 The second part of it is, is that Joe and Hunter Biden are very close in terms of how

01:09:59.180 they spend time together.

01:10:01.220 Hunter Biden was on Air Force Two a lot when Joe Biden was vice president of the United

01:10:06.100 States.

01:10:06.460 He showed up at critical times.

01:10:08.460 They discuss things in the laptop in a very detailed and intimate level.

01:10:13.460 That's another form of leverage.

01:10:15.160 And the third form of leverage is these deals stink and they look shady.

01:10:20.340 People are wiring money to Hunter Biden.

01:10:22.920 There's one individual that sends five million dollars to one of Hunter's businesses.

01:10:27.980 And the entire email exchange is Hunter's business partners saying he doesn't want to do deals

01:10:33.240 with us.

01:10:33.680 He only wants to do deals with you and with your family.

01:10:38.360 So all three of those give Beijing enormous leverage over the Biden family.

01:10:44.600 And when you add to that fact that these businessmen are linked to the highest levels of Chinese

01:10:50.520 intelligence, that's what should set off the alarm bells everywhere.

01:10:55.540 One guy, for example, who Hunter calls the super chairman in the emails, he says at one

01:11:01.860 point to a friend, I don't believe in the lottery anymore, but I believe in the super chairman.

01:11:06.540 And the super chairman arranges a 20 million dollar deal for Hunter.

01:11:11.520 Well, as he's arranging that deal for Hunter Biden, he is at the exact same time business

01:11:18.020 partners with the vice minister for state security, which is the runs the entire spy apparatus of

01:11:24.540 China.

01:11:25.080 And this gentleman is responsible for foreign recruitment, for recruiting foreign nationals

01:11:30.520 to spy on behalf of China.

01:11:32.100 Uh, that's the kind of people that Hunter Biden is openly and gladly dealing with in China to

01:11:39.540 collect millions of dollars.

01:11:40.940 And that to me is the strongest evidence that Hunter Biden is in fact compromised.

01:11:46.740 Uh, and Beijing has some leverage over his father.

01:11:50.240 And just on the timeline to clarify, uh, for sure the Ukrainian stuff was happening when Joe Biden

01:11:57.500 was the sitting vice president, when did the Russia stuff happen with the Moscow mayor's

01:12:02.520 ex-wife, billionaire, oligarch, ex-wife tied to mobs?

01:12:06.000 I mean, it's like so crazy.

01:12:07.460 When was that?

01:12:08.400 Yeah, it, it, it all began, uh, when Joe Biden was vice president of the United States.

01:12:13.240 So Yelena Baturino, those discussions started in 2013, 2014, those deals started getting consummated 0.54

01:12:19.400 in 2015.

01:12:20.200 The money flow started in 2016, uh, the China deals the same way, uh, Hunter Biden in 2011,

01:12:26.980 2012 starts showing up in Beijing, China, meeting the equivalents of the, you know, treasury

01:12:33.960 secretary in Washington, the head of JP Morgan, the head of Citibank, the head of Goldman Sachs.

01:12:39.640 That's when Hunter Biden started cultivating and developing those relationships.

01:12:44.240 And those deals started happening in late 2013.

01:12:47.400 So this all happened when he was vice president, the one deal with China that happened after

01:12:53.340 Joe Biden left the vice presidency was the one with CEFC, where there's the reference

01:12:58.740 to 10% for the big guy.

01:13:01.380 Uh, those discussions started when Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, but

01:13:06.240 that deal was consummated in 2017, shortly after he left the vice presidency.

01:13:11.360 The, um, the, the, the Moscow mayor's mayor's ex-wife, I remembered this from, um,

01:13:21.220 hold on a second.

01:13:22.000 Yeah, I'm just reading.

01:13:22.720 Okay.

01:13:23.020 From the debate, the presidential debate that Chris Wallace hosted between, uh, Biden and

01:13:27.360 Trump and Trump raised it.

01:13:28.800 Trump said, I, my team just pulled the transcript up for me.

01:13:31.400 Uh, he says also while we're at it, why is it, uh, just out of curiosity that the mayor

01:13:36.900 of Moscow's wife gave your son three and a half million dollars, Joe Biden, that is not

01:13:41.400 true.

01:13:42.560 Donald Trump, what did he do to deserve it?

01:13:44.960 What did he do?

01:13:45.940 Joe, vice president, Joe Biden, none of that is true.

01:13:49.180 And there's Chris Wallace jumping in, uh, telling Trump to let Biden answer the other

01:13:53.620 question, the back and forth and so on, and not trying to get an answer to that question.

01:13:57.800 Wouldn't that have been nice?

01:13:58.620 He didn't, so he, so neither Hunter Biden nor any entity in which Hunter Biden has a financial

01:14:07.880 or controlling interest received $3.5 million from this woman.

01:14:12.480 Are you saying that on the record?

01:14:13.860 I mean, I would have loved to have heard that follow-up, but he's already denied it.

01:14:16.640 He's denied it and it's not true.

01:14:18.280 His denial is false.

01:14:20.600 Yeah, no, that's right.

01:14:21.560 And the presumption in all of these instances was in favor of the Bidens.

01:14:26.320 There was never a journalist that was prepared to call them out based on documentary evidence.

01:14:32.060 I mean, here's the thing that's so shocking in the case of the $3.5 million from Yelena

01:14:36.960 Badgerina, uh, that didn't come from the laptop that didn't come from, uh, Russian disinformation

01:14:43.160 as everybody alleged, where did it come from?

01:14:45.220 It came from the United States treasury department, which flagged that money being transferred from

01:14:52.220 a sketchy source to Hunter Biden's firm.

01:14:56.080 And the reason it was flagged, it was a suspicious activity report is precisely because this foreign 1.00

01:15:03.460 money source is deemed to be either linked to organized crime, linked to some sort of criminal

01:15:08.540 activity, or to be a highly questionable of some nature.

01:15:11.900 Uh, and yet Chris Wallace could have simply asked that he could have said, but wait a minute,

01:15:16.600 there's a treasury department report that says $3 and a half million came from this source

01:15:21.620 to your son.

01:15:23.040 What was the purpose of that money?

01:15:24.480 But Chris Wallace, of course, didn't ask it.

01:15:27.600 Can you imagine if there was a $3.5 million transfer to Donald Trump Jr.

01:15:35.400 to Eric Trump?

01:15:36.500 I mean, the fact that this, it just, it shows you everything that they spent two years lying

01:15:44.360 to us about a fake, a made up Russia gate investigation, you know, trying to tie Donald

01:15:50.220 Trump to the Russians made up originating with Hillary Clinton and her campaign.

01:15:55.000 And then this where it shows an actual potential compromise for the sitting son for the son of

01:16:02.120 the, of the man who was vice president and wants to be president and they don't care at all.

01:16:08.120 They won't even, they tamp it down when it's asked at a presidential debate and they're not

01:16:11.720 even the one who raised it.

01:16:13.400 Yeah.

01:16:14.080 Now, and here's the thing, let's really put this in stark form, Megan, because you raise

01:16:18.480 a crucial point here.

01:16:20.120 If you look at Russia gate, the entire thing was based on this anonymous sourced dossier that

01:16:28.280 was put together by Christopher Steele.

01:16:29.920 We know now who paid for it.

01:16:31.380 We know the origin of it, but just think of it from a journalistic standpoint.

01:16:35.160 There was no sourcing.

01:16:36.780 There were no documents.

01:16:38.380 They didn't name who these anonymous people were claiming all this stuff about Donald Trump

01:16:43.900 and his activities.

01:16:45.240 So it's in, in terms of something you can use journalistically or in terms of investigation,

01:16:49.720 it's a zero, it's a nothing.

01:16:52.120 And yet they became so obsessed and enamored with this in the media and with certain government

01:16:57.640 organs.

01:16:58.320 This became the obsession for a couple of years.

01:17:01.380 And I have to say, when they first mentioned the Russia gate stuff, you know, about Donald

01:17:06.680 Trump, I was one of those people that say, we have to look at this.

01:17:09.840 The charges are so serious.

01:17:12.020 Of course.

01:17:12.280 But that was all they had it based on.

01:17:14.740 So anonymous sources, nothing to it.

01:17:17.980 This one dossier, that was it.

01:17:20.560 Contrast that with what you have on the Bidens.

01:17:22.920 Just objectively speaking, you actually have money transfers.

01:17:27.060 You don't have money transfers with the Steele dossier.

01:17:29.280 You had speculation.

01:17:30.400 You actually have millions of dollars that our Treasury Department says went from these foreign

01:17:36.400 sources to Hunter Biden and Hunter Biden connected businesses.

01:17:39.920 That's simply a fact.

01:17:41.540 You've got laptops that indicate conversations off the book meetings set up with Hunter Biden

01:17:48.780 business partners with his father.

01:17:50.760 You didn't have any of that with the Steele dossier.

01:17:53.420 So it's overwhelming how it was tilted in one side.

01:17:57.000 But they embraced one that had no evidence and they reject the other one that has all kinds

01:18:02.200 of granular evidence.

01:18:03.320 The dereliction is so patent and it matters.

01:18:08.580 It does matter.

01:18:10.000 Peter says that one of the aspects of this story that the media is missing is, as I mentioned

01:18:16.340 at the top, this isn't about tax evasion.

01:18:18.700 It's about actually China manipulating the son of a sitting politician.

01:18:24.340 Right.

01:18:24.760 Once the vice president, now the president.

01:18:26.340 To its advantage and Hunter Biden willingly going along to help a foreign adversary in

01:18:32.040 ways that may be to the detriment of the United States.

01:18:35.200 That's serious.

01:18:36.120 And we're going to get into it right after this.

01:18:41.860 All right.

01:18:42.520 So we touched on Russia and what Hunter was doing there.

01:18:45.320 And on China, you mentioned the CEFC, which is this energy company that he was completely

01:18:50.880 tied to through his own corporate entities.

01:18:53.020 That was when Joe Biden was private citizen, Joe Biden.

01:18:57.760 But as you point out, his dealings with China well predated that.

01:19:00.900 And that's an important piece of the story that I hadn't even been focused on.

01:19:04.220 So can you give us an overview of just how tied Hunter Biden was to China outside of the

01:19:11.420 CEFC thing where everybody involved is like has either been disappeared or has been charged,

01:19:17.100 including on his side?

01:19:18.800 I mean, like the Chinese officials are no longer around his side.

01:19:21.960 People have gone to jail.

01:19:23.800 You know, it's the height of sketch or as my 11 year old daughter would say, sussy baka.

01:19:30.020 It's sussy baka. 1.00

01:19:33.360 Yeah, she needs to be doing an analysis. 0.84

01:19:35.800 I think that's a pretty good assessment of what's going on here.

01:19:39.900 Yeah.

01:19:40.180 I mean, Hunter Biden's dealings in China began in 2011, 2012.

01:19:44.880 As best we've been able to find, his first deal was secured in 2013.

01:19:48.740 That's when he was given an ownership stake in a board seat in a investment firm called

01:19:54.340 BHR.

01:19:55.620 BHR is entirely funded by the Chinese government.

01:19:59.300 It was very it was very special fund at the time.

01:20:02.580 It got a special status in the Shanghai free trade zone that no other firm had on the planet.

01:20:08.400 And it started making all kinds of deals that advanced Chinese interests.

01:20:14.040 So, for example, Hunter Biden's firm, BHR, took a early anchor investment stake in a Chinese company called CGN, China General Nuclear.

01:20:25.920 CGN is an atomic power company, as the name implies.

01:20:29.440 The problem is about a year after Hunter Biden's firm invests in it, the FBI charges CGN and senior executives with stealing nuclear secrets in the United States.

01:20:41.400 Oh, great.

01:20:41.980 And this may get.

01:20:43.000 Yeah, this kind of fits the pattern.

01:20:44.700 I mean, the other investments they make, they go in and they buy a American manufacturing company called Hennigis that produces dual use technologies that have both civilian and military application.

01:20:57.000 They invest in mining companies that help China acquire precious minerals that they are trying to get at the expense of the United States.

01:21:06.420 So this is not just some sort of random electronics firm in China.

01:21:10.600 This is an investment firm where Hunter Biden sits on the board that is making investments in advancing Chinese state interests.

01:21:18.640 Then you also have another.

01:21:20.200 That's about a 20 million dollar deal.

01:21:21.980 Then you have another five million dollar deal involving Hunter's firm Burnham, where five million dollars is wired by a gentleman named Mr.

01:21:31.320 Zhao to Hunter's firm.

01:21:34.720 What's interesting is that money, Megan, is wired from an account that Mr.

01:21:39.820 Zhao has a business in.

01:21:41.820 That business, his business partner, is the family of the former minister of state security, which is the guy that runs not just the CIA of China, the FBI, the NSA, everything.

01:21:55.860 So that gentleman is wiring five million dollars to Hunter Biden.

01:22:00.700 And those are the beginning of the China deals that Hunter Biden secures in Beijing.

01:22:06.480 And as we've seen, some of that money is being used to subsidize his father's lifestyle while he's vice president of the United States.

01:22:13.960 Right. And I mean, we saw the email later when Joe Biden is, quote, private citizen Joe Biden, but he's about to run for president, 10 percent to the big guy.

01:22:22.580 But, yeah, even back then, you know, you reference the email to his daughter.

01:22:27.480 I've been paying half my salary to the dad.

01:22:29.640 And I know this is a smaller item, but it's you have the proof in black and white of the cell phone bills.

01:22:36.720 Right. That he was paying Joe Biden's cell phone bills, which is a little weird and had been doing it for years and years and years.

01:22:45.260 And it only stopped, I guess, in that period where Joe Biden went into private citizen mode and then he started to pay for hunters.

01:22:52.240 But like that's in black and white that we know that he was doing that.

01:22:55.880 He was paying Joe's cell phone bills.

01:22:58.800 Yeah. And that's kind of weird, Megan, on a couple of levels.

01:23:01.020 First, the bill is three hundred and twenty dollars a month, which is pretty big for a cell phone bill.

01:23:06.020 Indicates to me that he's got this the ability to receive cell phone calls from around the world.

01:23:11.760 That bill is being paid by Hunter's business, by his firm.

01:23:16.160 And you have to ask the question, why does the vice president of the United States need a separate phone?

01:23:22.240 That is funded by his son's business.

01:23:25.460 And to my mind, it's probably because that was their direct means of communication.

01:23:30.120 And we know based on the laptops that there were meetings that Joe Biden had meetings in the Obama White House with business people that Hunter was either doing business with or Hunter wanted to do business with.

01:23:43.220 These were individuals from Ukraine and also from China that those individuals say they met with Joe Biden in the White House.

01:23:50.660 But when you look at the official White House visitor logs, those meetings don't show up.

01:23:55.940 So they were making efforts to have off the books meetings in the White House with Hunter Biden's business partners that that reeks of cover up.

01:24:04.260 If you ask me, then it seemed that seemed to happen repeatedly with that, with the meetings happening when Joe Biden was in the White House.

01:24:11.980 And then suddenly they weren't there.

01:24:14.700 I'm just looking at my outline here.

01:24:16.080 In 2011, Devin Archer, Hunter's business partner, let's see, was able or or Hunter, Devin or Hunter, able to deliver 30 members of the Chinese Entrepreneurs Club.

01:24:28.320 And they they visited the White House on November 14th, 2011, according to White House visitor logs.

01:24:33.480 But these logs fail to disclose precisely with whom those Chinese entrepreneurs met Joe Biden himself.

01:24:40.420 Right. This is from you.

01:24:42.980 Then we get let's see.

01:24:46.360 Then, of course, there was 2015.

01:24:48.780 Hunter Biden invite invites a bevy of foreign oligarchs, including the former mayor of Moscow, Yuri Lushkovs and his billionaire wife, who you mentioned, to dinner at Cafe Milano in Washington, D.C.

01:25:01.580 Great restaurant. You should go there if you go through D.C.

01:25:03.360 Yeah. The Russians did not wind up attending, but others oligarchs from Kazakh did and the Ukrainians did.

01:25:11.620 And they were able to meet with Vice President Joe Biden in the secluded garden room.

01:25:16.720 You go on to say, as with other meetings with Hunter Biden's foreign business associates, Joe Joe Biden conveniently did not disclose the garden room meeting on his official schedule.

01:25:29.200 And on it goes. So it's and then when caught because he was gotten that this doesn't even touch on the Ukrainian Burisma visit to the White House, which he also didn't put in the White House visitor log, Joe Biden.

01:25:43.920 And when caught, the White House just said, oh, we're not we don't know about that, meaning that wasn't in the log.

01:25:49.980 So they've been lying to their gaslighting us.

01:25:52.620 They really are. And, you know, honestly, you have to kind of wonder, Megan, I mean, you've been in journalism for a long time.

01:25:59.720 You know, a lot of people in journalism. It's kind of a horrible case of kind of spousal abuse where the Bidens keep continuously lying and abusing the media.

01:26:10.080 And you wonder, when are they going to kind of stand up and say, we're tired of this? 0.95

01:26:14.100 We're tired of them making us look like fools, lying to us, changing their stories. 0.97

01:26:19.420 And we just kind of happily go along. I do feel like it's maybe starting to turn a little bit. 0.83

01:26:26.280 And I think part of that is because The New York Times is now proclaimed from on high.

01:26:31.980 The laptop is real, even though it's been known for a couple of years.

01:26:34.820 But I also think within the Democratic Party establishment, and let's face it, a lot of these media figures have at least social relationships with people in the Democratic Party establishment.

01:26:45.360 I think there's increasing acceptance of the fact that Joe Biden is weighing down the Democratic Party, weighing down the ticket.

01:26:53.480 He's probably not going to be the guy at the top of the ticket in 2024.

01:26:57.920 And I think there are moves to to basically jettison him, to kick him to the side.

01:27:02.700 You think so? That's why I think. Yes, I do. I really think you're going to start seeing that.

01:27:07.440 His polling numbers are horrible. Wait, but let me ask you about it.

01:27:10.320 OK, because I was asked about this recently by my pal, my pal Dan Wooten over on GB News.

01:27:15.580 And there was a think piece about whether this is all really an effort to get rid of him because he's terrible in terms of the polls.

01:27:22.100 Like when 33 percent approval rating, you don't win reelection at that.

01:27:26.220 Right. But I didn't believe it.

01:27:27.800 I didn't believe that this is an effort by, you know, the Times and the Post to start laying the groundwork to get rid of him because and I've heard you talk about this, too.

01:27:35.920 The pieces were they were they were puff pieces for him.

01:27:38.920 It was like, let's break this so we can be on record with a laptop because we know an indictment's coming.

01:27:44.080 But in the gentlest way possible for Joe Biden.

01:27:46.580 And I mean, both of them bent over backwards, say no connection to Joe Biden, no benefit to him. 0.98

01:27:51.760 This is the loser's son. And that's my word. I didn't say that. 0.98

01:27:55.440 But, you know, and and like you pointed out before, it's tax evasion.

01:27:59.700 You know, so I was like, it doesn't read to me like the beginning of it.

01:28:04.540 Let's let's oust Joe Biden campaign.

01:28:06.960 It reads to me like Joe Biden's using the media to distance himself from his son's nefarious dealings because they all know an indictment's likely to come.

01:28:14.740 Yeah, I mean, you certainly could be right about that.

01:28:17.920 The stories have not been harsh. They've not been critical, but they're starting to actually cover them.

01:28:22.560 I mean, you had the The Washington Post run the story on, you know, shocking revelation, the Biden's link to Chinese energy deal.

01:28:30.540 They ran this a couple of weeks ago, even though The New York Post had run that story in 2020.

01:28:35.780 There starts to be a sort of circling and understanding that there's probably going to be some issues here.

01:28:41.740 And I think a lot of it's going to come down, Megan, to what happens with this grand jury.

01:28:45.680 I still think one of the great things about our system, and there are many, is the fact that we have a jury of our peers.

01:28:52.780 And there is a group of regular Americans in Delaware who have been hearing all of this material involving Hunter Biden and the Biden family.

01:29:03.500 And we know, based on some leaked information, that the jurors asked at one point who actually is the big guy in these emails.

01:29:12.300 So it's going to be very interesting to see what this grand jury comes back with.

01:29:16.000 They're going to make a recommendation, and then the prosecutor is going to decide in consultation with the Department of Justice, and we know how political that is.

01:29:24.180 But if the grand jury were to come back and say, we see tax evasion, we see money laundering, we see political corruption, and or we see that he failed to file as a foreign agent.

01:29:36.100 He's doing all of these lobbying-like activities.

01:29:38.480 That's what they got Manafort on.

01:29:40.640 Exactly, what they got Manafort on.

01:29:42.500 If the grand jury comes back with that, it's going to be really hard to squeeze that toothpaste back in the tube.

01:29:49.120 Merrick Garland is going to have, I think, a real hard time justifying, you know, copying some deal with Hunter Biden.

01:29:56.320 So we'll see.

01:29:57.020 But I have a lot of faith in our judicial system and with the grit and the common sense of average Americans.

01:30:03.420 And it's going to be interesting to see what this grand jury has to say.

01:30:06.780 Well, Joe Biden couldn't put an end to this prosecution being done, not prosecution, but investigation right now before the grand jury being done by this U.S. attorney in Delaware because it would have made him look terrible.

01:30:17.760 I mean, it would have been shocking for him to pull this guy.

01:30:22.480 And so now he's going to be stuck with the result because we're going to find out one way or the other.

01:30:28.140 It's been going on for a long time, but we are going to find out one way or the other what the guy's conclusions are.

01:30:32.140 We haven't yet touched on Ukraine.

01:30:33.820 I've been dying to ask you a question.

01:30:35.820 We now know that Hunter was getting 50 grand a month from Burisma.

01:30:39.380 He had no oil and gas expertise, but that was the kind of company on whose board he was sitting.

01:30:43.940 And I know others have made the link.

01:30:47.380 I've heard you make the link about then Joe Biden goes and fires this prosecutor who's looking into Burisma, among other corporations, and says it's because this guy's bad and we don't believe he's going to clean up anything.

01:30:58.900 We think he's corrupt.

01:30:59.700 But I've heard you say, oh, it's too coincidental.

01:31:03.720 It happened like he fired this guy and basically protected Burisma right after Hunter gets all these windfalls from the company.

01:31:13.240 But others have said, like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the EU, they were all complaining about this guy.

01:31:22.980 So doesn't that undermine, I'm with you, I get that he was getting, this is grift, the 50 grand.

01:31:28.840 But tying to what Joe Biden did to the prosecutor, I'm not convinced because not all those entities would have had an interest in covering up for Hunter or making sure Hunter's money continued to flow to Hunter and possibly slash Joe.

01:31:44.260 No, you're right.

01:31:45.300 I mean, look, we know that the prosecutor in question was not a good, clean prosecutor.

01:31:50.560 He was a corrupt prosecutor.

01:31:52.960 That's absolutely true.

01:31:54.920 We also know that he was at the time, and there's documentary evidence for this, he was at the time investigating Burisma, which is the firm where Hunter Biden was on the board of directors.

01:32:05.460 So those two facts are, you know, clear.

01:32:09.880 Do we know the ultimate motive as to why Joe Biden fired the prosecutor?

01:32:14.160 No, but to me, it's pretty clear, Joe Biden should not have been making those kinds of decisions in the first place.

01:32:22.860 You know, imagine the context in the United States.

01:32:26.180 You can't have a powerful politician fire a prosecutor, even if there's legitimate grounds for doing so.

01:32:33.280 If that prosecutor is investigating the politician's son, it's a massive conflict of interest.

01:32:38.740 It looks bad.

01:32:39.360 So I agree with you.

01:32:40.680 We don't have definitive proof that they were linked.

01:32:44.020 There were other reasons to get rid of him.

01:32:46.100 But the fact that Joe Biden so brazenly in a number of cases, Ukraine, Russia and China, is involving himself in direct decisions that involve companies and entities and business partners linked to his son shows to me that he does not take conflict of interest and these kinds of provisions seriously.

01:33:06.900 And as a president or vice president, he's required to.

01:33:09.700 Yeah. For what it's worth, the Wall Street Journal says by the time this prosecutor left office, Shokin is his name, he was no longer pursuing the Burisma investigation.

01:33:20.160 But we don't know the facts.

01:33:21.180 I mean, look, we've seen that out of Ukraine these days. 0.87

01:33:24.100 The disinformation.

01:33:25.600 Of course, the officials there have been lying to us and will continue to lie to us.

01:33:29.460 That's not in any way a commentary on the sadness of what's happening to the Ukrainian people.

01:33:33.980 I'm just saying you can't you couldn't trust the Ukrainian officials before you can't trust them now.

01:33:40.200 We're doing our best to piece together what actually happened between those officials and the son of our sitting president.

01:33:47.420 And we're being given the runaround by them and by our officials.

01:33:51.380 Thanks to people like Peter, we're cobbling together the story.

01:33:55.240 But it would be nice if the rest of the media would help.

01:33:58.600 They're just barely starting to.

01:34:01.500 We've got the big toe in the Peter Schweitzer waters, which is something.

01:34:06.100 Peter, thank you so much.

01:34:07.820 Thanks, Megan.

01:34:08.360 I enjoyed it.

01:34:09.300 All the best.

01:34:10.240 Quick programming note for you before we go.

01:34:11.960 Some of our favorites are coming back this week.

01:34:13.660 The Fifth Column Guys will be here on Thursday. 0.59

01:34:15.840 So much to get to.

01:34:17.000 And my pal Stephen Crowder.

01:34:18.600 Love talking to him.

01:34:19.820 One of a kind.

01:34:21.040 He'll be here on Friday.

01:34:22.820 Plus, did you know that March had more arrests at the southern border than any other month of the Biden presidency?

01:34:27.400 Probably not because the media is barely covering it.

01:34:30.020 We're going to have more on that tomorrow.

01:34:31.500 Don't miss the show.

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01:34:41.960 Thanks so much for watching, listening and we'll do it all over again tomorrow.

01:34:47.500 Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.

01:34:49.640 No BS, no agenda and no fear.

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The Megyn Kelly Show - April 19, 2022

Hunter Biden's Business Connections to Joe, and the Future of the Right, with Peter Schweizer and Matt Continetti ｜ Ep. 303

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