Hunter ADMITS it's his laptop, China holds an American hostage, Blocking SPR sales to China & Getting Newsmax back on the air.
Episode Stats
Summary
Sen. Joe Biden s son, Hunter Biden, is suing the government for allegedly stealing his father s laptop. Was it his laptop or was it someone else's? What does the media have to say about this?
Transcript
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Let's just start so we know if either of us are going to get sued.
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This is maybe the first I've ever wanted to be sued.
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I think it would be hysterical to get sued by Hunter Biden,
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but unfortunately I never took a piece of that laptop with me anywhere.
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Actually, someone tried to, and I said I didn't want it.
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I have seen some of the images on it that have been put on Twitter
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and on the Internet, but always secondhand, not first.
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So I don't need to pass you a dollar to be my official lawyer for this one.
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Well, I didn't say whether you, you know, you just asked to be sued.
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I mean, don't blame anyone if they follow what you requested.
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They say they love the fact that he's playing offense.
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I just do want to go back to the Hunter Biden who said he wasn't sure it was
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his laptop back in the day when he did that big sit-down interview.
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You don't know, yes or no, if the laptop was yours.
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But now he does know, and he's going to sue everybody, and he's going on offense.
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Well, so this week he sent a series of letters, including he sent a 14-page letter to the
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Department of Justice addressed to the Assistant Attorney General for National Security, and
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he's asking the Department of Justice to prosecute everyone who had access to the laptop.
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And so it says, for example, John Paul MacIsaac, and it says, Mr. MacIsaac is admitted to gaining
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access to our client's personal computer data without Mr. Biden's consent, therefore prosecute him.
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So he wants the laptop repairman prosecuted, and then he also wants, he says he shared it with third parties,
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Now, there are a couple of things that are interesting.
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This is a lawyer who charges probably a couple thousand dollars an hour to write this letter.
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Number one, this is the son of the president writing a letter to an individual appointed by
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the president, the assistant attorney general for national security, who reports to the deputy
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attorney general appointed by President Biden, who reports to the attorney general appointed by
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So this is the president's son saying, hey, everyone who got their jobs from my dad,
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I'm asking you through a high-priced lawyer, please bring these criminal cases.
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Now, I got to say, if you're dealing with accusations of partisan bias at DOJ and a political double
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standard between Democrats and Republicans, it may not be the best idea in the world to start
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publicly calling for a political prosecution of the people that are your partisan enemies.
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Point number two, as you noted, the letter explicitly admits, finally, that this is Hunter's laptop,
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So after they sent the letter and everyone said, well, wait a second, you just admitted
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it was his laptop, they put out a statement, his lawyer, that says, these letters do not
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confirm Mac Isaacs or other versions of a so-called laptop.
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They address their conduct of seeking, manipulating, disseminating what they allege to be Mr.
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Biden's personal data, wherever they have claimed to have gotten it.
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I don't know if it's real, except for the fact that they wrote a whole series of letters,
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all predicated on the claim, you harmed my client by handing his laptop over.
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Well, and everybody in the media was covering this as, okay, he's admitting it's his laptop,
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but then they also went back to this idea they wanted you to feel sorry for him because he's a
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And look, I have the same mentality that kids of politicians should be off limits.
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This is someone who is trading off his father's name, who wouldn't have a business without
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And I want to play one of the clips in the media.
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Again, going back out there today and telling everybody, feel sorry for Hunter Biden.
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Senator, let's play this for everybody that's watching.
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This is MSNBC again saying, feel sorry for Hunter Biden.
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He should be off limits because he's a kid of the president.
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I don't think you're going to buy the BS, but take a look how they spin this.
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I mean, other than the big lie about losing in 2020, I don't know that there's anything more
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I mean, I think that if people are being honest, not many people aren't touched by or not many
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people don't have some window into the disease of addiction, which has afflicted Hunter Biden
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Most people understand a president's kids are not they're not a president.
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You know, look, this is actually typical of the talking points that are being used to
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defend Joe Biden and Nicole Wallace, the host there.
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She used to be the communications director at a White House in the George W. Bush White
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And now Nicole Wallace, whatever she used to believe is gone, is no longer operative.
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And what's interesting is what she's doing there.
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She's operating right there as Joe Biden's communications director.
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And we've talked about this on this podcast quite a bit, that the issue is not Hunter Biden's
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Most people, most families have loved ones who have wrestled with the demons of addiction.
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If that that was all that was going on, this would not be a matter of public concern.
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And I'll say also, I very strongly agree with the principle that kids are off limits.
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If he were a child, this would be very different.
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But the key point, when you are making the defense feel sorry for Hunter Biden because
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of addiction, you are trying to shift the topic.
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The reason this matters is because of Joe Biden's potential corruption.
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Hunter Biden, for years, made a living, made millions of dollars.
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This was an ongoing operation selling access to daddy, made millions of dollars from very
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shady characters, from Ukrainian oligarchs and the communist Chinese government.
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And the reason this is significant is it implicates Joe Biden in that corruption.
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If you're trying to be a political flack, you want to draw a line and separate Hunter
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If you're following the facts, you want to look at the connections between Hunter and
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She's saying it's all about Hunter and his addiction.
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She says, I don't even understand why anyone's concerned about this.
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That's why she's doing the whole segment on it.
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And she even said earlier in that same conversation, she said, well, there's nothing on this laptop
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We have millions of dollars to defend the people who are being actually charged with crimes
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in America from China that he was doing business with.
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We have conversations between the Russian oligarch and the wife of the Moscow mayor who's
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But even you look at Burisma, we now know a lot more about that timeline and this document
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and this email that had these 22 points in it of everything about what was going to happen
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Many people believe it could be tied, as you and I talked about in the last podcast,
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The Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, their fact checker, fact checked us.
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Because they said we could not prove that Hunter Biden's email about Ukraine, the 22-point
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email that we walked through in the earlier pod, we couldn't prove it came from a vice
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Now, mind you, we didn't assert that it came from classified materials.
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We said it has a level of scholarship and erudition that is markedly atypical from anything else
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It reads in the same style with the same level of analysis one typically sees in these briefings.
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And I said from having read a great many of these briefings that much of this could easily
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Glenn Kessler said, well, we're the Washington Post, damn it.
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And it is our job to be the press secretary of the White House, of the White House.
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So because you asked, and I actually laid out a way to test it.
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Well, Joe Biden's briefings from this week, the week that Hunter Biden was writing the email,
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the week before he was, Joe Biden was going to Ukraine.
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Two weeks before his son got the big job, $80,000 a month from Burisma.
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But what we called for on this podcast was for the special counsel to pull those briefings
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If it ends up being proven that they did come from those briefings, I look forward to the
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Washington Post formal retraction, which they won't do.
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Because these people kept the Pulitzer for reporting on the bogus Russian corruption story.
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And they happily display their Pulitzer saying, look, we spread misinformation as well as the
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You look at this White House now and it does seem that they are at least starting to lose
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some of the media because either there's self-preservation for them because they don't want to keep
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looking like total morons or they're mad at the White House for just misleading them and lying to
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them as they scream they're being transparent when there's a new raid or new documents found
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CBS News, and you've got to listen carefully here, they're covering this, they're going
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to the Beach House, and Gayle King kind of just knocks them off the bus a little bit here and
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is like, hey, let's not let them keep getting away with claiming they're transparent.
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They were very public when the FBI searched the Wilmington home, his private residence in
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And the search we're talking about that we learned about from two sources, that happened
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And now we're just learning about it right now.
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And in terms of the timeline early on, November 2nd was when this all started, this entire
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Roughly 10 documents were found in the Penn Biden Center when President Biden's lawyers
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National Archives alerted the Department of Justice.
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And we now know that the Department of Justice took this seriously enough to have the FBI
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We keep hearing about transparency, but then you hear stories like this.
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They may have found items that were classified or not classified.
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Because remember, any records from a vice president or president should all be at the National
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I mean, they should all be at the National Archives.
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You've called for them to go look at the documents in Delaware, at the University of Delaware.
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You've also said you should be looking at Hunter Biden's office.
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I don't think there's any way now the White House can separate these two stories.
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Well, and you can see the instincts to try to defend the White House, saying things like,
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And, you know, the raid on January 20th, they were very clear about it and let us know.
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So, but even while they're trying to spin for it, the Justice Department took it very
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seriously, you see the CBS reporter saying, well, we just heard from two sources there
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was another raid back in November that they didn't tell us about on the Penn Biden Center
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And you saw when the reporter repeats, well, this all started when the lawyers were packing
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Ben, I've seen some lousy lawyers in my day, but I've never seen lawyers whose billing rates
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are cheap enough that you use them to pack boxes.
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You only send in the lawyers when you realize, oh, crap, we got a problem.
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So she's, of course, not skeptical of any of that.
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Gail King comes in and says, wait a second here.
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And you can see even as shameless as the corporate media is in defending this White House, they
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are getting irritated at the constantly changing story every single day where they keep hiding
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the truth and the new facts come out and they hide the truth and new facts come out.
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But at the same time, they're telling everyone how transparent they're being.
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Yeah, I think we've been pretty transparent from the very beginning with providing information
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You know, we have released probably thousands of words of statements from the president's
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personal attorney and the White House counsel's office about the process that has been undertaken
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here, that process that has been fully coordinated with the Justice Department as they conduct
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And we want to be very careful to be respectful of the integrity of that ongoing investigation.
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And so and so I think that it's important to understand that as these things develop and
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as information develops throughout an investigation, we're trying to get you guys access to as much
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And I think the majority of the American people are starting to lose trust in this administration.
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Look, his claim is that they've been, quote, fairly transparent.
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Now, that's they've shifted back from very transparent, which is what Corrine Jean-Pierre
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But even fairly transparent, they claim that the first batch of documents was discovered
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Tell any of the American people, tell any reporters, let it be published before the election.
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So they certainly weren't they weren't fairly transparent.
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They hid it from the American people before the election.
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We're just learning now about about the FBI searching the Penn Biden Center back in November.
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Again, they hid that November, December, January.
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You know, their their spokesperson there says, well, we're coordinating closely with the Justice
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Department that I actually believe that's part of the problem.
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Because the Justice Department didn't leak a word of this during any of that period either.
00:17:43.200
But when it comes to protecting this White House, suddenly they are perfect.
00:17:58.600
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00:18:29.160
There was a very interesting timeline that we now know a lot more about.
00:18:33.560
That when they were looking at his house in Delaware, he happened to be at the beach house for three days.
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Then all of a sudden, they go to the beach house.
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They say it was planned and coordinated with the DOJ.
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They keep saying there was no, you know, warrant needed.
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And then they can't say, well, they didn't find any classified documents at the beach house.
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And there's a lot of people asking the question, well, no crap, they didn't find any there.
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They just went there for three days, knowing apparently they were going to come and search the daggum place anyway.
00:19:08.600
No, I don't think Joe Biden went and like hid or destroyed classified documents.
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That would be, to use the old Watergate adage, it's not the crime, it's the cover-up.
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You know, that would be like, you know, erasing, what was it, 18 minutes of audio tape from the Oval Office
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that ultimately played the pivotal role in bringing Nixon down.
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And then I think there's an awful lot of incompetence.
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They just keep getting caught again and again and again and again.
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There's two other major issues that I want to talk about.
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Another one deals with an issue that I'm going to ask all of our listeners and viewers to get involved in.
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Because it is something that's not been covered by the media.
00:20:05.280
You have been really pushing this issue over the last several days because there's an important meeting coming up in China
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Let's lead off with that because people, and I'll say this because I think it's important,
00:20:17.200
people need to be calling their congressmen and their senators and the White House,
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begging and getting this name out there, telling this story, posting articles on social media.
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Yeah, there's a Texan, an American named Mark Swedan, who has been unjustly imprisoned in China for more than 10 years now.
00:20:40.480
It began in 2012 where Mark traveled to China on a business trip.
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And on November 13th of 2012, he was abducted by China's Public Security Bureau.
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And a witness to the abduction said that he was abducted because the Chinese government wanted to view the contents of his cell phone.
00:21:03.200
He was accused of being part of a criminal conspiracy to manufacture and sell drugs.
00:21:18.040
The prosecution at the trial produced no forensic evidence to back up their allegations.
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The records in his passport show that he wasn't even in China during the time of the alleged offenses.
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And the 11 other people they indicted, none of them could identify Mark.
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And in 2019, a Chinese court formally sentenced him to death.
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They confiscated his rosary because they want to do everything they can to dampen and undermine faith.
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His cell is exposed to extreme heat and extreme cold.
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He's been subjected to really serious physical abuse.
00:22:24.520
And throughout all of this, by the way, he also has been denied access to American diplomats.
00:22:35.340
His mother, I've spoken with his mother a couple of times.
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She lives in Luling, Texas, which is where Mark was born.
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And Catherine has been fighting for her son for a decade, trying to get him freed.
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The communist government won't let her speak to him.
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It's been years since she's been able to speak to him.
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She's been trying to draw attention to get him out.
00:23:07.240
And so this week, I introduced in the Senate a resolution formally calling on the Chinese government to release Mark Svedan.
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And also calling on the Biden administration to use every tool at its disposal to secure his release.
00:23:21.860
And and the secretary of state, Tony Blinken, is going to Beijing, is going to China in the next couple of days and is going to be meeting with senior Chinese officials.
00:23:31.820
And my resolution formally calls on the Biden administration to use those meetings to try to get Mark released.
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My resolution was co-sponsored with John Cornyn, the other senator from Texas.
00:23:44.520
There was an identical resolution introduced in the House by Congressman Cloud, who introduced it there.
00:23:52.320
And I spoke this week on the Senate floor telling Mark's story.
00:24:00.200
And, you know, one of the points that I made, China tells people they aspire to be a great nation.
00:24:19.780
And their treatment of Mark Svedan has been shameful.
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And so it is my hope that when Tony Blinken is there, that he makes it a priority to press for Mark's release.
00:24:41.760
You need to get the articles online about him and start posting these on social media.
00:24:45.840
Because this goes back to what I refer to as what we saw with Russia recently and the WNBA player.
00:24:52.340
And when the name is out there and people start to talk about it, it gets more pressure and it can grow.
00:24:57.440
That's why I tell people, take our podcast, share it, promote it, tell everybody you know.
00:25:02.240
But there's also a question people are going to ask, and I'm going to ask you this.
00:25:05.760
In certain situations like this, sometimes media attention can be a bad thing early on.
00:25:13.780
And depending on which country you're dealing with, there's different protocol that usually are followed.
00:25:18.000
There's going to be people that are going to say, why have we not heard about this over the last decade?
00:25:23.240
Why did it take so long for us to get to this point that we're at now?
00:25:26.700
Walk us through how this kind of works because it's got to be confusing.
00:25:30.380
So the approach you take in a hostage case actually varies quite a bit based on the circumstances.
00:25:36.400
And I've been very active in fighting for the release of a significant number of American hostages held abroad.
00:25:45.320
It's a deep passion of mine, and so I've spent 10 years fighting for the release of hostages.
00:25:54.320
In some cases, you make the decision to do so publicly.
00:25:59.600
In other cases, and I'd say probably even the majority of cases, you make the decision to do so privately.
00:26:07.520
And it depends upon an assessment of, okay, would the public attention help or hurt?
00:26:13.640
In some instances, so there have been instances where, you know, I've talked with the U.S. ambassador in the country or senior State Department officials,
00:26:25.160
and their judgment is, you know, we're negotiating this, we're making progress,
00:26:29.420
and putting public heat and attention on it right now would be counterproductive.
00:26:35.820
There are other times where you just make the individual judgment, okay, public attention would move the ball forward here.
00:26:45.220
And so, and many times I'll make those determinations or my staff will, talking with the families of the hostages.
00:26:54.760
And it's, you know, you certainly hope what you say doesn't make things worse.
00:27:06.460
There's a reason why, in my floor speech on the Senate floor, what I said was carefully calibrated.
00:27:13.520
What I said on this podcast, there's a reason why I pulled out and used the same language.
00:27:19.460
Because when you're dealing with an active negotiation, you don't want to say anything that screws it up.
00:27:33.900
You know, I can tell you, if you go back to the Obama administration, there was a woman in Sudan, Miriam Ibrahim,
00:27:42.800
who had been, who was imprisoned and sentenced to death for the crime of being a Christian.
00:27:49.860
And Miriam had had two children, a little boy and then actually a little girl that she gave birth to in jail in leg irons.
00:28:02.880
And she was sentenced to receive a hundred lashes and then hang by the neck until dead.
00:28:10.900
And she could avoid that sentence if she renounced Jesus.
00:28:26.020
I spoke about her on the Senate floor, as I just did about Mark Swadon.
00:28:29.320
I also tried desperately to get President Obama to engage.
00:28:40.860
Samantha Power, who was in his administration, she would say his name.
00:28:47.380
And I tried to get her help to get Obama to say his name.
00:28:52.860
But ultimately, there was enough heat and light and attention put on the case that the government of Sudan caved and they released her.
00:29:03.440
They released her and she came to New Hampshire and is living in America.
00:29:43.720
And she looked at me with this profound sense of peace.
00:29:58.360
So there are times when public attention can be very helpful.
00:30:07.400
your engaging in public would be counterproductive.
00:30:11.000
And so I don't do it if the judgment is made that in that circumstance,
00:30:19.380
They're also speaking loud about this right now,
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tells you that obviously the calculus and the timing has changed here.
00:30:28.720
And there seems to be kind of a unity right now that we're seeing on this,
00:30:35.140
hey, we're all acknowledging what you've done here is wrong.
00:30:38.620
And we're all saying it's time to release this individual.
00:30:43.400
The United Nations has what's called a working group on arbitrary detention,
00:30:51.660
who investigate cases of arbitrary detention all around the world.
00:30:56.820
And they found that Mark was being held in violation of customary international law
00:31:04.480
and in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
00:31:09.620
So you've got the United Nations that has come out for this
00:31:15.860
And I'll tell you, I have raised Mark Suedan's case directly
00:31:25.020
and have leaned in very hard one-on-one pressing the case.
00:31:30.760
I hope that Tony Blinken, when he's there, does the same thing.
00:31:34.200
And I have some reason to be optimistic that he will.
00:31:37.740
But I think the more public encouragement, the more forceful it may be.
00:31:43.900
So it's amazing when you think about 10 years, your entire time in the Senate.
00:31:47.580
And for him to be in jail in these conditions with the heat and the cold
00:31:51.300
and having a jail cell that's in that climate at those times
00:31:59.100
People, call your senators, call your congressman, grab articles about him.
00:32:05.580
And that's going to be what can make a difference here.
00:32:09.700
And this is something that a lot of people may not realize happening right now.
00:32:16.060
Obviously, there was a lot of news earlier in the last year
00:32:19.080
where strategic oil reserves were released right before the election
00:32:24.360
We also saw that some of that oil went directly on a ship
00:32:27.240
to Chinese communist individuals that had direct ties to Hunter Biden's business dealings.
00:32:32.180
And the big guy, we would assume that would be Joe Biden.
00:32:34.860
And now there's some movement on the Senate on this type of issue.
00:32:37.980
Well, this week I authored and introduced legislation on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve,
00:32:46.480
So I teamed up with Joe Manchin, Democrat from West Virginia.
00:32:53.200
And what the bill will do if it's passed is make it illegal for the federal government
00:32:58.720
to sell oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to communist China.
00:33:06.800
And what's interesting, so there are a bunch of Republicans who co-sponsored it with me,
00:33:10.680
but there were also a total of five Democrats who were on board.
00:33:18.640
We haven't seen this type of, you know, kind of cohesion here
00:33:21.240
between Republicans and Democrats on this type of issue in a long time.
00:33:25.500
The Democrats who joined me, we've got Joe Manchin, we have Kyrsten Sinema,
00:33:31.740
we have Maggie Hassan from New Hampshire, we have Angus King from Maine,
00:33:39.920
and then we have Michael Bennett from Colorado.
00:33:45.980
And so, look, Manchin and Sinema are the two most likely to break and do bipartisan legislation,
00:33:51.380
but to get Hassan and King and Bennett is encouraging.
00:34:07.820
coordinated closely with Manchin who helped round up a bunch of Democrats.
00:34:12.700
My hope is that we'll get a vote on this and pass it.
00:34:15.720
And I don't think it's impossible that this bill gets passed,
00:34:20.160
that it may well be the fact that you have five Democrats signing on to this right now
00:34:30.500
And if we could actually get it passed, that would be a very good outcome.
00:34:34.160
If this does happen, is this a blow to the White House at all?
00:34:39.700
Is that this takes away their power to manipulate prices when they need it right for elections?
00:34:43.960
Well, no, not really, because they'd still have the ability to deplete the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
00:34:50.940
And I am supportive of additional legislation that would limit the president's ability to engage
00:34:56.300
in political manipulations like Biden did so shamelessly.
00:35:00.060
But I think the piece of selling to China was particularly indefensible.
00:35:07.460
There's other legislation, Republican legislation, that's broader.
00:35:10.760
And in fact, I've co-sponsored that broader legislation.
00:35:15.000
But if we can get China taken off the table, that's worth passing into law.
00:35:20.180
And if it's a bipartisan vote, it will be a result of Democrats saying,
00:35:27.420
OK, what the White House did here, we can't defend and we want to get some distance from.
00:35:32.020
Lastly, there was a letter sent and OAN was kicked off DirecTV.
00:35:39.060
Now Newsmax, they say, oh, we had a fight over fees.
00:35:44.920
There's been a letter that you've been a part of now that is saying, hey,
00:35:48.840
this looks like you're just trying to cancel conservative media.
00:35:52.240
And of course, they claim, well, we're going to fight back and show you guys transparently
00:35:58.020
that this is Newsmax's fault, that you can't watch them anymore, not our fault.
00:36:08.800
And I am, as of this week, the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee.
00:36:17.360
And that's great for conservative values to have this position.
00:36:19.860
It is the top Republican spot on the Senate Commerce Committee.
00:36:24.860
The Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over roughly half of the U.S. economy.
00:36:30.500
And so and we also have a very significant staff that I'm in the process of hiring up right now
00:36:37.320
who prepared this letter, who wrote this letter.
00:36:40.440
The Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over agencies like the Federal Communications Commission,
00:36:46.280
the FTC, when it comes to media and censorship, the Commerce Committee has that falls directly
00:36:59.000
The other committee that has major authority on that is the Judiciary Committee.
00:37:05.800
The ranking member on the Judiciary Committee is Lindsey Graham.
00:37:09.560
So I went to Lindsey and Lindsey and I co-authored this letter together.
00:37:13.880
So it's from the ranking member of Commerce and the ranking member of Judiciary.
00:37:18.660
Any company that gets this letter, they're going to take it seriously.
00:37:22.660
And then also Mike Lee and Tom Cotton both signed the letter as well.
00:37:27.900
And what happened, so DirecTV, all right, let's back up.
00:37:34.680
A year ago, the three biggest cable news networks that were right of center were Fox News, Newsmax,
00:37:45.900
and One American News, in that order in terms of ratings.
00:37:48.740
A year ago, Democrat members of Congress wrote to AT&T, which owns DirecTV, owns 70 percent of DirecTV.
00:38:01.860
Democrat members of Congress wrote to the CEO of AT&T and said,
00:38:06.620
please throw off air Fox News, Newsmax, and One American News.
00:38:12.880
We call it misinformation, which is the Democrat code word for seeking censorship.
00:38:17.040
So they asked the CEO of AT&T to throw them off air.
00:38:29.340
In the year that followed, DirecTV has now thrown off the air two of the three.
00:38:35.980
So about a year ago, they threw One America News off.
00:38:43.660
And I think in many ways that may have been a trial balloon for what they just did last week,
00:38:55.380
And so now two of the three have been deplatformed.
00:38:59.340
And so what my letter does is it lays out those facts.
00:39:01.920
And in particular, there was a negotiation between Newsmax and DirecTV where Newsmax was trying to get paid for its content.
00:39:13.840
Well, although I will say in the cable and satellite world, some channels get paid and some don't.
00:39:21.920
In fact, there are some channels that pay the carrier to carry that channel.
00:39:26.840
So it's not crazy, but it's not necessarily damning.
00:39:30.980
Newsmax was making the case they wanted to be paid because their ratings were high enough that it merited it.
00:39:44.220
Newsmax has made the allegation that DirecTV pays a number of other channels that are left of center and have much lower ratings than Newsmax.
00:39:56.280
So what this letter does is it asks a whole series of questions.
00:40:02.180
It asks them, number one, to preserve all their documents.
00:40:06.080
And then it walks through very specific questions about why they terminated Newsmax.
00:40:12.080
Is it true they said they were not going to pay them a penny?
00:40:15.700
Is it true that they pay liberal stations that have lower ratings money, but they won't pay them?
00:40:22.820
I will say I have subsequently had a long phone conversation with the CEO of DirecTV.
00:40:32.820
He said the facts that Newsmax had conveyed were not accurate.
00:40:37.600
I said, look, I understand and appreciate that.
00:40:41.440
I've been, before I was in the Senate, I was a practicing litigator for a long time.
00:40:45.620
I've handled a lot of cases, and I understand that any dispute, there's always at least two sides to it.
00:40:52.520
So I told him, listen, there's a reason we ask these questions.
00:40:58.080
And if the facts, as they've been conveyed, are not accurate, I'm interested in seeing that.
00:41:02.220
And I will say DirecTV committed to giving full and candid and real answers to the questions.
00:41:16.620
And is this about silencing conservatives or is this just really about business?
00:41:20.360
And listen, the goal is also a couple of other things.
00:41:22.660
The goal is also one of the things I ask for is any communication they've had or their corporate owners have had with Democrat members of Congress or with the White House or with the administration.
00:41:33.600
We know from the Twitter files this White House is quite eager to silence people.
00:41:38.700
I want to see any communications that have happened with Democrats.
00:41:45.560
I said, look, the outcome I'd like to see, I'd like to see Newsmax back on the air.
00:41:50.360
Um, and they are on other carriers, but DirecTV is a pretty big carrier and they lost a whole bunch of households when they got pulled down from DirecTV.
00:41:59.580
And I said, listen, there are millions of Texans and millions of Americans who would like the choice, who would like the option to be able to watch Newsmax.
00:42:15.340
And one of the things I made very clear also, I said, listen, if you disagree with what Newsmax says or OAN says or Fox News says, there's a remedy for that.
00:42:33.120
I think most of what MSNBC says is utter nonsense.
00:42:42.840
If nothing else, they help support podcasts like this because they give us easy pinatas to tee off of.
00:42:49.820
So the answer, if you disagree, is engage on the substance and actually present the argument.
00:42:57.680
It's not use corporate power and money to silence the voices you disagree with.
00:43:03.580
And so what I hope comes from this is that we learn more what happened.
00:43:06.920
We learn the extent to which Democrat politicians were involved.
00:43:10.720
We know of the opening letter that at the beginning of this, we don't know if there were subsequent communications.
00:43:15.820
But I also hope that this scrutiny, and it's our intention to drill down and investigate what happens here,
00:43:24.360
we hope that this scrutiny causes them to revisit the decision and say, you know what?
00:43:30.320
Our viewers are better off having the choice to watch Newsmax if they want than they are not having that choice.
00:43:38.760
It's fun to get to hear what's going on in D.C.
00:43:45.580
Don't forget, we have two audio versions of the show that come out each week.
00:43:51.380
So make sure you download our podcast at that subscribe button.
00:43:55.360
Tell your family and friends, don't forget to make those phone calls this week,
00:43:58.900
especially on behalf of this American hostage in China.
00:44:01.360
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00:44:03.880
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00:44:07.340
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