Shawn Ryan Show - #264 Hunter Biden - His Answer to the Laptop Claims, Burisma, White House Coke and Pardons

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

Hunter Biden is an American attorney, businessman, and author and the son of President Joe Biden. Born in Delaware and shaped by profound personal tragedies and a diverse career in finance, policy, and international ventures. His mother and sister passed away in a car accident when he was young, and his brother, who survived the accident, later passed at age 46 from brain cancer. Married to Melissa Cohen, with whom he has one child. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Georgetown University and earned a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School, before working briefly as a Jesuit volunteer in Portland, Oregon, and transitioning into banking and politics. Biden built his early career at MBNA America, then served at the United States Department of Commerce, focusing on e-commerce policy during the Clinton administration. In 2001, he co-founded the lobbying firm Oldaker, Biden & Belair, which worked on issues including online gambling. He served as a board member of Amtrak and is a founding partner of Rosemont Seneca Partners, an investment and advisory firm. He previously was on the board of BHR Partners, a China-based private equity firm, and from 2014 to 2019, he served on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, amid political investigations. In 2013, Biden joined the U.S. Navy Reserve as an ensign, but was discharged in 2014. Biden has publicly admitted to struggles with addiction, detailed in his 2021 memoir Beautiful Things, and has been sober since 2019. He faced public controversies, including the 2018 laptop scandal, and was under federal criminal investigation for tax matters and firearm possession. In 2024, he pleaded guilty to failing to pay $1.4 million in taxes from 2016 to 2019 on foreign income, which he spent on drugs and luxuries. In April 2025, President Joe Biden issued a pardon clearing Hunter of his federal gun and tax convictions. Biden continues to advocate for awareness of addiction through his personal story of recovery and resilience. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to https://RocketMoney.com/SRS today. Go to https://armra.com/SRS or enter SRS to get 30% off your first subscription order. Ready to upgrade your eyewear? Check them out at https://roka.com and use code SRS for 20% off sitewide. Hunter Biden Links: Book - https://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Things-Memoir-Hunter-Biden/dp/1982151110/ref=sr_1_2 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to the show, man. Thanks, man. I can't believe you're a fan. Why? I don't know. It's just, it's just, I just never, it's wild to me, that you're a fan. Yeah, man. I'm finding, so, I mean, I pretty much interviewed almost everybody that's on the Trump ad bin now.

Yeah. And that kind of, I think people may, I don't. don't know, people got maybe the wrong impression to me that I agree with everything that that side of the aisle says, and I don't. But, you know, we did... I'm going to get you in trouble. I got the exact opposite of impression. Right on. But, yeah, I don't know. There's just some... You know who else? Elizabeth Warren's team listens to my show a lot. That really, really surprised me. Okay. So here's why. Is that you're a great listener?

And I think that the authentic way in which you listen and respond leads me to believe that you're just open. Like, you're open to information. And you're not judging it as it's coming over the transom unless it's just fucking outrageous. You know, or somebody's being hateful or lying. for instance here. And, you know, I was saying, do those guys out there, I watch you do the, I've watched everything, not everything, but I've watched, I really do.

You know, I listen to you while I paint. And the thing that always comes across to me with you, is that fundamentally, you have like a, core set of beliefs of values and they're the same values I have I mean and maybe that's a shock or a surprise but you know

I was saying to you guys out there like we all think that you know if you're Republican or Democrat you know that we got nothing in common I will tell you what I was raised with my what I try to you

You know, I mean, obviously, I try and I've failed in many respects. And failed in my addiction and sometimes fail in my sobriety and being the man that I aspire to be. But I care about my family. I care about my friends. I care about my community. I care about my country and I care about my faith and

I'm, you know, maybe being presumptuous, I think that's what you care about. And I don't mean that's like some saccharine bullshit but our prescription of how to make all those things better may be different.

You know? And those are the things that we used to argue about. Yeah. You know, I've grown up you know, the majority of my friends were all Republicans, you know, I aspired, you know, I mean, my heroes was the guy you guys, you know, the people that served, like my brother, like you, like, you know. And, and so, anyway, my point is, I don't think, I don't know why you'd be shocked

other than by the impression that's been left about me I don't know I think I'm shocked because I'm dealing with this shit man you grew up in this in politics you know and I didn't grow up in this though yeah that's true

I mean I guess what I'm getting at is it's just man it's so fucking politicized now and so you think that, I mean, you think that the Republican Democrat, which I don't even fucking know what it means to be a Republican anymore, to be honest with you. I think everything's just so far off base now that I don't, I don't even know. I have, I have conservative values and that's all I can say anymore, you know, but it's just become so divisive that this, it appears that the decision has already been made for you to most people on who you can associate.

with who you can watch who you can take information from and who you can't and while i don't i don't and will never again fall into those fucking lines um i think a lot of people you know i think a lot of people can't they can't see pass and some things have happened to me too you know since i've been in this game of fucking podcasting and started diving into politics and you know what i've realized is that um you know whatever the main mainstream media determines the narrative is going to be about you, that's what it's going to be, whether it has anything. Exactly, right? But I mean, you know, I am not a maga cultist. I don't agree with everything that comes out of that, whatever political movement.

In fact, as time moves on, I agree with less, less and less and less of it. But, you know, but if you look at the mainstream media, the first thing they put in front of it, of my fucking name every single fucking time is mega influencer mega podcaster big a mega mega podcaster Sean Ryan it's like where do you come up where you can come up with this shit but but so anyways

well maybe I missed some interviews that's why I'm stuck in nervous I mean I don't think you've missed much no I haven't I've watched you know look I have like I have I have I have uh you know serious disagreements with you know with people that have been really really I think objectively, like, cruel to me.

Like, Tucker's been objectively cruel to me. And I know that you're friends with Tucker. I used to be, I used to know Tucker. I wasn't friends with Tucker. But, you know, I think that we're all, look, we should all have a common enemy. And the truth of the matter it is, it's not any politician or a federal government worker.

You know, who's benefiting right now? who you know whether the democrats are in control of congress or whether the republicans are who ultimately seems to be benefiting well i can tell you who's not benefiting not normal people yeah not regular guys not the guys you served with not the guys that i went to high school with not the you know nobody that i know um you know the people that are benefited and the people that seem to always some way avoid the consequence and win. And that's, you know, the 0.1%.

And it's not even the 1% anymore. I mean, it's like literally the, you know, and I'm not saying, you know, all billionaires are evil. I'm not saying that, I promise you. But I am saying that from my vantage point, we are all the victims of the algorithms that they have caged us in every one of us and we are

why are we all so mad at each other can't I don't understand this bad politics never used to be like this it didn't be like I'll tell you why where's my the phone like you pick up your phone man and then people are incentivized people that we used to trust are incredibly incentivized in a very perverse way to make me hate you

to label you Sean your vet special ops you have a inside view of that you have conservative values and so therefore you know at one point or another you supported you know some of the things that Donald Trump was saying and you know and the people that surrounded him

and so therefore you know what you are you're my fucking enemy you're my enemy I shouldn't be sitting here you know what I mean you're the one thing I've come to the conclusion of

because my own experience is all such a bunch of bullshit such a bunch of bullshit I wish people would just wake up right now man wake up man remember your neighbor

remember your neighbor who by the way may have voted for Donald Trump but didn't vote for this, didn't vote for this. Now, I could have told him. Maybe. Do you know what I mean? But I am

I'm so, I saw one of your shows where you talked about like some days it feels like we're really on the verge of real violence. Not this what do they call it? Sticastic. violence, not these kind of, the seemingly endless violence that we witness as relates to what just happened to Rob Reiner, to his son, or what happened to Charlie

Kirk, or what happened to the students of Brown University, or what happened to the people celebrating Hanukkah on Bondi Beach, you know, and by the way, that was all what, except for Charlie Kirk within the past day, day. But beyond that violence, I saw you talking to somebody about it like are we going to be picking up guns well the way i think what you're referring to is you know you see all this talk about revolution you know civil war all this type of shit and i mean if you think if you think about you know how would you how would you destroy the united states of america i mean i don't think that you destroy it by by kinetic war i don't think you nuke it. I don't think you send in troops. I don't think you, you know, do a naval battle.

You divide them because, I mean, there are more guns in this country. And I'm a gun order and I'm a fucking pro 2A guy. Don't ever try to take my damn guns. But, you know, but I mean, there are so many here that if if there was an adversary that was successful in dividing us so much so that it actually ended up in kinetic war. Nobody could come in. You can't even send a country to come in here to aid because there are so, I mean, there are so many fucking guns. And I spent 14 years in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen,

all over the Middle East. They don't have half the damn guns that we have in this country and that places. I mean, there are places there that you just, I mean, you're fucking dead if you go outside. And maybe you're dead if you don't go outside. side. And this here would be way worse. Way worse than that. When the desperation sets in, people start getting hungry, cold. They need warm clothes. They need food. They need water. They need

medication. Like when the system fucking breaks down, this will be the most dangerous place in the entire world. I 100% agree. I 100% agree. And so, you know, that's why i asked the question who's benefiting and one thing i know that who's benefiting from what's happening in our country right now is the immediate answer to that is our is our is our adversaries our most obvious adversaries uh russians chinese and a cadre of other actors that i think sometimes pretend that they're um uh our allies but would just as well see us burn um and then uh who else is benefiting the only people that are are doing better and have consistently amassed wealth to a degree that has never been seen

before in human history are the oligarch class of the uh the uh the uh the uh the elan musks and the peteels and a whole host of other people. And I'm not just picking them out, you know, and Jeff Bezos and, you know. And so there's a very, very, very finite, infantismal in terms of numbers, of people that are benefiting to a degree that we've never witnessed before,

except one other time, which was in the turn of the century, in like the 1900s, early 1900s, late 1800s. And with, you know, the gilded age and, you know, J.T. Rockefeller and the standard oil in that period of time. And I think to myself, well, what's the solution right now? what do I you know well I think first

first thing is is the realization that you know there's no there's no savior coming there's no

um uh uh uh Christ character of some political bent

that is going to come and you know fix everything and going to um allow people to begin to talk to each other across the fence and you know across the dinner table in any you know near future we have uh but if the if the problem can't be solved politically then how's it

going to be solved because it ain't getting any better and if you have uh at these people uh that i that i watch on your shows and and uh you know i'm a earn share expert like everybody else on a i but if you just listen to the people that are actually building these things you know what is it they think that there's a 20 to 30 percent chance that you know superintelligence could cause a mass extinction event and they think that you know we're going to reach a in the next three years and that AGI basically means that we're going to have anywhere from, you know,

70 to 90% unemployment. And, you know, and so at a time in which we're, as a human race, making an evolutionary step that is never, that supersedes every other evolutionary step that's ever occurred before.

what is the most important thing that we could have leadership and what do we have we have utter and complete chaos right now and at least from my perspective and i don't you know like so i think well what can we do i listen to you i listen to you talk to people that i don't that i don't necessarily in any obvious way agree with. Some, by the way, who have been really cruel to me personally. But I listen and try to figure out, is there any way that we can see eye to eye? Because we all need to wake up, man. Because what's the alternative? what's the alternative other than the dystopic vision that you just talked about well i think the unfortunate thing hunter is a lot of people are hoping for that to happen but they've never lived

in that so they don't know really what that's going to be like and i don't even know what the fuck that's going to there's a lot of tough guys out there but a lot of tough guys that that think that they you know uh you know they think that they because they own uh some of the guns that you've shot that you've shot in places where they will never have been, including myself. Like, you know, let me give you an example, and I know that we're not, like, the one thing I promised myself that I wouldn't do is, like,

I think people are so sick, like, who gives you shit what Hunter Biden thinks about politics right now? And, and, but I can tell you just from my, I can only talk about it from my personal experience. And being witness to it at, in a very intimate way and being a victim of it in some ways and not a victim of it that's a it's a pretty lame way to say it um being uh trapped by it caged by it in many ways not by any choice of my own the president just put out that tweet okay whatever they call

about Robert Reiner okay and somebody trying to break down the I don't know what the fuck that was there's storming the gates they know I'm in here they're gonna rip you off air yeah no anyway the president put out that out that true social thing and um and everybody's like god it's just it's just hard with taste and it beneath the president you know he basically basically blaming rob Reiner's murder and its wife Michelle's murderer on the fact that he is a um uh that of trump derangement syndrome um everybody says uh you know it just like as he lost his mind as he have, you know, dementia and this and that, and, you know, he's, and I, I don't think he knows

exactly what he's doing. And what he's doing is this, what he's always done, is he's given people permission structure. Rob Reiner died violently because he opposed me. And I wish his family well, rest in peace. That's what he's saying. and in so doing I think what he's basically saying is you know what like stand in my way and this is what happens and so 90% of people I really believe 90% of people even his supporters 90% of a supporter goes like oh why did you say that that's so cruel 10% what they hear is

he got what he deserved. And I see him do that over and over again. And it really worries me. And by the way, I'm not saying that there aren't people on the left that do the same goddamn thing. And it is, you know, it turns my stomach then. Yeah, it really is. The difference is the president.

The president has a responsibility. I think the most important responsibility of a president And it is not the, you know, other than, you know, the question of, you know, the deployment of force is the tone that he says for the country. More than any law, more than anything. It's just the tone that he sets. I'm with you. I mean, it's, you know, it's, it's, it does, though, comes from, you know, it's not just him. You know, I mean, with the, with the Charlie Kirk stuff and with the, you know, other assassination attempt on.

him and butler which actually they shut down the investigation on that for whatever reason i don't know why you wouldn't want to know who tried to fucking kill you but whatever right nothing to see here but you know i mean when you when you have you know when you have a political party that's continuously saying you're a nazi you know a fascist nazi fascist nazi he's like hitler you know and i mean and then you got assassination attempts all over the fucking country and it's just it's it's it's uh i know but it's like i said i'm not look i don't want to get into like the argument over the and i really mean it but like i hear you i hear what you're saying but part of me also says you don't want to be called a fascist don't act like a fascist and i'm what i mean by

fascism is this is deputizing a a largest federal police force in history to go on America's streets massed without warrants and dragged pregnant women out of their cars in the snow and kneel on their backs of sending people to prisons, death camps in El Salvador with no due process. I promise you that I believe this with all my heart is that you and I don't have have any distance between us in what we think about immigrants in immigration. How many immigrants do you serve with? How many what? Immigrants did you serve with.

Quite a few. Quite a few. Amazing people, right? How about in your personal life? How many people around here that are in this community that you're in? Or when you were grown up that are from immigrants? By the way, some, by the way, that may have bent the rules to be able to be able to be. to get in here and they shouldn't have and they should probably leave if they did but i don't think

that we have any disagreement that one of the things that makes this country an incredible country is immigration yeah 30 percent of every new business in the united states annually is started by an immigrant 35 percent of the fortune 100 CEOs in the united states of america top 100 companies America are immigrants. I did not know that. Yeah. You know, I don't think, I guess I shouldn't say, I can't even fucking say, I don't think anybody, for myself, you know, with the immigration thing, I think, I think for me, for me,

the issue with the immigration stuff is how it's prioritized. So I'll give you an example. I know we need immigrants. I mean, we built, I mean, we're building a studio, ice rooster town. We couldn't get anybody to fucking work to finish building this out. And this is only, this is about three months old. But point being, I mean, we have to have them. You know, they, we have to have them.

They are the, I mean, they just, they are the worker base now. It just is what the fuck is. But what I will say is when it comes to the prioritization, the stuff that I'm talking about, I mean, I think what, for me specifically, I got no problem. problem with immigration and i think what's going on right now is also a fucking disaster i think you know i think that before we before we go in and in deport every single person that's come here i i think we need to fix the actual the system this system on how you get in it's fucked up people can't get in good people can't get in you know what i mean but what's what's happened from my from my perspective

What I see is, you know, look, Hunter, we got all these guys coming home and women, you know, from, from Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, 20 fucking plus years of war, right? Most of these people can't even get help in the VA. Can't even fucking get that. You know what I mean? Everybody knows there's a veteran suicide epidemic. It's 22 a day. It's been going on for more than a decade. You know, we have a major suicide.

suicide epidemic going on with veterans. We have a major addiction problem going on with veterans, PTSD, traumatic brain injury. I mean, you name it, are people that spent 20 plus fucking years protecting this country, can't get the help they need. But if you flip on the news, all you see is free hotels for immigrants in New York. But Sean. Free health care. John, I got, I, I don't disagree with you. It's like, fuck man like we we that's real pain fighting for this fucking country i got you know what i got it if that's if if if if if that's the dichotomy that you presented with okay but again i'll say this you know what that's your algorithm man okay because here's the deal is it no one that i know of

okay that would say that they're a Democrat I don't even know if I'm a Democrat anymore I don't know if I'm part of any political because it's just like you know pox on all your houses in my opinion but not that you shouldn't engage in the political process is like I'm just talking about the parties I think it's like imperative that we don't give up on politics as a solution we got it because what's the alternative I mean truly if if the politics and process aren't a solution to our problems that the only solution to is who who who wins in a zero-sum game who wins guns in that violence that you talked about but if you think that that and I again

I don't want to make all this about political about you know I know that there that the people that you brought through here really, really care about the issues that you just talked about. I care about him. I know my dad did. I know I know 100% he did about veterans, about what's happening at the VA, about the addiction problem, about the suicide rate among veterans. I'm absolutely certain that he did. And so that's, you know, that's why he did the PACT Act. That's why he did a whole host of other things as relates to veterans. But I'm not going to, like, see, I don't want to get into my dad's policy prescriptions because then everybody just like turns off.

Yeah. But I can't say this, is this, is that nobody right now is in any way making even remotely a credible argument that if we, you know, if we stop giving immigrants free hotel rooms, then we'd be able to prioritize veterans instead. like what a bunch of bullshit like of course that's what you prioritize yeah of course that's what you do and not only that is this is it okay let's agree with this

the system is fucking broken completely broken so let's get together and do a bipartisan legislation as it relates to it and let's get the most conservative senator in the United States one of those conservative senators in the United States Senate to come up with a plan

that his caucus will accept and that he can sell to the to the Democrats. And let's create a piece of legislation that a sitting president will sign into law that will at least begin to address some of these problems.

Some of the inequities on both sides that are occurring. And what do we do? James Inhoff did that. Republican Party in the United States Senate did that. They got an agreement with the Republicans in Congress and the House side that they would vote for the legislation.

And then Donald Trump stepped in, six months before the election, and told them that he was going to primary, every single one of them voted for that. Because we're addicted to the problem. And the people, when you say you turn on the TV and what you see is a sea of information, some of it real about the bullshit, you know, you know, over abundance of, you know, of resources that immigrants are taking out of the United States. And what do I see when I turn on my TV or open up my phone?

I see the exact opposite. And so we're both addicted to the problem. And nobody's talking about the solution. And there's not somebody in politics right now that I, that is, you know, I think there are some people, but I don't think that we should expect somebody to come in and save us. I don't either.

I'll be honest with you, I fucking have given up. Like I just, I, it sucks. But here's my problem. My problem is, and I guess this goes to the reason why when you said, you're surprised that I listened, I'm surprised at, I'm not surprised. I understand where you're coming from on that is this, don't you think I want to

I said, don't you think I want to figure out a solution to the immigration issue? I think a lot of people do. Hey, let me ask you a question. Don't you think Gabon Newsom wants to figure out? Now, he, I assume that anybody that's running for president, if they could fix the immigration issue, would try to fix the immigration issue. Right? Because we need immigration. we need a vibrant immigration

but we don't want immigrants that are coming here illegally draining us of resources and also and being prioritized above people that are actual literal heroes that are coming home that are that are still recovering from 20 years of endless war

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RocketMoney.com slash SRS. I mean, you know, when you talk about nobody's coming to save us, I mean, there is no Christ-like figure coming, but then you also say, we can't totally abandon politics as a way to fix the problem. I think that's what you said. Yeah, I know. And it's, it's, it, uh, I mean, I realize the, uh, that it is a, um, that it is a, um, uh, oxymoronical, I guess, right?

So it, that, uh, but I'm, I'm, I'm trying to figure it out. And the only thing that I can think of is conversations like this. And not that I'm some, that, um, that, that, in any way important, but I really, really think that some people that have skin in the game, whether by any virtue of what they're doing in terms of their professional life or their political aspirations or that have been thrust into it, whether they chose to or not may have an obligation to say, I find that there are more, that I have more in common, I'm positive that I have more in common with Sean Ryan. who's considered by whoever incorrectly as a MAGA influencer,

then I do, then I don't have in common with them. Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. I think that... I think I just fucked you over. I think there's a chance on the edit that you're going to want to take that part out. But, no, but I'm being serious. I think we all have a lot more on.

common with each other than, then we don't. And so I'm 100% with you on that. But you know, you got to have a conversation to find out the answer. And people aren't doing that. So, but well, Hunter, I want to do a life expose on you and starting from birth all the way to now. And obviously there'll be some tough questions. But I think. I think we will hit every array of emotions out there. I think we'll get some laughs, some sadness, some happiness, some anger. And I think it's going to make a great interview. So once again, I just want to say thank you for coming.

I've really been looking forward to this. But in other news, if you see my beef with Dan Crenshaw, he's going to sue me, Hunter. He's going to sue me. I'm sorry, buddy. But so you're a Yale educated attorney. Yeah. Can you give us a legal analysis breakdown of the Dan Crenshaw lawsuit against Sean Ryan? Well, technically, I've been disbarred.

So I have to say that. I have to say that. It was very technically, meaning I've been disbarred. So, look, to be serious about it. Is it, like, what are you even talking about? I followed this, and it's the same, I don't know whether these people that are become so high on their own supply, think, and the people that, like, the people that, like, the succorfishes that attach to them, like these lawyers, think that, you know, any way that sending you a bullshit letter, demand letter, was going to do anything but make you say, fucking try me.

I mean, what's the hell, man? I mean, look, I, I, I, there's a bunch of things that you could do. Like, number one, it seems to me that you potentially could sue him right now. Really? Yes. And that's, for instance, that's what Michael Wolf did with the First Lady, is that she continued to threaten him and continue to threaten him like they threatened me. And my response to that was, bring it on. Like, you want to go through a discovery process with me in which I get to depose you, the president, and every person that you were associated with while you were friends with Jeffrey Epstein.

Like, you want to do that, then I'm willing, I'm willing to do that. I'm going to need a go-fund me, but I'm willing to do that. And I never heard from them again. And I didn't say anything that Michael Wolf didn't. But they continued to send Michael Wolf letters. Whatever you think about Michael Wolf is that Michael Wolf basically said, is that threatening someone with a lawsuit that is engaged in protected speech, particularly when who you're speaking about

is a sitting United States congressman which basically you can say whatever the fuck you want about them no matter what that's that's America you know what I mean seriously is that it's called abusive process and and potentially tortious interference

meaning that he's interfering he's attempting to interfere with your business so but if you if you if you want to engage him you could potentially, and I'm not positive, but preemptively sue him for fucking with you. And it seems to me that I saw his response, and I don't know, didn't crunch off anything.

I think Dan had a bad night. Oh, he really had a bad night. And I don't get it. Like, what, like, if you're going to respond after you made a threat of a lawsuit, then you file the lawsuit. if you truly believe that you want to go through the process of sitting down for a, you know, however many day deposition in going through every stock trade that you've made since you became a United States congressman and the information that you may have received

or not received as related to the companies who stock your trading, along with what you said to every member of SEAL Team 6 and what they said back to you when you said, I've been talking to, you know, my boys at 6. is like, I'll tell you what, I don't see how any reasonable person that would receive a text like that would not think, like, are you threatening me? And I don't know anybody that reasonable.

And I certainly know that there's not a jury in the world that wouldn't believe that. So the notion that that is unreasonable for you to come to that conclusion or thought that maybe that's what he was trying to say. And anyway, it's just a, Number one, you've got nothing to worry about, but it may be an opportunity for you also. That's good to hear.

It's kind of the way that I view these things. I don't really enjoy legal warfare, but I got to be honest, this one, you know, it's like, oh. No, it's horrible. Let's do the discovery, Dan. I would love to dive into your financial history as a congressman. Yeah, yeah. You know what I think happened? By the way, and it's much broader than that.

I had a guy He's also like actively threatening to kill people online Yeah Like he threatened to kill Or he's like if I ever see Tucker I'll kill him And then he said

Yeah I'm not joking No I know So why wouldn't I take But I don't know See that's the thing that I don't get Is um

Anyway You know the broader picture Is this license That people think that they have Particularly in Congress To be to hide behind the speech to Bay Clause. Now, the fact of the matter is,

is if he had been smart, he should have gone to the floor of the House of Representatives and he could have talked about you as much as he wanted to. But the idea that he would send you a private DM with that kind of like oblique or direct threat, who knows? His boys at six.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, like, I don't have any... I don't have any insight into your world other than having watched you, having watched the men. You know, I just watched that interview with Jocko and a number of others that you have interviewed, many of which are, you know, are right to the till of the hunt.

But you don't come away, I come away with the impression of this is the one thing that they care about more than anything is are the bond that they have with each that you guys have with each other and like a code of loyalty that that means and I can't imagine anyone would have been too impressed with somebody saying that publicly or privately to the number and not just go like well that is really weak sauce, man. And I, maybe I'm, maybe I'm, maybe I'm, I'm reading way too much into anything. I think, I think, are you familiar with Polly Market?

Only from listening to, like a predictive. Yeah, I mean, I literally from listening to some of the prediction market. Yeah. They, they only give, they actually did a thing on this. They only give Dan a 9% chance that he actually sues me. So, I think, I mean, we're both, we're both, we both, we both, we both battled addiction right at that i've spent many a nights where i've made shitty decisions and woken up the next morning going oh fuck by the way i think dan did that two nights in a row yeah i by the way i really do too you know you know and so in that sense i i have a i have a little bit of a like maybe somebody in his life yeah you know uh i feel bad for him too i hope dan can put the bottle down. I mean, he can't even do international

travel right now because he's such a fucking lush. Is that true? It's really bad. It's really bad. No. He's not allowed to travel. You know how many defamation suits I'm involved in right now? You're stucking me into another one. I can't afford it, man. No, it's a real thing.

It's a real thing. Okay. Maybe you'll get a letter to us. I would like see each other in court. Exactly. I sue a guy. Okay. You know, Patrick Byrne, the overstock guy. Okay, he wrote this thing and said that I was the person responsible for releasing the $8 billion in sanctioned Iranian money that was being held by the South Koreans, and I took a 10% fee for doing so and put it into, you know, bank accounts around the world, and that was the money that was used to fund Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7th, resulting in the death of 1,400 people. You know how many things people have said about me? That are like, I mean, on your show, by the way.

I'm aware. I know you are, motherfucker. Yeah, I know. And so he says this craziness, okay? And I'm like, I said to one of my letters, I was like, just, just please, can we, like, can someone tell me sue this guy? And anyway, I found somebody to do it in contingency, you're an incredible lawyer, Dick Arputlian. And we went to, and he said, I'm going to get him

and I'm going to go after him. And this is Byrne. He goes on all these shows. And he says he has tapes and he has the FBI informant and he has the former DEA agent. And he's got the Iranian spy who he's going to bring. He doesn't even show up to the trial. He refuses to come to the trial.

Are you serious? He fires all his lawyers the day before we're supposed to begin picking a jury. He doesn't produce anything. Okay. He literally doesn't produce a trial. anything. A default judgment is filed against him. And, um, uh, but now I'm, I'm like two years into this. I mean, it's been since then. Are you serious? Two years into this and we still don't have

a full thing. And like, and the court is going to decide about punitive damages. And so in between the time he gets the default judgment and the court is to decide, he goes back on Alex Jones and repeats the entire thing over. Are you serious? Over again. Yeah. They just do this stuff with impunity, but the whole reason I tell this story is this, is your instinct is right. It's awful. Litigation sucks. I've been, look, I've been tied up in criminal and civil and in courts. And, you know, I mean, like, I've got, I don't know, $14, 15 million dollars in debt that I have

no idea that I'm going to be able to pay off. I have, you know, I'm going to be able to pay off. know, I mean, millions of dollars in debt, that, you know, nobody's riding to the rescue for Hunter Biden. My dad, you know, entered the presidency as the poorest man to ever take the office, and he left the presidency, the, you know, not poorest, I mean, which he's fine, but, you know, like, he has no, we have no generational wealth. I don't have any, you know, despite what these guys say, like, there's no billions of dollars

buried underneath my dad's house and, you know, Delaware. And so in order, what I think these people rely on is they are so, they either have the money and they just hire people to go harass people through the legal process. Like Trump does that a lot. I mean, that's for real. And or they just don't care. And because litigation, even civil litigation like what you're talking about. it just overwhelms your life.

I mean, the depositions that you have to sit through and they prepare for, and then you've got to go through, you know, if you're suing for damages and you've got to sit down with a psychologist of their choice to go through your entire life. And, you know, I mean, just to, it puts you in a really uncomfortable position. And then you're dependent upon the idea that your lawyers are going to have, make, you know,

be able to make it through the process, the motions process and the motions practice and, you know, and all, and three years later, you wake up and you go, what the fuck did I do this for? You know? And so my suggestion is this, is that I think that you got the response, um, um, uh, I think you won already, okay? And I know that you didn't enter this with the intention of winning anything, is that you

were stating a fact based upon your own personal experience and obviously the personal experience of some of the people in the community that you come from that have a real disdain for this guy and the way that they treated they were treated by him in his position of authority and so you speak a truth what you believe to be a truth or ask a question that's worthy of asking about anybody that is a position of power which is the right of every American to do and you do that and his response is to send you a letter from his lawyers to tell you he's talking to his boys at six and then to get on and saying, you know,

that you're a liar in this and that, so we'll just let it go now. And challenge me to an interview? Yeah. The funny thing is, Hunter, I invited him on the fucking show in the original thing. And then after that, he challenges me to an interview.

It's like, well, Dan, you didn't really have to challenge me. I know you feel tough doing it. I'm sure you feel real tough doing it in front of your, you know, six followers that aren't bashing you right now. But I already fucking invited you, so you didn't have to do that. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's my point, is that if he thought that there was a value in him actually sitting down with you, then he can get on a plane like I did, fly his ass into Nashville, and come to the studio and sit down with you. You know?

And so I don't think that's going to happen, though. We'll see Man, I fucking hope it does I'm just taking bets We'll have to look at Polly Market after this I know, right? I think they're going to do another one I'll bet they do another one

Well, well, actually, what we're going to really I want to look at is Polly Market right now of whether or not you're going to get canceled after you air this interview with me I'll bet the answer's no No, I bet you I'll bet you I'll say, but All right, Hunter, I want to get into your story

So everybody starts with an introduction. Hunter Biden, son of the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, and the late Nalia Biden and the anniversary of her death is tomorrow. That happened 15th, two days. 53 years ago. Yeah, that's right. I'm really sorry, man. And survived a car accident in 1972 that killed your mother and babysitter.

Worked as a lawyer, businessman, lobbyist, and naval officer, a recovering drug addict who's been sober for over six years. Like I said earlier, congratulations. Thanks, man. You've turned art into a form of therapy and recovery from addiction, author of the best-selling memoir, Beautiful Things, Happily Married to Melissa, and you're a father of five children. You have lived one of the most scrutinized, polarizing, and chaotic American lives of the last decade. So, once again, well, Welcome to the show. And just a couple of things to crank out.

Everybody gets a gift. That should a couple gifts. So those are Vigilance League gummy bears made here in the USA up in Michigan. Legal in all 50 states. So you're not going to sabotage your sobriety. But, and then I got just... Are these? What's the principal ingredient of these?

It's just sugar. Okay. It's literally just sugar. Yeah, I was going to do CBD gummies because I have sleep problems. Yeah. And then my marketer was like, you're going to get sued for catering CBD to kids and gummy berries. And I said, fine, we'll just do fucking good. I'm all for sugar, man.

Right on. Yeah, thank you. And then I got you something else. And this is, so I know you grew up Catholic. I don't know where he's standing today, but that is from one of my friends, a really good friend of mine over at seal team six uh was at seal team six and um he has since retired and he calls those the warriors rosary i love this thank you very much you're welcome it means a world to me for real you're welcome and uh i carry one of those around with me everywhere for protection in fact mine's in

my pocket right now so thank you my dad wears one on his uh on his wrist no kidding yeah so he says right oh man um this means a lot to me i brought you a gift um that's in the it's in the other room but uh i'll show you at the break perfect perfect painting um but i really really appreciate this is really meaningful thank you very much you're welcome yeah and then the last thing before we get into it i have a patreon account it's a subscription account and uh it's turned into one hell of a community and so what do i i offer them the opportunity to ask every single guest a question and this is from ian lane you've spoken openly about addiction loss and recovery while living under intense public scrutiny? How do you reconcile taking personal responsibility for your actions while also resisting being reduced to your worst moments?

Yeah. You know, I was talking to some of you guys before we came in here, and one of the things that I was, I think that people would be the most surprised about, me is that the past six years of my life, since I got clean and sober, those years in which all of this scrutiny, I mean, descended upon me, like, you know, people say, you know, you must be used to this. Your dad's been in politics, whole life. There's nothing, nothing that I've ever experienced. I know anybody else that's ever experienced. I mean, I was on that, I think, the cover in New York Post more times in one year than anybody. in the history of the paper going back to like 1780 and none of it was good are you serious i didn't know that at one point uh the new york post was uh was publishing uh like 2.5

articles about me a day wow for like months months months long period of time and um and again none of it was good and then you're daily mail and you had the whole kind of right anyway my point being is this, is that there's scrutiny and then there's just, like, complete and utter, like, you know, living in a glass house naked, you know, with the lights on 24-7. And that's what it was like. And so it forced me to make a decision, particularly in early recovery, which was this. when I wake up in the morning, do I want to live or do I want to die? And when you choose to live, it's not that you realize you're making the choice not on your terms, on life's terms.

I choose to live on life's terms. Whatever comes my way is I got to make a choice. Because when I say live or die, I mean this, is that I still, am absolutely certain that if I touch a drink or a drug, I'm dead. It's a matter of life and death for me. Now, I think that you can relapse and people have been able to, but I don't think that I can. And so I was given that gift of utter complete desperation

to remain clean and sober. And you've been through it, and that's a beautiful, thing to have. And the other thing that it did for me is it forced me on a daily basis to realize how fucking lucky I am. You know, I don't know. I mean, I talk about it in my book. And, but it I was making a decision on a daily basis.

to kill myself, but it was the coward's way. How would you have done it? Well, drinking and drugging to the degree that I was. I was drinking, you know, a handle of vodka a day. I mean, which is worse than, you know, the amount of crack that I was smoking. The problem with the crack is the positions that you put, put you in in order to get it. That was the most dangerous part about the crack.

The most dangerous part to my physical body was alcohol by far and away in terms of the way in which um it impacts every organ in your body um and uh you know it's the only drug that you can die from other than benzos for um withdrawing from and um and so uh that's what i was doing to myself and when i got uh when i accepted the miracle of believing that there's something greater than myself that could help me get clean and sober I lived in with that realization at the front of my brain every morning that I woke up and still do and still do so do so despite the perspective that anyone would have from the outside world

understandably whether you love me or you hate me um i i would suggest if you hate me you don't know me get to know me then you can hate me um but uh regardless is that it has been um the last six and a half years despite everything that has gone on has uh been uh the most incredibly difficult but fulfilling um a period of my life Yeah. I feel, I know myself better than I've ever known myself in my whole life now. And I'm still learning. But I feel more comfortable in my skin today than I've ever felt in my skin. Good for you. Yeah. Good for you, man. Man, just, you know, doing the math. thinking about the last six years, you know, of what, what, what we've, what we've been through in this country.

And then to think about what, what you have been through in your first six years of sobriety, I mean, holy shit, dude. That is your dad's campaign, four years in the White House, and then the first year of the Trump administration. I mean, wow. That's a lot to go through for your first six fucking years of sobriety. Yeah. Congratulations. I appreciate it, man. I'm really, you know, that's a say, I know that I haven't handled it all.

You know, I'm, I'm, by no stretch of any imagination, I'm remotely, perfect, to say the least. But I am really proud. of uh you know at least that good i'm proud of my um i'm proud of my recovery good should be yeah all right honor are you ready i'm ready man where did you grow up i grew up in wilmington delaware um you know wilmington is a is about 30 minutes outside of philadelphia south of philly and uh delaware is uh as everybody knows a really small state and um when my my dad was 29 years old he uh he ran against a uh a three-term incumbent uh senator kind of named kill boggs who then became a friend of my dad's

after but uh that nobody thought that he would win he was 29 He was too young to be sworn in when he was elected. And it was 1972, and he won by a few thousand votes. And he became the youngest ever elected member of the United States Senate that wasn't appointed as they were before, like, 35. And despite the fact that my dad was a United States senator, you know, Delaware's a really small estate. and when my mom and my sister were killed in that accident

my brother and I were in the back seat and um and it's amazing I just got a letter from uh someone that said the woman and I literally just got it and when I was on I just saw it for the first time on the plane the woman and I didn't even know this story that was on um

she was an off-duty nurse and she and she drove by the scene in which we got struck by a tractor trailer that was coming down a hill on this like four-lane road or two-lane road and my mom pulled out into the intersection I guess

and and and we, Bo and I were trapped in the car and according to this note that I just got everybody assumed, just thought that we were dead. And so we were in the car for an extended period of time. And the nurse came onto the scene.

She just was a passing by. And she's the one that reached in and gave us the first aid to save our lives. Whoa. And I never met her. And you just got a letter from her? I just got a letter from one of her family's members saying that she just passed away and that she thought

that I would want to know. Isn't that amazing? Wow. Wow. Yeah. It's amazing. And literally, I have to only tell the story that it was a really, really violent and horrific event. My brother ended up in the hospital.

Both of us ended up in the hospital for an extended period of time. My biggest issue was I had serious brain trauma. and my brother was basically in the cast, a body cast for, you know, interaction for a long time. And, and, and, uh, uh, but the amazing part was, is that the Delaware's small state, I mean, the state adopted us, you know, they, I mean, really, like, I have more aunts and uncles that I grew up with. I mean, uh, and, um, and,

In that respect, you know, my dad came from a normal middle class family and he entered the United States Senate a normal middle class guy. And, you know, he said he made a vow in 1972 because it was right prior to the beginning of Watergate and he had the Spirit of Agnew and he made a pledge that he would never own. own his stock at our bond and he hasn't other than through whatever retirement account that he has with the united states government wow and he's got damn money because i have i have some legal bills that i could use some of the stocks but my point was is that you know uh despite the fact that my dad was the united states senator my whole life delaware's a really small place and um so you know if i pulled over for speeding my brother and I on the way to school you know it wasn't like oh it was like your dad Joe's gonna kick your asses you know what I mean that like that was kind of the way in

which we grew up because my dad commuted every day he decided that um my aunt moved in into the house and my uncle my uncle built a apartment above the little garage that we had and he moved in for a period of time and we spent almost every other day at least with my grandparents and so we were raised and then we got remarried when I was seven Beau was eight and and so I had pretty normal life you know and out of that tragedy I kind of gained a whole kind of extended family that maybe I wouldn't know otherwise it was a beautiful thing yeah yeah in my relationship with my brother you know i i i literally i think i one way or another except when he was in iraq for

here to talk to him my brother at least once a day really yeah we were we were um inseparable and we we used to fight and beat the shit out of each other like a brother's too but yeah yeah it was the the closest that thing i had in the world what kind of stuff we're into as a kid sports you know sports yeah wakana sports i played football but you know when i was much younger um you know i played everything but then in high school football yeah but we did everything you know i mean i mean we spent we how old are you 43 yeah so i'm 55 so you you're the tail end i mean you're actually no you're not but like we spent our lives outside from you know The rule was when, you know, when the street lights went on and you had to come in.

Yeah. And so we just literally, and whether it was, you know, summer, winter, it didn't matter. We spent their entire time outside on BMXs and skateboards and, you know, in the pond behind the house and, you know, all we did was, you know, shoot BB guns at each other. Nice. Yeah. What, I mean, what's it like growing up in, in, in. in politics and the political. Well, that's what I'm trying to say is that for us, I didn't grow up in D.C.

Yeah. You know, my dad never, he never had, I never experienced that, you know, D.C. insider. And that's maybe why I have such an amazing disdain for the people to continue to, like, you know, one of the things that you realize about D.C. and about being the United States Senator, you know, in Congress is that, you know, there are a lot of people

that give, the, the true blood, sweat, and tears to become elected. But there's, like, a permanent power class in D.C. And I'm not talking about, like, some shadow government. I mean, they're identifiable people that go from administration to administration, that go from, you know, working for, you know, one think tank to another. And my dad was never a part of that. You know, he, you know, I mean, he came home every night.

He famously hated to fundraise, and he didn't need the fundraise that much because, you know, come from a state of, you know, just under a million people. And so in many respects, a very, very normal life. You know, I went to, you know, I went to a little Quaker school, and then I went to St. Edmonds Academy, and I think I got more demerits than anyone in the history, according to somebody I just saw in the history of that school. and I went to the Catholic high school that my dad went to and then I went to Georgetown I worked for the

Jesuit Volunteer Corps when I got out of school it's like domestic peace corps you know what I mean but in terms of growing up in politics the only thing that I can say is that we had an incredible

we had a rule which was it was based out of the accident is that Bo and I could go with my dad anywhere if we asked. And we also knew enough

not to take advantage of it to the degree that it became like to get out of the math test or something like that. But we did take advantage of it to the degree we went everywhere with my dad. Really? Me, my dad, like everywhere. And the rule was, you know,

you speak when you're spoken to. And if you're going to sit in a meeting, you know, since we were five, years old is you go up and you shake somebody's hand you say um nice to meet you sir nice to meet you ma'am and then if you want to stay in the room then you you you know you sit you sit and you sit and you sit quietly until you've spoken to and we love to do that really yeah i mean so we were you know we were with my dad we went everywhere together everywhere and um uh and what a gift you know i mean like

And so we would go, get on a train with them, and we'd go, and we'd go and sit in the cloak room while he would go out on the Senate floor. But then we would leave. So unlike other United States senators and their families or congresspeople that move their families to D.C. and get a, you know, House in Georgetown and go to, you know, St. Albans and, you know, go to all the same restaurants. And Beau and I, like, you know, were a little shadow of the United States Center, but then we get back on the train and go back to Delaware. And so in that respect, it was a really unique kind of life. And I'm one that I never didn't have.

My dad's so proud. So you were, like, really close with your dad. Oh, he was so proud. You know the thing he loved to do more than anything? is take people he would literally he we would be walking in the senate um and he would run into some tours from jimini i mean like it didn't matter what state and because they'd be like asking somebody how to get somewhere he'd go come on and he would take him and he would take him to all these corners of the capital and show them like the you know the chambers that nobody gets to go in and if the

The Senate wasn't in session, he'd take him to the, you know, to the Senate floor and open other senators' desk for him. It would just be some, like, Republican, you know, tourists from, you know, Des Moines or, you know, or, you know, Omaha. I mean, literally. And I love that with my dad. He just so proud. He knew every story of every, you know, of every, of every great.

person that had come before him, and I got to sit, you know, spent a lot of time with people of names that nobody would remember, but they were kind of like our babysitters to Bo and I. And people that would kind of be shocked in terms of the politics, almost all of them, not all of them, but a great deal of them, Republicans, very conservative Republicans. I mean, I suggest if you want to read something about the way in which my dad served as the United States Senator,

go read his eulogy for Strom Thurmond. Okay. And for whoever listened to this, Strom Thurman, you know, started the Dixie Krab Party because he broke from the Democratic Party based upon their position on civil rights and on the Voting Rights Act. And over a very, very long period of time,

Strom Thurman very much changed. But he led a career that was incredibly divisive as relates. But my dad was able to work with him. And he was able to work with people like Jesse Helms. And I think that, you know, he had more success in terms of bipartisan legislation than any president in modern history. And one of the reasons is, is because he was trusted by, you know, Mitch McConnell and the people that had worked with him for decades in the Republican Party.

But anyway, that was my life. And so it was very, very normal in the respect of, like, you know, I went to Catholic Day School and went to a Catholic high school my dad went to, played football. I got in trouble. I, you know, gotten fights, you know, made it through and not completely unscathed, but, you know, with an incredibly tight-knit, close family.

And pretty idyllic childhood combined with this experience that I don't know of anybody that I know of that had at least during that period of time. I was a kid, because it was able to witness some of the things that Bo and I were able to witness it. That's interesting. Yeah, it was really, really amazing. Yeah.

How was it when... How were you in Jill's relationship? Are you... Very close. Very close. Yeah. How was it when she came into the picture when you were a kid? Sounds like you were about five?

Yeah. And so, my mom... I was just... about three. I was a month or so away from turning three when my mom died. And Bo was just before his fourth birthday. Bo and I were a year and a day apart, February 3rd and 4th. And my sister was 13 months younger. And she obviously passed in the accident. And I guess my dad and my mom met like a couple years later. And then, I think, you know, famously my dad asked my mom to marry him like five times before she said yes.

And she explains it this way, is that she was so in love with Bow and I. And she loved my dad. But she just, she was so scared that she would, that it was so. And I love that about her. I said, and I don't want to speak for my mom, but she was, but yeah, my mom is, is, Bo and I asked her, we literally got her dad by the hand and went into the room and we said, will you marry us? It was our idea to do it, yeah.

That's how, yeah. Wow. That's, I think that's when she finally said yes with the assist from Bo and I, yeah. Do you remember doing that? I had 100% remember. No kidding. Yeah. Yeah.

That's cool, man. Yeah. Yeah. And so when people say, call her my stepmom or her, she's my mom. I mean, I have my, you know. Bo and I always referred because from the age it was mommy, it was mom. And, um, and, uh, and, uh, and my mom has always been incredibly, uh, reverential about my birth mom, my neelia,

and has always given us a space to honor that. It's a hard thing to do. Yeah. We did it. Yeah. I credit all that to my dad, too. You know, being able to thread that needle, I'll tell you what. You know, he's the best dad I've ever read about, heard about,

and I swear to God, I'm not just saying that. um you know it's not an easy job and uh and uh and i'm sure he thinks he's made mistakes but but i don't um anyway so yeah that was kind of what it was like growing up so i got no excuses sean right i got you so all my fuck-ups are my own yeah that's what i've come to the termination of Hey, that's a good way to be, right? Yeah, man. Extreme ownership. Well, that was one of the questions, as I think you said,

is the accountability piece of it. Yeah. I'll tell you what. I, you know, last six years, you know, I mean, I know that we'll get to this part because it's the end of the, or at least the end of the beginning of the story is the pardon. But the, but I, I, I, I think that, you know, I've paid a price. Definitely paid a price. Yeah.

Maybe people don't think it's enough. And I don't think they will ever think that it's enough. But I promise you, and maybe you know this too, is that nobody can hold you accountable more harshly than you hold yourself. Yeah. And I've been there. over it and I'm done with it. And I'm not going to live in that guilt and shame anymore. Good for you. And I am, I'm a peace and knowing that I'm still trying to figure things out.

You know what I mean? I try to do the next right thing, but sometimes I fuck up still. I think less and less and never because of not trying. what kind of what are the discussions like at the Biden dinner table nowadays I mean do you guys talk about politics do you talk about and you believe he fucking said that

really or do you guys totally just no we're just like any other family and not at all I mean Jesus Christ I say to people you know I mean here's the bullshit is this is and maybe we'll get to this at some point

but I don't want to spend time on it because like in defense my dad got old he got old in front of people's eyes he literally lost a step like literally lost a physical step but he didn't lose

a step in terms of his capacity and his capability in terms of his intellectual ability to be the president of the United States. So all this bullshit about, you know, Joe Biden didn't know what was going on and did, I mean, find one person to go on the record, one person that is actually worked for or worked with Joe Biden. Like, here's my problem with Jake Tapper, okay, who wrote a book, you know, the other guy wrote the book

and Jake Tapper slapped his name on it but wrote a book without one single on the record source to say that it was a kind of open secret that Joe Biden was mentally incapacitated by one person Sean and I and that's the thing but what you did see is this

you saw someone become physically less robust and more frail you saw him the way that he walked in his shortened gate you saw his movements become stiffer you saw um uh a slower speech and um and that's called getting old and it happened you know i mean and i don't know if you have parents but you know i was i was shocked by it i mean i and i don't know there's one of these other things where just i think people just need to use a common

sense? Is it, it's not like it's unique. Now, here's the thing. Does that mean that he should have stepped aside, shouldn't have stepped aside, you know, the debate was like a, like, it, it blew up the whole thing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all of that stuff. But the, the fact of the matter is, is that I'm sitting here having this discussion. about, you know, my dad, when, I mean, are you kidding me? I mean, I've watched the president, current president. I mean, I've literally watched him. We all have fall asleep in a press conference that is his in the Oval Office multiple times now.

And that's not, you know, and by the way, I don't think he has dementia. And I'm not saying that at all. But he's getting old too. And I think that we, you know. Do you, I mean. How do we even start talking about this? Did I just bring this up? You just brought it off.

So I actually wasn't planning on talking about this. Gotcha. I knew he would do. But I mean, I will say that, you know, and I just, Hunter, I want to be able to speak without a you know and and so I'm just I'm gonna be blunt but you know I mean I have seen your dad on air fumble his words and seemingly forget what he's talking about but I don't think that that is I don't think that is I'm not attacking your dad I'm not yeah I think that I think there are a lot of people that have spent way too many way too many

years in politics I think Mitch McConnell is one of those people I mean when you Watch Mitch over the past year or two, there's been several examples where he totally blanks out completely. That's a very different thing, Sean. Blanks out. Yeah, no, I think that I think there are a lot of people in government right now, president included, who are too fucking old to be there. But so you come from it and the reason that I'm sitting here is I've heard you say that and you don't come from it with the cruelty. And or bullshit or having to make things up. or to say, you personally know.

Like, I've seen somebody who guys sits here and say, like, oh, yeah, we, everybody knew that he had X, Y, or Z. And it just, it makes you so angry as a son, but I've never heard you say that before. And I can say to you, is that I totally, completely can appreciate the position that you have about that. Now, I can go through a series of rationales for why, my dad decided to run for a second term, okay? Number one, he's the only guy that was able to beat Donald Trump. And this is what people, I think, that I sit and I listen to these, you know, these democratic pundits that have made millions of dollars off of just breathing hot air into a microphone

and living off of the fact that they, you know, know, they, they, they, um, carried Barack Obama's bag. Do you know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Or taking credit for, you know, running his campaign like David Axelrod does, nobody, nobody made Barack Obama except Barack Obama. Um, but they sit around and they act as if they, they know, um, uh, they know things that other people don't. And they make, well, you know, he should have just, he, he, he shouldn't have run for a second term. when they know better about the reality of the politics of the presidency, which is this, is that Joe Biden got 81 million votes.

He got more votes than anyone that has ever run for president of the United States by 7 million votes, more than anyone that's ever run. He had a higher voter participation rate than any time since 1900. Okay? And he came into the presidency, and in a two-year period of time, he passed more bipartisan legislation than any president since Lyndon Johnson, since 60 years ago, okay? He passed the PACT Act and the Chipson Science Act, and then just go down the list. He tries the Infrastructure Act, and then he passed the IRA.

He passed more legislation on a bipartisan basis, by the way, than anybody. He would have passed immigration reform if Trump hadn't kivoshed it at the end. And so he goes into the midterms, and he has the most successful midterms of any president since FDR. He limits the losses in the House of Representatives to single digits. He gains a seat in the United States Senate. It hasn't happened since 1932, and he picked up more governorships and state houses than any president since FDR since 1932 also, who worked with supermajorities. So after that, what's the decision that you make as a president of the United States? Because if you say that

you're not going to run at that time, what ends up happening is you become a lame duck. You use all the power of influence that you have. And so, based upon that success, and based upon the feeling that while he was losing a physical step, while his speech slowed, that he still had the capacity to be able to make the most important decisions that had led to the successes that he's had up until that point, he decided that he was going to run again. And then he ran. And then what happened was, is every little thing, every time he went up the steps of Air Force One, and if he used the short steps instead of the long steps, and if he stumbled when he was walking to the podium, and if he tripped over a word of a president

that he was talking about India and not Iraq. And every single thing became a New York Times level two-page exposé. The New York Times were over 100, I think, in 20 separate pieces on Joe Biden's age in a like 11-month period of time. Fox News didn't stop talking about it. And so here you are, is it you can't run away from the impression and then comes the debate.

And that was a complete and utter disaster. And he recovered in the debate, if you go back and watch the debate. He recovered in the debate and was able to, you know, get through the debate. But it reinforced every preconceived notion that people had, whether you loved them or hated him. So then he's got to make a decision about whether or not he's going to stay in the race. And the primary is over. he'd overwhelmingly won, he'd gotten a challenge from Dean Phillips, anyone could have run against him, anybody in the party could have run against him, and no one did.

Why didn't they? Because he had the most successful presidency of any Democrat or any president in his two years, in the three years that he was there, regardless of whether you think so or not, in terms of whether the affordability or whether he'd gotten inflation down enough or anybody, but just in terms of the brass tax, I mean, look at what he did as it relates to NATO. He was able to negotiate a, you may disagree with us strengthening NATO, but he was able to bring Sweden and Finland into NATO, the first separate new members of NATO since the pact was created in 1948.

I mean, whatever your position on the things that he did, he did them exceedingly well and accomplished them. And he had mistakes like every other president's had, some that I may disagree with, but absolutely 100%. It had some real failures also. What do you think some of those failures were? I think one of the failures was the way in which they executed the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I think it was an obvious fucking failure. I think 13 Marines are dead.

I think that there was a better way to do it. And I think that, and I can blame it on his general. I can blame it on the people of the way in which we did it. But my dad always knew this also, is that the buck stops with him. I think that that was a failure. I don't think leaving Afghanistan, I think leaving Afghanistan was the right thing to do. I think that in terms of the 20 years of blood that your brothers gave for an endless war in $8 trillion, is that there is a never-ending lust to continue to sell material.

and our blood, sweat, and money to a country that has never been anything but a killing ground for empires. So regardless of whether you believe that or not, the execution of the withdrawal resulted, I think, in, and by the way, you can blame part of it on Trump and that he let all those people out of the prison and tell of him, but you know what? But it stops with the president, and that's what he said. that was a mistake well how does he feel about that now same way that i do is that those lives literally are you know i mean i don't think that there's anything that um uh that uh is more and i don't want

to speak for my dad but i know my dad you know it's crushed by that crushed by it just absolutely crushed. And and I don't expect I don't expect I don't think when do we lose idea that that would be a surprise to anybody. Like for instance I disagree with George Bush on a lot of shit

when he was president but I never ever ever questioned whether or not he was a patriot, you know? Or, by the way, I guess I, who could, Patriot, what does that even mean? Is that if he could, he would do anything that he could protect people that we send a servant harm's way for our freedom. I just believe that.

And it doesn't make it any easier for the people that have lost people, for the families that have lost people, for the brothers or sister to dad, you know. I mean, shit. I don't know for certain that my brother's brain cancer was the direct result of the burn pits that he lived by for a year in Iraq when he was there. But I bet you had something to do with it. Oh, I bet I had something to do with it.

That's not like being shot. And I'm positive, but that's something to do with it. But, I mean, like, I don't want to, like, the point being is, I don't know. I think that there's a lot of things that you can't imagine the kinds of decisions that you have to make as a president. And that if you have a heart and you care. It just must be so overwhelmingly beyond comprehension, difficult. I cannot fucking stand the way the Afghan withdrawal happened. Yeah.

It, it, it, I don't even want to talk about it because it's going to get me into a really dark place. But I will say that, you know, when you have to make a decision on whether, when you have, have to make a decision and whatever decision you're going to make people are going to die yeah because of the decision that you made yeah that would be a really fucking tough call yeah so i will i will give him that yeah but yeah but the way that went down is uh i don't disagree with you sean and i don't think that uh and i again i know i was going to speak for my dad but i i would say this is that um uh i i i i hear your anger and and i'm not here to tell you that you shouldn't be angry you know and one of the things is this is that i don't think that um uh uh one of the things my dad taught me

that you learn from a guy named Mike Mansfield. He talks about it all the time, so it's not like it's a story that is one thing to question a man's judgment, and that's okay. You'd say, I think he used poor judgment. There's a decision that you made. But to question their intent, question their whether or not they came to the job

of whatever they're doing out of some, you know, mal-intent or because they're just bad people is you never get anywhere. But you can question their judgment, you know, question to judgment whether they made the right judgment or whether they were convinced by other people or maybe there's, you know, whatever the circumstance. And I don't know. But I hear your anger about that and I don't have any response to it other than the fact that I know that my dad came to it from a position of that 20 years was enough.

And it was not in the interest of anyone in the United States, particularly those that's serving, to continue to turn people through the 1% that have decided that they are going to be a part of protecting this country by holding the gun and climbing into helicopters and putting themselves in harm's way. We track our sleep, fine-tune our macros, and try every biohack under the sun, but the truth is your peak performance starts at the cellular

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Receive 30% off your first subscription order. Go to armor.com slash SRS or enter SRS to get 30% off your first subscription order. That's A-R-M-R-A.com slash SRS. Want more from the Sean Ryan Show? Join our Patreon today for more clips in exclusive content. You'll get an exclusive look behind the scenes where you can watch the guests interact with the team and explore the studio before every episode. Plus, unlock bonus content, like our extra intel segments where we ask our guests additional questions. Our new SRS on-site specials and access to an entire tactical training library you will not find anywhere else.

And the best part, Patreon members can ask our guests questions directly. Your insights can help shape the show. Join us on Patreon now, support the mission, and become part of the Sean Ryan Show's story. Well, let's get back to you. Yeah, man. Georgetown University. Did your dad ever, or your mom, I mean, what did they, did they ever talk about what they wanted you to be? Did they want you to get into politics?

Did they want you to be an attorney? No, no. But my dad wasn't like that. I mean, I kind of, you know, I always wanted to write and paint. I mean, literally, it's all. No kid. We were always into it. For a much time, I was a kid, yeah.

And I think the truth of the matter is that I never had the courage to do it. I mean, it takes a lot of courage. And people may think that that's an exaggeration. But put yourself out there through, whatever creative process that you're like privately engaged in you know i mean it takes a lot you know what i mean it's like you know i'm always amazed by people that can get up and dance in front of other people i was never that guy and but i really mean it i mean instead of seeing it as like oh they're goofy i look at them and i go god i wish i could do that one of the things that i that i knew that i loved to do but i didn't

ever have the courage to do openly i mean openly in the sense of like share it with beyond you know my brother was to paint and to write yeah when did you start that oh since I was a kid a little kid yeah I mean my I think my my aunt always used to tell me this story that my my my mom my birth mom said that that I was the poet and Bo was the politician and so maybe that was ingrained in me through that kind of a thing but that was, um, uh, uh, I, and I think that I, I denied myself that. And so I, by the way, you know, so I went to Georgetown and, um, uh, George'sin was okay, but I, I had a, everybody gets a, uh, Jesuit, when you move in to, to your freshman dorm, Jesuit lives on your

floor, a guy named Ted Deziac. And Ted Deziac, um, had started, um, had started, the Jesuit International Volunteer Corps and it was like a similar to the Peace Corps but it was kind of a branded as a under the Jesuit order but only in the sense is non-acumenical it wasn't like a you know out proselytizing it was like working in the community's social justice thing so they had a program in dangrega Belize and they had program in Micronesia and they had a program in Nepal and not a program they had volunteer opportunities in those places and so Ted Deziac and I became close with Fylo Diziac and and he we along he along with nine or I think ten other students started a summer program

which is now in like I don't know 13 different countries and there's a summer volunteer program and like for like 20 Jesuit universities all over the world. But we started it in Jesuit International Volunteer Summer Program in Belize. And so when I graduated from college, that's what I wanted to do. And I thought that I was going to go into the Peace Corps. And another guy that I was friends with Bill Watson,

another Jesuit priest. This is a young, really brilliant guys, you know, PhDs and philosophy and just amazing, amazing individuals, really dynamic people that have lived all over the world. And he suggested that I not go, there's no need to go outside of the United States is that if I wanted to serve, there was plenty of communities to serve here. And so I did the Jesuit domestic volunteer court, the JVC, Northwest. I ended up in, I was supposed to go to Indian Reservation in in eastern Washington state, and I ended up going to Portland, Oregon

and ran an emergency services center for people that basically families that didn't have enough money to, like, turn on their utilities to turn the lights or the gas or, you know, people with small or groceries. And I was, you know, I sat in the... sat in the basement of a St. Vincent de Paul church in, you know, up Martin Luther King Avenue in northwest Portland. And people would come in and I'd figure out how to get them groceries

or go advocate for them to get their, you know, their utilities turn back on or make sure their kids could get to somewhere with heat until we figured it out. And then I did that for a year. And that's where I met my first wife. And we had Naomi. shortly after that how'd you meet her yes she was also a volunteer she was in there yeah and uh and and uh and then Naomi I'm and then I kind of realized it did we're about to have a baby and um you know 80 bucks a month uh wasn't gonna cut it that's what you made as volunteer now you got to live rent free in a house with other volunteers but you got 80 bucks a month and everybody pulled their money for groceries

And even in 1992, 80 bucks a month was pretty rough, but it was amazing, it was amazing experience. And but then I went to, I decided I need to go back to school. And so I went to, I applied to two places. My brother was at Syracuse and I applied to Syracuse because they had a famous program. for a writing program at Syracuse and two schools. One was University of Iowa program and Syracuse's program.

And so I got into that writing program. But then I also got into Georgetown Law School and Duke. And I didn't know how I would be able to raise a, have a baby. It was 23. I thought I got to be a family. Man. And so we went to D.C.

And I went to law school. And then I transferred because I didn't get into Yale when I first applied. But the dean had told me that if I do really well in my first year, I would make it to, I could apply to transfer. And so like I got in. I was one of ten people. I don't know, like 5,000 applied to transfer. But I did really well. And I had my, I had Naomi on the day of my last exam, December 21st,

my civil procedure exam. And Professor Habanathi let me out of the exam, but to go have the baby. No kid. Yeah. And, and I took it after Christmas. Right on. But I did well. And then I went to Yale and we lived in a basement apartment on Court Street.

And I think we're the only, I'm the only person that got to cut the line at Sally's pizza because Flo, this is the famous Flo who sat this famous pizza place in New Haven, who has the best pizza in the world. I mean, I look like a kid. I mean, when I was 23 years old, walking around with Naomi, I mean, I went everywhere there. And, yeah, I mean, I looked like I was 16. to stop us all the time and go now when you get home tell your parents that your little sister damn needs to you know do this that or the other thing how old is she now she's 31 and she just had my um

not just 10 months ago 11 months ago she had uh willie willie my grandson congratulations yeah man how is it being a granddad uh it's uh it's the best it's incredible Yeah. Yeah. It's, and she's the best. I mean, she's an incredibly accomplished woman. Her husband is a, I love a lot. And he's a public defender. He served in, it was an active duty JAG officer for about two years when he got out of law school. And it's in the reserves now. and he's now a public defender and in L.A., and now he's a fifth-year associate in a big law firm. Yeah. Where do we go from here? Well, after that, I had a decision to make,

and I had a lot of debt. And so I had my law school debt, and I had my college debt. And so, and at the time, I remember, it was like $140,000, you know, between law school and, and Georgetown, because I'd taken out loans to go, but my dad couldn't afford. I remember my dad gave me the, for my first semester, he gave me the check. It was $7,500 for my first semester at Georgetown. And he said, this was more money than, I think, than my entire college and law school and law school. school combined. It was $7,500. And you think about it today. And that was my dad. My dad had to, in order for us to do that, he, I remember distinctly, he bought an old property

in Wilmington, in this little part of Wilmington called Greenville. And he, this will beat up a house, a beautiful house, but he bought it for like $100,000, but it had like five acres. And so, like, he sold off pieces of property. to pay for my first year of college. But then we took out loans. And so then I was married. And then I had law school loans. And the only way I was living off of it

was the money I would make as a summer associate. So when I was getting out of law school, what I thought I would do is to spend a few years and do what a lot of people that I was working with then is instead of going to the public service directly, is go work in the banking world. And I was gonna go work, I got to offer some Goldman Sachs and a bunch of other,

and I couldn't see how I'd live in the year, York City with a baby just didn't I mean I and I met somebody in Delaware that was running a big bank there and they convinced me to go work in Delaware and I went to work for a bank in Delaware and I was in the executive management program and after about two years of it I just like I was like I couldn't do it and not because it was a wonderful place to work but it's just like I just like my heart was in his name. And so I went down and I served in the Clinton administration the last two years of it. And I was executive director of e-commerce policy for the Department of Commerce when they used to call it e-commerce.

How was that? It was a great experience. I worked for Bill Daly for two years. And I traveled the world with them and e-commerce at the time was a new thing. And there was real questions about, you know, privacy, a lot of stuff that still hasn't been resolved to this day. but it was a big job and that, you know, my title was a lot bigger than my ability to affect anything. But it was a great learning experience. You know, when you were growing up, especially, I don't know, maybe from teenage years on,

I mean, your dad's a senator, you know, and I would imagine that a lot of people would try to use your dad's kids to get to him for example the bank that you worked out I know I have that they're a major donor to your dad's campaigns I mean would that would they ever who what type of people would try to use you to get to your dad how would they do I mean that's the thing is that

the reality is this is that you come to the understanding that I don't really think that there's a, that there's an industry or a, or a profession that a United States Senator doesn't have some influence over. And so, you know, the question is, is whether or not there's ever been an instance in which I've asked my dad to do anything on behalf of somebody that it's employing me or paying me. And the answer to that is no. And the proof of that is this, is that you have my digital footprint. Everybody does. The entire world has literally the entirety

of my digital footprint, every text message, every email, every phone, voicemail, every photograph, everything. And some of it, not even real, but everything for over 20, 25 years, going back to 2000. And I challenge you to find one time in which you will find one communication from me or a communication from someone in my dad's, in a position of authority in my dad's office in which you said, you know, I need you to do this because I'm getting paid. I'm not accusing you there. I know, but here's what I'm saying is, is that everybody else is, you may not

be accusing me to that, but my response to it is this, is that unlike anybody else, I'm the most transparent motherfucker you ever met. Right on. I mean, come on, man. You got it all. Everybody, I'm not you. I'm not, I'm not, but you got it. They got it all.

Everything. They got it all. Not only they got it at all, but they spent seven years investigating me with every single alphabet agency in the country and in the world. everybody. And what did they come up with? Is that I didn't pay my taxes on time for a two-year period of time in which I was an inveterate addict and I wrote a book about it and then paid my taxes with penalties and interest. And during that time, when I wrote a book, is that I bought a gun. That's it. Now, every other accusation, and I know where you're getting to and not where

you're getting to. It's not, it's a, it's a, um, I think a, an incredibly fair question, particularly at a time in which there is just such open corruption is what, you know, like, the impression that I think that the New York Post and everybody else, or even Tucker for that matter, has tried to leave people with is that I've been drifting off the coattails of my father and my brother and that I am, you know, like I went back and I worked for MB&A, MB&A, which is the largest credit card bank in the United States. And at that time, I'm, you know, and like any other bank, they had significant interest before Congress.

I worked in the General Counsel's office in MB&A. You know? I don't know what to tell you, is that there's the largest employer in the state of Delaware. I wanted to live in the state of Delaware. Now, I could have gone to work for Bank of America or I could have gone to work for Goldman Sachs or I could have gone to work for J.P. Morgan,

but they have any less of a, interest in it doesn't mean that any of those banks weren't major donators also to your day they all were but by the way but by the way what i'm saying is is that there is a here's another you know another major donor to my dad is the um uh trial lawyers so if i went to work with the trial lawyers and um and by the way i'm not saying like whoa is me oh my god my choices are so limited and things like that, I'm saying this, is that, you know, the question becomes is there any instance in which I was credibly accused of in any way of using my relationship with my father to influence him on behalf of a client, on behalf of somebody that I was being paid by?

and I can not only say no and hope that you believe me, but I can say not only no, go look, you can look at every email that I ever sent. You can look at every text message that I ever sent. So I'm not sitting there telling you and hoping that you believe me. And that's what I was talking about I think earlier is one of the real gifts of the last six years is

is it, I got, like, I got nothing to hide, John. I mean, it is all out there for anybody that wants to, you know, look at it. Now, you can continue to, people can continue to lie about me. It makes shit up. Hunter, I just want you to know that I didn't mean any, that's not where I was going with this question. No, I didn't think you were going there. I took it there. And the reason I took it there is because I founded it in,

enormous opportunity to talk to somebody who would listen about it without being defensive about it. Well, I'm going to tell you the tough questions that I'm going to ask you before we get there. I'll tell you what they are. I'm going to ask you some tough questions about Burisma. I'm going to ask you some tough questions about the laptop. I'm going to ask some tough questions about, actually, not even touch, tough questions. I'm just going to ask you to tell the story about your brother's ex-wife and you. And I think we'll have a really good discussion about addiction.

And I think the last tough questions will come towards the end when we get to the pardon. And other than that, we're just having a discussion. And so with that question, what I was actually, what I was actually, what I, what, what i was trying to get to is your old man is is in a and is a position of major influence and through my journey here just as a fucking podcaster i can see how people use my wife to get to me and i am anticipating on how they're going to try to manipulate my kids when they're old enough to get to me because i know it's going to fucking happen because i'm i'm starting to see like how people are and and when you're in a position of influence and how people turn

and change as that happens and so what i'm what i'm asking you is you know how how would people approach you how would they try to manipulate you to get to your dad and how would that make you feel well i think that there's uh that um at least in my experience there's uh there's uh there were two obvious ways in which um uh that would happen but there were the the one way is it's just a full frontal assault you know which was easy to say like i have no interest in speaking to you know where people would come and say hey can you talk to your dad about X you know I think it could be really cool for you you know what I mean and like you know this could be really great or um yeah and that was an obvious it's an obvious no it's not it's an

immediate at least in my experience is like no like I don't do that and I really don't do that and I never did do that. And regardless of whether anybody believes me or not, that 100% was the bright line rule in anything that I did in my professional career, and everybody knew that. And then the other way, however, was the most more insidious way, which I'm sure that, you know, whatever level that you're talking about in terms of your own familial relations and as you become more influential or as your influence has grown, is just a much more insidious way.

I'm about people that you believed to be honest, straightforward, interesting, in which you figure out, though, at some point, that they have an agenda and they have an agenda that's all about them and not about you personally

but about what you that what your wife can do for them as it relates to you but you find that out pretty quickly and and you know and that's really kind of easy to figure out

at some point when my dad was a United States center. Because I was, I was, you know, highly aware of it. My whole life is that he had the capacity to do things. Like, for instance, getting people into the Naval Academy. United States Senator, as you know, the capacity, that they have a, they get to choose choose, what is it, two candidates per year?

Shit, I don't know. Yeah, I think that's how it works. And Jeremy or anybody else can explain it better. But they have a, I think every United States Senator has the, on an annual basis, picks two for every service academy. They can appoint two people. And so a lot of the things that my dad did as it relates to things like that, realizing that there's an enormous room for abuse of that, is like he created.

a independent panel of people and took the decision out of his hands to be able to do that. And I just used that as an example of the ways in which, you know, and one of the rules in my family, not just didn't apply to me and applied to anybody to my family, is that if you're working for somebody, if you're getting paid for somebody, don't come into my dad's office and ask anybody to do anything on behalf of those people that you're being paid to work for, regardless of how good the cause. is, regardless of how righteous you may feel that it is. But that was the role.

And so those are the two kind of obvious ways that, one less obvious, one in which, you know, there's like a level of seduction that occurs, and where people sometimes even unwittingly overstep a boundary. that at least that I would have or anybody else in my family would have. And then there's the ways in which I now only in retrospect have become kind of fully cognizant of that are much, much more sophisticated in terms of the ways in which you can be manipulated. by people, sometimes wittingly, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes, you know, you know,

but I think that there's much more sophisticated ways of doing that. Could you give me an example? Yeah, want to get to Burisma? Yeah, let's get to Burisma. Okay. So here's the, you know, I... Could you start off with just describing what is Marisma? Okay.

What was it? But let's step back from Burisma, okay. All right. Is this, is that I leave the Commerce Department in that job, okay? And I was, you know, I worked at the end of the Clinton administration from 1998 to, you know, left in January of 2001. And I started a law firm, my own law firm. And I did kind of advisory work for, as related to the, you know, what I knew about, privacy in the new world of e-commerce. And there was an enormous amount of opportunity in that at that time because it was the dot-com bubble.

And so I had a lot of people that I had gone to college with and law school with and on papers that were, like, killing it. You know what I mean? They were, you know, they started dot-com, whatever. And it was, you know, and there was an enormous need for legal representation and understand. of the kind of regulatory framework that these new e-commerce, you know, entities were going to operate. And so I started a law firm with that in mind. And then, you know, it was the dot-com bubble burst. And I had a friend, a Jesuit priest, who had become president of of St. Joseph's University at the time.

And they had a program in which they got an earmark, what they called it at the time. And for a program in which they sent their graduate education students into the poorest school in Philadelphia, in which they sent basically student teachers and to fill in the gaps in Overbrook High School and the Overbrook School system. And they'd been doing it for years.

And if you know anything about Jesuit universities, there's the oldest organizations almost, I mean, they're almost always the oldest community organizations in any city that you go to. So whether it's St. Joe's in Philadelphia or whether it's been there for 120 years or Georgetown University, which has been there for 200 years

or University of Denver that's been there for, you know, I mean, you'd go down University of San Francisco, been there 140 years. Detroit Mercy had been there for, you know, it's the only university left inside the city limits of Detroit. So father, the president of the university asked me if I could help him do that. And I did. And I helped him in kind of navigating Congress, the House of Representatives,

in terms of figuring out who his representative was worse, I think was Chaka Vata at the time. and where it would go in an earmark, and they got the, I don't know what it was, $50,000, you know, a semester to be able to send students to fill in the gaps in this impoverished school system. And then he referred me to the president of Detroit Mercy, and Detroit Mercy was the only, it was a dental school, but it was the only dentist. in the entire city of Detroit at the time. So every other dentist had moved out to the suburbs. But within the city limits of Detroit, there literally was not one dentist office.

And so what they wanted to do is they wanted to take the dental school, which was serving the community at the time, free, and do mobile dental clinics so that they could do preventative care throughout these neighborhoods. And so I helped them to get the money for that. And then I went to, and then I got referred to, Xavier and Xavier University they had a veterans program where they took disabled

vets that were coming back from from Iraq and Afghanistan and that this is like 2004 at the time and the veterans community in which they gave them a they enrolled them at Xavier University but they also had them do community work as it related to I forget what the exact what it was but it was for disabled vets in Xavier University So I helped them get money to do that And the list goes on And I ended up representing like, I don't know I think it was at the height of it

Like 14, 15 Jesuit universities And that was my entire practice I was really proud of it Wow. Yeah That's solid work And then at that time I went on the board of Amtrak I became the vice chairman

And I actually got elected to be the chairman of the board of Amtrak After serving on it for over seven, six years And I had by that time gone on to the board of the U.S. UN World Food Program, which was the largest humanitarian organization in the world, serving 80 million people a day in 72 different countries, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. And I had eventually became chairman of that board. I was the vice chairman of the board for Truman National Security Project,

would put veterans that were looking to enter political office, and we supported them, the Center for National Policy, and became an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in the master's program. And I taught a course called The Art of Advocacy in outside of government. It was the idea that you could, the way in which you could use your influence to be able to do good things for good people.

And so one of the case studies that we used for that was the creation of PEPFAR in the way in which you had bipartisan support to institute a policy, which eventually has saved over 25 million lives. Wow. And I taught that class for four years, and then my dad went for president, lost, and then Obama picked him to be vice president. And in so doing, he had a group of people that I find to be really distasteful in hypocrites, but they said that I needed to give up my, because it was, you know, I was working for these universities, but I was assisting them both in the legal and the policy perspective and lobbying to help them get money to do these programs. And, you know, so, you know, it was, you know, I was a lobbyist.

And so I voluntarily, but with a lot of pressure from them, none from my dad, had to give up that business. And so I basically started back in square one. And I started a consulting firm because I also stepped down from the Board of Amtrak because they said that that was a conflict of interest. and they were concerned that it was conflict of interest. So you had to shut pretty much everything down because the fact that your dad just took VP.

And I had to rebuild. And I don't have any savings. Three girls, all private school at the time, and, you know, don't have any money. And so anyway, regardless, not in a different position than a lot of people is I had to figure it out again. And so what I did is I started a consulting company,

but mainly focused on infrastructure in rail because I knew a lot about rail by this. point, having served on the board of Amtrak for as long as I did. And there was a lot of potential private projects that were going on as it would, that, you know, have all fizzled out over the years. But I worked, I represented a really old, large Midwestern infrastructure, um, uh, from like guys who actually, you know, dig the tunnels and, and build the rails. And, um, and I, uh, and I, And I advised them from, you know, projects in, anywhere from Baltimore to, you know, Beijing, if they were interested, with just an understanding of how the process works.

And so that was, that was what I did. I was consulting on basically infrastructure projects and things like that. And then I began to consult for groups that were looking to raise capital. So infrastructure private equity firms that were looking for institutional capital to put into the private equity firms to be able to invest in infrastructure projects, mainly all domestic. And so I partnered with someone that had a long-term experience. One of my partners got a series seven. We started an investment advisory firm on top of the infrastructure advisory firm. And that's what we did for, you know, as I taught, as I was.

chairman of the board of the world food program as i was vice chairman of the board of the center for national policy the true national security project you know i was on the board of catholic charities i was on the board of about i think at least a dozen if not more uh you know uh small medium large uh major institutions and so you know i mean for instance on board of amtrak i was the chair of the corporate governance board for six year period of time and i also took a job as the as of counsel to at the time i think was probably the most significant law school law firm in the in the country which was boy schiller flexner and i was of counsel boyce shillard flexner and i focused on corporate governance yeah and so that's when we come to barisma and the way that beresma came to me

was through a partner a guy that i had not went on a partner as much as it a potential partner who I had a great relationship and then anyway it doesn't matter he just got a pardon from Donald Trump what did he get pardoned for no he ripped off some a Native American tribe and some

bond deal they did with some grifter and anyway I mean, a huge disappointment. But anyway, he introduced me to Burisma. And Burisma, this is right after the Russians, I mean, the Russians started taking Crimea, but they had made inroads into Dombasa and Dinesk. And remember, they were that significant incursion past Crimea into the eastern part of Ukraine.

And Burisma was the largest independent, completely independent natural gas driller in Ukraine. And naphtgas, which is probably one of the most corrupt organizations' worlds, is the state-owned natural gas entity in Ukraine. And one of the things that is beyond the potential rare art minerals, the most lucrative commodity in Ukraine, other than the level of education of their other population is natural gas. And Burisma was under direct threat from Putin.

I mean, that's basically why Putin wants, that particular part of Ukraine also, is the natural resources and also the fact that he runs pipelines through Ukraine to Europe. And there was a board member who's a guy named President Kwasnavsky, who is the first democratically elected president of Poland outside Lekvalenza, after Lekwilenza, who wasn't democratically elected, but the, in a champion of democracy in a post-Sylviet Europe, eastern Europe. And he was on the board, and he made an argument to me that they were worth representing because I said that I would talk to them if they wanted to talk to me

about representation through Boyz Schiller. And there was an enormous amount of subject matter expertise in Boyz Schiller. There are two partners that were very steeped and that had worked both at the CIA and the State Department and in the last administration that were very steeped in Ukraine and issues as relates to Ukraine. And that's what lawyers do. And so, I said, you should talk to them. And they did. And they came in through me as a, you know, the referring partner, you know, of counsel, member, you know. And in talking to them, you know, I became convinced by President Klofniewski that I should join the board.

And he said, look, the CEO of the company is not a, is no, you know, angel, but he's not one of the bad guys. He's a guy that's under threat from the real bad guys. The Dmitri Firtaches of the world who were controlling naphtagas and, you know, was wanted up until, I think, like, three days ago, you know, extradited by the United States for, I don't know, 47 different RICO charges in bribery, and is connected directly to, you know, to Putin who had been basically siphoning all the money of naphtagas back into Russia.

Those are the people that he was, that the CEO of Burisma were set up against. And they were like wolves at the gate in trying to take over Burisma. And he said, you know, and you just simply by being on the board would be a message. It would be a message. And I'll tell you what, is that it is well worth your while. And so two things, is that I did believe in it. I'd done a Crowell report, and I'd done a Nordello security report on the firm while I was at Boychiller, and working for them as an attorney for about two-month period of time before they asked me to go on the board.

And then he made a real push for me to go on the board, and I made the decision to go. on the board. And this idea that I didn't have any expertise, or I didn't know what I was talking about, or that I didn't have any experience with Boers, or that I didn't speak Ukrainian, or I didn't know about the night. I mean, it's all bullshit, all complete and utter absolute bullshit in which they try to paint me as not having as much experience as, you know, Don Jr., who just got a $695 contract from a $695 million contract for a startup private equity firm for a startup drone company that he's, you know, with 30 employees, you know, in like, I mean, I, I am almost beyond offended, you know, the idea that certain people in the, in that world have

painted of me as being a near-do-well, you know, kind of drifter that, you know, but it's kind of the board. Was it a mistake to go on the board? Yeah. Yeah. It was absolutely a mistake, not because of anything that I did that I am embarrassed about or in any way whatsoever feel conflicted about as it relates to what I did for Burisma, but because of the political position that put us all in. They use that as the toe in the door to be able to call my family, the Biden crime family, without any evidence. The person that said that Joe Biden took a bribe to, like, you know, protect Burisma, is sitting in a jail cell, sitting in a jail cell for lying to the FBI. And meanwhile, it still is this like lingering.

question that people have about Burisma. So I guess before I continue to just, like, go on, is that what do you think happened in Burisma? I mean, I think that, I mean, just a little more context on Burisma. I mean, Burisma, would it be fair to say that Burisma could have potentially supplied the vast majority of natural gas to Europe? No. No. No, not. Absolutely not. Bresma is almost all of Bresma's natural gas supply that production was internal to Ukraine, a Ukrainian industry. Okay, yeah.

But that could have supplied. That could have been a major supply to do all of Europe, correct? Well, only if they wanted to drain Ukraine of the vital natural gas that they need to run their economy. But, yeah, but no, Burisma did not have the capacity was not large enough to supply all the natural gas needs of any way, shape, close, even remotely of the needs of Germany alone. The production was not nearly that big, no. Could it have been, though, if we built up the infrastructure? Were the resources there that could have implemented that kind of infrastructure to allow that?

If you build up the infrastructure of naphtagas, the state-owned company, potentially, yes, but not even remotely for Brezman, no. I think that, I think that if, look, if I was the owner of a company that had that kind of resource, I would very much want the president of the United States son on my board. Oh, by the way, Sean, I don't, there's no doubt. Or vice president. at that time. Yeah, but by the way, not for any specific endgame like that. I'm absolutely certain that that was not. I think that what he was afraid of is that he was going to get killed.

I'm positive that the CEO was not by anybody in the United States is that he was going to get killed by Putin. And so he 100% thought that by bringing me on board, number one is that I was absolutely qualified. Number two is that I demanded that we'd be transparent about it. you realize I went on the board, and I put out a press release, saying that I went on the board. I wasn't hiding it from anybody, and who else was on the board? And I'm absolutely certain that part of the reason that he wanted me on the board was for protection.

He thought that if at least that he was associated with that name, that it would give him some protection from the forces of the Russian forces writ large that were out to literally bury him. So I don't have any doubt about that. Was there some, all I know is this, is that I serve my five years on the board, no one ever asked me to do anything that my dad had any control of. In three of the years in which I was on the board, three and a half of the years, which I was on the board, my dad wasn't in office. I took that job because it afforded me the opportunity to do two things.

Number one is that I felt incredibly comfortable serving on a board just from a capacity and the confidence of being able to build a value that I was being paid to do something that I had the capacity and was capable of doing. number one. At number two, it gave me freedom because they paid me a fucking lot of money. And my brother had just been diagnosed with a, with cancer, and a incurable form of cancer. And so it gave me an enormous amount of space to be able to spend time and do that. And I'm not saying, like I did it for my brother, I'm a saint, and that's the only reason I did it. That's bullshit. I did it because it paid well, and I knew what at the least. lines were. And that's what I did. Do you think that it would have been in our intelligence agency's best interest for you to be on that board? No, I now... Not that they manipulated you, just do you

think it would be in their best interest to have it? In our intelligence, it's... I think it ends up being that it was in a lot of people's best interests that were not mine, nor my father's. So it could be... Yes. That all of these things are true at the same time. What being, all of what things? That intelligence agencies wanted you in there, that, that, that it, that the, the, the, the, the guy that wanted protection, he wanted you in there for protection and also wheeling and dealing in the future. Yeah, I think that all these things, you know, could, could, uh, yeah. be true at the same time.

Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that you're right. And, you know, I refrained from doing this in terms of like the what-aboutism. It said, I didn't go work for the Ukrainian government. I didn't go work for, for instance, the Saudis. I didn't go work for the Albanians. I didn't go work for the Serbians. I didn't go work for the Emirates.

I didn't go work for the Gattaris. I didn't take money for the people. purposes of changing U.S. policy as it relates to weapon systems or individuals that were murdered or anything like that. And I got paid a amount that I was transparent about what I got paid. I served my five years on the board, three of which were when my father was not in office in any shape or form. And then I left. And so whether those things could have happened as it relates to me? Sure. Are those things happening not just in front of our faces, but like you might as well be coming and slapping us in the face. Jared Kushner is right now

negotiating a peace deal with the Ukrainians and the Russians with direct interest as it relates to the energy interest inside of Russia and their partners, whether it's in India, the Saudi Arabia, or what's going about to happen with Nord Stream Pipeline, a direct interest of which he's been taking $2.5 billion from partners to impact those changes. I served on a board for two years. You have every email that I've ever sent, every text message that I've ever sent,

every single communication that I have ever had, including during that period of time. And there is not a single communication, other than the one thing that they hungler had on is a guy that was in Washington, D.C. at the time, was the secretary of the board, said, hey, Hunter, thank you. It was nice meeting your dad.

And when she was walking out of a restaurant, and my dad was walking into a restaurant with me, and I introduced the two of them. And that's it. They started an impeachment investigation over this. I think one thing, one question that a lot of people have is the 10% for the big guy remark. Not for me.

And I'll tell you exactly what it was. It's from a guy named James Gileard, along with Tony Bobbillis, something. Bobelinski. Yeah, Tony Bobolensky, who claims to have known me so well. You know how many times I met Tony Bobelensky? Maybe four, maybe three times? In which I told him to go fuck himself

and that I wouldn't do business with him? In which they're negotiating a deal. not having, by the way, anything to do with Burisma. Nothing to do with Burisma. It had to do with a entity that was starting a U.S. entity of a Chinese energy firm in which they wanted to partner and create an investment vehicle. And James Gileard sends a email, not me, sends an email to six other people, including Tony Belmolinsky, and which I'm C-Ced on,

in which he proposes equity splits, of which he says 10% for the big guy. And I don't know what James Gileard was referring to, but I know this, is that that structure, that proposed group of people, a proposed partnership to do, like, an energy, number one was occurring when my dad was out of office. and was not a candidate for president and was two years away from being vice president

and his career public service according to everybody else was over so number one who gives a fuck who gives a fuck number two I didn't say that and number three it never happened so 10% for the big guy

go fuck yourself my dad has been my dad has given what 32 years 40 years of his tax returns. You have every tax return I've ever had. Everyone. You can go find them on the internet.

I had the DOJ. I had the FBI. I had grim tax. I had the Oversight Committee. I had the Judiciary Committee. I had the Ways and Means Committee in both the House and the Senate. I had the U.S. Attorney's Office in L.A. and D.C. in Baltimore, in Delaware, in Pittsburgh,

all investigate me. Holy shit. All of them, at the behest of Donald Trump beginning in 2017. And what did they come up with? So you think that there is like some hidden 10% for the big guy? Because this motherfucker, Tony Bobolensky,

who's some, you know, want to be, you know, a soldier who tried to convince me that he was a part of the, did what you did with one of those guys? It maybe is. I don't go, I don't know, but all I know is every guy that I've ever met that did what you did never told me that they did what you did or try to impress upon me that they did. And that's why I told Tony to go fuck himself. They never did a deal with anybody that suggested 10% for the big guy, which by the way, again occurred when my dad was neither vice president nor president and was never going to be in public life again, even if he was.

I'm not banning James Gileard. If James Gileard sent that and his intent was, maybe he's going to be able to get the former vice president of the United States to be, you know, somehow involved in this, then why would you be able to say that? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? He's selling, I mean, I will be surprised

if when they leave this White House, that the copper pipes are still in the walls. I'm not joking. It is the most openly corrupt, and everything that they do, Sean, is projection or confession. So I'll say it to you again, is that I believe that it was a mistake because I was very, very naive about what a viper's den Ukraine is. What an absolute, like, talk about a, like a level of corruption that I'm still staggering. because they're part of a kleptocracy, of a greater kleptocracy, which is, you know, I mean, what? Russia is nothing more than a, you know, a country mass, a gas station masquerading as a country, as John McCain used to say, with one person that is the ultimate don't don't of all dons.

And I don't mean Trump's. I mean, I mean, don't. And that's Putin. in which so getting involved in that anyway even though it was through a private company even though I served on the board even though you have every communication I've ever had even though you have testimony

thousands of hours of testimony from anybody that's worked for my dad under oaths by the way under oath so when Tony Bobolinski under oath went before the

oversight committee what did he have to say what he had to say what what crime under oath did he accuse me of he didn't he didn't because he was under oath but then you know what he did he went on to fox news and tuck carlson and accused me of crimes and then davin went to um uh you know to Tucker and he literally stuck his lips around the ass of Don Jr and Eric and he got a and he got a pardon out of it. And so did his partner that ripped off the Indian tribes to the tune of millions and millions and millions of dollars, of which they were absolved from having to pay back.

I think it was like close to $100 million. I don't know the exact number. So, you know, don't sue me. I really don't. And I don't know anything about other than is that everybody under oath, everybody in the court of law, look I was I had a special prosecutor there was a independent investigation from a special prosecutor of the only U.S. attorney left in the United States that was appointed by Donald Trump that my dad

left in place and when he was a U.S. attorney in Delaware he came to the conclusion that no charges should be brought against me and I went to a um a a a a a a a we came to a resolution in which I was going to plead guilty to two misdemeanors of failing to file my taxes on time because I'd already paid them back with penalties and interest. I paid over $800,000 in interest and penalties because during 2016 and 17 or 15 to 16, I forget, because the years, is that I literally was out of my mind and I thought that it was being taken care of me, whatever the reason I didn't pay my taxes. And when I figured out that I did in 2019, when I came out of recovery, the first thing that I did, I went to an accountant and I said, you know, I got to figure out my taxes.

And they gave me the number at the end of the day. And as soon as I got the number of what I owed with penalties and interest, I went to the United States government and I borrowed the money and I sent them the check. Four years later, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, five years later, three days before the statute of limitations ran. They charged me after coming to a negotiated settlement with me and a plea deal. They blow up the plea deal because MAGA went nuts and they decided to charge me with seven counts of tax evasion

that would have resulted in over 35 years in prison for taxes that I paid with penalties and interest. I can't find one single case as precedent in which someone similarly situated was ever charged. Roger Stone didn't pay taxes for, I think, like eight years and had secret bank accounts. At the same time, secret foreign bank accounts, I believe. And I'm like, I don't know, Roger, so, you know, again.

And they came to a settlement. They never, the United States government never informed me that I was being audited. They never audited me. I informed them we called them and said hey we can't find the transcripts my accountant's did

for 2017 and 18 I forget what the two years are they're 17 and 18 because I went in the 19 and said and they said huh and then we figured out that my accountant had done the taxes and sent them to an office that was empty and then he died, my accountant. So I got a new accountant in LA when I came

out of my two years of like, you know, my crack addiction. And I took care of the wreckage of the past. And I took responsibility for what I did. And that's why they decided that they were not going to charge me because they couldn't find any criminal intent in what I did or any way in which I was truly trying to evade my taxes because I came to them. But they blew up the plea deal and they not only charge me with that, but then they charge me with a 922G3 violation that's never been used against anybody except me other than people that go and purchase a gun in the commission of a violent felony, in which they also find that they can show that they were addicted to a substance or user of a Schedule 1 substance.

Shit. Ever. how many people that you know smoke pot and own guns regularly a lot a lot right they're all in violation of 922 g3 every single one of them

they charge me with three different charges under that again 35 years in prison three different charges no I challenge anybody out there find anyone else and by the way the Supreme Court's about to overturn the constitutionality of

922 G3 based on Second Amendment and Bruin and the case of money. And so it's not going to even be, I think, constitutionally viable within the next four months. Wow. But they took that and they charged me with it. Now, how fair do you think that that is when the only way that they became informed of the fact that I purchased a gun is through a group message from the gun shop owner, Don Jr., and a former state police officer that heard a story about me

throwing away, someone throwing away a gun that I'd purchased 10 days before that I owned for 10 days in a lockbox, in my truck that was never loaded and never fired. Five years later. Wow. Five years later.

That's how that came about? Yeah. A conversation with three people. Yeah. According to the there's this incredible investigative reporter that like dug up all of this stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. Incredible. They put it on some right-wing blog. And then the U.S. attorney came to it. And you know what the U.S. attorney did? Is they came to the right decision in after three years of that investigation of which they had been investigating me for over five years.

And they came to first a non-prosecution agreement, and then it was called a diversion agreement, saying, technically, they believe that I violated the law. So I would agree not to buy a gun. And they spent three years investigating whether you did any drugs when you bought that weapon. They never found that I did drugs when I did that weapon. You know what they did?

They put me in front of a jury, and they took my book, and they played the audio version of my book, in which I talk about my addiction during that period of time. And they just mash it all together. Now, 922G3 under any standard is a state of mind question, right? Are you addicted to?

Are you a user of a controlled substance? Well, I may have been an addict in the past. Am I addicted to or a user of a controlled substance? Right now? If I went to your range and fired a gun, would I be in violation of 922G3? No. No? According to their standard, I am.

And I will forever be. Have you had or do you have friends that have struggled with alcohol or illegal substances that have owned guns during that period of time? Yes, I do. And do you know people personally that may have had substance abuse problems that own guns at that time? And do you believe that the federal government should have the right to put them in jail for 10 years? If on a form, they said when they bought the weapon that they truly believed that they had overcome their addiction. Because no addict believes that they're an addict when they're not using. But it didn't matter.

They wanted to get me for something. they got me for something. And what they did is they put, they embarrassed me. They spent the entire trial and, for instance, you said that you wanted to talk about the relationship that I have with my sister-in-law. Like, my God, I'll tell you what, they put her on the stand. Talk about my addiction. It was fucking awful. It was awful. And one of the most difficult things for me in my entire life is how much I fucked that up. I mean, two people in a state of grief out of their fucking minds, me in particular, thinking that they had found the solution to the bleak, you know, the positions that they found

themselves in, the thing that they loved the most. And that's all I can say. And it was an enormous mistake, and I take full responsibility for it. And I am beyond embarrassed what I put my family through. Beyond embarrassed what I put my family through. But in the moment, it was not some, like, sick whatever. It was literally grasping for some, like, for life, for grasping for something. Grasping for some chance at, like, at a living again.

But you know what? Like, you judge me? Not you. Just anybody? Do you ever known anybody to be able to go through, like, a grief like that? And it's fucked up. you do fucked up things because i certainly did and i've been paying for them i've been paying for them for a long time now and i'm done i'm done killing myself over it i think that there is a side to what

happened there that nobody's heard and that's why i want to bring that up because i think that I think people need to hear that. Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. Because the way it's described in there is definitely not the way it's described in the media. No.

You know? And, you know, without injecting my opinion on anything, I think it's going to change a lot of opinions. When they hear, when they hear, you know when they hear all of the details when they hear the story when they hear why when they hear what you were going through when they hear what she was going through it just paints it's just it's just a it's a different picture than than what has been portrayed through the media yeah you know and i will i mean i we can talk about it but i will tell you this is that um many ways

part of it's not my story to tell in the level of pain that I in a that that caused my family and and by the way it still does in terms of is something that is really really really really it's tough but I can tell you this It was not, I almost don't feel like I owe, I understand what you're saying, is oh, these people that judge think that they have a judgment about it and explanation in any way other than this. Is it two people desperate to find a way out? And clung to each other.

as being the nearest thing to the thing that they both valued the most in the world and lost. And that's the answer to that. And it was an attempt to keep something alive that was permanently dead. And just a gigantic miscalculation about the way in which that would impact. fact the the ecosystem of the rest of my family and um and i am uh all i know is this is that um on everybody else than it has been on me and uh but i think that we're you know in a place it's very different now in which there's been a lot of healing but you know uh i take full accountability for that is bow's death what sent you down

The path of addiction? Hmm. I think that what it did is just sent me down the path of addiction. Anything, I think, I don't know, your experience as it relates to addiction to people in your life, your own life, is that you don't need much of an excuse to use. You know, it could be sunny, it could be raining. You could be up, you could be down.

But what Beau's death, did do to me was it sent me down a path of nihilism that I'd never experienced before in which nothing mattered and when it all fell apart. And in the immediate aftermath of Beau's death, there was a sense of real purpose. But then my marriage of 22 years began to falter, and I ended up on my own for the first time in my life. literally, in terms of living alone for the first time of my life. Because remember, I left, I went to college, the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, got married, had a baby, had two more, and, you know, and, and I, in that period of time,

directly after post-death, is that I didn't have the availability of my dad for the first time in my life, and that he was so like me. I mean, grief is a solitary journey in many ways as much as you try to cling to people. I think one of the reasons is that people, when they lose a child or, you know, a couple, is that they sometimes lose each other. And for a period of time there, I felt like I'd lost my dad.

I'd totally like I'd lost the entire structure of my existence. And so, you know, and I grasped towards one thing that was and not in a nefarious, purient way in any way to someone that was the nearest thing to what my brother was. And we, I did grasp for each other. And I, and my addiction completely 100% fucked that up. And it was awful.

and so I do know that Bo's death didn't make me an addict but by my own actions, by the circumstances that I found myself in, by the depth to which I didn't think that there was a way out, it certainly was a factor what sent me down a rabbit hole that I'd never gone before, which was completely wanting to disappear from the face of the earth. It was awful. You know, I think that people have this vision of, you know,

that it's kind of funny when Marjorie Taylor Green shows pictures of me and, you know, naked and, you know. By the way, 90% of which is like, aren't selfies. People taking pictures of me passed out in a bathtub with a crack pipe. You know, I wasn't taking pictures of myself, you know, remotely while I was, you know, passed out. And, you know, but whatever the case may be is I don't do anything but cry when I think about those times. Not for anybody but myself. I mean, it was, it was truly demoralizing. I mean, I am, what people, I don't think, fully comprehend about addiction, if they're not the direct addict, that sometimes can take you to a place in which all you're doing is just thinking about getting high or thinking about how you're going to get high, thinking about how you're going to cover up getting high, and thinking about how you're going to come down from getting high.

and then it becomes just this round-the-clock thing in which it's not even about getting high it's about not dying it's literally about the feeling that if I don't if I don't I cannot I cannot get up from this bed unless somebody hands me a drink

in order for my body to function and and that's the level to which I found myself for a long period of time I mean relatively in anyone's life like the fact that i didn't die i believe is a miracle how many times do you think you were

close to death no dozens dozens whether it was by um you know like finding my places in which people were pulling guns on me to um uh to putting one time i woke up in a uh you know face down in a full, you know. And I don't even remember that, but that's what they told me. You know, I, by anybody's standards, was, yeah, I mean, I talk about it. Very descriptive. Very descriptive in the book.

And the reason is, you know, people kind of make fun of me about that. And when I talk about, like, I search the carpet for drugs. And the point of this story is not that it's some fucking funny story for you to laugh about. And, you know, Laura Ingram to go, ha, ha, hi, he's a crackhead. And, you know, Donnie Jr. and, you know, these guys are all fucking tough guys. That, you know, like, you know, because they go to UFC fights. I tell those stories because, you know what, I think I know, I know. I'm positive that people write me and say thank you. Thanks for sharing that because in the program

that I come from is that the one thing that keeps you trapped is your secrets. It's the things that you did in the dark that nobody else knows about except the people that you were in that motel room with like crawling around on the floor for hours looking for crumbs of crack cocaine. until your hands and your fingernails get bloody. If I can tell you that, in front of everybody, write a book about it, and my dad is the president of the United States,

and I came from a place of incredible privilege. What I'm trying to tell you is that you have nothing to be ashamed of if you've then figured out how to get clean and sober. All I have is respect for. you. Doesn't mean that I don't think that you should be held accountable for the shit that you did that was stupid while you were high. But I want to tell you something is that if you were me, if you were me, you know, calling through the cut down in, you know, at 3 a.m. in downtown L.A., you know, with a gun to your head, begging somebody to sell you

crack and you made it out of that fucking more power to you and fuck anybody that fucking would make fun of you for it that you can't talk to anybody about it fuck you and fuck all those people that judge over it you can judge me for the decisions that i that i made and for the fuck-ups but I've been paying the price and I take responsibility for those things and I fully fully have been transparent about it

for the pure purpose is that we are only as sick as our secrets man and I know that what the gift that has been given to me is that I don't have to I don't have any more secrets not a one

not a one Wow I live the same I was not expecting to like you this much I mean dude I just we got a lot more time I still can fuck that up I promise I mean I just I mean I'm not fucking around man I live by that

that i have talked about damn near everything publicly and i don't have any secrets left yeah but i've talked about how fucked up i was on my cocaine addiction on my benzos on my sleeping pills on my booze on my woman eyes all of it it's all fucking out there yeah and you know when you what i realized is every every fucking skeleton in that closet that you release out into the world it's like free and part of your soul man yeah because what are you going to do come at me i don't give a fuck it's all out there yeah i got nothing left to lose buddy and by the way it doesn't mean that you're fucking proud of it yeah what it means is is that you're free of it you're free of it and it also sets an example for others to follow and just like you're said you just like you just like you just said you know

coming from where you've come from with with with with your dad being the president of the united states i mean there that is a that is a tremendous amount of shame because of the expectations that have been put on you by society because of the because of the the the position that your family members are in yeah and so to come out and to have the courage to say yeah i fuck this up this is what happened this is the description this is how i saw it and this is is how I lived and to be that open about it. I mean, then I know how much courage that is. Actually, maybe I don't because I don't have any family members in that type of a position.

But I mean, but I'm in an influential position and to do to come clean on all of those things. And I mean, shit, just the other day I had to do something where I fuck something up and I talk shit about somebody that I should, a group of people that I shouldn't have. I had to come clean. I did it. also did the same damn thing to kamala harris who i couldn't fucking stand and i did a public apology anyways addictions and in all of that all of that all of that all of that stuff and how bad it gets and yeah scrounging around for drugs and going to get more in the thrill of finding it and all i mean i get i could i could i could go for days about that stuff but um and maybe

we will yeah but i do want to commend you you know for coming clean and and and and and being that open about it, because most people will never see that kind of courage. I really appreciate that, man. And I really mean it. I know that you're surprised by that, but coming from me, that means a lot. Thank you.

You're welcome. Yeah. Let's take a break. Yeah, man. My days don't slow down. Between work, the gym, and time with the kids, I need eyewear that can keep up with everything I've got going on, and that's why I trust

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You've seen her many times on the show. She's going to give unfiltered insights on global terrorist activity. For Patreon exclusives, you're going to get epic range days with me and damn near every guest that's come in the studio. You're also going to get behind the scenes content and guest updates. You're going to get first dibs on new merch drops and limited edition items that will never be sold again. Plus, exclusive offers from our partners you won't find anywhere else. So subscribe to the Vigilance Elite Newsletter right now. All right, Hunter, we're back from the break. Getting ready to dive into the life of a crack at it. Absolutely. Mine was Coke,

but I'll dive in there with you. And same thing, just a little bit different. yeah well you started with coke right uh yeah i mean basically but the um when i really uh i went uh i went straight to to crack when i like decided that i was gonna drop off the face of the earth go full time yeah yeah did you do did you i'm just curious did you partake in any drug use as a child? Yeah, I, you know, I tried everything, but I didn't, nothing stuck, nothing stuck like alcohol. Nothing. Yeah.

I mean, I had tried Coke, I, you know, I don't, you know, the one drug that I'm 100% certain that I'm incapable of handling. Which one? Pot. Really? Are you serious? I mean, like a great. like a great addict is like I am absolutely certain of it because after 400 failed attempts

and being curled in a ball like you know hugging my you know on the tile floor in a bathroom it literally makes it it is the it's one of the only drugs I clearly cannot in any way metabolize without literally turning me into a complete and utter incompetent I just turned into a total fat ass on that. You can't stop fucking eating. I mean, I literally become so anxiety written. It's really... Well, that happens too.

My friend Eddie Gallagher posted a diagram of a joint once. And it was basically like, you know, the first little bit is, it's all good. The next little bit, maybe a little bit of paranoia, the next little bit, oh shit, the cop. And then the last little bit is like, the CIA's fucking coming to get... And it was like, damn, dude, that's like right on the money. But, you know, I don't want to make, like, a joke out of the whole situation. But, you know, I, but sometimes you kind of have to. That's just how you get through it.

And at least for me, I've got really dark, fucking dark sense of humor. But, you know, with my addiction, I mean, I was a boozer since high school, but I didn't do any hard drugs until my 30s. Yeah. I mean, I had tried. There was no real, you know, prevalent availability. And, you know, I played sports, and so, you know, football season, you know, we tried not to even drink and, you know, and high school.

And I, but I tried cocaine when I was in high school. And then not throughout. college it dabbled maybe and but net it wasn't really around it was almost my problem was alcohol and and it remained alcohol until I walked into that park which I described in in the book is you know I left a I was in a an outpatient program which I was committed to and I had relapsed and And I was in the middle of a divorce and separated. And I had spent, I'd done everything to try to get back.

And I'd gone to like 45 days of an inpatient program. And then I did about three months of a sober coach in which I blew into a breathalyzer. that took your picture whenever the sober coach would call with a commitment with that if I failed it that I would go back into into treatment and and I did that and then that wasn't good enough for whatever reason and so then I committed to doing an outpatient program which was five days a week and you know about five hours a day from like eight to two and um and i and i relapsed and um and i told them that i relapsed and they wanted me to take a um uh uh they wanted me to pee in a cup um and i said look i relapsed

i used cocaine and but i drank primarily and i used cocaine but that's what i did i'm telling you the, I didn't want it as any part of a record in which the people don't fully understand is the kind of, the, it's the, the conundrum that some addicts find themselves in, in treatment facilities that are also facing like legal issues or divorces or things like that, is that it's not protected by HIPAA. So you can go into a rehab and be in the middle of a divorce and have all of those records. Gotcha. It can be subpoenaed. Or if you're in a civil case, I mean, like so many, which is a real, I think, oversight on the part of people as it relates to privacy and getting people to be as honest as possible. And so I was like, look, I'm telling you, I relapsed. I mean, what's the difference if you have a, they say, well, you can't come back if you don't take the test. And I said, but I'm admitting to you what I did. and they said now it's just our policy unless you submit to the test you can't come back so i walked out and um and it was in downtown dc and i went over to uh park lincoln park and um you know not far from the white house uh my dad at this point was not in office or anything but i uh it was between the apartment that i was running

and Shaw and I saw somebody in the park that I'd recognized from literally years and years ago, but she was kind of a famous person. It was bicycles. Everybody called her bicycles. And I said to her, can you get me crack? And she did, you know. And when I said, she was a kind of a very well-known,

like, homeless. homeless semi-homeless kind of drug user in the like bicycled up and down like a character almost yeah she's total character everybody knew her and um not everybody didn't know her i knew her knew of her and um you know five months later she was you know uh at the keys to my apartment and and uh we'd become uh using buddies for an extended period of time and um uh and it it's a you know uh it's it's every thing that they say that it is um and nobody fully um um i think captures the the power of crack cocaine nor explains it correctly. It's all so wrapped up in a lot of prejudice

and bias based upon kind of the racial profile that people that, you know, sort of crack addicts. And, you know, at least if you're from my generation of the 90s in which, if, you know, he was introduced to the streets and just tore communities apart. And the thing that truly tore communities apart was not necessarily the diction. It was a response to it.

And so, anyway, long story short, is that's, you know, I actively sought out the thing that I thought was the most destructive thing that I could do to myself at that moment of time, beyond physically harming myself. What was it that took you to rehab? What was it that made you want to get better? Like, what was the realization? finally in the at the at the end i mean that was the that was in 2000 uh i think what i get my

years a little bit mixed up but that was too like that was a year after post death 2016 where i basically stayed sober and and attempted to stay sober for that year period in which i was under the care of somebody a professional and the thing that wanted me to stay sober and clean is my family is that, you know, I have, I, my, um, uh, my three oldest daughters are, my, uh, are, like, they were my whole world. And, um, and, and they, and I was an enormous, you know, I would like a constant presence in their life, because for the vast majority of it, I was clean and sober. And, and I, uh, was, and I, and I, and I was not, uh, uh, um, and I, and I was not, uh, uh, um, a user or a drinker in that I would ever kind of do it around them.

I don't think that there are more than maybe a handful of times, and I can't speak with them. All I can say is this, is that I was a very present parent. And then all of a sudden I was gone. All of a sudden, I was completely unavailable. And I don't think there's anything more, traumatic that you can do than that and and so to to be there and then not be there if you've been able to redeem yourself to your for oh yeah to your daughters for

that oh I I'm not I can't be the judge of whether I've redeemed myself but all I know is that we have a very very very very close relationship and but they're that and again it's literally the I think the worst thing that I could possibly do is speak for anybody else that has suffered because of somebody else's addiction. That's one of the things that I'm 100% certain is I never want to do. But all I can say is that, you know, it is a constant work in progress because of the fact that I'm bound and determined to at least make up for any of of all of that lost time, that neglect. Because I don't, and I don't,

I know this, I know my daughters love me, deeply, and have been there for me, and are beyond Melissa, the singular, thing that made me think that there was something worth living for. And, um... But, you know,

cause a lot of pain, you know. Who do you think you hurt the most? Beyond myself. definitely um my daughters yeah and i and again the reason being is that they were older but um they had just lost uh their uncle beau to them um was everything um and uh and uh I mean, he was as present in their lives as he wasn't mine. And, you know, my brother was not perfect, but he was about as close to perfect as you can be, as a human being.

And I really mean that. And I challenged anybody that knew my brother that didn't feel the same way, almost universally. And I know that people talk about people in death as if they are something more than they were. But in my brother's case, I couldn't say enough things that could fully describe what an extraordinary human being he was. And when I graduated from law school,

my brother moved in with me and my wife and my two daughters, and he took the third floor of the house that we renovated, this old farmhouse. And he just was never present in their lives also. So the one thing that was probably the most, not intentionally cruel, but the cruel is that they lost their Uncle Boe and then they lost me at the same time. And I became so wrapped up and selfish in my own grief.

And I don't think that there is, that there's anything that I ever can do. to make up for that. And those are some of the things. Now, do I believe that they've forgiven me for that? Absolutely. I mean, I know they adore me. And I really mean that. And I know that.

But it's not up for me to be able to determine whether I've ever made up for what I, that level, that deep, deep level of hurt that children, more than anybody, ends up experiencing for a parent that, that has suffered from addiction. Do you think they're going to watch this? Oh, yeah, 100%.

Yeah. What would you say to them right now? Oh, everything I've already said to their face is to them personally. I mean, I call them almost every day. Finnegan and I have been in a little bit of a fight about that. But, yeah, but is that they are each in their own way extraordinary people that I am immeasurably proud of and they have they have been a

a greater source of strength to me than they will ever fully appreciate yeah I bet they'll love they're that yeah I tell them all the time and then they you know and maybe they call me back maybe they don't there's daughters and then I get my dad calls me he goes have you talked to me

you talk to me he said i'm like jesus christ dad yeah i tried i tried her well i called her i got her on the phone the only thing that makes me mad about my dad is he's an even better grandfather than he is a even a parent but yeah they're they're extraordinary women and you know one of the things about you know the like all of this is um you know i'd sometimes get down like what the fuck these people are awful and they're ruining my life and they're doing this and you know and and and um and i think like this isn't hard on me it's them how hard is it on them how hard is it for them to walk in to work as grown women working in New York City in an office building and everybody know who you are and your dad's on the you know for no apparent reason other than just to shame me on the front cover of the New York Post with a crack pipe dangling out with shirtless with a woman standing behind him and then again the next day and then again the next day and then again the next day and then again the next day and and so I all

Always, always, at least when I, when I start to feel sorry for myself, be like, fuck. Like, God damn, how lucky am I? How lucky am I that they still pick up the phone? Never stop loving me. I don't deserve that. Nobody deserves that. but I have it and um it's an incredible thing it's a good boy to live yeah it's a uh but god you know they still fuck up still don't do it the right way I still let people down I mean

and the only thing that's different now in my life is that i truly don't start from a position of what's in it for me first in terms of what can i get to alleviate this pain like i like um uh uh uh i at least know that uh that uh that the uh yeah uh that i'm not ashamed of the mistakes that i make today do you know what i mean it's because i'm i um or i am i am i'm certain uh that i'm uh trying to to be the best person i can be and i'm doing my best at it do you know what i mean like i'm trying every day and i know that i'm failing but it's not you know i'm at the same time i'm comfortable with who i am and i don't think i think a lot of my life although I wouldn't admit it is

I felt lesser than for whatever reason I don't know what it would you know what I mean like I just like you know uh uh lesser than who anybody didn't matter but alone in a crowd you know um and uh I felt like I

like for instance like with art like I wanted to be an artist you know no I ended up going to Yale law school and and you know having a pretty successful career and doing the things that I did

but you know like I just never you know like I felt like I'm not good enough you know I don't want to show people you know you know my stupid you know you know I mean

I don't know whether it was my poetry or my paintings or my you know but that's the person that i wanted to be and i didn't have the courage when i was that age to do it and i had to be completely utterly broken humiliated and dehumanized in order for me to say to myself fuck everybody else just be who the fuck you are you know i mean everybody tells me to stop using the fucking f word so much but fuck you you know what i get told that i every time too you know it's like i i don't know like I don't have to, I don't have to, I don't have to, I don't have to be anything except exactly who I am.

And I don't owe you any explanation, but I owe myself to be radically honest with when I fuck up and what is my responsibility and when I should say sorry to somebody. but the one thing I know about anybody that's ever come into into recovery decided that they got to stop using or they got to stop drinking and you know a lot of people can drink and use responsibly

but anybody that I know that decided not to they didn't come in on a fucking winning streak man they didn't decide to stop drinking because you know things were so good but when they put that down and what are they going to

what are they going to you know what fills that hole and for so long in my recovery i didn't i didn't have anything to fill that hole because i wasn't i i didn't feel whole i didn't feel like i was being honest with myself the better who i wanted to be or you know anything what got you there the complete and utter uh you know destruction of my ego psychedelics no i think that the um i think that everything was a little bit of a step towards that. But ultimately, at the end of the day, the gift that was given to me was given to me by the most horrendous people in the world is the people that, you know, stole my digital images and put them in the New York Post. And Miranda Devine used me to, you know, to cash her checks and, you know, and the Daily Mail, you know,

I mean, like, all of that. The worst humiliation, I think, that in a modern digital age, That's what you mean by destruction of the ego. Yes, completely, because you have to decide, is that you? And if it isn't, then who are you? Then who the fuck are you? And you realize is that I used to, I in the past would think, I think that a lot of addicts do this. Like, I watch you, okay?

and I would and I would and I would and I would put you on this pedestal okay somebody that I respect it somebody that's served somebody that put themselves physically in harm's way on behalf of other people somebody who had the discipline and the courage to do the things that you did and so that's your your outward persona and I would and I would compare myself to you and I would think I'm never going to live up to that and and then

something in your life happens like they completely dehumanize you through you know I mean by the way imagine if I was a woman imagine if I was a bunk of Trump

and I know that sounds really but just say they released one you know nude selfie of how How crazy would people fucking go about the violation of privacy that is? How insane would they go? Rightfully so. But I was the crack addict degenerate son of the former vice president of the United States,

and I was fair game in the world. And I had a decision that I had to make is when I would think and I would become obsessed with the idea, like, how do I ever earn your respect again? And then I realized, and I don't know whether I, like, it was like a, like a, there was no, like, like, light ball moment. It wasn't like being struck by lightning, but just, gradually I just realized, like, every day that I got out of bed, and I put one foot in front of the other, and I sat down and I painted, and I shared what I made in my creation with the people around me, and then a wider group of people, and then pick up the phone and call to someone. else that was sick and suffering and would try to be of service to somebody that was looking for a way out and just as long as I was true to myself and try to make amends with the people that I needed to make amends with as long as I

fucking did that I could get to the next day I don't know if I'm explaining it no in any way that it makes sense but to completely deconstructed me. And that humiliation and dehumanization, which was a full-time 24-7 campaign that was directly coordinated, you know, right from the president. I mean, the whole Where's Hunter thing. I mean, you don't know what kind of havoc that wreaked in my life, man. When he started to say, Where's Hunter in front of 70,000, 50,000, 30,000, whatever, crowdside he made up in his head and they aired it on every single cable channel and played it over and over again on fox news surprise surprise people showed up at my fucking house with bullhorns

in the middle of the night and followed us i don't mean security my wife is pregnant they ran her off the road twice i mean it has real world consequences man and then so we moved a second time in the middle of the night, and we were in Venice, and we lived on the canal, and one of my friends had put us in this place until they found us there. And then they got canoes, and they sat out in the canal this far away, as far away as that wall with a bullhorn for hours on hours and hours with the six-month-old screaming, yelling for me to come out. And then they got a billboard truck, and they parked the billboard truck, a full-size billboard, digital billboard truck, and sat in front of the house

and ran all of the pictures from the laptop. I'm me naked, of me smoking crack, of me being a criminal. For a week, for 10 days, for two weeks until we moved. And then they followed us there. And so it had real, real world consequences, but it put me in the position

of having to make a choice every day. Am I that? And if I'm not, who am I? Who am I? Am I the character that Tucker Carlson makes me out to be? Or, you know, am I, am I, who am I? And I think that I've answered that question,

and I think that, but that's for me. And, you know, I guess the one thing I've learned is this. You know, you talk about that. book that you recommend to everybody, which is basically the red-letter words of Christ. Do you want one? I love one. I already have it on a book on tape. I had it before you said that I'd gotten it. And on audio, I'd love the hard copy. But what's the thing? What's a singular message of Christ? Love. In my opinion. Love.

love one another love your neighbor and love God and do not judge unless you want to be judged but more than anything it's just love

and and that's what I think like I what's the real epiphany is that the first place that you've got to love is yourself. And if you're going to love yourself, you've got to be honest with yourself. Because how do you love the person that's keeping the secret about the thing that you're ashamed of?

You just can't. It's impossible. And I figured out how to love myself. And that doesn't mean that I don't fuck up and... You know, I certainly feel every day at applying the, at least the way in which, by the way, I think that you find the same lessons in, not just in the red letters of Christ, the actual words that he spoke, I think you find it in the Bhagavad Gita. I think you find it throughout all of the upon a shots. I think that you find it in all of the most sacred texts

is that it comes down to one thing. And you asked me before us, how are we going to find our way out of this as a country, as a people, as a, is it the only way I know is the thing that people are desperate fucking for is connection. It's the only way. and that's what each one of these messages is about of all of the sacred text is that we are all

connected we know whether we think it or not i mean literally down to the scientific level that karl sagan would um uh has taught us is that literally we are stardust and we are all connected and we are not just in the metaphysical sense but in the actual physical sense and um and unless for me it just go back to to me is that unless unless you figure out a way to love yourself then all you're going to end up doing is hurting other people anyway i don't know if that makes sense to you that makes sense i mean we had a conversation offline about psychedelics Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we talked about 5MEODMT.

Yeah. And we had, I guess we can't say the exact same experience, but we had the same experience. And that experience, however you arrive there, is probably different. But I don't think so. When you arrive, you feel the oneness, you feel the connectivity, you see that everything's connected. I mean, you described it the exact same way that I described it. When I took it, I don't know if you were blindfolded or if you weren't. For the 5MEO I was, for the Ivo gain, it was not.

I took the blindfold off for the 5MEO. Oh, you did. Yeah. And I had no visualizations, no hallucinations, none of that. What I did have was a very profound, intuitive, and it showed me I could feel I could feel the flow of energy going through everything I could feel it coming through the ocean onto the islands back into the ocean onto the on to the beach up the trees and the grass and the birds in the air

everything you could it it became everything is one everything is good and if there's something bad than it would have been like a spotlight in the dark. You would have been able to point it out immediately. I mean like, and that's what I felt. And that's what you described. And so, you know, when you're talking about judgment and ridicule and all of these things, I mean, in the end, I mean, if you're spewing that shit into the fucking ecosystem, into the world, it's going to come back.

exactly on you and if you spread goodness throughout the world then that also is going to come back on you and that's that's one of the major life lessons i think that i learned that day probably not even realizing that i learned it that day but you know yeah you know it showed me that if i treat you like shit or put anybody else in front of me and i treat that person like shit that's that's treating myself like shit because that's got to fucking come back to me yeah because it's all connected yeah does that make sense it makes total sense and and it's uh it's uh it's this the uh that experience um for me didn't have the same level kind of a profound immediate effect as a related

to my um sobriety but uh but it was a it here's a really interesting part about it it's the only drug that i know that i haven't um uh that i've taken and enjoyed that i haven't craved do you have that i mean i don't feel like the desperate need to try five mEO again you don't it a handful of times yeah i do it i do it maybe once every couple of years to clean myself out. My point about it is... No, I don't crave it because I have a very healthy respect for it and a tremendous amount of fear.

Okay, yeah. And that's what I was about to say, is that I think that I came to that experience with Ivo Gamut 5MEO with the right respect for, in reverence for the plant medicine time. I tried to ayahuasca. in a different environment for the same purpose and had a very, very, very horrible, dark experience. But I came to it with a very insincere... Intentions.

Intentions. And both ostensibly in an attempt to find sobriety. I think that there is so much incredible promise in some of these... plant medicines as it relates to people that suffer from PTSD, particularly in the studies that they've done in the communities. I know that you talked to Governor Newsom about that, and they're making some real inroads.

But just all I can talk about it is from the personal experience and how it informs me as like, you know, what was the thing that made me ready? I don't know the combination of attempts that I made. that all led up to me being open and willing to, like, look in Melissa's eyes and when she said, this ends now to say, okay, to a stranger, and put myself at the mercy of someone to trust that they are going to help me do the hard work. But anyway, I think people are desperate to be connected, and I think that that is both

beautiful thing and one of the things that uh uh has exposed people to um and and made them very easy targets including myself to the algorithms that i you know bent to the need to be a part of something the easiest thing to be a part of is um is uh is hate you know it's the easiest thing it's really easy to get people to band together to uh to blame somebody else whether it's a group or an individual you know and that's why I give people a real break and I kind of understand like I can imagine I don't read the the comments anymore but I was in um I'll give you an example is that Bowie was about not about he was a year and a couple months old or a few months old and it was a Halloween of 2021 and so he's like this big and he's in a one of those like zip up

chubacca costumes it was like the cool he was the cutest thing you've ever seen in life and we went with my with Melissa Bo and my father-in-law who was visiting from South Africa and my mother-in-law had just passed three months earlier to glioblastoma like my brother did almost exactly five years apart from my brother six and um and lee my father-in-law we went to this little place in cornell uh which is like in the mountains behind malibu and i mean you know it's rural i mean it's rural is out here that part of california and there's this little place, the outdoor seating, and it was like that, you know, the in-between time with COVID. And I put Bowie on my shoulders, and it's one of those beautiful, it's Halloween day,

and it's like around 4 o'clock, it's a magnificently beautiful fall day. And we're walking to the car, and this couple comes, like, bursting around the side of the restaurant, because all the tables were outside. And is, the woman has a phone out. she's filming me which is rage in her eyes and the guy who's about my size is like gets like this far from me which means he's this far from from a one and a half year old it's like the most accused little thing you've ever seen in your life and he's screaming you fucking criminal you should fucking be executed you fucking criminal pedophile you i mean and is screaming

and the woman's screaming the same thing and Melissa goes to step in front of of us and at this point we have secret service and the secret service like jump in and we're two feet from the car put us in the car and we go away and it was the first actual physical like altercation that I nearly came in and it really shook my father-in-law and um and I went to everybody went to bed and I'm up and I'm flipping through my phone and I in my Apple Feed, and there's this story that was out that day about a woman that was a school teacher in Orange County, I think, or I forget whether it's Ventura County or Orange County's eighth grade history teacher, and one of her students videotaped her class. And in her class,

for close to the 45 full minute of the class, she was teaching her class that Hunter Biden was running a pedophile ring in China and that he's taken billions of dollars and that he was responsible with George Soros for being a part of the conspiracy to release COVID at the Wuhan lab and just went through. Like everything, every conspiracy,

everything in the New York Post, everything that Sean Hannity gave, a little bit of life too, and every one of those things. And it made me realize this. If you believe that about me, if you really believe that about me, wouldn't it be incumbent upon you to get up from your fucking lunch

and fucking scream at me at the least? If you truly believed that I was running a pedophile ring, wouldn't it be incumbent upon you as a decent human being to confront me? Mm-hmm. And it made me realize

like, what do we fucking do? What do we do now, man? Because I can come here and I can talk to you and I can make it clear and I can say. But you know what? There is so much money to be made in that in that hatred

in those lies and the realization that how do I combat that how does anybody combat that in this moment in time you can say a lot of things about my dad you know

that I don't have any problem with about his policies or whether you think that he was too old or whether you think that he whatever but you know what to say anything other than my dad is the most incredible father I've ever met my entire life and is a decent, decent human being that has real empathy and cares about people. Like, you know, like, I can, I don't have any problem with you criticizing,

but you know how many, how, how many people believe that my dad is a pedophile? because some motherfucker stole my sister's trauma diary and sold it to Don Jr. And took things in the trauma diary because she had faced sexual violence when she was, that's my sister's story. And then created an idea that my father was a pedophile. Do you know how much that lives in that world?

and then how much directly comes from the Trump's? Directly comes from literally people like Don Jr. Who was directly involved in that. Who is directly involved in contacting the owners of the gun shop to have them go to the state police to doctor a... They doctored the form. The actual form? It's not the actual form I filled out.

What do you mean? When I went in to buy the gun, okay, you have to come up with it. You have to have an ID. You have to have a state ID. And I didn't have one. And they said no problem. And so when the, the, the, um, when, uh, ATF came to get the form after they were like supposedly tipped off by, uh, you know, that, uh, they, uh, they, uh, they,

actually, they forged the form, the actual form of which I was charged with the crime for filling out incorrectly. It wasn't that the form that the Department of Justice used to prosecute me was not the actual form. The gun shop owners actually forced it. How do you know that? Oh, it's part of the record. You can go look at it in the record. Go look at reporting from the empty wheel and the actual documents. I'll show you the documents. I'll show you the two different things. We tried to get them introduced in court,

and the judge said it was irrelevant. How is it irrelevant? Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, I literally, I will show you so you can put it up on the thing. Two separate forms. We'll put it up.

You have the forms? Yeah. We'll put them up. Yeah. I'll get my lawyers to send up to you. And that's the point, is that my my point is is it they're literally directly involved in that and if you can make people believe the worst possible thing what's that called that um i always i literally have a a a mental break but

the idea of being is that if you can convince people even a very small subset that someone is the worst thing that you can possibly say. What worse could you say about somebody other than that they're a pedophile? Right? I don't think of anything that I can possibly think that that's the worst. Like agrees it.

But if you can convince even 5, 10% of the population that they think somebody can be a pedophile, then you certainly can convince 35% of the people. population that you just flood the zone of that shit with that they are a um that they're corrupt or that they that they were part of some bribery scheme even if that bribery scheme turns out to be a concoction by a guy that was working with the russian intelligence that is sitting in a jail cell in uh in out in california right now in federal penitentiary if you blow the whole thing up

but that's what they do and anyway I guess my whole point and I'm now talking too much and losing the train of thought is that

people are desperate for connection and when they find a connection and a cause of a common enemy they feel a part of something and what we've given each other not you and me but this country that we're living right now all we've given each other is people to

think of as enemies and it makes me really and I don't mean this in a second way it is probably the most devastating, emotionally devastating thing other than the death of a family that I've experienced in my life

is a feeling that this thing that my family has given 50 years of our life to is, I'm about to, we're about to lose it. I really feel that, and I don't think that that's kind of, you know, melodrama you know I listen to you and I listen to other people that are on the other side of this that say the same thing and I kind of look at them and I think

like God can you not see that we're trying to figure out the same thing can you not see the humanity in me because I'm not the person that high school that eighth grade teacher informed by Alex Jones and you know Jesse Waters would have you believe that I am.

Promise you I'm not. Spend a minute. Because those motherfuckers they got one thing that they're doing. They're making money. As we all suffer, they are just laughing all the way to the bank.

There's a damn shame. Yeah. There's a damn shame. You know, driving with a friend of mine, he's a really close friend he's had some real health problems and I came back in Delaware and I took him out to lunch

and we drove by one of those huge American flags and they used to fill me with an enormous sense of pride and driving by it and he goes it's Jesus Christ and I don't know

of anybody that's more patriotic than this person he's like makes me cry makes me cry and I am I

thinking who did I fucking let take that away from me like I'm bad at my You know, I get so angry, and I find that the thing that I get angry about are from the perspective of a son, you know, like, I really went off on George Clooney, and I really went off on the Potsave America guys. And, and, um, and the reason I did is because I think

there are a bunch of fucking arrogant fucks. I do. I think that Jake's, Jake Tapper is a, is a, um, is a pompous, arrogant fuck. But you know what? I think they love this country. I don't think that they're bad people. I think they're just arrogant fucking bucks. From my own personal experience. And my point is that, like,

when did I allow anybody to steal that pride from me what is with Jake Tapper he's such a I mean look I almost got in a fight with Jake Tapper at the Super Bowl in I forget when it was

I mean the first Eagle Super Bowl not the first but it must have been shortly after my brother's death and he had done something that I thought was totally fucked up and I told him I would fucking if we weren't in front of a lot of people I would knock him the fuck out and this is how much of a pussy is

he called my dad and demanded an apology what he's a grown fucking man he called one of my dad's staffers and he said I felt threatened and Hunter owes me an apology and by the way I

I felt incredibly justified. I'm not going to tell this story because it's too convoluted. But just that. That's who Jake Tapper is. I mean, you know, he talks big, hides behind a pen in a desk. And I don't think that he contributes in any way to the discourse or provides any real journalism whatsoever. And so I'm allowed to have my own personal feelings,

but my whole point of it is, is it like, who cares, though? Is he the one that kind of like... Did he write a book about your... Oh, yeah. Cognitive decline and released it, like, right at the very end of the... Yes, right at the end, like within two weeks of the... Way to jump on the bandwagon, bud. Yeah.

You're about three years and six months too fucking late. Yeah, no sources. No on the record sources. No shit? None. Wow. Nobody on the record will go on the record. But, you know, he was certain and he was absolutely this and that and the other thing.

He's just so full of shit. Anyway. He really came around to the narrative early on that one. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But my point is, this is so a world of incredibly disingenuous. But I don't know what it is, like, I'm at a loss about what it is brings it together. and that brings us back to this conversation, is that at the very beginning

you're saying to me, I can't believe that you're like, like this. Like, what don't you get? Is this? Is it, I don't get any of that from listening to you. Even though you, even when you platform people that I think are fucking out of their mind,

and I don't say platform, but you know what? From probably the majority of your audience are thinking of this, Exactly that about me right now. Guarantee you. Yeah, guarantee you. But I don't know.

I don't know how we fix it. I don't know. Well. Let me, uh, I'll tell you how we'll fix it. I thought you were going to get that gun in the corner. I said what the fuck? That would be a method number two.

I literally thought that you were going over to pull that Glock off the fucking... I said, Jesus Christ, he's getting real here. I got something for you, buddy. What is today, the 16th? 16th. Great. Oh, me. Oh, dude.

i thought i this is a drawing i did that's a drawing yeah so it's um anyway it's my it's my version of a you can you got to get you can put it in a in a uh amazon frame and put it in the bathroom somewhere yeah yeah that's not going into amazon right are you fucking kidding me dude thank you well this is awesome thanks man i always wanted some 100 Biden art we got it thank you yeah that is awesome of course the next one according to the New York Post is at least a half a million dollars I'll be expecting that you can you can pay me in um in um uh in uh Trump cryptocurrency I don't have any of that but okay but uh yeah here you go Jesus calling

Thank you, man. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. That's the only thing that fixes this. Yep. Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you.

This is fucking awesome. Cool. Thank you. Glad you like it, man. A lot of dark stuff going on in the world right now, and it's to the point where I don't even believe my own eyes anymore. Because I cannot verify what people are saying about all the police. political violence, the division. I partnered with this production company called Ironclad,

and we're doing an eight-part audio series on SIOPs, on why foreign countries, governments, maybe even our own government, would conduct a SIOP on its own people. And I just think that this series is gonna be extremely important because it's gonna open the eyes of people on why these things happen. You can head over to Sciopshow.

Dot com. Order it today. I think you're going to get a lot out of this. Who's pulling the strings? Who's pulling them? My explanation as it relates to Don Jr.'s involvement with my sister's diary is that I believe with the person that the person that stole it initially. brought it to a fundraiser at Marlago and, um, and, uh, and, uh, and got it to like Don Jr., who I think was the one who eventually connected them with the people at Project Veritas. And, and then they just weaponized it. Um, and, uh, um, um, do you mind if I ask,

what was the, I mean, I'm just curious, what was the conversation within the family when, when that came out? the the just got like the like the like

the journal um uh like barbarity of these people um they don't really mean it

it's like uh like how do you get how do you get away with that and not um um

uh pay for it I mean like again like let's move this into the laptop okay this is the same thing and uh writ large you know in which you steal someone's digital life and you turn it into whatever boogeyman that you want to and um and

And just from, let's just go to the most basic level of the, of the, of how wrong that is, of what a, what it a, what it, what it, what it, what it, what it, a incredible invasion of anyone's privacy that is. instance, is it, if I stole your phone, you have an encrypted phone, and I was able to then cobble together or broke into your iCloud, of which I know that they did, or, and cobbled together whatever they ended up calling a laptop, okay? And then, and was able to, through the the worst period in your life, okay? Which you talk openly about. You talk openly about, you know, your issues with substances that didn't make you proud of who you've been and try to change. And I took those moments and I, and I took every photo that was taken of you during that time.

in the worst period of your life and made a monster out of you in order to, and I know that it was never about me. It was about my dad. And it was to destroy my dad. I think that the thing that they truly thought, I think that the thing that Steve Vannon and Rudy Giuliani believed was that they would be able to repeat history in the same way that they,

and do the same thing that they did to, Senator Muskie in 1972. And they broke into his wife's psychiatrist's office. They stole their private notes. They revealed that she was a struggled with alcoholism and, you know, every other embarrassing thing about her. And Edwin Muskie, everybody knew, who was a decent, hardworking blue-collar senator,

from New Hampshire that by all accounts was the only guy that could beat Nixon at that time and they broke him because they knew there was nothing that he cared about more in this world than his relationship with his wife and his wife and his family

and they broke him and he cried on stage and talking about her in a time in which that was the end of somebody's place political career and he had to drop out of the race. And that was what their intent was with me. It was never about, because there is no evidence of corruption in the laptop, none. Tell me what you think the laptop is. I mean, what do I think the laptop is? I think that the, I think that I found out about the laptop. I think the first time I've,

I found out about the laptop. I interviewed this guy, Peter Switzer. And that was, if I remember, correct, this was years ago, that was a major part of the interview. He actually gave me a hard drive of the laptop and said that this had been scrubbed to take all the kitty porn off of it. Otherwise, I couldn't have this. It would be illegal.

Yeah, exactly. I never opened it because I was, I just... Yeah, but that's my point. is that's the shit that they did that's that's what they and then and then of course all the pictures of you with hookers and the barissima emails and apparently it was all on there yeah but but for instance in that you had dropped it off to a laptop repair guy yeah so but for instance just that is that remember the first thing that rudy juliani did it's called eliminationist rhetoric is that he went to the steps of the newcastle county courthouse and del

and stood on the staffs and demanded a meeting with the chief of the Newcastle County Police in Delaware and the state police and the attorney general and the U.S. attorney. And he said basically he pulled a, you know, one of those, I have here in my hands a evidence of, you know, mistreatment of children and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. it's just all complete and utter bullshit. So Peter Schweitzer, the bright part, he said they had to scrub it of images of children. Let me ask you a question.

Do you think those images would have come out by now? I mean, it is absolutely insane, in a complete and utter fabrication. A complete lie. Completely. But that's where they started because they realized that it didn't have any evidence of the corruption that they then concocted about a bribe or my, you know, billions of dollars flowing through. Like you say, the Burisma emails. Yeah, there were emails from and to Burisma from me as a board member of a company in which I served on and I was transparent about and I actually put out a press release about in which show no evidence of any, any whatsoever.

criminal activity. Any involvement of my father. Not one single communication between me and anyone in my dad's staff or my dad or anyone about me asking for a favor on behalf of a client. Not one. Not a single one. So what they originally revert to? They originally reverted to basically accusing me of the worst thing that you could possibly ever accuse anybody of. that child porn yeah i mean imagine having to wake up from that i wake up the next day from that and thinking even if one of the people that you respect in the world believe that that could be true like oh my god like how do you ever get out of bed

and then how do you defend yourself Sean when you go out and do this you go I'm not a pedophile I'm not a pedophile like literally like I don't beat my wife you know what I mean and that's what they did and then they just repeated it over and over and again until it kind of played out until at least some responsible journalist said, okay,

like, if you keep, like, we're not going to keep repeating this because it's patently false, and there's zero evidence of it. So then they moved on to the next thing. They moved on to the next thing that I was a, you know, the next thing was a, like a symbiotic relationship between the Russian GRU and, like, Steve Bannon and Gao, the Chinese billionaire, you know, that ran the Chinese, that, that cult, in which what they determined then was, is that I was funding weapons labs in Ukraine with George Soros to infect migratory birds to murder the population in Russia. And that was the whole thing. That got me sanctioned by the Russians.

They did like a two and a half hour press conference on it. And then it just comes around. and then in the right-wing, you know, podcast EcoSphere from Alex Jones back to, you know, Russia, back to Chinese operatives, back to Gao, back to Bannon, and then they recycle it again. And then what ends up happening is that the New York Post and Sean Hannity, you know, give it some credence.

They don't do it in a way that is completely absurd, but they report on the accusations. and then the New York Times writes a story about the story and then it gets on CNN and Jake Tapper does a piece on well this may not be true but clearly

there's you know Hunter Biden's corrupt it's like what the fuck are you talking about and what do you do so I started the day as a pedophile and I went to bed as a as some super spy that is

providing billions of dollars in funding for weapons labs and I woke up the next morning being accused of something else and it became almost impossible so what I can tell you about the laptop is that there is no laptop

that that's bullshit what was provided out there what the um there was no fucking laptop there is an actual physical laptop that somebody had but the guy that had that said he had the laptop the existence of the search for the laptop came before he was even a twinkle in rudi joliani's eye there were people talk to leparnas let parniz literally went to ukraine to get a laptop from dmitri furtash to get a hard drive Hunter Biden's hard drive from Dmitri Firtash and Andre Dirkatch in Ukraine, in Austria. Four months before John Paul McIsaac ever even, nobody ever existed.

And so what they did is they cobbled together stolen, concocted, fabricated, mishmash of digital information, largely which is, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of emails for from 25 years. I mean, no laptop could have held all of that. And so what they did is they just, they put it all together. And then they talk about it. I mean, John Paul McIsaac, who is literally blind, has no, there's no videotape of me ever dropping off a laptop.

There's no, so whatever. So you never dropped off a laptop for a shop? I have no recollection whatsoever of ever dropping off a laptop to John Paul McIsaac, to his shop. and so what he did though let me just put it this way say i did say i took my laptop and to get repaired okay and you're john paul mc isa and what he says is he reads and he goes to repair the laptop but then he starts to read the files in the in the laptop and he reads a file and he sees files about Burisma. By the way, a board of which I'm on of an independent private Ukrainian

company in which I am a board member doing corporate governance as an attorney. And he says that the only thing that he can think of doing is calling Rudy Giuliani. He's a laptop repair shop owner in Wilmington, Delaware, whose store, It's three and a half miles at most from where my parents live, where everybody knows my parents live. So if he had a laptop that he wanted to return, he thinks that the best thing to do is call Rudy Giuliani's lawyer about Costello and give it to my sworn enemy,

who then take it and in it, I will once again ask you this question. What crime has anyone ever... But there was no... laptop, right? No. He took a hard drive. He took whatever he said. He said that he had a damaged laptop, and what he did is he downloaded a hard drive. And then he gave that hard drive to Bob Costello. And then from that hard drive, you have people like Patrick Byrne and Jack Maxie and a whole bunch of other people. Like, I could list the names that come together. There's one woman that's like known as Cat Lady or something like that, literally. And what they're

they say that they did is they cobbled together all of this digital material that was floating out everywhere, that had been stolen from phones, that have been taken from the dark web, that had been taken from the hard drive that John Paul MacGy. They consolidated it all. And they consolidated it all, and they made it out to be this thing. And so then the story doesn't become about the laptop at all. Because there's nothing in the laptop other than a record of me being a degenerate. A degenerate drug addict.

at the worst moment in my life, at the worst moment in my life, of people clearly, me not taking selfies, of people clearly taking pictures of me in the rooms that I found myself in. Smoking crack, doing drugs, doing whatever. Nothing criminal, other than, obviously, drug use.

And what other people would think is, you know, abhorrent behavior. I mean, whatever. I mean, having sex with women. And so they take that, and then you can say whatever you want. No one read the stories. When you put me naked on the front page of the New York Post over and over again with a crack pipe in my mouth,

it becomes like gold. And Maria Devine said it was the most read, the most followed story in the history of the paper. she's written and sold two best-selling books based upon that and it's all about the pictures it's like sex drugs and politics man and that's what they did so then it became about the cover-up of the laptop story you know why twitter took down that story because non-consensual um uh pornography

it's because under what is the law today that was pushed by Melania Trump, it's revenge porn. You're not allowed to take a picture that is stolen from somebody's digital material of them and naked and with another person and publish it. I mean, you're not allowed to do that.

It's a crime. But in my instance, my instance, and so that's what the New York Post story ran in the initial story, and it had naked pictures of me in there. And under the terms of Twitter, they took it down when I objected to it. So you've got to take that down.

And so they took it down. And then that became the hobby horse for everybody. It was an issue of free speech and how the deep state buried the story. What story? That I was a drug addict? And then I was in rooms

of which people took pictures of me, and I took pictures of myself? Because otherwise, I've sat across from journalists, I've sat across from detractors. And I don't know of anybody that's kind of at least more informed than you are in terms of the number of people that have come through this studio that have had an opinion about it. And I know that you prepare and you have a team that prepares.

Does anyone of your team ever been able to tell you of any crime other than crimes of as it relates to illicit drug use that is on a laptop? And I mean, wouldn't you have, if there were, wouldn't you come? And by the way, obviously, like, it's all there, Sean. Like, there's nothing more to show. So there's not a single. instance of a crime. And I told you is that I got investigated by crimtax and main justice.

I got six years of investigation of the U.S. attorney in the state of Delaware, in the state in Pittsburgh, in Baltimore, in the Baltimore field office, of the Philadelphia field office, the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles, the House Ways and Means Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, the House Oversight Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee, oversight committee, all of, every one of them, and probably a number of foreign, you know, foreign intelligence agencies. Not a single criminal act has been even, even accused of me that is based on evidence from the laptop. So the irony is, is that the thing that they hang around my neck as being this, you know, this great sin, the laptop, is an actuality, evidence of the absolute

bullshit of their accusations. Wow. So they say that I was engaged in some type of bribery in Ukraine. Now, the person that stated that to an FBI agent and an FD 1023, a confidential, informant, statement was then arrested by

the same special prosecutor that was prosecuting me because they blew up my plea deal because you had Congress

come to them come to the U.S. attorney and say this is bullshit we know that he was engaged in bribery because we have an FD 1023 a private confidential thing

an informant that claims that he was engaged in bribery and has evidence of it. So they they blow up my plea deal, okay, because of that. And they pretend like it, well, it was because some confusion as it relates to, you know, I had immunity. Everybody gets immunity when they do a plea deal. Why would you enter a plea deal if you didn't get immunity from the federal government that they weren't going to come back and, you know, charge you with something else? And so they blow up the plea deal and they bring this guy.

in the informant Smyrnoth and they bring him in and they say, okay, tell us about this bribery. Tell us about this FD1023 that you have members of Congress out there waving around as

evidence of Joe Biden's corruption. And he basically breaks down and says it's all bullshit. He was encouraged to do so by others. He was encouraged to do so by people in intelligence in Russian intelligence.

That's the story. Go read the story about Smyrnoff, who's sitting in jail. Serving a sentence for lying on the FD1023. Well, now that that story blows up, what do they do? Three days before the statute of limitation

runs on these charges, they charge me with the things that they had just come to a plea with me on. Anyway, man, the laptop, once again, you know, there are people out there that have just dined out on this, you know, the laptop. And it's become a kind of buzzword for, you know, corruption of some kind of, like, you know, epic, you know, a roadmap to the, to the Biden crime family. tell me other than me being a evidence of me being a crack addict what the laptop tells you

because not a single person that is at least comes from a good place like you say well you know 10% from the big guys somebody sent me an email about a deal when my dad was not vice president of the united states and when he was not president of the united states and when he was not president of the United States in which they proposed if that's what they meant that my dad the big guy would get 10% of the deal of which I never entered into the deal with them and never did a deal with them it's funny how those details don't make it in and so you know all of this bullshit well about like for instance like you know 35 former you know they harp on all the time and then became about free speech. Well, then it became about the big cover-up of the story. You know,

remember that, and they had hearings on it, and they, you know, they, after Elon bought Twitter and turned it into X, and they had that, Matt, whatever, that reporter's name come on. He said, lamented the fact that, you know, the story was taken down, and the reason it was taken down is because the deep state and CIA and, you know, remember, remember when the story was taken down. In the Trump administration, my dad wasn't president when the story was taken down. He wasn't vice president when the story was taken down. Trump controlled all levers of government. Twitter took down the story because it violated their own revenge porn laws,

because it was publishing pictures of me naked with other people having consensual sex, but without my consent, which is an absolute and complete violation of any of the rules of Twitter or even X as it stands now. That's why they took it down. And let me ask you that. Is anybody that's listening to this, if somebody stole your phone for whatever reason and decided that they wanted to accuse you of other things, but the way they were going to do is they were going to show you and your wife having sex naked in their bedroom. Do you think they should be able to do that and put it up on X right now? No.

And in that, accuse you of other things? Say, you know, Hunter Biden accused of bribery without anything to back it up, but then show a picture of you in a motel room doing drugs, naked with a woman. Does anybody have the right to do that? Do you think that that X shouldn't have taken that down or that Twitter shouldn't have taken that down? Because I'll tell you what it did is that Bannon's a genius because then that became the story

and that became the cover-up and that became the thing that was the great injustice you know, which led into the whole J-6 thing and to stop the steal part of it and if they had just let the story of Hunter Biden's laptop come out they actually, that's where the how the election was stolen

is that if the corruption that the laptop proved, I keep going back to, what did it prove? And I keep coming back to, like, the idea, I don't know of anybody that is more informed in terms of the people that they have spoken to than you. Is anybody been able to tell you what Hunter Biden's laptop proves? No.

I know. And so here I am. Six years later, Sean, and I'm still talking about a fucking laptop that actually it's not even a laptop. It's an amalgamation of concocted digital material that has been stolen from me over the course of 22 years

and some of it fabricated. And all you've got to do is just add a little bit here and there. I mean, that's what Gao did. And there's tapes of it. There's tapes of Gao talking to Bannon the night before the election in 2020 in which he's talking about how they've taken the whole,

hard drive to New Zealand, and they're manufacturing pictures of me with children in China. Are you serious? Yes, there's literal, I mean, you literally have Gao. I mean, go to the Mother Jones. You have access to that? Yeah, go to the Mother Jones. It's all reported, but nobody listens. I mean, literally, there are tapes of Bannon, Gao, and others sitting around talking about

how they've stolen the laptop, how they've stolen the hard drive, and how they're manufacturing images because they can do any they could you can say whatever you want at this point go listen to the tapes there's literal tapes he was very close to winning outright then and shutting down trump that the hard drive from hell stopped his momentum then the other thing is the way we blunted the way we drove up by these negatives the only thing that stopped the momentum was the hard drive from hell And two parts of that were Luda's editorial creativity over the pictures. And really the CCP involvement, that's what shocked the American people. Sleepy Joe, he never drove up Biden's negatives.

It was only when we got the hard drive. We got it to you that in the post, if you look, here's what the Biden's fucked up. From the day the post story came out and then you started pumping out, we got you the stuff, and you started just dumping it out. And then the internet started picking up and they suppressed it. Remember, the best thing that happened to us was Twitter and Facebook

suppressing it because then everybody wants to see it. Remember, we hammered this guy every day for 10 days with the worst pictures in the world, drug addict, taking money from CCP, from Chinese spies. No response. And the negatives just keep going up

because people are sitting there going, I didn't know that about Joe Biden, but Joe Biden, nobody, not won. One person came out and said, those pictures are not true, right? Nobody came out and said anything you're saying is not true. Even the wildest allegations, when Trump got COVID and when Trump had that first debate within that one week period, Biden could have put him away. The campaign would have been over.

Biden would have won with 500 electoral votes, but they didn't do it. And we're able to stop. So now I'm not saying Trump's going to win, but we have a fighting change. These are legit? Oh, 100% legit. 100%. I mean, I would believe Mother Jones, but they wrote a hit piece on me

that's complete bullshit. Well, by the way, by the way, the tapes exist, and I will send you the link to the Mother Jones article with the physical tapes that no one's ever denied actually exists. Oh, by the way, with Bannon's partner, Miles Quack, who, by the way, is, you know, in prison for the next. you know, 45 years from stealing over 1.8 billion dollars from, uh, from, uh, Chinese

dissidents. Do you know why the shit's the one that let his fight, his, his, his apartment on fire when the FBI rated it in the Sherry Netherlands or on Park Avenue. Wait, what? Yeah, they rated his, they rated his apartment. He had the penthouse as is his Sherry Netherlands or, you know, that one right on Park Avenue. And the FBI came in and all of the, um, all of the hard drives, went up in flames and burned the whole Penn House apartment on Park Avenue. By the way, Steve Bannon's partner, who at the same time, at that exact same time, Steve Bannon is sitting with Jeffrey Epstein coaching him about how he can, you know, fool the American people into the fact that he's not really a fucking pedophile.

That's Steve Bannon, who concocted this. whole thing. You could put this whole thing together and handed parts of it off to Rudy Giuliani. I mean, it's all there. Talk to Noel Dunphy, his assistant. Talk to, talk to Lep Parnas. I mean, Leparnas says the entire Russia thing, the entire thing about Ukraine and the bribery and the corruption of the Biden family. He was the guy that Giuliani literally deputized, that Trump literally deputized to go to Ukraine and dig up dirt on me. Talk to Lepartis.

Leparnas says it's all bullshit. We made it all up. And we sat there with John Solomon and Ken Vogel in New York Times and Rudy and what's his name?

I'm going to get names wrong and I'm going to get sued. But my point is, it's all there. I'm not making any of this shit up. Bob Costello. They literally went to Ukraine and took a dossier and filmed it with O-A-N from a guy named Durkatch, okay, who was a known Russian GRU agent, and I swear to God I'm not making any of this even remotely up, who's wanted for treason, who fled to Russia and now serves in the Duma in Russia. as a Russian senator. He's the one

that came up with the bullshit bribery thing. Are you fucking kidding? No. And by the way, and this is the thing that drives me insane. Rouge Giuliani with an OAN film crew with Durkatch, who literally has been tried in abstentious and convicted of treason inside of Ukraine, who has fled Russia

and has made it clear that he is a Russian agent. He was sanctioned and convicted him or charged in the United States for being a GRU agent. That's where Giuliani was getting all of his information. He's the one that told them that Dmitri Firtasch wanted to sell Hunter Biden's laptop. Five months before this, you know, what's his name ever existed? The laptop repair shop guy. Wow. And I'm, I'm, I'm, I can 100% give you each one of these things. I can give you the tapes of the Mother Jones of the conversation between Bannon Gow and

the, in the four or five other people that were in his apartment the night before. That's when Bannon says that, you know what we're going to do? When he loses the election, we're just going to say it's stolen. That's what we're going to do. He lays out the entire. Stop the Steel effort. And this shit's 100% real. 100% real.

It's not that 11 labs that can clone the voice or any of that shit. 100% real. 100% real. And so all of this stuff exists, but you know what? Nobody gives a fuck about me in the aftermath of what happened with J6. Nobody gives a fuck about what they did in terms of what I'm talking about, in terms of like the complete dehumanization of me. And so then I became the pariah by everyone.

Nobody in the Democratic Party stepped up except for maybe a couple people that stood by me. You want to figure out who's your friend? Here's another gift that they gave me. I know who's really my friend. Because if you were willing to stand, with me, or even be seen with me,

or be associated with me with any way for a period of time, there was nothing in it for you, absolutely zero, nothing. The biggest regret that I have is I allowed them to think that I couldn't be around my dad, because I would rub off, because I would bring, by the way, like, for instance, like this bullshit, you know, the, you know, cocaine in the cubby hole in the in the in the West Wing think I we were talking

about it before like well you know on what fucking planet am I walking in off a West Exec Avenue with my own Secret Service uh detail stopping by the cubby in the situation for that before you go into the situation room and decide that I'm going to put a baggie of cocaine into the cubby hole before I make it on my way to the residence. And what world? And what world does that make even the most insane drug addict sense of anything?

But you know how many people fucking believe that? You've had guests on here who come and accuse me of actually that being mine. But that could be, I wasn't even there. You know how much time I spent that. in the White House over the course of the four years? I'd say no more than maybe eight to 10 days a year the entire time that my dad was in office. And this is a family that does everything together.

You know how hard that was for me not to be there? Just to be there for him. Like he didn't have my brother. and basically virtually lost me because I allow people to, you know, I mean, people around him that I'll never forgive for not pushing back. And then you start to think, well, you're the drug out of Connor. You're the one. You're the one that put yourself in those rooms.

You're the one that allowed those pictures to be taken or took. you're the one that um you know that uh allowed your stuff to be stolen or lost you're the one that um embarrassed the family you know so that's just to stay away fuck that man you know i figured out you know a while back is that that was exactly what they they uh uh uh what they want it is for me is for me to fail is for me to relapse I truly believe that what they really wanted to happen is they wanted to make it impossible for my dad to emotionally even remotely mount a campaign or to or to govern knowing that there's only one thing that he cares more about than this country and as I think everybody should

is their family it's his family and and i refused i refused to allow them to do that and i knew there was one way the fastest way to fail is to not figure out how to be clean and silver for good but I'll tell you what they're good at it and I sit here and I talk about like the laptop or I was on the board of a company

Burisma you see what they're doing man I don't care what you think about anything I don't know how you can look at what they're doing in the way in which they are profiting off the presidency directly profiting and directly Don Jr. opened up a club in Georgetown, called the executive club, and he's charging people an $500,000 initiation fee to join the club

with the stated purpose of the club being, is the place where you can come and rub shoulders with the decision makers in his father's administration. Half a million dollars is the second most expensive club in the country. Are you serious? I'm 100% serious. Half a million dollars to join. So they opened a club. They opened a club. They opened a club. and on opening night of the club, they had half the cabinet there. Of the club, half a million dollar initiation fee

for a private club run and owned by Don Jr., called the executive club. And they state the purpose. It's the place to go to be able to be with the people that are the greatest influence within the administration,

cabinet members. He has a private equity company. Don Jr. has a private equity company. It's just in the New York Post. New York Times, and in the Washington Post, and in the Wall Street Journal, and in every newspaper on page 14, of which his private equity company has a majority, I think majority stake in a startup drone company that's never produced a drone. It has 13 or 30 employees, I don't know. They got the largest loan guarantee of $695 million that the Pentagon has ever issued.

And that's just one of the companies in which he has, his private equity firm is invested that has contracts with the Pentagon. Just one. You want to talk about they talk about me doing foreign business? What fucking foreign business you're talking about?

I had a partner who was Chinese was part of a private equity company and we were going to invest in natural gas in the United States in an industry that I knew of. And it fell apart and it didn't happen. And I worked for on the board of a Ukrainian gas company

and as a lawyer, I represented a guy that was from Romania for a three-month period of time. There's my foreign business. I never had any business with any foreign government, ever, ever. They're building towers in Saudi Arabia. They're building towers in the UAE. They're doing spas and golf courses and residential properties in Qatar. they're building on government property that they bought through Jared Kushner's

fucking private equity fund, a government-owned island in Albania, I think it is, and they're doing one of the last public spaces in Serbia, a deal directly with the government. And that's just the tip of the fucking iceberg. Well, don't forget about Gaza. And Jared Kushner is basically, not basically, has flat out stated that Gaza is all about a real estate play in which it is the best beachfront property in the Mediterranean. And they're going to redevelop Gaza. And where are they going to get the money to do it? They're going to get the money from the Saudi royal family.

They're going to get it from the Emirates. They're going to get it from the Qataris. They're going to get it from the Russians. They're going to get it from the oligarchs. From Blavatnik. from all of these guys, from Dimitri Firtash, who has been wanted for extradition in Australia and the United States for the past 10 years. And all of a sudden, he's off the extradition list. But by the way, he's doing a deal with naphtagas and the Saudis and Don as it relates to the pipeline. As Jared Kushner and what's his name? name, Whitkoff, who has zero experience. Everybody says that I don't have experience. I was a

fucking adjunct professor at Georgetown University School of Foreign Fucking Service. I'd served on, like, I don't know, 19 different boards. I was the chairman of the board of the largest support group for the largest humanitarian organization in the world. I had traveled the world. I had been to every fucking, all the places that you were jumping from, I've been, not with a gun. But there, in the refugee camp, and everywhere else and they said that I didn't have experience the Yale fucking educated lawyer

what experience does Don Jr. have in anything other than being handed a check in an office by his dad name one Jared Kushner had the biggest

real estate failure in the history of real estate in New York and when he bought the 666 building on 5th Avenue and had to be bailed out by the Qataris when Trump was president

and we're wondering like whether Hunter Biden I don't get it man, I really don't. And I sit here and I think, like, well, shouldn't that make you fucking mad? Shouldn't that make everybody mad? Forget about me. Forget about whether you think I'm a fucking, you know, crook or whatever, whatever you want

to believe. They're doing it right in front of her face. I mean, the New Yorker, you know, assessment of how much money that they've made in the, in the first 10 months, it's like, what, $3.4 billion that they can identify in the increase in the wealth of the Trump family in nine months? And by the way, it's not like they're not like directly telling us this. And I don't know, understand. Like if, okay, so if I give myself, or give the people that voted for him, the widest latitude with the belief. that like what you said is because they gave a shit about things they gave about

shit about the prioritization of what's wrong in the United States rather than what's wrong overseas of us of us taking care of vets instead of taking care of illegal immigrants of all of the shit that you want me to give them the latitude to believe that that's why they voted for Donald Trump shouldn't this make you really fucking pissed off hunter I've been pissed off for a long fucking time yeah I know but but I mean I'm not just talking about you and I don't want to get you in trouble but I can I can like almost feel like the the resistance from your audience of this message coming from me but let me give you this one he's in the fucking Epstein files man yeah and that's the reason that we're not getting them and it's

like like what are we even talking about Susie Wiles came out today in a very fair article have you read that no it says that he she his chief of staff said that he acts like an alcoholic and that of course he's in the Epstein files and that Pam Bondi completely screwed this thing up and totally screwed them all. That's his sitting chief of staff on the record in Vanity Fair that came out today. And what are we supposed to be distracted by? Or is it supposed to be distracted by the absolute ugliness of someone taking the barbaric murder of a beloved liberal he's a beloved liberal but he made like the movies of my uh that made my generation a few good men misery stand by me when harry met sally like my god just as an artist alone like jesus god let's

give the guy the the the uh the reverence that he's due for for for for gifting humanity the princess bride as a movie and he He says that basically he was murdered because he was infected by Trump derangement syndrome. Yeah, we'll basically deserve it. We'll throw the tweet or whatever you call it on truth, social, I don't know. Yeah. Whatever, whatever that, we'll throw it up on screen so everybody who can read it. I think the response that I saw from that was fucking horrendous.

and I wanted to bring this up a little earlier but you know when you're talking because you seem surprised at what people believe and I can see how you would think that from your vantage point from your perspective but I'll give you the perspective of everybody else and so the perspective of everybody else is yes

you know we saw we saw you know whether they're true whether or not fucking true i don't i don't know you know i don't i just i just don't have the insight and i'm not i'm not the person i think a lot of people are painting things as fact now that are all complete bullshit it makes a damn near fucking impossible to find what's if there is any real truth anymore yeah but what here's what you know what we see is we see we just see corruption that's never corrected and there are never any consequences we see Eric Swalwell fucking Chinese spies

still sitting in there we see we saw all the corruption with Trump and whether you're whether you believe it whether you don't believe it whether you think he's guilty whether you don't think he's fucking guilty they won at him hard nothing happened

whether you believe the stuff that happened to you whether you don't believe it you know what I mean whether the laptop's real whether it's not, it doesn't matter. Burisma stuff, nothing happened. The stuff, you know, when your dad was president, I can't think of any examples off the top of my head. I know there's a thousand of people who are going to get back.

I got to stop you. But what I'm saying, Hunter, is like, you never see, whether it's true or not true, you never see any fucking accountability on the Democrat side, on the Republican side. I don't disagree. You brought it up the Epstein files. We've been talking about this.

shit for, I don't know how many fucking years now. And Trump was a big part of that. And the Republican Party was a big part of that. Well, now we got the fucking presidency. We got the House and we got the fucking Senate. And we still have zero Epstein files. You know, and I sat right across from the fucking current director of the FBI and listened to him, spew lie after fucking lie after a fucking lie to me. Not even realizing he was going to get director of the FBI while he's sitting in front

of me. But he did fucking get it and he told us all what he was going to do if he did get it. I don't see anything. I don't see any differences. So you see what I'm saying which is just past the buck, pass the buck, this guy's guilty, this guy's guilty.

John, I never, never. I mean, we just never fucking see accountability and so then then it then it becomes the political elite class the oligard class which you are part of whether you got a lot of money or not been in politics for a long time and it you see what i'm getting at you see people you see a population of people that are getting beat to shit with the most offensive thing that you've ever said with with with with all the car Oh, my God. With, with, all right, I get it.

I get it, I get what you're saying. I get what you're saying. Is it, is it the perception of that. But here's what I want to say to you. There is truth, John. And the fact of the matter is, is that the only people that are benefiting is how I started off when we talked, started talking five hours ago. Who's benefiting? Them.

Yeah. I sure as hell not. I see that. And, and I'll sit here and answer any question. Like, for instance. Let me just, like, stop you on, like, one thing. Like, Eric Swalwell, that whole thing. Bullshit.

There is the truth. It's bullshit. It's a total bullshit story. He didn't fuck a Chinese spy. He 100% did not fuck a Chinese spy. 100% completely concocted. Have Eric on. Have Eric on this show.

And I promise you. It's absolute 100% bullshit. But here's the thing. We are all a victim of our algorithms. And so are you, and so am I. And I'm not, I'm not like pointing the finger. No, I'm aware. And that's my story about the people that came up to me at the, you know, screaming in my face.

Is it, but there is a truth, Sean, but who's benefiting? Who's benefiting from turning us all, like, I mean, like, at each other's throats of, like, concocting this bullshit. I'll tell you that to begin with, it's our adversaries. And then on the second, it's the people that really control these fucking things. And it's oligarchic, not political people. It is the people that control billions and billions and billions of dollars. And those are the people that are benefiting. 100%.

Do you think that Mark Zuckerberg gives a fucking shit about any of this? Do you think that in any way? No. I mean, let me point this out. I mean, we just watched every single tech, billionaire, whatever you want to call them, literally switched from the Biden administration, right into the Trump administration. They're all there.

They were all bitching about Trump before. But here's the thing. They hated my dad. What do we do? We brought it in the whistleblower. We tried to, we, not we, I don't have anything to do with the fucking part of it. And I agree with you. Nobody's fucking held them accountable.

If you really wanted to be able to hold the social media companies accountable, make them liable like everybody else for fucking killing little girls because of driving them to suicide. I mean, they literally testified before Congress and the whistleblower and showed how they manipulated the algorithm to send our children into depression in suicidal states. And you know what? They didn't change it even when they were notified of it.

And even when they became aware of it. And even when they saw that people were taking their lives, teenagers, kids. they did nothing about it and we have the facts and the data and all of an actual witness testimony that they did this what did they do?

Not a damn thing and did anyone hold them accountable anybody in Congress? You know why? Because the biggest fucking problem that we have in this country is money. Is money in our politics and money in our media? And that's nothing new.

But if you want to find a common enemy, you know, I don't understand how they don't realize that people are going to pick up some fucking pitchfork soon, man. Maybe they do realize it. Well, I'll tell you what. Maybe that's why they're building their bunkers and their billion-dollar yachts and their hidden structure. I don't know, but it is, at some point, I think,

what I was saying before is that, There is this, there is going to be this unholy union between radicals that both come to the same conclusion is that no one can be trusted and everyone is the enemy and chaos is the only answer. Violence is the only answer. And that's what we're being driven towards. And I really truly believe that. But there is a truth.

There is a truth about, for instance, Eric Swalwell that I know, and I know to be a lie. There is a truth about, let me give you an example. The fucking case against Donald Trump as related in New York was bullshit. I think it was a bullshit fucking case. I think he's a crook. I think that he stole documents. I think that was a real case. I think he tried to overthrow our government.

I think that he tried for a fucking coup. I think that was a real case. But the case in New York was bullshit. If you're going to charge him, he should have charged about 14 other real estate magnus in New York for the same fucking shit that he's doing. But what we do is that we allow ourselves to be driven by our algorithms

to believe things that just are not even remotely true and which then we all give up like you just said nobody's held accountable you know why the Biden Justice Department did not this is this is the explanation that I have

why did Joe Biden not demand the release of the Epstein files if it was such a big deal to Democrats I don't know the same reason that Joe Biden didn't demand that they dropped the prosecution of me because he didn't involve himself with the Department of Justice because as

every other president before him, other than Richard Nixon, who resigned because of it, he didn't direct the Department of Justice to do one thing or another. Why didn't Merrick Garland do it? Guess as good as mine. I don't know. But I will tell you this, is that now we're here after we have an FBI director, a deputy FBI director, a attorney general, and several other people that are in his cabinet and the president himself, who largely got elected through the energy of the people that wanted to have, for absolutely the right reasons, these files released, regardless of whose names were in it. And they haven't released it. And they fought it tooth and nail. And then they had to get legislation. And then they passed the legislation. And he said,

don't sign it or don't vote for it. And then he said, go ahead and vote for it. And then we have reports that there's, what, 100 FBI agents that spent thousands and thousands of hours of scrubbing his name from the files. Oh, I'm sure they did. Yeah. And now we can't trust anything that's going to come out. And who fucking loses? The children.

Not like it's an insignificant thing in any way. And they talk about these young women. They weren't a young woman. Fucking 14-year-olds. kids kids hundreds of them entire networks that they developed

what do you think that was what do I think that was what do you think this whole Epstein debacle was do you think this was a I don't even fucking know at this point and I really mean it it's like I will tell you is that the only thing that is

clear to me is this Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump during a period of his life were fucking thick as thieves and Donald Trump has tried to pass this off as being what Palm Beach was in the 90s okay and that may be his view of it but I've seen enough

evidence of Donald Trump and his team modeling agencies and what he said on Howard Stern about how he can go he would go into the back of these, you know, Miss Teen USA pageants and, you know, walk up to the girls naked, they were talking about girls when he's talking about doing that. And wonder whether or not Donald Trump in his mind has come up with this concoction that it was all just what they did in the 90s. It was models. I mean, that's what Michael Wolf says. Michael Wolf says that the justification in Trump's

mind was, is that they were models. Wow. You're 14, 15 years old. I mean, we have a president that has been credibly accused by well over a dozen and a half women, if not more, of sexual assault. And we're wondering whether or not, as he fights tooth and nail for the Epstein files that all of his supporters demand it be released. So they could nail Bill Clinton to a cross. And he won't release him. Why?

Out of the kindness of his heart for the people that may get hurt. Do you have, have you ever known the president to act out of anything but his own self-interest? Uh-uh. Ever? And so we're sitting here and acting as if, like, okay, I'm willing to believe that people can vote for him. and support him and overlook the kind of the personal cruelty of his politics. Because by the way, according to everybody, Donald Trump is an incredibly charming person in person. He really supposedly is.

He is. You know, I know that he had, like, I think he told my dad when he came to the White House, he's like, Joe, we would have been best of friends if it weren't for politics. And so, I don't know what kind of sociopathic mind is able to do. do those things. And then the next day, say that Joe Biden is a, you know, the worst human being to have ever lived and a, you know, a corrupt, senile, you know, criminal. Well, I mean, I talked about this with Megan Kelly, too. She talks about her account. I don't know if you remember that whole debacle, but a handful of years ago, but pretty much says the exact same thing.

Yeah, man, and so I don't, you know, it's just where have we gotten to, man? I don't know. I want to tell you something, but I don't want to offend you. Yeah. And, but I'm going to say it. Yeah. You know, the thing that makes you look really guilty. Mm-hmm.

And after sitting here with you for. six and a half hours now with the breaks and everything. I find you to be a very genuine person and I believe you. The thing that makes you look very guilty is the pardon. The pardon from, was it, 2014 to, what, 2020, 20, 24 or whatever. Can I tell you why? Yeah. Makes me look guilty?

It's because I was found guilty. and that's what it pardons for but it was a blanket pardon yeah because you have to be able to go back because the charges stemmed from over seven years ago so they went all the way back to 2015 for my taxes that's what I was charged with

it's now 2025 those are the crimes that I was pardoned for in which I pled guilty to not filing my taxes on time and incorrectly identifying business expenses as personal expenses as business expenses. That is all it's for. Yeah.

So... There's like eight different charges for over two different years, but yeah, that's what it is. Those are all that the charges are for. And then there's the gun charge that went back to 2017. So it goes back to the beginning of their investigation

as it relates to my tax investigation, which is, was back to 2014, I believe. And so, 2024, it goes back 10 years. And that's the blanket pardon. It's for those crimes. And when you give someone to pardon, that's the pardon that you give them. And the reason to give me the pardon is this,

in which I have, make no apologies for anymore, is this, do you think that under the Donald Trump Department of Justice, that I would have gotten a fair shake as related, to what I knew that I would get a fair shake for, which is I believe that I would have won the appeal and that 922 G3 is going to be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, which would nullify my conviction. And I believe that I would have won on an appeal

in the way in which they brought the tax case against me. And during that period of time, however, I would have been under the auspices of the Bureau of Federal Prisons. which is controlled by Donald Trump, and controlled by Pam Bondi, and controlled by the people that have been saying for over eight years at that point that I was literally the spawn of the devil. And the demand, even if it wasn't in their interest, the demand from their most vitriolic and hateful followers would have been the same way that they blew up my plea deal, is that that I needed to be in jail at that time, that I shouldn't be held on release, that I should be

charged with other things, that they really are just letting me off easy, that, you know, I was engaged in bribery, or I was, you don't think that they would have used me if I was under the thumb of the federal government and the Federal Bureau of Parole to silence my dad or silence anybody in my family or silence the people around me because that's what they're doing right now to everybody else and so i don't make i i don't apologize for it and then just a poorly on a human level my dad's 83 years old i'm 55 even if you think that i fucked up even if you think that I am there is not a

there's not a legal commentator in the world that would say to you that as a first time offender I would have ever received a jail sentence for a nonviolent crime of owning a gun for 10 days and lying on a forum or for failure to pay my taxes on time and take after paying penalties and interest

full penalty of interest $2.8 million that I would have end up serving any time but do you think that i wouldn't have served time that it wouldn't have been an enormous amount of pressure to do that tell you what i think and that they wouldn't have been able to violate me on a parole that they decided that they wanted to take a p test and tell me that i was you know a junkie would anybody ever believe me i think that no they wouldn't believe you no i don't think you would have received a fair trial and with that being said

I don't think anybody in the Trump family would have received a fair trial. No, I agree with you. I 100% agree with you. I do. I think that we no longer have a fair and just justice department. Tell you what, man. I don't think, I won't argue that with you. I won't argue with that with you.

And I loathe to think that. that I'm in any way associated with that. Because that's the truth of the matter too, Sean. It's fucked up. Yeah. It's fucked up and that I, you know, like that my dad gave me a pardon. You don't think that that like really makes me like feel like fuck. Like I'm the poster boy for that.

I'm the poster boy for, you know, the elite son of the president who got a, who got something nobody else could possibly ever get. Simply by the fact of his birth, no matter how much he fucked up, he got away with it. And to your point, you got these guys sitting here trying to figure out how they're going to fucking make ends meet to make it to the end of the week and that are getting, you know, it just got pulled over by some fucking state cop that's giving them a fucking hard time. And they come back and they turn on Fox News or they put on the Sean Ryan show. And here's fucking Hunter Biden.

Like, he got a pardon. He got something I didn't. It would piss me the fuck off too. I get it. I mean, what do you want me to do? Like I said, I hope you don't take that the wrong way. I don't take it personally at all. And it's like literally, it's one of the things I keep coming back to you about, like, what I...

It's like, I've been forced into either deciding that I truly can't exist in any healthy way whatsoever. if I gave a shit about what other people think beyond the people that I know that I owe them my respect. And that may be people that I meet, like you, the people that I watch, that I want to earn their respect,

like you, like I said. I don't think there's anybody that I learned in my family that we should respect more than the people that... And I'm not blowing fucking smoke. And like, you know what I mean? like oh i love the you know i love guys that you know i didn't serve well i did serve i got kicked out of the navy and um and and uh but and to know that that uh that's the perception is that i got to get out of bed in the morning and just try to do the fucking right thing that's all i can do yeah but i'm not going to

apologize. I'm not going to apologize for, I will apologize for a lot. I will apologize to my family. I will apologize to my friend. I will apologize to the people in the community that I care about in which, you know, like, I mean, I have a lot of people that I've apologized to. I've spent five years making amends trying to make amends. And I still owe a lot more amends to a lot of people that I haven't been able to make amends with or had the bravery or the courage enough to do yet. And it's personal stuff. And, um, but what I won't apologize for is, um, uh, for things that I did not do. For, for bullshit, uh, conspiracy theories that, that, that, uh, the laptop, I won't apologize for Burisma. May not have been, you know,

the smartest thing to do in retrospect in light of the fact that they try to impeach my father over it. But I'm not going to apologize for it. I know what I need to apologize for. I've done a lot of it and I've still got a lot to go. But God, I hate. I hate.

And I'm fully, fully aware for every room that I walk in. They're like, walk in with your guys. guys, you know, and I see that you put together a team of people that are, like, they're buttoned up from the guy that pick me up at the airport to, you know, to Jeremy. Like, they're buttoned up guys. And I mean, you just get a sense in that. And I bet you they don't fucking think that I'm a decent human being before I walked in here. I know I walk into that room with and the incredible advantage of incredibly low expectations.

Because they not only think that I, you know, near-do-well and somebody that's been given all of the advantages of the world and squandered them. But they also think that I'm sleazy on top of that and that, you know, I'm a part of the problem. And that's, and, you know, it is a beautiful thing to be given the space to try to, um, uh, uh give them a different impression what do you think they think now oh uh i don't know

i think that um they think that i probably fucking talk way too much and that they're thinking when is he going to shut up because we want to go home and eat dinner with our families i think that that's what they're thinking at this point is that i've just literally tired them out i've submission by verbal diarrhea. That's what I think, they think. No, I don't know. You know what I think they're thinking? What?

Motherfucker, we got fooled again. Yeah. I'll tell you, you know, I wish I had the energy to go one by one by the people that... I really mean this. You know, the people that remind me of my brother. Um...

Anyway... What would you say to Bo? Uh, I say to him all the time. Just talk to him all the time. you know one thing that um one thing that um i never ever single thing that i never doubted in my life yeah and he could beat the shit out of me and i could you know i mean we were brothers you know i mean i don't know we uh then we fought and and uh and uh But never my life, you know, would ever, ever doubt that no matter what, sorry, is that he would jump off a bridge for me.

yeah sorry it's been 10 years I'm still crying over it but not bad tears I promise you it's uh like um I feel so incredibly lucky

to have that relationship and still have it I really mean it I still have it I mean that's the one thing that I'm positive of is that um is that i am uh in my best moments i'm fully 100% connected to that and god what a gift you know you talk to them often yeah yeah i mean all the time there's not a day that goes by

it's probably not, you know, and I don't mean in a melodramatic, you know, macabre way, it's just that, you know, I went through a period of time where I did everything in my power to drown out his voice in my head. I mean, I literally, you know, I, I, uh, in that period of time,

I tried to smoke, smoke them out. I couldn't, I couldn't do it. and um but there's never a moment and i don't and i and i really don't mean it in a melodramatic way it's never a moment that i'm not having a conversation you know and uh usually you know you know he's telling me to shut up stop talking have you ever got anything back from him oh yeah yeah i really mean it i i i i i uh and i i don't think this is like i uh was i i i have 100 percent you know uh and i and i don't mean it in like some like you know uh you know cinematic you know ghost kind of thing like my brother's hovering over my shoulder

it's just that his voice is in my head like I can hear him talking to me and I don't mean that it's kind of coming out of left field it's like when I have a conversation and want to figure out how to do things it's like you know I can hear him kind of whether it's the echo of it

or you know and there's never a time that I don't feel I feel the same thing about my mom you know I don't think that people leave us. I think that whatever that energy is becomes only discernible to us to the degree with which we try to tie ourselves in

with the rest of the with every sentient thing and I mean everything and I don't know I'm now I'm getting yeah people can truly think that I'm talking to ghosts

but no I really mean it I talk to my brother all the time I talk to him man yeah I don't give a fuck what people think yeah no I don't I truly don't I'm giving you and out to be able to say, well, he wasn't a little crazy at that point. But the, but yeah, I talk to him all the time. Talk to him all the time.

He used to write to him in those moments. And just to write it down. And, uh, you know. And the messages I get back aren't, you know all sunshine and roses a lot of it's tough love a lot of it's telling me you know the only thing what i hear from my brother is the only thing that'll save you is radical honesty with yourself you know um and he's right in i said to you guys out there I said, you know, I just don't, like, I don't feel like,

I hope it is not coming off as like I'm, like, in any way being, like, defensive. But I at the same time, want to be able to tell the truth. And the truth is, is that I fucked up a lot of shit. My life, my family, my, I created, and, you know, you know, Jake Tapper went on some show, and after I criticized him for the book that he wrote, and he said, you know, Hunter Biden is demonstrably a scumbag. I think he used the word scumbag, or sleazeball or something like that,

who dated his brother's wife and cheated on her brother's widow and cheated on his wife and abandoned his children. and, like, went through this whole list of things and is a known crack addict who, you know, who's been a long-term addict and, you know, went through this whole fucking, you know, list of things. And, um,

you know, yeah, it was crack addict. showed really poor judgment when I was addicted to drugs I had I made real mistakes in my personal life

never had an intention of cruelty or some kind of venal you know I think all of it basically out of grief and trauma and loss and desperation and selfishness to try to fix that whatever hole was in my heart

but haven't we all that I really mean this haven't we all Lord knows I have and you know I say to people like Jake you know you

cast the first stone you know like like man, like, who the fuck are you or anybody else for me to judge you? Now, I've had the gift of making it all for everybody to judge. I mean, the gift of, like, realizing that no one else's judgment defines me. I'm just honored that you gave me the space.

and I really mean it to spend six hours is who the else fucking cares, Sean? I mean, who am I? But it really means it the world to me that, like, you know, and you let everybody else, but more importantly to me,

it was just meant to me be able to sit with you. Thank you, ma'am. Go. I think that's what it's all about, man, redemption and owning your shit. It's a great story in the history of the world, the redemption story. You got a hell of a story, man. Yeah, I still get a long ways to go. You want to end this with a prayer?

Yeah. You want to lead it? The prayer that I always say is Hail Mary, because I'm a Catholic boy. so hell Mary full grace the verse with thee blessed art thou among woman blessed of the fruit of thy womb

Jesus Holy Mary Mother of God pray for her sinners now at the hour of her death amen amen yeah honor

thanks ma'am thank you man appreciate it what a fucking interview dude thank you thank you No matter where you're watching Sean Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this,

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