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

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

Dr. Jordan B Peterson  and writer Miranda Devine discuss her 2021 book “Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide.” They delve into Hunter Biden���s depravity, the corruption of his family's business dealings, how they built and maintain their regime, the insane and far-reaching coverup from the deep state to the mainstream media, and the unfortunate aftermath for not just those directly involved, not just American citizens, but innocent people all across the world who find themselves in the midst of political and physical warfare. Miranda Devine is an Australian radio host, columnist, and writer who now lives in New York. She has written for the The Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun-Herald, the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Herald Sun, the Sunday Times, and the New York Times. Her 2021 publication, “Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide,” details who Hunter Biden is, his drug addiction, his supposed dealings with his father both when he was vice president and now, and their manipulation of the establishment media to censor dissidents and suppress the opposition. Dr. Peterson's extensive catalog is available now on DailyWire+: https://bit.ly/3KrWbS8  - Links - For Miranda Devine: "Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide" (Book): https://www.amazon.com/Laptop-Hell-Hunter-Secrets-President/dp/163758105X Miranda Devine on X https://twitter.com/mirandadevine?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor 

Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I'm discussing something truly explosive, I would say, with columnist and writer Miranda divine. We're talking about her 2021 book, which should be old news by now, but hasn't been well covered enough to be that. Laptop from hell, Hunter Biden, big tech in the dirty secrets the president tried to hide. We delve into what Hunter Biden inadvertently, unconsciously or purposefully revealed about his family's business dealings, how they built and maintained the regime, the surreal but comprehensive cover-up by the so-called deep state, enforced and willing collusion with the legacy and social media companies. And the aftermath, yeah, we're not done with that yet. Not just for those directly involved, not just American citizens, but for innocent people all across the

world, find themselves in the midst of political, psychological, and physical warfare. It's quite the episode. I thought maybe we'd open up with actually the story of the laptop itself, because, and we might want to what might as well walk through this in chronological order. And so Hunter brought three laptops, as I understand it, into this laptop shop. Do you want to pick the story up there? And we'll wander right through to the point where the New York Post is publishing it, and then the story isn't covered.

I think we can set the stage for everyone, just so they remember exactly what's going on. So do you want to walk us through that story? Sure. So it's April 2019 and late at night, Hunter Biden goes into John Paul Mac Isaacs, little computer repair shop in Wilmington and Hunter's been at a cigar shop nearby. He smells of booze. Initially John Paul MacKyzeck didn't recognize him. He just felt a bit of irritation that someone was coming in with three waterlogged laptops right on closing time. And he booked them in and pretty quickly ascertained, he couldn't immediately fix any of them. And then Hunter signed a work order and gave his contact details and went away.

And the next day or two, John Paul MacEyzerak is looking at three laptops, he's figured out one of them, he can just give him a new keyboard, separate keyboard, and that work and he figured out something with another one of them. And the third one he decided he would have to upload the contents onto his big server and then give the contents to Hunter on a hard drive. He called Hunter and he said, can you come in and bring in, he told him particularly what the hard drive was he wanted. And sure enough, the next day Hunter brings the hard drive

that he'd asked him to bring. And John Paul Mack is that gives him the other two. Lack tops, one is the right off, one, he's given him a keyboard with it. And then Hunter goes away and John Paul Mac Eyeset continues to, it's a very slow process. He said to upload all this information because the battery kept John running out on the laptop. So he had to keep on charging it and then restart. And every time he

restarted he would have to look on at the material to see where he was up to. And that was why he sort of had such a kind of intimate understanding what was on the laptop. And you know what initially struck him was just there was so much porn on the laptop. So I mean it's homemade porn. It's much porn on the laptop. So I mean it's homemade porn, it's it's hunter filming himself having sex with various women, filming himself naked and so on. But John Paul MacAzac also noticed you know a lot of business documents, invoices and a company called Berisma, which popped up a lot. So he completed his work and he called Hunter to come pick up his laptop and got no response.

He was texting him and emailing him and he wanted Hunter to pick up his property and to also pay his $85 bill. And that didn't happen. And so 90 days later as per the work order, the property became his, he owned it now and he just put it on a shelf and didn't think about it anymore. And then, so we talked about April 2019 and Hunter dropped off this laptop just about a week before his father announced that he would be a candidate for president and Hunter at the time was in a rage against his family. Absolutely furious with them at the end of his tether. that Joe's staff that he'd amassed in his campaign were disrespecting him and his father was allowing them

to disrespect him. And there were stories being brief to friendly media that Hunter is a basket case, he's a drug addict. He's just a bird and his father has to put up with. And as far as Hunter was concerned, how dare they treat him like this and shame him when he felt that he'd supported the entire family, the extended family for decades. And he'd given half his money to pop as he raged to his daughter one day, he said, unlike pop, I would expect you to give me half your salary. So that's the context that hunter dropped off the laptop and never returned

to pick it up, despite all the incriminating evidence on it, incriminating of his father as much as him. Okay. So, so what are we, what are we supposed to make of that? Like I'm trying to understand this. So first of all, I'm thinking about it the way I would think about it if I heard this story from a client. So the first thing I'd wonder is the timing is suspect. Like why would you drop off those laptops a week before your father announces his run for president? It seems, a week before your father announces his run for president. It seems to call it careless is to barely scrape the surface,

especially when you know perfectly well what's on those laptops, not only this treasure trove of homemade pornography, which is like a highly questionable enterprise in and of itself, you have to wonder exactly what motivates someone to continually film himself, engaging in sexual activity with all the various hookers that he was consorting with and strippers and so forth. There's a narcissism about that that's quite remarkable. But also, there's a vindictive carelessness about it that's also market because it's not one laptop, it's three and three is a lot. And there are rife with information that's devastating personally, right? I mean, you wouldn't

think you'd be sharing your homemade pornography with the world. And also, there's this immense amount of detail about all of these business enterprises that have been accumulating for decades. What is the observer's to make of that? No, is he that adult that he didn't even notice that this was foolish or is there a desire to be caught? I guess that's certainly a possibility. Or is there revenge against his whole family, including his father? I mean, I don't know how to make heads or tails

of this because it's so utterly preposterous. It's not surprising in some ways, I suppose that one of the reactions of the broader media was to assume that this couldn't possibly be real because when you read it, I mean, I'm still recovering from reading your book. And I want to delve into that as deeply as possible to establish, let's say, its credibility, but I really, I'm taken aback by the material that you reported in laptop from hell. I don't know what to make of it. I was thinking about what I would do in Joe's position in so far as I'm able to do that. So now I have a son and he's, I'm speaking as Joe here, I have a son and he's, he's a bit of a juvenile delinquent, let's say except he's not a juvenile, he's 50. And so he's about 30 years past the due date on juvenile delinquency. And he's rocking up a fairer, fairly high financial bill on the

hooker and cocaine front and the penthouse in Las Vegas. He's acting like the evil son of a Hollywood villain in every possible way. What am I supposed to do with him? And the first thing I would think, if I had any senses, well, how about I don't put him in a situation where he has more money than God? Because that's the last thing you want to do with someone who's addicted, let's say, especially something like cocaine, because an unlimited supply of money

means an unlimited supply of drugs. Then you might think, well, I'm also president, and my son is behaving in a way that, well, doesn't exactly shed a positive light on the family, but also is dangerous in all sorts of ways. Maybe I shouldn't be taking them on my business trips there as a plan. Maybe I shouldn't be introducing them to world leaders all over the planet, especially in Russia, in China and Ukraine, for example, or in any number of other corrupt countries that we might mention. Maybe I should have him for his own good

supervised, you know, and for the country's good so that he strains himself out and doesn't get a tremendous amount of trouble instead of enabling him at every turn and and then what and then what tangling us up in Ukraine In a way that's morally hazardous to say the least like I look at the situation in Ukraine I read your book I looked at Hunter Biden's dealings with Paris Ma. I think well Is there a five percent overlap between the Biden's financial interests and the fact that we're in a bloody war or A one percent overlap because the right amount of overlap is absolutely zero between the Biden's financial interests and the fact that we're in a bloody war or a 1% overlap because the right amount of overlap is absolutely zero when we're talking about war with Russia. So you went through this, you've been living it for a long time. Like,

what position did you start with when you started assessing the laptop material and what happened to you and the way we're looking at things as you walk through it? Yeah, look, I sort of came to a disgusted, I guess, because you know, opening up the laptop, there's just so much sorted material there. I ended feeling sorry for Hunter ordered material there. I ended feeling sorry for Hunter and feeling utter contempt for Joe Biden and also feeling that Joe Biden is a really bad person. As you said, what kind of a loving father puts his addicted son in front of a torrent of unaccountable cash. And that's what he did. You know, it wasn't that he was just enabling Hunter. Hunter was an integral part of the family influence peddling business. Hunter was the bag man. You know, there's a video where you

can see, taken quite some time ago, Hunter's quite young. He, Every job that Hunter had, every university position that he had was due to his father. He didn't have the marks to get into Yale Law School, and so favours were done. His first job out of college was at a wildly inflated salary for one of Joe's donors in Delaware. And from his salary, he complained that he had to pay not just his college fees off, but also his brothers. That was the way Joe worked. You know, he posed as the poorest man in Congress while living a champagne lifestyle while not really having any bills to pay. The usual bills that normal middle class families worry about like helping their children

get through, get to the best college they can and somehow paying the bills, getting them to private schools, getting the grandkids into the same thing, you know, internships, judgeships, fellowships, cushy government jobs, you name it. All of these things were there for the taking for Joe's extended family. And, you know, I know that Joe Biden spent his entire life building this mythology around himself that he's a good family man, a devout Catholic, modest Joe, working class Joe, lunch pal Joe, and it's all a lie. because Joe Biden's always had a fascination or a desire to be like the Kennedy clan. And so he's constructed a life and a family sort of image that's very similar to that.

And there was a fascinating interview that he did with Kitty Kelly when he was just newly in the Senate, newly widowed. And he was very cocky and would talk about, she said he dressed like great Gatsby, you know, Gatsby S. Very well dressed. And he would talk about himself as, you know, having had the the greatest wife that any man could have had. And their sex life was just brilliant to no man's ever experienced that.

And not in a sort of a mordland way, but in a boastful way. And just talking about himself in a way that, like he said, rose Kennedy. The Kennedy matriarch keeps on inviting him over for dinner, but he's too busy. And, you know, sort of boasting that the Kennedys are his friends and that they're throwing themselves at him, but, you know, he sort of fobs them off. So he's a very peculiar person. And I think,

and he also has always, it's not just that he's cognitively challenged now and he tells lies and told stories. He's always been a fabulous, he's always lived in this kind of delusional fantasy world where he sort of self aggrandizes and creates these stories about himself as the conquering hero, even if he never was in the place, like he was never with Nelson Mandela or he was never at ground zero or all these places that he puts himself in. And I don't even know if he really understands what he's doing, but it's a pathology. And so I think to myself about someone like Hunter, you know, this little motherless boy, who's a bit ADHD, a bit hyperactive, very smart, and he has this father who's Mac mccurial and not there very often, and has this huge job that's obviously more important.

And the entire family revolves around Joe, and it always has his mother put Joe on a pedestal and all the siblings' roles were to serve Joe. And so Joe as an adult, that's the way his own family behaves. And then there's the stepmother Jill Biden who comes in when hunters around about eight or nine. Who doesn't, who hunter anyway feels doesn't like him. She loves bow, he is older brother by one year, but she doesn't, Hunter feels that she just doesn't like him.

And so that's a huge burden. And I for father that lies all the time, I'm sure, broke promises all the time, is very destabilizing. And, and you know, promises all the time is very destabilizing. And another example of Joe's cynical exploitation of his family is that he had just been one an election to be a senator, this was the biggest thing in his life and his family's life. He was only 29 years old, he was 30 by the time

he was sworn in, the youngest senator. And his wife dies in a car crash tragically just a few days before Christmas while he's away in Washington and and their baby daughter is also killed and Hunter and his brother Bo are like two and three years old and they're very badly injured. And so this is just a devastating blow for this young senator-elect. And so he ends up being sworn in at the hospital bed of his children. And so he invites all the, you know, the world's photographers into this hospital room and he sets up a podium there and he's sworn in

and all the photographs showing the foreground, these poor one little motherless boys, a bandaged hunter has brain injury, his brother Bo has a broken leg and they're just listlessly lying in bed while in the background, their father is being sworn in. And I just, you know, that photograph touched the heart of everybody. I mean, you would have to be completely heartless, not to feel great sympathy for this poor

widow and his poor little boys. Right. But you also might be wondering why that photo op is staged that way, if you were particularly cynical and curious. Exactly. And that's what I came to think afterwards, how cynical it was of him to do that, and he's used that photograph in every campaign since. And so it takes on a new, very sinister life, I think.

Well, okay, so I want to go two directions. I want to return to the laptop. I want to talk about Mac Isaac and his attempts to bring the laptop to the attention of the FBI and then the eventual press response. But before we do that, I want to talk about Delve a little bit more into Hunter and his business acumen. So, you know, I've had a lot more economic opportunities put in front of me in the last four or five years. And that makes interacting with my family. It allows us a lot more opportunities, but it's also complex because once you have a lot of opportunities, personally, it's hard to know exactly how many opportunities to offer your family members. Let say your children because you want to offer them opportunity

But you want them to stand up on their own two feet and to do things for themselves And so when I was reading your book I was thinking okay, well Joe is in a position to offer hunter opportunities and People do that for their children and as your multiply, it gets harder to draw exactly the lines, but you don't want to put your kids in a position where their opportunities exceed their capabilities. And so what I kept wondering when I was reading the book was, well, hunters being put in front of all these international leaders, let's say in business people, if you were going to make a case for Hunter's business acumen and ability, how would you do that? Because it looked to me like the opportunities were not proportionate to the ability.

I couldn't tell what it was that Hunter had to offer apart from access to his father. And if you were trying to defend him, you know, in good faith, he has a legal degree, he has a legal degree from Yale. He's intelligent by your own admission. It's like, why isn't the story that Hunter is running his business affairs as an independent individual? Why isn't that an acceptable story, if it's not?

Look, I mean, I think that the business really wasn't a business. I mean, they didn't have a product. They weren't manufacturing anything. The business was influenced. It was it was contact with his father. It was, you know, at one point his uncle Jim, Joe Biden's younger brother decided that they were going to go into the business of selling gas from Louisiana, from Monkey Island to the Chinese. And so there was something, it's all sort of business deals. And there were always other people, Hunter's business partners who took care of the sort of pesky details, like setting up a business,

and doing the due diligence for it. And so on, that was something tiny Bob Linsky was brought in to try and legitimize what they were doing. But the fact is that Hunter was not interested in business. He found it incredibly boring. What he had always wanted to be was an artist or a writer. And look, I mean, he's now both, you know, he's written his memoir, and he's also doing paintings. And I know that's a grift in itself and the way the White House has handled that has been appalling. And the art world is known for money laundering and so on. So it's not the wisest choice, but still, I mean, my sister's a good artist

and she looked at Hunter's art and she said it's good. So there is something there. I mean, you know, and he's, the reason I feel sorry for him is I think that this is someone who has been utterly crushed and, you know, by his father, not really crushed, but sort of manipulated by his father. And I guess it's to his credit that he really hasn't been crushed. I mean, it's his freedom is expressed itself in this sort of malevolent way that he's just so destructive to everybody around him

and into his addictions and his utter selfishness. But you know, this is someone whose father just treated him as a spare, as you know, the bad man, as just for utility because the oldest son, Bo, was the golden child who also was being treated as an object in a way as sort of the apple of his father's eye who was going to continue the sort of dynasty, the dynastic ambitions of Joe Biden and become president after Joe. So, you pointed to something fairly specific there, you know, because I said, well, you know, how do you, if you're trying to offer your children opportunities, how do you justify that?

And one of the things you alluded to was, while you look for where their talents genuinely lie and try to ally the opportunities with those talents and you pointed out that Hunter can write and maybe he's got some artistic ability. I've looked at his paintings and they could be a lot worse than they are. Like I see some talent there. The prices that are being commanded for them are, well, the art world is a very strange place, so we won't say too much about that. But the prices are certainly a hell of a lot higher than 99% of artists would ever receive

for doing anything no matter how spectacular in the course of their entire lifetime. But you point out that as far as you can tell on the business front, which is what we're speaking about, there is actually no business there. And so I have my children involved in my business affairs. My daughter is running this new enterprise that we hope to turn into an online university and my son runs a software company, but they've done the bulk of the work on both of those projects. And they're actual projects.

They have an actual, there's an actual product there. We have actual customers. We write, they're actual businesses. And I don't feel that I've smoothed the road for the men in an appropriate way because all of these opportunities would have been sitting there languishing if they wouldn't have taken the ball and seriously run with it. And so that's what you want to do if you have opportunities ahead for your kids, you try to figure out a situation where if they work hard and act appropriately, then they're going to benefit and hopefully

bring benefit to other people at the same time. Then there's no cost in that to anyone. When I was reading your book, I was trying to give Hunter the Benefit of the Doubt partly for the reasons that you described. He's had the whole families had their fair share of tragedies and you have to write that into the story. But for the life of me, I couldn't figure out what in the world he could have possibly been selling

except for alliance with the family name. And Joe should have regarded that as an extreme moral hazard. And we should all regard that at the moment. As I said earlier, as a bloody extreme moral hazard, given that we're at war with Russia for all intents and purposes. And so this just isn't acceptable. You know, and you said you feel sorry for Hunter,

and I can understand that too. And I think the family is capitalized on that sympathy, but by the same token, at some point, you cross the line from victim to perpetrator. And it seems to me, maybe this is just my judgmental self, but his behavior on the sexual front in particular, like veers into perpetrator rather than victim. Now, you go out of your way and your book to point out, there's absolutely no evidence as far as you can tell that he veered into,

say, underage sexual activity. And so that's a very important thing to point out. But what he's doing with his hookers and his strippers and his homemade porn is hardly wholesome family friendly affair. And that in itself, apart from the business dealings, might have been enough so that an intelligent father who was also simultaneously president would have put some damn serious walls between him and his son and maybe also around his son. And that clearly failed to happen. So at best, we have a situation where the father is enabling and at worst, we have a situation where he's where what? He's benefiting from the position that he put his son in in the same way, perhaps that he benefited by having those photographs taken when he was confirmed for Senate.

Means a damn ugly story, right? Those are vicious, those are vicious accusations. And so it, they're rough things to levy. But as I said, going through your book, why should people believe you? Like, why shouldn't they just think, well, here's Miranda Divine muck-raking journalist, and she's taking this laptop and doing everything she possibly can to, you know, to portrait in the worst possible light for her own self-grantisement. Journalists certainly do that. So why should people listening and watching regard you as a credible figure, do you think? Well, I guess, I mean, it's not me, it's the evidence. That's what the book is.

I mean, it's just laying out and trying to distill in order this mess of a laptop. And every part of it is straight from the laptop. I haven't invented anything. And I verified the material that I used by talking to various of Hunter Biden's associates and former partners who's names are on the laptop, who were cc'd into emails and were part of businesses

and their names here on documents. For instance, one I can name is Tony Bobalinsky, who was Hunter's business partner in the final Chinese deal with CFC. And Tony Bobalinsky, I have the contents of his three devices that he also handed over to the FBI just before the 2020 election. And that overlaps with and corroborates that Chinese section of the of the laptop. And I mean, recently, Devon Archer has come out of the shadows. He's another of

Hunter's sort of former business partners, but also Hunter called him his best friend in business. And in fact, Devon, who's quite a wholesome person, didn't share any of Hunter's vices. He was doing the lion's share of setting up businesses and organizing things. So that all that Hunter had to do was fly into some town and get into a suit and stop smoking crack for a couple of hours and just go and meet these Chinese or whoever. And so, Devon Archer also has testified before this Congressional Committee and verified

a lot of the material that I've written about. And I think just as time has gone on, it's now almost three years, there's nothing in the book that hasn't been verified over and over or corroborated or proven. No one has proven anything wrong. And the laptop, even though Hunter's still being coy about, maybe it's my laptop or maybe it's not my laptop, maybe it's Russian disinformation you know, his lawyers are suing people for breach of privacy, John Paul MacGazzec for breach of privacy, for exposing his material, which he admits is his material. So it's a confusing sort of position to take. Okay, so well, and well, and you're still standing and you're not tied up in court for defamation,

et cetera. And it has been quite a while since you published the book. Let's go back to Mac Isaac for a minute and continue the laptop story. Okay. Now, in your book, you said that, and you just elaborated on that now because one of the things people might be wondering is, well, what the hell is this laptop shop owner combing through this hard drive floor to begin with? That's really not his business.

But you accounted for that. You said that that was partly a fluke on the technical side that because he had to keep rebooting the laptop and monitoring the upload. He was confronted with the material and then that started to make him nervous. Now you detailed this in your book that mech Isaac actually got extremely nervous once he realized what was on the laptop and he went to the FBI. Is that correct? Is that if I got that right? And then the FBI did pick up the laptop. And so let's lay that out. Let's lay that out to the point where the contents of the laptop start to be made public by the New York Post because the next absolutely hideous and despicable sequence of events that occurs is that the New York Post breaks the story

essentially and then the powers that be shut it down in all sorts of ways, right? Facebook does, Twitter does. But even more stunningly, you have dozens of security personnel working for the government, attributing the contents of the laptop to Russian disinformation. And this is just prior to the election. Okay, so let's go back to Mac Isaac. He's looking through this laptop. He's starting to short out. He just runs this little shop and a bomb has been dropped into his lap. He goes to the FBI. That's correct. What does the FBI do? And then how does the story break? Giuliani gets involved. How does the story break? Well, firstly, what happens is that in the background here, you have the impeachment,

the sort of prelude to the impeachment of Donald Trump. Donald Trump's made a phone call with the Ukrainian president Zelensky, the new Ukrainian President. And during that public phone call, he says, you know, can you do me a favor and investigate what's been going on with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and Berisma, basically. And because this had been talked about, I mean, it was very unseemly at the time the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, those sort of mainstream organizations, media organizations that are now trying to explain away these problems,

were actually reporting that it was pretty untoward that Joe Biden's son was, you know, on the board of this corrupt Ukrainian energy company and what they didn't know was that he was making a million dollars a year. So this was sort of the buzz in the background and the word barisma came up and John Paul MacEyesak was a Trump supporter, no crime in that and he was alert to And he was alert to the sort of details of this looming impeachment. And he remembered the name Baruchismas. So he went back and he scoured through the laptop and he found all these documents. And that was really what made him scared because he's in Delaware the way he explains.

It is the Biden's own Delaware. He was afraid that something would happen to him. So he, in fact, he made several copies. He put one in an envelope and sent it to a friend and said, don't open this on the open. If something happens to me, that was our frightened he was. And he contacted the FBI, but he did it to a secure us through it through his father

and uncle or something in New Mexico. And they got rebuffed and really quite rudely. And he made a couple of efforts and nothing happened. This was from sort of like September and then November of 2019. He finally gets a phone call and he's asked about this laptop and in December, December 9, two FBI agents turn up at his doorstep, question him, he tells them he's got a very forensic mind, so he's really had figured out what he felt were the most problematic things on the laptop and what he thought were crimes. And so he laid it all out for them. And then he was frightened because he said, there's one of the FBI agents

left. He said, because he was worried about his own safety and he said, what will I do? And one of the FBI agents, he claims, said to him, well, in our experience, nothing happens to people who don't talk, you know, who don't open their mouth. So he took that, when he told me that I thought, well, you know, I can understand you being paranoid, but that sounds very far-fetched. But as the sort of cover up in the FBI involvement in it has come to lie, I look back on that conversation and think, well, maybe he wasn't so off base. So, so what the hell did he have to gain? Well, exactly. I mean, what he was, what he was, what he said to the FBI, when he was hoping was,

he felt this was exculpatory information for Donald Trump to use in the upcoming impeachment. And he wanted the FBI to know that and he's a very, you know, his father was in the military, his uncle was in the military, he's a very law and order sort of guy and he really had faith that the FBI would do the right thing and that's why he was so desperate for them to take it and he thought, good, well, I've gotten that off my conscience. I'm now protected and no one will come and try and kill me for this, which is really what he was worried about. But then the months ticked by and nothing happened and the impeachment was going on and he just thought, this is ridiculous. Why does no one know? So he tried to contact various Republicans.

He tried Jim Jordan and Lindsey Graham and, you know, sent faxes and emails and phone calls and no one ever got back to him. And then he saw Rudy Giuliani who was then President Trump's lawyer on television and talking about Barisma in Ukraine. And so he tried him as a kind of a last-ditch effort. He sent an email and low and behold, Rudy Giuliani's lawyer, a guy called Bob Costello, who served with him at the Southern District of New York, a very buttoned up, very sharp lawyer,

was intersecting Rudy's mail at that time, I don't know why security reasons or something. And he saw this letter and it was a very email. It was a very well-written email, very detailed, very precise. And he thought, well, this guy might be something you called him, ascertained that he seemed on the up and up and got him to FedEx, a copy of the hard drive to his home in Long Island. And a copy of the hard drive to his home in Long Island. And then when he opened it up, he just saw evidence. He was Bob Costello, was the, I think, deputy head of the criminal division of the Southern

District of New York. So he knows the crimes when he sees them. And he said he saw a lot of crimes on this laptop. So he calls Rudy and they then, and this is sort of August, late August of 2020. And so they then spend the next six weeks or so just doing their due diligence on this, trying to figure out if it's you know legit, if it's real, if it's on. And they satisfied themselves at that point where they felt they could hand it to the media without looking like fools. They brought Steve Bannon in at the last minute to help with some of the Chinese names

because Steve's got a lot of connections there, but Steve Bannon did not get a copy of the hard drive. They did not give him one. They were very close with that information. And then Steve Bannon started sort of alluding to it in the media. And he started, you know, and Rudy did as well trying to get various media to pay attention to it. Okay, so one side venture here and then back to the story breaking in the New York Post. So Trump is being hauled over the calls at this point for Russian collusion. And when is it that Biden is in contact with Ukrainian authorities to get the prosecutor who's going after Brisma fired?

So that was in December of 2015. He first tied the $1 billion in USAID to the firing of Victor Shokan. And he did that pretty much off his own bat. I mean, it was US policy, State Department policy to clean up corruption in the prosecutor general's office. Victor Shoken had been brought in just about a year before, actually less than a year before, he'd been brought in in February 2015 as a kind of a clean skinned by Poroshenko, who was the American backed president of Ukraine to clean things up because there'd been a huge scandal with his

predecessor. Do you want me to go back into the details of that? Well, there's a loose end here, I guess, for me. And that is, well, Trump is being accused of collaborating inappropriately with members of a foreign country, Russia, in this case. But we also have, at the same time, Biden, who's made reference to this on the world stage, getting a prosecutor fired. My understanding is that that prosecutor was going after Berisma. And have I got that right? Okay.

And it's the same Berisma that Hunter is involved in and that's paying him a million dollars a year. Yeah. So, Berisma was owned by a guy called Slick Cheewski, who was a mini-garc, they call him a billion there, and it was, but behind Slachewski was a really odious oligarch called Egor Kolomewski, who would have people's eyeballs gouged out. But he was, and Lachevsky had been a minister in the previous Yanukovic government, which had been sort of Russia aligned, and the Americans wanted him out. And I mean, I don't think it's controversial or incorrect to say that the CIA was involved in the coup. How much they were involved,

whether they nudged or whether they were more involved, who knows, but they certainly were involved. And so Janikovic was thrown out and he is sort of corrupt as the Minukrains, the most corrupt country in Europe, one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and all the ministers fled from that government taking billions of dollars of Ukrainian people's money, except for one, a guy called Michaelis Lechevsky who owned Berisma. While he did flee to Russia initially and then to Dubai, he was allowed to keep his business, his oil and gas business for RISMA, and to continue to make money from it, which I think is a curious point. Everybody, every other person involved with that Yanukovych government was forced

out and had to flee, but as Lechevsky, while he wasn't allowed back in the country, could continue to earn money, in fact could put Americans like Hunter Biden and his friend Devon Archer onto the board of his company to try and legitimize it and keep the Americans sweet and to put pressure on Ukrainian authorities not to investigate him. And you know Victor Shokhan was brought in, as I said, after a scandal. And the scandal was that his predecessor, who ran the Prosecutor General's Office, a guy called Ureema, had presided over the collapse of a case that had been brought by the British serious fraud squad in conjunction with the FBI against Lachewski.

They had frozen $24 million of Lachewski's money in a London bank account. And this was a very important case for the serious fraud squad because it was the show piece that the government was boasting about in the head of the serious fraud squad had a whole conference about that they were going to claw back the ill-gotten gains of the Ukrainian oligarchs that had been banished from that country because they were aligned with Russia. So this was a really important case and a bribe was paid to the prosecutor general's office, people in the prosecutor general's office, and the case collapsed. And the money, a British judge, unfree froze that money and Zlegeski could take it back. And so this was hugely embarrassing to the US Embassy, which really was running

things in Ukraine. And they were being pressured. The Ambassador, Jeffrey Piotte, was getting a lot of grief from the British who were completely furious about the fact that they blamed the Americans for this happening. Well, I didn't have control over this corrupt prosecutor general's office. and Poroshenko, the president was under pressure as well. So he brought in this guy, reluctantly, Victor Shokin, who was sort of a, you know, kind of a superstar. He was a very popular prosecutor.

He was always a line prosecutor, had never wanted to be a boss. And he had been responsible for some very high profile convictions. And you know, he was quite flamboyant in the way, for instance, one time he busted a correct politician and he went into the router, the Ukrainian parliament, and he played video to all the parliamentarians of this kind of clandestine video of this politician accepting a bride, we're asking for a bride and getting one. And, and you know, that was a major story. And he'd also arrested the killers of this, of this journalist who'd been beheaded and his body, trust up and left in a forest. And that was seen as, you know, he'd been writing stories that were damaging to the previous regime and various oligarchs. So he also

busted that story and that case open and arrested those people. And we were still pursuing the people behind them, the powerful people behind them. So he was kind of a without fear of favor prosecutor. He'd already suffered a one assassination attempt when a sniper fired through a window and a meeting he was at. And so he was a sort of a good choice for Poroshenko to appoint as the prosecutor general and Stokens says that he didn't want to do it, but he agrees he knows it's political and you know politics in Ukraine is very ugly and so but anyway he reluctantly took it because he said Poroshenko appealed to his patriotism and you know I've spent a lot of time talking to Shokan and I mean mean, not in his, I can't speak Ukrainian, and he can't speak English, but through translators and through Google

Translate. And he does strike me as a very patriotic, proud Ukrainian, and proud of his record as a prosecutor. And there's evidence that he's given me to show that he was a very successful prosecutor. And as prosecutor general, every year, I mean, there's a lot of bureaucracy there and a lot imposed by the Americans and Europeans on the prosecutor general's office. So there was a lot of reporting going on. And he's showing me reports where he had three times as many prosecutions of corrupt people as either is to predecessors. So there is some evidence, and I've also seen kind of in the background where he lives and he doesn't seem to live lavishly.

And so, I can't see any evidence that he's corrupt and no one has ever brought forward any evidence that he's corrupt. So how did Biden have him fired? And why? Well, well, Shokin says that he was investigating Lachevsky and Berizmer at the time. And there is evidence for that because in February of 2016, about six weeks before he was removed, Shokin issued a warrant for seizing all of Lechevsky's property in Kiev. And that was a couple of mansions,

three plots of land, a Rolls Roy Silver Phantom car. That was reported in the Ukrainian media and but in other European media as well. And so that's established that that happened and no one's ever denied that. And so that's evidence that what Shokhen is saying is true, is that he said he had more than one case. He had several cases of foot of against Lachevsky

for money laundering and corruption and so on. And so, you know, therefore I come at this from, well, why are these allies being told by Joe Bayon and by his allies, also by people at the Atlantic Council, people who are sort of affiliated with that sort of, with sort of the Atlantic Council is sort of the NATO Front, so with NATO people. And there's sort of Russia hawks that are bound in American academia. They all backed back Joe Biden. Also, there were some Europeans as well. But again, I've interviewed, for instance, a guy called Jan Tmbinsky, who was the EU ambassador to Ukraine at that time. He was quoted as welcoming, you know, Shokens removal, and there was always anonymous sources quoted by the Washington Post and New York Times and so on Bloomberg and financial times. I'm all saying that the Europeans, the EU, wanted

Shokun gone because he was corrupt. But Jan Tobinski, when I interviewed him, said, no, look, I knew there were problems in the prosecutor general's office, and it all comes back to that bribe that was paid in the, there's Lechevsky serious fraud, called Case in London falling apart. Everybody was up in arms about that, but that was not shoken. And Tobinski says, I didn't make any comment about Shokin because those kind of details were up to the Ukrainians, which is the proper way to behave. Not only that, I mean, I've found a European Commission report from December of 2016. In fact, it was about a week after Joe Biden traveled to Ukraine on December 9 and gave that ultimatum to Poroshenko that

you fire Shokun or you don't get the billion dollars in aid. This European Commission report was the final report of their sort of investigation and sort of writing Ukraine to do various things, including very importantly to clean up corruption in order to qualify for visa-free travel, which was very important to Ukraine. And this report said, yes, they've satisfied everything, and in fact, they can, they now can qualify for visa-free travel. And on the corruption front, they've done very well. There's been a lot of progress.

And they actually identified Shokun's office as having made strides including setting up a new anti-corruption office inside the prosecutor general's office and that Shokun had just appointed someone to that. And there are letters as well from the summer, August September of 2015 from John Kerry and Victorian Newland. John Kerry was then the Secretary of State. Victoria Newland was a senior State Department person. Congratulations, Shokhan. Two Victor Shokhan. I've seen them saying,

good on you for your progress and your good work, what are you doing? That's comprehensively dealt with, I would say. Let's go back to the emergence of the laptop story in the New York Post. So why did the post decide to move ahead with the story? What did they initially report and what was the consequences? Well, so unbeknownst to me, I didn't really know anything until I get a text message from, it was late on a Friday night from Bob Costello. And I had been doing stories with Rudy Giuliani and I just derived in July of 2019 in America

to do an 18-month stint cover the election because my former editor, Colin, in Australia was editor of the editor-in-chief, had been editor-in-chief of the New York Post, he asked me to come and do this this 18-month stint, which I thought would be a lot of fun. The first thing I did was befriend Rudy Giuliani, because when I lived in New York with my family in earlier times when it was crime ridden, you know, I had a lot of admiration for what Rudy Giuliani had done as mayor of New York cleaning it up. And I knew that he was close to Donald Trump. So I figured if I wanted to cover Donald Trump,

I would be engrossed at myself with Rudy Giuliani, which I did. And I had just written a story about Rudy who'd been the first person to talk to Donald Trump after he'd gotten out of hospital recovered from COVID. And Rudy loved that story. So I guess I was top of mind. He'd been trying to shop this story around

to other media and he had no nobody biting and time was running out. And he felt that he wanted to get this out in the media before Trump had to to a debate against the first debate against Biden. Anyway, so Bob Costello sends me this text and he says, look, there are four photographs in it from the laptop and he says, this is a really good story, let's talk. So, next day, we had a long conversation about the email from John Paul MacIsaac, the crimes that were on the laptop, and he talked me through it. And it convinced me that, and he's a very serious person, and he convinced me that he'd done due diligence on it enough to satisfy him, that he wasn't selling me a bill of goods, but obviously

we would have to do our own due diligence. But it was enough to make me think this is pretty big. And so I texted my editor on the Saturday night, Colin, and sent him the photos. And then we had a conversation. And then he just decided, well, let's just put the entire, you know, newsroom on this and it was all guns blazing. Reporter went down to Delaware, interviewed John Plumac Isaac, picked up the subpoena that the FBI had given him

to when they collected the laptop, picked up the work order with Hunter Biden's signature on it. You know, we contacted people who appeared on the laptop. I didn't, I wasn't doing this recording. This was my colleague Emma Jo Morris and other people in the paper were doing this. And look, there was, there was trepidation in the newsroom. Let's put it that way about this story because, because Steve Bannon, who had a bad reputation for being loose with

the truth, was involved, although he was much less involved than our competitors in the media claimed. He certainly wasn't involved with anything I was doing. And Rudy Giuliani's reputation already had suffered somewhat, and he'd already been smeared as being sort of an agent of Russian influence or a victim of Russian influence. And so, you know, and Ukraine was sort of a dirty word. I mean, everyone was nervous about it, but to his very great credit, my, and I don't think any other, any other editor in America would have done this, but Col Al and did it. And he said, no, I'm satisfied. This is a great story. And remember, this is three

weeks before the election. And he pulled the rip cord. And our first story was, you know, Biden's secret emails on the front page. And it mainly was about an email from a barisma executives to Hunter saying, you know, thanks very much for introducing me to your father. And, you know, the peculiar behavior of the Biden campaign too, made it raised our suspicions because it was like, to us, they were saying, oh, you know, maybe there was a meeting, it's not on his official schedule, you know, you meet a lot of people to the Washington Post, etc. No, no meeting ever occurred. And there were all sorts of other strange things, but strangest of all, we sort of expected obviously in the middle of a very tough election campaign middle of a very tough election campaign to get pushed back from that side and from other media, but not from social media. Immediately, we held the story until 5 a.m. normally it would go out at 10 o'clock the previous

night, but online we held it until 5 a.m. and within three or four hours, it had been shut down and censored by Facebook and Twitter. And the first we knew of it was a Facebook executive who also happens to be very plugged into the Democrats. It just tweeted that Facebook was now going to come review his exact words, but it was basically throttle the reach of our story, pending fact checking, right? They still haven't done the fact checking as far as I can tell, because the first thing you would do, which is what we did, if you fact checking, and she would go to the other people who appeared on the emails that we were publishing,

and say, hey, did you get this email? And Tony Bob Linzki was already out there. It wasn't hard to find. He was on the emails. You could have asked him, but they have never contacted him. So some fact check. And then Twitter followed suit. And who at Twitter? Who at Twitter, do we know?

Yes. So now we know. I didn't know when I wrote the book. But the story of the cover up, I think the book, but the story of the cover up I think is bigger than the story of corruption, which is you know the age old Washington story At Twitter were embedded various FBI and CIA X operatives including in a very important role was a guy called James Baker who was had been the chief lawyer at the FBI. Did I say that?

And he'd been parachuted eight months before the election into Twitter as their deputy chief lawyer, deputy council. And he was involved, as we now know, from the Twitter files, in discussions that morning, October 14, 2020, of whether or not to basically shut down our story. And the excuse that Twitter used was that we had violated their hacked materials policy. And that's important. It seems bizarre to us because nothing about the story was hacked. But now we understand that for weeks beforehand, the FBI had been briefing Twitter and Facebook, although we don't know as much about what they were telling Facebook, but I assume it was the same thing. They'd been briefing Twitter to look out in October, likely in October, to look out

for a hack and leak operation, hack and dump operation of Russian disinformation, likely about Hunter Biden. So, and you think that was a consequence of them knowing what was on the laptop contents because it had already been turned over to them by Mikhail Zik? Partly, that was, they had had the laptop since December 2019, but also there's a hidden part of the story, which fits in, But also, there's a hidden part of the story, which fits in, which is that the FBI had been spying on Rudy Giuliani since November of 2019. And which is about the time that John Paul Mac Isaac was contacting the FBI and saying he had this laptop, right? And Rudy Giuliani was the president's private lawyer, so there was

this covert surveillance warrant on his cloud, and that meant that in August of 2020, when John Paul Mac Isaac sent that voluminous detailed email to Rudy Giuliani, the FBI, they were doing their job, would have had access to it. So they would have known the cats out of the bag, right? And then they also would have had access to his eye messages with me. Now, there wasn't a lot, we mostly spoke on the phone, but there were a couple of messages. And enough, when I looked back to see that it was obvious that the New York Post was interested was going to publish. I mean, one of them I said, don't give it to anyone else, right? We, you know, all systems go here. So they knew it was coming. Well, you know, you just skipped over something, you know, about five minutes ago saying, you know, oh, well, by the way, this is probably as big a scandal as the Hunter Biden laptop itself. And it's like, well, yeah, I would say so. Is the FBI is conspiring

with Facebook and Twitter to suppress the story about the president's son being in cooots with Ukraine, Ukrainian energy company three weeks before the election. Yeah, I would say that's like that's that that makes Watergate look like nothing. Like seriously. Part of the reason I think that this story hasn't got traction is that there's so much explosive material in it that you can't even keep track of it. It's just one preposterous scandal after another. And now the New York Post got kicked off Twitter entirely, right? Wasn't that the case? I think I got kicked off Twitter around the same another. And now the New York Post got kicked off Twitter entirely, right?

Wasn't that the case? I think I got kicked off Twitter around the same time. But you guys were gone from Twitter, right? And now the New York Post is the oldest newspaper in the United States. If I got that right, very influential newspaper, but Twitter shut you down completely. So let me add, throw something else in here., of course, I've been watching your country from the outside since I'm a Canadian. And then I've been watching Trump play the stolen election song for, well, since the election. And I've thought a couple of things about that. I thought it was off-brand for him to claim victimization because Trump is the guy who Trump's around and says, I always win.

And in this case, he didn't win. And then I've talked to many people who've been analyzing the court cases where corruption in the election has been alleged. And Trump has come out on the losing side of the vast majority of those. And then I think, well, he's got the details wrong with regards to the election, but he's got the meta-narrative right. And because I can't help, and this isn't, I'm not speaking as a Trump admirer here, by the way, be that as it may, one way or another, his notion that, see, my sense is

if the bloody laptop story hadn't been suppressed, the election wouldn't have gone the way it went, because it was a pretty narrow margin, and this is a pretty vicious story. And so the fact that the FBI conspired with Facebook and Twitter to collapse this story, to to limited reach and then to attribute it to Russian disinformation and then to have the security community come out. Now you detail this in your book too.

There's dozens of people from the security and intelligence community that come out and say, Oh, this is definitely Russian disinformation. And one of the things you point out in your book is, they had absolutely no evidence whatsoever to be making that claim. And so now all of a sudden your story disappears and the New York Post is off Twitter and it's three weeks before the election

and it's a very narrow election and it turns out that Biden wins. It's like, well, the call out of scandal is to say almost nothing. And it's no wonder that Trump's story that the election was stolen resonates with his base, even if it's not stolen in the detailed way that he describes. There's certainly something unbelievably rotten going on

at the highest possible levels of essentially fascist collusion, right? Government, the presidency, the White House itself, the FBI, the CIA, Facebook, and Twitter, all colluding to take down the New York Post for reporting on the corruption of Hunter Biden. Yeah, you kind of think that would be front page story on a place like the New York Times, for example, if it wasn't corrupt beyond comprehension. Yeah, not just corrupt, but I also wonder, corrupt, but I also wonder, since I've been investigating this story, I see the intelligence community as so embedded in social media, in Facebook and Twitter, and manipulating

behind the scenes and censoring. It's not just the Twitter files, it's this incredible court case called Missouri versus Biden, where the charge is that, and a judge actually did find that the Biden administration is appealing that, but found that the Biden administration, the government was putting enormous pressure on these social media companies to censor anything when they're narrative. I mean, whether it was on COVID, on vaccines, on the Ukraine war, memes about Jill Biden,

anything that was detrimental to the government was verbototen and the government was holding over these social media companies, the threat that the Republicans are into as well, that ought to be followed through on actually, that they would break them up and use section 230, which allows them to escape the normal legal constraints that are normal publisher like the New York Post has. But so that was the threat hanging over them. Okay, so let's delve into that for a second. Okay, so now we have a situation where the president's office itself has been found in violation of the first of Inment, direct violation of the first amendment. It's not some accidental violation.

It's a programmatic repeated violation of the first amendment. It's not some accidental violation. It's a programmatic repeated violation of the first amendment. And the journalists, let's say at the New York Times, or CNN for that matter, MSNBC, aren't smart enough to understand that a direct assault on the first amendment actually, well, let's say threatens their livelihood in so far as they're actually acting as journalists. So how do you make sense out of the FBI CIA collusion with the White House? Why the hell would they do that? And then what's going on with the journalists? Like, this is something that just makes my jaw drop. It's like, of all the things that you would think would light a fire underneath journalists.

It would be the assault by politicians on the First Amendment. So like, what the hell? Why is this happening? Well, there's two things there so on the journalism I my Feeling is that if the social media companies are basically controlled by Intelligence operatives so to must be the New York Times and the Washington Post the so-called prestige brands They wouldn't bother with the New York Post and post the so-called prestige brands. They wouldn't bother with the New York Post,

but the New York Times, for instance, is an incredibly powerful entity. It dictates, it sets the agenda for newsrooms across the world. I've worked in Australia as a journalist and in Britain. And the New York Times is incredibly influential. And it's sort of all the news that's fit to print. If it's in the New York Times, you can take it to the bank.

That has been the, you know, it's brand. And I've just seen through the Russia collusion stories and the stories that I have done deep dives on, particularly the laptop story, that they pedal lies, outright lies, and the Washington Post as well. They do fact checking. When you actually go back and look, the shokin thing, I know I spent a long time talking about that, but there is layer upon layer of so many lies, and it's not just lies, it's documents disappeared internationally. lies, it's documents disappeared internationally. It's an operation. It's not just journalists being sloppy or one corrupt journalist. This is a concerted operation, the likes of which you would get from you know spies. So I don't know exactly how it works, but a rule of thumb that someone told me is the State Department these days is about 50% CIA.

So, you know, and you, you know, in this various ways, you can tell who's CIA and who isn't in, and they, they, these spies operate as diplomats. So why are they, why are they so aligned, why are they so aligned with the Biden administration? Like I wouldn't think that necessarily that the natural allies of the security slash intelligence community would necessarily be the left wing Democrats. Like so how do you account for that? It's not really about that.

It's about, well, I mean partly it may be, but because Washington, you know, they're all from the swamp and in Washington 90% of people vote Democrat. But I think it's something more. And I think this is why Trump was perceived as an existential threat. Because actually when you look at his presidency, he just, you know, he didn't do any,

he didn't start any wars. He didn't do any dangerous. There's a plot. He didn't do any dangerous. He, you know, the economy was ticking along. There was nothing outrageous he did. He really, for all his rhetoric, There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot.

There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot.

There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot.

There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. There is a plot. there, you know, it's not only, you know, in 9-11 it was, and I mean, I regret myself. I fell for all of that. And I was all ra-ruff, very ra-rck, which I visually regret. And now I'm very cynical about the lies that I was told and bought then and I hear now from the same people. And so I think that Trump just didn't buy into that whole project. It's America first, it's more the isolationist streak. And you know, he would

ask NATO, why aren't you pulling your weight? Why aren't the Europeans paying for their own military? Why are we having to be the policeman of the world? Why can't we have a decent relationship with Russia? I mean, just upending decades of cold woman mentality, which has never gone away. I mean, like he upended the Palestine narrative with regards to the Abraham Accords. Exactly. And all for the good, really. Well, that was something, yes. Fresh thinking there. And so I think that is why he's an existential threat because of those people who were the deepest

of the neocon deep state really loathed him. And you see that in, I mean, the CIA letter by the 51 former intelligence officials is very, very instructive. The, that was the letter that was written just a few days former intelligence officials is very, very instructive. The, that was the letter that was written just a few days after our story came out and was suppressed. And it was designed, we know, to help Joe Biden

in the second debate against Donald Trump, in which obviously the laptop from hell is going to come up. And we now know, thanks to the oversight committee, now the Republicans are in control, that that letter was organized by Mike Morel, who had been a former acting CIA director and was on a promise to be Biden's CIA director. So he had a personal motive. So when you say it was organized in what way? What does that mean exactly that letter? So what we also find is that Anthony Blinken, now the Secretary of State and a member of Joe Biden's inner circle, was working for the Biden campaign. He phoned Mike Morel a day or two, or maybe the

same day, Morel's vague on it, that our story came out. And Morales said, oh, he didn't tell me to write the letter, but he would not have written the letter if he hadn't had the phone call from Anthony Blinken. And if Anthony Blinken hadn't sent him a USA Today story, which I have no doubt was ceded by the intelligence community, which said that the laptop was Russian disinformation. And so Mike Morelden said about calling, getting 51 former, most of them CIA people, some like James Clapper, who's lied before Congress, not exactly in Honours Broker, he was also rep pulled in,

but there were five former CIA directors or acting CIA directors who signed that letter. This was a heavy duty letter. And what they said was, well, the message that it sent was that the laptop and our story, therefore, were Russian disinformation. Right, right. They wrote the letter and they try to get out of now, was very easily. They used a language like, has all the earmarks, which is a way of a Russian information operation. They used the weight of their previous high careers in the CIA to basically sign seal and deliver this letter. And Mike Morrell says in his emails to other people when he's trying to recruit them to

sign the letter that he wants to get, if he tells John Brennan, former CIA director under Obama, who had a lot to do with the destabilization of Ukraine. And he tells John Brennan, you know, I want to give Joe Biden a talking point at the debate, you know, a way to... Oh, how nice of... Well, the thing that struck me is so preposterous about that. When that broke, I thought, well, that's a lot of former intelligence officials. It's hard to imagine that they're all colluding.

But on the other hand, why in the world would the Russians be so thrilled with Trump? I mean, you had to buy that story, right? You had to believe that Trump was somehow a natural ally of Russia and Putin. And I mean, I know that Trump got along with Putin the same way he got along with the preposterous leader of North Korea. But it certainly didn't seem to me that there was any evidence to suggest that Trump was the natural ally of Russia. And so you had to buy that to believe that the Russians would be so interested in Trump that they would go to all this work to produce this complex form of unbelievably sophisticated

disinformation in the form of a fake laptop from Hunter dropped off in some no-account place in Delaware. I mean, none of that makes any sense unless, you know, you attribute like super spy capabilities to some genius on the Russian front, which strikes me as, you know, somewhat preposterous. And yet, well, all 51 of these people signed this document. And so everyone thought-

You were the standard without looking at the laptop without asking to have a look at the hard drive without any details. But you and your details. Any due diligence. I mean, they had no evidence to say this none. And they just, they, they, in fact, admitted in the letter, they say, you know, from our vast experience, we've ascertained, you know, this is exactly the whole earmark, the Russian

information operation. So they, they abused their authority. They abused the trust that the American people would have in that authority. And it's extraordinary to me that they haven't apologized. We have tried numerous times. I've sent emails, I've phoned, I've called their bosses, I've called the think tanks, they've, the bosses of the think tanks that they're aligned to, you know, every which way, we've had other reporters do the same thing and there's just nothing from them, it's just, just, just, one guy called David Priese who was a CIA, something or other, he went on Fox News and he said he's happy that he did it. You know, it was the right thing to do.

By what standard? Because Trump is so evil that every possible weapon used against him is justifiable. No matter what, is that the rationale? Well, that's the subject. But no, he had some bogus excuse. I can't remember it was so flimsy, but they, you know, and I have spoken to someone who should have signed it, had the credentials to sign it, and didn't sign it because he felt that it just, there was no basis for it. He didn't want to be involved in some political. He just saw it as a

political hit. And so that would have been, these people are very savvy. I mean, you'd expect them to be their high-level CIA analysts and directors. You would expect that they would sniff a rat and know that this was political. Of course they knew. But as you said, they felt there was this illness that had was afflicting the intelligence community and all the formers, which was that Trump is an existential threat. Sure, that's right. You see that in the reaction of people like Harris. Is the Trump is such a threat that no matter, see, it's so interesting to me to see this happening because it's happening on multiple fronts, like we're told by people continually that we face existential threats that are such that all the normal rules should be upended by moral people.

And those normal rules could mean every single one of your constitutional rights, which is, of course, what happened in the COVID lockdown, which is now a disease that the doctors, according to MSNBC, are having a difficult time distinguishing from the common cold, you know, so that's kind of a problem. And so we have emergency emergency emergency climate change. Well, that's the, that's the next one. That's the next one. It's like climate change is such an emergency that every right-thinking person is, is terrified into apocalyptic panic. And so, you don't get to fly and you don't get to have a car and you don't get to leave your city and you don't get to eat meat. And, and, well, you know, quote, we get all the power. And of course,

that has nothing to do with any of this. And so, you know, one of the things that I've come to conclude is that if you're listening to someone who says the crisis is such that your fear justifies my suspension of your civil liberties, then you're talking not to your ally in crisis and an appropriate leader, but to a tyrant in sheep's clothing. And this is exactly what's happening with the Trump front too. It's like, oh my God, he's so dangerous, just like climate change in COVID that anything goes no matter what, because no matter what we do on our side and we're the good guys, it can't be nearly as bad as Trump might do

at some unspecified point in the future. It's like, well, just about enough of this. I mean, the story that you unfold, and I know we touched on the collusion part of it here at the end, this right again, FBI CIA, Facebook, Twitter, conspiring with the Washington Post and the New York Times to subvert what I would say is the story of the biggest political scandal in my lifetime. A guy was around. I was young during the Watergate hearings and the Nixon collapse. And that was nothing compared to this as far as I can tell. First of all, it was, you know, Nixon had his hands in a variety of relatively unseemly places, but not in his most spectacularly multi-dimensional

manner as this, especially not when you factor in the post-hawk Hunter Biden collusion to silence the people who brought it to public attention. It's absolutely beyond comprehension. So how has your book done by the way? How many copies has it sold? It's done very well. It sold in hard cover. 200, like, I can't remember. So it's in the hundreds of thousands though. Yeah, yeah. Oh, right. No, it's done very well. And then there's audiobook and Oh, right. No, it's done very well. And then, you know, there's audio book and ebook is done very well as so. So are there newspapers other than the New York Post that have carried the banner forward in the in the Biden laptop investigation? Or or no, I mean, there have been obviously Fox News and conservative online publications, but no. But no, I kept on hoping, because I know that there are,

at least I don't know, Washington Post, but I know at the New York Times that there are honest journalists and some of them have covered aspects of this. And so you get glimmers of truth coming out, but you know, for instance, it took, it was about March or April, well after Joe Biden was ensconced in the Oval Office in 2021, that the New York Times finally came out and admitted that, yeah, you know, the laptop was real, or then depended some of these emails. That was by the way. Oh, by the way, it was the 23rd paragraph of a story that was buried somewhere.

And then after that, of course, because in your time set, see agenda, washing the poster, everyone else just tripped over themselves to do similar. And they all had this boilerplate paragraph. And it was, there is no evidence that Joe Biden was involved or knew anything about what was going on. Okay, so let's go down that because we're running out of time here and there's so much more to cover. We haven't even covered the details of the business involvement,

but let's do that. Okay, so I'll play devil's advocate. So Hunter has been along for the ride with his father, but his father is concerned about him and is keeping an eye on him. And why not offer him a spot on the jet since it's sitting there anyways. We get to catch up and do family things together. And Hunter, I like to have Hunter along in my meetings

is he brings another set of eyes to the situation. And if he happens to be doing some business on the side, well, what's the problem with that? Okay. And I'm arm's length from that completely. I don't have a clue what's going on and I'm certainly not benefiting from this in any financial manner. And so like what's the big fuss here, everyone?

I'm just being a good father and, you know, opening some doors for my son. Okay. So what's wrong with that story? What does, how is Joe involved? And what's the evidence for that as far as you're concerned? Well, first of all, I mean, this is Joe Biden's business. This is how he has supported his family in a lavish way, lived in DuPont mansions and you know, put all his kids through schools and all his nephews and nieces and so on. He's run an influence peddling operation that his family, first of all his brothers,

ran for him out of Delaware. Delaware is a very peculiar state. It's like the Liechtenstein of America. It has the most opaque corporate laws, you know, rules. and practically every corporation in America is headquartered in Delaware. That gives the senator from Delaware this enormous power because he has all these very wealthy companies wanting favors from him also because when he came into the Senate, he was clay to be molded by the older senators there and they felt sorry for him because he was newly moved. And so they took him under his wing. He doesn't like to admit this, but it was the sort of racist sort of dixie crack senators who did that, Democrats. And he got these very high-falutin jobs, powerful jobs. He was for many years chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,

chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Therefore, Judiciary Committee had power over who became judges. Also in the Foreign Relations Committee, he was wooed very early on by China. He went over there as a young senator, was taken to the equivalent of Martha's vineyard for a weekend and they filled his head with propaganda. He came back and he was so embarrassingly pro-China that the Wiggly standard had a front page just excoriating him and saying he's an embarrassment. And Joe Biden, as this very influential head of the Foreign Relations Committee in 2001 was instrumental in getting China into the WTO,

which was a disaster for American manufacturing for the very American working class that Joe Biden purports to care about. He was very influential with his reluctant Democrat colleagues. I think the Republicans were into it, but the Democrats weren't. Bill Clinton wasn't into it.

So that was Joe Biden. For all his nonsense and his clownish behavior and his lies and the fact that he's laughed at by people as sort of harmless to Lee Joe. He did carry a lot of clout and he did make things get legislation through for those donors, those credit card donors in Delaware that were again to the detriment of the little people. And in return, he got cheap houses and his previous less good houses were bought at an inflated price. As I said, his son got jobs at inflated salary and who knows what else. So it worked for him. So he had this influence peddling operation going on. It was in his DNA,

in Delaware. And then when he became vice president and Hunter now comes into the family business, he was already a lobbyist in in Washington. So that was working. And now Joe starts flying him around the world with him, flew him famously to China in 2013 to when when Joe was going to China to do America's important business like stop China from aggressing in the South China Sea, militarizing those islands, stop China stealing America's intellectual property and so on. And Joe walked away from that meeting with the Chinese CCP leaders with nothing on behalf of America, but Hunter walked away with a 10% stake in a Chinese firm that had two and a half billion dollars. OK, OK, so let's focus on that for a minute. So you just laid out three concerns

of international importance, particularly in relationship to the US with regard to China. You said Biden came home from that trip, empty handed, but his son came home with a substantial business victory. Okay, so now it seems to me, now tell me if I'm wrong. Well, I would say, first of all, well, that shouldn't have, have happened. Regardless of its legal, regardless of its legality, it's a clear moral hazard, right? Is that well Biden is negotiating

with the Chinese on these important affairs? His son shouldn't be negotiating business deals on the same trip, especially business deals that benefit the Biden's. Okay, so now how, if you're a Democrat, how do you argue against that proposition? Am I missing something here? How is that not inappropriate?

Well, this is how Joe Biden does it. He uses the Greece card again. It's always about, because he is older, son, the apple of his eye, tragically died of brain cancer. That is overlaid. We're told the way that Joe was so devastated that his AIDS didn't dare bring up the case about barisma, for instance, because that was around that time. Anytime Joe is in hot water, you just see this throughout his career. What they bring up the tragedy of his wife and daughter dying, the tragedy of his son dying later on.

And, you know, Joe when he's in trouble, I mean, I hate to say this because it sounds so awful and maybe I am being too cynical, but he will manage to get himself photographed at church walking through the graveyard with tombstones in the back. Honestly, I don't want to see that, but I see it. It just pops up. It's so cynical and awful. I think it must be perhaps just muscle memory for him now. You know, he doesn't

really mean to do it. He just, that's the way it works. Yeah, well, be careful, careful what you practice. Yes. Right, yeah, right, right, because, you know, what's, what's first a plan becomes a habit and then it just becomes second nature and then you say, well, I didn't know. It's like, yeah, you knew once, you just forgot. Oh, there's one more thing I want to delve into,

I think, and I think we should take the time to do it. And so, and then, of course, I would also like to ask you what you've learned since you wrote the book. So maybe we'll end with that. But can you briefly, relatively briefly, go through the business dealings that you detail in the book? I mean, that takes up like two-thirds of the book. I mean, I know we talked about the excess volume of homemade pornography that's

on the laptop, but and I would say that's relevant in the moral domain, but not in the political domain. There's dealings with China, there's dealings with Russia, there's dealings with Ukraine, and that's not all. So do you want to walk through some of that? Well, just hit the highlights, let's say. That's mainly it. It's also Kazakhstan Romania. The pattern is always the same. It's these sort of corrupt countries. They would like to have, for whatever reason, it's either oligarchs that need the sort of Joe Biden in primata so that they can pressure their own governments to stop investigating them. That's happened in Romania and in Ukraine.

In Russia, it's more there's an oligarch who paid money to, I think it was a money laundering operation. I mean, it was like $200 million to buy real estate or parts of real estate in America. And that was through one of the businesses that actually Devon Archie was organising, but there was three and a half million dollars that seemed to becket skimmed off that and put into an account of Hunter and Devons. And so, and it's just sort of, you know, the barisma deal, they had a couple of China deals that fell over. There was, there always seemed to be, whenever they were really with very unsavory people, whenever Hunter was, you know, mixing with these unsavory, particularly in China, those people tended

to get like arrested or disappear. And I wondered, I thought throughout the laptop, as I thought about it, there always seemed, Hunter seemed to have a guardian angel, you know, he's who Danny, I mean, he's still who Danny are watching over him. And of course, it would make sense. People have told me that the vice president's son would have CIA or intelligence anyway, keeping an eye on what he's doing, especially when he's a crack at it. And, you know, has a hooker problem that they would be keeping an eye on him and pulling him out of scrapes to save him. And we saw that happening in America,

God knows what happened overseas. And one thing I should say is about Joe's benefiting. I didn't find a lot on the laptop, but it's like being a little bit pregnant. And I'm sure there is more, and this is what James Komeome and the Oversight Committee is looking for and why they're trying to subpoena Joe Biden's personal bank records

and hunters and the rest of the families. So I found some evidence that Hunter was paying for Joe's household bills. So there was a painting of his house in Delaware. There was painting of his house in Delaware. There was air conditioning, new air conditioning for a cottage on the estate. There was a retaining wall, new shutters. Why is it so relevant just out of curiosity that there is documented evidence that Joe directly benefited financially. I mean, there's overwhelming evidence that Joe's son, who he travels with, benefited

overwhelmingly financially. It's like, are we supposed to make the presumption that there's no moral hazard there for the president? That his, that because it's his son and not him, that means it has absolutely nothing to do with him. I mean, and yet this is a very close knit family that spend a lot of time together and that prayed that around to a substantial degree. I mean, I would regard, at least to some degree, a favor done for my son as touching on me

in a positive manner. I'm wondering if I've got something wrong there because of course there's the legal issue and if that's, it's not like that's irrelevant, but it would, it seemed to me that given that it's the presidency, that there's a broader moral hazard issue here too, especially given that we're at war with Russia because of, because of Ukraine. I mean, that's not a little thing. The fact that they the Biden family was tangled up in Ukraine in all sorts of interesting ways. Let's put it that way and that we're now at war and and also an extremely expensive war I might add,

where tens of billions of dollars are being dumped into an unbelievably corrupt country with like no virtually no oversight because if you think there's oversight in Ukraine, there's something wrong with your head. Everyone's known forever that that's a remarkably corrupt country, even by Eastern European standards, which is really saying something. And so why is it that, why is it, do you think that in order for there to be a real scandal, there has to be absolutely documented evidence that some of the money that was definitely paid to Hunter by foreign agents had to be funneled directly to Joe. Otherwise, he's completely innocent.

We can just go on as if nothing's happening. That doesn't strike me as reasonable. Totally agree. I mean, it's one of the narratives that's being crafted to protect him. And that is, you know, the White House has changed from Joe saying, you know, I knew nothing about my son's overseas business dealings to now they're saying, oh, Joe was an in business with his son. This was after Devon Archer testified and Devon had to be very, very careful because he's facing jail himself and he has a

lawyer, pro bono lawyer, who's very close with the Biden. So he had to be careful in what he said, but what he said was that the brand was Joe Biden, and that Joe was on the speaker phone with Hunter at least 20 times when now we're having these meetings. You know, trying to, trying to... Well, if the brand, if the brand wasn't Joe Biden, then what the hell was the brand? Because I don't see any evidence that Hunter Biden had a brand. What the New York Times and the Washington Post, etc. I want is they saying, there has to be a check with Joe's name signed by a corrupt oligarch

for anybody to even open their eyes and say that Joe did something wrong. I mean, I don't think so. That's not something that the people who are investigating. That's not a road that the people who are investigating this should walk down. The right road, as far as I can tell, is to say, hey, look, folks, we're in a really dangerous war with Russia. And no one will say we are because we're all winking and nodding and pretending that it's Ukraine, but we know what the hell's going on fundamentally.

And there's some chance that part of the reason that we're in this war is because things that weren't exactly straight were going on with the president's son. Yeah. Right. Victor Shokin has a problem. Victor Shokin has a problem. He blames Joe Biden.

For some reason, Obama outsourced foreign policy to Joe Biden. No idea why, but that's what he did. Joe Biden was the guy standing in the tarmac when Xi Jinping arrived in America. Joe Biden was the guy who went to Ukraine, you know, I don't know, seven or eight times. And I mean, the Ukrainians even were a bit insulted that Obama didn't bother ever going to Ukraine. So Victor Shokhan blames Joe Biden, the Vice President, for Ukraine not being able to defend itself when Russia invaded Crimea. And of course, Russia invaded Crimea as a direct result in retaliation for that alleged CIA coup that throughout Yanukovych, it was kind of moderately friendly to the Russians, but it wasn't kind of in their pocket.

Yanukovych had been talking about doing a deal with Europe, which obviously the Russian didn't like, and he pulled out of when the Russians gave him a big, blub, blub, blub. But the fact is that a lot of Ukrainians, Victor Shokin being one of them, say that they were told at that time, and Poroshenko told Shokin this, that the Americans, and that means Biden said, look, don't do anything,

we are going to deal with this diplomatically. Well, they didn't deal with the diplomatically. I don't know what whether whether I mean Bob Gates, the previous, you know, high ranking Bush and then Obama, Secretary of Defense said that Joe Biden's been wrong about every fallen foreign policy issue ever. And I don't know whether that's because he's a bumbling fool or whether it's because he's a bubbling fool or whether it's because he's compromised in some fashion. He always puts his own interests first. And so now we have a situation where Russia, we were so demonized and and completely falsely during the Trump

administration where the whole Russia, Russia, Russia hoax was happening and and people like Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat head of the intelligence committee was boldly saying that that Donald Trump was an agent of the enemy Putin. He was a Russian agent. None of that was true, but it sort of does a job of demonizing Russia in the eyes of the American people. And, you know, I mean, Russia is completely to blame for having invaded Ukraine this time. But Putin would have seen an opportunity because of course, the last time Joe Biden was in charge of policy for Ukraine, they invaded Crimea

and nothing happened. So I just think it's a very dangerous situation where you have this guy who has to be compromised considering all the pies that his family was in and all the millions of dollars that flowed through to his son and his brother and various other family members from all these different countries that are adversaries. How can Joe Biden not be compromised? Well, that's a good place to end. I would say we're going to do another half an hour everyone who's watching and listening on the Daily Wire Plus platform. I don't know exactly

what I'm going to talk to Miranda about when we get there, but you can come over there and find out and for all of you who are watching and listening, you know, thank you very much for that Miranda. That's, that's quite the book laptop from hell. For those of you again who are watching listening, you might want to go read that and, you know, draw your own conclusions because this is, it's something you should be investigating and thinking about, especially because there's an election upcoming in a, you know, about a year and it's going to be an important one. And because things are quite the mess, and they could easily get worse, and you might want to know what the hell's going on. So let's sum up.

What do we see here? Well, Hunter left his laptop very carelessly a week before his father announced his run for presidency. Three waterlogged laptops, just in case one wasn't enough. And so that's three is quite a lot, actually. And then a guy who really had no public exposure at all and no desire for it caught on to what was on the laptop and tried to get it to the relevant authorities. And, and that was difficult as it turned out, even though he went to the press and you think they'd be be all over it. He finally got Giuliani interested. And Giuliani got the New York Post interested. And then that story broke soon before the

previous election date. And then it was shut down. And it was shut down because of fascist collusion between Facebook, Twitter, and the deep state, fundamentally, and was blamed on Russia collusion. And then 51 former security and intelligence officials wrote a letter stating that this had all the year marks of a Russian disinformation campaign, even though they'd never seen it, they didn't investigate it and that was all a lie. And that was just before the election,

which was decided by a hair. And after that, Trump claimed that the election, which was, which was decided by a hair. And after that, Trump claimed that the election was stolen. He claimed it at a level of detail, but I don't know what a sensible person is supposed to think about the fact that the two biggest social media empires in the world shut down the New York Post story, devastating the Biden family on the grounds of the laptop that hunter himself left at a Delaware computer repair shop. That's where we're at. All right, we'll see everybody on the daily wire side.

Thank you very much, Miranda. Much appreciated. you