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The fall of the Big Guy, with Miranda Devine
448 Plays48 minutes ago
As friend of the show Charles C.W. Cooke has said, “To the honest eye, Joe Biden was a mid-wit career politician from Delaware who had the chance to appear normal enough to unseat Trump from office. To the authors of our roiling morality play, he was Earth’s Last Honest Man. After he won the White House, this second characterization was foisted upon us with abandon.” It was never true, as was finally and irrefutably hammered home with the pardon of his son, Hunter.
No one has done more to expose Biden for the man he really is than Miranda Devine. Australian listeners will remember Miranda from her successful career in Australian journalism, before she moved to the US to take up a role with The New York Post. She has gone on to release two of the most influential books on American politics this decade, 'Laptop from Hell' and 'The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold out America.'
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Read The Spectator Australia here.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Promotion
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Far At Will, a safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston. If for some reason you're not already following the show, you can find us everywhere from Spotify to Apple Podcasts to YouTube. If you like what you hear here, please consider giving us a glowing five star review. If you don't like what you hear here, forget I said anything.
Critique of Biden's Presidency
00:00:41
Speaker
There have been many irritating features of Joe Biden's woeful presidency, but chief among them undoubtedly has been his apologists need to turn the man into something that he is manifestly not. As friend of the show, Charles C.W. Cook has said, to the honest eye, Joe Biden was a midwit career politician from Delaware who had the chance to appear just normal enough to unseat Trump from office. To the authors of our roiling morality play, he was Earth's last honest man.
00:01:11
Speaker
After he won the White House, this second characterisation was foisted upon us with abandon.
Introduction to Miranda Devine
00:01:17
Speaker
It was never true of course, as was finally and irrefutably hammered home with the pardon of his son, Hunter.
00:01:24
Speaker
No one has done more to expose Biden for the man he really is than Miranda Devine. Australian listeners will remember Miranda from her successful career in Australian journalism before she moved to the US s to take up a role with the New York Post. She has gone on to release two of the most influential books on American politics this decade, Laptop from Hell, and earlier this year, The Big Guy, How a President and His Son Sold Out America. Miranda, welcome back to Far at Will.
00:01:52
Speaker
Thanks so much, Will. Great to be with you. ah Great to have you on again.
Surreal U.S. Political Landscape
00:01:56
Speaker
Let's start with a wider lens. What are your reflections on the year that was in American politics?
00:02:05
Speaker
Look, I mean, it's something, it's surreal almost. It's like something out of a scripted novel. There's been no end of excitement on the campaign trail. And if you just think of the iconic images that have come out of it, there's Donald Trump at Butler rising up with his fist in the air, blood streaming down his face, fight, fight, fight.
00:02:27
Speaker
You know, you had all through the year, I mean, really all through Joe Biden's presidency, you've had these images of this decrepit old man falling upstairs, ah bumbling the teleprompter, getting lost on stage or having to be led around by world leaders. So, you know, they're sort of, they're, they're both almost the same age. Biden is a couple of years older, I think three years older than Donald Trump, but the vitality difference between them was just enormous.
00:02:57
Speaker
And yet we were told by the media that Joe Biden was completely fine, not just the media. I mean, it's the Democratic, the handmaidens and the Democratic party and their whole constellation of, you know, influences telling us that Joe Biden was AOK, cognitively brilliant. He right ran rings around Carreigeon Pierre, the White House press secretary. She said, oh, I can't keep up with him. And Donald Trump was supposed to be Hitler. If he wasn't Hitler, he with had Alzheimer's. you know He was too old. He was an authoritarian, et cetera. And all of that came to a crunching halt.
Trump's Victory and Media Rejection
00:03:38
Speaker
on election day because the American people just ignored all those gatekeepers and just decided that love him or loathe him, Donald Trump is a strong leader that is going to put America in a better position in the world and is going to be better for their hip pockets. So he won resoundingly with a clean sweep of all the battleground states and the popular vote. And that hasn't happened in 40 years, I think, for a Republican.
00:04:07
Speaker
And plus, sorry, he won the House and the Senate. I mean, narrowly in the House, they still have, ah they already had the House narrowly before the election and that situation is maintained, but they did gain the Senate.
Global Trends Against Elite Ideologies
00:04:20
Speaker
So he's got, you know, untrammeled power, at least for two years now.
00:04:25
Speaker
I want to pick up on that nice line that the American public ignored the gatekeepers. And I think you can put this in a broader global trend that would include Brexit and Trump won. The voice in Australia is another really good example.
00:04:40
Speaker
Will the, for want of a better word, the elite, the institutions that have been captured by a very particular ideology that the majority of people don't seem to want to go along with, will they learn from this latest Trump victory? Do you think there will be institutional changes in the media, in the corporates, in the broader political sphere?
Media's Misunderstanding of Populism
00:05:00
Speaker
Or do you think things will just keep going on business as usual and there'll continue to to be this gap between the masses and the elites?
00:05:07
Speaker
I think that apart from the Democratic Party, the rest of that sort of cavalcade of people you just mentioned, I think they have realised what's happened. A lot of them had jumped ship to Donald Trump before the election, Elon Musk being the primary one, but also Joe Rogan. I mean, people who were you know Democrats in a past life or centrists or apolitical.
00:05:31
Speaker
suddenly decided that this election really was, as the Democrats kept saying, an existential election, but not in the way the Democrats pretended, but just about you know as much as anything else, freedom of speech.
00:05:46
Speaker
And you know not just, I guess, freedom of speech on the traditional media platforms, but also when you listen to some of the tech bros, the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that have ah climbed on board the Trump train.
AI Bias and Misinformation Concerns
00:06:00
Speaker
Mark Anderson, for instance, talks about AI and how the Biden administration was determined to Basically strangle it at birth or at least ensure that they they the biden administration the democratic party had control of ai which basically gives you control of everyone's minds because i determine what reality is if
00:06:24
Speaker
you know, if there are malign forces there who want to lie. And I mean, I use chat GPT a little bit, just, I mean, it's not useful really in my work, but it's ah just as an experiment to see how dishonest it is. And you know, it will tell you complete lies. It will make up fantasies and and it's very woke. And so that's that's not the world that we want to live in where whatever control the media has over you know people's thoughts and ideas now would just be impossible to evade.
Trump's Alternative Media Strategy
00:06:58
Speaker
But during the election campaign, I think Donald Trump, the one thing that the Democrats are admitting is that Trump beat them on the sort of get out the message
00:07:10
Speaker
metric because he just bypassed all the media that was so biased against him, so Trump deranged that and just went straight to these sort of podcasts with enormous followings like Joe Rogan, millions of people listening and unfiltered, long form.
00:07:27
Speaker
and and so people listened to those, listened to Donald Trump in his own words as himself with his larger-than-life personality and decided actually he's not that scary. He's an interesting man and his ideas are quite
Populism vs. Power Structures
00:07:43
Speaker
sound. you know they He's quite an open person. He's not He's not rigid in his beliefs, but he is really an America first patriot. and You realise that it's not Donald Trump intrinsically in his crass, you know brass, new york bash New York property developer style and his showmanship and his crudity and so on. That's not really what is front and centre and what what
00:08:12
Speaker
the the people controlling things are afraid
Deep State and Political Resistance
00:08:14
Speaker
of. They are afraid of this populist surge around the world, and which is really a rejection of the power elite's carriage of the world. you know you saw how i mean This is what my second book is about.
00:08:30
Speaker
the sort of what Donald Trump calls the deep state, what the Obama people called the blob. And it is universal around at least sort of the five I's. This cabal of the State Department, the CIA, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Pentagon,
00:08:49
Speaker
that sort of colluded to keep Trump out of office.
Foreign Policy Comparisons: Obama, Trump, Biden
00:08:54
Speaker
And they had been sparked by, or triggered by Brexit, I think first and foremost, that alarmed them because this was a movement of the people that was ah beyond their control. And there were leaders being elected and, and you know, changes happening. That meant that that the old paradigms were now shattering and more isolationist, I guess, mood in America. and And just, it's less isolationist than just in Trump's and J.D. Vance's thinking, just a reluctance to embark on impossible wars just for the sake of it, to intervene, to do regime change around the world is not something that the American people
00:09:45
Speaker
have ever agreed to, ah didn't really know what was going on and and don't want. And I think we saw the stark difference between Obama, Obama's presidency, Trump's abbreviated presidency, and then Biden's, just in foreign policy.
Trump's Achievements in Foreign Policy
00:10:03
Speaker
While you can't really, you know the agenda of the blob or the agenda of the Deep State is not written in stone anywhere, but you can see the agenda in the actions of those three presidencies. And under Obama and under Biden,
00:10:20
Speaker
We had war. We had terrorism. We had Putin invading his neighbors. We had, under Biden, or and I mean originally with Obama, Iran empowered and you know able to fund its proxies to attack Israel.
00:10:38
Speaker
under Donald Trump, just he's using first principles like the New York property developer that he is, just logic and common sense. He's just looked at foreign policy the way he does domestic policy and just sort of behaved. In a way, he uses that gangster patois that people like Putin and President Xi in China understand.
00:11:06
Speaker
But he just sorted things out. you know He vanquished ISIS. People forget now, but in that 2016 election, ISIS was really a menace and frightening, and they were burning people alive on television and constructing all these gruesome acts to put the fear of God into us, chopping the heads off American hostages and so on. and Putin, you know with Donald Trump, was back in his box.
00:11:33
Speaker
Trump would say things to him like like, I love those golden domes in Moscow would be a shame if something happened to them. And as Trump himself says,
00:11:45
Speaker
basically ah Putin and Xi just didn't really know if he was bluffing, but they weren't willing to risk it. And so they were in their box.
Miranda's Book on the Deep State
00:11:54
Speaker
Kim Jong-un, North Korea, Barack Obama had told Trump when he came into office, look, the biggest threat that we face is North Korea because they're setting off all these nuclear tests. And Donald Trump was mocked for his bromance with little rocket man, as he called him.
00:12:14
Speaker
But it worked. Kim Jong Un was back in his box. And then he had the glimmerings of a piece in the Middle East with the Abraham Accords. And you know it it was peace through strength demonstrated to the world that it worked. And for some reason, that was an existential threat to the blob. And they kept on calling Trump an existential threat to democracy, but really he was an existential threat to them and their control of the presidency.
00:12:45
Speaker
I want to understand the blob or the administrative state or the deep state, whatever you want to call it in a bit when we look at your book. But just before we do, I want to pick up on something earlier in your answer there where you mentioned the rise of the alternative media.
Rise of Alternative Media
00:12:59
Speaker
And this was the election where well and truly we can now say that the podcast, the so-called fringe media has become mainstream. In fact, it was a really good clip of Van Jones at a panel event the other day. You may have seen it.
00:13:11
Speaker
where he said the fringe media is now the mainstream media and the mainstream media is now the fringe media and the Democrats just didn't understand that. I'm actually curious about your opinion on a personal level. You are still a member of the legacy media. Do you see this as an existential threat to your job?
00:13:28
Speaker
No, because I mean, obviously, eventually, you know newspapers are going to go by the wayside in the next 10 years or so. But the New York Post and digitally as well, we're healthier than ever, turned a profit a couple of years ago.
00:13:44
Speaker
I think the reason the mainstream media, the legacy media, is dying on the vine is not just a technological reason because you can adapt. you know The New York Post has adapted from print to digital, obviously, and we're moving into other areas. and you know
Mainstream Media's Credibility Decline
00:14:01
Speaker
You have a brand that is trusted and you can parlay that into anything.
00:14:05
Speaker
But they've the the reason is that the New York Times and the Washington Post and ah NBC and ABC and CNN and MSNBC are are all struggling for viewers and readers is because they betrayed their audience one too many times. you know When you keep on lying about Donald Trump you know saying the very fine people hoax, the Russia gate hoax, calling him Hitler. and People can see because Elon Musk bought X, for instance, or through these podcasts or these alternative ah media sources, Truth Social,
00:14:45
Speaker
which Donald Trump created himself, um Rumble, which is another sort of independent style of YouTube, where people aren't being canceled because they're disagreeing with the establishment and you can hear Donald Trump unfiltered. And so there are enough Americans that realize they were lied to.
00:15:05
Speaker
And those that didn't realize, for instance, imagine the average MSNBC viewer who religiously watches Joe and Mika every morning, and they are completely Trump deranged. you know ah Every crazy thing that's said about Donald Trump, they amplify and exaggerate and and And then they're assured that there's no way that Hitler's going to win the election. Then Hitler wins the election, wins the popular vote, and Joe and Mika hightail it off to Marilago to suck up to Hitler, and then come back and tell their audience they did it, and oh, it's all going to be okay. you know That is mind-blowing. And there were people who really did believe what Joy Reid and and Joe and Mika told them. and
00:15:51
Speaker
And they didn't realize that they were being spun, that these these shows that they watch, these panels, dotted with CIA operatives, deep stashes who lie, who have lied, you know, Peter Strzok.
00:16:06
Speaker
um Andy McCabe, John Brennan, James Clapper. These are names that are part of the Russiagate hoax, the attempts to subvert Donald Trump even before he won the first presidency, who went on to cripple his presidency's first presidency.
00:16:26
Speaker
who who then lied about the Hunter Biden laptops that it was Russian disinformation. All of this was blindly propagated through the mainstream media and they got found out. And so you saw, especially after the election, their numbers just plummeted and they're really on life support. The only reason I think I mean, for instance, the Washington Post has, Jeff Bezos has brought in new management and I think Will Lewis, your English photos, viewers would know. And he just stood up in the newsroom and he said, look, we're bleeding audience. We've lost, I can't remember what it was, but it was like 30% of our, tens of thousands of readers and you're not doing a good job. So that's why we have to change things. And they all went into conniptions and
00:17:22
Speaker
It was a disaster. It was a revolt. and I think The New York Times survives because it has so many millions of subscribers. and it has also i mean It was at the top of the tree. It is the most influential news brand in the world and newsrooms all over the world. Australia, New Zealand, England,
00:17:42
Speaker
are are sort of dictated to or they take their their guidance from what the New York Times puts on the front page. And so all the news that's fit to print has become a shadow of itself. The Grey Lady is debased and they survive because of their subscriber numbers, which are fairly healthy, but they're very secretive about who their subscribers are. So, you know, it would be very easy and cheap for for a group of people to buy up you know a few million subscriptions. and and Then you really have a lot of ah control, a lot of influence in the New York Times universe because I know having worked behind a paywall in the past that you really influenced or you certainly look at the comments and the readers and so on because that's a metric that your editors as well. That's a metric that you're judged on
00:18:39
Speaker
um It's a sort of your part of your performance review. and so That's a very cheap way. You don't need to buy the New York Times. and so Their subscribers are very healthy. The Washington Post had an enormous subscriber base in Washington DC from basically the public servants, the various departments.
00:18:59
Speaker
and And at one point that their subscription numbers plummeted and someone, we don't know, but someone said ah to me that, oh, that's because a lot of those departments just canceled their subscriptions because Biden was annoyed with the Washington Post for some story that they they'd run.
00:19:16
Speaker
So that those big subscription models are very, they're not as strong as they look. They're really paper tigers. So I just think they've betrayed their audience and their audiences acted accordingly walked away.
Deep State's Societal Influence
00:19:30
Speaker
Perhaps the more idealistic, the more naive amongst our listeners would hear you say things like,
00:19:36
Speaker
The panels of you know CNN and MSNBC have been infiltrated by CIA operatives or deep state officials, and they'll go, surely that can't be the case. Your book is is a very, very scary insight into the tentacles that that deep state has across all of the institutions in society. and let's So let's go there.
00:19:56
Speaker
The first book, Laptop from Hill, is primarily around the crimes of the Biden family. And the second book is about the cover-up. Before we get to the cover-up and what they look like and how that invisible hand really operates, some people would say, well, look, Biden's gone. Trump's back in. The good guys have won. Huzzah. Why do we need to bother about this? Let's just put it into the background and focus on the future. Why does this story still matter?
00:20:21
Speaker
Because those same people that orchestrated the coverup of Biden corruption that propped up Kamala Harris as this sort of great candidate and crippled Trump's first presidency are still there.
Trump's Strategy Against Deep State
00:20:35
Speaker
And they will do whatever it takes to cripple his second presidency. um He's older and wiser. He has a ah much savvier group of people around him.
00:20:46
Speaker
Primarily, I mean, you look at JD Vance. And so I think it's going to be an all all out battle. And he's been very open about what he's going to do in terms of dismantling the sort of bad parts of the FBI and the CIA and the State Department.
Influential Trump Supporters
00:21:04
Speaker
But it's, it's going to be a battle. And I think the jury's still out on whether, you know, how successful he'll be, because it's a huge job. He's going into it with open eyes and he has, you know, basically a lot of the smartest people in the in America on his side. People like Elon Musk and David Sachs. And I mean, even hilariously, Mark Zuckerberg, who's such a weasel from Metta, Facebook.
00:21:31
Speaker
You know, he, he was bullied by the Democrats into allowing Facebook to be censored against sort of Trump, Trump world, and also to donate $400 million. dollars We call them Zucker bucks in the 2020 election, which was supposedly used to help get out the vote, but it was just get out the vote in Democrat areas. And so Mark Zuckerberg now, he just gave a million dollars to Trump's inaugural and he's trying to weasel his way back into the good books.
00:22:02
Speaker
So look, everyone's sort of coming on board either reluctantly or with eyes wide open. And so it'll be easier for Trump, obviously, than the first time, but still difficult because there's a lot at stake.
Hunter Biden Laptop Controversy
00:22:16
Speaker
you know I say that these these panels on and MSNBC and so on are infiltrated by these CIA or these deep state operatives. i mean That's not even a secret. like John Brennan was CIA director. Michael Hayden was and NSA director. you know James Clapper, Leon Panetta.
00:22:35
Speaker
They're well-known because they also signed the Dirty 51 letter, I call it, which was really the first thing that opened my eyes to there was something deeper going on than just you know corruption, Joe Biden's corruption, the fact that he lied to the American people during the the 2020 campaign about ah his knowledge and involvement in his son, Hunter's ah sort of influence peddling operation around the world. That was a lie we knew from the laptop. It was a letter from senior intelligence operatives that said that the russian that that laptop was ah Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation.
00:23:16
Speaker
Correct. Yes. And in fact, before that, we published the first stories from the laptop, which showed that Joe Biden had met with Hunter, his son Hunter's Ukrainian paymaster in Washington when he was vice president, which flew in the face of all Joe's denials. So that was a big story. This is three weeks before the election. And within a couple of hours of that story hitting the internet, five o'clock in the morning, we held it.
00:23:45
Speaker
within a few hours of that, Facebook and Twitter had censored the story that were throttling its reach. They locked down Twitter, locked down the New York Post's account for the next two weeks. and you know The New York Post is the oldest newspaper in the country Now it's the third largest, then it was the fourth largest by circulation. And this was a momentous thing to do. And that really was, we weren't surprised about the pushback on the corruption because obviously for the campaign, that was a disaster. And Joe Biden just went to ground, but we were surprised by the sort of big tech intervention. But at that stage, we still thought, this is just ah Twitter and Facebook, they're woke, they don't want Donald Trump.
00:24:28
Speaker
Trump deranged, they want to help Joe Biden. Then a few days later came this dirty 51 letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials, including five former CIA directors or acting directors. Very high powered group. And they said that the Hunter Biden's laptop, therefore our story stories ah were Russian disinformation.
00:24:52
Speaker
they had never They hadn't seen the laptop, they hadn't asked for a copy of the hard drive. they just And they admit during in the letter that they don't really have any firsthand knowledge of this. But that letter was terribly influential. they use the The actual words were classic earmarks of a Russian information operation. And anytime you manage to get any of them. that They're all always hiding and ignoring and refuse to comment. But anytime someone does manage to get one of them to comment, they say, oh, you misunderstood. We didn't say it was Russian disinformation. But of course they did. All the media came out immediately and said Russian disinformation. They were fanning out across the airwaves saying that it was Russian disinformation. And it was a very successful operation. It was designed
00:25:44
Speaker
to give Joe Biden a talking point in the debate the next day, the last one against Donald Trump.
Biden Campaign's Role in Cover-up
00:25:51
Speaker
Obviously Trump brought up our stories, laptop from hell, the corruption, and Joe Biden very successfully just killed it by waving around this letter from the 51 former, you know, it was the intelligence establishment had said, that's not true. It's garbage. It's Russian disinformation.
00:26:12
Speaker
And it worked. So the whole story died and Joe Biden was elected and there were polls. I mean, you don't know for sure, but said that in such a narrow election, if enough Biden voters had known the truth about Joe Biden, they would have changed their vote. So that was pretty important. And what we then found out after that was that that letter had been instigated by the Biden campaign, by Anthony Blinken, now the benighted Secretary of State, and he had called a guy called Mike Morrell, former Acting Director of the CIA. Mike Morrell testified later on behind closed doors to a congressional investigation under oath.
00:26:57
Speaker
that that he had no idea. He did did not even think of writing this letter until he got the phone call from Anthony Blinken with a follow-up email, sending him a link to a USA Today article, which was basically the skeleton of what the letter would be, saying that unnamed sources in the intelligence community, probably the same people who signed, or maybe it was Blinken himself,
00:27:23
Speaker
ah said that you know this story was Russian disinformation, the laptop was not real.
CIA and FBI's Election Interference
00:27:28
Speaker
and so um That was it. He had his template. Mike Morell went ahead, called up all his colleagues. and Then the next most sinister part of this is that we at the time thought these are like formers. These are all retired intelligence officials.
00:27:43
Speaker
Well, there were 42 of them were CIA, XCIA, not all XCIA. Many of them were active contractors at the time with all with security clearances. But that letter was so inflammatory and so political coming just a couple of weeks before the election.
00:28:02
Speaker
that the panel of internal CIA people that were supposed to vet any pronouncement made by you know former operatives, they had to ah they they just freaked out and thought, we have to send this up the line. This is above our pay grade. It ended up on the desk of the CIA director at the time under Trump, Gina Haspel, and she gave it the green line.
00:28:24
Speaker
So, this letter was actually a CIA domestic election interference operation. and Just a little addendum to that. Gina Haspel had been um CIA station chief in London at the genesis of the Russiagate hoax Operation Crossfire Hurricane.
00:28:44
Speaker
and so you know she was ah Trump trump If you talk to him about it, he says about Gina Haspel that we called her the Black Widow. He said, because she was very good at killing people. you know I guess bad guys, terrorists. Anyway, she's a fascinating person. I ah delve a little bit into her ah in the book, but that these these same people, they come in and out of government. They go into Raytheon or law firms with you know pricey salaries, and then they they rotate back into government to control things.
00:29:20
Speaker
Just another slight example is the FBI, when when ah Twitter and Facebook came out, said that our story was had to be censored. Twitter said that we we had violated their hacked materials policy. We're like, hacked? What's hacked? Nothing. and Later on, ah Twitter did apologize but and said they were wrong. But the reason that they censored our stories was because they had been prebunk The stories have been pre-bunked by the FBI in the weeks before the election. The FBI was meeting with Big Tech, these companies, on sort regular meetings, weekly meetings before the 2020 election. and In one of those meetings, they told ah Twitter, and I assume Facebook, Zuckerberg's sort of gone quite far in agreeing that the same thing happened.
00:30:14
Speaker
told ah Twitter to look out for a hack and leak operation from the Russians, likely in October and likely involving Hunter Biden. So as soon as they saw our stories, they knew what to expect and they knew that that was the sort of Russian disinformation they'd been warned about. And the other interesting thing is that the link again to Russiagate is that the top lawyer at the FBI, a guy called James Baker, their chief counsel, general counsel,
00:30:44
Speaker
He got parachuted into Twitter eight months before the election. And in the Twitter files, we can see that he played a ah large role in convincing you know other people in Twitter, including the much maligned Chief Censor. He had a different title, but that was effectively his job, Joel Roth, who was was reluctant actually to go along with.
00:31:08
Speaker
a lot of this censorship and James Baker had played a pivotal role. He also was front and center in, in a lot of the sort of dirty tricks, alpha bank, a Russia gate, all of that stuff against Donald Trump back in the day. So that's just a few examples of how the FBI and the CIA intervened that I saw in just my little segment of this story, which is the Hunter Biden laptop.
Biden Family's Influence Peddling
00:31:34
Speaker
But it's a very good way of.
00:31:37
Speaker
demonstrating how their fingers are in the pie. the burning question ah my mind as you are speaking goes to the why what are the incentives or potentially what is the ideological drive that encourages someone in the cia or fbi to do this just park that for for one second because i think it's worth clarifying relying on but exactly is being covered up And this gets to, and I think it, I've often thought this, I think that the salacious stuff on the laptop is perversely almost a benefit to Hunter Biden because the sordid details of porn and hookers and cocaine and all that sort of stuff actually is a distraction from the more important stuff, which is effectively influence pedaling. What is influence pedaling? And when does it cross the line from being unethical to illegal?
00:32:25
Speaker
Well, influence peddling is what the Bidens were doing. Joe Biden was the most really the most powerful man in in the world because Barack Obama had outsourced foreign policy to him. So in countries like China.
00:32:40
Speaker
Russia, Ukraine. I don't know. I suspect it's because you know Obama was just a kind of a newbie senator when he ran for office. and Despite the fact that in the vetting process of of Joe Biden, there were problems about his family that came up.
00:32:57
Speaker
They decided I guess the obama people decided that they needed to have someone with experience who knew his way around washington was respected and and interestingly. I have gotten no real evidence for this I think that the blob wanted their man in place that in no obama was an unknown quantity.
00:33:20
Speaker
And so the Obama people made this deal that yes, they would accept Joe Biden. ah He would give their their sort of ticket more gravitas in Washington, but also Joe Biden was the puppet of the blob and he would do their bidding internationally.
00:33:38
Speaker
So I don't know, but it is curious that Joe Biden was the one going in meeting President Xi. I mean, in 2013, there were a whole lot of problems that United States had with China. Part of that was the militarization of those islands in the South China Sea. This was a threat to US allies, you know, Japan, but Australia as well.
00:34:01
Speaker
and and then also the theft of US international ah sorry IP, intellectual property. There was a whole lot of spying going on in universities and so on. and so Joe Biden went in December of 2013 to China with these very important agenda items.
00:34:20
Speaker
and He took Hunter along on Air Force Two and he came away empty-handed on behalf of America. Hunter came away with a 10% chunk in a big Chinese deal. so So Obama just outsourced and didn't seem to have any problem with this obvious kind of in your face corruption. And influence peddling is corruption because what it's doing is it's monetizing the power and influence
00:34:51
Speaker
that a politician has, like Joe Biden had. And when Hunter Biden walked down the steps of Air Force Two behind his dad in Beijing, that was an unmistakable sign to China that this was American power come to do private business.
Hunter Biden's Role and Struggles
00:35:13
Speaker
They understood because that's the way these corrupt countries work.
00:35:17
Speaker
Hunter was what in China is called a princeling because you never give the bribe directly to the ah high official. You give it to a family member, to a princeling, a son or a daughter. And and that's exactly what what transpired. And it happened in, you know, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Romania, all these countries where Joe Biden was the numero uno, his son Hunter and his brother Jim.
00:35:46
Speaker
Just came along behind behind and... you know, put their hands out and got millions and millions of dollars. And Hunter was a crackhead at the time. And so the idea that, for instance, this Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, would put him on the board for his expertise in what? In energy? In, you know, Ukraine politics? Who knows? But that's just absurd. He was getting a million dollars a year and Joe Biden would fly into Kiev all the time.
00:36:17
Speaker
and straight after the made on revolution in february of twenty fourteen, joe biden became the most powerful man in ukraine because ukraine was broke on its knees needed money from the west and joe biden was the guy who was going to deliver it and he would fly into key and he would say,
00:36:35
Speaker
ah lecture them about corruption, corruption is a cancer, and they all knew in Ukraine that his son Hunter was sitting on the board of the most corrupt company in Ukraine, which is saying something and, you know, making, they knew he was making a lot of money and he never showed up, never went to Ukraine. So that's influence peddling. You just parlay, you don't really have to say anything.
00:37:00
Speaker
It's just that the proximity to power. Hunter Biden would meet with foreign clients and just when they were clinching the deal or you know just as a ah proof of his power, his his proximity to power, he would get his dad on the speakerphone, plop it on the table and say, dad, I want you to meet, blah, blah, blah, Sergio. and and Joe would chat away to them about the weather, whatever. Devin Archer, Hunter Biden's former business partner, has told me how it went down. He ended up testifying to Congress. Of course, he never Joe Biden never talked business. This is very high level. you know All he had to do was be there on the line at the job of a hat whenever Hunter wanted him. That was enough to demonstrate that any money that you paid Hunter would be well spent.
00:37:51
Speaker
And on Hunter in the book, the way that you portray him is that it was his job to do the dirty stuff. So Joe, and then for him, Beau could maintain squeaky clean images. And I'm wondering how you reflect on.
00:38:07
Speaker
the character of Hunter Biden today, because I fluctuated a bit when I was reading the book between just going, this is a morally bankrupt, degenerate, corrupt degenerate. And then this small part of me maybe as well said that this is a guy who's probably been used and abused by his father. You now obviously have done a great deal of research and put a lot of thought into this. How do you reflect on Hunter Biden, the man today?
00:38:33
Speaker
Well, I think the latter characterization, I think I feel sorry for him. He was the designated bag man of his family. He wanted to be like an artist or a writer and he's he's quite talented. He is far more intelligent than his father anyway, um although Joe I think Joe might be dyslexic and I think he's quite savvy and shrewd. He's certainly politically a genius, really. He's very cunning. I mean, he managed to outsmart Obama and Nancy Pelosi and the rest of them in this last episode when he anointed Kamala and denied them the little primary they wanted. Yeah. So Hunter, I think, you know, you're right. I mean, he is a degenerate and in many ways ah a sociopath.
00:39:19
Speaker
But I think he does deserve sympathy. He was, um he lost his mother at an early age. His father basically had just got this great job in the Senate when his wife and baby daughter were killed in a tragic car crash. And Joe wasn't going to give that up for anybody. So he went off to the Senate for this big career and ah claims that he always came home every night. But I'm told that, you know, when he came home on the Acela,
00:39:46
Speaker
on the train to back to Wilmington, um he would get home so late that he wouldn't really, maybe he had breakfast with the kids before he went off
Hunter's Motives and Family Dynamics
00:39:56
Speaker
again. But he basically, Hunter says that he was brought up by his aunt Val, Joe's younger sister, who I think is one of the the best humans in the Biden family.
00:40:09
Speaker
because she basically sacrificed her first marriage to move in and be a mother to these two little motherless boys, Hunter and his older brother, Beau, older by one year. um And Beau was the golden child, literally like little blonde boy, sunny, everybody loved Beau. And Hunter was the more troubled ah younger brother, adored his big brother, but also I think resented him.
00:40:33
Speaker
in a way, and Beau then died of brain cancer in 2015, I think. and And that set off a whole whole sort of train of chaos for Hunter, whose addiction problems became much worse. He gave himself an excuse. And then he also embarked on this torrid affair with Beau's widow, Hallie Biden, ah who also had ah had two young children.
00:41:00
Speaker
he hooked her on crack. and so It was disastrous for her and her family. She managed to finally extricate herself from that. so Hunter, sort of you know ah he very much resented his father, certainly at the time that he loved his father and he's sort of captive to him.
00:41:22
Speaker
but In 2019, April of 2019, when he abandoned his lap, actually three laptops, waterlogged laptops at the laptop repair shop around the corner from where they lived in Wilmington, Delaware. He was raging against his family, absolutely furious because his father, it was two weeks before his father was announcing his candidacy and Joe, I think Joe, but Hunter thought Joe's staff, maybe he wasn't willing to admit it was Joe.
00:41:52
Speaker
We're seeing all the stories around about hunter's crack addiction how he's hopeless and joe wasn't sure if you could run because hunter was such a burden and worst of all more endowed joe's favorite columnist in the new york times.
00:42:08
Speaker
Hunter knows that and she's written this piece about, you know, poor Joe. What can he do about the dreaded Hunter or the, or the pathetic Hunter, you know? And Hunter is like, I have supported this family for 30 years. I've had to give half my salary to dad.
00:42:28
Speaker
you know and this is the way you disrespect me he was so angry and so jordan i i' have sort of always sort of suspected maybe there was some freudian motivation for. Abandoning the laptop i mean he got numerous emails and texts and phone calls from john paul mack isac the owner of the laptop repair shop he wanted to be paid is eighty five dollars you wanted to get his keyboard back that he'd lent hunter.
00:42:54
Speaker
and Hunter just cleared off to California and ignored it all. and so you know i mean Maybe that was some Freudian get back at his father. Jordan Peterson just recently has come up with this very interesting theory. and He interviewed me and he's he cites the books as well. and he He thinks that this is that Joe Biden is the worst ever father. He's just enabled his son's bad traits. And that Hunter really was, he said, if, if any son is treated the way Joe Biden has treated Hunter, um there would be so much rage inside him um that would have to find expression. And there's no way that these things that Hunter has done are, are not deliberate, you know?
00:43:43
Speaker
That's fascinating. I need to look up that interview. If that's Biden, the family man, let's look at Biden's legacy as a
Joe Biden's Presidential Legacy
00:43:50
Speaker
politician. Now, Dominic Sambrook, another friend of the show, he had one of the great cutting lines on election night. He was asked, how will history view Joe Biden? And he said history will barely mention Biden now. He will be an interregnum between the two Trump presidencies. He will be an actor in the Trump story. Do you agree with him?
00:44:12
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. i think i mean He might have a special place in being the probably the worst or the second worst president in history, just judging by the economic and the foreign disasters.
00:44:31
Speaker
And, and also the fact that he was obviously cognitively impaired from the start and that was covered up. And, and then all came out in glaring spotlight in that final dramatic debate against Donald Trump when he just seemed to be completely out of it and just collapsed on stage in, in, you know, real life. And so all the lies that we'd been to, I mean, just the week before,
00:44:58
Speaker
We at the New York Post had been chastised for, you know, running cheap fakes. This new word was made up cheap fakes by the White House, from the White House podium, for running video and stills from Joe Biden. I think it was the G20 or the GH that he was in and where he was sort of on camera wandering off from the rest of the leaders and just completely out of it. And we were, everyone in America recognized that, who had their eyes open the previous three and a half years.
00:45:28
Speaker
This is Joe Biden on one of his bad senior moments that he was having and and we were chastised for that we were just lying to the people and And then it all came to a crashing halt on that debate stage. And the Democrats had to just quickly, you know, shuffle Biden away. And we really have hardly seen him since he's the disappearing president. Donald Trump's really the president already. Like he went to the opening of Notre Dame um and Joe Biden didn't go. He sent Jill Biden and Donald Trump's there and the world's leaders are coming up and
00:46:07
Speaker
paying homage to him and treating him like he's already the president. And Joe Biden couldn't find time in his schedule, which is very sparse, to make it to Notre Dame. So I think his legacy will be simply that he was a real disaster, that because of him, Trump got a second lease of life.
00:46:28
Speaker
And I think definitely Trump will be opening up the books on a lot of the law fair and the sort of devilish machinations of the Biden presidency of the Democrats. I mean, it goes back to Obama, the censorship, the law fair.
00:46:46
Speaker
that'll all be opened up and we will see inside the belly of the beast. and Biden um was a puppet, but he was also aware. i mean He has still has periods of lucidity and he certainly was lucid enough to screw over his ah the people who stabbed him in the back and deliver them, who he knew better than anyone was completely unelectable. That's Joe Biden. and he He spent a lot of time and effort during his presidency to woo a whole bunch of sort of, I don't think like this kind of pseudo historians. People like John Meacham, who was a journalist, calls himself a historian because he wrote a few history books.
00:47:27
Speaker
And he would invite them to the White House and they would whisper sweet nothings in his ear and tell him he was the second coming of FDR and so on. So, ah you know, maybe that first draft, they will write a couple of books just trying to burnish his like legacy.
00:47:43
Speaker
but I don't think he's getting a presidential library anymore because the donors are furious. They're furious that the Kamala Harris campaign squandered $2.5 billion dollars and had lost. They want to know where did the money go and why are you $20 million dollars in debt after after spending all that money in 108 days? I think four times what Trump spent.
00:48:07
Speaker
So ah he's not going to get that presidential library. He's not going to get his legacy burnished other than by these little pet historians, four or five of them. I think history will look on him very dimly as a terrible moment in American history that caused a lot of damage.
00:48:25
Speaker
And that he was a corrupt and sort of pathological liar in his entire career, sort of a joke in Washington, a plagiarist whose previous attempts to run for president were kiboshed by his own dishonesty.
Systemic Corruption in Washington
00:48:41
Speaker
and And then he got elevated by Obama, got this second lease at life. And then I guess because of COVID and he was able to hide in a basement,
00:48:54
Speaker
And he just wasn't Donald Trump who was still on the nose, partly because of his own mistakes, but also because of the ah you know relentless drumbeat of propaganda against him. He was the accidental accidental president and just was very unworthy for the job.
00:49:12
Speaker
That little insight that Biden was a puppet, but he was also aware, tees up my final question quite nicely. And I think it is probably the most important question to consider for the future of American politics. And that is, are the Bidens a uniquely corrupt stain on American politics, or are they merely the symptoms of a corrupt system? And if that is the case, can we expect more stories like this to continue well after Joe Biden leaves office?
00:49:39
Speaker
Look, i I think Washington is a ah corrupt sewer. It's both sides of the aisle. Joe Biden is just past master of influence peddling. He's done it since his earliest days in Delaware with his donors. Delaware is this sort of peculiar state, a small state, but it's where a lot of US corporations are headquartered um because it has some very opaque you know corporate rules. It's called the Lichtenstein or the Virgin Islands maybe of of America. And so that gave the US Senator from Delaware a lot of power because he he these were his donors. They wanted to co-favor with him. He had been elevated for bizarre reasons to some of the most powerful roles in the Senate. you know He was either the that chair or chairman or the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee and also the Judiciary Committee over a decade in foreign relations. and so he He did wield a lot of power and he just became used to getting freebies, whether it was you know cheap houses or his houses being bought at inflated salaries, his family members getting
00:50:56
Speaker
grace and favor jobs that inflated salaries, et cetera. So I think that he's not more corrupt, but because of the Hunter Biden laptop, we had this unique opportunity, this sort of window into the corruption and exactly how it worked. You know, it was this, it was just like looking inside the the machine and seeing all the cogs working and it's an incomplete record, but it allowed us to find the the whistleblowers, people like Tony Bobolinsky and Devin Archer, who were CC'd on emails. and That was how we verified who was who and whether these were real and not Russian disinformation. and Then more whistleblowers came out of the woodwork as the story evolved. and so This has been a very useful record of Washington corruption.
00:51:48
Speaker
and I don't know how you fix that. i mean term limits stopping ah There are a few new actually laws that the Republicans who were investigating Biden corruption have brought in, and that included some more safeguards around family members are going to business, earning money off the back of their ah So trying to put some limits on influence peddling. I mean, also you'd have to look at insider trading because on both sides of the aisle, but Nancy Pelosi is the most prolific and the most famous you know a speaker of the house. She's become like a multi, multi centillionaire, isn't what they call them.
00:52:29
Speaker
Just because of trading and she just, you know, she knows exactly what's going on with, you know, Google or Microsoft just about to have some investigation or whatever. And their stock's going to go down, you know, she can short it, whatever. I mean, she, there are websites dedicated and social media sites dedicated to following Nancy Pelosi's stock picks because you're going to do very well. And of course she does, her husband, I think buys the stock, but whatever.
00:52:57
Speaker
So yeah I don't know how they can put rules around that. you know i I remember in Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, when he became president Prime Minister, put all his investments in a blind trust. But I'm not sure how protective that is even, because then you can you can meddle with that. So that's all fun and games for the Trump administration to try and manage. And it should be a bipartisan thing. There are plenty of powerful Republicans who I think have become very rich while in Congress. And that's not the way it should be. Maybe term limits would help.
00:53:30
Speaker
I think you were being a bit modest before. We wouldn't have been able to get an insight into that machine without your efforts, Miranda, laptop from hell and the big guy staggering journalistic achievements. Congratulations, ah everyone listening, pick up a copy of both, put them in the Christmas stockings, essential reading. Miranda, thank you for coming on for it, Will.
Episode Conclusion and Promotion
00:53:48
Speaker
Thanks so much, Will.
00:53:50
Speaker
Thanks for listening to this episode of Far at Will. If you enjoyed the show, why not consider a subscription to The Spectator Australia. The magazine is home to wonderful writing, insightful analysis, and unrivalled books and arts reviews. A subscription gets you all of the content from the British edition of the magazine, as well as the best Australian political commentary Subscribe today for just $2 a week for a year. No, I'm not joking. $2 a week for an entire year. A link is in the show notes.