Miranda Devine: Hunter Biden . . . and the Coverups

Miranda Devine:  Thank you so much. It’s just such a treat to be here. It’s such a wonderful occasion, and of course, my first time at Restoration Weekend, and amazing to follow James O’Keefe. I’ve come to know Project Veritas and admire them very much because they do a lot of the gonzo journalism, the really uncomfortable, behind-the-scenes uncovering of people’s secrets that used to be the province of all journalists and seems now to have been sort of given away. It’s too hard, it’s too dangerous, and maybe they don’t want to uncover secrets. 

 

So I mean, it’s interesting that just in the last few months, I know four people in New York and Washington who have been raided by the FBI over their uncovering of Joe Biden corruption. Three of them are lawyers and one of them is a journalist, James O’Keefe. The other three are Rudy Giuliani, who was the first person to tip me off to the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop, or his lawyer, Bob Costello, did last October; and the other two are lawyers associated with Rudy Giuliani: Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova. And all four of these people have had no charges laid against them. They’ve had their front doors either beaten down or they’ve had the same experience that James just told you about. Simultaneously with the raid were really defamatory and unfair and dishonest leaks to various new organizations, the New York Times, the Guardian. 

 

This is a coordinated strategy whereby someone who is uncovering secrets that somebody in power does not want to be exposed, and the justice department, the Southern District of New York, once the most respected and independent and most powerful law enforcement agency in the country, seems to have been weaponized against people who want to expose Joe Biden’s corruption. 

 

So at the New York Post, we know all about the powers that be trying to shut us down and censor us. It was 13 months ago that we published the first of our bombshell stories that came from Hunter Biden’s laptop. This story was on the front page October 13, and it was titled, “Biden’s secret e-mails.” And it detailed an e-mail from one of Hunter’s business partners, a Ukrainian businessman, Vadym Pozharsky, thanking him for the meeting with Joe Biden, who was then Vice President, in Washington. Now, this was important because Joe Biden had been telling journalists throughout the campaign that he knew nothing about his son’s overseas business dealings. So a, it showed that he was lying, and b, we also know that just months after this meeting in Washington with the Burisma executive, this Ukrainian corrupt energy company that was paying Hunter Biden $83,333 a month to sit on its board, even though he had no expertise, and which, after Joe Biden ceased being Vice President, they cut Hunter Biden’s pay in half. So it’s pretty obvious it was a quid pro quo. 

 

But months after this meeting in Washington that Joe Biden denied and that we put on the front page, he went to Kiev. He was the Vice President, and he went to Kiev, and he threatened the government there that he would withhold a billion dollars in aid, in U.S. aid to Ukraine, which they desperately needed. He said he was doing it because he wanted them to fire their chief prosecutor, a man called Viktor Shokin. 

 

Now, what you don’t know, and what the New York Times and Washington Post and the rest of the media in this country never reported was that Viktor Shokin, at that time, was investigating Hunter Biden’s boss at Burisma, the owner of Burisma, an oligarch named Zlochevsky. And a few days before Joe Biden made this threat, Viktor Shokin had moved to seize all of this Burisma owner’s property. All his mansions in Kiev, even his Rolls Royce Silver Phantom. All his property was seized. This was a current and serious investigation that was on foot. And yet, the story that you will hear from Joe Biden and from his media allies, is that no, Viktor Shokin was doing nothing about corruption in Ukraine, that he wasn’t investigated anybody at Burisma, that he himself was a corrupt prosecutor, and that was why Joe Biden, because Joe Biden cares so much about corruption, had threatened the government. And they made him — he made the government fire Viktor Shokin.

 

So we published this story, and it was a momentous story in anyone’s language. It was news. And yet, none of the rest of the media touched it. And within a couple of hours of the story going live on our website at 5 a.m., Facebook announced that it had stopped our ability to spread it on their website. No one was allowed to share the story on Facebook, and they said that this was because they needed to fact-check it. They were concerned about its accuracy. And to this day, there’s been no evidence that Facebook even tried to fact-check it. I know that people who were recipients of various of the e-mails that we had published have never been contacted by Facebook. People like Tony Bobulinski. No one has ever contacted any of the other recipients, which is the first thing you would do if you were fact-checking. So that was a lie. 

 

Next, Twitter decided to pile in, and they locked our account for the next two weeks. They prevented anyone from being able to share the story. And in fact, they even suspended Kayleigh McEnany, who was then President Trump’s press secretary, because she tried to share the story. 

 

So that was a useful fig leaf for the rest of the media, for the New York Times, for CNN, MSNBC, Washington Post, to ignore our story. They could legitimately say, in their own eyes, that this was fake news, this was a suspect story, because big tech had censored it. And that was something that they clung on to for a few days. 

 

And then the coup de grace came out: It was a letter that John Brennan orchestrated and that he had one of his proxies give to politico, and this letter was signed by 50 former high-flying, important officials in the intelligence and defense communities. People like James Clapper, like Leon Panetta, like Michael Hayden. Fifty of them had used their authority and the prestige of their former offices to declare that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. You’ve heard that story before. And John Brennan, of course, who’s been at the center of every dirty trick against Donald Trump, was instrumental in getting this letter out. 

 

And that letter served to completely kill our story. Nobody would touch it. It was Russian disinformation. Adam Schiff, James Clapper, John Brennan fanned out across the media and they told this story. They said the intelligence community had found that the laptop was Russian disinformation. It was Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin’s last-ditch attempt to install their agent, Donald Trump. So of course, everyone bought that. Project Veritas actually was quite helpful in that period because the CNN News meeting that James just told you about, in one of those morning meetings straight after we’d published our story, Zucker and one of his senior executives told their CNN editors not to cover the New York Post story. They said, it’s not true. It’s old news. We already know this. This is what got Trump impeached. Just ignore it. And they did. 

 

So this was a very successful and coordinated censorship operation. It was effective because it shut down our story, and we know that if that story had been allowed to get to the American people, it would have potentially, from a poll done by Media Research Center, changed the course of the election, because they polled Biden voters and found that 50% of them had never heard of Hunter Biden’s laptop. They knew nothing about the corruption it contained. And they knew nothing about the investigations that the Department of Justice had opened up into Hunter Biden and his uncle, Jim Biden, Joe’s brother, over tax evasion, money laundering and various alleged violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. So they knew nothing about that. 

 

And what the poll found was that if 10% of them would have changed their vote, if they had known, and in battleground states, we know that Joe Biden only won the election by 45,000 votes spread across a number of battleground states. So that small percentage, the 10% of the 50% of Biden voters who didn’t know about the laptop and would have changed their vote, could have changed the course of the election. So it was a very effective and successful censorship operation. 

 

But what it did do was it — in their panic, just three weeks, or less than three weeks before the election, it brought the social media giants out into the open. We could see — they flexed their muscles. We could see the power that they had, and soon afterward, of course, they kicked President Trump off social media. 

 

And shortly after the Brennan letter was released, Joe Biden had to do a debate with Donald Trump, and he was prepared with that letter, armed with that letter, the Brennan letter, to combat anything that Donald Trump would say — obviously would bring up about the corruption found on the laptop. And all Joe Biden said was, the intelligence community, these 50 respected members of the intelligence community, have said it’s Russian disinformation; it’s just you doing favors for your handler in the Kremlin. And then, when Donald Trump brought up all the porn and the crack use, the drug use and the really degenerate material that’s on the laptop, Joe Biden just pulled off this masterful Jujitsu move, obviously practiced. He looked down the barrel of the camera, and he said, like many of you at home, my son has an addiction problem. But he’s beaten it, and I’m very proud of my son. And that was it. He managed to turn around what should have been a crippling blow into a nothing burger. You can only say that the censorship of the New York Post story amounted to election interference, and you can see from the concerted efforts to censor the story just how dangerous Hunter Biden’s laptop was to Joe Biden’s election prospects. 

 

Now, I’ve spent more time than is healthy delving into the innards of Joe — of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and I can tell you, it’s dangerous to Joe Biden for two reasons. It is about Joe Biden; it’s not really about Hunter Biden. He’s just the vessel. First, the book — the laptop exposes Joe Biden as a liar and a terrible father. I mean, what father would put his drug-addicted son in front of gushing torrents of unaccountable cash? And Hunter Biden even says, in his own memoir, Beautiful Things, that he really wrote to sort of launder some of the most objectionable material in the laptop, came out as a crackhead who’d recovered — he even says that the money that he was getting from Burisma, $5 million from Burisma for nothing, he even said that that became a temptation for him in terms of falling off the wagon. 

 

But the second important reason why the laptop was so dangerous to Joe Biden is because it shows the extent of his influence-peddling scheme overseas. It began, of course, the way he made money and enriched himself and his family, in Delaware more than four decades ago. But when he became Vice President and Barack Obama appointed him point man for China, Joe Biden then internationalized this influence-peddling scheme and the result is that America’s national security has been compromised. 

 

Now, I’ll just briefly, because it seems to be a question everyone asks me — I’ll briefly cover the porn and the sort of degenerate aspect of the laptop. And there are lots of photographs of Hunter’s erect penis; I can tell you that. He had an obsession with photographing it. He would place M&Ms along it. He would measure it with a ruler and photograph that. He would — one time flopped it into a plate of pizza from room service at a luxury hotel in Las Vegas and photographed that. So he had this bizarre compulsion to photo-record everything in his life. He would video-record his sex sessions with various women, prostitutes, his brother’s widow, with whom he had a sort of torrid affair for some time. He would video-record their sex sessions and upload them to a website called Pornhub, which is a sort of amateur porn site, and he’d give these videos little titles like “Lonely Widow.” 

 

So you really have to acknowledge that, because the reason it’s important is because this is someone who was not a functional human being. He would spend, in the nine years on that laptop, several of them were spent on benders. He would spend months living in the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, living in a bungalow near where John Belushi died of an overdose. He would have a string of hookers and drug dealers come through that cottage by the pool. He would photograph a lot of it and videotape a lot of it. He learned how to cook crack over the four-burner stove on — in the bungalow at the chateau, and he would photograph that. He was very proud of his prowess with the crack cooking, and he would have little baggies with these little pieces of crack inside it, and he would weigh them on a little Cheech and Chong scale and take photographs of that. 

 

So this is someone who would either be on benders, or then he would go into very expensive rehabs, and this was just a cycle that he would live in. And I mean, one of these rehabs — I mean, all these rehabs seem to be a joke. They didn’t really do anything for him. They were just sort of pampering time for him. But he — one rehab that he did in Newburyport in Massachusetts had — he would — during the day he would get these intravenous infusions of a drug called ketamine, which is a horse tranquilizer. And it’s also a party drug. But he would spend the days getting this drug coursing through his system. It was supposed to somehow stop addiction. And at night he would go back to his lodgings and he would invite over prostitutes and drug dealers and smoke crack all night. So I don’t really think his rehab, he took it very seriously. 

 

So the reason it’s important, though, to address that before you get to the corruption is because this is not somebody who could hold down a job at McDonald’s. This is not a high-powered international businessman who’s capable of flying around the world doing billion-dollar deals because of the genius of his entrepreneurship. This is someone who was introduced into the very inner sanctum of not just President Xi Jinping in China, but of Vladimir Putin in Russia. He was also in the inner sanctum of oligarchs across the world from Romania, from Ukraine, from Kazakhstan. And he would fly to Lake Como or Monte Carlo to meet these — these are playgrounds of the oligarchs. And he would hang out with them. And so that was his bizarre life. One time his business partner, Devon Archer, described themselves as like something out of Jason Bourne, that they saw themselves as living this sort of James Bond lifestyle, meeting what Devon Archer called “the garchs” at Lake Como, the oligarchs. 

 

So this person is the President’s must trusted advisor. I mean, currently. He’s in and out of the White House. He’s in and out of the long weekend White House in Delaware. Biden, just on Wednesday, Joe Biden, the President, he gave a eulogy in Delaware, and he said that he took Hunter’s advice before doing a climate deal with China. He said Hunter advised him to use empathy when figuring out how to negotiate these deals with China to — Joe Biden explained to the congregation what empathy means, putting yourself in another person’s shoe, seeing things from their perspective, and that was Hunter Biden told his father. He said, see it from China’s perspective. 

 

And of course he did, because Hunter Biden is still a business partner. He’s in business with the Chinese government. We have annual reports and board meetings and other papers and documents on the laptop. He holds, still holds, 10% of a Chinese investment fund called BHR, which, among other things, partnered with the Chinese military to buy a Michigan automotive firm which had, basically, secrets. It had — what’s it called, anti-vibration technology, which is used by stealth fighters in the U.S. military. So that was bought and taken to China. BHR, this company that Biden owns 10% of, has shares in Chinese firms which have been sanctioned by the United States for trying to steal American secrets and technology. It also owns shares in a facial recognition firm called Face Plus Plus, which has been used to — for human rights abuses, basically, let’s say, on the Uyghurs. BHR invested, actually, $30 million in 2017 in Face Plus Plus, we see on the laptop, and two years later, that value of that investment had more than doubled. So there should be some nice fat profits coming out of that fund for Hunter Biden when he cashes in his chips, which he’ll probably do the day after Joe Biden stops being President. 

 

And of course, this is important because Joe Biden ran as Honest Joe. Integrity was his byword. And he asked people to compare his character to Donald Trump’s, and he vowed before the election that nobody in his family would have any business dealings with foreign interests. But as I said, Hunter is in business, still, with the CCP, and Jen Psaki gets asked about it periodically by — only the New York Post and Fox News, in the press conferences, and she has had since February that Hunter is working very hard to unwind his shareholding in BHR, but he still owns it, and no one cares. There’s really no interest to the media. They obsessively pored over every aspect of Donald Trump’s business, his children’s business, but not interested with Hunter Biden. You know the story. 

 

So what the laptop tells us is that Joe Biden not only knew about what Hunter was up to, but he was intimately involved in his family’s influence-peddling operation around the world. He orchestrated it and he benefited from it. For instance, we know that Hunter wanted to be an artist or a writer. That’s all on the laptop, all his longings to be a creative person, but he was not allowed to be. He had to be the bag man, the money man, the earner for the golden child, which was his older brother, Beau, who, sadly, has died. But that was Joe’s plan, that Beau was going to become president and — after Joe, of course, and it was going to be this Biden dynasty that was going to rival the Kennedys, that Joe Biden had been — just admired and had modeled himself on since he was a child. 

 

And so what we had was, Hunter Biden, having to go into business, do something he hated, and basically represent his father. We saw what happened in 2013 when Joe Biden, as Vice President, took Hunter along on Air Force Two to Beijing to meet President Xi Jinping. And we know that Joe Biden came away from that meeting with the Chinese president emptyhanded on behalf of America. There were some pressing issues, especially for America’s allies in the South China Sea. China was militarizing those islands that were going to be a threat to Taiwan and Japan and Australia and America’s allies there, but Joe Biden came away emptyhanded. Also on the subject of intellectual property theft: nothing. But Hunter Biden came away from that meeting a very wealthy man, because he was signed up then to this 10% ownership of, basically, a Chinese company that would, by 2019, have $2.5 billion of funds under management. And during that visit, Joe Biden also secretly met with Hunter’s business partner in that operation. So he was instrumental and knowledgeable. He knew what was going on.

 

And to Chinese eyes, Joe Biden arriving with his son on Air Force Two was very normal, because this is the way that business is done. Corruption is done among the elites, the so-called Red Families in China, through their children, their family members, who are called princelings. And so they recognized Hunter for what he was: a princeling. When he walked off Air Force Two with his father, they understood that this was American power come to do business. 

 

And Joe’s connections would continue to unlock doors for his son to the inner sanctums of all these oligarchs and Putin and Xi. It got to the stage — he’s still taking drugs. He’s still completely out of control. Uncle Jim has dispatched to kind of babysit him. And he — it’s like some sort of — I don’t know — a sort of a comedy routine. Bungling Jim Biden and his drug addict nephew Hunter are sort of bumbling around in the center of these really gigantic geopolitical deals between Russia and China over energy. They were in the middle of this power struggle between the U.S. and Russia over energy, and somehow, they’re in the center of it. They’re crucial to it. And they have no idea what’s going on. All they care about was money. 

 

And so finally, look, I think you hear from Walter Shaub, who’s the Obama ethics czar, a former Obama ethics czar. He’s now quite outraged about Hunter Biden’s latest grift, which is the — his artworks where he is — dubious artistic merit, first-time painter, and he’s selling these paintings for as much as $500,000. And the White House’s ethical solution to this obvious dilemma is to say, well, we’ll just keep secret the people who buy these paintings, which is just — does not make sense. So Walter Shaub, rightly, is outraged about it. 

 

But I want to know, where was Obama’s ethics czar during the Obama administration, during eight years when Joe Biden was monetizing his influence? There was nobody railing against or stopping Joe Biden from doing what he was doing, which he was doing pretty much out in the open. It was pretty obvious when he was taking his son on Air Force Two, flying him all over the place, and his business partners. We had Devon Archer, Hunter’s business partner, went to the Oval Office just before he and Hunter were placed on the Burisma board, and he went to the Oval Office and did a selfie with Joe Biden, which was then put up on the Burisma website. And there’s e-mails on the laptop from the Vice President’s counsel saying, quickly get that down! So they were aware that Joe was dodgy, but they turned a blind eye. 

 

And they didn’t care about the story of Café Milano. Now, I told you about the e-mail that the New York Post ran that first day, and we only had the tip of the story at that point. What the story really was, and what I discovered through more documents on the laptop, is that on April 16, 2015, Hunter Biden organized a dinner for his business associates from Russia, from Ukraine and from Kazakhstan in a private room at an Italian restaurant, very well known, in Georgetown called Café Milano, and he invited his father to meet his business partners. And Joe went. And Joe denied it. He just refused to answer questions, and his people said no, no, no, there was nothing, no meeting on that date. He was otherwise engaged. Nothing on his official diary. 

 

But we have RSVPs, we have e-mails in which Hunter invites people and assures them his father will be there. We have the guest list, which Hunter cooked up with his friend Devon Archer. We know who was invited. We know one of the people invited was the Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, who later showed up in a Senate inquiry by Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson as having given $3.5 million to Devon — into one of Devon Archer’s bank accounts that he had founded, in one of the companies he’d founded. So we know there was dirty business going on, and we know that Joe Biden was involved in it, and yet, no one’s interested. The receipts are all on the laptop. That’s why there was so much trouble exerted, and that’s why social media, big tech, came out of the shadows and flexed their muscles and showed just how much power they had, which is probably a good thing in the end. 

 

So I’ll just leave you with two thoughts. One is that people are saying that Joe Biden should get a pass because of his cognitive decline. They’re saying, well, he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. He doesn’t understand what’s going on. Now, I’m one of the first to say that his behavior is bizarre and there’s definitely something wrong with him, but whatever’s wrong with him was already baked in. I mean, that was clear before the election. It was why they hid him in the basement. But it sort of goes beyond the mere aging process and whatever alleged childhood stutter he had. 

 

But I’m told by foreign officials who have had — been in these high-level meetings with Joe Biden over the last six months that he has times — at times he’s completely incoherent, like he was at the G20 in June, wandering around just behaving inappropriately; delirious is how he was described to me. But there have been other meetings in which he is completely lucid, where he relies not very heavily on notes, where he is running the agenda, where the people around him, the Tony Blinkens, the Ron Klains, the Jake Sullivans are taking his lead. They are obeying his instructions. They are treating him like the guy in charge. He runs the agenda. So I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the fact that Joe Biden is in charge and that there’s a B team around him that allows him to make decisions, and he’s always been a man of poor character, he’s always been a liar and a fantasist, and he’s always had poor judgment. So it should be no surprise that his presidency is so disastrous, and that just is with him running things. 

 

And then lastly, this point is a bit of a horror movie point, and I apologize for it, but Hunter Biden has serious political ambitions. He’s discussed it seriously with people who are closest to him. His ex-wife laughed in his face and he was very resentful that she would think it was an idiotic idea. I’ve spoken to someone to whom — who’s involved in the laptop, but to whom Hunter, off the record, to whom Hunter has confided a lot of his innermost thoughts, and he definitely — this person thinks that Hunter could become president. Wants to become president, and could. 

 

And I laughed and scoffed, and they said, no, when you think about it, it’s a classic redemption story. He’s seen the hard times. He understands how politics works. And he always gets what he wants. He’s very smart. And he wanted to be an artist, he wanted to be an author; he’s now both, and he’s now in the White House as the President’s advisor. So, stranger things have happened. I just would be aware that that’s a possibility in the future. Thank you. I think — okay.