Miranda Devine on Hunter Biden’s Laptop from Hell

CLAY: We’re joined now by Miranda Devine, who has got a fantastic book out. She writes at the New York Post. The book is called Laptop from Hell, and, Miranda, thanks for taking the time to join us here. I believe in the years ahead the collusion to cover up the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop is going to be seen as one of the greatest failures in the history of independent American media. Do you agree based on all the things that you’ve seen inside of this laptop and that was covered up? How massive was this story, and maybe more wildly, how massive was most of the media’s cover-up for this story?

DEVINE: You’re absolutely right. And thank you very much for having me on, both of you, Clay and Buck. Look, I think we understood that three weeks before the election when we published the first of the emails from the laptop that were so damning of Joe Biden, we knew it was a bombshell. And we expected that the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN and all this sort of media organizations that were in the tank for Joe Biden that just would do anything to get rid of Donald Trump.

We knew that they would ignore it, but what was so shocking was the power of social media, of the Big Tech oligopolies, Facebook and Twitter. And within a couple of hours of our story going online at 5 a.m. October 14, Facebook had come out and said that they were blocking it pending a fact check, which still — more than a year later — has never happened. And then Twitter followed suit and locked the New York Post’s account the next two weeks until a few days before the election and people couldn’t even share the story in true and correct message.

Kayleigh McEnany was the then president’s press secretary. She was canceled or suspended from Twitter for trying to share the story. It was really sort of lost at the time, but when you look back now, it was such a display of power and such an intervention into the election by these faceless, unaccountable, global corporatists that it’s really frightening. And, you know, shortly after that, of course, they deplatformed the sitting president of the United States.

And that prompted even Emmanuel Macron from France to say, “Whoa, this is rather frightening for all of us.” The whole world should realize that these companies have become more powerful than the leaders of countries, and they are still the same. I mean, nothing’s changed since then. And we know from polls taken after the election that almost half of Biden voters knew nothing about the scandal that was on the laptop.

The evidence of the influence peddling that was going on with Joe Biden, the evidence that Joe Biden had met with Hunter Biden’s business partners from overseas was compromised, in China and Russia and elsewhere. If they had known that, about one-tenth of Biden voters would have changed their vote. And so in an election that was won by 45,000 votes across a handful of battleground states, the censorship of our story could have made a difference.

BUCK: Absolutely. Miranda Devine, everybody. Laptop from Hell is her book. Miranda, it’s Buck. I want you to… I was at TheHill.com when a lot of stories were being broken about the relationship with Hunter Biden and Ukraine, and this has been around for a while. We didn’t have the laptop. We didn’t have the Laptop from Hell. What should people know?

Because the suppression story which Clay started out with is enormous and may very well have — likely did, I believe — change the trajectory of the election, and it was dishonest and a disgrace what the Big Tech and media did together. What do people need to know about the corruption aspect of it? We always say if this were Donald Trump Jr., they might actually cover this more than the January 6 insurrection at CNN. What did Hunter Biden actually do, and where is the real corruption that we know of from this laptop?

DEVINE: Look, the importance of the laptop is really not Hunter Biden, who is this sort of tragic figure: Drug addicted for most of the nine years the laptop covered, crackhead. The story is actually about Joe Biden and what the laptop tells you about his involvement in not just Hunter’s about his younger brother Jim’s scheme around the world to monetize his power, Joe Biden’s power, and what Joe Biden did in return for that money and how he financially benefited.

So we know that for the last two years of his vice presidency, Hunter Biden and his partners and Jim Biden were doing work overseas around the world using Joe Biden’s name to open doors. And we know that that was being done with Joe Biden’s OK, imprimatur, full involvement. The money, however, was going to come after Joe Biden left office. And this was why Tony Bobulinski was brought in to become CEO of their latest joint venture with China and sort of regularize and make everything, you know, squeaky clean.

Because by that stage, Joe Biden was a private citizen, future president. And, you know, it wasn’t just that the Bidens were doing business or had a joint venture with someone in China. They were in partnership with a company called CEXE, which is the capitalist arm of President Xi’s belt-and-road initiative. And this is the imperialist push by China into corrupting, buying up, paying off, putting into servitude poorer countries around the world — and the Bidens were involved.

They were using Joe Biden’s name to help the Chinese Communist Party push into the rest of the world at great expense to the United States, to America’s national interests, to America’s national security. And the other element, I think, is there is some evidence to show that Joe Biden financially benefited. We know Hunter Biden had been complaining about having to give half his salary to his dad.

We know about an email saying 10% of equity in this private venture was going to be held by Hunter Biden for “The Big Guy,” which Tony Bobulinski says is Joe Biden, and other documents on the laptop show was Joe Biden. But there’s also evidence of commingling of finances between Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, shared bank accounts, shared debit cards. Also, there’s a little bit of evidence — just a tip of the iceberg, I imagine, but it is there — showing that Hunter Biden was paying regular household bills for Joe Biden.

Joe Biden’s always made out that he is the poorest man in Congress. He’s a really humble fellow from Scranton, Working Class Joe, Lunch Pail Joe. But actually, his lifestyle is a very champagne outfit — you know, beautiful mansions, great clothes. He and his family live a life of unimaginable luxury and privilege. And whether it’s cash or it’s just entree to the best Ivy League places, to government sinecures, you name it, whatever they wanted it be.

It was a magic carpet ride, and Hunter Biden was paying some of the maintenance on the mansion, whether it be painting or fixing a retaining wall or fixing shutters or paying for a new air-conditioning system in the cottage on the grounds that Joe Biden was charging the Secret Service to rent. It was expensive to have that kind of lifestyle, and it seems that Hunter Biden was paying for it.

CLAY: Miranda Devine, author of Laptop from Hell, New York Post writer as well. Miranda, is it fair to say, based on everything that you have seen from this laptop and all of your research, that everything the media said about Donald Trump and his sons, Joe Biden was actually the one doing, ironically enough? All of this Russia collusion talk, all of the China discussion, all of the fear about the Trump sons and the Trump family in general, that when you actually look at the data, Joe Biden was doing everything that the media tried to tell us Trump was doing?

DEVINE: Yes, absolutely. Projection. I mean, projection is the psychological ailment of a lot of these Democrats. They’re always projected onto people racism or bad thoughts or bigotry which they harbor in their own hearts. And it’s the same with the Russia collusion stuff. I was so shocked a couple of times when I was delving into this laptop that I had to push myself away from the desk and go after and just think about, “Did I really just see this?”

Because Hunter Biden was right in the inner sanctum of Vladimir Putin. He was hobnobbing in Moscow with Vladimir Putin’s oligarchs, these corrupt people who were propping up the Putin regime. And he would meet them at Lake Como or he would meet them in Monte Carlo. His partner one time said basically, “We’re living the life of Jason Bourne and James Bond,” and they were.

These bumbling… He was a crackhead, his uncle Jim was just a bumbling moron, and they were getting tens of millions of dollars from these people trying to curry favor with their father and bumbling around the world in these luxury oligarch venues. And it just is so surreal. So he was in with Putin and in with President Xi, and there’s this one chapter in the book where I talk about this deal.

This incredible, multimillion-dollar deal — the biggest deal China had ever done in they were buying Rosneft, which was the Russian state-owned energy company, and Vladimir Putin had been forced into this by sanctions that were placed on Russia by America and Europe after that MH17 plane was downed over Ukraine. So it was a reluctant marriage, but it was a great deal for President Xi.

And it was a marriage of Russia and China that just would have altered the geopolitical energy balance and really put America on the back foot. And only because Donald Trump came into office and told his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to start disrupting Chinese influence in buying up of American properties, that that final deal was knocked off because Hunter Biden…

One of his partners was arrested at JFK; then President Xi got worried, and he disappeared another one of Hunter Biden’s partners. But the whole Rosneft deal fell apart. China had to pay Russia millions of dollars in compensation. But if it had gone through, Hunter Biden was right at the center of this, and it would have had a huge effect on America and America’s prosperity.

BUCK: Miranda Devine, Laptop from Hell is the book. Fascinating stuff, Miranda. Thanks so much for being with us, and best of luck to you.

DEVINE: Thanks so much, Clay and Buck.