The Long Knives Are Out for Hunter Biden

CLAY: Buck, I started off this morning first thing when I woke up. I saw this headline from NBC News, and I said, “My goodness, the long knives are officially out for Joe Biden and for everyone who is trying to defend Hunter Biden,” because when NBC News — which has mostly pretended that this story doesn’t exist — is suddenly writing a headline of: Hunter Biden’s Hard Drive Shows He and His Firm Earned about $11 Million from 2013 to 2018, while Joe Biden was vice president and still in office…

This is based on his laptop, which all of a sudden everybody is covering, and this is just what stands out to me when you actually read. This is the opening paragraph, Buck. “From 2013 through 2018 Hunter Biden and his company brought in about $11 million via his roles as an attorney and a board member with a Ukrainian firm accused of bribery and his work with a Chinese businessman now accused of fraud, according to an NBC News analysis of a copy of Biden’s hard drive and iCloud account and documents released by Republicans on two Senate committees.”

The reason why I bring this up, Buck, you and I have been talking about this laptop and Joe Biden’s connection to it and how incredibly dirty it is for some time. But when you have the NBC Newses of the world opening up stories with that paragraph, things have changed in a way — we talked about the New York Times, the Washington Post, everybody diving in, most of them have pretended this story didn’t exist. This is getting incredibly tumultuous for the Democrats, Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.

BUCK: Think of the shift here of the pendulum from the universal Democrat-media decision to not cover, to ignore, which as we’ve discussed before — you’re an editorial guy, I’m an editorial guy — what you do and don’t talk about is really in many ways the most important decision you make in the media —

CLAY: Yeah. That’s right.

BUCK: — and they just pretended like this was nothing. It wasn’t interesting. It was fake. It was Russian disinformation. And now that the emails have been put online for anyone to see, you can effectively go through them now. It’s almost like the initial WikiLeaks dump, remember that, when you could put them out there and you could sift through all these State Department cables. So, now that they have put this out there, there are a couple things going on.

One is that they are starting to recognize any person who sees this is gonna ask some basic questions. Now that he can with all agree on the essential facts here, ’cause they aren’t denying the existence of those facts anymore, who pays a drug addict — and let’s be honest — an irresponsible imbecile — a crack- and heroin-using (or was it just crack?), stripper-impregnating, behind-on-alimony-payments and child-support payments?

Who pays that guy $11 million for his advice, Clay? Think about this for a moment. No one is paying Hunter Biden millions of dollars, and now we know it is $11 million. I know it’s over a period of years. That’s a lot of money, folks, right, we all know this is big time money. No one pays that money because they think Hunter Biden is so smart and gonna help their business grow. Burisma didn’t pay it. The Chinese businessmen that he was interacted with wasn’t paying it because of that.

So let me get to the “why.” And the “why,” of course, is to create influence in the White House for corrupt foreign countries. And when you think about the fascination that the Democrats had with the emoluments clause under the Trump administration, the Washington Post was running front-page stories about diplomats buying cheeseburgers and drinking beer at the Trump hotel and how maybe that was influencing foreign policy. It was laughable. Versus this? So now it’s out there. The other question I’d have for you, Clay, is what do they do — and I think it becomes increasingly clear this may happen — when it’s shown that a substantial part of Hunter’s business was kicked back to the Big Guy?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: The sitting the president of the United States! That’s a big deal.

NBC: “The immediate focus appears to be…whether or not there’ll be any charges as a result of this federal criminal investigation” into Hunter Biden’s finances and his foreign business deals while Joe Biden was VP. pic.twitter.com/8bW6z7E118

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 19, 2022

CLAY: No doubt. And this is all tying in… So Hunter Biden made $11 million while his dad was vice president. The money didn’t stop. Joe Biden — and I can’t believe more people aren’t talking about this. Joe Biden in his first year out of office, Donald Trump is sworn in in late January of 2017. In roughly 11 months, Joe Biden made $11 million, according to his own tax returns. Now, that’s an awful lot of money: $11 million, Buck, for a guy that’s never owned a business, prior to that point, that has never done anything other than basically be a government employee.

As soon as he leaves office, he makes $11 million? And there are millions of those dollars in income that’s not explained. Now, he paid taxes on $11 million. But exactly where that money came from and how he got paid? In other words, if Hunter Biden made $11 million between 2013 and 2018, do we suddenly think his illicit connections to Ukrainians and Chinese businessmen — who, by the way, as the NBC News report says in its opening paragraph, which is so significant: it’s not as if he is involved in relationships with guys on the up and up.

It specifically says “with a Ukrainian firm accused of bribery and a Chinese businessman accused of fraud.” So in addition to the fact that Hunter Biden is, as you said, a crack fiend, not reliable in his own right, he is interacting for business purposes with companies that are involved in bribery and fraud, individuals untrustworthy in nature.

BUCK: Can I also put out there, at some point you’re not a conspiracy theorist, you’re a coincidence theorist with some of this stuff. meaning the media, the Democrats explain away everything, “Well, that’s just… You know, it just happened that way.” And let me give you one example. There are many you could point to with the Hunter Biden situation. But somehow, we know that Joe Biden was, by his own admission, involved in the pressure from the U.S. government to fire Shokin, a prosecutor, who as part of his portfolio was looking at foreign corrupt practices of businesses in Ukraine and specifically Burisma.

Now, you can tell me a lot of things. But if you’re gonna tell me that Hunter Biden getting — people say 50, but I’m told by those very close to this that it’s more like — $80,000 a month? Hunter Biden happened to be getting $80,000 a month while his dad was vice president in charge of U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine under mandate from the Obama administration and specifically demanded…? Look at Hunter Biden.

He doesn’t know what time of day or year it is most of the time. But he had a really strong opinion on how good a corruption prosecutor was in Ukraine? Does anybody really think…? You know, I know the media goes, “Oh, but we have State Department people who say he was great.” Yeah, just like we had 51 intelligence professionals who said that the laptop was fake, right?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: We know that people will prostrate themselves for these lies. That’s not a coincidence. I don’t care what anybody says. It’s not a coincidence.

CLAY: I just want to hit with you a couple more lines. This is NBC News. This is not Breitbart. This is not Red State. This is NBC News. “The documents and the analysis, which don’t show what he did to earn millions from his Chinese partners, raised questions about national security, business ethics, and potential legal exposure,” and here is a quote from Walter Shaub, a former director from the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. He said… Sorry that’s the wrong quote I want to use. Frank Figliuzzi. I’m probably —

BUCK: Figliuzzi.

CLAY: You know him?

BUCK: I know of him, yes. He’s a loon.

CLAY: FBI former assistant director for counterintelligence said, “There is a national security risk when foreign powers like China see an opportunity to get close to someone like Biden,” direct quote. It’s all about access and influence. If you can compromise someone with both access and influence, that’s even better. Better still if that target has already compromised himself. Buck, everybody wanted to talk about the Steele dossier and what Russia had on Trump, even though we now know the Steele dossier is just based on three random friends’ conversations.

Wall Street Journal did an incredible piece recently on this. But, Buck, how easy is it to compromise a crack addict? They have… You want to talk about compromising information? Imagine. We already know tons of compromising information about Hunter Biden! Imagine what China and Ukraine have on Hunter Biden. The fact that NBC News is now diving in here and asking all these questions that people like you and me and most of our listeners have been asking for almost two years is a major shift and pivot in the way that this story is covered.

BUCK: People should all remember because the shifting standards here — when it comes to corruption prosecutions, this is some of the dirtiest stuff you’ll see the Democrats do — the governor of Virginia previously, Bob McDonnell, was hounded by federal prosecutors. They wanted to send him to prison for 11 years, Clay. Do you know what the totality of gifts that he accepted from a businessman were? $175,000.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: They wanted to send his wife, who wasn’t even a public official, to prison for two years. The Supreme Court had to step in and say, “But he didn’t do anything!” You can say he accepted gifts, but if there was no “quo” in the quid pro quo… They didn’t care. He was a popular Republican governor at the time, and they wanted to destroy him. But I just want everyone to understand, Democrats:

When it suits them think you should go to prison from decade for accepting gifts even if you don’t do anything and even if there’s no corruption attached to the actual exchange of goods, services, et cetera. What was Hunter…? Hunter Biden was being give an gifts too, folks. There was no work product. There was no work product in exchange. Hunter Biden’s work product is teaching people how to freebase! He has no work product. It’s absurd.

CLAY: No. It’s a great question.

BUCK: But, you know, I’m gonna ask come back. Is this just an insurance policy now for Democrats? Are they creating the out if they don’t want Biden to run again? Is this the sword of Damocles hanging over this administration’s head? That’s what I want to think about.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: One of my theorems that I’ve posited for a long time is that the Democrats just get away with political prosecutions and Republicans, not only we don’t do it to their side, we don’t complain enough about it, and you go down the list of all the prominent Republicans that have been hounded by unfair, unjust prosecutions. In the case of Ted Stevens, federal prosecutors hid clearly exculpatory evidence.

I believe one of those prosecutors committed suicide. You look at what happened. I’ll do a summary. I was gonna run down the list. You got Rick Perry in Texas, Chris Christie with Bridgegate. I just mentioned Governor Bob McDonnell before. Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin. All of them, Clay, hounded by prosecutors unfairly and then the emoluments clause, which I mentioned. Under Trump, they wanted to impeach him under this.

And state attorneys general from Maryland and I think it was another state — I forget where — went after him because he, quote, “received payments for hotel rooms and events from foreign governments,” and there were licensing fees paid for The Apprentice. They were actually saying because foreign diplomats sometimes stay in Trump hotel or something — which has, you know, 400 rooms — it’s like they’re buying foreign policy.

CLAY: Buck, when I came to work on this show, I get a call from somebody who is a big sports fan but also pretty high up in politics, and they said, “Buddy, everything that you have ever done — particularly with your taxes and everything else — you are stepping into the lion’s den. Some people will be aware of this, the degree to which Rush was hounded by the government over where he was doing his show over taxes, over every little thing that they could do to try to come after him. That was one of the first calls I got ’cause, look. I’ve been doing sports, which is fine. People are competitive and angry, and they get fired up about sports.

BUCK: But the IRS doesn’t come after you ’cause you’re rooting for the wrong team in sports.

CLAY: Yeah. That’s what I was told, and look, the problem — and this is me speaking as a lawyer — with many of these prosecutors is you can find somebody and charge them with a felony if you want to for almost anything. Every single individual out there, if a prosecutor went through every single thing that you do all day long every day they could make a case to try to charge you with something. It’s crazy.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: We’re talking about Hunter Biden and the increasing danger that is surroundings his, potentially illegal issues. Buck, you made a reservation for us at a steakhouse. We’re gonna be celebrating the one-year anniversary of Clay and Buck up in New York City in about a month, and I don’t know… I don’t know…

BUCK: I can neither confirm nor deny that that may be a preemptive strike for our bet.

CLAY: (laughing) When I got the text, I was like, “This feels like a bit of an olive branch on Hunter Biden angle.” I’m excited to be up there, by the way, although —

BUCK: Can I just remind everybody… What…?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: He’s going to pay a fine and he’s gonna plead to some misdemeanor. There will be no jail time, right? That’s the thing. He’s not actually gonna go to trial and face prison.

CLAY: I think he’ll get charged.

BUCK: You keep… What I’m saying is, he might… Oh, you’re saying he might get charged criminally and then…?

CLAY: Yeah, I think he’s gonna be charged criminally. I think it’s… Look, the reality is I think they’ll try and drag it out, because I really think there’s a strong chance that one of his final acts in office, ’cause I just… I keep watching Joe Biden, Buck, and I just find it impossible to believe that he’s truly going to be able to run for reelection, and so I think one of his final acts may be pardoning his son.

BUCK: That would be fascinating politically, right —

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: — and that would be quite a situation, at least that he would commute his son. He definitely would that that, by the way. I don’t think there’s any doubt.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: He wouldn’t let his son go to jail. But just so we’re clear, our bet is pressing criminal charges —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — with the possibility of prison time attached.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: ‘Cause if they do, like, deferred prosecution and he pays some fine or something and he doesn’t actually face a criminal charge, that’s what I’m saying is gonna happen.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: He’s not gonna skate entirely.

CLAY: I think they will charge him, and so all of that chaos is out there.