SOURCE:
"When Peter Doocy of Fox News asked former Vice President Joe Biden in 2019 about the conversations he had had with his son, Hunter, about his foreign business dealings, Biden claimed he never had any such conversations. In her new book, “Laptop From Hell,” New York Post columnist Miranda Devine tells a different story.
“Mr. Vice President, how many times have you ever spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings?” Peter Doocy asked Biden on Sept. 21, 2019. “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden responded.
In an interview with CNSNews.com, Devine said of that statement:
“It’s completely untrue and it’s not the first time and only time that Joe Biden denied knowing anything about Hunter’s business dealings. I mean, it’s obvious from the laptop and also from the testimony and the details that Tony Bobulinski--Hunter’s former business partner--has revealed, that Joe Biden met on numerous occasions with multiple business partners of Hunter from overseas.”
Here is a transcript of Devine’s complete interview
with CNSNews.com about the “Laptop From Hell:”
Terry Jeffrey:
“Hi, welcome to this edition of Online With Terry Jeffrey. Our guest today is Miranda Devine. Miranda is a columnist for the New York Post and author of ‘Laptop From Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide.’ We’re going to talk to her today about the laptop from hell, which Hunter Biden abandoned in a Delaware repair shop.
“Hunter Biden may have been the younger son of a man who was elected to the Senate before he turned 30 but he did not have the greatest of childhoods. On December 18, 1972, two-year-old Hunter Biden was sitting in a car at an intersection outside Wilmington, Del. His mom was at the wheel and his brother and sisters were passengers with him. Miranda, what happened then?”
Miranda Devine:
“Well, his mother pulled out into the intersection and was t-boned by a truck carrying timber and the truck tried to avoid the collision but, unfortunately, the car was totaled and Hunter’s mother and his baby sister sitting in the front seat were killed and he and his older brother Beau--one year older than him--were quite badly injured. Hunter had a head injuries and his brother Beau had broken limbs. And, so, they were hospitalized and Joe Biden, who had only recently won for the first time a Senate race in Delaware, was a new widow with these two little boys and he made the decision to go ahead and go to Washington and take up this big career and his two little boys were left to be looked after by his sister who, by all accounts, was very devoted.
Gave up her career to look after these little boys. She moved into the house with Joe and the boys and Joe used to—well, he said that he used to--commute backwards and forwards from Washington, D.C., to Delaware, although the boys didn’t see much of him because he arrived after they were asleep. And Hunter felt, he complains bitterly about I guess feelings of abandonment, particularly when his father married Jill Biden, when he was about eight-years-old and the woman that he had seen as his mother since he was two--his aunt Val, who he adored--moved out and was replaced by his stepmother.
“And Joe Biden, I guess the most vivid image of Joe Biden’s career was that really heart-tugging portrait of him being sworn in at the bedside of his injured little boys, motherless little boys, in bed, lying down and looking forlorn and he’s used that photograph to great effect in every campaign since because no American can fail to feel sympathy for a man who’s lost his wife and baby daughter and has these injured, little boys to bring up.”
Jeffrey:
“But despite those very tough experiences that Hunter Biden had as a young boy in Delaware, he went on to graduate from Georgetown. Then he went to Yale Law School. He graduated from Yale Law School. You would think that when he graduated from Yale Law School--his father was still a United States senator--that here was a young man who was on his way to a great life. What happened to Hunter Biden after that?”
Devine:
“Well, of course, daddy helped him get into Yale and daddy helped him get every job that he’s ever had, every appointment, every government sinecure. And Hunter Biden was getting these jobs in Delaware with Joe Biden’s donors--like the credit card company MNBA--at highly inflated prices and he complains bitterly about being treated as the bagman for the family. At one point, there’s an email on the laptop where he says: I get no respect but I’ve supported this entire family for 30 years. In another complaint, he says that he’s had to give his father half his salary.
“So, he was expected to go and earn money and be given money by Joe’s corporate donors and he wanted to be an artist and he wanted to be an author. He married, he had three children, he had had some sort of problem with drugs and alcohol since his earliest memories. He talks about, in his memoir, about scooting under a table during one of his father’s electoral events and downing some alcohol that he had found when he was about 7 or 8
and another occasion, when he was about 18, I think in his final year of high school, he was busted by the police on some drug charge which was later sort of erased. And he fell off the wagon at some point during his marriage. He was a drunk. He started smoking crack cocaine and having this double life, while making millions of dollars from these overseas business interests that were paying him in order to curry favor and get favors from Joe Biden.”
Jeffrey:
“And, meanwhile, his brother Beau went on to be a successful politician and looked like he was headed to be a very successful political figure in this country. What happened there?”
Devine:
“Well, that was another tragedy and a genuine tragedy in the Biden family. Beau, who was the golden boy always, Hunter’s older brother, who Joe had aspirations for to be part of this sort of great Biden dynasty to rival the Kennedys, in which Beau would become president one day. Beau was the U.S. attorney general--sorry, Delaware attorney general at one point but then he got brain cancer and died in 2015. And this was a great blow to Joe, obviously, and to Hunter. And Hunter’s drug and alcohol use just spiraled out of control.
“He also had an affair with his brother’s widow, his sister-in-law, Hallie Biden. Quite when that started is cloudy but certainly Hunter’s now ex-wife Kathleen believed that it happened early and perhaps around the time of the funeral, perhaps earlier. But she was certainly very suspicious and Hunter denied all, but it was obvious from the laptop that that relationship was a long one, but it was a very tempestuous one and really ill-fated and caused the entire family a lot of embarrassment and angst.
And at one point, when it was leaked to Page 6, the New York Post Page 6, Hunter Biden convinced his father to make a statement to the press saying that he and Jill supported this and thought it was lovely that Hunter and Hallie had found love again.”
Jeffrey:
“Wow. In September 2019, when Joe Biden was in his 2020 presidential campaign, Peter Doocy at Fox News asked him, quote: ‘How many times have you ever spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings?’ And Biden responded, quote: ‘I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,’ which is a quote you have in your book. Was that a true statement?”
Devine:
“It’s completely untrue and it’s not the first time and only time that Joe Biden denied knowing anything about Hunter’s business dealings. I mean, it’s obvious from the laptop and also from the testimony and the details that Tony Bobulinski--Hunter’s former business partner--has revealed, that Joe Biden met on numerous occasions with multiple business partners of Hunter from overseas.
He met one business partner in Beijing--that was the famous time when he flew Hunter into Beijing in 2013 on Air Force Two. Hunter walked away from that little trip with a 10-percent stake in a Chinese private equity fund that, as of 2019, had $2.5 billion worth of funds under management.
“And Joe Biden met Mexicans, Kazakhstanis, Ukrainians, Russians, Chinese. He met Hunter’s overseas business partners and he didn’t just meet them by accident; he met them deliberately. He invited them to his home at the Naval Observatory, the vice presidential residence. He attended at least one dinner at Cafe Milano, a Georgetown Italian restaurant.
This one dinner in I think it was April 2015, or it might have been 2016, anyway, this one dinner, Hunter did a sort of three-for-one deal. He invited Kazakhstanis, Mexicans, and Ukrainians. And Russians, sorry--”
Jeffrey:
“And then had his dad drop by.”
Devine:
“Four-for-one deal and got his dad to come. And this was denied and denied before the election and funnily enough, when I found out about--because it takes a bit of digging in the laptop--I realized that this meeting that the Ukrainian had had with Joe Biden, which was the story that we initially published three weeks before the election and was denied by the Biden campaign, what I realized:
It wasn’t just a meeting; this was an entire dinner at Cafe Milano. I wrote the story and of course the White House doesn’t respond but when the Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler went to the White House to fact-check my story and prove it wrong, lo and behold the White House admitted well, yes, Joe Biden did go to that dinner, but he only went very briefly and not for any nefarious purpose; he went for a religious purpose, apparently. I’m told that that’s not true either, that he did come late and he did leave early but he did sit down for a meal.”
Jeffrey:
“Let me get you to hone in on the China connection a little bit. You say that in 2013, when Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, he goes on an official trip to China, flying Air Force Two, of course a U.S. government plane, and he brings Hunter with him.”
Devine:
“Mmhmm.”
Jeffrey:
“And when Hunter’s in China with his father, the vice president of the United States, does he make any business connections?”
Devine:
“Well, he doesn’t make a business connection; he already knew this guy Jonathan Li, but Jonathan Li came to the hotel where Joe and Hunter were staying and Joe went, took some time out to go and meet him in this private room, shake his hand, and give him his blessing.”
Jeffrey:
“And Jonathan Li was a Chinese national businessman.”
Devine:
“That’s correct.”
Jeffrey:
“And he had ties to the Communist Party of China?”
Devine:
“I don’t know, but I mean, look, everybody who’s working with a Chinese state-owned enterprise has some link, obviously, to the regime in China. This was a private equity fund that was part-owned by the Bank of China, so it was sanctioned by the regime. I don’t think Hunter Biden would’ve been able to get a 10 percent stake of this private equity fund had it not been for his father. And it’s crystal clear to--"
Jeffrey:
“So, as vice president of the United States, Joe Biden is in the People’s Republic of China.”
Devine:
“Yep.”
Jeffrey:
“He brought his son with him.”
Devine:
“Yep.”
Jeffrey:
“His son goes to meet with this Chinese
businessman who has money from the Bank of China --”
Devine:
“Yep.”
Jeffrey:
“--in his business.”
Devine:
“Yep.”
Jeffrey:
“And Joe Biden goes to meet with this guy with his son.”
Devine:
“Yes.”
Jeffrey:
“Okay.”
Devine:
“And Hunter Biden has admitted that. He said: Ah yes, am I going to go to China and not have a cup of coffee with my business partner. But this is what the Bidens do. They sort of admit to a little bit, they do a limited hangout of admission to make everything look innocent.”
Jeffrey:
“And yet Joe Biden claims he’s never talked to his son about his foreign business interests.”
Devine:
“That’s right.”
Jeffrey:
“He met with him with a foreign businessman in China; he just didn’t talk to him about it.”
Devine:
“Well, yes, I guess that’s what we’re supposed to believe. But how can you not know anything about your son’s foreign business dealings when you’ve met his business partners from China and Russia and Ukraine and--”
Jeffrey:
“And that meeting in China is documented in the laptop?”
Devine:
“Not really. There’s little bits and pieces. There are missing emails and missing sections in the laptop. To really--I mean, the laptop itself was not enough. In my book, it doesn’t rely on just the laptop.”
Jeffrey:
“The Secret Service people were with Biden when he went to that meeting with Li, correct?”
Devine:
“Presumably. Of course, they must have been. I don’t know if they went into the room at this hotel that he was staying at. It was only a brief meeting but you can be a little bit pregnant.”
Jeffrey:
“And at the time, Hunter Biden also had Secret Service protection?”
Devine:
“I think so. I think he had it then. There was a period when he waived off the Secret Service protection. I mean, at one point, he had bodyguards supplied by Burisma, which was that Ukrainian corrupt energy company, so maybe the Secret Service was cramping his style when it came to drugs and prostitutes.
Who knows? But he did--He found them aggravating. But the fact of the laptop is that it’s an incomplete record. It covers nine years of Hunter Biden’s life and almost—you know, that’s Joe Biden’s vice presidency, eight years of his vice presidency.
But to augment it and to corroborate it, you have the material that Tony Bobulinski handed over to the FBI in October 2020, just shortly after the story was published about the laptop and that is a trove of documents and emails that corroborate and overlap with the ones on the laptop, but also additional material such as encrypted messages--WhatsApp messages--where Hunter and his partners were more loose in their conversations.
And then there is another piece of the jigsaw puzzle, which was provided by Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, the two Republican senators, who conducted a really, very useful investigation into Hunter and his various business dealings overseas and corruption there and bribery. And they followed the money trail because they had access to Treasury Department documents. So that’s part of the jigsaw puzzle and you really need to put it all together, which I did in the book, to get that sort of matrix of blame.
You can say pretty clearly that this was an influence-peddling operation conducted in several of the countries that Joe Biden had carriage for during the Obama Administration and from which he, himself, appears to--well, he was certainly involved, intimately involved--and appears to have profited from, there’s some evidence that he benefited financially.”
Jeffrey:
“At some points in your book, you talk about Hunter Biden referring to quote-unquote ‘the big guy.’ Who is the big guy?”
Devine:
“The big guy is Joe Biden. That was who Tony Bobulinski said that when they referred to Joe Biden, they used a code word, code phrase, ‘big guy.’ Also, Hunter used to refer to his father as ‘my chairman.’ And, so that you can see references to both those names in the laptop, but also on WhatsApp messages that Tony Bobulinski--and I have all that material that Tony Bobulinski had and also Tony Bobulinski made a statement, gave a press conference--again, before the election--saying that Joe Biden is not telling the truth when he says he’s never met any business partners because I was one of them and I met him twice in L.A. and he was the big guy who was going to benefit, have a 10 percent stake in one of these Chinese deals.”
Jeffrey:
“And there’s one of the documents that says that the big guy is going to get 10 percent.”
Devine:
“Yeah, 10 percent equity in this joint venture with a Chinese energy company and that 10 percent for the ‘big guy’ was to be held by Hunter.”
Jeffrey:
“And that was in 2017 that that message happened?”
Devine:
“Yes, that message was in 2017. But that could be deceptive because apologists for Joe Biden say, ‘Oh, what does it matter? He was a private citizen by then.’ But the--”
Jeffrey:
“He hadn’t been one for long.”
Devine:
“No, he hadn’t been. This February 2017. But the fact is that the work that the Biden family and their partners had been doing for CEFC around the world had been done during the last two years of Joe Biden’s vice presidency in 2015 and 2016. That’s documented in quite detail on the laptop. And the money only was coming after Joe Biden stepped down.
There was obviously a reason for that after Joe Biden completed his vice presidency and this new joint venture that Joe was going to get 10 percent of was just the formalization of this informal agreement that they’d had with CEFC for the previous two years. And, you know, there are letters and documents and Tony Bobulinski attests to that, as well.”
Jeffrey:
“In the very beginning of that trail, was it the 2013 trip to China that Hunter took with his father?”
Devine:
“No, there’s earlier trips that Hunter took to China. He had--I can’t remember what the date was-it might’ve been--I’m just guessing, I can’t remember--it might’ve been ‘10 or ‘11--that he had entre to the most incredible, highest echelons of sort of Chinese state-owned enterprises. Bank of China was one, but there were about a dozen. He went on this sort of road show of just going and meeting these really high-ranking people.”
Jeffrey:
“While his father was vice president of the United States.”
Devine:
“While his father was vice president. And one of the things he used to do was bring along an autographed copy of one of his father’s books to give away as party favors. In China, it’s obvious what this is; they have a name for someone like Hunter Biden. It’s a princeling. The sons and daughters of top CCP officials, you don’t give the money to the top official; you give the bribe to the family member.”
Jeffrey:
“Okay, so back to Biden’s claim that he never discussed his son’s overseas business deals ever. Tony Bobulinski, in your book, he talks about a meeting he had with Joe Biden, correct?”
Devine:
“Yes, that’s right. He had two meetings with Joe Biden in Los Angeles.”
Jeffrey:
“Tell us about it. So he’s in the Beverly Hilton hotel--”
Devine:
“Yeah.”
Jeffrey:
“--with Hunter Biden and Jim Biden, who’s Joe Biden’s brother, correct?”
Devine:
“Yes.”
Jeffrey:
“What happens?”
Devine:
“Well, Joe Biden is flying into this Milken conference at this hotel and so Joe, Jim, and Hunter are trying to woo Tony Bobulinski, who’s a naval veteran. He’s a self-made businessman, successful in his own right. And they want him to be CEO of this new joint venture with CEFC, the Chinese energy company, to sort of regularize it and make it legal and make it dot all the i’s and cross all the ‘t’s and have proper business practices.
So, he’s a little bit reluctant, but anyway they’ve convinced him to come and meet Joe. And Tony Bobulinski has been a Democratic donor, so he thinks that Joe Biden, former vice president, is a pretty important guy. So, Joe flies in, comes into the hotel.
Tony Bobulinski’s been told beforehand: Don’t mention anything in detail. Just keep the conversation at a quote, high level, which means that we’re talking about what we’re talking about, but Joe needs to have plausible deniability as Jim Biden, Joe’s younger brother, told Tony Bobulinski. That’s why they were quite confident that they could run these influence-peddling schemes and that nothing would rub off on Joe.
“And so the meeting happened--a fairly short meeting--and Joe Biden said to Tony Bobulinski words to the effect of: Welcome on board and thanks for looking after my son.”
Jeffrey: “But Joe Biden’s never told the truth about that meeting.”
Devine:
“Well, he doesn’t really get asked and he went to ground after our story and after Tony Bobulinski came out during the election campaign and was allowed to get away with it.
“It was very hard to get to him and with the rest of the media doing a basically blackout on anything to do with this story--I mean, it’s one thing to ignore the New York Post and to censor it as Big Tech did, but it’s quite another thing to ignore Tony Bobulinski, a really credible guy who had a high-level security clearance; he’d been an instructor on naval submarines and a successful businessman.
And he was saying that he had first-hand evidence that Joe Biden was involved in this influence-peddling scheme and that he hadn’t been telling the truth and he was ignored. And similarly, Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson had brought out in September their report showing this money trail of millions going into Biden family coffers and their partners’ and they were traduced as agents of the Kremlin peddling Russian disinformation and they got away with it.”
Jeffrey:
“Alright, so, yes, as you mention, Sen. Grassley and Sen. Johnson were able to do a limited investigation given the leverage they had. If the Republicans take back control of the Congress, particularly the Senate, in the next election, should they go back and use their subpoena power and full investigative power to really dig into this and find out what went on? Should there be more of an investigation?”
Devine:
“Absolutely, there definitely must be. This operation by the Bidens enriched them enormously but it also put at risk America’s national interest and, potentially, national security, and particularly since some of the biggest-paying countries were our greatest adversaries and you’re looking at China and Russia, just for starters. I mean, also Ukraine.
“This whole incident of Joe Biden pressuring Ukrainian then-President Poroshenko to fire the chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who at that moment was investigating and just issued a warrant for and was seizing the property of Hunter’s main benefactor, the owner of Burisma, a guy called Zlochevsky.
Now, that was all swept under the carpet, incredible. Joe Biden boasted that he withheld $1 billion in U.S. aid unless that prosecutor was fired and that’s a really murky story which, again, led to the impeachment of Donald Trump. I mean, it was like Opposite Day, crazy. So the Republicans have to get to the bottom of that but, you know, they have to be different Republicans from the ones that were there previously because Ron Johnson, his committee had two Republicans, Mitt Romney and Rob Portman, who refused to allow him to issue subpoenas to a number of individuals that would have shone a lot of light on this scheme.
And that included a Ukrainian and also Hunter Biden and various of his associates. They put the kibosh on that. They really crippled Ron Johnson’s ability to investigate and that was when the Republicans had the power. So, if and when they get the power back, they ought to be using it and understanding that playing by the Marquess of Queensberry rules is just a mug’s game because the Democrats are waging war against Republicans.”
Jeffrey:
“Miranda Devine, author of ‘Laptop From Hell,’ thank you very much.”
Devine:
“Thanks so much, Terry
“Hi, welcome to this edition of Online With Terry Jeffrey. Our guest today is Miranda Devine. Miranda is a columnist for the New York Post and author of ‘Laptop From Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide.’ We’re going to talk to her today about the laptop from hell, which Hunter Biden abandoned in a Delaware repair shop.
“Hunter Biden may have been the younger son of a man who was elected to the Senate before he turned 30 but he did not have the greatest of childhoods. On December 18, 1972, two-year-old Hunter Biden was sitting in a car at an intersection outside Wilmington, Del. His mom was at the wheel and his brother and sisters were passengers with him. Miranda, what happened then?”
Miranda Devine:
“Well, his mother pulled out into the intersection and was t-boned by a truck carrying timber and the truck tried to avoid the collision but, unfortunately, the car was totaled and Hunter’s mother and his baby sister sitting in the front seat were killed and he and his older brother Beau--one year older than him--were quite badly injured. Hunter had a head injuries and his brother Beau had broken limbs. And, so, they were hospitalized and Joe Biden, who had only recently won for the first time a Senate race in Delaware, was a new widow with these two little boys and he made the decision to go ahead and go to Washington and take up this big career and his two little boys were left to be looked after by his sister who, by all accounts, was very devoted.
Gave up her career to look after these little boys. She moved into the house with Joe and the boys and Joe used to—well, he said that he used to--commute backwards and forwards from Washington, D.C., to Delaware, although the boys didn’t see much of him because he arrived after they were asleep. And Hunter felt, he complains bitterly about I guess feelings of abandonment, particularly when his father married Jill Biden, when he was about eight-years-old and the woman that he had seen as his mother since he was two--his aunt Val, who he adored--moved out and was replaced by his stepmother.
“And Joe Biden, I guess the most vivid image of Joe Biden’s career was that really heart-tugging portrait of him being sworn in at the bedside of his injured little boys, motherless little boys, in bed, lying down and looking forlorn and he’s used that photograph to great effect in every campaign since because no American can fail to feel sympathy for a man who’s lost his wife and baby daughter and has these injured, little boys to bring up.”
Jeffrey:
“But despite those very tough experiences that Hunter Biden had as a young boy in Delaware, he went on to graduate from Georgetown. Then he went to Yale Law School. He graduated from Yale Law School. You would think that when he graduated from Yale Law School--his father was still a United States senator--that here was a young man who was on his way to a great life. What happened to Hunter Biden after that?”
Devine:
“Well, of course, daddy helped him get into Yale and daddy helped him get every job that he’s ever had, every appointment, every government sinecure. And Hunter Biden was getting these jobs in Delaware with Joe Biden’s donors--like the credit card company MNBA--at highly inflated prices and he complains bitterly about being treated as the bagman for the family. At one point, there’s an email on the laptop where he says: I get no respect but I’ve supported this entire family for 30 years. In another complaint, he says that he’s had to give his father half his salary.
“So, he was expected to go and earn money and be given money by Joe’s corporate donors and he wanted to be an artist and he wanted to be an author. He married, he had three children, he had had some sort of problem with drugs and alcohol since his earliest memories. He talks about, in his memoir, about scooting under a table during one of his father’s electoral events and downing some alcohol that he had found when he was about 7 or 8
and another occasion, when he was about 18, I think in his final year of high school, he was busted by the police on some drug charge which was later sort of erased. And he fell off the wagon at some point during his marriage. He was a drunk. He started smoking crack cocaine and having this double life, while making millions of dollars from these overseas business interests that were paying him in order to curry favor and get favors from Joe Biden.”
Jeffrey:
“And, meanwhile, his brother Beau went on to be a successful politician and looked like he was headed to be a very successful political figure in this country. What happened there?”
Devine:
“Well, that was another tragedy and a genuine tragedy in the Biden family. Beau, who was the golden boy always, Hunter’s older brother, who Joe had aspirations for to be part of this sort of great Biden dynasty to rival the Kennedys, in which Beau would become president one day. Beau was the U.S. attorney general--sorry, Delaware attorney general at one point but then he got brain cancer and died in 2015. And this was a great blow to Joe, obviously, and to Hunter. And Hunter’s drug and alcohol use just spiraled out of control.
“He also had an affair with his brother’s widow, his sister-in-law, Hallie Biden. Quite when that started is cloudy but certainly Hunter’s now ex-wife Kathleen believed that it happened early and perhaps around the time of the funeral, perhaps earlier. But she was certainly very suspicious and Hunter denied all, but it was obvious from the laptop that that relationship was a long one, but it was a very tempestuous one and really ill-fated and caused the entire family a lot of embarrassment and angst.
And at one point, when it was leaked to Page 6, the New York Post Page 6, Hunter Biden convinced his father to make a statement to the press saying that he and Jill supported this and thought it was lovely that Hunter and Hallie had found love again.”
Jeffrey:
“Wow. In September 2019, when Joe Biden was in his 2020 presidential campaign, Peter Doocy at Fox News asked him, quote: ‘How many times have you ever spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings?’ And Biden responded, quote: ‘I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,’ which is a quote you have in your book. Was that a true statement?”
Devine:
“It’s completely untrue and it’s not the first time and only time that Joe Biden denied knowing anything about Hunter’s business dealings. I mean, it’s obvious from the laptop and also from the testimony and the details that Tony Bobulinski--Hunter’s former business partner--has revealed, that Joe Biden met on numerous occasions with multiple business partners of Hunter from overseas.
He met one business partner in Beijing--that was the famous time when he flew Hunter into Beijing in 2013 on Air Force Two. Hunter walked away from that little trip with a 10-percent stake in a Chinese private equity fund that, as of 2019, had $2.5 billion worth of funds under management.
“And Joe Biden met Mexicans, Kazakhstanis, Ukrainians, Russians, Chinese. He met Hunter’s overseas business partners and he didn’t just meet them by accident; he met them deliberately. He invited them to his home at the Naval Observatory, the vice presidential residence. He attended at least one dinner at Cafe Milano, a Georgetown Italian restaurant.
This one dinner in I think it was April 2015, or it might have been 2016, anyway, this one dinner, Hunter did a sort of three-for-one deal. He invited Kazakhstanis, Mexicans, and Ukrainians. And Russians, sorry--”
Jeffrey:
“And then had his dad drop by.”
Devine:
“Four-for-one deal and got his dad to come. And this was denied and denied before the election and funnily enough, when I found out about--because it takes a bit of digging in the laptop--I realized that this meeting that the Ukrainian had had with Joe Biden, which was the story that we initially published three weeks before the election and was denied by the Biden campaign, what I realized:
It wasn’t just a meeting; this was an entire dinner at Cafe Milano. I wrote the story and of course the White House doesn’t respond but when the Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler went to the White House to fact-check my story and prove it wrong, lo and behold the White House admitted well, yes, Joe Biden did go to that dinner, but he only went very briefly and not for any nefarious purpose; he went for a religious purpose, apparently. I’m told that that’s not true either, that he did come late and he did leave early but he did sit down for a meal.”
Jeffrey:
“Let me get you to hone in on the China connection a little bit. You say that in 2013, when Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, he goes on an official trip to China, flying Air Force Two, of course a U.S. government plane, and he brings Hunter with him.”
Devine:
“Mmhmm.”
Jeffrey:
“And when Hunter’s in China with his father, the vice president of the United States, does he make any business connections?”
Devine:
“Well, he doesn’t make a business connection; he already knew this guy Jonathan Li, but Jonathan Li came to the hotel where Joe and Hunter were staying and Joe went, took some time out to go and meet him in this private room, shake his hand, and give him his blessing.”
Jeffrey:
“And Jonathan Li was a Chinese national businessman.”
Devine:
“That’s correct.”
Jeffrey:
“And he had ties to the Communist Party of China?”
Devine:
“I don’t know, but I mean, look, everybody who’s working with a Chinese state-owned enterprise has some link, obviously, to the regime in China. This was a private equity fund that was part-owned by the Bank of China, so it was sanctioned by the regime. I don’t think Hunter Biden would’ve been able to get a 10 percent stake of this private equity fund had it not been for his father. And it’s crystal clear to--"
Jeffrey:
“So, as vice president of the United States, Joe Biden is in the People’s Republic of China.”
Devine:
“Yep.”
Jeffrey:
“He brought his son with him.”
Devine:
“Yep.”
Jeffrey:
“His son goes to meet with this Chinese
businessman who has money from the Bank of China --”
Devine:
“Yep.”
Jeffrey:
“--in his business.”
Devine:
“Yep.”
Jeffrey:
“And Joe Biden goes to meet with this guy with his son.”
Devine:
“Yes.”
Jeffrey:
“Okay.”
Devine:
“And Hunter Biden has admitted that. He said: Ah yes, am I going to go to China and not have a cup of coffee with my business partner. But this is what the Bidens do. They sort of admit to a little bit, they do a limited hangout of admission to make everything look innocent.”
Jeffrey:
“And yet Joe Biden claims he’s never talked to his son about his foreign business interests.”
Devine:
“That’s right.”
Jeffrey:
“He met with him with a foreign businessman in China; he just didn’t talk to him about it.”
Devine:
“Well, yes, I guess that’s what we’re supposed to believe. But how can you not know anything about your son’s foreign business dealings when you’ve met his business partners from China and Russia and Ukraine and--”
Jeffrey:
“And that meeting in China is documented in the laptop?”
Devine:
“Not really. There’s little bits and pieces. There are missing emails and missing sections in the laptop. To really--I mean, the laptop itself was not enough. In my book, it doesn’t rely on just the laptop.”
Jeffrey:
“The Secret Service people were with Biden when he went to that meeting with Li, correct?”
Devine:
“Presumably. Of course, they must have been. I don’t know if they went into the room at this hotel that he was staying at. It was only a brief meeting but you can be a little bit pregnant.”
Jeffrey:
“And at the time, Hunter Biden also had Secret Service protection?”
Devine:
“I think so. I think he had it then. There was a period when he waived off the Secret Service protection. I mean, at one point, he had bodyguards supplied by Burisma, which was that Ukrainian corrupt energy company, so maybe the Secret Service was cramping his style when it came to drugs and prostitutes.
Who knows? But he did--He found them aggravating. But the fact of the laptop is that it’s an incomplete record. It covers nine years of Hunter Biden’s life and almost—you know, that’s Joe Biden’s vice presidency, eight years of his vice presidency.
But to augment it and to corroborate it, you have the material that Tony Bobulinski handed over to the FBI in October 2020, just shortly after the story was published about the laptop and that is a trove of documents and emails that corroborate and overlap with the ones on the laptop, but also additional material such as encrypted messages--WhatsApp messages--where Hunter and his partners were more loose in their conversations.
And then there is another piece of the jigsaw puzzle, which was provided by Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, the two Republican senators, who conducted a really, very useful investigation into Hunter and his various business dealings overseas and corruption there and bribery. And they followed the money trail because they had access to Treasury Department documents. So that’s part of the jigsaw puzzle and you really need to put it all together, which I did in the book, to get that sort of matrix of blame.
You can say pretty clearly that this was an influence-peddling operation conducted in several of the countries that Joe Biden had carriage for during the Obama Administration and from which he, himself, appears to--well, he was certainly involved, intimately involved--and appears to have profited from, there’s some evidence that he benefited financially.”
Jeffrey:
“At some points in your book, you talk about Hunter Biden referring to quote-unquote ‘the big guy.’ Who is the big guy?”
Devine:
“The big guy is Joe Biden. That was who Tony Bobulinski said that when they referred to Joe Biden, they used a code word, code phrase, ‘big guy.’ Also, Hunter used to refer to his father as ‘my chairman.’ And, so that you can see references to both those names in the laptop, but also on WhatsApp messages that Tony Bobulinski--and I have all that material that Tony Bobulinski had and also Tony Bobulinski made a statement, gave a press conference--again, before the election--saying that Joe Biden is not telling the truth when he says he’s never met any business partners because I was one of them and I met him twice in L.A. and he was the big guy who was going to benefit, have a 10 percent stake in one of these Chinese deals.”
Jeffrey:
“And there’s one of the documents that says that the big guy is going to get 10 percent.”
Devine:
“Yeah, 10 percent equity in this joint venture with a Chinese energy company and that 10 percent for the ‘big guy’ was to be held by Hunter.”
Jeffrey:
“And that was in 2017 that that message happened?”
Devine:
“Yes, that message was in 2017. But that could be deceptive because apologists for Joe Biden say, ‘Oh, what does it matter? He was a private citizen by then.’ But the--”
Jeffrey:
“He hadn’t been one for long.”
Devine:
“No, he hadn’t been. This February 2017. But the fact is that the work that the Biden family and their partners had been doing for CEFC around the world had been done during the last two years of Joe Biden’s vice presidency in 2015 and 2016. That’s documented in quite detail on the laptop. And the money only was coming after Joe Biden stepped down.
There was obviously a reason for that after Joe Biden completed his vice presidency and this new joint venture that Joe was going to get 10 percent of was just the formalization of this informal agreement that they’d had with CEFC for the previous two years. And, you know, there are letters and documents and Tony Bobulinski attests to that, as well.”
Jeffrey:
“In the very beginning of that trail, was it the 2013 trip to China that Hunter took with his father?”
Devine:
“No, there’s earlier trips that Hunter took to China. He had--I can’t remember what the date was-it might’ve been--I’m just guessing, I can’t remember--it might’ve been ‘10 or ‘11--that he had entre to the most incredible, highest echelons of sort of Chinese state-owned enterprises. Bank of China was one, but there were about a dozen. He went on this sort of road show of just going and meeting these really high-ranking people.”
Jeffrey:
“While his father was vice president of the United States.”
Devine:
“While his father was vice president. And one of the things he used to do was bring along an autographed copy of one of his father’s books to give away as party favors. In China, it’s obvious what this is; they have a name for someone like Hunter Biden. It’s a princeling. The sons and daughters of top CCP officials, you don’t give the money to the top official; you give the bribe to the family member.”
Jeffrey:
“Okay, so back to Biden’s claim that he never discussed his son’s overseas business deals ever. Tony Bobulinski, in your book, he talks about a meeting he had with Joe Biden, correct?”
Devine:
“Yes, that’s right. He had two meetings with Joe Biden in Los Angeles.”
Jeffrey:
“Tell us about it. So he’s in the Beverly Hilton hotel--”
Devine:
“Yeah.”
Jeffrey:
“--with Hunter Biden and Jim Biden, who’s Joe Biden’s brother, correct?”
Devine:
“Yes.”
Jeffrey:
“What happens?”
Devine:
“Well, Joe Biden is flying into this Milken conference at this hotel and so Joe, Jim, and Hunter are trying to woo Tony Bobulinski, who’s a naval veteran. He’s a self-made businessman, successful in his own right. And they want him to be CEO of this new joint venture with CEFC, the Chinese energy company, to sort of regularize it and make it legal and make it dot all the i’s and cross all the ‘t’s and have proper business practices.
So, he’s a little bit reluctant, but anyway they’ve convinced him to come and meet Joe. And Tony Bobulinski has been a Democratic donor, so he thinks that Joe Biden, former vice president, is a pretty important guy. So, Joe flies in, comes into the hotel.
Tony Bobulinski’s been told beforehand: Don’t mention anything in detail. Just keep the conversation at a quote, high level, which means that we’re talking about what we’re talking about, but Joe needs to have plausible deniability as Jim Biden, Joe’s younger brother, told Tony Bobulinski. That’s why they were quite confident that they could run these influence-peddling schemes and that nothing would rub off on Joe.
“And so the meeting happened--a fairly short meeting--and Joe Biden said to Tony Bobulinski words to the effect of: Welcome on board and thanks for looking after my son.”
Jeffrey: “But Joe Biden’s never told the truth about that meeting.”
Devine:
“Well, he doesn’t really get asked and he went to ground after our story and after Tony Bobulinski came out during the election campaign and was allowed to get away with it.
“It was very hard to get to him and with the rest of the media doing a basically blackout on anything to do with this story--I mean, it’s one thing to ignore the New York Post and to censor it as Big Tech did, but it’s quite another thing to ignore Tony Bobulinski, a really credible guy who had a high-level security clearance; he’d been an instructor on naval submarines and a successful businessman.
And he was saying that he had first-hand evidence that Joe Biden was involved in this influence-peddling scheme and that he hadn’t been telling the truth and he was ignored. And similarly, Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson had brought out in September their report showing this money trail of millions going into Biden family coffers and their partners’ and they were traduced as agents of the Kremlin peddling Russian disinformation and they got away with it.”
Jeffrey:
“Alright, so, yes, as you mention, Sen. Grassley and Sen. Johnson were able to do a limited investigation given the leverage they had. If the Republicans take back control of the Congress, particularly the Senate, in the next election, should they go back and use their subpoena power and full investigative power to really dig into this and find out what went on? Should there be more of an investigation?”
Devine:
“Absolutely, there definitely must be. This operation by the Bidens enriched them enormously but it also put at risk America’s national interest and, potentially, national security, and particularly since some of the biggest-paying countries were our greatest adversaries and you’re looking at China and Russia, just for starters. I mean, also Ukraine.
“This whole incident of Joe Biden pressuring Ukrainian then-President Poroshenko to fire the chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who at that moment was investigating and just issued a warrant for and was seizing the property of Hunter’s main benefactor, the owner of Burisma, a guy called Zlochevsky.
Now, that was all swept under the carpet, incredible. Joe Biden boasted that he withheld $1 billion in U.S. aid unless that prosecutor was fired and that’s a really murky story which, again, led to the impeachment of Donald Trump. I mean, it was like Opposite Day, crazy. So the Republicans have to get to the bottom of that but, you know, they have to be different Republicans from the ones that were there previously because Ron Johnson, his committee had two Republicans, Mitt Romney and Rob Portman, who refused to allow him to issue subpoenas to a number of individuals that would have shone a lot of light on this scheme.
And that included a Ukrainian and also Hunter Biden and various of his associates. They put the kibosh on that. They really crippled Ron Johnson’s ability to investigate and that was when the Republicans had the power. So, if and when they get the power back, they ought to be using it and understanding that playing by the Marquess of Queensberry rules is just a mug’s game because the Democrats are waging war against Republicans.”
Jeffrey:
“Miranda Devine, author of ‘Laptop From Hell,’ thank you very much.”
Devine:
“Thanks so much, Terry
