[0:22] Hello, Hearts of Oak, and welcome to another interview coming up in a moment with Miranda Devine, the journalist who wrote Laptop from Hell, Hunter Biden.
And I had the fascinating privilege of hearing Miranda speak at a conference in February.
She was the keynote speaker there. And I immediately got hold of the book.
I'd followed the work she had done, read it cover to cover, fascinating, short book.
And I know we've delved into this topic before. Miranda brings, again, everyone brings something unique, something fresh and I know you will enjoy listening to her. She unpacks not only Hunter Biden's lifestyle, his lifestyle of drugs, alcohol and sex addiction, which is a sorry, sorry tale, although it is quite comical the book at the beginning and I find myself laughing. I don't know whether I should have been.
Through the early parts as she writes a tale and tells a tale, a sorry tale, a sad tale of a chaotic lifestyle financed by Joe Biden. And then we go into that corruption side and how Joe Biden is very much part of that and the Biden name is used for corruption for financial deals across the world with multiple companies. So join us as Miranda delves into the dark world of Hunter Biden and the corrupt world of his father Joe Biden.
It is an absolute delight to have Miranda Devine with us today. Miranda thank you for your time today.
Thanks for having me, Peter.
[1:47] Not at all. I had the pleasure of seeing you in CPAC and also in Miami a month earlier.
So it's absolutely wonderful.
And we have touched on Hunter Biden before. We have had Phelim McAleer before.
And we so we've looked at a little bit before, but I've had great fun reading through the laptop from hell.
I will get into that. Your handle @MirandaDivine.
There is your Twitter handle and all the links to the book and everything else are in the description.
[2:20] Now I think in the intro you say that a month before the 2020 election, I think it was you talked about Rudy Giuliani emailing you with info from the Hunter Biden laptop. Was that your dissent into Hunter Biden's world?
Yes it was. It was actually Rudy Giuliani's lawyer at the time, Bob Costello and he texted me some just a few choice grabs from the laptop and he said it was late at night I think a Friday night and he said I'm just sending you this so you know that it's legitimate and let's talk. This is you know he'd spent the past since the end of August this was now, the beginning of October, he'd spent all that time just verifying as best he could that this was real, that the laptop repair shop owner who had sent him the material, sent him the hard drive
[3:24] was a legitimate person, and he was satisfied to the extent that he felt that he could approach the New York Post. And so I guess that was the beginning of it and of course, you know, when we published, I mean it was a legitimate story, it's been proven over and over again since then that the emails that we published were real, but we were immediately censored.
[3:53] Well, you talk about that as being kind of a moment that made you kind of become curious in the issue because when I guess a story is censored you begin to ask why it's been censored.
So was it that that kind of perked up your interest in this, curious to find out why it was being restricted.
Oh no, I mean I knew from the minute that, you know, we got a look at what was on the laptop that this was a bombshell story. So there was no question that the story was huge and, you know, all credit to my editors for having the courage to publish it where no one else would and all credit to my colleagues, particularly Emma Jo Morris, for actually digging down and getting the story out there. So look, there was no question in any of our minds that this was an enormous story that showed corruption at the very highest levels in Joe Biden's campaign. And we're talking about one of the two candidates for president, and we felt that it was important that the American people had
[5:03] all the evidence at their disposal about the characters of both men, so that they could form an educated judgment about who to vote for, but unfortunately that wasn't possible because of the heavy-handed intervention of big tech. And so I think what changed for me there was just I knew that we were going to get a lot of pushback and criticism for publishing the story, particularly from the Biden campaign, which refused, remember at the time, to engage on this at all other than than to tell other media organisations that it wasn't true, that Joe Biden had never met with Hunter Biden's business partner from Ukraine in Washington, DC, as we had shown through this email or a couple of emails that he wasn't the big guy who was getting 10% from this Chinese business deal, et cetera.
He swore blind that he knew nothing about his son Hunter's business dealings and that our stories were wrong. And of course, you know, with time that's just
[6:07] proven to be completely wrong and even the New York Times and the Washington Post had to admit it.
But I guess we knew we were going to come in for some stiff opposition. What we didn't anticipate was that Twitter and Facebook would shut us down within hours of the story going live. You know, this was an extraordinary intervention into the free press by these unaccountable oligopolies.
And, you know, shortly after they did that to us, they said they threw the sitting president of the United States off their platforms.
And that frightened even, you know, Emmanuel Macron in France, because world leaders were looking at this and saying, if these companies have the power to unseat, de-platform the leader of the free world, what else can they do?
Absolutely. Could I ask about your, I mean, your journalistic background is substantial.
I mean, Boston Herald, Daily Telegraph, The Sun, Sunday Times, and now with New York Post.
Did, I mean, your experience as a journalist, did it not make you question going up against this subject, which is right at the heart of the, I guess, the American establishment?
[7:33] What do you mean? Like not wanting to do it? I mean I would have thought that any journalist would want to do this story once that they had confirmed that it was real. I just, I don't see, you know, I wouldn't care if it was about Joe Biden or Donald Trump. I mean it's a really important story that goes to the heart of American national security. Here is a situation where Joe Biden has lied about his involvement in his family's influence peddling scheme that was running throughout his vice presidency and in fact he's run some form of influence peddling via his family for four decades out of Delaware. And so you know I think that's a really important story and it's just the sort of story that journalists are supposed to do without fear or favour. So I mean whether you have a lot of experience or a little experience.
[8:30] I think it's just crystal clear that this is a bombshell story and that's why it's even more inexplicable that you know these news organisations like the New York Times with enormous resources, way more resources, way more investigative reporters than we have at the New your post.
They really have done very little with this story. They ignored it initially.
You can almost forgive them for ignoring it before the election because the stakes were so high.
They didn't have the hard drive.
They hadn't had the benefit that we had of the early, you know, the head start.
But it took them then, I think, 19 months, the New York Times, to even acknowledge that this was a real laptop and that the material on it was legitimate and authentic and that it raised questions for Joe Biden is something that they just wouldn't tackle.
[9:24] The New York Times published a story acknowledging that these emails were real, but it buried it in like the 23rd paragraph of the story on page A19, I think.
And after that, then that was sort of the green light for the Washington Post and CNN and so on to follow up.
But all of them had this boilerplate paragraph in their stories, there is no evidence this has anything to do with Joe Biden.
There's so much evidence, ample evidence. That was our entire stories, everything I've ever reported from this laptop has been about Joe Biden.
It's not about Hunter Biden, who is a poor, sad soul. You know, he was a crack addict throughout this.
[10:08] You know, most of this nine year period that his laptop covers.
You know, he had his personal life was in turmoil. Split from his wife, he was undergoing an acrimonious divorce.
He had, despite the millions of dollars that was coming into his coffers from China and Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan and elsewhere around the world, he had serious money difficulties.
He also seemed to have some sort of a sex addiction, judging from the amount of hookers that he was ordering online and sex cams and you know homemade porn etc. So this was a very troubled person and you know I feel sorry for him. I think that there is room for people to have some sympathy for this very troubled soul and wish him the best. He says now that he's clean and let's hope that that's the case. But where I think there is no sympathy and should be none is with regards to Joe Biden, Hunter Biden's father, who deputised his drug-addicted son to go and be the bag man for the family in these countries carrying the Biden name.
[11:22] And reaping millions of dollars from America's adversaries. That is something that he has, it's unequivocal that he's lied about it.
So what I think the Republicans in Congress are trying to do is nail down the money trail.
They're doing a pretty good job of that now systematically. And also ask the questions about whether or not Joe Biden compromised America's national security and is now tailoring foreign policy because of this influence peddling scheme that was so lucrative for his family.
At the beginning, I find myself actually chuckling, probably laughing a little bit, reading the first few chapters. You've got the interaction, and it is a dark comedy.
It's tragic, with, I guess, Hunter playing this hapless villain, I guess, in it.
[12:22] I don't know whether you meant to inject some of that dark humour or whether I was just being heartless reading it.
I'm not sure, but yeah, let us know how you put that together because I found some of the interactions and the messages, you obviously have taken that from the laptop and put that down, and it was kind of comically sad, I guess.
Yeah, I think that's a good way of describing it. It really is.
You know, some of the situations that Hunter gets himself into are, you know, if they were in a movie, you would be laughing out loud. And it is a black comedy.
He just is this sort of... He and his uncle Jim just bumble their way around the world and they're, you know, they're in palaces and sumptuous mansions of oligarchs and eating chicken feet in high-flying skyscrapers in private clubs of Chinese military people who are in the inner orbit of Xi Jinping.
[13:29] Who end up then disappearing.
You know, it seems I feel like with Hunter Biden that he's like one of those characters in a sort of cops and robbers blow him up movie where the main character just, you know, all around him there are cars blowing up and buildings on fire and he just walks through the smoke and emerges unscathed. And all around him everyone was going to jail, getting killed, getting locked up, you know, getting into all sorts of trouble, and he just seemed to emerge unscathed.
[14:07] You know, there's a lot of speculation people I've talked to in, who know about, you know, intelligence services and how they operate, who would say to me that there's no way that the son of the Vice President mixing in those circles that he was in the inner sanctum of Xi Jinping in China and Vladimir Putin in Russia, going, you know, to Lake Como to mingle with oligarchs and and Hong Kong and Shanghai, I mean, Monte Carlo.
[14:39] This is the most incredible international story of intrigue and mystery and danger.
And that there's no way that the US intelligence services would not have been keeping an eye on Hunter.
And it did feel like he had a guardian angel. Every time he was in a scrape about to come unstuck, suddenly he's okay, he's back stateside and everything's hunky-dory and he's ordering
[15:06] crack from his dealer again and meanwhile off the laptop goes, you know, the super chairman or someone else, you know, that maybe he's been warned off, you know, don't mix with that person that's going to get you into trouble. I don't really know what went on behind the scenes but we also know he had various contacts in the FBI. So that's a whole new story I think that will be unraveled potentially by another committee the Republicans have set up which is the weaponization of the federal government which is looking, among other things, looking at how the FBI covered up the story of the laptop.
Yeah, completely. This is the laptop from hell with
[15:50] A hunter looking quite rugged there with a cigarette. Many images of him, but some of the stories you put through the book are of him being, as you said, being rescued by Secret Service, I guess. Especially at times where he shouldn't have had protection. There was no reason for him to have that protection, and yet they seem to be there to help him out of different situations he find himself in?
Yeah, look, there could be a couple of reasons for that. There are some invoices on the laptop that show that a couple of these former Secret Service people, including a very high-ranking guy who had been the head of the Vice President's Secret Service detail when Joe Biden was in office, and they actually had gone into private practice and Hunter Biden and his brother Jim Biden had hired them to go and do some due diligence on some of,
[16:53] for prospective business partners and so there was an invoice for a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars that hadn't been paid. This is why it sort of came to the attention or came to my attention because there were various emails going backwards and forwards between Jim and Hunter about who should pay this money. I mean it was it was months and months overdue which was not uncommon. There are a lot of bills including with Joe Biden that seem just not to get paid or to be very, very late being paid.
And I'm told by some people in Wilmington, Delaware, where Joe Biden lives, that a lot of the local tradesmen just don't get paid.
There seems to be this sort of expectation from the Bidens that it's such an honour to do work for them that you shouldn't expect to get any money for it.
But that's one reason. And then, you know, another reason is, I think, we know that there was one scandal where Hunter Biden's lover at the time, Hallie Biden, who was actually the widow of his late brother, Beau, they were living together off and on.
They had a very volatile relationship.
And for reasons we still don't know, Hunter decided to buy a gun at a store in Delaware.
[18:11] And shortly after he bought it, Hallie seemed to get worried about what he might do with it.
And so she drove it to the local shopping centre and threw it in a garbage bin, a trash can.
And then she tells Hunter, or Hunter looks for his gun, he can't find it, and she says, oh, I threw it in the trash can. So he says, go back and get it.
She goes back, it's gone. A homeless guy's found it.
[18:34] So then the cops have to come. And it's not just the local cops, it's the state police, it's the FBI.
And what's really quite sinister is that two men who said they were from the Secret Service flashed a Secret Service badge, went to the gun shop and demanded the papers, the background check papers, the paperwork that Hunter had filled out to do with the gun, which of course if he took that away there's no proof that he ever bought the gun and so to his credit the gun shop owner said no I can't do that because he's worried that he's going to lose his license if something terrible happens with that gun. But you know when we ask the secret service why did you do that, Hunter Biden was not under secret service protection, his father was out of office, etc. The secret services, we did have nothing to do with that, that wasn't us. So maybe it was ex-secret service people presenting themselves as secret service. I'm told that the former secret service agents still have a badge, it's a different type, but a smaller badge than the real one but I guess how would you know the layperson and so maybe these are former Secret Service people. We do know one other thing which is that Joe Biden...
[19:52] But we know this from the laptop too. Joe Biden really sucked up and curried favour with the Secret Service people around him.
He, you know, in his... Before he became a sort of defund the police guy, he...now he's back to his original persona, which was as a, you know, as a working-class Joe who's all for the cops.
And so he had support from police unions and so on previously, not in the 2020 election, but he did things, Hunter tells us in various emails, like he would
[20:32] get Secret Service agents, kids into elite colleges that they wouldn't be able to get into otherwise, or do other favours that they're not really bribery because it's not really cash, But it's just favour trading, which is what Joe Biden specialises in, using his power to, get things happening for people who otherwise wouldn't be able to avail themselves of that, those kind of perks. So, and then we also know that the guy who was the head of his Secret Service detail, his, one of his parents died, I think it was his father died somewhere in the Midwest.
And Joe and Jill Biden flew on Air Force Two to that funeral.
And so, you know, that kind of gesture really engenders a lot of loyalty in people, particularly people who are in service jobs.
And so I think, you know, it was probably a combination of maybe paying people to look after you, but also just vestigial loyalty to Joe Biden.
[21:40] There's another thing that keeps coming up and it's the amount of money.
And I had no idea until I was going to it.
Eva just at the beginning, the first couple of pages you talk about.
[21:54] Talk about one overcast day, Hunter's catching up on porn, he spent $1,000 on his Wells Fargo debit card.
Annoyingly, Wells Fargo keeps sending alerts. He's tripping his card limit of $65,000.
You then talk about him getting invoices of 82,500 retainers from international business development.
Then he says, he talks about his balance shows 1 million, but there's a debit of 2 million.
I mean, they're crazy sums of money to any average person reading this.
I mean, tell us about that. I guess the greed involved.
Yeah, and the chaotic lifestyle that Hunter had, I mean, there were millions of dollars coming in.
[22:41] But, you know, I think his alimony was 30 or 40 thousand dollars a month. He had this heavy crack addict habit. He had various households that, I mean, there was his, Hallie Biden's family that he presumably, I mean I know that they shared a credit card and they were running up $250,000 a year on one Amex and they put everything, you know, all their kind of working, living expenses seemed to go on the Amex. He had very lavish tastes in clothes, like his father, he would go to, you know men's boutiques in midtown Manhattan or on Madison Avenue and think nothing of spending, you know, five grand, ten grand here on a coat, on a jacket or, you know, a tie.
[23:33] And so he just spent like he was the big spender, but he always seemed to have money problems.
And I think part of that was because the money that was coming in wasn't all for him.
And I'll give you a perfect example.
And this is just from the very new bank records that were
[23:58] put out the other day by James Comer, the head of the Oversight Committee, the Republicans who were looking into the money trail of the Biden's. So he's found, we already knew that there were these two, three million dollar payments from the Chinese energy company that paid the Biden's millions of dollars, but these two, three million dollar wires went to Hunter's business partner in in Arkansas, a guy called Rob Walker.
And so we always knew that that money was destined for Hunter, but we never could see how it made its way there.
And so what James Comer has found, at least with one of these $3 million wires, he's only been able to find one, that $1 million went to the Biden family, 1,065,000.
And it was split up between four Biden's. So there was Hunter Biden, his uncle Jim Biden, who's Joe's younger brother, Hallie Biden, who I told you that sister-in-law turned lover, and then another fourth unnamed Biden.
It's just on the wire, it just says Biden.
And so, and these payments were made over three months in small dribs and drabs.
[25:13] Presumably to keep them away from authorities.
Didn't work because the reason we know about them is that the banks, it tripped some suspicion in the banks automatically and so they had to file suspicious activity reports with the Treasury.
So we know from that $1 million, Hunter got about a third of it, I think
[25:37] From that money, you know, so there's three million and he's getting about 400,000.
And so he's told his business partners that $800,000 a year is not enough for him to live.
So really he was burning through cash and what would have seemed, you know, to any normal person, a huge amount of money to him was barely enough.
And then remember, he, it was supposed to pay tax on this money.
And obviously he was not good at paying his taxes because this is one of the issues that the IRS and the US Attorney in Delaware is looking at him for is tax evasion, alleged tax evasion, alleged money laundering and foreign agent violations to do with his foreign businesses.
And we know that he's paid back, I'm told $2.8 million to the IRS.
So that means, you know, he earned five and a half million to owe that.
And, you know, he earned a lot more than that, we know.
[26:43] But, and also, I mean, maybe he's having to pay tax for money that he never received that went to other members of the family, you know?
So he does feel sorry for himself a lot in the laptop and he talks about giving half his money to his father.
Bitterly he complains about that. And he bitterly complains about having carried or supported the rest of the family all the time. And this is a guy that wanted to be an artist or an author.
[27:13] And instead he was put to work straight out of Yale, that his father got him into Yale Law School, pulling some strings. So he gets straight out of Yale and goes into this inflated salary job for for one of his father's,
you know, donors in Delaware, but boring job. And that's been his life, doing a series of boring jobs and inflated salaries, getting, you know, various sinecures and, you know, like the Ukraine Burisma board appointment for a million dollars a year, a huge amounts of money. But he's got to share that with the rest of the family. So you see him spiral down into addiction and chaos.
And he's bitter and angry all the way, and particularly when it comes to that period when he abandoned his laptop in Delaware at that laptop repair shop. He's really in a rage at that time and feels that his family doesn't respect him and doesn't appreciate all he's done for them.
Obviously Joe Biden is the figure that's behind a lot of it and one of the quotes is Don't worry about investors, Jim Biden would say, according to an unnamed executive quoted by Politico.
We've got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden. None of what happened to Hunter, I guess, was because of Hunter's brilliance. It was all to do with his father.
[28:42] Oh, absolutely. And, you know, this is influence peddling. I mean, this is a a Washington DC wide disease and it's bipartisan.
Both sides do it. How many, you know, look at Nancy Pelosi. I mean, look at so many of these Republican and Democratic politicians who go to Washington and become very rich by the time they leave.
It's really unseemly and disgusting. Joe Biden lives an incredibly lavish lifestyle And it would be impossible to sustain that on a senator's salary for 40 years plus.
So I think it's been out there in plain sight and it's a terrible thing.
Washington is very corrupt and I'm not sure that there's appetite on either side to clean it up.
[29:41] What's special about Joe Biden is, for one thing, he's really the master of influence peddling through his family.
And secondly, as vice president and now as president, he is crucial to our national security because as vice president, Barack Obama deputized him to be his man in charge of China and Ukraine and various other parts of the world.
And Joe Biden was given some very important tasks when it came to China.
He was supposed to stop China militarising the South China Sea and threatening America's allies there.
And he was supposed to stop China from stealing America's intellectual property.
I mean, this was 2013.
This was a time when China was really ramping up its aggressive tactics.
And it could have been nipped in the bud there and then.
[30:45] But Joe Biden did nothing. He got nothing out of it. All that happened was his family was bought off.
And when Hunter Biden flew into Beijing on Air Force Two with the vice president, it was crystal clear to the Chinese what that meant. This was a princeling. Hunter Biden was a princeling like the princelings in China who are related to the top CCP officials. And this was American power come to do private business and private business happened. Joe Biden shook the hand of Hunter's now new business partner, and Hunter left and within a few days, he had 10% stake in a Chinese business which had two and a half billion dollars funds under management at one point. I mean it doesn't mean he had 10% of 2.5 billion but he had 10% of whatever the profits were. We still don't know how much that's worth. It's been estimated, I think Peter Schweitzer estimated it at 20 million
[31:48] dollars, could be less, could be more. Hunter Biden's lawyers keep vaguely saying he's divested himself of that fund, but there's no actual evidence of that. It's still listed on the Chinese stock exchange websites as being owned, 10% owned, by Hunter Biden's company, and Hunter Biden still owns that company, Skinny Atlas, even though he hasn't, I mean, it's gone dormant, I think, because he probably hasn't paid some bills. So, I think that's the kind of thing you know, it's pretty worrying that the son of the President, if he still owns that 10%, is in business with the Chinese Communist Party. And all we get from the White House and from Joe Biden is lies and stonewalling. So that's why this is an important story. It's not about Hunter Biden. I wish him the best. It's about the President and whether he's compromised. And and that's why the Republicans are going down this path of trying to find where the money went.
[32:52] One of the chapters, The Delaware Way, I guess, looks at what Joe Biden has done, how he has built up that influence over, what, 35 years as a senator, and has taken that influence, that peddling, global, I guess, with the Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan.
I mean, what do you mean by The Delaware Way?
Well that was a phrase that was coined by a prosecutor actually many moons ago, I can't remember what it was, the 80s or the 90s I think, and they were investigating some irregularities with one of Joe Biden's re-election campaigns and there was a family called Tagani, there were a wealthy beer brewing family from the area, a young guy called Chris Tagani about the age of Joe's sons and he was sort of turned witness for the prosecutors, wore a wire to try and
[33:54] see if the Biden's were doing illegal things to do with, you know, funding the Joe's campaign.
Well, turned out that he didn't manage to find anything and he went to jail. But during the prosecution, one of the prosecutors described this sort of cosy quid pro quo relationship that goes on in Delaware politics as the Delaware way. It's you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.
And there's something really insidious about Delaware. It's a very small state, doesn't have much in the way of an economy apart from the fact that it is the headquarters for practically every corporate in the country, because it's kind of described as the Virgin Islands of America because it has a very opaque, that sort of corporate structure and you can't see who owns companies and so on. So it makes it very easy for the Biden's to sort of hide
[34:53] money but more importantly what it did for Joe Biden when he arrived as a 30 year old senator was he was being oppressed by a lot of very powerful, very wealthy people to do favours for them in the Senate and as he became more and more powerful in the Senate he was chairman of two very powerful committees, the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee for many years, those favours became bigger and bigger and his power grew and he was really king of the castle in Delaware and despite really,
the state not amounting to very much, he was in this unique position.
And so that was why when his donors, you know, were offering to buy houses from him or sell houses to him, or give his family jobs and inflated salaries, that was all of great benefit to him.
And in return, you can see policies that he was pushing that seemed to benefit his donors.
But whether or not you can really draw the line and accuse him of a crime is a whole other matter.
But certainly that's the Delaware way.
[36:08] What about you personally as you delved into this? You come face to face with Hunter Biden, a tragic story, and then Joe Biden, absolute power, corruption. What was your takeaway from going into this? Because I guess when you begin to research something, you don't know where it's going to lead. So what were your kind of takeaway thoughts as you did the research and you put the book together?
Well it was just so much bigger than I had ever imagined. I mean I remember there was one night I just pushed myself away from the desk and had to and clear my head because I could not believe what I discovered. And it's not just from the laptop, you have to understand that this is also material from Tony Bobulinski, who's Hunter Biden's former business partner. It's, you know, had the contents of his three devices that he'd given to the FBI.
It's also a lot of financial records that came from
[37:11] Chuck Graslie and Ron Johnson, the two Republican senators who were very prescient back in mid-2020, they were investigating Hunter Biden's role in Burisma. Their report was, I think, Hunter Biden, Burisma and corruption. And that was the Ukrainian company that was paying him $83,000 a month for, basically nothing. And so they had a lot of treasury records. And also speaking to, to various sources off the record.
You piece together this jigsaw puzzle and when I realized just how enormous the China deals were, there's one deal where Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin
[37:59] get together and this company, CEFC, that was paying Hunter and Jim Biden millions of dollars, their partner in China was brokering this deal for China to buy a $9 billion chunk of the Russia state-owned oil company, energy company, Rosneft.
And this would have shifted the geopolitical tectonic plates in a way that was very detrimental to the United States.
I mean, it's along the lines of what's happening now with Russia and China getting into bed over Ukraine, but this is on energy.
And really a very damaging thing that Joe Biden's son and brother were part of.
They were helping broker it.
[38:50] And they would have profited from it. So it's incredible that the whole thing fell apart when the Trump administration now had come into office.
And for whatever reason, the FBI arrested one of Hunter Biden's Chinese business partners from this company, CEFC at JFK.
And this is a case where we're now told by, this is a whole another weird part of the story that's just happened in the last couple of weeks, but there's a, an Israeli scientist, but also former high ranking officer in the Israeli defence forces, who has just been arrested in Cyprus a few weeks ago, on suspicion of gun running charges and is about to be extradited back to the United States and he's still in jail.
But I've talked to his lawyer. His lawyer says that Hunter Biden had a mole, an FBI mole called One Eye, who tipped off his Chinese partners from CFC that the FBI was investigating them.
And sure enough, I mean, there's some evidence on the laptop that corroborates part of his story.
And part of that is that
[40:08] just shortly before Patrick Ho was arrested at JFK by the FBI in 2017, Hunter was invited to the palatial penthouse in Manhattan of the boss of CEFC, a guy called Chairman Yee, and offered $1 million to be his legal counsel in case he got into any trouble.
And then Chairman Yee skedaddled it back to Shanghai and according to this Israeli, told Patrick Ho that the coast was clear for him to come back to New York.
And as soon as Patrick Ho arrives in New York, he gets arrested on bribery charges.
And what the Israeli says is that Patrick Ho was the fall guy.
He was sort of the sacrificial lamb to the FBI.
[41:00] And so, there again, we come back full circle to what we were first talking about, Hunter Biden having protection from the FBI, the Secret Service. He certainly had connections at the FBI. We do know that because after Patrick Ho was arrested, there's an email showing that he'd contacted his FBI sources about how to help Patrick Ho.
To finish, the book has been out a year. What has been the response?
And also the second part, how does that fit into a Republican-controlled Congress? Because you've given them a manuscript, you've said here is the evidence in a 200-page book, you can now run with this. So what was the response coming out a year ago and how can it be used by, I guess, the Republicans now in charge of the House.
[41:57] Well, it's been an amazing bestseller. I mean, it just keeps on selling even today.
It's still in hardcover and, you know, it was on the list apart from, of course, the New York Times.
And so I think, you know, the reviews on Amazon from regular people have been good.
I mean, I think it's like 4.6 out of 5 and 10,000 reviews.
And the feedback I get is that people appreciate it because it's such a complicated story and this is sort of putting it into narrative form.
James Comer has told me, who's the head of the oversight committee, that he loved it, he read it.
I think it's just useful in terms of just itemizing what's important on the laptop.
There's a lot of extraneous material And I think a mistake that a lot of people have made is to get caught up on the sort of sex and drugs and rock and roll part of it. There's no crimes there. It's sad. It's dysfunctional.
But it's irrelevant. It's just gossip. What's important is the financial and international
[43:13] schemes that the Biden family was involved in. Excuse me.
No, absolutely. Well, to the viewers and listeners, you can get it. It is available hardback, it is available paperback, it is available audiobook, and also on Kindle. I personally like getting a paper copy so I can make notes.
It's not paperback yet, unfortunately. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry.
Yeah, but it's still hardcover, ebook, and Kindle.
I warn the viewers that actually often I read books for interviewing and sometimes you find them too intriguing and this was one of those that actually I ended up marking far too much in the book that there's so much information. But Miranda, thank you for coming on and sharing about the experience of putting that together and sharing the story. Thank you so much.
Thanks Peter, great to talk to you.
Thank you so much.
