Speaker 1: All of a sudden, there's a private flight and there's
Speaker 1: three people in a hotel room across from the Pentagon.
Speaker 1: One of Hunter Biden's attorneys trying to convince me that
Speaker 1: they think there's things in the data that could really
Speaker 1: help them out, and explaining what happened and who spread
Speaker 1: that data, who stole it in his invasion or privacy,
Speaker 1: and I finally got to the point they said, listen,
Speaker 1: we think there's really three people involved with this. They
Speaker 1: said it's Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and then they mentioned
Speaker 1: Roger Stone. Maybe a couple days later, I'm on a
Speaker 1: zoom with Hunter and his wife and they're like, will
Speaker 1: you please help us.
Speaker 2: I'm John Ceipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I served in
Speaker 2: the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover
Speaker 2: all around the world.
Speaker 3: And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I
Speaker 3: served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Speaker 2: Although we don't usually look at it this way, we
Speaker 2: created conspiracies.
Speaker 3: In our operations. We got people to believe things that
Speaker 3: weren't true.
Speaker 2: Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
Speaker 2: news Almost every day.
Speaker 3: We'll break them down for you to determine whether they
Speaker 3: could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Mission implausible. So welcome to Mission implausible, Jerry.
Speaker 2: Today we're going to talk about Hunter Biden's laptop, which
Speaker 2: means a lot of different things to different people, and
Speaker 2: clearly is the number one story on Fox News and
Speaker 2: in some parts of our political debate.
Speaker 3: All right, John, let's open up the Costco size can
Speaker 3: and see whether it's empty or full of worms, Jerry.
Speaker 2: As you know, living overseas, we always went to Costco
Speaker 2: to get big items before we headed overseas. I bought
Speaker 2: so much toilet paper from Costco before I went to
Speaker 2: Russia that it lasted me through two years of Russia
Speaker 2: and then two and a half years in Serbia before
Speaker 2: I had my new toilet paper.
Speaker 3: The one good thing about working all the time you're
Speaker 3: working either in the embassy or you're at hotels, going
Speaker 3: to diplomatic tools, you don't you can steal it, but
Speaker 3: you don't use a lot of your own toilet paper
Speaker 3: because you're pooped there. Yeah, you work the restaurant, you
Speaker 3: shower at all.
Speaker 2: In Moscow, Yeah, even a shower at home. They had
Speaker 2: you on video. They probably had it at the embassy too,
Speaker 2: and they certainly had at hotel, so there's no way
Speaker 2: around it.
Speaker 3: All right, John, let's talk Biden laptop.
Speaker 2: Well, we're going to get into sort of the background
Speaker 2: of this issue with several episodes here, but what's happened
Speaker 2: lately is a pretty big story. So the Justice Department
Speaker 2: recently acknowledged that an FBI informant named Alexander Smirnoff was
Speaker 2: quote spreading disinformation to sign the hurt President Joe Biden
Speaker 2: after speaking with Russian intelligence officers. But what's new is
Speaker 2: this indictment alleges that Smirnoff lied in twenty twenty to
Speaker 2: create a false narrative about the Bidens after meeting with
Speaker 2: Russian intelligence sufficient. So we're going to focus on the
Speaker 2: laptop rather than the whole hunter Biden story. And as
Speaker 2: we'll discuss in the podcast, Jerry and I play an
Speaker 2: actual small role in this story, but we're going to
Speaker 2: use two episodes to talk about it. And so what
Speaker 2: we're going to do is have our producer, Adam Davidson
Speaker 2: interview us for a change.
Speaker 3: The Biden's story is like a black hole. It sucks
Speaker 3: everything into it. Even John and I.
Speaker 4: So I'm assuming most people have heard the phrase Hunter
Speaker 4: Biden's laptop because.
Speaker 3: I've seen it on bumper stickers.
Speaker 2: Is a twenty twenty four Republican slogan.
Speaker 4: Yes, and a great band. By the way, they're fabulous.
Speaker 4: I liked their early acoustic work best. But let's just
Speaker 4: start with the very basics. Is there an actual laptop
Speaker 4: that is Hunter Biden's laptop? It's now like her emails,
Speaker 4: it's just this phrase you hear, but what is it
Speaker 4: tied to?
Speaker 3: So initially, as I understand it, several weeks before the
Speaker 3: twenty twenty elections, Rudy Giuliani revealed that he had a
Speaker 3: laptop that he claimed was Hunter butdens and he's claiming
Speaker 3: that information from the laptop was stolen. So I think
Speaker 3: now we can certainly affirm for certainly that there is
Speaker 3: a laptop and it was the one that Rudy Juliani had.
Speaker 3: Now what was in it and how we look at
Speaker 3: that will be open to discussion today. So, yes, there
Speaker 3: is a laptop.
Speaker 4: So this might be something I shouldn't admit in public,
Speaker 4: but I myself have a laptop, and in fact, many
Speaker 4: of the people I care about most in the world
Speaker 4: have laptops. Owning a laptop is not necessarily It is
Speaker 4: often associated with nefarious activity, but it's not always. So
Speaker 4: I'm assuming when we hear Hunter Biden's laptop, it's referring
Speaker 4: to what was on that laptop. And I know there's
Speaker 4: some like nude photos, But why does anyone who isn't
Speaker 4: Hunter Biden or whoever he was emailing care what was
Speaker 4: on his laptop?
Speaker 2: Well, Adam, you're going right to the heart of the matter.
Speaker 2: That is largely the question that the people who want
Speaker 2: the world to believe that there's something horrible going on
Speaker 2: here don't want to deal with. Right, So the question
Speaker 2: is who cares? Like Hunter Biden is the son of
Speaker 2: Joe Biden. He's a son who's had a series of
Speaker 2: personal problems, drug issues and other things. But right prior
Speaker 2: to the election, this notion that he had dropped off
Speaker 2: a computer at a Delaware computer shop, which then made
Speaker 2: its way into the hands of Rudy Giuliani and eventually
Speaker 2: the New York Post and the FBI. It is automatically
Speaker 2: supposed to suggest that there's something nefarious and that it
Speaker 2: somehow has to do with Joe Biden. Right, so essentially
Speaker 2: it has this suggest that Hunter Biden is somehow up
Speaker 2: to something and that Joe Biden has been involved or
Speaker 2: helped him, or there's something criminal going on. And the
Speaker 2: problem is this laptop, as I understand, it's been in
Speaker 2: the hands of the FBI for several years now, and
Speaker 2: there's been nothing public that has suggested that there's anything
Speaker 2: criminal in there. But there has been suggestions of salacious
Speaker 2: you know, dick picks and nude picks and all kinds
Speaker 2: of things, which, as ugly as that may be, it's
Speaker 2: not really clear what that has to do with his father.
Speaker 4: So this is something I've wondered about with conspiracies. But
Speaker 4: let's say I want to disparage say John Ceipher, and
Speaker 4: I'm part of a team of smart people who know
Speaker 4: how to spread bad information. It seems to me that
Speaker 4: a really clear strategy that some people follow is have
Speaker 4: a phrase, have a lot of like nefarious, sish seeming
Speaker 4: stuff around it, but you actually don't want specifics, Like
Speaker 4: if I say John Steifer robbed a bank on March
Speaker 4: thirteenth in Bethesda, that isn't the way. It's more, Hey,
Speaker 4: everyone knows what John Szeipher was doing in Bethesda, the
Speaker 4: cipher Bethesda story. Is that a thing that people who do,
Speaker 4: for example, you guys conspiracies.
Speaker 3: No, I guess the show's over. You've done it. But no, No,
Speaker 3: casting vague aspersions is always better because those are unfalsifiable.
Speaker 3: You can't ever prove a negative. Right, So before we
Speaker 3: go to the heart, let's go on a little journey
Speaker 3: as to like how we got here. So hunter by
Speaker 3: and supposedly, and I accept that this is a fake,
Speaker 3: he shows up at this place in Delaware to get
Speaker 3: his two laptops fixed, and he never picks him up again.
Speaker 3: So odd fact number one. The guy he shows up to,
Speaker 3: he hands his laptop over to I'm not making this
Speaker 3: up to a guy who's legally blind. So this guy
Speaker 3: apparently he can't identify who gave him the computer. He
Speaker 3: doesn't know because he can't see his face. So okay,
Speaker 3: the guy who's legally blind has nothing better to do
Speaker 3: than open this computer, get it working, and then do
Speaker 3: you know, sit around and read one hundred and twenty
Speaker 3: thousand emails of somebody else's stuff, which I'm sure we
Speaker 3: all have time to do. Right. He is so shocked
Speaker 3: by this that he hands it over as most computer
Speaker 3: repairmen do. He hands it over to Rudy Giuliani. Hey, Rudy,
Speaker 3: here you go. Well now we're talking chain of custody issues,
Speaker 3: right who the computer up? Can you prove it likely?
Speaker 3: Hunter Biden? Yes, yes, yes. My understanding is that Giuliani
Speaker 3: had this thing for months and said on it. My
Speaker 3: understanding is before it ended up with the New York
Speaker 3: Post it being the hard drive. Forensic work has shown
Speaker 3: that it is clear that the computer was I'll use
Speaker 3: the word tampered with, but people were in the computer
Speaker 3: refiling things, messing with the computer. How's that for technical talk?
Speaker 3: And so the question is is what is on the computer?
Speaker 3: Is it the original? And has it been manipulated in
Speaker 3: any way, shape or form? That I think is still
Speaker 3: an open question. So let me put it there. So
Speaker 3: blind guy gets it, blind guy reads it, blind guy
Speaker 3: hands it to Rudy Giuliani. Rudy Giuliani sits on it
Speaker 3: for X amount of time. Rudy Giuliani, mind you, who
Speaker 3: is also the same guy who was in Ukraine looking
Speaker 3: for on Hunter Biden.
Speaker 4: Hunter Biden, who did work in Ukraine, presumably went there
Speaker 4: with a laptop at some point.
Speaker 2: And I understand also that the FBI warned Rudy Giuliani,
Speaker 2: who was traveling back and forth to Ukraine, that he
Speaker 2: was engaged with known Russian intelligence officers. They warned him
Speaker 2: about this at the time. So Rudy Juliani, who's at
Speaker 2: some point comes across this laptop and he's looking for
Speaker 2: dirt on Hunter Biden, presumably to get dirt on Joe Biden,
Speaker 2: is engaged with Russian intelligence officers at the same time.
Speaker 3: I just want to quick throw in that the FBI,
Speaker 3: we know, had gone to Twitter and had talked and
Speaker 3: said that to be careful that Rudy Giuliani specifically was
Speaker 3: someone that Russian intelligence was trying to manipulate. So we
Speaker 3: also know that from public accounts.
Speaker 4: So first off, we don't know if there's any evidence
Speaker 4: of actual wrongdoing right by Hunter Biden. But if there is,
Speaker 4: is it actual evidence or was that tamp.
Speaker 3: With that's for a jury to decide, right.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's not even clear that there's anybody's charged
Speaker 2: with anything here.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: I've been a reporter for much of my life. My
Speaker 4: spidy sense is telling me there's nothing here because highly
Speaker 4: motivated people Rudy Giuliani and others who really, really really
Speaker 4: wanted to find very clear, convincing evidence against Hunter Biden
Speaker 4: and Joe Biden had access to this thing for months.
Speaker 4: They've sort of done their best and they haven't come
Speaker 4: up with anything. It is theoretically possible that Rudy Giuliani
Speaker 4: is incompetent and is surrounded by incompetence, But to me,
Speaker 4: that suggests there just isn't anything there.
Speaker 3: I would disagree with you. So there is something that's illegal,
Speaker 3: and then there's unethical. So if accounts are true, Hunter
Speaker 3: Biden was receiving fifty thousand dollars a month from a
Speaker 3: Ukrainian energy firm. Him and his uncle may or may
Speaker 3: not have had business interests in China. So the question
Speaker 3: is do only members of people involved in politics what
Speaker 3: is okay for them? So me personally, I think that
Speaker 3: family members should not be involved in this. So Clarence
Speaker 3: Thomas's wife, Jimmy Thoms shouldn't be involved in politics if
Speaker 3: her husband is ruling on these things. And I would
Speaker 3: put out that Avonka Trump in twenty eighteen, while she
Speaker 3: was in the White House was being granted copyrights. She
Speaker 3: received eighteen of them, like it was a large percentage
Speaker 3: of the copyrights China granted to the US. She received
Speaker 3: eighteen copyrights from China. So I would say that there
Speaker 3: is an unethical issue here is you know, was Hunter Biden?
Speaker 3: Did he really have value of fifty thousand dollars a
Speaker 3: month for Barisma? But is that illegal or not? And
Speaker 3: I think the answer is it's not illegal. It's just
Speaker 3: I personally find unethical.
Speaker 4: Before I ever heard about any laptop, I looked into
Speaker 4: the Bresmath story and I was thinking of writing about
Speaker 4: it for The New Yorker. I didn't do exhaustive reporting
Speaker 4: on everything, but my basic inclusion was lots and lots
Speaker 4: of Eastern Europeans, Central Asian kind of former Soviet Union
Speaker 4: oligarchs pay a lot of money to people with impressive resumes.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of Democrats, a lot of Republicans on
Speaker 4: all these boards. General Wesley Clark.
Speaker 3: Is very involved.
Speaker 4: And it's not illegal, and it's pretty colm, but.
Speaker 2: It seems that the reason it was brought up right
Speaker 2: before an election. Yeah, we'll eventually get to why Jerry
Speaker 2: and I signed this letter that we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about is for it to matter, it has to affect
Speaker 2: Joe Biden's effort to run for president. Right, So Hunter
Speaker 2: Biden is a citizen and maybe a scuzzy citizen, and
Speaker 2: maybe he's done illegal things and maybe he gets arrested
Speaker 2: and does abay care?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: Is that an October surprise? Is that something that's going
Speaker 2: to affect the election of Joe Biden versus Donald Trump?
Speaker 2: Because what this really comes down to is that oftentimes
Speaker 2: the timing of when this came out, This stuff was
Speaker 2: going on for quite a long time, and then a
Speaker 2: week few weeks before the election, all of a sudden
Speaker 2: it's storn into the public space that there's this horrible
Speaker 2: scanned and somehow it has something to do with Joe Biden.
Speaker 3: Right, And it's not even a scandal, it's casting aspersions.
Speaker 3: And I think we need to go back to the
Speaker 3: twenty sixteen election, and I think we can look at
Speaker 3: two things. One now is of today. It was the
Speaker 3: McDougall story and the Stormy Daniel's story were both basically
Speaker 3: money was paid to prevent them from coming out to
Speaker 3: influence the election, which clearly did. And also in twenty
Speaker 3: sixteen with the grave and by the pussy tape, right
Speaker 3: within a day, the stolen emails stolen by the Russians.
Speaker 3: DNC heck, the DNC heck those through WikiLeaks. Those drop
Speaker 3: nothing illegal in there, by the way, but probably some
Speaker 3: unhappy stuff. And so it was clearly manipulation that the Russians.
Speaker 3: I think the Mother Report is very clear about this,
Speaker 3: as are almost not almost all intelligence agencies are the
Speaker 3: only person who disputes this is Vladimir Putin and people
Speaker 3: who leave him. Now we go into the twenty twenty
Speaker 3: election again, three weeks the same playbook. Something pops out
Speaker 3: exactly the same way, that is generalized and cast suspersions.
Speaker 3: You got to look at this with some suspicion.
Speaker 4: And really similar dynamics to the Hillary email and the
Speaker 4: DNC emails, where the exact same thing. It was reported
Speaker 4: as this vague thing Hillary's emails without any specificity. It
Speaker 4: was just a phrase like a marketing campaign, and like
Speaker 4: you said, the timing and just it allowed for a
Speaker 4: constant drumbeat of something.
Speaker 3: All right, thanks, Adam, Let's talk to someone new. We
Speaker 3: have Asher Ingappa, who is very impressively a teacher at
Speaker 3: the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, former dean of
Speaker 3: the Law School at Yale, a former FBI special agent.
Speaker 3: And one of the reasons we're talking with her today
Speaker 3: is she did a really long and authoritative peace on
Speaker 3: Hunter Biden and you can get that in her subsetect.
Speaker 3: And really looking forward to chatting with her.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me just to start us off, like,
Speaker 2: why the obsession? That's the question?
Speaker 5: Yeah, Well, and Jerry, I think you've hit the nail
Speaker 5: on the head. Hunter Biden's laptop at this point can
Speaker 5: mean anything you want it to mean. I think most
Speaker 5: people who use the phrase actually don't know what they're alleging.
Speaker 5: They just know that it's something really really bad and
Speaker 5: it involves the government and the CIA, and it's like
Speaker 5: Hillary's emails. You know, there's shorthand, and I think, quite frankly,
Speaker 5: Republicans are really good at this. They're really good at
Speaker 5: creating shortcuts that are ambiguous and undefinable and therefore can
Speaker 5: just be used to claim or allege things that they
Speaker 5: never have to actually articulate. So I did some research.
Speaker 5: There's a great piece in New York Magazine by Olivia
Speaker 5: Newzy where she really breaks down the history and really
Speaker 5: this is a laptop that was left at a computer
Speaker 5: repair shop in Delaware. The person who owns the laptop,
Speaker 5: never picked it up, and so the computer repair shop
Speaker 5: owner decided to copy files, and by the way, not
Speaker 5: copy the entire hard drive or mirror the hard drive,
Speaker 5: but just to selectively copy files, which he then passed
Speaker 5: on to, among other people, various members of Congress, sort
Speaker 5: of usual suspects. Steve Bannon eventually gets a hold of this.
Speaker 5: I mean, it goes down some chain of command. There
Speaker 5: is an allegation that the FBI came by and seized
Speaker 5: the actual physical laptop, though I've never seen that confirmed officially,
Speaker 5: though that may be true. And basically what happens is
Speaker 5: that from these files that this blind computer repairman copies,
Speaker 5: he claims to have found several smoking gun emails that
Speaker 5: shows that Hunter Biden was engaged. I mean, I'm not
Speaker 5: even really sure what the allegation is. He was using
Speaker 5: his connections at Barisma to engage in political influence and
Speaker 5: doing deals with China and all of this stuff. And
Speaker 5: this was coming up right before the twenty twenty election. Now,
Speaker 5: when this started surfacing, it was a New York Post
Speaker 5: story that broke this. People were like, this sounds really sketchy,
Speaker 5: and there were a lot of things that were happening.
Speaker 5: At the same time, Rudy Giuliani was under a counterintelligence
Speaker 5: investigation because of contacts that he had when Ukraine we
Speaker 5: were approaching an election, etc. And the social media companies
Speaker 5: had because of what happened in twenty sixteen, the hack
Speaker 5: and dump by Russia, had established greater communication with the
Speaker 5: FBI because they understood that they could be used as
Speaker 5: vectors foreign influence operations. So when this started coming up,
Speaker 5: the social media companies, based on kind of all these
Speaker 5: tabletop exercises that they had done with the FBI, et cetera,
Speaker 5: were like, let's just put the brakes on this, let's
Speaker 5: add some friction to the story. And so they temporarily
Speaker 5: I don't even know if they block the story. They
Speaker 5: might have for a few hours or something, but they
Speaker 5: definitely prevented its amplification.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for twenty four hours. Twitter basically didn't know. You
Speaker 3: could put it on there, but you couldn't like forward it, right.
Speaker 3: So before we go, just a quick question though, So
Speaker 3: apparently the agreement is if you don't pick up the computer,
Speaker 3: the computer belongs to the company, belongs to this guy
Speaker 3: Mac whatever his name was. But does the information belong
Speaker 3: to him through to the poison tree. Right, So if
Speaker 3: he takes the information out, your information, if you hand
Speaker 3: it to a computer salesman and they fix it, you know,
Speaker 3: pick it up, the computer may belong to them a
Speaker 3: fantasy agreement if you don't pay. But does the information
Speaker 3: does he have legally have the right to Is that hacking?
Speaker 3: Because that was part of the Twitter thing is like
Speaker 3: this is hicked information, we don't put it on there.
Speaker 3: So that was the first.
Speaker 5: Question, right, I think that's exactly the right question to ask.
Speaker 5: And in fact, Hunter Biden has filed lawsuit. So I'm
Speaker 5: not sure if it's exactly against the computer repairman, but
Speaker 5: there's a number of defendants, but it's for invasion of privacy, right,
Speaker 5: So it's really about this. I mean, just because somebody
Speaker 5: puts on the bottom of their receipt that you leave
Speaker 5: something there and it belongs to you, doesn't mean you
Speaker 5: lose all of your privacy interests in the content is.
Speaker 3: The hardware, it's not the information.
Speaker 5: I think that would be the argument, and I think
Speaker 5: Hunter Biden might even be arguing, look, it doesn't belong
Speaker 5: to you like you were. In legal terms, they call
Speaker 5: them a bai lee like a Baylor Bailee relationship. I
Speaker 5: think it might depend on the intricacies of state law.
Speaker 5: But whether you can just like convert that into your
Speaker 5: own personal property, like after a certain time, right you've
Speaker 5: been entrusted with that, you can maybe charge fees or
Speaker 5: something like that. But so there could be all these
Speaker 5: legal things. But I think what you're getting at is
Speaker 5: that the intrusion into the contents of that, even if
Speaker 5: it were somehow, you know, became his property, I think
Speaker 5: is a very valid legal question. And I suspect that
Speaker 5: the reason that there was a delay in filing a
Speaker 5: lawsuit about that, because I think invasion of privacy is
Speaker 5: kind of the big scandal here, Like somebody just went
Speaker 5: through a person's hard drive and released it all of
Speaker 5: their personal information.
Speaker 3: Let's take a breather back in a moment, glad to
Speaker 3: have everybody back. Let's go back down the rabbit hole.
Speaker 3: The real issue for most people is like, Okay, what
Speaker 3: did Hunter Biden a Hunter Biden do wrote? But what
Speaker 3: is the illegal thing it's alleged, and what is the
Speaker 3: allegation somehow because I don't remember voting for Hunter Biden,
Speaker 3: But what is the allegation against his father who was
Speaker 3: running for president.
Speaker 5: I went down that rabbit hole and I used a
Speaker 5: kind of a three step formula that people who are
Speaker 5: looking to test the validity of conspiracy theories used to
Speaker 5: determine whether it has any basis in fact or not.
Speaker 5: I mean, look, there are theories about conspiracies that are
Speaker 5: literally actual conspiracies, so we need a way to test them.
Speaker 5: And the three step process is asking three questions. Well, first,
Speaker 5: what is the claim? Okay, so you need to know
Speaker 5: what the allegation is, That's what you're asking. Then what
Speaker 5: is the evidence for your claim? What is the source
Speaker 5: of your evidence for that claim, and what is the
Speaker 5: reasoning that links your evidence back to that claim? So
Speaker 5: for me, the big question, as you asked, is what
Speaker 5: exactly is the claim? Before I can even go down
Speaker 5: this road. So there's two scandals, and each scandal has
Speaker 5: its own claims. Okay. The first scandal is about the
Speaker 5: contents of the so called laptop. The allegation is that
Speaker 5: Joe Biden's efforts while he was vice president to pressure
Speaker 5: the Ukraine government to fire the prosecutor who is investigating
Speaker 5: Barisma was influenced by Biden, who was on Beisma's board
Speaker 5: from twenty fourteen to twenty nineteen. In other words, they
Speaker 5: believe that the firing of that prosecutor was because he
Speaker 5: was being influenced by his son. The other claim is
Speaker 5: that Joe Biden financially profited from Hunter Biden's deals in China.
Speaker 5: Those are the two big claims. The problem is that
Speaker 5: the evidence for these claims is very thin. They rest
Speaker 5: on these so called smoking gun emails, which are very cryptic.
Speaker 5: I can go into the details if you want, but
Speaker 5: as I refers to.
Speaker 4: The big bad guy, you know.
Speaker 5: Like these kinds of things. Scandal number two is about
Speaker 5: Twitter's decision to add friction to the amplification of the story,
Speaker 5: so that allegation is basically that Twitter and the FBI
Speaker 5: were conspiring at the direction of Democrats or whoever and
Speaker 5: Joe Biden to basically not allow this story to get
Speaker 5: into the public domain, and that this constitutes election interference.
Speaker 3: This is Donald Trump's FBI to be correct, right, yes.
Speaker 4: Correct, correct?
Speaker 5: Now, Remember that this is really key. They have to
Speaker 5: create this nexus between the government like the FBI and
Speaker 5: Twitter in order for there to be something, for example,
Speaker 5: for Jim Jordan's committee to investigate. Right like, in other words,
Speaker 5: if Twitter was doing this just on their own I mean,
Speaker 5: too bad, so.
Speaker 3: Sad private company. Yeah, so that's.
Speaker 5: Basically the allegations.
Speaker 2: It's not much. Frankly, is it possible we're just taking
Speaker 2: it way too seriously because essentially, to me, it looks
Speaker 2: like it was a stunt, the smear Joe Biden right
Speaker 2: before an election, and the Republicans just mad that didn't work.
Speaker 2: So therefore they're spinning and throwing stuff in the air,
Speaker 2: hoping that there'll be enough stuff that would just confuse people,
Speaker 2: and it'll just add to the other stuff they're trying
Speaker 2: to confuse people and whatever. Part of the problem is
Speaker 2: that if we go down and like, okay, let's let's
Speaker 2: investigate this, let's look, let's it's sort of we're playing
Speaker 2: the game to a certain extent rather than just saying
Speaker 2: it's bull and moving on.
Speaker 5: So, you know, I do think it's important to engage
Speaker 5: with it. But I think you're one hundred percent right
Speaker 5: that the expectation was that the media would react and
Speaker 5: respond the same way they did with the Hillary Clinton
Speaker 5: email thing, and that this would be you know, hijack
Speaker 5: the news, et cetera. Shockingly, the media kind of learned
Speaker 5: and they were They understood that it's important to question
Speaker 5: the provenance of this type of information. So the coverage
Speaker 5: became not about the substance of the emails. It became
Speaker 5: about who was behind it, where it was coming from,
Speaker 5: and for what reason, which is exactly the questions that
Speaker 5: you want to ask. I mean, if you go back
Speaker 5: to twenty sixteen, imagine if they had been asking those
Speaker 5: questions about Hillary Clinton's emails.
Speaker 3: Right, there's an irony here that apparently Juliani and Bannon
Speaker 3: they had versions of the hard drive, and they had
Speaker 3: it months before, and yet they waited until three weeks
Speaker 3: or so two weeks before the election and released it
Speaker 3: so that no fact checking could be done. And what
Speaker 3: we did is simply say, caveat emptor right, you know,
Speaker 3: buyer beware, Let's see what this really is before we
Speaker 3: all jump on the bandwagon and make accusations.
Speaker 5: You changed the frame of the story, That's what That's
Speaker 5: all this comes down to. You changed the frame of
Speaker 5: the story, which neutralized the impact of that information.
Speaker 2: I wonder, if these people had this information from this
Speaker 2: laptop and there's something potentially horrible in there, why didn't
Speaker 2: they publish that? Why haven't they been talking about a
Speaker 2: lot of this stuff comes down to people want the
Speaker 2: smear to be out there rather than the details.
Speaker 3: But four of the five things that the Biden family,
Speaker 3: who were private citizens at the time, asked Twitter to
Speaker 3: take down were dick pics set out by Hunter Biden,
Speaker 3: and which is against Twitter rules that you know to
Speaker 3: be to be put on there. Yet this has been
Speaker 3: spun into Biden as though he was still the vice president.
Speaker 3: Of course he wasn't basically asking them to take them down.
Speaker 3: And I don't know why right wing media would want
Speaker 3: to see that sort of you know, Hunter Biden, or
Speaker 3: yes you do to say, whereas the same stuff you
Speaker 3: know one.
Speaker 5: Thing about conspiracy theory, So conspiracy theories that have no
Speaker 5: basis in reality are defined as a belief that people
Speaker 5: or groups are secretly coordinating behind the scenes to generate
Speaker 5: very specific outcomes. There is research that suggests that people
Speaker 5: who believe in conspiracy theories, because conspiracy theories really generate
Speaker 5: a sense of powerlessness, become more politically disengaged, so in
Speaker 5: other words, they can be less likely to vote. It's like, well,
Speaker 5: what does it matter, right, the deep state is gonna
Speaker 5: make sure Briden wins again, or whatever. If that's what
Speaker 5: you're actually promoting, you're actually encouraging people to just opt
Speaker 5: out of the system. Now, Also, conspiracy theories can be
Speaker 5: linked with willingness to use violent means, because that is
Speaker 5: an avenue. If you don't believe that you can actually
Speaker 5: get your desired outcome using legitimate channels, then you feel justified.
Speaker 3: It's a good point. I'm not sure they want to
Speaker 3: win elections if winning elections means getting the most votes, right.
Speaker 3: I mean, you get in Wisconsin, it's a fifty to
Speaker 3: fifty state and you've got seventy five percent of the
Speaker 3: seats are in one particular political party. Those people aren't
Speaker 3: wanting to win elections. They're looking to manipulate the system
Speaker 3: so they can maintain is a minority.
Speaker 5: That's right. They want to entrench minority rule using and
Speaker 5: you know, whether it's gerrymandering, voter suppression, disinformation, whatever. And
Speaker 5: they have to do that because not only do conspiracy
Speaker 5: theories and leading to less turnout, so do the increasingly
Speaker 5: extreme positions.
Speaker 3: Thank you very much, Josha, great to talk to you. Now,
Speaker 3: let's talk to Denver Riggleman, really interesting guy, former Air
Speaker 3: Force intelligence officer and a Republican congressman from Virginia. He
Speaker 3: worked on the House Select Committee looking at the January
Speaker 3: sixth attack, and he's now working with the legal team
Speaker 3: advising Hunter Biden. And he's got a great distillery in
Speaker 3: southern Virginia.
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me, really, it's an honor.
Speaker 3: Mistake.
Speaker 2: You obviously don't know us. And just to give you
Speaker 2: a little background, Jerry and I are both signers of
Speaker 2: the famous dirty fifty one letter that was published about.
Speaker 1: I think that's going to come full circle where the
Speaker 1: fifty one center is a letter will probably be smiling
Speaker 1: a little bit about validation. And I think when people attack,
Speaker 1: I don't think they understand what Russian amplification or influence
Speaker 1: looks like, but you guys do. So I got in
Speaker 1: a little bit of trouble because I wrote the book
Speaker 1: The Breach, and the far left and the far right
Speaker 1: both hated me, which was a great place to be,
Speaker 1: but I did really well. It was a New York
Speaker 1: Times bestseller. Then I had this sixty minutes thing, and
Speaker 1: what I did know is people were watching.
Speaker 3: So I.
Speaker 1: Get this cryptophone call from a friend of a friend
Speaker 1: of a friend from people who had gone to Berkeley
Speaker 1: together about this other guy in LA. They're like, hey,
Speaker 1: this dude is looking for you, has been sending emails.
Speaker 1: Do you know dr right, I'm like okay. And they
Speaker 1: mentioned the name and they're like, he would like you
Speaker 1: to come to LA to help on a problem set
Speaker 1: that might deal with the son of a present. And
Speaker 1: I told him to pound sand. I said, I just
Speaker 1: got out of some hell. I said, I'm finally home.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm old City Moore, but you know, I
Speaker 1: did feel some duty. But I said, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to LA. If you want to talk to me, I'm
Speaker 1: here in Virginia. I didn't really think it would happen.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, there's a private flight and there's
Speaker 1: three people in a hotel room across from the Pentagon
Speaker 1: you probably know the Double Tree at three hundred Army
Speaker 1: Navy Drive, And there's three people. One of Hunter Biden's
Speaker 1: attorneys trying to convince me that they think there's things
Speaker 1: in the data that could really help them out in
Speaker 1: explaining what happened and who spread that data, who stole
Speaker 1: it in his invasion or privacy. And I was very skeptical.
Speaker 1: So I listened to for two or three hours. Then
Speaker 1: I asked questions for two hours and I finally got
Speaker 1: to the point they said, listen, we think there's really
Speaker 1: three people involved with this, and I've sort of proven
Speaker 1: it by this point, but they said it's Rudy Giuliani,
Speaker 1: Steve Bannon, and then they mentioned Roger Stone. Maybe. I'm like, Okay,
Speaker 1: you guys probably know I have a dark spot in
Speaker 1: my heart for some of those cats. So a couple
Speaker 1: days later, I'm on a zoom with Hunter and his
Speaker 1: wife and they're like, will you please help us? You
Speaker 1: guys know that's not easy. But when I met him,
Speaker 1: he's been clean since May of twenty nineteen, his new kid,
Speaker 1: His wife was awesome, and they got very emotional, and
Speaker 1: at the end I said I will help, and the
Speaker 1: wife was just so amazing, like, I cannot believe you
Speaker 1: would do, Like you're going to put everything on the line.
Speaker 1: I said, Well, I said, I'm not pro Hunter, anti Hunter.
Speaker 1: I'm pro data and pro fact and Hunter goes, that's
Speaker 1: what I want. He goes, Denver, I think I want
Speaker 1: the truth, I said, but the truth is discoverable. So
Speaker 1: if you go to court, know that I could find
Speaker 1: things that actually could hurt you, not help you, He goes,
Speaker 1: I don't care. I want to know the truth. So
Speaker 1: I signed on. And now you are talking to the
Speaker 1: guy that has three of Hunter Biden's laptops and a
Speaker 1: cell phone. And have looked at all the data from
Speaker 1: Marco Polo, from four Chan, all the data that the
Speaker 1: Congress is using, they say is from a laptop. All
Speaker 1: of that is forensically unsound. We have proven so much
Speaker 1: on the curation of fabricated data or manipulated data, out
Speaker 1: of context data. But I guess what I'm telling you, guys,
Speaker 1: is that when you look at the Rudy Giuliani's on
Speaker 1: the Russia team meeting with Teleazenko and Fertash and Dirkash right,
Speaker 1: and guys, we have video of him from January of
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, four years four months before the laptop talking
Speaker 1: to Ukrainian agents. That's January twenty nineteen.
Speaker 3: Pro Russian Ukrainian agents Russians.
Speaker 1: But I've been doing it since December sixteenth, and the
Speaker 1: Russian Ukrainian team was read by Giuliani, and the Chinese
Speaker 1: team with Guo in the National Free State of China
Speaker 1: was all run by Bannon and Loude. So you got
Speaker 1: Bannon working with Chinese nationals. You got Giuliani working with
Speaker 1: Ukrainian and Russian connected agents proven so you have this
Speaker 1: going on simultaneously, and it's just really interesting to see
Speaker 1: the data lines and how the laptop data went from
Speaker 1: John Paul mac Isaac at the Apple repair shop in Delaware,
Speaker 1: and how it's a copy of copies of copies of
Speaker 1: copies of copies. Have a Tasta side on the Bannon side,
Speaker 1: through Jack Maxi and through his underlings, and through the
Speaker 1: Juliani side, through Costello and his underlings, and it's so
Speaker 1: much from the Garrett zieglers on a Marco Polo site
Speaker 1: all the way over to the yak of Apple bombs.
Speaker 1: On the other side, you have Hunter's Kiwi bro who
Speaker 1: actually released the data. On the four Chan side, who's
Speaker 1: in anothereage of data. So it's it's probably i would
Speaker 1: say it's been copies of copies, non forensically sound with
Speaker 1: different data sets incorporated, have probably been spent twenty to
Speaker 1: thirty times. And it's just amazing to me again that
Speaker 1: after four years of this, first of all, that the
Speaker 1: Bidens weren't more aggressive, but they thought the same thing
Speaker 1: that they thought about Tara Reid.
Speaker 3: Right right, who's not in Russia, by the way, applying
Speaker 3: for Russians.
Speaker 1: Now in Russian right, Tar Reid is just a pathological liar.
Speaker 1: And it took four years to clear really for people
Speaker 1: to finally say, ah, she was full of shit. I
Speaker 1: still think Joe and Hunter thought that would actually happen.
Speaker 1: And I keep telling them the far right ecosystem, media
Speaker 1: ecosystem will roll you over. They're tougher than Democrats, they're
Speaker 1: meaner than democrats, they're better coordinated than democrats. I said,
Speaker 1: They're just better than you guys at pushing this stuff out,
Speaker 1: and they don't care about the truth. The hardest thing
Speaker 1: about Hunter is how do you make a guy who
Speaker 1: did very bad things into a per send where you like,
Speaker 1: he's a good person who feels bad about those very
Speaker 1: bad things, who admitted to it in his book Beautiful Things,
Speaker 1: which was really interesting to me that he'd admitted to
Speaker 1: all of it. A guy who people think is awful
Speaker 1: because of crack and prostitutes and leveraging his dad's name
Speaker 1: for money, how do you say, well, he understands that,
Speaker 1: but this guy was not an international criminal that was
Speaker 1: putting the United States at risk purposefully.
Speaker 3: Yeah, to be to be clear, and for the record,
Speaker 3: we're not Democrats or Republicans like like you, I understand
Speaker 3: it's about it's about the data and what you can
Speaker 3: show and what makes sense. Also on Hunter Biden, we
Speaker 3: don't actually care about Hunter Biden. We care about the
Speaker 3: truth of the accusations. But it's really for us and
Speaker 3: it should be for everybody else. Is was there illegal corruption?
Speaker 3: Involved in illegal corruption? Because the Trump kids were also
Speaker 3: involved in selling their dad's name and a lot of
Speaker 3: other people in politics. So but that's not illegal unfortunately perhaps,
Speaker 3: So you know, what is the truth of these of
Speaker 3: these of these accusations. And in the letter that we signed,
Speaker 3: basically we say caveat emptor this came out just before
Speaker 3: the election. This has all the hallmarks of what the
Speaker 3: Russians would do. We he ever said that it was
Speaker 3: you know, manipulated information and amplify.
Speaker 1: I would humbly submit, don't defend your positions. I would
Speaker 1: be offensive.
Speaker 3: There we go.
Speaker 1: I would be offensive. I am now who gives a shit?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: And I think you know you guys want to play
Speaker 1: the same game. Prove it wasn't motherfucker's You know, you
Speaker 1: had to have multiple I think attack modalities. Stop to
Speaker 1: steal Hunter biden laptop? Maybe Tara Reid? How do you
Speaker 1: how do you really put some stink on this candidate?
Speaker 1: And listen, you're right about Hunter, right, he did bad things.
Speaker 1: He did some bad things, but it isn't just about
Speaker 1: it is about not only did he do corruption, the
Speaker 1: part that the American people should be afraid of if
Speaker 1: they could do this to Hunter digitally, invasion of privacy,
Speaker 1: steal your data and then spread that with no repercussions
Speaker 1: or accountability. Now in a very dangerous situation that anything
Speaker 1: could be faked, right, and you can have a veneer truth.
Speaker 1: You guys know, the best way to do conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: and lies is to have some true shit. And that's
Speaker 1: the thing you have. You have real facts and data
Speaker 1: that belonged to Hunter that might have been taken out
Speaker 1: of context, manipulated, fabricated, or curated in such a way
Speaker 1: to make it look worse than it is.
Speaker 2: But in that sense, you can argue they haven't done
Speaker 2: a good job because this information has been out there
Speaker 2: for a long time. They're claiming that it shows Joe
Speaker 2: Biden is corrupted. But if the information's out there, and
Speaker 2: people can see it, Well, where's that piece, where's that
Speaker 2: piece of data that says that.
Speaker 3: Okay, let's take a break from the craziness just for
Speaker 3: a minute or two. Welcome back. We're saying over and
Speaker 3: over the Hunter Biden laptop, and it's become sort of
Speaker 3: like a shibboleth. Right, it's just like her emails. I
Speaker 3: hear it all the time, but most people couldn't tell
Speaker 3: you what it is. It's just bad, right, And then
Speaker 3: they want to talk about his dick pics. So what
Speaker 3: is the laptop thing?
Speaker 1: That Hunter Biden laptop team thing? Is this one device
Speaker 1: delivered in April twenty nineteen to a Max shop in
Speaker 1: Delaware by a supposedly high Hunter Biden right, that had
Speaker 1: all the secrets of the universe about all the corruption
Speaker 1: of the Bidens on one actual device. That's the Hunter
Speaker 1: Biden laptop. It causes COVID, right, it can redirect satellites.
Speaker 1: The Hunter Biden laptop proves financial crimes all the way
Speaker 1: up to Joe Biden himself. It proves that they were
Speaker 1: getting illegal payments from Russia, Ukraine and China, and it
Speaker 1: proves that they were trying to style out America through
Speaker 1: some deep state plot in order to manipulate these individuals
Speaker 1: so Joe could get back in office at some point.
Speaker 1: So it's all of that in a box of doughnuts.
Speaker 1: It's a conspiracy, sticky.
Speaker 3: Bobm and it's been surprised.
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah, well, and it's obviously been suppressed. The
Speaker 1: issue is is that that day he actually turned in
Speaker 1: three laptops to that shop, So that's number one. Number
Speaker 1: two is that that laptop has never been forensically validated.
Speaker 1: Where is it? The FBI has it.
Speaker 3: That's great, but.
Speaker 1: All the data, any forensic scientists would go on the
Speaker 1: stand and say that this is all a soup sandwich.
Speaker 1: You can't link it to anything. So the Hunter Biden
Speaker 1: laptop has actually become the symbol for all data associated
Speaker 1: with Hunter and Joe that's been pushed into the ecosystem
Speaker 1: to prove some nefarious activities. This isn't going away. There's
Speaker 1: no magic bullet. This is the people who just really
Speaker 1: want to state of the factory's data. Side, like you
Speaker 1: guys are doing right now, is making it sexy through
Speaker 1: narrative and trying to put it out there in a
Speaker 1: way that like, listen, the people that are usually projecting
Speaker 1: and accusing people of these awful things, sometimes with the
Speaker 1: people actually doing it. That is really important for the
Speaker 1: American public to know. And if they're accusing people like you, guys,
Speaker 1: who have served our country with valor and honor, these
Speaker 1: people don't even know what they're talking about, and if
Speaker 1: they did, it doesn't matter to them because it is.
Speaker 3: War, war and profit. I mean, let's be clear that
Speaker 3: Steve Bannon said it was war, but he was also
Speaker 3: shaking down his own support orders to build a wall
Speaker 3: that he never built, and he stole their money. Let's
Speaker 3: be clear on that.
Speaker 1: Of course he did.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Denver, fantastic speaking with you. Now let's turn
Speaker 2: to our producer John Stern.
Speaker 6: All Right, guys, I didn't really do any research per se,
Speaker 6: but I did go onto YouTube and found some clips
Speaker 6: for you. All right, what do I have for you?
Speaker 3: First?
Speaker 6: This is a Giuliani news clip from June twenty ninth,
Speaker 6: twenty twenty three, on America's news source Newsmax.
Speaker 7: I have an intimate knowledge of most of it from
Speaker 7: the having gotten the hard drive from John. But sure,
Speaker 7: I mean he's that hard drive contains probably fifty to
Speaker 7: sixty let's call them potential crimes for him.
Speaker 1: And his father.
Speaker 7: Almost everyone that he's involved in except the pure drug crimes,
Speaker 7: involves Joe as the principal. I mean, Joe is the
Speaker 7: main die. And Hunter explains it when he says that,
Speaker 7: you know, he got all of his income for thirty years.
Speaker 7: I have of all of Hunter's income for thirty years,
Speaker 7: which means Hunter's income was really directed to his father.
Speaker 2: It's frustrating because in the political sphere, people like Rudy Giuliani,
Speaker 2: who's made it clear that he'll say anything to support
Speaker 2: his client or his political client in this case, Donald Trump.
Speaker 2: In our world, if there's a crime, or there's even
Speaker 2: a suggestion of a crime, you go to professional investigators,
Speaker 2: you go to the police, you go to the FBI.
Speaker 2: You know, having Rudy Giuliani say it is sort of
Speaker 2: irrelevant to me. It's obviously done just for political purpose.
Speaker 3: So he says he's got the evidence, but he doesn't
Speaker 3: actually give us the evidence. He just says, I've got
Speaker 3: stuff that proves this, and then he makes these accusations.
Speaker 3: You know, in the world that most of us live in,
Speaker 3: if you make an accusation and you say you got proof,
Speaker 3: you provide the proof rather than just make an accusation.
Speaker 3: So Giuliani, apparently, if I understand this correctly, had all
Speaker 3: this information much earlier, and he had been operating with
Speaker 3: associating with Russian intelligence officers, which the letter that we
Speaker 3: signed said. But he waits until a week or two
Speaker 3: before the election to throw all this out there, and
Speaker 3: that clearly, regardless of whether the stuff is true, they
Speaker 3: waited just before the election for an October surprise in
Speaker 3: order to manipulate the election. Making accusations was one of
Speaker 3: the oldest dirty trucks in the book. All right, here's
Speaker 3: the other half of my research. Guys, do you remember
Speaker 3: when Pergozen had that coup attempt against Putin? Do you
Speaker 3: still recall that that was all the way back home?
Speaker 3: Very much so?
Speaker 6: All right, So June twenty fifth, twenty twenty three, seeing
Speaker 6: an opportunity, no coup attempt should go unutilized by Fox News.
Speaker 6: So Mario Bartuomo had a theory that the coup attempt
Speaker 6: was actually an attempt to distract the American public from
Speaker 6: Hunter Biden.
Speaker 3: And here's that clip.
Speaker 8: Look, I know that the State Department in the White
Speaker 8: House would like everybody to move the Hunter Biden story
Speaker 8: off of the front page and start talking about all
Speaker 8: the drama in Russia over the weekend.
Speaker 4: We're not going to do that.
Speaker 8: On Sunday Morning, Futures, the biggest story of the week
Speaker 8: was that what's at message from Hunter Biden? And he
Speaker 8: is basically doing a shakedown that you would expect in
Speaker 8: a Francis Ford Coppola Godfather movie. Pay up or you're
Speaker 8: going to face retaliation. The White House wanted to give
Speaker 8: the media something else to cover, and this is the
Speaker 8: mo this is exactly the way they do things. In fact,
Speaker 8: on Friday, I said, Wow, what a blockbuster, what's that message?
Speaker 8: I'm sure there will be an enormous story over the
Speaker 8: weekend that the White House is going to be pushing
Speaker 8: to take this story off of the front page. And
Speaker 8: sure enough, we've got the State Department drumming up all
Speaker 8: the drama that took place over the weekend in Russia.
Speaker 8: So I don't know if it's going to break through.
Speaker 8: The mainstream media has an excuse again not to cover it.
Speaker 8: They're covering everything about Russia and the Wagna Group. Yeah,
Speaker 8: it's true, as if it really matters to the US
Speaker 8: right now.
Speaker 6: I love the particular theory because it didn't age well.
Speaker 2: It's almost like people on Fox News and the other
Speaker 2: people are so frustrated that the American public is not
Speaker 2: jumping all over this that they have to throw it
Speaker 2: in at all points and try to hope that some
Speaker 2: spaghetti sticks to the wall. So they took the progosion
Speaker 2: uprising in Russia and tried to say that I had
Speaker 2: something to do with distracting from the Hunter Biden laptop.
Speaker 3: I think it speaks more to her mindset. I mean,
Speaker 3: she's right insofar as the coup in Russia, which is
Speaker 3: a huge story, detracted from the Hunter Biden story, but
Speaker 3: she goes it, takes it a step further and says
Speaker 3: that it was a conspiracy by I don't know, the
Speaker 3: Russians the Biden administration to distract from the story.
Speaker 2: I think they get talking points and they say, listen,
Speaker 2: just try to put the Hunter Biden laptop thing out
Speaker 2: there as much as you possibly can in any story
Speaker 2: you can, and we're just hoping that somehow it sticks.
Speaker 6: So, guys, there's a lot more to the story than
Speaker 6: one episode can hold. In fact, you were too of
Speaker 6: the signers of a now infamous letter.
Speaker 2: New York Post calls us the dirty fifty one.
Speaker 3: We are two of the least important, in most insignificant
Speaker 3: signers of that letter.
Speaker 2: I'll tell you that, So please come back for part
Speaker 2: two on Hunter Biden's laptop on Mission Implausible.
Speaker 6: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'sha, John Ceipher,
Speaker 6: and Jonathan Stern. The associate producers are Rachel Harner and
Speaker 6: David Sollinger. This has been a production of honorable, mention
Speaker 6: and abominable pictures for iHeartMedia.