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