Media Silent as IRS Whistleblowers Expose Blatant Biden Family Corruption. Plus: Google Suspends SYSTEM UPDATE from Its Ads Platform | SYSTEM UPDATE #105
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, two IRS whistleblowers have come forward with some remarkable revelations about the DOJ's investigation into the President's son, Hunter Biden.
The New York Times reported this week, quote, Hunter Biden agreed with the Justice Department on Tuesday to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and accept terms that would allow him to avoid prosecution on a separate gun charge, a big step toward ending a long running and politically explosive investigation into the finances, drug use, and international business dealings of President Biden's troubled son, unquote.
That deal would also allow him to have probation and not spend a single day in jail.
Now, among other things, these whistleblowers allege that the DOJ acted politically and corruptly to rein in the investigation of Hunter Biden.
They say that prosecutors overrode the recommendation of senior IRS investigators and others in the Justice Department to charge Biden with multiple felonies rather than just two misdemeanors.
Newly revealed evidence shows that Hunter Biden repeatedly invoked his father's name in an attempt to pursue lucrative business deals in both China and Ukraine, countries where Biden wielded substantial influence while Obama's former vice president and then again as presidential frontrunner, including techs where Hunter threatened Chinese business associates with reprisals at the hands of his father, who he alleged was sitting at his side when sending those threatening texts.
And we have new evidence that the FBI had authenticated the Hunter Biden laptop as early as 2019 and then stood by silently when former intelligence operatives united with the corporate media and the Biden campaign to falsely claim that the materials from the laptop were quote Russian disinformation.
Many of these concerns that relate not only to Hunter Biden's conduct but also his father's were raised by the reporting by the New York Post and others before the 2020 election.
But due to the lies spread by the intelligence community and various media outlets led by Politico's Natasha Bertrand, namely that the laptop was not reliable but instead was Russian disinformation, media outlets attacked and demonized rather than reported and investigated on these allegations.
And then in the days leading up to the 2020 election, big tech platforms led by Twitter and Facebook censored the reporting from circulating at all.
The bald-faced lie that Hunter Biden's laptop was, quote, Russian disinformation, which came from countless political, media, corporate, intelligence sectors, is one of the single worst disinformation campaigns ever to emanate from establishment circles.
It may very well have altered the 2020 election results.
We'll never know that for sure, but that was clearly its intent.
And now we have brand new information about the resulting criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, which also sheds all new light on that disinformation campaign.
This has all been predictably downplayed or distorted by corporate media, the culprits in the first place that spread the lies, and we'll highlight the key revelations about these IRS whistleblowers and what they mean.
Then, this program has tried for many weeks, more than a month, to pay for an online ad on Google's various platforms, particularly its YouTube platform.
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No matter how many times we appeal, we are always told that we are barred forever from advertising on Google's platform.
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Yet more proof that these big tech companies are out-of-control monopolists who censor the internet for their own ideological and financial interests.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Two IRS whistleblowers, one of whom is a senior investigator in that agency and another who has requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, have one of whom is a senior investigator in that agency and another who has requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, have come forward with some truly remarkable and incriminating allegations about the Biden Justice Department, how it handled the criminal investigation have come forward with some truly remarkable and incriminating allegations about the Biden Justice Department, how it handled the criminal investigation
in.
Hunter Biden just appeared at the state dinner held for the Indian Prime Minister and seemed very happy.
And why wouldn't he be?
As he mingled with the guests, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, whose Justice Department just handed him such an incredibly encouraging and positive outcome.
These whistleblowers have a lot to say about how those misdemeanors were accepted, overriding the recommendations of multiple members of the IRS, investigators who have worked on these cases for a long time, and prosecutors in the Justice Department, that Hunter Biden's conduct was so serious And had it been any other citizen, he would have been charged with multiple felonies rather than two misdemeanor counts that enable him to walk free.
And yet that's exactly what happened.
And we're going to go into those allegations about the politicization of the Biden Justice Department and the mistreatment and misconduct of the Justice Department and the prosecutor in the case of the president's son.
But before we do, we also want to shed light on one aspect of the revelations that we regard as extremely important.
Namely that the FBI, as early as 2019, had concluded as part of the investigation to Hunter Biden that the Hunter Biden laptop was not Russian disinformation, but in fact was entirely authentic.
It formed the foundation for the FBI and IRS's investigation.
And this was a year before The CIA, the corporate media and big tech all united in the days before the election to spread the outright lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was, quote, Russian disinformation as a way of discrediting the reporting from the New York Post that raised a lot of questions, not about the integrity of Hunter Biden, but about the integrity of the Democratic Party front runner for President Joe Biden.
So first let's look at the evidence and what it shows.
We are going to show you an article from the Free Beacon on June 22nd of this week and needless to say the conservative outlets are doing a very good job reporting on this while the corporate media almost entirely downplays it.
There you see the headline quote whistleblower says FBI verified the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop in November of 2019.
So almost a full year Before Natasha Bertrand in Politico spread the outright lie from the intelligence community that this laptop was not authentic but was Russian disinformation, the article reads, quote, The FBI authenticated Hunter Biden's laptop as far back as November 2019, according to testimony from an IRS whistleblower released on Thursday, and knew the device was not part of a foreign disinformation campaign.
The Bureau learned of the laptop on October 2019, the whistleblower, IRS Supervisory Agent Gary Shafley said, and just one month later verified its authenticity.
The IRS was notified about the laptop in December 2019 and told that, quote, it likely contained evidence of a tax crime, the whistleblower said.
Shapely stunning claims raise important questions about the Department of Justice's conduct over the last several years.
FBI Director Christopher Wray refused as recently as March to verify that the contents of Hunter Biden's hard drive were not part of a foreign disinformation campaign.
Numerous outside investigators and newsrooms, including the Washington Free Beacon, have concluded that Hunter Biden's hard drive is authentic since its existence was made public by the New York Post in October 2020.
Now, just a reminder of what happened during that time, which again, were the days leading up to the 2020 election of a highly contested election between Joe Biden and the incumbent Donald Trump.
The New York Post on October 13th published one story and then followed it up with a second, based on information from this laptop, that showed that Hunter Biden was trading on his father's name, selling access to his father in two countries.
First, in Ukraine, where as we know, Hunter Biden was paid $50,000 a year by Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company.
Because Ukraine was not being run by Ukrainian officials, but rather by Joe Biden as Obama's vice president after Victoria Nuland had installed the government that the United States wanted.
And Hunter Biden got $50,000 a month for access to his father.
Obviously, no one thinks Hunter Biden was qualified for that post.
He wasn't an expert in energy at all, let alone in Eastern European energy.
The only value he had to offer was access to his father, and that's what they paid for.
And he was pursuing business deals in Ukraine based on access to his father and also pursuing highly lucrative business deals with the president's brother, Jim Biden, in China.
And there was, as part of this laptop material, a particular memo that seemed very clearly to say that Joe Biden was part of one of these deals that they were pursuing in China.
And in fact, it was 10% of the deal that would be reserved for Joe Biden.
Fortunately for Joe Biden, he never had to answer any questions about any of that reporting because the corporate media spread the lie that that material was Russian disinformation.
Now before this, Whistleblower had come forward.
Every major corporate media outlet has acknowledged that they were able to verify the authenticity of this laptop.
They, of course, waited until the election was over and Joe Biden was safely elected.
But first, The New York Times and The Washington Post and CBS News and then CNN and multiple others in reporting on the investigation into Hunter Biden have all said That the laptop is authentic, the materials on it are genuine, and they have been able to independently verify that fact.
But before the election, there were many conservative outlets that did the same.
And one of the ways they did that, as I've explained many times, is the same way that we were able to verify the archive in the Edward Snowden case.
Remember, Edward Snowden gave us this gigantic archive of top-secret documents from the NSA.
And we had no proof that the documents were real.
We had no proof that he hadn't altered them or that they weren't fabricated.
And we had to investigate.
And we did many things to verify the authenticity of that archive before publishing it.
And all those techniques that we used, including going to people who had documents in the archive and comparing what they had to what was in the archive and seeing that word for word it matched what was in the archive that led us to conclude that that archive was authentic.
Enough evidence to allow the Guardian and the Washington Post and almost every other major media outlet, including the New York Times, Snowden Archive were the exact techniques used by conservative media and by myself and others to conclude before the election that the Hunter Biden laptop was not Russian disinformation but instead was authentic,
including going to one of Hunter Biden's business associates, Tony Bobulinski, including going to one of Hunter Biden's business associates, Tony Bobulinski, and he showed everybody on his phone and in his computer that the emails that he got that were in that archive on Hunter Biden's laptop match word for word what Definitive proof that that material was authentic.
And yet the words Tony Wabulinski barely appeared in corporate media.
They had no interest in finding out the truth.
They instead spread this lie.
That it was Russian disinformation.
Remember, I was so confident the laptop was authentic that I staked my career on it.
I demanded to publish an article in The Intercept reporting on these materials, and when they didn't let me, I quit.
That's how sure I was the laptop was true.
Anyone who wanted to know the truth was able to see the truth.
And yet, this is what the corporate media did instead on October 19, 2020, two weeks before the election, six days after The New York Times first published its story based on the materials on the laptop.
The single most reliable liar for the intelligence agency is Natasha Bertrand, who spent years repeating one lie after the next about Russiagate and got promoted from Business Insider to MSNBC to The Atlantic to Politico and now finally at CNN, the ultimate place that security state liars end up.
Spent years doing this, just repeating whatever the CIA told her to say, went to Politico, and this ended up shaping the entire perception of the story.
And there you see the headline, more than 50, Hunter Biden is Russian disinformation.
Not might be, not seems to be.
Hunter Biden story is Russian disinformation.
Dozens of former Intel officials say.
Here's what she said, quote, more than 50 senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden's son, quote, had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.
The letter, signed on Monday, centers around a batch of documents released by the New York Post last week that purport to tie the Democratic nominee to his son Hunter's business dealings.
There you see, the story was not about Hunter Biden.
It was about Joe Biden and his ties to Hunter's business dealings.
Under the Banner headline, quote, Biden's secret emails, the Post reported it was given a copy of Hunter Biden's laptop and hard drive by President Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who said he got it from a Mac shop owner in Delaware who alerted the FBI.
All of that turned out to be completely true, and yet Joe Biden was never Required to have to answer for any of these allegations raised by these materials because the media instead ran cover for him by claiming that the laptop was fake, that the Russians did it.
Here from Jen Psaki, the Biden White House Press Secretary, who at the time was a Biden campaign operative, now of course hosts an MSNBC show where she constantly prattles on about the dangers of disinformation.
There you see her tweeting out the story the minute that it was up.
Quote, Hunter Biden's story is Russian disinformation, dozens of former intel officials say.
So pervasive was this lie that Twitter and Facebook both announced that they would prevent circulation of the story.
Twitter cited, when asked, a policy that prevents hacked materials from being circulated, but nobody ever believed this material was hacked.
They had no basis for thinking that it was, and the Twitter file showed that inside Twitter they knew they had no evidence for that allegation.
They didn't care.
They were so eager to protect Joe Biden, and there was so much pressure on them to do so, that they made it impossible to post that story, and they locked out the New York Post from their Twitter account until the election because of their refusal to delete it.
All actions that Jack Dorsey, the then CEO of Twitter, has acknowledged was a pretty grave mistake, but the damage was done.
Facebook announced it was algorithmically suppressing the story based on this lie, and announced this through a lifelong Democratic Party operative named Andy Stone, who had worked for Nancy Pelosi in the DCCC.
And Facebook, when it made this announcement, said it was suppressing the story pending a third-party fact-check into these materials, which of course never came.
Because any fact check would have revealed what was clearly the case, which is that the laptop was true.
And we now all know the laptop was true and accurate.
And according to these IRS whistleblowers, the FBI knew that as early as 2019.
And yet, Joe Biden was protected.
Watch what happens whenever Donald Trump, in their presidential debate, tried to raise these questions and ask Biden to answer for them.
There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what this he's accusing me of is a Russian plant.
They have said that this is has all the care for five former heads of the CIA.
Both parties say what he's saying is a bunch of garbage.
Nobody believes it except his and his good friend Rudy Giuliani.
You mean the laptop is now another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax?
That's exactly what, that's exactly what it's called.
This is where he's going.
The laptop is Russia, Russia, Russia.
Gentlemen, I want to stay on the issue of race.
Okay now, the person on the left, Donald Trump, who was saying that the laptop was authentic, and was trying to get Joe Biden to answer for the ethical questions raised by it, is deemed an agent of disinformation.
The one who is mocking the notion that this was Russian disinformation.
That's who we're told always lies.
The person here on the right, the now President Joe Biden, who won that election as a result, at least in part of this lie, Who stood up and said to the cameras, I refuse to answer questions about any of these stories because they're Russian disinformation and my good friends in the intelligence community say so, this is the person deemed to be honest.
And yet, in this presidential debate watched by millions of Americans, Joe Biden flatly lied by saying that this laptop was Russian disinformation and Donald Trump was saying, are you kidding?
You're now going to blame this on Russia?
No, just to give you a sense for the incredibly aggressive climate that surrounded the story, they basically made it impossible for any corporate journalist to ask Biden about it.
There was one journalist in corporate media brave enough to ask Biden to answer this question.
His name was Bo Erickson of CBS News, who was a campaign reporter for CBS.
And he tried to ask Joe Biden about this on the tarmac.
Watch what happened on October 16th.
I refuse.
I refuse.
I knew you were going to ask that, Joe Biden said.
Snidely smearing the reputation of a reporter, which when Donald Trump did, we were told, was some grave attack on press freedom.
Biden, of course, was free to do that.
He said this is a smear campaign and I'm not going to answer.
Now, when usually when the president attacks the integrity of a reporter the way Joe Biden just did, when he said it's a smear campaign, right up your alley, other journalists defend the journalist for doing his job and asking the question of the powerful politician Demanding that he be held responsible, that he have to answer the questions.
But in this case, that's not what happened.
Instead, what happened was most of the media decided to attack Bo Erickson and call him a Russian agent.
Here you see an article at the time from the National Review, no friend of Donald Trump.
And there was the headline, quote, journalists joined Dem operatives and attacking fellow reporters over the Biden Burisma story.
The article says reporters who dared to address the story were slammed as tools of a Russian disinformation campaign.
All over social media, Bo Erikson was maligned by fellow journalists and by Democratic operatives for daring to ask this question.
Here was what the former Obama National Security Advisor at the White House, Ben Rhodes, said, quote, Paula Reid of CNN had tweeted, Biden adopts the Trump playbook, which is exactly what happened.
Attacking the pool reporter Bo Erickson for asking about Hunter Biden's story, which has been a focus of President Trump's campaign over the past few days.
Fine to attack the story, but why personally insult Bo?
She was doing her job, actually.
Credit to Paula Reed.
She was defending Bo Erikson for asking this question, which of course journalists should have been asking, but only he had the courage to do so.
And Ben Rhodes then led the vilification campaign saying, maybe because Bo is acting as the far end of a Russian disinformation operation.
Like Jen Psaki, a complete liar.
These are the agents of disinformation.
Do you see it?
It's the intelligence community joined at the hip with Democratic Party operatives and the corporate media.
These are the people who lied and lied and lied and lied in order to affect the outcome of the 2020 election.
There were, I could show you all night, examples.
People like Jim Clapper and John Brennan going on the news, on cable news and network news, and just saying that this was Russian disinformation without any pushback.
It was Christiane Amanpour.
Every one of them asserted this to be true.
Now, as I said, even if you think the corporate media is the only reliable source of valid information, which is what they think, by now we know this was a lie.
The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, CBS News all independently verified The archive, and now we have an FBI whistleblower saying the FBI knew it was valid as early as 2019.
Do you know that not a single one of these media outlets, not Politico, not CNN, the Huffington Post produced basically a campaign ad for Joe Biden.
Based on the idea that this is Russian disinformation.
Obviously, The Intercept, through the former New York Times reporter Jim Risen, also spread this lie.
Every one of them spread it.
Not a single one of them has retracted that lie.
Not a single one has acknowledged that they spread a lie from the CIA before the election.
There's zero accountability in journalism anymore.
They know that they are lying in order to help the Democratic Party win, and they know their audience wants them to do that, and so when they get caught red-handed, lying like they did here, they have no inculcation at all, no inclination to go and apologize or retract the story, or even explain how they got it wrong.
Nothing!
Zero!
Because their function is to lie.
That is their job.
That is their purpose.
And you see all these people, Democratic operatives and corporate media outlets, all of whom spread this lie.
And now it turns out that the FBI itself knew it was a lie and allowed the CIA to pollute our discourse with full-scale disinformation because obviously the FBI also wanted Donald Trump to lose, according to this IRS whistleblower.
Now, beyond the issue of the authenticity of the archive being apprehended and known by the FBI a year before all these establishment outlets joined together to lie to the American people to manipulate the 2020 election, the IRS whistleblower also says that the Biden Justice Department, Merrick Garland and the rest, intervened and politically corrupted the investigation into Hunter Biden
Here you see CNN reporting on the allegations and the headline it says whistleblowers say IRS recommended far more charges including felonies against Hunter Biden.
Here's the body of the article quote Two whistleblowers told Congress that IRS investigators recommended charging Hunter Biden with attempted tax evasion and other felonies, which are far more serious crimes than what the president's son has agreed to plead guilty to, according to transcripts of their private interviews with lawmakers.
The IRS whistleblower said the recommendation called for Hunter Biden to be charged with tax evasion and filing a false tax return, both felonies, for 2014, 2018, and 2019.
The IRS also recommended that prosecutors charge him with failing to pay taxes on time, a misdemeanor, for 2015, 16, 17, 18, and 19, according to the transcripts, which were released Thursday by House Republicans.
It appears that this 11-count charging recommendation also had the backing of some Justice Department prosecutors, but not from our senior attorneys, according to documents that the whistleblower provided to House investigators.
I think it's an important point.
These are not just people coming forward In a deal with prosecutors announced earlier this week, Hunter Biden is pleading guilty to just two tax misdemeanors.
The allegations come from Gary Shapley, a 14-year IRS veteran who oversaw parts of the Hunter Biden criminal probe, and an unnamed IRS agent who was on the case nearly from its inception.
Shapley approached Congress.
Imagine the courage needed to do that.
To come forward and stand opposed to the Biden government, knowing that the entire corporate media is against you, the government is against you, every major power center in Washington and the United States is against you, and you put your name on this allegation, you risk your career as an IRS investigator to come forward with these explosive allegations.
You have to really have the courage of your convictions to do that, knowing that the train That will be rolling on its tracks to roll over you that you will unleash.
Shapely approached Congress this year with information that he claimed showed political interference in the investigation.
He and the entire IRS team were later removed from the probe.
Quote, I am alleging with evidence that DOJ provided preferential treatment, slow walked the investigation, and did nothing to avoid obvious conflicts of interest in this investigation, Shapely told lawmakers.
David Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S.
attorney in Delaware who oversaw the Hunter Biden criminal probe, eventually reached a plea deal where the president's son will plead guilty to two misdemeanors for failing to pay taxes on time.
The plea agreement will also resolve a separate felony gun charge if Hunter Biden abides by certain court-imposed conditions for a period of time.
Hunter Biden isn't pleading guilty to any felonies, and he wasn't charged with any tax felonies.
CNN reported that prosecutors are expected to recommend no jail time.
He is scheduled to appear in federal court in Delaware on July 26.
The DOJ probe into Hunter Biden was opened in November 2018 and was codenamed Sportsman.
According to Shapley's testimony, federal investigators knew as early as June 2021 that there were potential venue-related issues with charging Hunter Biden in Delaware.
Under federal law, charges must be brought in the jurisdiction where the alleged crimes occurred.
If the potential charges couldn't be brought in Delaware, then Weiss would need help from his fellow U.S.
attorneys.
He looked to Washington, D.C., where some of Hunter Biden's tax returns were prepared, and the Central District of California, which includes the Los Angeles area where Hunter Biden lives.
But Shapley told the committee that the U.S.
attorneys in both districts wouldn't seek an indictment.
A second whistleblower, an IRS case agent who also testified to the committee but hasn't been publicly identified, also told lawmakers that this is what happened.
So there's cooperation not just from the documents but from the second whistleblower.
He agreed that Weiss was, quote, told no when he tried to get the cooperation of the U.S.
attorneys in D.C.
and Los Angeles who are Biden appointees.
Hunter Biden's eventual plea agreement was filed in Weiss's jurisdiction in Delaware.
Shapely contends in his interview that Attorney General Merrick Garland was not truthful.
When he told Congress that Weiss had full authority on the investigation, Shapley recounted a meeting on October 7, 2022, where, according to Shapley's notes memorializing the meeting, Weiss said, quote, he is not the deciding person on whether charges are filed against Hunter Biden.
This undermines what Weiss and Garland have publicly said about Weiss's independence on the matter.
Shapely also testified to committee investigators that it was during this October 2022 meeting that he learned for the first time that Weiss had requested to be named as special counsel but was denied.
In testimony to Congress in March, Garland said Weiss was advised, quote, he is not to be denied anything he needs.
Regarding the claims of political interference with the Hunter Biden criminal probe, Weiss told House Republicans in a recent letter that Garland granted him, quote, ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding when, where, when, and whether to file charges.
But after the transcript was released Thursday, spokespeople for the U.S.
Attorney's Office in D.C.
and Los Angeles issued near-identical statements, reiterating that Weiss, quote, was given full authority to bring charges in any jurisdiction he deemed appropriate.
The DOJ echoed those comments in a statement saying Weiss quote, needs no further approval for bringing charges whenever he wants.
The whistleblowers also alleged that at multiple key junctures, investigators were thwarted in their efforts because prosecutors were concerned about interfering in the 2020 presidential election.
In 2020, IRS investigators sought to conduct search warrants and take other overt steps, but according to Shapley, several weeks before the election in September 2020, a DOJ prosecutor questioned the optics No.
of searching Hunter Biden's residence and Joe Biden's guest home.
Later that year, other planned searches were delayed because then-President Trump was refusing to concede and was continuing to contest the results.
Now, if there's any truth to those allegations, and again, And again, I think whistleblowers who come forward and put themselves in front of the freight chain called the Biden White House and the U.S. government and the entire corporate media behind them deserve a presumption of good faith and authenticity.
They're putting their names on these allegations that could unravel their lives.
And they don't just have assertions, they have documentation.
And the problem here is that the U.S.
media and the U.S.
intelligence community has already demonstrated they're willing to lie to protect the Bidens from this kind of interrogation.
Remember, this doesn't just involve Hunter Biden.
It involves the extent to which Joe Biden was involved in the pursuit of these deals, whether he knew about these financial transactions and the tax evasion that was going on with it, and whether he in any way intervened or his underlings intervened to protect his son from the kind of apolitical investigation we were promised.
Remember, Donald Trump and, in that case, we're told nobody is above the law.
Every citizen is treated exactly the same.
And now you have not partisan actors, but IRS whistleblowers who are saying that in this case, that is most definitely not what happened.
Now, it isn't just that the FBI knew the laptop was authentic, and it's not just that the IRS agents and whistleblowers say that this case was overwhelmingly politicized to protect Hunter Biden.
By overriding recommendations to charge him with felony counts.
But also, Hunter Biden himself explicitly claimed that his father was heavily involved in these deals in China.
In fact, not only that, but was supporting his threats to Chinese associates to give him their money and answer their inquiries.
Otherwise, Joe Biden would use his contacts and power to destroy them.
From the New York Times this week, IRS agent told Congress of Hunter Biden invoking his father in a business deal.
Quote, a whistleblower said the tax agency found a message from 2017 in which Hunter Biden pressured a Chinese business partner by saying he was with his father, who was then out of office.
Maybe we can put these on the screen, this New York Times article.
The lead IRS agent investigating whether Hunter Biden committed tax crimes told Congress his team uncovered evidence that Mr. Biden had invoked his father, who was then out of office while oppressing a potential Chinese business partner in 2017, to move ahead with a proposed energy deal, House Republicans said.
In testimony made public on Thursday, Gary Shapley, an IRS agent since 2009 who supervised the tax agency's investigation into Hunter Biden, said his team used a search warrant to obtain a July 30th, 2017 WhatsApp message from Mr. Biden, Hunter Biden, to Henry Zhao, a Chinese businessman.
In a summary of the message provided to the House Ways and Means Committee by Mr. Shapley, Mr. Biden, Hunter Biden, told Mr. Zhao that he was sitting with his father And that quote, we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.
Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand.
And now means tonight, Hunter Biden wrote, referring to other participants in the proposed deal.
And Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me, meaning his father, and every person he knows, and my ability to forever hold a grudge, you will regret not following my direction.
Taken at face value, the message would undercut President Biden's longstanding claims that he had nothing to do with his son's international business deals.
Coming days after Hunter Biden agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges of failing to file his taxes on time in 2017 and 18, the release of the information underscores the determination of House Republicans to continue to try to tie his father to his business dealings and suggest that they were corrupt.
What a bullshit narrative that is from the New York Times.
Do you see how they try and say this is something the House Republicans are trying to do?
This is something two IRS investigators have come forward In order to disclose, at great personal peril to their careers and themselves.
Yes, of course, House Democrats have no interest in these allegations.
Exactly the same way that the corporate media had no interest at all in trying to get Joe Biden to answer these questions before the election.
When one journalist tried, he was called a smear artist and a scumbag by Joe Biden.
And a lot of people in the media united with Joe Biden to say that he was acting as a Russian agent by asking Joe Biden these questions and then Joe Biden was allowed in those debates with Donald Trump to refuse to answer the questions all about these things that should have been asked before the election and would have been had the CIA not lied with the corporate media and saying this was Russian disinformation.
So it's not House Republicans trying to tie Joe Biden to these deals, it's these IRS whistleblowers who have done so.
Now, let me make a point about the main defense of Joe Biden whenever he's asked about his role in Hunter Biden's business dealings.
Obviously, polls that they've conducted have shown the public responds well when Joe Biden talks about his son as a proud dad.
And I have objected many times in the past to the exploitation of this archive for delving into Hunter Biden's personal and sexual and drug life.
I actually don't think it's relevant, I know some of you do, but I don't, to look at pictures of Joe Biden smoking crack with prostitutes or learning about the details of Hunter Biden's sex life.
Unless there's criminal elements there, I don't think it's in the public interest.
And even if there are, they don't involve Joe Biden.
So I've never been interested in the part of the archive about Hunter Biden's drug addiction or his sex life.
And I think it's commendable that Joe Biden is a supportive father.
I do think the people like Hunter Biden who have drug addictions and overcome them aren't people who should be ashamed, but are people who should be proud.
And I think it's nice that Hunter Biden's father says he's proud of how his son fought drug addiction.
That's something a good father should do.
That's why the public responds well to it.
The problem is, is that Joe Biden exploits this cynically and disgustingly to deflect any questions at all, not about Hunter Biden, but about Joe Biden.
And the media constantly lets him get away with it.
So here is a video that is the last time Hunter Biden was asked about these allegations regarding his son.
And this is what Joe Biden did to deflect from these questions.
I'm very proud of my son.
So that was it.
He says, I'm very proud of his son, and I do sometimes think that Republicans and conservative media outlets have done themselves a disservice by running wild in all these kind of scandalous, scurrilous questions about Hunter Biden's sex life and drug life, because a lot of Americans are addicted to drugs or have been and overcome that.
And I don't think people are going to hold that against Hunter Biden, let alone against Joe Biden.
And it gives Joe Biden the opportunity to kind of play the angry father and say, this is a smear campaign against my son.
I'm proud of him for overcoming drug addiction.
The reason it's so offensive is because Joe Biden is exploiting the good faith of Americans about drug addiction to pretend that this is only about that.
And not about very real questions about whether the Biden administration politicized the corruption investigation into Hunter Biden to protect Hunter Biden and whether Joe Biden himself was involved in these business deals.
Look at what Joe Biden does every time he's asked about this.
Here from CNN in October of 2022, quote, Biden says he's, quote, proud of his son's fight against drug addiction.
Who cares?
The issue is not Hunter Biden's drug addiction.
Quote, President Joe Biden on Thursday for the first time addressed his son's exposure to possible criminal charges for allegedly lying on a gun purchase obligation.
But he said he was proud of Hunter Biden for confronting his struggles with drug addiction.
In an interview with Jake Tapper airing on CNN tonight, Hunter Biden purchased a gun during a time in which he was now acknowledged he was struggling with drug addiction, an issue now under federal criminal investigation because federal law requires purchasers to attest that they aren't users of or addicted to illegal drugs, CNN has reported.
Federal prosecutors are weighing possible charges related to tax violations and for making a false statement related to the gun purchase, CNN reported.
President Biden told Tapper on Tuesday that he was, quote, proud of Hunter Biden for being straightforward about his battle with drug addiction.
This is a kid who got, well not a kid, he's a grown man.
He got hooked on, like many families have had happen, hooked on drugs.
He's overcome that.
He established a new life.
I'm confident that he is.
What he says and what he does are consistent with what happened, the president said.
And for example, he wrote a book about his problems and was straightforward about it.
I'm very proud of him.
Now, I do think those are valid sentiments, like I said.
But Biden and the media have repeatedly exploited the addiction issue and conflated it with all the other valid questions about Joe Biden using his name and selling influence in conjunction with his family.
Here, for example, is NPR in October of 2020 in an article that was truly disgusting.
Essentially trying to say that anyone who asks questions about Hunter Biden's business deals, this was October 16th, three days after the New York Post article on Hunter Biden's and Joe Biden's business deals in Ukraine and China, NPR ran an article saying experts say attack on Hunter Biden's addiction deepened stigma for millions.
The formal position of the Of NPR was that we have no interest in reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop because we think it's a distraction.
So not only didn't they pursue these questions about Joe Biden, they ran cover for it by pretending that it was inherently illegitimate, even harmful to addicts to even ask these questions.
About Hunter Biden's business dealings.
That's how disgusting the corporate media was.
They were willing to exploit these good sentiments around addiction to pretend that this was all it was about.
Now, what makes this, just this part of the story, so repulsive to me is that Joe Biden has long been one of the nation's hardest core warriors on criminalizing addicts and punishing drug users.
He's the architect of the prison state.
Throughout the 80s and 90s, he prided himself on getting to the right of Republicans on questions of criminal law and drug use.
He was adamant that drug users and drug addicts be sent to prison for many years, saying, we're not doing enough to send addicts to prison.
So when it came to other people's families and their struggles with addiction and their kids' struggles with addiction, Biden had no compassion at all.
He wanted to send these people to prison for a long time.
Here's Joe Biden in 1991 on the floor of the Senate giving a speech on exactly this question.
Let's look at the facts.
Since 1986, Congress has passed over 230 new or expanded penalties for drug and criminal offenses in this United States.
230 new penalties.
These penalties range from an automatic five years in jail for any person caught with With a rock of crack cocaine, a piece of crack cocaine as small as a quarter.
I don't have a quarter with me, but if you visualize what one looks like, yeah, I do have a quarter.
If you have a piece of crack cocaine no bigger than this quarter that I'm holding in my hand, one quarter of one dollar, We passed a law through the leadership of Senator Thurman and myself and others, a law that says if you're caught with that, you go to jail for five years.
You get no probation.
You get nothing other than five years in jail.
Judge doesn't have a choice.
Now, the fact of the matter is, he's boasting of that.
That was something he did with his good friend Strom Thurmond, the Jim Crow segregationist.
They passed this law that said, as he just explained, if you have a tiny little bit of crack on your possession, you're going to prison for five years, the judge has no discretion.
You're getting locked up.
Even if you committed no violence, even if you never sold any crack to anybody else, just having it on you to use, He sends you to prison for five years and you see him smirking with pride over how many families' children who are addicts he sent to prison.
And now he feigns compassion because his own son is in that position, but he's not advocating an uprooting of this law.
It was President Trump actually who passed the first criminal justice reform bill in a long time, working with the ACLU.
He's not using his pardon power to let out huge numbers of people who are in prison on drug charges the way President Trump did at Kim Kardashian's urging regarding Alice Johnson.
He's just exploiting these sentiments around addiction to avoid answering questions about business deals involving his son and even accusing people who raise questions of it of somehow stigmatizing addiction.
Let's listen to the rest of the speech.
We've gone from there, all the way up to saying, under the leadership of Senator Thurman, and I'd like to suggest that I take some small credit for it myself as well, and others, the presiding officer, that there is now a death penalty.
And we passed it a couple years ago.
If you are a major drug dealer, involved in the trafficking of drugs and murder results in your activities, you go to death.
All right, so that's how he always positioned himself in his career.
He wasn't some person saying, oh, we have to be understanding about addiction and treat it as a disease and that we should be proud of people who overcome it.
He said, we're going to send them to prison for years.
Here, when he was running for president in 2015 and the New York Times didn't want him to win, Actually, this is when he was Vice President, in 2015, and there was speculation that he might run against Hillary Clinton.
The New York Times ran an article entitled, Joe Biden's role in the 1990s crime law that could haunt his presidential bid.
And this is what they said, quote, when Joseph Biden Jr.
became the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1987, a few months ahead of his first and ultimately unsuccessful presidential campaign, he told aides his goal was to enact legislation that would take a comprehensive approach to reducing crime.
As the ranking minority member of the committee since 1981, Mr. Biden had helped pass two bills establishing mandatory minimums for drug offenses.
But as chairman facing high violent crime rates, a crack cocaine epidemic, and accusations by Republicans that his party was soft on crime, Mr. Biden wanted holistic reform.
The effort, which defined much of his time as committee chairman, culminated in the 1984 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, a sweeping bipartisan bill that touched nearly every aspect of American law enforcement that was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
More than two decades later, the legislation is once again the subject of fierce debate This time as a bipartisan coalition of activists and lawmakers seeks to undo the era of mass incarceration.
They say the 1994 crime bill helped create.
The rapid shift in mood that these efforts reflect, a reaction to fallen crime rates and a renewed attention to issues of racial injustice, could prove one of many hurdles for Mr. Biden if he decides to become a candidate for president.
Despite reservations, Mr. Biden, who has served as the Obama administration's unofficial liaison to the law enforcement community, has not only stood by the 1994 legislation, but has also frequently taken credit for it.
As recently as this spring, in an essay on community policing for a book of bipartisan reform proposals put together by the Brennan Center for Justice, Mr. Biden referred to the legislation as the quote, 1994 Biden crime bill.
And in an interview with Time Magazine in February of 2014, he said, quote, I am not only the guy who did the crime bill and the drug czar, but I'm also the guy who spent years when I was chairman of the Judiciary Committee and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee trying to change drug policy relative to cocaine, for example, crack and powder.
activists said it would take an acknowledgement by Mr. Biden, similar to Mr. and Mrs. Clinton's, to begin to get the ear of the young minority voters so crucial to Mr. Obama's coalition.
Quote, many of us who grew up in the black community in the 1990s, said Patrice Cullors, a political organizer and founder of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Quote, we witnessed the wave in which the policies that came from both the federal government, but also state government, tore our families apart.
That's the reality of Joe Biden.
Not somebody who has compassion for drug addicts, but somebody who reveled with pride in talking about how much he loves sending drug addicts to prison for years.
So all these crocodile tears, which again, I actually support the sentiments he's invoking, even though he doesn't authentically feel them, or maybe he feels them with regard to his son but nobody else's kids, are ones I support.
I do think But the last and least valid criticism that we should be making of Hunter Biden was that he was a drug addict.
Especially since he's spoken openly about it and overcome it.
That part I think is commendable.
I don't think that's relevant to the public interest, what he did with crack and prostitutes.
Again, unless there's a criminal element there, which I haven't seen.
What is absolutely relevant, in fact compelling and vital, Are there questions being raised by these IRS whistleblowers about whether the Biden Justice Department politicized this investigation to protect Hunter Biden from felony charges in prison?
And whether or not Joe Biden was involved, as those messages at least suggest.
Maybe Hunter Biden was lying, that is absolutely possible.
But the messages suggest that Joe Biden was sitting at his side and was participating in these deals in China and Ukraine.
There had to have been some predicate for saying to the Chinese, you know my father's involved in this deal and he also wants answers.
Those are the questions that should have and would have been asked before Americans went to the polls in 2020 and voted for Joe Biden.
That was what the New York Times was, the New York Post was reporting.
But as a result of the concerted campaign to spread disinformation by claiming that the laptop was Russian disinformation, the lies told by Jen Psaki and Ben Rhodes And Natasha Bertrand and Politico and CNN and the CIA and Big Tech, Biden has never had to answer those questions and still has never answered them.
Because every time he's asked, he does these crocodile tears about his son and his addiction problems.
Now that there's IRS whistleblowers making these claims and providing these documents and substantiating witnesses, It is way past time for Joe Biden to be forced to answer these questions, but we should also never forget how toxic and malicious and deceitful was that disinformation campaign perpetrated by the intelligence community in bed with the Biden campaign but we should also never forget how toxic and malicious and deceitful was that disinformation campaign perpetrated by the intelligence community
So we have a little bit of a report that pertains to ourselves that we had been thinking about reporting for a while, but we wanted to really nail down the story, especially because it does involve ourselves and we're not accustomed to doing reports on ourselves.
But... - Yeah.
Six weeks ago we, or two months ago, we hired a firm to create a digital ad to promote the reporting that we do on this program.
It's a new program.
It's only six months old.
We're on Rumble, which is a platform that is known to 30-35% of Americans.
According to polls, it was 20-25% the last poll nine months ago.
There's been a lot of high-profile hires since then.
The traffic is way up on Rumble.
I presume the number's higher, but still, it's a platform that a lot of Americans, probably most, have never heard of, which makes me excited because the growth for our program, which already has a big audience, the ceiling is so high.
And so part of what we wanted to do was, in conjunction with Rumble, buy Advertising time on various digital platforms, including YouTube, which is owned by Google, in order to show the falling ad that we have put on Twitter and we wanted to pay to spread on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
Here's the ad.
The largest media corporations in the United States have become the opposite of adversarial to power.
Do you want to go get some ice cream over there?
They have become the leading propagandists, the leading messengers.
Go ahead.
No.
No, I... probably best I don't.
That is not what we do.
I mean, this is massive and extraordinary.
People need to get out.
I share this with Glenn Greenwald for exposing truth.
To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?
Charges against the famous journalist Glenn Greenwald.
Press freedom groups were appalled by these charges.
Every night at System Update, we bring you real reporting.
Questioning establishment narratives rather than amplifying them.
Russiagate.
Twitter files.
Dr. Fauci.
Julian Assange.
Real assault on trust freedom.
When we finally got out of Afghanistan six months later, the arms industry gets this brand new war.
Yeah, where did the anti-war Democrats go?
It's ridiculous that Nancy Pelosi has never faced a big speakership challenge.
This is a scam.
Increasingly, the only trustworthy form of journalism is independent journalism, fearlessly operating with no establishment constraints.
That is what Rumble provides, and that is what System Update is.
So I like that a lot.
I think they did a great job on it, but you'll note it doesn't contain any claims.
We're not crusading for any particular perspective.
We're not making any assertions.
We're just showing the kind of segments and the kind of interviews and the kind of journalism we do on this program.
It's a very neutral ad from the perspective of analyzing its content.
And yet, from the beginning, Google has said to us in multiple different ways, there's no chance we are ever going to open an account for you on Google Ads, which is the platform they use to sell ad space on YouTube and every one of their other platforms that they control.
From the beginning, we got this huge runaround through our manager of social media.
Here you see an initial rejection where she tried to upload the ad, and Google said your account is suspended, We're closing, it says, sorry my eyes are old even though I'm not, it says we've detected suspicious payments in your account.
We only had one payment.
It was used with the U.S.
credit card.
There was absolutely nothing problematic about that, so we figured that might just be a snafu, a bureaucratic snafu.
They have appeals process, and yet every time we tried to appeal, including speaking to live people, we got this incredible runaround where sometimes they would just keep saying, your account is suspended.
You have no chance of ever getting it reinstated.
Don't try.
If you try, we're going to find you.
Every time she would talk to a live person through Google, and she has all the transcripts to demonstrate this, the minute that she would start pressing about what the real reason is that we got banned, they would disconnect the conversation after a while because they had no explanation to give.
Like I said, I didn't want to jump to these conclusions.
We spent weeks going through the process and it became very clear that Google will not let us advertise because we're a show on Rumble.
As you might know, Rumble has sued Google.
Alleging that it has abused its monopoly power by purposely burying Rumble videos in its search engines as a way of protecting its other platform, Google.
And that kind of vertical integration and power, monopolistic power, is a violation of the antitrust laws.
If you try and find one of the episodes for System Update that's on Rumble, even if you have the exact title, it will be very difficult to find on Google search terms.
You'll find the YouTube clip that we post.
We post a 10, 15 minute clip each night on YouTube, but it's almost impossible to find these Rumble shows because they're obviously burying it.
A federal court refused to dismiss Rumble's lawsuit against Google, allowed the lawsuit by Rumble to go forward into discovery, Rumble lawyers are going to get a lot of interesting information about how Google manipulates its search engines and algorithms to punish competitors of its other platforms.
But this seems to be a pretty clear example of it.
In fact, just this week, we have a YouTube channel that we use that's totally unlisted that we use just for internal use to post things to it that are things that we're going to post elsewhere or that are parts of the show that we use to edit and the like.
And that unwatched channel Had a strike against it because the show that we did on Professor Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, where we went through all of the statements that he's made over the years and critiqued them, was deemed to be disinformation, COVID disinformation or vaccine disinformation, even though we didn't make any claims about vaccines.
That's how aggressive Google's censorship is.
Now, in one way, Google is bearing their own grave, because the more they censor, the more voices and content creators they drive to their competitors that offer free speech.
That's the way that Rumble started growing in the first place.
But it's kind of amazing to say, hey, we have this significant budget, That we want to spend to make people aware of our show and to inform them of what our show is about.
It's a news show.
It's not a show that crusades about political issues.
Nobody's contesting that.
And yet Google just continues to find reasons to refuse to let us to promote the ad and it seems clear it's not about our show, it's about the fact that we're on Rumble and they fear Rumble as a competitor because of Rumble's massive growth and the way they've stolen so many of YouTube's main content creators and will continue to because people hate the climate of censorship that Google has created and crave a free speech platform that Rumble is now guaranteeing.
It's extraordinary though that they are in the middle of a federal lawsuit alleging antitrust violations where the federal judge, very rarely, it's a very rare instance where Google loses and can't get a suit against it dismissed, but in this case the judge rejected Google's motion to dismiss and allowed the Rumble lawsuit to proceed alleging antitrust violations for Google to be engaging in what seems to be exactly the kind of conduct
That is the foundation for what could be a very, very expensive lawsuit, not just in terms of what Google gets ordered to pay if they lose, but in terms of the documents that Discovery will reveal to just feed that so vindictively out of this kind of fear of competition that exactly what the antitrust laws are written to prevent and outlaw is kind of amazing.
But that shows you how Eager and willing, big tech firms are to use censorship for all kinds of reasons.
They have taken the internet, which was supposed to liberate humans from centralized state and corporate control, to free the flow of information and used it as a weapon to constrain the flow of information more than ever.
It ties so well to our first story, where Facebook and Twitter, in a completely unaccountable manner, Blocked circulation of the New York Post story, knowing that that's how most people in the United States now get their political news, through the internet.
As a way of protecting Joe Biden.
These are lawless companies that do not believe in, in fact, actively and aggressively oppose free speech and use their censorship power to promote every aspect of their agenda, financial, political, and ideological.
And we will definitely continue to report more on this as well as report on the rumble suit that I believe is very promising against Google for lots of different reasons.
And as I said, It ties not only to the story that we did tonight about the lies that were told about the New York Post reporting about Joe Biden that led to censorship, but also on Monday night we will have for you what I consider to be a special episode where we break down the key seminal hallmark cases of the 20th century from the Supreme Court that guarantee a maximum amount of free speech that defines the United States by the First Amendment
And the ways in which that is now being aggressively eroded as part of the attack on free speech overall by the West.
So we hope you will watch that show because it very much relates to these issues as well.
So that concludes our show for this evening and for this week.
As a reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday night we have our live after show on The Locals where we answer your questions, it's interactive, we take your feedback, we listen to your suggestions about who we should interview and what topics we should cover.
It's available exclusively for our local subscribers, which also gets you access to the show's transcripts and written journalism that we post there.
To join our locals community, which also supports and helps the independent journalism that we do here, simply click the join button right below the Rumble video player on this page and that will take you to the Our locals community as another reminder system update is available as well in podcast form where you can follow us on Spotify, Apple, and every major podcasting platform.
The show in podcast form airs 12 hours after it first appears live here on Rumble.
And if you rate and review each episode that helps spread the visibility of the program.
For those who've been watching, we're very appreciative.
We hope to see you back here on Monday night and every night at 7 p.m.
