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April 19, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:37:53
20220419_hunter-bidens-business-connections-to-joe-and-the-
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GOP Roadmap and Future 00:03:55
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
25 minutes over 18 months.
It's no surprise that the media continues to run cover for the Biden administration.
And we're going to get into the very latest with the president of the Government Accountability Institute, Peter Schweitzer, who's been on this from the beginning, I mean, from four years ago, and also discuss the latest on what's happening in China.
By the way, I'm wearing my lighter shades today because I'm having some light sensitivity in the wake of my LASIK.
It's not uncommon when you have dry eye like me.
So I found an happy medium on my eye approach today.
Anyway, we're going to begin the show today, however, with journalist Matt Continetti on the past, the future of the Republican Party.
And they're related.
And it's actually sort of a roadmap, he argues.
If you look at the past, it'll show you where the GOP is going and what to expect.
He has literally written the book on the right.
book is called The Right, The 100-year war for American conservatism, and it is out as of today.
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Velkommen til, Matt.
Grat å ha deg her.
Thanks for having me, Megan.
It's great to be here.
So I love this, because we always approach our lives, I think, whether it comes to the COVID pandemic, whether it comes to politics, as if we're the first people to ever be here.
Like, there's no path from which we can learn.
We're just going to have to forge our own path.
And yet, somebody like you takes the time to actually study, for example, in this case, the history of the GOP.
And you say it kind of explains exactly where the GOP is going.
And one of the most interesting things I thought from it was how you argue Trump was not an aberration.
Trump actually may have been the normal for the GOP.
Not necessarily the tweeting, but policies and his approach and what was appealing to him.
And Ronald Reagan may have been the aberration.
So let's just start with that.
You look back at 100 years, and what give us the top-line conclusion there.
Why did you reach that assertion?
Well, Megan, most histories of the American right, they begin at the end of World War II, and they culminate with the election of Ronald Reagan, or sometimes if they take the tragic view, they have a coda with Barack Obama in 2008.
What I wanted to do was I wanted to kind of widen the lens to take in a greater picture of American history and the history of the right, and also include the prehistory of the American right, what the right looked like before the Cold War, before America's victory in World War II, and take up the story basically until today.
Republican Economic Shifts 00:03:30
So my story begins in 1921 and it ends in 2021.
And when I told the story that way, I found that the Republican Party of 2020 resembles in many ways the Republican Party of 1920, especially in its attitude toward immigration, in its attitude toward international economic competition and trade, and in its attitude toward overseas entanglements and foreign intervention.
All right.
So you start way, way back with the Harding administration, then into the Coolidge administration.
And then, and the conservatives are sort of going along pushing these ideals that you talk about.
And then FDR, I mean, comes along and things change dramatically.
The pendulum shifts in the country toward progressivism for many, many years.
So how did that happen?
How were the Republicans out of power for some 20 years after Harding and Coolidge?
Well, the answer is pretty simple.
The Great Depression.
And the Great Depression really delegitimized the Republican economic record.
The Republicans of the 1920s really benefited from the public perception that their policies were responsible for the extraordinary growth of the period.
But when the Great Depression happened, that really kind of delegitimized, discredited the Republican economic policies.
And it allowed FDR to fundamentally transform the social contract in the United States and expand the size and scope of the federal government really in a way that America had never known.
And so the right in the 1930s defines itself in opposition to FDR and his New Deal.
And this...
Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
Well, so this is an interesting development because most conservatives in other countries are defenders of the established order.
That's basically what we mean when we talk about conservative.
But for America, the established order beginning with the New Deal is liberal.
And so conservatives were on the outside.
And it took a long time for conservatives to work their way back in to the center of power and the center of American politics.
Was the electorate right to blame Republican policies, conservative policies, for the Great Depression?
I don't know.
I mean, the cause of the Great Depression wasn't necessarily the fault of the banks or the stock market.
I think the studies of Milton Friedman, the great libertarian economist, pretty much proved that the Great Depression was worsened by the policies of government, by the policies of the Federal Reserve that led to the credit contraction and the banking crisis and prolonged the Great Depression.
For whatever reason, the American electorate thought that FDR was handling the Depression well, not only in his pragmatic attitude of experimentation, but also his personality.
You know, one of the lessons of this history that I wrote is that personality counts for a lot in American politics.
The quality of candidate matters a lot.
In fact, the personality of a candidate probably matters more than his or her policies.
And I think that applied to FDR.
Candidate Quality Matters 00:11:26
His charm was evident.
He had charisma, he presence.
And so the American public invested a lot in him.
And then by the end of his presidency, of course, America had entered World War II.
And the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor delegitimized the rights foreign policy of non-intervention and no overseas entanglements in the same way that the Great Depression had delegitimized its economic policy of laissez-faire.
So really by the end of the Second World War, the right is out of power and it's also on kind of the margins of intellectual and cultural life in the United States.
And so there my story starts charting how they got back in and got back into the mainstream.
Right.
And it's fascinating to talk about William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review and so on.
But before we go there, a word on personality of presidents, because there was a piece, it was yesterday, I think, in the New York Times by Charles Blow.
I mean, not exactly a conservative guy.
And he was talking about Biden's problems and this devastating Quinnipiac poll that shows his approval rating at 33%.
Maybe it's an outlier, but as he points out, there have been four major national polls released last week.
And in three of them, Biden has the lowest showing of his presidency.
So he's struggling.
There's no getting around that for the White House.
And it comes on the heels of a politico interview, as Blow also notes, with Biden's pollster, in which he's very blunt and says, there's really no one who would deny this is a really sour environment for Democrats.
And Blow is asking the question about what if the issue here is not the messaging, right?
Because the White House and the pollster, they all say, we got to do better on the messaging.
If we could just get the message out, they sent Biden on a two-city tour to bring the message to the American people.
Like, oh, wow.
Okay.
But he says, what if it's not the messaging, but the messenger?
And he makes the point, Charles Blow does, that voters have a void of emotional connection to him, that they can't cheer him on.
And if they can't cheer you, they will chide you and talks about how he's just not resonating even with the people on his side to the point that you were just making, which is even if his people like his policies, and I don't know that they do, they feel nothing for him.
Right.
If they felt more strongly about Biden, then perhaps they would kind of overlook some of the awful consequences of his policies.
I think one of the more revealing poll results in recent weeks was Gallup asked the public what their concerns are.
Of course, the number one is the economy, cost of living, the inflation.
It's devastating America.
Number two, though, was poor leadership in government.
And I think that the electorate has come to a conclusion about Joe Biden, and it is a negative one.
And the conclusion really began with our withdrawal from Afghanistan.
It's carried on through the mixed messaging on COVID during the Omicron wave.
It's gone through the inflation.
The public is not giving Biden the benefit of the doubt.
And that's because we have to remember why Biden is in the Oval Office.
He didn't win the Democratic nomination because he had a grip over a core constituency or was able to have everybody swoon over his words.
He won the Democratic nomination basically because Democratic bigwigs realized that he was the only plausible candidate to take on Trump in the general election, that the alternative was Bernie Sanders and a Sanders nomination might mean a total collapse of the Democrats.
And then he won the general election, in my view, mainly because he wasn't Donald Trump and that it wasn't a mandate he received from the public.
It was an anti-mandate.
It was don't be Donald Trump and otherwise don't do anything else.
And that's why the Republicans performed better than expected at the congressional level in order to even check Biden there.
But of course, Biden, not realizing that he received an anti-mandate, not realizing that he had the smallest margin in the House of Representatives for Democrats in 100 years, decided, you know what?
I will be FDR without the charm.
And that has not worked out well for him at all.
And not only going hard left on economic policy, but going hard left on social issues, which many believe is why he's seeing such a precipitous drop with Hispanics.
Those two issues.
Hispanics tend to be more conservative socially, and he hasn't been.
And they're getting hit by these pocketbook issues in a way they weren't under the Trump administration.
And so, you know, the White House is in a panic.
There's no question they understand what's coming their way in these midterms.
And the only real question is, do they lose the Senate and the House or just the House?
And do they even try to pivot?
You know, they tried to pivot away from COVID, but do they try to pivot away from anything else?
Right now, Matt, they're not.
Right now, there's talk in the news today.
You've seen it before, of the new plan to bring back Build Back Better, the $2 trillion additional spending plan that was already rejected because they couldn't get their own party, namely Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema, to sign on to it.
And they're going to revive it right now with record inflation.
They're going to spend more if their party allows it.
Now, this is a night of the living dead when it comes to legislation.
I don't see much of a chance for Build Back Better, precisely as you say, Megan, because of the inflation.
That was Joe Biden's main concern in December when he came out against the bill.
Inflation has gotten only worse with time.
Look, the window is closing on this Democratic majority, and I don't think they really know what to do.
And it's because they're so beholden to their progressive left-wing base that they're unable to pivot to the center.
You mentioned the Hispanic vote and the realignment of the Hispanic vote, just this epical development in American politics.
Another issue there is schools.
You know, I think we still haven't internalized the anger and frustration and grief in many cases among American parents because of the way that the schools handled COVID, the way that they continue to handle issues like masking.
And then, of course, COVID provided this moment of radical transparency into what is being taught in the schools.
And there too, parents are up in arms.
So when you think of the education issue, for example, historically, that has been to the benefit of the Democratic Party.
Not anymore, not anymore.
And so too with the economy.
You know, Democrats have often benefited from coming into office after a recession, right?
And so they get to take credit for the natural recovery of the economy after a recession.
In many ways, that's what Barack Obama did.
That's what Bill Clinton did.
Biden doesn't have that luxury because of his very policies, because of that stimulus bill he put in place a year ago, despite the warnings of Democratic economists that it would unleash inflation.
He did it anyway.
The inflation came.
And now, not only is education not a democratic advantage, the economy is no longer a democratic advantage.
And that, I think, spells victory for Republicans in November.
Well, something else has happened to the parties in this country over the past 10, 15 years.
And that is this shift in who is the party of elites.
And I don't know, maybe 15 isn't the number of years.
Maybe we go back to Bill Clinton, but you're the expert in this.
Where it used to be the Republicans were sort of the Chamber of Commerce Party, and they sort of had the working class.
They didn't care about the working class, right?
It was like they were worried more about the white shoe class and, you know, Wall Street and people who make the money and pay the paychecks.
And now that seems to have done a complete 180, you know, over the course of Bill Clinton's warming up to Wall Street and then Barack Obama's doubling down on it, not caring at all about the working class and its problems, which led to Trump and this migration of voters over to the GOP side.
And you write about this too, about this internal conflict and also coordination within the Republican Party when it comes to elites versus populists.
Can you educate us a bit on that?
Well, it's, as you say, a major theme of my book, this competition and sometimes coordination, cooperation between populists and conservative elites, intellectual elites primarily.
And it starts really at that moment where the right after World War II is delegitimized, is out of power, doesn't even have a foothold in the Republican Party.
And what the conservatives of that time in the mid-20th century discovered, Megan, was that their arguments weren't convincing the elites in our society, who were primarily liberal elites, but they were resonating with the working class, with white Americans without college degrees, with basically the descendants of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.
And so when William F. Buckley Jr. runs for mayor of New York City in 1965, he does it in order to knock off the Republican candidate, who is a liberal, a congressman named John Lindsay.
He doesn't do that.
Instead, what happens is Buckley's votes come from the Democrat.
They come from the Democratic candidate, Abe Beam.
And it's because Buckley's arguments for economic dynamism, for law and order in particular, they resonate most in the outer boroughs of New York, the same places that would go on to put Rudy Giuliani in power in the 1990s.
And a place like Staten Island, of course, voted heavily for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.
So we can see even in the mid-1960s that the working class is going to move out of the Democratic column.
And this happens with Richard Nixon and his hard hats, right?
The construction workers that were one of his most devoted constituencies.
It starts with the Reagan Democrats in 1980, and it just carries on through to the point where we have today, where the Republican Party is, I think, a populist party.
Populist Upsurge Explained 00:03:27
And it's become a unique situation for conservatives because conservatives who appreciate populism and its power also need to be able to figure out, well, how can we inject populism with our ideas and our policies in order to address some of those very real concerns that the electorate has today.
Yeah, so define populism for this, for the purposes of this discussion.
Sure.
For me, populism is a confidence in the ability of everyday people to make decisions and a lack of confidence in what the experts or the elites in our society are saying and doing and the decisions they make.
So that's how I define populism.
And when you look at the history of the United States, you find that populism is a feature, not a bug in American politics.
From the original Tea Party to today's Tea Party and the Trump movement, populism has always kind of risen up at moments in American history where elites are, the people in power are not responding to changing social and economic conditions or they're responding in the wrong way.
And so, well, I date this latest populist upsurge really toward the end of George W. Bush's administration, when George W. tried twice to pass a comprehensive immigration reform that included an amnesty for illegal immigrants residing in the country.
And that, I think, really created a fissure between conservative elites in Washington who were for the Bush bill and for the populist grassroots, which were living through what was happening on the border.
And they said that amnesty would only incentivize more border crossings, more lawbreaking.
And that distrust between the populist grassroots and the conservative elites in Washington that began, I think, circa 2006 with the fight over immigration only grew worse over time.
So how does it wind up that they elect Barack Obama out of George W. Bush, right?
I mean, there just weren't enough Republicans to whom immigration was important because you certainly wouldn't have gone that route if your main concern was immigration.
Right, right.
Well, many people stayed home when the nominee is John McCain, right?
And there's also simmering distrust and discontent with George W. Bush's Iraq War.
And that's another element of the populist upsurge as well.
By 2007, when Bush finally changed his strategy and sent more troops to Iraq to pacify the insurgency and secure the population, a lot of Americans and even many Republicans were beginning to believe that the war had been a mistake.
And so you saw kind of the phenomenon of the Ron Paul campaigns in 2008 as an expression of this discontent with the way that Republican elites were running things.
Romney and Grassroots Distrust 00:05:26
And so Barack Obama in 2008 benefited from, I think, disillusionment with the war.
He benefited from a lack of Republican enthusiasm, precisely because Republicans were not on board with the Bush administration's immigration plan.
And then, of course, he benefited from the financial crisis and Great Recession, which the Great Recession had started even earlier, but the financial crisis kicks in in September 2008.
And that was kind of all she wrote, as they say.
The Great Recession did for Obama what COVID did for Biden, right?
Exactly, right?
Yeah.
Or the Great Depression did for FDR.
Doubled the party in power.
Exactly.
And Obama, though, was able when he ran for reelection to say, well, look, unemployment's coming down.
Things are headed in the right direction.
And Mitt Romney's not really in touch with the people.
I don't know if Joe Biden will even be in a position. where he can make similar arguments in 2024.
It is interesting.
Remember when there was the big push to draft Chris Christie?
And instead it was Romney that year.
And everybody's like, oh, you know, he missed his window, which he clearly did miss his window.
But one of the things people liked about Chris Christie, this is before Donald Trump is he's a fighter.
He used to yell at the teachers' unions.
He didn't let anybody push him around.
We weren't used to seeing politicians like that.
And he was scrappy.
He knows from Jersey.
Jersey's, yeah, I like Jersey.
Everybody's known as like a fighter.
You don't mess with somebody from Jersey, you know?
And my husband always jokes because we spend our summers there and he's like, you just wanted to buy the property in Jersey so you could make the Jersey jokes.
But anyway, my point is everybody loved him, but he missed his window.
And I wonder whether in retrospect, he really would, he might have gotten it done.
He might have beat, he might have beaten Barack Obama because Mitt Romney was completely the anti-Chris Christie of that year and the anti-Trump, you know, the elite religious, you know, corporate raider, perfectly coifed.
You know, I mean, if you want to look at Republican elite, look it up in the encyclopedia.
There he is.
There's Mitt Romney.
What do you make of that?
I think there's something to it.
I think Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, really were the best that conservative elites in Washington had to offer in 2012.
Obviously, they're well-spoken, intelligent.
They had plans.
They had big ideas, but they failed.
And why did they fail?
Well, I think primarily it was because Romney did not connect with those working class voters that had been so important to successful Republican coalitions in the past.
And in particular, I think of an ad that the Obama campaign used very effectively, which was simply a testimonial from a worker who had been laid off at one of the factories, which Romney's company had turned around, right?
Basically by laying off people.
And it was direct to the camera, and he talked about how devastating that was for him and his family when he was laid off.
And in the Rust Belt, an ad like that really went a long way.
So Romney couldn't capture that, couldn't connect on that level.
And then a second reason is that there was a feeling among many conservatives and especially the populist grassroots that Romney was, you know, he played by the rules which had been rigged in the liberals' favor.
So, of course, he didn't challenge Candy Crowley during that presidential debate when the CNN anchor who was moderating the debate, Crowley, basically lied about what Barack Obama had said after the Benghazi terrorist attack.
Did he call it a terrorist attack?
And he got out an act of terror.
He got away with it.
And referring to no act of terror will be tolerated was the same as him saying, we've been attacked by terrorists.
This is a terrorist attack.
It's not the same.
Right.
And Crowley basically just shut Romney down and Romney didn't fight back.
And so there was this building sense among a lot of conservatives, and especially among the populist grassroots, that they wanted someone who would fight back against these institutions, primarily the media, that they felt were so anti-conservative, that had been captured by the progressives.
And so you see how that would attract this group to someone like Donald Trump, who didn't care what anyone thought. about anything.
And even today, you see how they're attracted to someone like Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, because he also is willing to challenge the press.
And he's also willing to challenge liberal corporate elites.
I mean, look at Disney.
He's going up against the House of House, right?
So I think there's a lot of conservatives who admire that quality.
The question is, though, does that fighting spirit repel some of the voters who are independents and who are more moderates who live in the suburbs, but who are also key to having a Republican victory?
Weekly Standard Legacy 00:06:31
You can't have one or the other.
It has to be both the populist grassroots and the suburban independent moderates.
And pulling off that trick is very difficult.
But we do know we can see, for example, Glenn Young was able to do it in Virginia of all places.
Well, and Trump did it.
I mean, Trump did it.
In 2016, he was able to.
Yes.
He won independence by about seven points in 2016, and then he lost them by double digits in 2020.
And that's the whole story right there.
There's so much.
I want to go back to that moment you referenced, you know, mid-60s and the Republican Party is asking itself now what?
And the birth of National Review and the effort to sort of fight the elite capture of all these institutions and how the Republicans did.
How well did they do?
Because that's something obviously Republicans are dealing with today on a mass scale.
I don't think you can argue they've captured any of these industries, at least as of 2022.
So what happened?
And can they be recaptured?
More with the guy who has become an expert on all of this, thanks to self-study, tons of reading, and a lifetime devoted to these causes.
In the introduction, you refer to 1150 17th Street.
And there's a reason you start here because it sort of shines a window on the effort by the right to start fighting back and trying to recapture the national narrative and these cultural institutions.
And why?
Why does 1150 17th Street give us a window into that?
Absolutely, Megan.
Well, one of the strategies that the conservatives used to fight back was to create what they called counterinstitutions.
So if the media was too liberal, we were going to have an alternative conservative media.
And talk radio is the greatest expression of this.
If the universities are captured by the radical left, we're going to have to find think tanks where right-leaning scholars can work and have a home where they can formulate their own ideas.
And so the address in Washington, 1150 17th Street, was a hub of these sorts of counterinstitutions.
It was the headquarters for many years of the American Enterprise Institute, where I work today.
And it also housed the magazine where I worked for many years, the Weekly Standard.
And in addition, it even had a small think tank also associated with the Weekly Standard called the Project for a New America Century.
So 1150 17th Street was kind of the main hub of the American right for a period of basically the turn of the 21st century and throughout the George W. Bush administration.
And it was there that I showed up for work one day in July of 2003 as a recent graduate of Columbia University and to begin a job at the Weekly Standard.
And I think it was meaningful because now today, if you go to 1150 17th Street, you see nothing.
The building was knocked down in 2016.
And those institutions that were once housed there, some have moved.
So AEI, where I work, is in another building a few blocks away.
But the Weekly Standard, for example, is no more.
It was shut down in 2018.
The world of the American right has changed in the 20 years that I've been working in Washington as a journalist and commentator.
Big time.
It's crazy to think when the Weekly Standard shut down.
I can't say it was a surprise because at that point, Bill Crystal, who's mainly associated with it, had so alienated the Republican base, the Trump-loving Republican base, he's a never-Trumper.
I mean, he's basically like a Lincoln Project guy now that, you know, just completely blew up his own audience.
Steve Hayes was also a never-Trumper, but I think more reasonable.
He never went Lincoln Project crazy.
He just was like, Trump's not my thing.
But it was held against him.
And all these guys who were on the Brett Baer Special Report Panel slowly got removed because as Trump captured the Republican Party, people didn't want to hear from the Never Trumpers all the time.
It was like, look, he won.
You know, let's keep in mind who the political enemy is.
It's not the Trump supporters within the GOP.
It's the Democrats.
And so those publications started to fall and falter.
And it wasn't, you know, you could have predicted Weekly Standard was not going to withstand the Trump era.
Well, I think that in many cases, there was a fixation on Trump, which wasn't helpful for the pundits we're talking about.
But did the Weekly Standard have to close?
I'm not so sure it had to, but it did.
Well, I mean, it could have been more like National Review, which I had Rich Lowry on my show, the Kelly file, the night they published Never Trump.
I mean, I believe that's where the phrase never Trump came from, the Never Trumpers.
But National Review, while quick to criticize Trump if they disagreed with him on various issues, once he won, started to sound more like a normal conservative publication that had its issues with him, but understood the Republicans were not the enemy on these culture wars, on these political battles, on these economic tests.
And so, you know, Charles C.W. Cook is one of my favorite commentators.
There is.
He can't stand Trump.
But I love listening to him on Trump or not Trump-related issues because he's an honest broker and he'll tell you what he really thinks and he understands who he's really fighting.
And it's not Donald Trump.
So he would criticize him, but he would understand when Donald Trump did a good thing that that was an appropriate thing to praise, right?
Not like these blinded left-wing commentators or never Trumpers who just couldn't see any good the man did.
Outsiders Seeking Solutions 00:12:58
Yeah, I think that it speaks to the change that happened not only on the right and how Trump kind of forced the issue for a lot of people, where you stood and what you were willing to defend and to and to and to overlook or to also to say that the goal was the policies and not the personality.
And it basically forced a realignment within the Republican Party and the conservative movement, made it much more populist, made it much more based on outsiders.
The people who were in the periphery of the conservative movement 25 years ago are now at the center of it, are now in charge of it.
And that also coincides with this larger trend we were talking about, which was the return in many ways of the ideas of the old right, of non-intervention, of no overseas entanglements, of insulating the American economy from global economic pressures, especially vis-a-vis China, and of course, and an attitude toward immigration, illegal immigration in particular,
that wants to secure the borders.
So the American right is a very different place than when I showed up 20 years ago in Washington.
And that's one of the reasons that I wrote this book, because I wanted to...
Not that different from the Coolidge administration.
Right.
Not that different from the Coolidge administration, which we just opened the Harding and Coolidge, which we opened the discussion on and we spend time on in the book.
So it's interesting.
We have been here before, not within our lifetime, but we as a country have seen a Republican Party that looks very much the way it looks now, at least on paper.
You asked the following question.
Is the American right the party of insiders or outsiders?
Is the right the elites dash the men and women in charge of America's political, economic, social, and cultural institutions?
Or is it the people?
And I made a note because in no, if that's the definition of the elites, the people who are in charge of our political, economic, social, and cultural institutions, then no, there's no question the right is not the elites because the right doesn't control any of those.
I mean, they've all been seated to the left.
The left has taken over.
I mean, it depends on the day, but certainly political institutions today, they control the White House, they control the Congress, the House and the Senate.
Economic policies being driven by Joe Biden.
Social.
I mean, naming a social institution that the Republicans control.
Cultural, all the university systems, not to mention it's expanded.
Media, completely controlled by the left, sports, not to mention corporate America now, more and more aligning itself with leftist causes.
If that's the definition, then the right cannot be the elites, right?
Then the American right has to be the party of outsiders slash the people.
I think that's where it is right now.
I think that's where the right is now.
It wasn't always that way.
And again, going back to the 1920s, there's one difference actually between today and the 1920s is that the right was in charge and it was self-confident and it was more than just the people at that time.
But when you look at the institutions you mentioned today, for sure, the right is locked out of them.
That's not to say that the right is completely powerless.
They don't have a majority in Washington, but there are many governors throughout the country, many states.
Yeah.
There are alternative media, right?
There's podcasts like this.
there's the Fox News channel.
There are other institutions, but you're right that they are outweighed.
The cultural mass is certainly on the progressive left.
And so I would just say that this is a situation that the right has faced throughout its history, ever since that New Deal and that transformation of American government.
The conservatives have had to find a way.
Well, how do we maneuver in this new situation?
And there have been many successes.
There have also been some failures.
I think right now the momentum is with the conservatives.
It's with the right, precisely because the larger electorate is encountering the results of progressivism and not liking what they see.
I mean, people want to have, you know, to afford their grocery bill.
They want to send their kids to good schools.
And they want to live in neighborhoods with safe streets.
And they don't have any of that now.
And so they're going to turn to the out party, which is the Republican Party.
And the question then becomes: will Republicans and conservatives have solutions that they will be able to implement and that will effectively address these major concerns of the public?
And I worry sometimes that while the right today is very good at capturing the frustration, very good at pointing out what's going wrong, I worry that they're not doing enough work to figure out what they have to do or what they're going to be able to do when they have Congress in, I believe, next year.
Well, and I mean, is your argument that they should come up with a plan to do more?
Because we've had a lot of conservative commentators on this show from all different walks of life.
Peter Schiff was just on, Economist, talking about how what do we need from government?
Nothing.
Get them out of the way.
Get them out.
The politician left or right will be part of the problem in the Reagan-esque way.
So what we need is a shrinking of government in every department.
But could that realistically happen?
Well, I mean, it's very hard, of course, in divided government, but I do think that the Republicans should be ready to say, well, this is going to be our budget.
This is what we're going to want to propose that government spend.
Not necessarily rush to have a fight over the debt ceiling, but have an alternative and say, this is what we want to do.
Because if we know one thing about the spending, it's that it's driving the inflation.
And so cut the spending in addition to kind of making sure that the Fed does its job.
But I also think there's a broader agenda that needs to be done.
How can the Republicans at the federal level give parents the tools they need to have successful education for their children?
How do we address the deaths of despair that are still devastating this country that were made worse by the pandemic, the fentanyl that's flowing over the border?
I think the Republicans need to spend more time talking about their solutions.
And in the past, as I go through my book, conservatives have had the solutions.
They had solutions to the stagflation of the 1970s.
They had solutions to the crime wave that began in the 1960s.
They had solutions to the growing welfare dependency that was also a feature of the second half of the 20th century.
So I think in some cases, they're the same solutions that we can apply today.
But I would like to see more conservatives and more Republicans talking about the solutions.
I think they will.
I think Kevin McCarthy is doing a lot of work in forming these task groups, task forces to look into policy solutions.
Because if they don't have the solutions, if they don't have an affirmative policy agenda, I think people will get frustrated very quickly and that none of these problems will be solved anytime soon.
What does your look back tell you about how the culture wars are likely to play out?
You know, right now the left is so focused on identity politics, skin color, gender, sexuality, and so on.
And the right is finally starting to push back on it.
It's gone so hard left, right?
This race essentialism, this radical trans ideology, this forcing kink on five-year-olds in their classroom as if it's somehow illuminating or beneficial to them in any way.
I don't know.
I was talking about this with somebody recently.
Have we ever gone back?
Has the pendulum ever swung hard left only to come back?
Or once it edges leftward, are we just stuck there?
And we have dissenters, but that's where we are for better or for worse.
You look around in American society today and just take a look at, let me just take one thing because it's going to make me sound like an old lady, but who cares?
Look at the nudity that's acceptable on television or at public events, right?
Look at how women walk around dressed these days.
Whether it's the Oscars or just on the street, with literally their butt cheeks hanging out wherever you go.
You can't avoid it.
I have a little boy.
I have three little kids, but one's eight.
I don't want him seeing that.
There's no avoiding.
You turn on the Super Bowl, you turn on the Oscars, you turn on anything, you're going to see raunchy, you're going to see somebody smack another actor right across.
You're going to see just the lowering of our cultural standards when it comes to class, just a sort of a genteel manner, respect for oneself and others.
What have you learned?
What, if anything, did you learn on that front?
Well, I think if we're talking about manners and mores, there hasn't been much success in kind of stopping that lowering of standards that you're discussing.
And it's caused a lot of frustration among conservatives over the years.
It's caused a lot of disillusionment and even despair about the state of America.
And I think that's a danger for the American right to become so frustrated with the condition of American society that they lose all hope in it.
They neglect to see the more positive aspects of America.
I think that on the culture wars, it depends on what issues you're talking about.
So we discussed manners and mores, and for there, there's no denying, I think, the degradation throughout American society.
But if you look at an issue, say abortion, right?
Well, the pro-life movement, which began in the aftermath of the Roe decision in 1973, is on the verge of perhaps having an amazing victory, depending on what the Supreme Court rules in the Dobbs case in June.
If you look at guns, gun rights, the transformation of the gun debate over the last 30 years, much less 60 years, is remarkable.
Americans are much more protective of their Second Amendment rights.
And whether it's concealed carry or constitutional carry, we offer much more liberty to gun owners than we have before.
If we think of the role of affirmative action, here too, there's the potential for a Supreme Court case in the next term to really roll back affirmative action.
So I do think that there are some green shoots, but I do think that there are also signs of decay and things to be worried about.
I worry about the collapse in religious attendance and religious affiliation.
I want to see that come back, and I worry that it might not for a long time.
One thing I do take from my history is that Ecclesiastes is right.
There's nothing new under the sun.
And you can find precedent for almost every fight we're having in America today.
You can find precedent for various situations and conditions in America today.
And on one hand, that means that we don't make much progress, but I'm a conservative and I don't really believe in progress anyway.
On the other hand, it means that we've been here before and we've gotten through it and we'll get through it again because this is the United States of America.
And what I worry so much about is parts of the right losing the faith in the United States of America and its constitution and its political principles.
Hunter Biden Foreign Money 00:14:42
And I think that's what need to anchor conservatives and the right now and forever.
Matt, thank you so much.
Well said.
Well written.
I'm so glad you wrote this book.
It would make a great gift to yourself or to somebody else.
I got it just for myself and I recommend you do the same.
It's called The Right and it's out today.
Matt Continetti, all the best.
Thank you.
Coming up the latest on the Hunter Biden investigation.
Will it reach the White House?
The man who's been on this from the start, Peter Schweitzer, is here next.
Since 2018, author Peter Schweitzer has been looking into the Biden family's overseas business deals.
Can you imagine what a morass that has been?
And his fortitude to even take it on, never mind, actually understand it.
No one knows more about these investigations or explains them better than Peter.
Not Ron Johnson, not Chuck Grassley.
No one.
Peter firmly believes that criminal charges are heading Hunter's way.
Peter's president of the Government Accountability Institute and author of Red Handed, How American Elites Get Right, Helping China Win.
Welcome, Peter.
Great to have you here.
Great to be with you, Megan.
Thanks so much for having me.
Okay, so I really enjoy your podcast and listening to you.
And you are very good at explaining such a dense subject matter.
It's like, I don't know how you've done it for years.
And I heard you joking recently that, you know, the good news is four years after you got onto this, the mainstream media has finally come along.
So maybe four years from now, they'll finally come along on China, right?
Which is what you put your other book on.
We could always hope, Megan, right?
We could always hope.
Yes, hope springs eternal.
So I think one of the fascinating things you've been talking about lately is, because I had Ron Johnson on the show, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.
And he, I'm like, let's talk about the tie, the evidence that Joe Biden's tied to any of this.
And it was pretty weak sauce.
You know, it was mostly opinion.
You know, he gave a few things.
You're, I think, a lot stronger on the specifics.
You know, I'm a lawyer.
I don't want opinion.
I don't want like rhetoric.
I want show me actual evidence that he knew about any of Hunter's dealings or benefited from it.
And that's where you come in.
But let me just start with a broader picture, because I know you do believe, given the New York Times reporting on this finally, the Washington Post finally coming on board, that they did that for a very good reason.
And what is that reason?
Yeah, I think the reason is that Team Biden wants to get ahead of the story.
Think about it, Megan.
We first started reporting on this in 2018, and the Biden team has ignored this story from the beginning.
And they've obscured it, or they've said that first there were no deals, then they said there were deals, but Hunter made no money.
Then they said that Hunter didn't talk to his dad about it.
Then they shifted to, well, his dad didn't make any money on it.
The bottom line is that they have ignored this story.
So suddenly, about four or five weeks ago now, the New York Times runs a piece that has the fingerprints of the Biden legal team all over it.
The big revelation there, of course, was that the laptop was real.
They admitted and acknowledged that.
But if you read the story, the story is all framed in the context of, yes, he didn't pay his taxes.
Yes, there are these other legal concerns, but Hunter has paid back the taxes that he owed.
And judges usually don't send people to jail for a very long time if they've paid their back taxes.
That to me all stinks of just getting ahead of the story.
They're commenting on it.
They're working with the New York Times on it.
And they're trying to frame it now.
The fallback position is that Hunter may have done some illegal things, including failing to pay millions of dollars in taxes, but it's going to be okay because they are messaging it accordingly.
So that to me is squarely evidence that they are very concerned that Hunter is in fact going to be indicted on some of these charges.
Much better for them if they're like, you know, he's just like you.
He may not have paid every dollar owed in tax, but don't we all hate the IRS?
And look, he made good on it.
So move along.
And you've been arguing that's not the story at all.
That is a head fake.
And we'll get into why, why you say it matters so much more than whether he paid his damn taxes or not.
Let me just show the audience the evidence of what you just said, Joe Biden's evolving story on his son's overseas roles.
And people should keep in mind, they did not just take place when Joe Biden was, quote, a private citizen in between the vice presidency and the presidency.
A lot of the China stuff goes back in Ukraine too, to when he was the sitting vice president.
And so, and if the mainstream media would do its job and cover this, everyone would know this.
But let's just talk about his evolving story because there was Biden in 2019, Joe Biden in 2019, claiming despite the fact that he had a 12 to 16 hour ride over to Asia to China with his son on Air Force 2.
Like, what did they talk about?
Oh, have you, you know, have you seen the new whatever Avengers movie?
No, he said he's never discussed Hunter's business dealings overseas.
Never.
Okay.
He said that in 2019.
Here it is.
Vice President, how many times have you ever spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings?
I've never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.
I have never discussed with my son or my brother or anyone else anything having to do with their businesses, period.
Do you stand by your statement that you did not discuss any of your son's overseas business?
Yes, I stand by that statement.
Honestly, Peter, it's like they were sitting next to each other on Air Force 2 and he's like, what are you doing here?
Hunter, who let you on board?
Why are you coming?
Yeah, why are you on this plane, Hunter, with me on Air Force 2?
Yeah, no, it's ridiculous on the surface of it.
And the problem with Hunter, with Joe Biden's denials is that Hunter Biden himself admitted to the New Yorker that he had discussed his business dealings, at least the Ukraine once with his father.
And then, Megan, you start looking at the Hunter Biden laptop and you look at the email collection from one of Hunter Biden's business partners, a guy, Evan Cooney, who went to jail, gave us access to his Gmail account, just went into the Gmail account and were able to look around.
And you find that there are numerous examples of Joe Biden as vice president of the United States at the time, meeting with Hunter Biden's business partners.
And so the question is, Megan, you know, Hunter Biden shows up in the White House with these foreign nationals from China or from Ukraine, and his father doesn't ask them who they are or why they're there.
I mean, it's absurd.
It's patently absurd.
And this is part of the problem, I think, is that the media was not on this story.
Joe Biden continually, I mean, I hate to use it, but it's true.
He continually lied about the relationships that his son had and the fact that he did not discuss them with his son.
And now we're at a point where the media is trying to play catch up, but the sitting president of the United States does have these entanglements.
His family has these financial entanglements that include some very troublesome figures in China and elsewhere.
Like everybody is a troublesome figure.
You've talked about that and written about that too.
Everyone around Hunter Biden is a troublesome figure.
I know you guys played on your podcast the game criminal or spy, right?
Was that it?
Criminal or spy?
Right, you're right, right.
Exactly.
And yeah, I mean, it just, you look at the China deals and think about this in the context of the Cold War, Megan.
I'm certainly old enough to remember the Cold War.
And imagine if Jimmy Carter's family or Ronald Reagan's family had done business deals with Russian businessmen linked to the KGB.
I mean, there'd be alarm bells going off everywhere.
If you look at the deals that we know that Hunter Biden and the Biden family got based on the laptop, based on the material that Senator Johnson's committee got from the Treasury Department, you know, it shows the actual transference of money.
You're looking at $31 million.
But the real troublesome factor is not just the money.
Who made those deals happen?
Or as my kids would say, who made it rain for the Bidens in China?
And it becomes very clear, these were not just random deals that Hunter stumbled on in Shanghai or Beijing.
There are four businessmen that feature prominently in the email.
And when you look at those businessmen, who they are, you look at public source information in China, in Hong Kong, and in the United States, you find out that all four of those businessmen in China who made the Biden deals happen have links to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence.
That's not a random act.
That indicates to me that this was an effort by Beijing in what they call elite capture.
They're trying to forge these financial bonds with prominent American politicians, including the Bidens.
And once they form that bond, it gives them leverage.
And those politicians end up doing a lot of things that Beijing wants because of that leverage.
Okay, so we're going to get into all that because it's fascinating.
But before we leave the Joe Biden denials, lies, as you say, I've never discussed the Hunter business deals.
No one believes that.
Then flash forward to the 2020, one of the 2020 debates.
And he couldn't even get his messaging straight there.
First, he claimed it had changed from I've never discussed it to, well, I have never taken a penny.
I mean, as from, look at me, I'm fine.
I'm clean.
Here's that.
Soundbite four.
I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life.
I have not taken a single penny from any country whatsoever.
Okay, so then we went back to see, well, what did he say about Hunter?
And the lies continued.
Listen to what he said about Hunter, 2020 debate.
My son has not made money in terms of this thing about, what are you talking about?
China.
I have not had it.
The only guy made money from China is this guy.
He's the only one.
Nobody else has made money from China.
My son has not made money from China.
Let's start with that one.
Yeah, the money doesn't lie.
This is, I think, the importance of what Senator Johnson's committee did because he has subpoena power and he used it.
And by the way, he deserves a lot of credit.
This is kind of a thankless job in D.C. Nobody likes to pursue these kinds of issues because they're afraid it's going to blow back on somebody on their own side.
But what they showed very clearly is based on the U.S. Treasury Department suspicious activity reports, which was money going to Hunter Biden's account, is that he was taking in millions of dollars from Chinese interests.
So Joe Biden is flat out lying when he says that.
When was Hunter taking in the millions from China?
Well, we know based on the SARS that they started coming in 2016, 2017, and 2018.
He also had a deal in place on that famous ride on Air Force 2 in December 2013.
He was given a 10% ownership stake in a Chinese financial management company that was funded by the Chinese government.
We know that stake was worth $20 million.
Now, he sold that stake in 2021 after his father became president, but that's him receiving money in compensation as well.
And here's the other thing, Megan.
When Joe Biden says, I've never taken a dime of foreign money in a legal way, that's technically true, but he's also being deceptive here because what the emails show is that Hunter Biden was taking foreign money and Hunter Biden was paying some of his father's bills while he was vice president of the United States.
He was paying some monthly bills and he was also paying for things like renovations on his home in Delaware.
So he may not have directly taken foreign money, but he was a beneficiary, a direct beneficiary of foreign money that his son was receiving while he was vice president of the United States.
So this is fascinating because you gleaned that, yes, in part from what Ron Johnson got, but also from the laptop, the laptop in which the press had absolutely no interest other than to tell us to look away, to shield our eyes.
It would be suppressed on Twitter, any discussion of it.
And had the media been doing its job prior to the election, they would have seen what you've seen on the laptop, which proves there is a connection between the money Hunter's taking in and the way Joe Biden, the man who wanted to be president and won the election, was living.
Who was paying his bills?
Was it dirty money?
Was it money from China?
Was it money meant to exert influence?
So walk us through, you just referenced them in passing, but like what's on there that suggests Biden, the elder, was benefiting from the monies Hunter was taking in?
Well, Megan, it comes in a couple of levels.
First of all, there are some of the comments that Hunter makes.
There's a message exchange that he has with his daughter.
His daughter at the time is in her early 20s and she's asking her father for money.
Most parents are experiencing this when they have kids that age.
And Hunter says to him, you know, I don't have a lot of money to send you right now, but don't worry, when you get older, I'm not going to do to you what Pop, meaning Joe Biden, has me do, which is to give me, give him half of my paycheck.
That's a pretty blunt statement.
It's probably a little bit of hyperbole, but there's evidence to show that that's actually true.
I don't know that he's actually giving him half of his paycheck, but we know that there are monthly bills that he is paying.
It's clear in the emails.
And we know that there are renovations done to the home in Delaware.
What we've been able to calculate, Megan, based on sort of very explicit, non-cryptic financial transactions that you're talking about, tens of thousands of dollars that we can confirm.
There's undoubtedly more.
Verified Ukraine China Records 00:15:07
The emails also indicate that Joe and Hunter Biden, again, while Joe Biden is vice president of the United States, had a joint bank account.
And the man that is handling Joe Biden's bank account, finances, taxes, et cetera, is a guy named Eric Schwarren, who is who?
He's Hunter Biden's business partner.
So you've got this merging of financial interests that's taking place.
And of course, let's remember also, Megan, that Hunter Biden's taking in money from China.
He takes about 2 million of that and sends that to James Biden, who is Joe Biden's brother.
We don't know if James Biden is also paying some of Joe Biden's bills.
So this is crying out for attention.
It is illegal, by the way, fundamentally illegal according to federal law for a politician to have their lifestyle subsidized by family members.
They can buy them the occasional birthday gift or Christmas gift, but you cannot be paying their monthly bills with your business.
That is flat out illegal.
And that's what the Bidens were engaging in.
Yeah, because for this very reason, I mean, in part, they don't want foreign adversaries trying to curry favor with or get blackmail info on a sitting politician through the family member, right?
And that's exactly what we have to worry about here.
By the way, what an ingrate Hunter Biden is.
He should give half of his money over.
I really discussed a lot, but not a penny of that would have originated with him if it hadn't been for the old man.
Well, that is absolutely true.
And by the way, let me just say, you know, when the media says, oh, well, we couldn't verify the laptop, they could have verified the laptop.
They chose not to.
I mean, the New York Post, of course, brought in forensic scientists that showed that the laptop was accurate and real.
When we got the laptop, Megan, what we did is we took the laptop and we measured it up against existing bodies of information that we knew were true.
So for example, Senator Johnson's committee, at about the same time the laptop became public, released Hunter Biden's Secret Service travel records, which of course are secret.
Only the Secret Service had them at the time.
We said, well, we wonder, does the Hunter Biden laptop actually match what the Secret Service is telling us?
So when the laptop says, you know, Hunter's in Dubai or going to Dubai or came from Dubai, is that actually reflected in the Secret Service travel records?
It lined up 100%.
So in other words, you can't fake that or make that up.
Same thing with the financial transactions that Senator Johnson's committee, we looked at the laptop.
When the laptop said, you know, $5 million was wired by Mr. Zhao in Beijing to Hunter Biden.
Sure enough, it shows up on the SARS.
So the point is they could have done this.
We did it.
They chose not to.
It was an active choice they made because they did not want this story to come out.
And you're talking about there.
You're not talking about like daily rags.
You're talking about 60 minutes, Leslie Stahl directly to the sitting president.
It can't be verified.
Trump's saying, what do you mean it can't be verified?
Yes, it can be verified.
She was just too lazy or disinterested or more accurately, interested in the outcome of the election going her way to do it.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, the same.
These are the country's most revered, respected news organizations who this is why people say the election was rigged.
I mean, there was a massive story brewing in that laptop.
It wasn't Russian disinformation and the media worked collectively to suppress all of it.
It's not just Hunter's a loser that we knew.
It's so much bigger than that.
So let me ask you there's so much to get through.
Can you give us, and I know you're so neck deep in it, but can you give us an overview?
Because I know it's Ukraine, it's China, it's Russia.
What Hunter was doing in each place.
And let's start with what I think is the easiest, which is Russia has to do with the mayor of Moscow's widow, who's herself an oligarch worth over a billion bucks.
And yes, I heard it alleged she gave him $3.5 million, Hunter's organization, his corporation.
They never give it to him directly.
And then they denied that.
The Biden team denied that, but that appears to be true.
And in addition to that, you mentioned it earlier, but you found papers suggesting he may have been somehow laundering.
Maybe that's too strong a term.
Tens of millions for this woman.
The connection in Russia may be a lot deeper than was first reported.
Yeah, that's right, Megan.
I mean, let's remember this grand jury that's meeting in Delaware is looking at Hunter Biden on tax evasion.
They're also said to be investigating money laundering.
And this is very interesting because if you look at the trial of Hunter Biden's business partner, Devin Archer, that was held in 2016, there was a lot of corporate records and information that came out from that trial.
We had a researcher there that pulled all those records.
And one of the things that shows is this company, Burnham Asset Management, that Hunter Biden and Devin Archer co-founded together.
This is where the $3.5 million was wired by Yelena Baturina.
Yelena Batarina is the ex-wife of the former mayor of Moscow.
Our State Department under Barack Obama declared that she has links to organized crime.
So, I mean, this is not, you know, a typical ordinary businesswoman.
But these records in the court trial, according to Burnham, you have Devin Archer saying that they are handling, in his words, handling hundreds of millions of dollars for Yelena Boturina.
That's in the corporate records.
Now, you know, is he lying?
I mean, we don't know, but these are the corporate records of the company.
We also know as it relates to Russia in the emails that Hunter Biden was seeking to do business with other pro-Putin oligarchs.
Oleg Daripaska, he reached out to him and said, hey, we would love to do business together.
So the point is, and I try to make this point rich large, when Team Biden says, well, Hunter is an international businessman, he's not doing business in London or Tokyo or Seoul, South Korea.
He is going to the most corrupt far reaches of the planet, where, by the way, his father has enormous sway on foreign policy, places like Russia, Ukraine, and China.
And let's remember under Barack Obama, President Obama anointed explicitly and publicly Joe Biden as the point person on U.S. policy towards Ukraine and China.
That is not a coincidence.
And before we get to the dealings in Ukraine and China, there's a reason for that.
There's a reason why Hunter was suddenly a cause celeb in Ukraine, in Russia, in China.
And I've heard you make this point too, that there are a lot of legitimate business deals to be had with foreign companies and with foreign executives from foreign countries.
However, there's a reason that all of the ones Hunter was involved in were so sketchy.
What is it?
Yeah.
Yeah, they're so sketchy because they are either linked to organized crime, corrupt foreign oligarchs or foreign intelligence services.
And all you have to look at, Megan, is again, they're people, American businessmen go around the world.
They're doing deals all the time.
They bring something to the table.
Hunter Biden and the Biden family brings nothing to the table other than Joe Biden and Joe Biden's position of political power.
So in these emails, whether it's Ukraine, China, or Russia, you never see a discussion of, frankly, legitimate business services that they're going to provide.
They're not bringing any expertise.
They're not bringing any of their own capital to these deals.
They're basically taking this foreign money and talking about the fact that Joe Biden is at some time vice president of the United States or maybe president of the United States at some future time.
So what they're selling is Joe Biden.
Exactly right.
Because you can get legitimate access if you're, you know, some respected foreign bank through the front door.
You don't have to go through the back door.
You don't have to deal with Hunter Biden, the loser kid, who everybody knew is addicted to drugs and prostitutes and all sorts of problems.
They did that because that was a potential opening to get access to, quote, the big guy, and then even better possibly to get financial leverage over the big guy.
I mean, what a dream for the Chinese if you can get the son taking your money and then giving it to the dad.
I mean, that's a dream while he's the sitting vice president or possibly about to run for president, which is in fact what happened, that he was doing this stuff while he was gearing up to run for president, and then he would win.
So we need to know what leverage, if any, do they have over him?
Yeah, they have enormous leverage.
And part of that is because we know several things about Hunter's relationship with his dad.
One is they're very close, and I think that's very admirable in a lot of respects.
But that means Joe Biden really cares about his son and his reputation and his standing.
That's part of where the leverage comes from for Beijing.
The second part of it is that Joe and Hunter Biden are very close in terms of how they spend time together.
Hunter Biden was on Air Force II a lot when Joe Biden was vice president of the United States.
He showed up at critical times.
They discuss things in the laptop in a very detailed and intimate level.
That's another form of leverage.
And the third form of leverage is these deals stink and they look shady.
People are wiring money to Hunter Biden.
There's one individual that sends $5 million to one of Hunter's businesses.
And the entire email exchange is Hunter's business partners saying he doesn't want to do deals with us.
He only wants to do deals with you and with your family.
So all three of those give Beijing enormous leverage over the Biden family.
And when you add to that fact that these businessmen are linked to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence, that's what should set off the alarm bells everywhere.
One guy, for example, who Hunter calls the super chairman in the emails, he says at one point to a friend, I don't believe in the lottery anymore, but I believe in the super chairman.
And the super chairman arranges a $20 million deal for Hunter.
Well, as he's arranging that deal for Hunter Biden, he is at the exact same time business partners with the Vice Minister for State Security, which runs the entire spy apparatus of China.
And this gentleman is responsible for foreign recruitment, for recruiting foreign nationals to spy on behalf of China.
That's the kind of people that Hunter Biden is openly and gladly dealing with in China to collect millions of dollars.
And that to me is the strongest evidence that Hunter Biden is in fact compromised and Beijing has some leverage over his father.
And just on the timeline to clarify, for sure, the Ukrainian stuff was happening when Joe Biden was the sitting vice president.
When did the Russia stuff happen with the Moscow mayor's ex-wife, billionaire oligarch, ex-wife tied to Moss?
I mean, it's like so crazy.
When was that?
Yeah, it all began when Joe Biden was vice president of the United States.
So Yelena Bacherina, those discussions started in 2013, 2014.
Those deals started getting consummated in 2015.
The money flow started in 2016.
The China deal is the same way.
Hunter Biden in 2011, 2012 starts showing up in Beijing, China, meeting the equivalents of the Treasury Secretary in Washington, the head of JP Morgan, the head of Citibank, the head of Goldman Sachs.
That's when Hunter Biden started cultivating and developing those relationships.
And those deals started happening in late 2013.
So this all happened when he was vice president.
The one deal with China that happened after Joe Biden left the vice presidency was the one with CEFC, where there's the reference to 10% for the big guy.
Those discussions started when Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, but that deal was consummated in 2017, shortly after he left the vice presidency.
The Moscow mayor's ex-wife, I remembered this from a second.
Yeah, I'm just reading.
Okay.
From the debate, the presidential debate that Chris Wallace hosted between Biden and Trump, and Trump raised it.
Trump said, my team just pulled the transcript up for me.
He says, also, while we're at it, why is it just out of curiosity that the mayor of Moscow's wife gave your son $3.5 million?
Joe Biden, that is not true.
Donald Trump, what did he do to deserve it?
What did he do, Vice President Joe Biden?
None of that is true.
And there's Chris Wallace jumping in, telling Trump to let Biden answer the other question, the back and forth and so on, and not trying to get an answer to that question.
Wouldn't that have been nice?
He didn't.
So neither Hunter Biden nor any entity in which Hunter Biden has a financial or controlling interest received $3.5 million from this woman.
Are you saying that on the record?
I mean, I would have loved to have heard that follow-up, but he's already denied it.
He's denied it and it's not true.
His denial is false.
Yeah, no, that's right.
And the presumption in all of these instances was in favor of the Bidens.
There was never a journalist that was prepared to call them out based on documentary evidence.
I mean, here's the thing that's so shocking.
In the case of the $3.5 million from Yelena Bajorina, that didn't come from the laptop.
That didn't come from Russian disinformation, as everybody alleged.
Where did it come from?
It came from the United States Treasury Department, which flagged that money being transferred from a sketchy source to Hunter Biden's firm.
And the reason it was flagged, it was a suspicious activity report is precisely because this foreign money source is deemed to be either linked to organized crime, linked to some sort of criminal activity, or to be highly questionable of some nature.
And yet Chris Wallace could have simply asked that.
He could have said, but wait a minute, there's a Treasury Department report that says $3.5 million came from this source to your son.
What was the purpose of that money?
But Chris Wallace, of course, didn't ask it.
Can you imagine if there was a $3.5 million transfer to Donald Trump Jr., to Eric Trump?
Cell Phone Dossier Details 00:15:18
I mean, the fact that this meet, it just shows you everything that they spent two years lying to us about a fake, a made-up Russia gate investigation, you know, trying to tie Donald Trump to the Russians, made up, originating with Hillary Clinton and her campaign.
And then this, where it shows an actual potential compromise for the sitting son, for the son of the man who was vice president and wants to be president.
And they don't care at all.
They won't even, they tamp it down when it's asked at a presidential debate.
And they're not even the one who raised it.
Yeah.
Now, and here's the thing.
Let's really put this in stark form, Megan, because you raise a crucial point here.
If you look at Russia Gate, the entire thing was based on this anonymous sourced dossier that was put together by Christopher Steele.
We know now who paid for it.
We know the origin of it.
But just think of it from a journalistic standpoint.
There was no sourcing.
There were no documents.
They didn't name who these anonymous people were claiming all this stuff about Donald Trump and his activities.
So it's in terms of something you can use journalistically or in terms of investigation, it's a zero.
It's a nothing.
And yet they became so obsessed and enamored with this in the media and with certain government organs.
This became the obsession for a couple of years.
And I have to say, when they first mentioned the RussiGate stuff, you know, about Donald Trump, I was one of those people that say, we have to look at this.
The charges are so serious.
Of course.
But that was all they had it based on.
So anonymous sources, nothing to it.
This one dossier, that was it.
Contrast that with what you have on the Bidens.
Just objectively speaking, you actually have money transfers.
You didn't have money transfers with the Steel dossier.
You had speculation.
You actually have millions of dollars that our Treasury Department says went from these foreign sources to Hunter Biden and Hunter Biden-connected businesses.
That's simply a fact.
You've got laptops that indicate conversations, off-the-book meetings set up with Hunter Biden business partners with his father.
You didn't have any of that with the Steel dossier.
So it's overwhelming how it was tilted in one side, but they embraced one that had no evidence and they reject the other one that has all kinds of granular evidence.
The dereliction is so patent and it matters.
It does matter.
Peter says that one of the aspects of this story that the media is missing is, as I mentioned at the top, this isn't about tax evasion.
It's about actually China manipulating the son of a sitting politician, right?
Once the vice president, now the president, to its advantage and Hunter Biden willingly going along to help a foreign adversary in ways that may be to the detriment of the United States.
That's serious, and we're going to get into it right after this.
All right, so we touched on Russia and what Hunter was doing there.
And on China, you mentioned this CEFC, which is this energy company that he was completely tied to through his own corporate entities.
That was when Joe Biden was private citizen Joe Biden.
But as you point out, his dealings with China well predated that.
And that's an important piece of the story that I hadn't even been focused on.
So can you give us an overview of just how tied Hunter Biden was to China outside of the CEFC thing where everybody involved is like has either been disappeared or has been charged, including on his side.
I mean, like the Chinese officials are no longer around his side, people have gone to jail.
You know, it's the height of sketch, or as my 11-year-old daughter would say, sussy baka.
It's sussy baka here.
Yeah, she needs to be doing an analysis.
I think that's a pretty good assessment of what's going on here.
Yeah, I mean, Hunter Biden's dealings in China began in 2011, 2012.
As best we've been able to find, his first deal was secured in 2013.
That's when he was given an ownership stake and a board seat in a investment firm called BHR.
BHR is entirely funded by the Chinese government.
It was a very special fund at the time.
It got a special status in the Shanghai free trade zone that no other firm had on the planet.
And it started making all kinds of deals that advance Chinese interests.
So, for example, Hunter Biden's firm, BHR, took a early anchor investment stake in a Chinese company called CGN, China General Nuclear.
CGN is an atomic power company, as the name implies.
The problem is about a year after Hunter Biden's firm invests in it, the FBI charges CGN and senior executives with stealing nuclear secrets in the United States.
Oh, great.
And this makes yeah, this kind of fits the pattern.
I mean, the other investments they make, they go in and they buy an American manufacturing company called Hennegas that produces dual-use technologies that have both civilian and military application.
They invest in mining companies that help China acquire precious minerals that they are trying to get at the expense of the United States.
So this is not just some sort of random electronics firm in China.
This is an investment firm where Hunter Biden sits on the board that is making investments advancing Chinese state interests.
Then you also have another, that's about a $20 million deal.
Then you have another $5 million deal involving Hunter's firm Burnham, where $5 million is wired by a gentleman named Mr. Zhao to Hunter's firm.
What's interesting is that money, Megan, is wired from an account that Mr. Zhao has a business in.
That business, his business partner is the family of the former Minister of State Security, which is the guy that runs not just the CIA of China, the FBI, the NSA, everything.
So that gentleman is wiring $5 million to Hunter Biden.
And those are the beginning of the China deals that Hunter Biden secures in Beijing.
And as we've seen, some of that money is being used to subsidize his father's lifestyle while he's vice president of the United States.
Right.
And I mean, we saw the email later when Joe Biden is, quote, private citizen Joe Biden, but he's about to run for president, 10% to the big guy.
But even back then, you know, you referenced the email to his daughter.
I've been paying half my salary to the dad.
And I know this is a smaller item, but it's you have the proof in black and white of the cell phone bills, right?
That he was paying Joe Biden's cell phone bills, which is a little weird and had been doing it for years and years and years.
And it only stopped, I guess, in that period where Joe Biden went into private citizen mode and then he started to pay for Hunters.
But like that's in black and white that we know that he was doing that.
He was paying Joe's cell phone bills.
Yeah, and that's kind of weird, Megan, on a couple of levels.
First, the bill is $320 a month, which is pretty big for a cell phone bill.
It indicates to me that he's got the ability to receive cell phone calls from around the world.
That bill is being paid by Hunter's business, by his firm.
And you have to ask the question, why does the vice president of the United States need a separate phone that is funded by his son's business?
And to my mind, it's probably because that was their direct means of communication.
And we know based on the laptops that there were meetings, that Joe Biden had meetings in the Obama White House with business people that Hunter was either doing business with or Hunter wanted to do business with.
These were individuals from Ukraine and also from China that those individuals say they met with Joe Biden in the White House.
But when you look at the official White House visitor logs, those meetings don't show up.
So they were making efforts to have off the books meetings in the White House with Hunter Biden's business partners.
That reeks of cover up, if you ask me.
Then that seemed to happen repeatedly with that, with the meetings happening when Joe Biden was in the White House and then suddenly they weren't there.
I'm just looking at my outline here in 2011.
Devin Archer, Hunter's business partner, let's see, was able or Hunter, Devin or Hunter, able to deliver 30 members of the Chinese Entrepreneurs Club.
And they visited the White House on November 14th, 2011, according to White House visitor logs.
But these logs fail to disclose precisely with whom those Chinese entrepreneurs met.
Joe Biden himself, right?
This is from you.
Then we get, let's see, then of course there was 2015.
Hunter Biden invites a bevy of foreign oligarchs, including the former mayor of Moscow, Yuri Lushkovs and his billionaire wife, who you mentioned, to dinner at Cafe Milano in Washington, D.C. Great restaurant.
You should go there if you go through D.C.
The Russians did not wind up attending, but others, oligarchs from Kazakh did and the Ukrainians did.
And they were able to meet with Vice President Joe Biden in the secluded garden room.
He go on to say, as with other meetings with Hunter Biden's foreign business associations, Joe Biden conveniently did not disclose the garden room meeting on his official schedule.
And on it goes.
So it's, and then when caught, because he was caught, and this doesn't even touch on the Ukrainian burisma visit to the White House, which he also didn't put in the White House visitor log, Joe Biden.
And when caught, the White House just said, oh, we don't know about that meeting.
That wasn't in the log.
So they've been lying to where they're gaslighting us.
They really are.
And, you know, honestly, you have to kind of wonder, Megan.
I mean, you've been in journalism for a long time.
You know a lot of people in journalism.
It's kind of a horrible case of kind of spousal abuse where the Bidens keep continuously lying and abusing the media.
And you wonder when are they going to kind of stand up and say, we're tired of this.
We're tired of them making us look like fools, lying to us, changing their stories.
And we just kind of happily go along.
I do feel like it's maybe starting to turn a little bit.
And I think part of that is because the New York Times is now proclaimed from on high, the laptop is real, even though it's been known for a couple of years.
But I also think within the Democratic Party establishment, and let's face it, a lot of these media figures have at least social relationships with people in the Democratic Party establishment.
I think there's increasing acceptance of the fact that Joe Biden is weighing down the Democratic Party, weighing down the ticket.
He's probably not going to be the guy at the top of the ticket in 2024.
And I think there are moves to basically jettison him, to kick him to the side.
You think so?
And that's why I think, yes, I do.
I really think you're going to start seeing that his polling numbers are horrible.
Wait, but let me ask you about it.
Okay.
Because I was asked about this recently by my pal Dan Wooden over on GB News.
And there was a think piece about whether this is all really an effort to get rid of him because he's terrible in terms of the polls.
Like when 33% approval rating, you don't win reelection at that.
But I didn't believe it.
I didn't believe that this is an effort by the Times and the Post to start laying the groundwork to get rid of him because, and I've heard you talk about this too.
The pieces were, they were, they were puff pieces for him.
It was like, let's break this so we can be on record with a laptop because we know an indictment's coming, but in the gentlest way possible for Joe Biden.
And I mean, both of them bent over backwards saying, no connection to Joe Biden, no benefit to him.
This is the loser son.
And that's my word.
I didn't say that.
But, you know, and like you pointed out before, is tax evasion.
You know, so I was like, it doesn't read to me like the beginning of a let's oust Joe Biden campaign.
It reads to me like Joe Biden's using the media to distance himself from his son's nefarious dealings because they all know an indictment's likely to come.
Yeah, I mean, you certainly could be right about that.
The stories have not been harsh.
They've not been critical, but they're starting to actually cover them.
I mean, you had the Washington Post run the story on, you know, shocking revelation, the Biden's link to Chinese energy deal.
They ran this a couple of weeks ago, even though the New York Post had run that story in 2020.
There starts to be a sort of circling and understanding that there's probably going to be some issues here.
And I think a lot of it's going to come down, Megan, to what happens with this grand jury.
I still think one of the great things about our system, and there are many, is the fact that we have a jury of our peers and there is a group of regular Americans in Delaware who have been hearing all of this material involving Hunter Biden and the Biden family.
And we know based on some leaked information that the jurors asked at one point who actually is the big guy in these emails.
So it's going to be very interesting to see what this grand jury comes back with.
They're going to make a recommendation and then the prosecutor is going to decide in consultation with the Department of Justice.
And we know how political that is.
But if the grand jury were to come back and say, we see tax evasion, we see money laundering, we see political corruption, and or we see that he failed to file as a foreign agent.
He's doing all of these lobbying-like activities.
That's what they got Manaford on.
Exactly what they got Manaford on.
If the grand jury comes back with that, it's going to be really hard to squeeze that toothpaste back in the tube.
Merrick Garland's going to have, I think, a real hard time justifying, you know, copying some deal with Hunter Biden.
So we'll see.
But I have a lot of faith in our judicial system and with the grit and the common sense of average Americans.
And it's going to be interesting to see what this grand jury has to say.
Well, Joe Biden couldn't put an end to this prosecution being done, not prosecution, but investigation right now before the grand jury being done by this U.S. attorney in Delaware because it would have made him look terrible.
I mean, it would have been shocking for him to pull this guy.
And so now he's going to be stuck with the result because we're going to find out one way or the other.
It's been going on for a long time, but we are going to find out one way or the other what the guy's conclusions are.
We haven't yet touched on Ukraine.
I've been dying to ask you a question.
Massive Conflict of Interest 00:03:11
We now know that Hunter was getting 50 grand a month from Burisma.
He had no oil and gas expertise, but that was the kind of company on whose board he was sitting.
And I know others have made the link.
I've heard you make the link about then Joe Biden goes and fires this prosecutor who's looking into Burisma among other corporations and says it's because this guy's bad and we don't believe he's going to clean up anything.
We think he's corrupt.
But I've heard you say, oh, it's too coincidental.
It happened like he fired this guy and basically protected Burisma right after Hunter gets all these windfalls from the company.
But others have said, like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the EU, they were all complaining about this guy.
So doesn't that undermine, I'm with you, I get that he was getting, this is Grift, the 50 grand.
But tying to what Joe Biden did to the prosecutor, I'm not convinced because not all those entities would have had an interest in covering up for Hunter or making sure Hunter's money continued to flow to Hunter and possibly slash Joe.
No, you're right.
I mean, look, we know that the prosecutor in question was not a good, clean prosecutor.
He was a corrupt prosecutor.
That's absolutely true.
We also know that he was at the time, and there's documentary evidence for this, he was at the time investigating Burisma, which is the firm where Hunter Biden was on the board of directors.
So those two facts are, you know, clear.
Do we know the ultimate motive as to why Joe Biden fired the prosecutor?
No.
But to me, it's pretty clear Joe Biden should not have been making those kinds of decisions in the first place.
You know, imagine the context in the United States.
You can't have a powerful politician fire a prosecutor, even if there's legitimate grounds for doing so.
If that prosecutor is investigating the politician's son, it's a massive conflict of interest.
It looks bad.
So I agree with you.
We don't have definitive proof that they were linked.
There were other reasons to get rid of him.
But the fact that Joe Biden so brazenly, in a number of cases, Ukraine, Russia, and China, is involving himself in direct decisions that involve companies and entities and business partners linked to his son shows to me that he does not take conflict of interest and these kinds of provisions seriously.
And as a president or vice president, he's required to.
Yeah.
For what it's worth, the Wall Street Journal says by the time this prosecutor left office, Shokin is his name, he was no longer pursuing the burisma investigation.
But we don't know the facts.
I mean, look, we've seen that out of Ukraine these days.
The disinformation, of course, the officials there have been lying to us and will continue to lie to us.
That's not in any way a commentary on the sadness of what's happening to the Ukrainian people.
I'm just saying you can't, you couldn't trust the Ukrainian officials before.
You can't trust them now.
We're doing our best to piece together what actually happened between those officials and the son of our sitting president.
Subscribe for Tomorrow's Agenda 00:01:35
And we're being given the runaround by them and by our officials.
Thanks to people like Peter, we're cobbling together the story, but it would be nice if the rest of the media would help.
They're just barely starting to.
We've got the big toe in the Peter Schweitzer waters, which is something.
Peter, thank you so much.
Thanks, Megan.
I enjoyed it.
All the best.
Quick programming note for you before we go.
Some of our favorites are coming back this week.
The fifth column guys will be here on Thursday.
So much to get to.
And my pal, Stephen Crowder, love talking to him.
He's one of a kind.
He'll be here on Friday.
Plus, did you know that March had more arrests at the southern border than any other month of the Biden presidency?
Probably not, because the media is barely covering it.
We're going to have more on that tomorrow.
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