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June 20, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
31:15
Will Hunter's Plea Deal Save Joe?

Today's breaking news that Hunter Biden has accepted a "slap on the wrist" plea deal on gun and tax charges has ended a nearly five year investigation into the "first son." But none of the serious charges have been addressed? Is this a way to change the subject? Also today, China in Cuba? And...did Blinken blink in China?

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Hunter Biden Pleads Guilty 00:12:48
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you today.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing well, thank you.
Good.
A lot better than Hunter Biden.
Did you read that?
I mean, they finally got him.
He went to court.
He had to do a little pleading, a little diplomacy here and there.
But he, Hunter Biden pleads guilty.
Wow.
So, boy, he saved the taxpayers' money.
They're not even going to have a trial on this, probably.
But he's guilty of some serious crimes.
Tax crimes, that's a big one.
And also, he's an ultra-liberal, I thought, but he had his own guns and lied to get them.
But anyway, it's in the news because it's a big issue.
But I tell you what, I think the big issue has disappeared all of a sudden.
You don't hear about it because I think he was doing some seriously wrong things that would have qualified for criminal activity.
And yet they were put aside.
They're not going to be part of this.
And he was able to plead guilty to minor offenses.
And so he's probably feeling better.
I imagine this will be shelved.
I don't think between now and the election that they'll get any closer to Biden, President Biden, because they've already avoided that, and they were just going to deal with Hunter.
But that's still there.
So we will see what happens.
But it's almost like a closed deal, except will it remain as a political issue, which is probably more important at this particular time because the courts are so biased, getting into a court doesn't mean that, oh, we're going to have justice.
The truth is going to come out.
But that is not the way our court system works.
So I think that people are not going to be easily swayed because it's already in the news.
Even the news that is close to being, you know, Main Street media are mentioning that some of the more serious charges were not going to be dealt with.
And I think that, well, who knows?
This might be another time for another $3 million boost to Trump's coffer.
I think that they could make a pretty strong case for politicizing this since it's not equal justice.
That's one thing for sure.
And I think this whole thing that he's being treated like everybody else is nothing more.
And I think the Republican, even independent people who are looking for the truth, well, the truth, I think, the major part of the truth that people wanted to know about has just been buried.
Yeah, it really is hard to believe that he's being treated like the average Joe on this, you know, when you look at what he had.
And let's put up that first clip.
This is how Politico is phrasing it today.
Hunter Biden reaches plea deal with feds, if you can put that up, to resolve tax issues, gun charge.
Just made a little plea deal, no big deal.
Zero Hedge wrote it up.
We can look at the next one.
This is basically the meat of what's going on here.
Hunter, 53, is now expected to plead guilty of two misdemeanor tax charges of failure to pay 2017 and 2018 combined tax liability of roughly 1.2 million.
He'll also admit to illegally possessing a weapon after his 2018 purchase of a handgun, which will likely result in a diversion program, which would result in the removal of the gun charge if the program's conditions are met.
In total, he'll likely receive two years probation for diversion conditions.
Now, you mentioned Trump in your opening statement.
It really is hard, and maybe we're biased.
I don't know.
I don't think we are.
It's hard to look at what Trump faces.
400 years in prison for a few documents to Biden for these things, as we know, the tip of the iceberg, facing just literally a slap on the wrist.
And once again, the people involved, like say with January 6th, I mean, oh, well, we had intense hearings about this, you know, but any evidence that might have given a fair balance on who did what there, that was excluded.
And people will, more and more, will become not known.
It was nothing more but a cover-up there and made use of.
But the deal that they made is something that might still the deal itself.
Well, people who are knowledgeable will know that's a negative.
They won't see that as a negative.
But maybe there's some others who just barely look at that and say, aha, he was guilty.
And oh, he didn't pay his taxes or something like that.
So there'll be some people that'll, you know, because this is big news right now, there's still a few people out here that could care less about this whole thing.
And some days I wished I could care less about it too.
But it's just the stuff that goes on where it's realized by more and more people.
This is not equal justice before the law.
It just seems so unfair because this is a brilliant businessman.
He's making $100,000 a year from Varisma.
How dare the IRS hassle him when he's just going around trying to run an honest business?
It was already stolen from the federal government, probably.
You know, I mean, looking for other charges, I can say for a fact, literally two minutes, or no, literally two seconds looking at the stuff on his laptop, you could probably find about 50 charges that would carry a lot of time.
But here's some of the reactions, and thanks to Zero Heads for finding a couple of tweets for us.
To put it in perspective, what if you and I lied on our gun application, et cetera, et cetera?
Well, you and I don't have a big old couple pounds of crack cocaine like he does, but if you try to, this is Larry O'Connor, who I believe is a right-wing talk show host.
If you try to purchase a firearm and you neglect to fill out the ever-changing paperwork or tell a lie on those forms, you will not see the same kind of mercy from the ATF, FBI, or WOJ.
Instead, you will be S-O-L.
And the problem is that he had to lie on the form.
Well, he didn't have to, but he chose to lie on the form saying, you know, hey, are you a drug user?
And he was a drug user.
He was, he was, he was, and, you know, continued to be.
And he said, no, no, I don't use that stuff.
And that's the big problem.
And actually, Katie Pavelich, who I think is another conservative activist, she has a good tweet about it too, if you can put that next one up.
She says, lying on a federal firearm background check form carries up to 10 years in prison and is a felony, but not for Hunter Biden.
So there you have that.
Well, you know, I think the winner here is probably the president.
Yeah, yeah.
Because as this is closed out, oh, it's over, he done with, he admitted to doing something wrong.
The other was dismissed because it was so unimportant that now there will be no talk about the president's participation in that.
And then once again, you've already made the comparison to how have they treated Trump on these things?
And of course, he's an easy guy to attack and criticize.
But tell you what, when they go overboard, they lose credibility.
And I think that's what's happening right now.
And people are finally saying, you know, he's a bum, but he's nothing like they claim.
And I think all these charges.
So they're going to, maybe, I'm sure before the election, there'll be another indictment.
Yeah, oh, yeah, at least.
Or several rulings.
But yeah, the amazing thing is they really don't wake up to this because they're not driven by being satisfied with just having equal justice.
Go to the court and make your point.
But they just go on and they think they can get away with it.
But fortunately, people still do wake up slowly.
And I have to reassure myself because people did wake up on the lockdown slowly.
And they better stay awake, too.
Yeah, you're right.
And I think what people are calling this is a containment strategy.
This is a way to contain the more serious charges.
And Biden can simply say, look, why do they keep hounding my son, these right-wing conspiracy theorists?
They're hounding him.
He's already admitted to his crimes.
He's already paying for his crimes.
Why can't you leave him alone?
And, you know, it may well work.
But here are the things that they're not talking about.
I'll put up this next clip because this is in the, and this is what you specifically asked me about when we started the show, before we started the show.
Some of the things that are not involved are the alleged payments.
And this is from Zero Head.
Spoiler, none of the charges involves Hunter's role as an international bagman for the Biden family, alleged, of course, which included a $10 million payment from Burisma to Hunter and Joe Biden, according to the FBI source.
And go to the next one.
Here's some further clarification of how it came to be that we're not talking about this.
The federal investigation into Hunter Biden began in 2018 and initially centered around Hunter Biden's finances related to overseas business ties and consulting work.
Over time, and I've highlighted this part, over time the international business dealings were dropped from the investigation, perhaps due to Joe Biden's alleged involvement.
And the focus shifted to Hunter's failure to report his income as well as lying on the paperwork to produce, to purchase a gun in 2018, possibly.
So these things just sort of quietly went away.
The Justice Department was asked whether they're still looking into it.
They say, yes, it's still under investigation, so don't hold your breath.
But here's what they're not talking about.
And this came out a few days ago.
This is a top Republican on the Justice Committee, I think.
If you put this next one, this is from the Daily Mail.
And this is something that's probably a lot more important than buying a gun and not paying the taxes.
Top Republican James Comer says new Biden bank records will show that the family accepted between $20 and $30 million from foreign nationals.
He's the oversight committee chair.
Sorry, I stand corrected.
But he's claiming that through this whistleblower and through their own investigations, they're seeing $20 to $30 million in their bank accounts through these different shell companies that have benefited the Bidens.
So this is the containment.
They want to contain this so they'll admit to the tax stuff, I think.
Yes, you know, maybe they can simplify this and say, oh, you're a bunch of crybabies just because Trump couldn't hire a good attorney.
But Biden got some good attorneys.
But I think there's another factor way through that whole body.
I don't think the attorneys, the attorneys probably, they were around, but the ones who were making the wheeling and dealing weren't the average attorney that goes to represent these people.
But Trump has had his trouble with attorneys and things like this.
employees.
Yeah.
Well, we're going to be ready to move on now.
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Our second segment, Dr. Paul, deals with China and the fact that, if we can put that up, the Wall Street Journal article we were talking about earlier today, which is fascinating, allegedly, China is planning a new training facility in Cuba, and it raises the prospect, according to the Wall Street Journal, of Chinese troops on America's doorstep.
That is true.
China And Taiwan Tensions 00:14:29
And I have mentioned before in this program, that's a very real year at the time when we were doing the same thing when we were contending with it in Cuba.
And that was in 1962.
The enemy got too close and some work had to be done and some negotiation.
Unfortunately, that has worked out better than some other issues.
But the understanding, though, is that this is just routine.
And we're going to lecture them.
We're going to threaten them.
We're going to posture over this.
And I kept thinking, I mentioned this to you, that they have us in a box in a way, the mainstream media, because they have conditioned, the American people, the American people now, they don't like the Chinese.
They're really hacked off at them.
So let's say we want to compare this to what we do around the world.
We do this all the time.
That point was made with the Cuban crisis in 1963, 62 and 63, is that the settlement was, okay, you caught us.
And you want me, the Russians, Soviets want to say, you have to take this out.
Okay, yeah, you take them out of Turkey.
And fortunately, Kennedy and Khrushchev worked that out.
But it was back there and they were doing it.
And the reason they were going into Cuba is because we were in Turkey.
And where are we now?
Or do we have less countries occupied than we did after World War II?
No, I'll bet you it's double or triple.
We keep adding them to it.
Of course, we've sort of have a purchase agreement with NATO.
So we sort of take care of them when they need money and guns.
And yet they have to fight the battles for us to stay out of it.
But they just don't apply the rules to everybody across the board.
This whole thing that we're yelling and screaming.
And I wonder, you know, we certainly have seen, you know, the map is that's more dramatic, but it probably could be pretty dramatic around China as well.
But the one around Iran, you know, where are we around Iran?
We have these nukes and bases all the way around.
It's totally surrounded.
And of course, that's what the Russians were annoyed about because they were concerned about it and they negotiated with the Americans all the way back to the Cold War.
American diplomats, we have no intention on doing that.
We're not going past here.
We're not going to move up to the property line.
And there was some falsehoods there, and the rules are different.
If you own the reserve currency of the world, you own most of the weapons of the world, and you have, compared to other countries, a very healthy economy and a lot of wealth.
All they needed was antagonism and a reason to hate some other country for no good reason other than to justify the continuation of our empire.
Yeah.
Well, let's look at some of the details of this for the Wall Street Journal article.
This next clip will tell us what it's all about.
This is all reported.
I think it's been denied, but China and Cuba are negotiating to establish a new joint military training facility on the island, sparking alarm in Washington that it could lead to the stationing of Chinese troops, excuse me, another security and intelligence specialist just 100 miles off Florida's coast, according to current and former U.S. officials.
You know, we've talked about it on this show for as long as we've done the show, and you've talked about it for decades.
Before, while you were in Congress and in public life, we always say the same, what if the shoe were on the other foot?
What if they did to us what we've done to them?
And I think this is an example where we're seeing the shoe possibly being on the other foot.
You know, talk about just with Ukraine, for example.
The U.S. was arming and training and equipping and sending weapons to Ukraine on the border with Russia since 2014 at least.
So you have these nine years of the U.S. doing this, and now just the announcement that maybe the Chinese are going to do something similar in Cuba, and of course, everyone flips out and goes insane.
Yes, and this will be used against our position because you guys are too soft.
But I don't think that anybody can accuse us of being soft on statism and communism and authoritarianism and all that mess.
But if we apply the same rules to one's own country, you know, it's a social risk-taking because the people get most of their noise and information from the politicians who are out spewing this type of activity.
So that is a big problem.
And I just see an increase in this by making it handicapping those who want to speak out the truth.
Hopefully we can help encourage a debate in the presidential races coming up.
This would be a good time.
Wouldn't it be pretty neat if the Republicans would sort of have a real debate among themselves on a policy?
But right now is if you don't agree, you're in big trouble.
And there's a little bit of that going on because there has been some shift.
We can't deny that.
There are a few now in Congress.
There is actually a few more than I had as allies when I was there.
There were very few.
We were so desperate we had to go see the progressives who were better than some of the Republicans.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
The other thing that this points out, though, Dr. Paul, is the failure of U.S. diplomacy on Cuba.
You know, the U.S. has basically kicked Cuba in the face for 60 years, done everything we could to try to destroy the, try to kill the leaders, all kinds of crazy stuff for 60 years.
And now, if you put up this next clip, by doing this, we've isolated Cuba.
Cuba doesn't look to the U.S. as an ally or a friend or even someone to negotiate with.
If you could put this next note, and this really underscores the failure of U.S. diplomacy, which is always one-sided.
This is from the Wall Street Journal article.
Discussions for the facility on Cuba's northern coast are at an advanced stage but not concluded.
U.S. intelligence reports suggest.
The Biden administration has contacted Cuban officials to try to forestall the deal.
Again, after 60 years of kicking them in the face, do they really think that a phone call saying, hey, guys, don't let the Chinese in, we mean it.
You think that Cuba's going to say, oh, you've been so nice to us?
Okay, that's a deal.
They're going to say, no, we want the Chinese.
We want to have a tough big brother as our ally here to protect us.
So it really is a failure of the U.S. entire U.S. approach to the rest of the world, I think.
Yeah.
But it is a big deal as far as I'm concerned.
And this is not going to be resolved with maybe sending our top diplomat.
Oh, yeah.
Maybe we just need more diplomats like I used.
I used to sort of kid and say, you know, we have an umpteen number of diplomats, a lot of them.
Why don't we ever use them?
Because I think they've lost the whole notion of what a diplomat.
A diplomat is nothing more than somebody who promotes their own set of standards and their own lives.
But that's the whole thing is the CIA to the D CIA are essentially in the embassies around the world.
I had somebody in the family that was not a close family member but was worked in an embassy.
And he verified.
He says, any embassy I've ever been in, you learn who the CIA agents are.
They have them there.
Getting information and helping us be safe.
Helping democracy.
Yeah.
Well, you mentioned real democracy.
You wrote about this week.
JFK, that was real diplomacy.
I mean, real diplomacy in 62 when he calls up Khrushchev, hey, get those missiles out of Cuba.
Khrushchev says, okay, but you've got to get those things out of Turkey.
All right, that sounds like a deal.
Let's do it.
You know, that's actual diplomacy where you give up a little bit.
But the irony of this is that the distance between Cuba and Florida is about the same as the distance between Taiwan and mainland China.
So in some ways, you can almost see that the Chinese are trolling the U.S. by saying, oh, yeah, you're going to arm and train Taiwan to fight China.
Well, we're going to go ahead and go over to Cuba and do the same thing and see how you guys like it.
I'm sure that the distance is not lost on the Chinese.
But you mentioned sending our top diplomat over to China.
Well, we did that.
We did that this week and put up, skip ahead to that tweet from Stephen Roach, which is interesting because Blinken's long delayed trip to China finally took place.
This is him speaking with the Chinese foreign minister, but he had a very short meeting.
And this is Stephen Roach who wrote by diplomatic drive-by.
Blinken and Xi met only for 35 minutes, one of the shortest high-level meetings on record.
Consecutive translation cuts the exchange in half, leaving less than 10 minutes of perfunctory speaking time.
It was a very short trip.
Blinken, as usual, looked like he had a case of indigestion, which is possible.
You never know.
But here's what happened.
If you look at the next one, this is from our friends over at Moon, Alabama.
They point out that Blinken walked out of his meeting with Xi.
It seemed like someone read him the Riot Act.
He did not look happy.
And here's what he said.
He said, the United States will not support Taiwan breaking away from China.
He said, amid a series of confusing statements by Biden on the issue.
We do not support Taiwan independence, America's top diplomat said in Beijing after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
If you remember, Biden said a few times, we're going to defend Taiwan, we're going to defend Taiwan.
The rhetoric has been escalating and escalating.
And all of a sudden, he walks out of a couple-minute meeting with Xi and says, No, we're not going to do that.
So, interesting.
We should refer to the meeting as a low-level meeting, diplomatic meeting, because they've diminished themselves as far as importance goes.
But, you know, it still should strike more Americans and ask the question, why are we over there?
You know, provoking and looking for trouble.
That's not like in the neighborhood.
It's not like the Gulf of Mexico.
But China might want the Gulf of Mexico to be like, say, the South China Sea.
And there's a lot of waterways that are very close to a lot of the United States.
We wouldn't tolerate that for a minute.
And yet, here we are.
We've done this for years, but it's way back.
You said 60 years.
It's been back as long as our country has existed that we have been involved and had a little war over it, too.
So that to me is a real pity because I think if a country had a foreign policy where the principle would be, mind our own business.
That's what we do with our neighbors at home.
You mind your own business to stay out of trouble.
And how do you stay with friends with people that you might disagree with for various reasons?
Just avoid it.
Don't try to reform everybody you run into.
That leads to trouble.
But that's what happens to an empire.
I think what we're witnessing now is the beginning of the end of the American empire, the end of the American reserve currency, the dollar reserve currency of the world.
And also the empire that's going to end will cause a lot of ramifications.
This stuff will get sorted out.
You know, if there's chaos that we hope and pray we can help, you know, cancel that out and not have it.
You can imagine if local people had been allowed just because nobody had the strength or the energy and the money to interfere in Ukraine.
Maybe the Russian-speaking Ukrainians and the others that were European-speaking people, maybe they would have gotten together.
It would be more likely because they would both have an interest.
Now, it's international, it's NATO, it's United States, it's a military-industrial complex, on and on.
And then it builds, the dissent builds.
Look at, you know, we try to explain at least where the Russians are coming from, not to identify with their policies as much as where they're coming from.
And they have every reason to say that they can justify morally that when NATO moves up to their boundaries, they're up to no good.
Yeah.
Well, the final thing out of this meeting is that if you can go to the next clip, is that, yeah, Blinken made some pronouncements, but they also, interestingly enough, the State Department updated its fact sheet on Taiwan again to reinstate a line about not supporting formal independence for the Chinese claimed democracy, democratically governed island.
So they've changed their website.
They're changing it back and forth over and over again.
So I think they really were getting the message.
Before I close out, Dr. Paul, if you're ready, unless you've got some more to go on.
I just want to mention one incident that we know about and it's been around what has happened recently.
The Chinese balloon was the big deal.
Because it floats over the United States, how many days, a week or two, we didn't do much about it.
Then finally we shoot it down and that broke off relationship.
But I think we needed two good diplomats from each country.
I think we could have solved that problem.
But that is what precipitated here four months ago and the cancellation of a high-level meeting that turned into a low-level meeting.
Yeah, exactly.
Bad News Turned Into Power 00:03:44
Well, before I close out, I'm going to mention, as usual this time of year, I'm looking on the weather channel and I see there's a tropical disturbance off the coast of Africa I mentioned yesterday coming towards us.
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We have a power grid that was designed in the 1800s.
The White House recognizes we've got a big problem.
They want to spend a few billion dollars to update our power grid.
But how long is it going to take to fix?
Who knows?
It's the government.
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And my final thing, I have two little things at the end.
First of all, again, September 2nd, Ron Paul Institute Conference in Washington, D.C. I'll have something up probably today.
The tickets will be on sale.
It's going to be a great event.
We've got some great speakers.
Actually, that's something else I'm not going to mention.
But big news for tomorrow, Dr. Paul, you and I have decided to hold our own presidential forums because we don't like what other people are doing.
So tomorrow we're going to bring, we have scheduled live for tomorrow, Vivek Ramaswani, who is a Republican candidate for the president.
He's going to join the Liberty Report.
We're going to grill him.
We're going to hear what he has to say.
And it's not an endorsement because every candidate, even Nikki Haley, you're invited.
Joe Biden, come on down.
We'll have you on the show.
We'll talk policy.
We'll talk the presidential race.
We'll have a little bit of fun doing it.
So mark your calendars.
Tomorrow live at noon Eastern time, Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswani.
We don't want to close out the opposition party because if Robert Kennedy calls up, we'd like to get on your program like he's done before.
We might just consider that one.
We'd love to have him back.
You know, people get after me sometimes because, Ron, we sort of like it that you're an optimist, but you have to be limited.
How can you be optimistic with what's going on in the world today?
Well, it's not always easy unless you look long-term.
So if you look short-term and you're thinking about tomorrow and you're thinking about Cuba and Ukraine, there are a lot of problems ahead.
But when I see bad news, and I kid Daniel a little bit about it, we see the bad news and we dwell on this.
I said, well, it is bad news.
I agree with you.
And this is so upsetting.
But just remember, there's a lot of people watching this bad news and the things that our government's doing to us.
And they have it put together and they see it overwhelming.
I said, yeah, but people are going to see this who are sort of pessimistic and maybe sort of like on lockdown.
People finally really woke up, you know, woke up to it.
So I think the bad news should be turned into something.
Search for the answer, search for truth, and then offer it out there and some of you will be interested in it.
And that, I think, is the most important thing we can do.
Searching for the truth is no easy job because it's an ongoing lifetime process.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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