The Tucker Carlson Show - Tucker Asks Hunter Biden’s Former Business Partner: How Are the Biden’s So Rich?
Aired: 2023-11-26
Duration: 11:51


=== Billion Dollar Bet (05:24) ===

[00:00:00]  The case was that Shokin there was all this pressure to fire Shokin from this, you know, the larger community, and then he was fired, and then somehow Burisma was let off the hook.
[00:00:09]  I mean, that's that's what the story was.
[00:00:12]  And Joe Biden, of course, was the driving force behind his firing.
[00:00:15]  Yeah, he was involved in that.
[00:00:17]  There's obviously video-involved.
[00:00:19]  I mean, Biden bragged at Council on Foreign Relations, you know, they had a billion dollars coming from IMF, and I said, if you don't fire this man, you're not getting a billion dollars.
[00:00:27]  Right, right.
[00:00:29]  But it's, it's, you know, I think on this one, it's, it's, it certainly wasn't made clear to us at the board level, you know, that that was a, that there was any, any, uh, that that was a favor to be done.
[00:00:43]  The narrative, I don't know the narrative, and I don't want to, you know, I don't want to lead anyone down that kind of path, that that's what that's what happened because I don't know there.
[00:00:52]  But Joe Biden knew that his son was on the board of this company that was being hassled by the prosecutor whose firing he was calling for.
[00:00:58]  Right.
[00:00:59]  Yeah.
[00:01:02]  And this took place three years after he sent you a letter saying thanks for all the work you're doing with Hunter.
[00:01:07]  So like clearly he would know this would benefit the family.
[00:01:13]  Right.
[00:01:13]  And I don't want to get it, but the narrative was that Shokin was already taken care of.
[00:01:18]  That was the popular narrative.
[00:01:20]  That's the only thing that I that he was already on his way out.
[00:01:22]  Exactly.
[00:01:24]  That was the narrative that was fed to the board.
[00:01:28]  Okay.
[00:01:28]  So you were told when Shokin got fired that like it had nothing to do with no, we were told that that was bad and we don't want a new prosecutor.
[00:01:35]  Shoken was taken care of.
[00:01:37]  So it's very, I mean, this is not like, you know, checkers.
[00:01:40]  This is multiple dimensions here.
[00:01:44]  So possibly.
[00:01:45]  It's like connect four.
[00:01:46]  No, exactly.
[00:01:47]  It's like, no, I think it's, I think in this particular case, it's pretty high stakes and pretty sophisticated.
[00:01:53]  So the narrative that I was told was that.
[00:01:55]  That's just, you know, I've said it under oath and I'll say it again.
[00:01:58]  That was the narrative.
[00:01:59]  That was the narrative.
[00:02:01]  Did you ever, were you aware, do you have knowledge that Hunter spoke to his dad about Burisma?
[00:02:08]  Do I have knowledge?
[00:02:10]  Yes.
[00:02:10]  Do you know that Hunter spoke to his dad about Burisma?
[00:02:12]  Did you ever see them talk about it, hear them talk about it?
[00:02:14]  Was it?
[00:02:16]  No, I don't have knowledge of that, though I'd assume it.
[00:02:19]  You would assume it.
[00:02:19]  Right.
[00:02:20]  I would assume it in a general sense of travel and that kind of thing.
[00:02:24]  But on, you know, like I've told a lot of people in the past, there was not business content conversations.
[00:02:32]  It was the idea of signals and influence, the prize is enough in speaking or hearing or knowing that you have that proximity to power.
[00:02:43]  No one is so unsophisticated that's been in politics for 50 years that Hunter is going to talk about last quarter's how many billion cubic meters of gas we pumped out of the gun.
[00:02:56]  So it's just, I think a lot of the narrative gets caught up on over-speculation of these conspiracy theories that are just not true.
[00:03:06]  That's not the way it actually works.
[00:03:07]  It just doesn't work like that.
[00:03:08]  So it's enough to be sitting at a meal at Lake Como with your new Ukrainian friends and wow, your dad happens to call.
[00:03:15]  Let's put him on speaker.
[00:03:16]  That would be, I think that's enough.
[00:03:20]  That's the second most powerful man in the world.
[00:03:23]  It's just how the world works.
[00:03:26]  So there's been a lot of effort on the part of Republicans to prove money transfers from Hunter to Joe.
[00:03:34]  Right.
[00:03:35]  And then there's the other brother Jimmy, who I'm going to ask about in a minute.
[00:03:40]  But and so far there are hints of it, but we haven't seen the direct transfer.
[00:03:46]  But did you ever wonder when you were in the Biden orbit, like, how do they live so well?
[00:03:52]  I mean, the Biden's, Hunter grew up at a huge house in Wilmington.
[00:03:56]  The family had this very expensive beach house.
[00:04:00]  And, like, how do you do that on a politician's salary?
[00:04:02]  We don't pay our politicians very much.
[00:04:03]  Well, I think Hunter had a successful lobbying and advisory business.
[00:04:07]  Sure, but these are his dad's houses.
[00:04:09]  Right.
[00:04:10]  Like, how does that, how does that, did you ever wonder, like, how do you do that?
[00:04:15]  Well, they, you know, at that question, I really only was under the kind of tenure at the Naval Observatory.
[00:04:21]  So I knew the government was paying, we were paying for it.
[00:04:24]  Yeah.
[00:04:25]  No, of course, but like they had these other houses.
[00:04:28]  Yeah, I never, I, I, the only, I was at Bo's house, I was at Hunter's house.
[00:04:32]  Um, but those, those were the houses.
[00:04:35]  So it was, that was, that was, that was not a, uh, that was not something that I often thought about, put it that way.
[00:04:41]  Okay.
[00:04:42]  It's just interesting because you're coming from a non-political world on Long Island, middle-class world, and you wind up and you know, run all these high flyers.
[00:04:50]  Right.
[00:04:50]  I mean, I.
[00:04:51]  And some of them, but don't have business jobs.
[00:04:53]  They have political jobs, but they're living really, really well.
[00:04:55]  Yeah, I thought the cost of living was lower.
[00:04:57]  And what?
[00:05:00]  I don't, it is, it is pretty remarkable.
[00:05:01]  It's pretty weird, right?
[00:05:03]  Suburban place to live.
[00:05:04]  And yeah, I mean, I think the, again, that the money that's thrown around DC is significant.
[00:05:10]  I mean, as far as lobbying contracts and legal contracts and all of the, you know, the bills that go out.
[00:05:17]  And I mean, it's, there, there's money flow.
[00:05:19]  I mean, it certainly is.
[00:05:20]  But it sticks to the people who live there.
[00:05:22]  Like, the money's supposed to go out to the whole continent.

=== Dinner Politics and Influence (05:46) ===

[00:05:24]  Right.
[00:05:25]  Yeah.
[00:05:25]  That's a bigger discussion.
[00:05:27]  Doesn't interesting.
[00:05:29]  So when Shoken, when Biden called for Shoken to be fired very publicly and then got it done, like, bam.
[00:05:38]  Right.
[00:05:39]  What did you think?
[00:05:40]  Again, the narrative, this has been, they've tried to beat this into my head a million times because it does work on paper as far as the, you know, the logical steps.
[00:05:50]  But we were told that Shoken had already been taken care of, you know, that he was under control and that this is going to be a whole big problem for Burisman now.
[00:05:58]  Yeah, it's a huge problem.
[00:05:59]  Because, I mean, I don't know what that guy.
[00:06:03]  The guy who's going to shut our business down just got fired.
[00:06:05]  Oh, no.
[00:06:07]  It's just what it was.
[00:06:08]  It was kind of pounded into our heads.
[00:06:10]  Obviously, as I look back in the rearview, it doesn't paper as well.
[00:06:16]  But it looks like there was some.
[00:06:19]  I'm asking you because you said at the outset that, well, first of all, that you liked Hunter.
[00:06:25]  Absolutely.
[00:06:25]  Who was very likable?
[00:06:26]  I can attest personally, a very likable guy.
[00:06:28]  Absolutely.
[00:06:31]  But that you thought it was useful.
[00:06:33]  He knows his way around Washington.
[00:06:35]  His dad's vice president of the United States, all this stuff.
[00:06:37]  It's all good.
[00:06:38]  But that there was the Icarus problem, that if you use those contexts too much, maybe it hurts you.
[00:06:44]  Maybe you're burned by it.
[00:06:46]  Did you feel that when Shoken got fired?
[00:06:48]  Like, ooh, maybe this is a little bit close to the sun here.
[00:06:53]  No, on that one, I just was kind of, listen, I was, I was, I was, uh, I was, I was, I was believing the narrative because we were in where I felt the Icarus was when he got, right when he announced, we were in Doha as one is as one is running around with some of the royal family at another conference.
[00:07:14]  And, you know, part of the benefits of actually doing the Rosemount Seneca partnership, you know, you're getting access in these meetings.
[00:07:22]  Anyway, long story short, we're in Doha and they release some picture on the website that Hunter had joined the board.
[00:07:28]  And that was kind of my, that was like the tipping point where Icarus had arrived a little too close to the sun.
[00:07:34]  Yeah.
[00:07:35]  And the rest, you know, and the rest of my story has, you know, been a slow downward trajectory changed at that point.
[00:07:44]  It was a, like this, exactly.
[00:07:46]  That was really, that was the Icarus moment.
[00:07:48]  When I saw that release and I saw, it was in the middle of Burisma that had released that?
[00:07:53]  Burisma released it, didn't tell us.
[00:07:56]  And it was like the most Googled news story in the world for 18 hours.
[00:08:02]  And I was like, this is going to be a different.
[00:08:05]  Well, because to a civilian, you're thinking, okay, huge, super lucrative Eastern European natural gas company.
[00:08:12]  Incredible.
[00:08:13]  sort of semi-employed kind of lawyer lobbyist from D.C., like, what is he doing on their board?
[00:08:19]  Like, it just seemed...
[00:08:20]  Right.
[00:08:21]  Yeah.
[00:08:22]  And then that really, at the time, I was not...
[00:08:26]  I didn't have, you know, we didn't calculate the risk appropriately.
[00:08:31]  And the rest is history.
[00:08:33]  So whether or not Hunter convinced his dad to come out against Shoken, and there's debate.
[00:08:38]  Right.
[00:08:38]  It was very clear that the Burisma guys were hoping to leverage Hunter's relationship with the vice president, his father.
[00:08:46]  Yes.
[00:08:47]  At one point, they told Hunter to, quote, call his dad?
[00:08:52]  Yeah, I mean, I think referencing the email that you put earlier, there was constant pressure to send signals to leverage all of his, you know, his dad included, but the Biden brand, all of the, you know, the DC insider and relationships to help Burisma survive.
[00:09:14]  I think that's the, you know, at the end of the day, what we're talking about.
[00:09:18]  That was the idea.
[00:09:19]  That's what he brought.
[00:09:21]  It was that ability to help on the geopolitical stage, keep them out of trouble, keep them out of investigations, unfreeze assets, unsuccessfully, you know, unfreeze visas.
[00:09:35]  And, you know, the first challenge, which was like there was a 23 million pound account that was released to Burisma because of alleged non-cooperation by the prosecutor.
[00:09:50]  I don't know if Shokin or the guy before that But that was successful And I think Did Hunter help with that?
[00:09:56]  The The perception of him being on the board probably provided a halo that helped with that, but no active, you know, there was no active.
[00:10:06]  But they were not consulting him on pipeline construction or wellhead design.
[00:10:09]  No, no, no, no.
[00:10:10]  It was hiring lobbyists and law firms and various NGOs to help clear the path from regulatory roadblocks at the end of the day.
[00:10:24]  When they asked him to call his dad, did he?
[00:10:27]  I was not privy to the conversation directly, but they've asked, you know, that was, you know, Vadim met with his dad at dinner at Cafe Milano, a famous dinner at Cafe Milano.
[00:10:39]  So, you know, I did not listen to a particular call where they spoke, but I know that the request was made by Vadim a lot.
[00:10:49]  What did Vadim say to the vice president at that dinner at Cafe Milano?
[00:10:53]  At dinner was, you know, politics.
[00:10:56]  I think there was a world food program element, weather, nothing specific to Burisma.
[00:11:03]  But the idea was by having that relationship and by saying, I met with the vice president in Washington, that gives him a SWAT.

=== The Prize of Contact (00:40) ===

[00:11:11]  Yeah, I think at the end of the day, that's the prize or the, you know, being able to have, whether it's on, you know, speakerphone or in person, to have, you know, that person in direct contact, whether you're talking about, you know, weather or, you know, politics or what have you, that that's the important part.
[00:11:31]  I don't think, you know, there's no relevance in asking, you know, the vice president about the gas revenues or anything.
[00:11:41]  It's enough.
[00:11:42]  And the prize is that contact and that access to power.
[00:11:48]  You'll hear people say the news is full of wine.