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current nonfiction authors and books. the latest book reviews and we'll talk about the current nonfiction books featured on c-span book tv. and joining us now is the new york post columnist miranda devine, who is the author of this book as well. the big guy how a president and his son sold out america. miranda devine. this is a complet cated story you're telling in this book. in 300 plus pages. what's what's what's a simple explanation? thanks, peter. look, it's the story of the cover up of joe biden's family's corruption. i wrote the first book, the laptop from hell, which was basically the tale as told by snippets on hunter biden's abandoned laptop. but also that wasn't enough. i also relied on whistleblower

fears and also congressional sort of investigations up to that point that had been done by senators johnson and grassley. but as soon as our first stories in the new york post were published about the laptop and showing specifically documents that suggested that joe biden was involved in his son, hunter biden's influence peddling, particularly with the ukrainians. our story is that the new york post were censored immediately by big tech and that sort of led me on the journey to this current book because, i mean, i just feel like we were all so naive back in october of 2020. we didn't realize the extent of the cover up. at first i thought it was just twitter and facebook being, you know, a bit left wing wanting running joe biden to win the election. but there was far more to it. we managed to unravel a very complex and sophisticated cover

up conducted by the cia, the fbi, the state department, the department of justice and the irs to protect joe biden, his son, hunter, and his brother jim biden, and effectively to cover up their sort of international influence peddling schemes. how much money would you estimate you write about in this book? look, it's not a lot. we're talking. about 20 to $30 million, which is not a lot of money really to sell out your country and compromise the president of the united states. i see the bidens as really small time grifters. joe biden had been, you know, getting benefits from his donors in delaware for decades since he became the senator for delaware at the age of 29. and he just internationalized it when he was vice president. and president obama. and he's administration turned a blind eye and these institute

illusions, these national security institutions that are supposed to keep us safe. they also turned a blind eye, in fact, greenlit a lot of these schemes that hunter biden was conducting in ukraine, russia, china, kazakhstan, romania, you name it, wherever. joe biden as vice president for those eight years had power. that's where hunter biden and jim biden swooped in to cash in. when did you learn about the hunter biden angle to this story and how did you get ahold of the laptop? so that was back in early october of 2020, just a few weeks before that november election. and i had been i come to new york working at the new york post, had ingratiated myself with rudy giuliani, who was the president. president trump, flynn's

personal lawyer. and i come to new york just 18 months before the election. and i had to get up to speed quickly and i thought rudy would be a great guy to get to know. and i'd lived in new york before. he'd been mayor and had a lot of respect for what he'd done there. and so i did some stories with him and i have to admit, he and his lawyer, bob costello, had tried to get this laptop that they'd been given by the laptop repair shop where hunter had abandoned it some back in april of 2019. and they tried to give that story to other journalists and hadn't met it. no. one edition. and so i was really lost cab off the rank the last person that they tried to post and sort. i maybe i didn't know what i didn't know, but i was very keen on and i thought it was a great story and told my editor karl allen, who'd brought me to new york and he loved it as well.

and set the whole team on it. you know, our best reporters and just they fanned out to delaware and elsewhere and just did the due diligence on the laptop and made sure that it was legitimate. and we just published what we could back up at the time and that was and the first story was an email from hunter biden's ukrainian business partner, a man by the name of the dean pozharskyi, thanking hunter for introducing him to his father in washington, dc. back when joe was vice president. and i found out actually after the election that it wasn't just me. amazing, amazing that joe biden and his campaign denied had taken place. it was actually a dinner at cafe milano in georgetown, down in a private room where hunter ate, invited his business partners from not just ukraine, but from russia and kazakhstan to meet

his father as a sort of three for one deal. and at that time, at the white house did admit not to me, but to the washington post that was trying to fact check my story that, yes, joe biden did attend that dinner, but it was not for any nefarious purpose. and he only stayed a short time, which actually wasn't true. i knew from people at the dinner that he stayed for the entire dinner. miranda devine how quickly did you see the laptop as a legitimate issue? look, i mean, i obviously, you have to be a bit suspicious, but i you know, saw immediately that the laptop seemed genuine. and, you know, there were there was so much personal information there. there were so many touch points where you could sort of confirm that this email had been sent and it was legitimate because you just talked to other recipients of the emails. i mean, this is why i knew that facebook when they censored us,

said that they were censoring us pending a fact check. i knew they never did a fact check because to this day, they've never done the first and most obvious fact checking you would do, which is to contact people like tony bobulinski or devin archer, hunter biden's business partners, who were on those emails and others. so i know that they haven't contacted those people, so they didn't do the fact check. so that was a pretty straight forward fact check that we were able to do. and there were a lot of other touch points with you know, financial documents and and so on and so i, i just very quickly came to the conclusion that this really was hunter biden's laptop and we knew that the fbi had taken the laptop out comfortable with the chain of custody of the laptop. john paul mac isaac, the owner of the laptop repair shop, had shown me the work order with

hunter biden signature and phone numbers and email address and details on it. he'd shown me the subpoena from the fbi picking up the laptop and a copy on a hard drive. he. he, you know, had a lot of information that satisfied me that this was a legitimate chain of custody. and then, of course, we find out in june of this year that not only had the fbi had in their possession, as we knew the laptop from december of 2019, but they had confirmed in november of 2019 through hunter biden's icloud details that this was hunter biden's laptop. and then they had their forensic expert examine it. and so by december of 2019 or january of 2020, they had satisfied themselves and had told the investigators, looking into hunter biden, that this laptop was not tampered with, that it was legitimate and that it was fit for use in a court of

law as evidence which it was in june of this year in delaware. and i was sitting in the delaware courtroom and i saw the prosecutor stand up, hold the the silver macbook pro that belonged to hunter biden rep put in plastic. he held it aloft. he walked it over to the jury. he showed it to them. then he walked to the witness box where an fbi agent was sitting. he showed it to the fbi agent who confirmed that, yes, this was hunter biden this laptop that they took into their possession back in december of 2019. so and then, i mean, hunter biden also, he was convicted by the jury in that gun felony case in delaware in june, but also he pleaded guilty last month to a whole bunch of felony tax charges, tax fraud charges in california. the indictment that drew heavily again on the laptop and the information in it miranda

devine. is it fair to say that somebody could read the big guy and say, okay, there's a lot of dots there, but they don't really connect? yes, i guess you could. i mean, look, i've written this as a reporter. i haven't drawn my own conclusions. i've just tried to lay out the evidence as i found it, which i think is pretty bombshell, pretty astonishing. and in some ways terrifying the extent that the cia and the fbi and the state department, for instance, went to to keep the truth from the american people, particularly before the 2020 election, to keep the truth about joe biden and, you know, effectively they rigged the election because we know that there are polls which show that enough biden voters would have changed their vote if they'd known the truth about joe

biden's involvement and his family's influence peddling schemes and so maybe rigged is too strong a word, but certainly they meddled or interfered with the election in denying the american people the ability to do that. so the proper due diligence on one of the candidates for president. so all i've done is lay out that evidence. i figure that people can draw their own conclusions. to me, the conclusions are pretty obvious, but you know, you can probably drive it and the democrats have tried very hard to drive a truck through some of it. i mean, in particular, i think the failure of the republicans in the house to be able to pinpoint much cash going to joe biden. there are a couple of circumstantial pieces of evidence, such as there are two, $250,000 checks written by jim biden. joe biden's younger brother, who was in business with hunter biden, with the chinese. he wrote those checks to joe

biden just after he'd received a windfall in one of their deals, effectively 10%, which is sort of reminiscent of an email on the laptop that talks about a chinese deal in which countries would hold 10% of the equity for the big guy and the big guy being joe biden. the code name that hunter biden his business partners used for joe biden. but i, i think that those two checks from jim biden to joe biden, they had written in the memo line that they were loan repayment notes. and this is what the white house and joe biden's representatives insisted, that these were just loans, that joe biden had was a kind big brother. his his younger brother was in financial dire straits. so joe biden lent him money on these two occasions. and jim biden was just paying him back. and they're publicans never managed to find any evidence to

the contrary. there was also other evidence in the on the laptop showing that hunter biden was paying for joe biden's or some of his bills, just small bills, a few thousand here, a few thousand there for maintenance and upkeep on joe biden's delaware estate, things like new shutters for a cottage on the estate, new air conditioning, a retaining wall, some painting, those sort of things. and also that hunter biden was paying the monthly at&t bills for a cell phone for joe biden and some sort of indications that maybe that joe and hunter had some shared bank accounts or debit cards, but, you know, just circumstantial evidence. and it was never backed up by anything. so i guess, you know, people could say you're not joining the dots very well, but certainly joe biden was heavily involved in chasing and being available

for joe biden's overseas shady oligarchs and chinese ccp officials that he was making money from. joe biden, you know, attended dinners, as i said, invited them for breakfast and flew hunter into beijing in december of 2013 on air force two, when joe biden was meeting the high and mighty of the ccp and brought hunter biden along. and that was an unmistakable message to the chinese that here was american power come to do private business and sure enough, just days after that, visit hunter biden was a gifted 10% of a an equity scheme with the chinese. when i say gifted, i mean he was lent the money to buy these equity shares by the chinese. so, you know, it's it's certainly clear that joe biden

maybe we haven't proven that he personally benefited directly, but he certainly benefited in a sideways way. hunter biden has complained, for instance, that he had to pay for everything to this extended family who leave a rolls royce lifestyle with no visible means of supporting themselves. this is nieces and nephews and knots and uncles and so on. hunter biden also complained at one point that he had paid for his own tuition at ivy league schools, as well as his brother beau's tuition. so these are bills that the normal middle class family has to put. joe biden didn't have to spend any of his own money on supporting his family because he had donors or hunter biden and jim biden's influence peddling operation to pay for all of that. and you write in the big guy that at one point hunter biden

became a political person of interest. was that to the fbi? it was actually to the banks such as morgan stanley that hunter biden's business deals and huge amounts of money were flowing through millions of dollars were flowing through that raised red flags for the banks and their fraud unit. so money laundering units, investor get it. and one of the criteria used to raise the red flag is the fact that hunter biden was a political person of interest. he being the son of the then sitting vice president, also just the fact the countries that this money was coming from russia, ukraine, china, not the the the the most uncorrupt and squeaky clean countries. and some of the characters that hunter biden was getting money from. that all raised red flags and so then what the banks are obliged to do is to create suspicious activity reports, which they

then lodge with treasury and those suspicious activity reports then found their way onto the desks of investigators. these were iris investigated to what? leading the investigation into hunter biden in delaware. they were looking into him for tax fraud, money laundering, bribery and foreign lobbying violations. in the end, he was only charged with with tax offenses and gun offenses. so they you know, the other potential deal crimes or the allegations there, they were never really the irs investigators were never really able to track down. you know, we can surmise because they would have led them to joe biden and they were warned off any investigative trail that led to joe biden. friends, agents. they wanted to get a search warrant for a cottage on joe

biden's delaware estate that hunter biden had been living on. and they were denied that. they were told by the prosecutors, the doj, no, you can't get that, though. the prosecutors told the fbi and irish investigators that they were not allowed to ask about joe biden when they were interviewing witnesses. they were not allowed to ask the identity of the big guy. the big guy being the codename that hunter biden business partners used to fit for joe biden because the family was paranoid that joe's involvement in this influence peddling operation would become known. and so, again, they were stopped. the investigators were stopped from following the trail to joe biden. in another case, hunter biden wrote a whatsapp message to his chinese partners, basically shaking them down, demanding to know why they hadn't paid him the $20 million that he said he was owed. and he said in that whatsapp

message in a threatening manner, i am sitting here with my father and he also wants to know where our money is. and if you don't come up with it, he will make sure, as i will, that everybody we know will make your life a misery. i'm paraphrasing. and so what the irish investigators wanted to do in that case was joe locate hunter's phone, find out where he was and if he was indeed sitting with his father when he sent that message. again, that was denied by the fbi or not the fbi and denied by the doj, by the prosecutors who didn't exactly in that case say no. they said all we'll have to think about it. and they just got delayed until it never happened. and the evidence had disappeared from the servers. we know this information because the irish lead investigator, joseph ziegler, and his supervisor, gary shapley, who are from gary shapley rollins, what's the equivalent of the

seal team six of the irish? these are the absolute creme de la creme of irish investigators. and they became whistleblowers at great detriment to their own careers because they could no longer live with their consciences and sit silently while the doj just destroyed pervert and obstructed slow, walked, corrupted their investigation. and so they became whistleblowers. and that that act of doing that meant that they sweetheart plea deal that the department of justice had worked out with hunter biden was blown up and the then us attorney for delaware, david weiss, who was running the investigate and he sort of in a panic, said to his prosecutors, look, he's got a i just got to plead guilty to something, you know, get him a misdemeanor or something. and but when they took that sort of slightly amended plea deal to

a delaware judge and the she knew enough because there was an amicus brief from the whistleblower as well from the house republican, with all the whistleblower evidence in it that had been filed with the court the previous day. so she knew enough anyway to question quite deeply the prosecutors about this plea deal and she asked them, this is a new set of prosecutors that have been brought in because the old set of prosecutors, the entire team had been taken off the case after the irish guys blew the whistle. so this news came of prosecutors. the judge asked them, you know, are you really sure that that you are giving him in this plea deal? blanka immunity from any other future charges such as for fara violations, foreign lobbying violations and those prosecutors had to honestly say, well, no, that's not our intention.

at which stage hunter biden lawyer chris clarke, you know, conferring with his client, just blew the whole thing up and said no. in that case, the deal is off. and that was a huge mistake for hunter borne of hubris and entitlement, because if he'd just taken that plea deal and agreed that he was not immune for future prosecutions, he would not have ended up being charged as he was in delaware and in california and be convict it on both counts, on both jurisdictions. miranda devine even during their years in business together. how would you describe the relationship between hunter hunter biden and his uncle jim biden? well, jim biden, they were very close personally when hunted. biden's mother and baby sister were killed when he was in a car crash that he was in when he was two years old, three days old. his uncle, jim biden, actually

moved into the garage of the house. joe biden, sister val biden, she moved into the house to take care of him along with joe biden's mother, because joe biden had just been made to finish off at delaware and he was off in washington busy doing what he did. and he had these two motherless sons, hunter, in his big brother, beau. and so jim biden was sort of a surrogate father to joe hunter and really looked after him. i mean, when hunter went off the rails several times on, you know, crack and alcohol and his prostitute addiction, it was jim biden who would sweep in and cut him off to rehab. hunter really trusted jim biden and trusted his judgment, although jim biden's judgment is kind of lacking and he's always he's the type of person who's always, you know, had a dream of thinking that the next deal is going to be the one that's going

to really make them rich beyond their wildest dreams. he's periodically broke. so feast or famine situation where he leaves well above his means, like all that the bidens do. and so that's their relationship. and in terms of business relationship, jim, was more involved. he was involved a little bit in romania, but mainly he was involved in the the last see ifc deal with china with this chinese energy company that was controlled by a chinese military intelligence. we believe. and so that was the sort of get rich quick scheme which sort of fell apart in the end. so we've got ukraine, china, romania, other countries involved in your story. that's right. yeah. there's the man, one guy, kazakhstan there was a bit going on as well. i mean, there were other sort of places that they went around on behalf of cfc.

a lot of these foreign countries, they what they were doing while the chinese were interested in hunter biden was because they president jeez, what a great imperial notion, imperial project was something called the belt and road initiative. and this was a way for china to basically take over poorer countries, ensnare them in debt traps and buy up their infrastructure and bribe their top officials and the belt and road initiative had become a little well known. and i think countries around the world were a little wary of it by sort of 29, 2010, certainly 2013. and so and and certainly by the last two years of joe biden's vice presidency, when hunter biden got involved with cfc,

what that what the chinese wanted was this sort of imprimatur. and the power, the influence, the good name of the vice president of the united states to partner with so that they could persuade these countries that, you know, this was a legitimate business deal coming in to buy up all the infrastructure like happened, you know, the czech republic and so on and so i think that was the value of hunter biden to his chinese business partners and what it effectively meant was that the biden family was promoting china's influence to the detriment of the united states around the world during joe biden's last two years as vice presidency. so with joe biden not running for reelection, does this story and your book flounder? well, no, because i mean, i wrote the book fully expecting that joe biden would not be the

candidate for 2024. and he lasted a lot longer than i thought, but the same people who covered up for joe biden, the same institutions in the national security space, the cia, fbi, state department, the department of justice, the irs, they are the same people who are now propping up kamala harris. they want a president they can control. you know, this this group is also called the the blob. the obama people used to call the blob, which was that sort of triumvirate of the cia, the pentagon and the state department. and their agenda is not the agenda of the american people. it's its opaque, not known by the american people. it's led as we can see, under joe biden, to a world on fire, to the sort of provocation of russia, to the ignoring pretty

much of china's expansionist program. it's it's not good for america and that's certainly the way we can see the trump presidency versus the biden presidency. you know, under donald trump, who is uncontrollable by anybody, and particularly by the blob who fear him and did their best to ensure that he didn't win the 2020 election, in part by censoring our report on the laptop, but also many other things. the blob sees donald trump as an existential threat. yes, but not to america. not to democracy, to them and their power and control over the president of the united states. and under donald trump, you know, we saw iran was on its knees. iran was broke and not able to fund its proxies to attack israel, as happened last october

seven. china was in its box, you know, with tariffs and so on. north korea was in its box. we saw when donald trump came into office, barack obama said to him, look, the biggest problem that we have in foreign policy is north korea, because it was being belligerent, it was setting off all these nuclear tests. and while donald trump was mercilessly teased by the democrats and by the media for he sort of bromance with kim jong un and little rocket man, he called him, in effect, what happened out of that bromance was that kim jong un was tamed. same thing with vladimir putin under donald trump. vladimir putin didn't invade any other countries as he had during the obama administration, as he did immediately with joe biden and so we see that the blobs agenda is no, it is not only

antithetical to the desires of the american people, but it's also incompetent. and we see that in the way that foreign policy was carried out under joe biden. and so i think that's what we have to fear. those same people who protected joe biden, hunter biden biden are the same people who will do whatever it takes to ensure that donald trump doesn't win another term. the book is called the big guy how a president and his son sold out america. the author miranda devine fine. thank you for being on booktv. thanks, peter. and thanks for joining us for about books. a reminder that all book tv programs can be watched online at booktv dot org.

thank you for being here. good evening and welcome. my name is cory waldron and i am the executive director at centurion. thank you.