Wins & Losses - Clay Talks with Miranda Devine

This week on Wins & Losses, Clay Travis is joined by journalist Miranda Devine. Clay and Miranda go through all the details, from start to finish, in regard to her story about Hunter Biden and his infamous laptop.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome in Wins and Losses. I'm your host, Clay Travis.
We are joined now by Miranda Divine of The New
York Post. You may have heard her interviewed on Clay
and Buck some over the past few years. You certainly
have probably seen her on Fox News. I believe they
should rescind all of the Russia Collusion Politzer Prizes and
give them to her. And during the course of this conversation,

(00:23):
I bet you're going to end up agreeing with me.
So thank you to Miranda for joining us. And Miranda,
before we dive into your book, Laptop from Hell, the
whole New York Post story, all of that, what's your background?
How did you come to be writing for the New
York Post? Where did you grow up? What is your
journalism background? Kind of let people know more about you. Honestly,

(00:45):
I would like to know too. I'm not that expert
on your past history here. Well, Clay, thanks for having me,
and I suppose it will be confusing to tell you
that I was born in Jamaica, Queens, even though the
accent is obviously not from there, and my parents were
journalists here, and then we moved to Tokyo, where I

(01:09):
spent six years at an American school and had a
very strong American accent. And then we moved to Australia,
which is my parents or my mother's homeland, and I
got an Australian accent overnight pretty much. And then I
did a mass degree as a as a detour, and

(01:31):
always wanted to be a journalist, and my parents had
said no, no, don't do it, but I ended up
they were back in America. My father was working to
the Reader's Digest, he was an editor there, and I
ended up coming back here to go to Northwestern University.
I did a journalism degree or masters to one year,

(01:54):
and then I bounced around a bit and ended up
at the Boston Herald and where I spent a very
pleasant couple of years three years, and then I went
back to Australia, got married, spent twenty years there, pretty
much raised our sons. And then my editor at the

(02:17):
time and the newspaper I was at in Sydney was
transferred to New York to become editor of the New
York Post, Carl Allen, and he was legendary editor in
Australia and then here, and he at the end of
his tenure he said to me, why don't you come
over and just come over for eighteen months covered the election,

(02:40):
and that was the twenty twenty election. So I came
here in twenty nineteen and basically the Posts minies day.
So we've been here ever since. Okay, So, first of all, Australia,
and this is a stupid American question. We're going to
be married, and unless my wife will use me in
the next year, which is always possible, we're gonna hit

(03:02):
twenty years. We've got three boys. Everything else. Before we
even dive into the New York Post story, if I
were going to Australia for two weeks and I was
taking my family fourteen twelve eight, three boys, where would
you say you should fly into? Where would you say
you absolutely have to see? Like if I had two

(03:23):
weeks to go to Australia because I'm thinking about taking
my wife on our twentieth wedding anniversary and I've always
wanted to go, I've never been. What would you say,
as an Australian to me an American who's never been before,
you absolutely have to see this. Well, I'm biased because
the city that I've spent the most time in is
Sydney and it's absolutely beautiful. But with your kids, I

(03:46):
would definitely take them up to Queensland, to the Gold Coast.
There are a lot of you know, sort of Disney
World style places, absolutely stunning beaches. And then you can
go further north and into some pretty wild sort of
kadow country and meet some Aboriginals and and you know,
going to sort of outback Australia, which is pretty cool.

(04:09):
I mean, if you could get onto a station and
outback station, you know, a huge like a huge cattle
ranch sort of thing, but was probably sheep, that would
be an amazing experience. But I would also say, if
you've got two weeks, you should explore the region, So
go to New Zealand, go to a place called Queenstown,

(04:31):
which is just absolutely spectacularly beautiful. So yeah, that's my advice.
All right, that's on my that's on my list. I
literally jotted all of that down as you were talking.
I bet there's a lot of other Americans who similarly
would love to take a trip to Australia and also
maybe New Zealand, although it's been so crazy during COVID
in both places that kind of turned me off a

(04:52):
little bit. But I want to now dive into So
you come to the United States in twenty nineteen to
work at the New York Post. We know, and this
is kind of putting the time frame out there, and
it certainly jump in and correct me if at any
point I'm wrong. In December of twenty nineteen, the Joe

(05:12):
Biden son, Hunter Biden's laptop is turned over to the FBI.
Right the John Paul, the laptop repairman, says that Hunter Biden,
he thinks he's not gonna have great vision, shows up
with this laptop, turns it into him to get repaired,
and while it is there it is he comes and

(05:34):
becomes aware of what's on this laptop, contacts the FBI
after Hunter Biden doesn't show up, doesn't pay for it,
doesn't come back to reclaim it, and shares it with
the FBI. In December of twenty nineteen, you become aware
that this laptop exists, allegedly exists, let's say at the time.
When when do you first become aware, Hey, this thing

(05:56):
is out there. Not until the beginning of VOLD Target
twenty when I got a series of text messages from
Rudy Giuliani's lawyer Bob Costello and Rudy Giuliani had been
sent them the sort of hard drive the copy of

(06:17):
the laptop in August of twenty twenty. So this is now,
you know, nine months after John Paul mac Isaac has
handed over the device the laptop to the FBI, but
very cleverly kept a copy of it, and he only
contacted the FBI eight months after Hunter Biden abandoned the

(06:42):
laptop at his store and it became his legal property.
And so I get this text message late at night.
I've been talking to Rudy as soon as I came
to New York. I cultivated Rudy Giuliani because, well because
I knew of his proximity to Donald Trump and that
he knows everybody in New York. But also I had

(07:04):
lived here back in the the you know, the bad
old eighties with my parents, when New York was just
a hell hole, and so I had a huge amount
of respect for what he'd done to clean up the city.
So to me, he was an icon of New York.
And I was going to work for the New York Post.
I wanted to become his friend, so I was sort

(07:25):
of doing that, and he now was trusting me and
given the interviews and so on, and so I think
I was top of mind when they'd had some difficulty.
That's a long story, but you know, they had contacted
a friend of mine at the New York Post earlier
and she'd she didn't have a copy of the hard drive,

(07:47):
but she'd been working on it. But the whole project
to hit a sort of legal stumbling point, and so
I think Rudy Giuliani and Bob Costello wanted it to
go to the Post, but they were just they'd come
to the end of their tether because it was now
so close, you know, to the election. It was a

(08:08):
month before the twenty twenty election, so they were going
to hand it over to the Daily Mail or some
other organization, and at the last minute, Rudy Giuliani said
to Bob just try him around it. So he tried
me late one night, and I loved it, and and
you know, spent some time the next day talking to

(08:28):
both of them about it, and resolved that this was
kind of above my pay grade. So I sent some
of the information and talked to my editor in chief,
Kole Allen, the Australian editor that I had that I
had this very good, long standing relationship with so it
was a mutual trust situation, and he immediately saw what

(08:49):
a you know what potential there was in this story.
So he just put his you know, all the best
journalists in the newsroom onto checking it down. We sent
someone down to Delaware to interview jump On Maciaac and
it was all systems go, and within five or six
days we had the first story up and running. Okay,

(09:12):
so you have been doing journalism for a while. Every
journalist has to have in some way a bullshit detector, right,
for lack of a better way of describing it, because
you've probably over the years been pitched all sorts of
fantastical This is the once in a lifetime story. This

(09:32):
is incredibly compelling, and probably over time you do some
research and you're like, okay, this isn't as it was
initially conveyed to me. When did you start to look
at the documents yourself and say, holy crap, this is
a monster story. The data is just voluminous of Hunter Biden,

(09:55):
this being officially his laptop, the videos, pictures, everything else.
Because in the back of your mind you had to
know that the Biden team was never going to be like, yeah,
you know what, you caught a red handed kind of
take me through that process in your mind of hey,
this thing exists, but could it really be real? And

(10:17):
working your way towards your own determination of the documents. Yeah,
well you're absolutely right, Clay that you know, after three
decades or more in journalism, I've wasted so much time
when I was younger in um, you know, being a
little too or not skeptical enough. You know, people come

(10:37):
to you with their stories and voluminous documents, and I've
wasted so much time until I find out at the
end that you know, it's just not worth a story.
So I now, you know, at the last ten years
or so, I just err on the side of just
ultra skepticism. I just anyone comes to me with the story,
I just immediately was in, oh, yeah, sure, I'm not

(10:59):
going to waste my time. I'm on this. I'll have
a quick glance at it. So, you know, ninety percent
of the stuff that comes to me, I will just dismiss.
This was different because, first of all, Rudy Giuliani, in
the sort of a year and a half, a couple
of years, i'd come to know him he'd never steered

(11:19):
me wrong. Bob Costello is an incredibly legitimate person, you know,
former assistant head of Criminal Investigations at the Southern District
of New York, very eminent lawyer. Brain like a steel trap.
So the two of them were very legitimate. The material
they were showing me, even before I had the laptop

(11:43):
just checked out, you know, just quick Google st searches
of dates and times and photographs and so on, just
on a very cursory level checked out. And then you know,
John Paul mac Isaac was a legitimate guy. He m
you know, and as I've come to know him, I mean,
he's a very genuine person, a real patriot. He's a
Trump supporter, but that doesn't outlaw someone from having an

(12:07):
opinion and having legitimate material. And he was very concerned.
The reason he contacted Rudy Giuliani in the end, and
after originally contacting the FBI, was because he saw the president,
President Trump, who he'd voted for, getting ranked over the
coals over the Ukraine impeachment, and he knew that hot

(12:29):
in the laptop there was exculpatory evidence about Ukraine, about
the rhythma, you know, chapter and verse. He did a
really good forensic deep dive on that, and that was
very impressive. I mean I had his material, his email
that he sent to Bob Costello initially in August twenty six,
which really, I mean even today stands the test of time.

(12:51):
He pulled out of that laptop three of the most
crucial documents and narratives to do with Ukraine that are
as danning today or even probably more than they were then.
So all of this again, you know, we then UM, uh,
you know, other reporters Emma Joe Morris, a terrific journalist

(13:12):
friend of mine, UM, she did some some excellent kind
of a due diligence UM, and other journalists that we
had did as well. UM. And so we were very
confident with those first UM that first week of stories
that the emails that we were referring to were legitimate. UM.
And then you know, I get a chance to actually

(13:34):
do it, a longer, deeper dive in it, and I
end up talking to oh sorry, from the very beginning,
I also had UM, I forgot two, also had tiny
Bob Lynski's UM material, all his that he'd handed over
to the FBI. I came into UM possession of that

(13:54):
early on, so I was able to cross match the
emails that came from you know, that Rudy, that Tony
bob Lynsky and Hunter Biden had in common, And on
top of that, Tony bob Lynsky had WhatsApp messages and
other documents that sort of Buttston augmented what was on
the laptop. And then you know, obviously talking to Tony

(14:17):
Boblinsky and other people who were recipients of those emails,
it just was just incontrovertible. This was a legitimate laptop.
This was Hunter Biden's laptop. On top of that, you know,
the night before we published October fourteen, twenty twenty, the
night before we had contacted that earlier that day um

(14:42):
Hunter Biden by his lawyer, George Muzir, and that evening,
John Paul Maciaac gets the phone call from George Muzir.
We know it was George Muzir because John Paul Maciaac
in his computer shop had the presence of mind say, look,
I don't know if you are who you say you are.
Can you please send me an email and your work email,

(15:05):
so then I know you're actually hard to bind lawyer
to just verify who you are, George Masir did that,
And what George Mazir asked Jumple mac Isaac for was
he said, I understand that you have a computer belonging
to my client and we like to have it back.
So you know, there were just it wasn't like one bombshell.

(15:29):
It was just a thousand points of light. With any
of these, um, it's material. We have vast troves of documents.
Um there's always, you know, countless ways that you verify it.
And I've just told you a few of them. And
now you know, I wrote a book on it, and
I've spent now you know, over two years in depth

(15:52):
looking at it. And there's not one element of this,
this this laptop that I have public or investigated that
has not come out to be completely legitimate. And of
course the fact that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden never
never denied that this was Hunter's laptop, and Hunter said

(16:13):
I could be in my laptop, you know, I might
have lost it, so I might have stolen it. They've
never denied it. They've never denied outrite any of the
information on it. And in fact, Joe Biden halfway through
twenty twenty one, I had the first story that we
wrote from the laptop was on that October fourteen story

(16:35):
was an email that was Hunter Biden's Ukrainian paymaster, who
was paying him a million dollars a year, thanked him
in this email for introducing him to his father in Washington, DC.
And that was in twenty fourteen, when Joe Biden was
Vice president. And I managed to find that sorry, twenty fifteen.

(16:57):
And so I managed to find later on as I
went further and further into the laptop. But this wasn't
just any O meeting. This was a dinner that Hunter
Biden had organized in April of twenty fifteen for his father,
then the Vice president, to meet his clients, prospective benefactors

(17:19):
from the Ukraine but also from Russia and Kazakhstan. And
he organized this dinner at a Georgetown restaurant called Cafe Milano.
And you know, so many emails and he says, o'h.
Ostensibly this is you know, supposed to be about you know,
the World Food Program that he's involved with. But don't

(17:41):
you know, my dad's coming. Don't hill anyone, and you know,
they denied that this meeting ever happened. And then halfway
through twenty one, I published the story about the Cafe Milano,
and the Washington Post decides that they're going to fact
check me. Glenn Kestler and lowenb hauled. Glenn Kessler finds

(18:01):
out that actually the White House admits that Joe did
go to the dinner, but that he didn't go for
any nefarious purpose and only stayed a short time, which
is not true. He stayed for the entire dinner. I'm
told by people who were there, stayed for the entire dinner,
just didn't drink. Okay. I love all of this. I

(18:22):
want to dive into the timeline if we could, and
we're talking to Miranda Divine. I'm Clay Travis. This is
Wins and Losses, a deep dive into the New York
Post story on Hunter Biden, Joe Biden and how it
came to pass and the reaction to it. And my idea,
by the way, for everybody out there listening, is so
many of these details. You may have come on to

(18:43):
this story a year in, you might have come in
two years. A lot of people out there are still
trying to catch up. And I told you before we
started recording, Miranda, it's like a television series that you
might suddenly have watched an episode of in year three
and you're like, oh, this is interesting, but you don't
really know the background upon which it's based. So my
idea is to kind of ground this inner reality, to

(19:05):
get the timeline everybody understand it. So you published the
first story is at October fourteenth of twenty twenty. Yeah, okay,
all hell breaks loose. I want to go into all
hell breaking loose as you published, but I also want
to contextualize a couple of things that we now know
that are very important. The FBI was at the time

(19:28):
surveiling Rudy Giuliani. So not only did the FBI have
the Hunter Biden laptop since December of twenty nineteen when
it was handed over to them by John Paul Maciaac,
but also they were surveiling Rudy Giuliani, so in theory,
they were aware of everyone in the media that he
was talking to. And as point of fact, and I'm

(19:50):
sure you've seen this as the Twitter documents have come out,
the FBI actually conducted a briefing basically the night before
this story was coming out, while saying there may be
some Russian disinformation coming out to seed in the Twitter
in the Facebook sphere, We've seen Mark Zuckerberg come out

(20:11):
and talk about these briefings. We've seen the actual documents
from inside Twitter. Did you have any clue that the
FBI had at the time Rudy Giuliani under surveillance and was,
in theory aware of the communication that you were engaging
with Rudy Giuliani. Presumably they would have heard you and
or seen your interaction with him in some way, with

(20:33):
him under surveillance. Did you know about any of that
at the time, had no idea, and neither did Rudy Giuliani.
This was a COVID surveillance warrant and the FBI was
basically spying on his cloud, so they had access to
all his emails and messages at that time for about
two years. I mean they started when he became President

(20:55):
Trump's private lawyer. Whether or not they were really using
Rudy giuliania now and sorry, sorry to cut you off, Miranda.
Would they have been phone tapping him as well to
hear conversations or to your knowledge? Was this just like, hey,
they're getting every text message for in theory and email

(21:16):
that he would have been sending. Do you know, I
believe it was just a cloud. I think it's quite
easy for the FBI now to just send messages to
you know, the Apple or whoever to get access to
people's Yeah, okay, that's interesting. Does that make you feel
as a journalist, as someone who was reporting on a

(21:37):
presidential election? I just want to focus on that for
a moment, Like that feels insanely dirty to me, because
they have sense we should mention this too. Found out
that Rudy Giuliani violated no law, and they have said, hey,
we're not bringing any charges. So they got a wire
tap potentially, I think it's fair to say, under unsavory conditions,

(22:00):
investigated him, determined that he was doing nothing wrong, and
in theory, I'm presuming you would have been texting with
Rudy Giuliani and emailing, right, so they were able to
then keep trapp tabs on you and any other journalist
that he was talking to. Does that make you feel
dirty that the United States government was able to be
basically snooping into all of your communications, especially when you're

(22:23):
a journalist trying to get a truthful story out. Oh,
for sure. But I mean, I guess you know most
of the sources that I speak to, UM, you know,
for a long time now we just assume that someone's
listening in it. It might unparanoid, but we use encrypted apps.
You know. I think Britty Juliani was always very careful

(22:44):
about what he said. He's just not someone who really
writes a lot on text and neither way. I guess
it makes you want to just meet face to face
almost right, so that in theory you can you can
talk open. How crazy is that that you have to
be concerned about the FBI as a journalist, that you
have to be concerned about the FBI snooping on you

(23:06):
such that you want to meet in person as opposed
to even engaging in a phone conversation. Well, it's crazy,
but we've seen that the FBI has been raiding journalists,
raiding lawyers. Um. You know, attorney client privilege means nothing,
Journalistic sources meant nothing. They raided Project Veritas and took

(23:28):
all their their phones, with all their you know, confidential sources.
There's just doesn't seem to be any restrictions there are,
There are no taboos anymore. So look, what we know
is that Rudy Giuliani was under I call it false pretenses.
He was under surveillance. His house was raided, his home

(23:52):
and his office were raided. I think it was twenty
twenty one. All his devices were seized, and then quietly
two years later, more than two years later, two and
a half years later, they returned all his devices and
they just said that there were no charges. This he
was being looked at by the FBI over Foreign Agent

(24:15):
Registration Act violations or alleged violations, which they found there
weren't any violations. But ironically that's the exact same violations
that Hunter Biden is being looked at by the Delaware
US Attorney. But anyway, so Rudy Giuliani, we know he's
under surveillance during the time that I was speaking to him,

(24:39):
but more importantly, in August of twenty twenty, he was
under surveillanced by the FBI when John Paul Maackiazac sent
that initial very voluminous and detailed email to him with
screenshots from the laptop talking about Ukraine and his concerns
about national security. So the FBI had that. They also,

(25:02):
well I don't know if they had it. I mean,
maybe they're lazy and they had this surveillance weren't and
didn't see it, So I can't. I can't definitively say
that the FBI saw that email, but they certainly had
access to it because they were spying on Rudy. They
would have also had access to mine messages with Rudy.
One in particular. Most of them were pretty anodyne, but
one of them in particular would have tipped them off

(25:23):
that The New York Post was going to publish. So um.
And you know, the FBI had had the laptop since
December twenty nineteen. They had interviewed John pulmac Isaac twice.
They knew he was a legitimate guy. Um. They they
presumably had done some research on him. They knew that

(25:44):
what was on the laptop was genuine, and they had
buried it. We now know from FBI whistleblowers who came
forward to Chuck Grasley and Ron Johnson that they that
they were there were people within the FBI, within the
Washington's Field office, who buried anything to do with the

(26:05):
Hunter Biden laptop or anything to do any information that
was derotory about Joe Biden, for instance, including Hunter Biden's
former business partner Tony Bobolynsky, who I mentioned before, who
I had all his material. He'd come forward to the
FBI a week or so before the twenty twenty election

(26:26):
voluntarily handed over the contents of his phone which I had,
and also he had a five and a half hour
interview with them and told them about his concerns about
the influenced peddling operation that Joe Biden and his son

(26:46):
and his brother Jim Biden had been carrying on to
do with China, because Tony Bobolynsky was involved in the
China deals. And so the FBI also we know from
whistleblowers buried that. Okay, up, and they start to cut
you off. I'm gonna get into that in a second,
but just to me, the essence of the question here, Miranda,

(27:08):
and you've laid it out, but I just kind of
want to sum it up is the FBI had had
this laptop since December of twenty nineteen. They knew that
it was real based on talking to John Paul mciaac,
just based on the voluminous degree of incriminating behavior and
just also specific behavior. This couldn't have been the pictures,
the video, like it couldn't have been made up, all right,

(27:30):
I mean, and again they knew that it was real
from December of twenty nineteen. They are they then have
trumped up charges basically to be able to surveil Rudy Giuliani.
As a result, they know that your New York Post
story is coming out. They are telling all of the
big tech companies, hey, Russian disinformation is coming out. So

(27:54):
I'm curious how you would analyze this someone at the FBI.
It's possible, right that the lower level FBI people who
are giving these sermons to the big tech companies about
Russian disinformation, they may not have known. There's a possibility
there's different investigations going on and they didn't know about

(28:14):
the laptop or the specifics of it. Let's give them
a little bit of benefit of the doubt here. But
someone at the FBI, maybe it's Christopher Ray, someone certainly
at the very apex of the FBI, knew this laptop
was real and allowed a false information campaign to be
waged against your New York Post story. To me, that's

(28:37):
the essence of this question. Who ordered that code read
who knew the laptop was real and then used every
asset they could, including the FBI itself to protect Joe Biden.
Hunter Biden from this troop to coming out. Is that
kind of to me? That's the essence of this story
right now, as all of this information has come out,

(28:58):
somebody at the FBI knew this was real and prevented
the truth from coming out. Who was that? That's the
crux of this story to me, that's the sixty four
thousand dollar question. And like Watergate, the cover up by
the FBI, inclusion with the social media companies and probably
the CIA or former CIA operatives they were involved in

(29:22):
bearing this story. The cover up is worse than even
the corruption that we've uncovered from the Biden family. And
the FBI basically had warned Twitter and Facebook during the
weekly meetings before the twenty twenty election to expect hack
and league operations by Russia, and Twitter was warned that

(29:45):
they would probably involve Hunter Biden and probably happened or
likely happened in October. Facebook was told warned, we know
from Mark Zuckerberg talking to Joe Rogan was warned also
to be on high I look for a dum progression
propaganda in October before and that's why I think this

(30:06):
is so important Miranda, because I understand why people are
angry at Twitter and Facebook. But if you were a
mid level employee at Twitter and Facebook and your FBI
came to you and said, hey, we know, based on
our investigation that Russian dis info is coming based on
allegations surrounding Hunter Biden and Joe Biden in their relationship,

(30:27):
there's going to be doctored documents and everything else. When
your story dropped, they would have seen this and said, oh,
my goodness, this is exactly what we've been warned about,
which is why the nefarious actions of the FBI are
so galling, because they took advantage of I really think
they played Facebook and Twitter for fools. But also, if

(30:50):
I'm putting myself in this position, Miranda, if I had
been twenty eight or thirty two and I'm a midlevel
employee at Twitter and the FBI is sharing this information
with me, and they've already seated this idea of your
democracies in peril because of Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani
and everybody else, like you can see why they reacted
the way that they did. Right now, I mean, it's

(31:11):
easy to make them villains, but I think the FBI
is a supreme arch villain here, and really Twitter and
Facebook were just stooges getting played. Yeah, I think you
can say that, particularly when Twitter had as its deputy
general counsel a guy called James Baker, who had been

(31:31):
the general counsel, which is top lawyer at the FBI
during all the Russia collusion hoax stuff. You know, he
was front and center. He was the guy who drafted
the memo for James Comee about Hillary Clinton. He was
the one who brought in the Alpha Bank nonsense and
all the other sort of nonsense stuff that turned out

(31:54):
to be false, the Steel grossier and some one at
about Donald Trump being a Russian asset. That was James Baker.
He's a dirty player, and he somehow he gets basically
has to resign from the FBI and low and behold
about a year before the election lest he shows up

(32:15):
at Twitter as their number two lawyer. And he was,
we know now from the Twitter files, instrumental in getting
Twitter to censor The New York Post after we published
our first story on the Hunter Biden laptop and lock
the New York Post. I'm sorry, I want to go
to next. So October fourteen, twenty twenty, the story breaks.

(32:37):
I'm sure you were expecting it to be a bombshell,
but all hell broke loose, even in a way that
I don't think you would have anticipated. What was that
experience like to have that story happen and then the
results and maybe tell people who weren't necessarily following this
minute by minute what happened to the New York Post
when the story comes out to you, To everyone involved

(33:00):
in the story, well, we knew it was a huge story.
We knew that it was incredibly damaging to one of
the two candidates for president. It was three weeks before
the election, and so you know, it took a lot
of DUTs for I have to say, my top editor
to decide to go with it, and so we were bracing.

(33:22):
We had decided, rather than all the editors had decided,
rather than publishing the night before as we normally do,
like ten o'clock at night, we would hold back and
publish in the paper but online only at five o'clock
in the morning. And immediately journalists on Twitter, you know,
people like Maggie Happman from The New York Times and

(33:45):
people from NBC and so on, started talking about it.
And sharing the story because it was huge on anyone's
standard journalistically, this was a massive scoop. Suddenly you had
the actually a guy from Facebook who was a former
Democratic operative. He pops up and he says on Twitter

(34:09):
and he says, we are I can't remember his exact words,
but throttling and stopping the spread of this story, pending
fact checks, not going to make any comment, not going
to link on this story. And then shortly after that,
Twitter did the same thing. And effectively, I mean they've
got all sorts of words they use, like producing the

(34:30):
spread or something. I don't know what their jargon is,
but effectively they just sense it. They just killed the
story there and then. And you know, I don't know
if people understand, but with newspapers now, so much of
what we do is online, and it cost us a
lot of money. The fact that our you know, our

(34:52):
story was locked down. Account was locked for over two
weeks until a couple of days before the election. It
really for the New York Post, which is the country's
oldest newspaper, the third largest bicirculation. It was just an
incredible audacity by these social media giants to do this,

(35:13):
and we now see from the Twitter files, the internal
communications inside Twitter, and some of what Mark Zuckerberg told
us went on in Facebook. They didn't take this lightly.
They knew that this was huge, but they were massaged
into it. The story had already been prebunked by the FBI.
If that grooming of Twitter and Facebook hadn't been happening

(35:37):
in the weeks before our story was published, they probably
wouldn't have been bold enough to censor The New York Post.
But because they felt that they were operating on FBI instructions,
basically to save national security against Russian interference with the election.
They were willing servants of the intelligence community. And there

(36:02):
is something really dirty about the fact that he was
the FBI intervening for the second election in a row,
and with just completely dishonestly. They knew that our story
was real. You can't tell me that the people who
ordered the censorship of the post from the FBI did

(36:23):
not also know that what we were going to write
was real, no doubt. And I think that's what's so important.
A lot of people focus on Twitter and Facebook. Someone
at the FBI, maybe a group of people at the
FBI at the top again, just to reiterate, they knew
that your story was coming. They had known that your
story was coming for some time because they had Rudy

(36:44):
Giuliani under surveillance and they were aware of much of
his communications and the fact that he was trying to
shop this evidence from the laptop which they had been
in possession of the FBI themselves since December of twenty nineteen.
All Rudy Giuliani was shopping was another version of the

(37:05):
information that they already had, which, by the way, if
John Paul Mike Isaac hadn't made a copy of what
was on the Hunter Biden laptop, no one would have
ever believed him about this, right, And the FBI would
have probably destroyed the laptop and never admit that there
was anything on there that was in any way incriminating. Right,
So someone ordered a fix in a big way. I

(37:25):
think this makes and I'm curious what you think, Miranda,
And obviously you're involved in writing this story and you've
done an incredible job, But I've been saying this makes
Watergate seem like jaywalking, right, Like when you actually consider
the complicity involved from the FBI and where exactly and
how many different people were involved in this conspiracy of

(37:46):
silence to protect Joe Biden and potentially rigged the twenty
twenty election. I mean, it is a story the likes
of which most of the people listening to us right
now have never experienced in our lifetimes. Yes, and it
has the added element of the threat national security that
Joe Biden and his family's influenced peddling operation had during

(38:11):
the eight years that he was vice president and his
son and brother were running around the world partnering with
Chinese Belton road Front organizations allied with the Chinese military
and military intelligence. And also were you know, a hunter

(38:33):
was getting paid, as I said, eighty three thousand dollars
a month from this corrupt energy company in Ukraine for
sitting on their board. And you know, the only reason
that he was getting money from any of these people
was it was a bribe paid to the family of
the second most powerful man in the world, Joe Biden.

(38:55):
And Joe Biden had been appointed by Barack Obama to
be his point man in and his point man in Ukraine,
and both of those countries were extremely lucrative to the
tune of tens of millions of dollars to his family
and you know Joe Biden was involved in that. And
that's what the value of the laptop is that it

(39:16):
shows you how much Joe Biden was involved. He met
with Hunter Biden's overseas business partners. He met them in Beijing,
he met them in Washington, DC. He invited them to
his home at the Vice Presidential residence at the Naval Observatory.
He met them, as I said, Cafe Milano. He met

(39:37):
them in his White House office, so he was intimately involved.
He was described as the big guy in one of
their emails who was going to get a cut, a
ten percent cut of one of these Chinese deals. Tony
Bob o Lynsky, hunter Biden's former business partner, swears blind

(39:58):
that the big guy is Joe Biden, and that's backed
up by other material on the laptop. There's so much,
you know, invoices and bank statements that show you the
money flow, where it's coming from the meetings, Joe Biden's involvement.
And then you have to add to that the Treasury
Department documents, these so called suspicious activity reports that banks

(40:21):
are required to file when money that comes through into
their bank accounts of American citizens comes from dodgy sources,
suspect sources overseas, and there were dozens of those suspicious
activity reports filed about the Bidens and that was unveiled
by Chuck Chuck Grasley and Ron Johnson when they did

(40:45):
their incredibly good investigation, which came out in September of
twenty twenty. Before I even knew about the laptop. I
read their report, their first report, and it was chapter
and verse. It was like the prelude to the laptop.
If you read that, then when you saw the laptop,
it became clear this was the flesh on the bones

(41:06):
that Chuckle and Ron Johnson and already put together about
the Hunter Biden corruption and Ukraine. And it just as
a little side note, the FBI also intervened to try
and derail and discredit that that Chuck Grasley and Ron
Johnson's investigation. In fact, when I started writing about it,

(41:29):
I was warned off and said, oh, no, that's Russian disinformation.
I was like, why it wasn't. What didn't seem to
me to be so. And what Ron Johnson told me
was that he was ambushed by the FBI with a
bogus defensive briefing. Ian I think it was August to
twenty twenty or late August early September twenty twenty, because

(41:53):
Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Adam Schiff had complained to
the FBI that there was some sort of Russian disinformation
going on that was going to be derogatory about Joe
Biden in the Johnson Grassley investigation. And if you think
of the timing, August twenty six is when John Paulmaciaac

(42:14):
sent that voluminous email to Rudy Giuliani that could have
been I believe was intercepted by the FBI. So somehow
the Democrats are panicked around that time and they went
to the FBI and they said, we need you to
do something about the Johnson Grassley investigation because it's Russian disinformation.

(42:35):
Johnson gets ambushed by the FBI walking down the corridor.
His staff say, hey, there's a couple of FBI people
in your office. He goes back face start talking to
him about his investigation and people involved in it, saying
warning him that Russia is trying to spread disinformation. He
smelled a rat immediately. He said, that's not true. And

(42:56):
if I see this in the media, I'll know that
you are just setting me up. Sure enough, a day
or two later, what happened. Story gets leaked to the
media that the Johnson Graduley investigation has been polluted by
Russian disinformation. We're talking to Miranda Vine New York Post.
I mean, this to me is just incredibly compelling. And

(43:16):
again I'm just gonna keep saying, if they actually gave
Pulitzers based on real news, then Miranda and her crew
at the New York Post should get all of them
that were given out for Russia collusion. They should be rescinded.
I want to ask you a couple of questions here.
Everything in these details is the exact same except instead

(43:37):
of Hunter Biden, Donald Trump Junior is the one with
the laptop. How does the media cover it if Donald
Trump Junior had been accused on a laptop of everything
that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, it's Donald Trump Junior
and Donald Trump exact same details. Otherwise this story is
covered how in the United States media it would have

(44:01):
been wall to wall just like the Steel dossier, the
Russia collusion anything that would have been true unlike those yeh, yeah, exactly.
So that's the irony is that they blew up and
one Pulleitzers, The Washington Post and the New York Times
one Pulletzer prizes for their coverage of the Russia collusion hoax,

(44:22):
which was proven after a two year investigation by Robert
Mueller to be completely baseless and seeded by Hillary Clinton's
campaign to start with. So it was a Democrat dirty
tricks campaign that was aided and abetted by shadowy forces

(44:43):
within the intelligence agencies. Probably the same people covered up
our story and covered up the Hunter Biden laptop, and
it would have been everywhere. But what we got instead
was the opposite. This time, we had four days, five
days after after story was published, there was this letter

(45:07):
openly one intelligence officials right who say that this is
all Russian disinformation. Yeah. Mostly they were former CIA and
of course led by John Brennan, James Clapper, the usual
truspect to perjured themselves in front of Congress. And these people,
fifty one of them put the weight of their very high.

(45:28):
I mean, I think there were four or five former
CIA directors or acting CIA directors, and a whole lot
of other very high ranking former intelligence officials who should
hang their heads in shame for putting their name to
a scoreless letter that dishonestly said that the story that

(45:49):
Hunter Biden's laptop had all the earmarks of a Russian
information operation in effect, and the way that Politico, which
was first leaked that letter reported it was that this
was a Russian disinformation operation. But of course they used
weezel words since pretending that they weren't trying to convey
the impression. Of course they were, and it killed the

(46:11):
story stone dead in terms of the rest of the
media following it up. It was a very convenient figly
for the media to say, oh, no, we're not going
to cover this, it's Russian propaganda. And then, of course
a couple of days later you had Joe Biden had
to appear at that last debate against Donald Trump. Bad
timing for him, because of course Donald Trump waught up

(46:35):
the Hunter Biden laptop store and his meeting with the
Ukrainian paymaster, and Joe Biden just used that letter from
the fifty one dirty intelligence operatives and said, you know,
the intelligence community says that this is just a Russian
plant and turned the books back on Donald Trump. And

(46:57):
he got away with it. It got him off the hook.
He had gone to ground after our story refused to
answer questions hidden the basement, ran away from any questions,
and after that debate, he really was home free. So, Miranda,
and by the way, the Russian disinformation, why, I'm sure

(47:19):
you've seen some of these reports, and I hope some
of the people that are listening to us right now
are finally seeing the light of day. But around fifty
percent of people, up to sixty percent I think I
saw on a recent survey, actually still believe that this hoax,
that this was a Russian disinformation hoax, and the Hunter

(47:39):
Biden laptop is all made up. How frustrating is it
to you, not only that that argument was made, but
that substantial portions of the American population believe that this
is all a farce, that this entire story is not true. Well,
I mean, it's incredibly frustrating. I mean, it's very depressed

(48:00):
thing for America that that's happening. And it's not just
on their story. It's on COVID, it's on Ukraine, it's
on all sorts of things. And the reason is because
they've been propagandized by a completely corrupt establishment media. And
I count the New York Times in the Washington Post there,
but you know also ABC, CBS, you know, VIACOM, m CNN, MSNBC, etc.

(48:26):
They have a narrative, they have hired as experts, as consultants,
use these totally discredited Deep State people, whether it be
Brennan or Clapper or um you know, Peter Strock, Lisa Page.
These people are treated as heroes on CNN and MSNBC

(48:49):
and as experts whose whose word is impeccable. In fact,
they lied and uh and ran a complete Baganda mission.
And on top of that you have social media, it
has just clamped down on the truth about these stories.
So you know, you have at least half the country

(49:11):
is ignorant. They only believe, they believe everything that they
read in the New York Times or the Washington Post.
And it's not just in America. I know, you know
from Australia that the leading news organizations in Australia they
rely on the reporting from the New York Times. They

(49:31):
regard that has been gold standard. And so they are
completely ignorant about what's been going on in America. When
it comes to Russia's collusion, Donald Trump, the Hunter Biden Laptop,
Joe Biden's corruption, they don't really know any of that.
And that's the same across Europe and the rest of
the world. I would say, because you're not getting your

(49:53):
information from social media, and you're not getting it from
what are regarded internationally as most credible news sources, because
the New York Times and so on, resting on the
laurels of their former reputations. What Miranda, when you now
they're all suddenly coming out right, CBS, I think that

(50:13):
a story. I'm sure you kind of just arch your
eyebrows up and they're like, oh, we did a research
project and we determined that the Hunter Biden laptop is authentic.
And then the New York Times they cover it, and
then Washington Post they all cover it years later. Is
that validation for you or is it more frustration for
you when you see these stories being written years after

(50:36):
you had shared the truth? Not really either, But you know,
I mean, we know it's true. It doesn't matter whether
they say it is or it isn't. I roll my
eyes a bit, but I'm glad that they've come on board.
But I note always that that they're doing it's it's

(50:57):
like a limited hangout. They just put out enough information
because they know it's coming out anyway. They know their
readers are starting to ask, why don't we know about this?
It's leaking across the sort of iron wall that they've
built up between themselves and the truth. And they they

(51:20):
know that Hunter Biden has been under investigation since twenty
eighteen by the US Attorney in Delaware. They know the
grand juries you know, has interviewed or had testify various
important witnesses, form the business partners of Hunter Biden and
so on. So they know that there's going to be
a story and a possible indictment out of that, and

(51:40):
they need to get ahead of the story. That's why
they've been um, you know, saying that certain limited parts
of the laptop are authentic, but they always put a
boiler plate paragraph down, you know, eight or ten parts,
which paragraphs which says, you know, there's no evidence that
Joe Biden was involved. Well, that's just not true. They

(52:04):
now have the laptop. We've published voluminous information and it's
come from elsewhere of Joe Biden's involvement. Joe Biden told
the American people during the twenty twenty campaign that he
knew nothing about his son Hunter's overseas business dealings. That's
just palpably false. There's evidence that is now on the

(52:25):
public record of his meeting with you at least a
dozen of Hunter Biden's former business partners. There's also some
evidence that I've published that Joe Biden financially benefited from
Hunter Biden, that they were shared debit cards, mingled finances,

(52:46):
and that Hunter was paying to some of the bills
in Joe's at Joe's mansion, you know, the maintenance of
a painting, new shutters, new air conditioning, and so on,
because it's a very expensive estate to maintain. And he's
also paying for a cell phone for Joe Biden. I
only have the tip of the icebergs. There's just a

(53:07):
little bit of information of that in the laptop. But
I'm sure that the Republican investigators will have access to
bank accounts and so on. And that's important all that
you're sharing there, because you actually and the New York
Post did not cover as much of the sensational and

(53:27):
ridiculous private life of Hunter Biden, right. I mean, there's
scatters of information on that laptop. Nude videos, prostitution, the
drug use. I mean, all of that is very salacious,
but you guys, by your nature, said, okay, he's not
the candidate who's running. What we're really focusing on is

(53:48):
Hunter Biden and Joe Biden's improper involvement in larger international affairs,
not on the personal peccadillos of a drug addict son.
And I think that's important because there is an attack
sometimes where they say, well, Joe Hunter Biden doesn't have
an elected office, why should we care about anything with him?

(54:08):
And they try to focus on the personal failings. You
guys specifically avoided trying to sensationalize those. Yeah, we did,
and deliberately so because well, I mean a because the
evidence that Joe Biden was compromised by China, Russia, you know, Ukraine,

(54:30):
these other countries was so bombshell that the fact that
his son was a crack addict and you know, spent
millions of dollars on hookers and drugs was kind of irrelevant.
I mean, that's a you know, that's a salacious story,
and ordinarily you'd run it. But because the corruption angle

(54:51):
and the national security angle just vastly overwhelmed that, we
didn't want to have the two stories mixed up. We
didn't want people to get distracted by the pawn and
the hookers and the crack and not see the real story.
We ran some pictures. We ran, you know, obviously a
photo of Hunter with the crack pipe in his mouth asleep,

(55:14):
and a couple of other things like that, because that
was just showing visually what we had, that we had
that this was real. It's significant in the evidence to
your point, Yes, that it is real, right that these
are Hunter Biden videos, and that it would be hard
to fake. And that's why that's important. But you're reporting
is on the significant nature of Joe Biden's involvement. And

(55:37):
I think that's so important because you'll get attacked now
as there is an acknowledgment that the laptop is real,
some people will come out and say, well, why should
we care about Hunter Biden. He's admitted he was a
drug addict. Because of his relationships with foreign countries and
the way that that has implicated his father, the president
of the United States. Yes, and also the fact that

(55:57):
he was a crack addict, it even more implausible that
these foreign countries and these oligarchs would give him tens
of millions of dollars. He was his life was a
complete mess during this period. He was incapable of even
you know, answering emails. For a lot of this, he'd

(56:18):
go up on benders, he'd be in rehab, he'd come
back and be compassed for a little while, and then
he'd fall off the wagon again. So, um, you know
his personal life, you know his divorce, his affairs, his
problems were immense, and so there was no way that
he was a proper businessman. And you know that was

(56:40):
important to make the point as well. But again, this
is not a story. We never made it a story
about Hunter Biden. It was always a story about Joe Biden.
And that's something that James Comer, who's the chairman of
the Oversight Committee now Republican, is always making that point
that this is about Joe Biden. But it is quite

(57:01):
a successful tactic by I guess the Biden apologists to
continually push that point that you know, Hunter Biden isn't
running for office, Hunter Biden isn't the president. You know,
why don't you leave him alone? You know, he's had
a terrible problem with addiction and he's recovered, and you're
just tormenting him, and he's a human being and so on. No,

(57:24):
I mean, I feel sorry for Hunter Biden, but the
fact is his laptop is a peep hole into a
long standing corruption problem that the man who is now
the president has had for over four decades. As a
very influential senator from Delaware, head of the Foreign Relations Committee,

(57:45):
duchess by China. In his very earliest days back in
the seventies, he was you know, pinpointed by the Chinese
Communist Party as a as a likely ally. They invited
him to Chinese is one of the delegations to go
over there. He went to the equivalent of Martha's vineyard.
He came back. He was so embarrassing in his effusive

(58:07):
praise of China that the Weekly Standard at the time
just made a mockery of him. And as a senator,
he was instrumental during the Clinton years in getting his
reluctant Democrat colleagues to agree to China joining the World
Trade Organization. I think it was in near two thousand

(58:29):
or two thousand and one, and that had a really
terrible effect on the American working class, on American manufacturing,
on the American center at which it lasts obviously to
this day. So that was Joe Biden, and he's always
carried water for China, boasted always about his hours of

(58:50):
face to face time with President Jijing Ping, and so
I just think that that story is terrifying for America.
And we know now right to this present day, the
classified document scandal revolving around Joe Biden now links and

(59:14):
I think this is why he's been so panicky. It
links him to the Hunter Biden investigation that's been going
on in Delaware because there are items in that laptop
that could well appear to be only could have come
from classified information. And I'm not going to go too

(59:38):
far with that because I don't know for sure. But
I published this week an email from the laptop that
Hunter Biden had written to his business partner, Devon Archer,
and it was an uncharacteristic email. It was very long,
it was very detail, very informed. It listed twenty two

(59:59):
point It's about Ukraine's political situation and had detailed information
geopolitical strategic information predicting an escalation of Rush's destabilation, destabilization
can bang talking about you know, natural gas, what will
happen with energy prices in the UK, etc. And that
all comes to the four when you know that in

(01:00:23):
that first tranch of classified documents discovered at University of
Pennsylvania in Joe Biden's office, we're told by sources who
told CNN that those related to Ukraine, to the United Kingdom,
and to Iran, and so two of those countries are
mentioned in this you know, this email that stands out

(01:00:49):
because it's unlike anything that Hunter Biden has written in
the nine years of this this laptop. It coincides with
He's just about to join the Barisma board, as Devon
Archer is, and his father is just about days away
from going on his first trip to or an early

(01:01:11):
trip to the Ukraine, and presumably Joe Biden got a
classified briefing on the situation in Ukraine before he went,
and Hunter's email to Devon Archer has a distinct flavor
on an official briefing and maybe even a classified briefing.
Miranda Divine is with us. I'm Clay Travis. This is

(01:01:32):
wins and losses. You have a master of journalism, You've
been in journalism for decades. What does it say about
the state of United States journalism that the New York
Times and the Washington Post. Let's use those two for example,
because they consider themselves to be the paragon of the
journalistic establishment. You've referred to both here. They put democracy

(01:01:54):
dyes in darkness at the top of the Washington Post,
for God's sakes. When Donald Trump was elected, the New
York Times all the news that's fit to print. What
does it say about those two lions of the liberal
establishment that they wouldn't cover this story, that they would
consider this to be unworthy of contemplation by their audience

(01:02:16):
in the lead up to a twenty twenty election. Well,
I think it tells you that they have been thoroughly corrupted.
And you know, I mean, people will say, well, of
course she's going to say that because their rivals. But
I think any fair assessment of the way that they
have handled themselves since at least since Donald Trump came

(01:02:36):
on the scene, publishing false stories, publishing anonymous anonymously sourced
from obviously intelligent sources that were planting misinformation, disinformation, they
have they have swallowed hook line and sinker that the

(01:02:57):
whole far left culture all ideology. But they've also obviously
there's been a decision made to just fall in and
lose their skepticism when it comes to any dirt that
they were provided when it came to Donald Trump and
then become pure as a driven snow and very skeptical

(01:03:23):
when it comes to any information that's derogatory about Joe Biden,
even if that information is backed up a thousand different ways.
They have never done a proper investigation of the laptop. Never.
The Washington Post talks about having authenticated some of it,
but even then, the copy of the hard drive that

(01:03:43):
they have came through a very suspect avenue. It cannot suspect,
but it came from It didn't come direct They didn't
get one directly from John Paul Maciaac. They've got a
copy of the hard drive that had gone through several
hands to do with a guy called Jack Maxie and
who you know, and people who people who had copied

(01:04:05):
it and added things to it, and you know, and
Nat gives The Washington Post a sort of get out
of Joel free card because they can say, well, you know,
the chain of custody on this isn't very good because
the hard drive that they've chosen to base their reporting
on is not the snow white, crystal clear original hard

(01:04:26):
drive that John Paul Maciaac gave US, and so it's
almost like they're setting themselves up with a sort of
a backdoor to get away with it. It just seems
otherwise it's just incredibly sloppy reporting, because John Paul maciac
would have given them a copy. And John pallmac Isaac's
now written a book. He's put in there a lot

(01:04:46):
of detail about, you know, his interactions with the FBI,
and some of that's quite sinister. Now. When he told
me about how he felt that the FBI agents who
came and took the laptop and a copy of the
drive from him back in December twenty nineteen, he felt
that they were threatening him or warning him to keep

(01:05:07):
his mouth shut. And I thought, oh, you know, he's
just a bit paranoid, as a lot of whistleblowers are,
because they get scared and they haven't been they haven't
dealt with law enforcem before, and they get frightened and
and they've seen too many movies. So that's what I thought,
So I dismissed. I didn't him write what he said,
but with the benefit of hindsight now and now seeing

(01:05:28):
from the whistleblowers from the Twitter files, just how dirty
the elements of the FBI were certainly the Washington Field office.
I now really believe that his instincts were right, because
when those FBI agents were leaving him with the laptop,
one of them turned and said to him, in our experience,

(01:05:51):
nothing bad happens to people who don't talk. And he
just that just disquieted him. And as he thought about it,
he thought, well, that was a warning me not to talk.
And I think they thought that he wouldn't talk. And
because they took the laptop, but plus the hard drive
that he'd made a copy of, they must have thought
that that was it, that they had everything. They didn't

(01:06:13):
realize he'd made another copy, because copy Miranda, they would
have buried the story and claimed that this laptop basically
never existed exactly, because that's all they've done. We haven't
heard from the laptop. When I think it was Senator
Grasley or another senator asked someone at the FBI in
a hearing under oath, whereas the laptop. They couldn't answer.

(01:06:37):
They have they have effectively canceled the laptop. They've canceled
Tony Bobolynsky. Tony Bobolynsky, you would think would be a
prime witness for the grand jury that's going on in
Delaware looking at Hunter Biden Gervisly's business dealings, and he
knew all about the China, one of these China deals,

(01:06:59):
and that he's never been subpoena, he's never been called
as a witch. It's crazy, Uh, Miranda, you mentioned John
Paul Maciaac being feared for his safety. Have you feared
for your safety at all during the reporting on this laptop? Um? Look,
it's it's run through my mind, but you know I don't.

(01:07:22):
I'm not. I'm not too worried. No, but who knows.
You're not suicidal. You're not contemplating death, by the way,
for everybody out there listening right now. Correct, No, exactly exactly.
You're not planning on jumping off a bridge. You're not
planning on vanishing for everybody out there. You're you're of
sound mind, exactly. And I think there's so much of

(01:07:43):
the story out now that it's impossible to put the
genie back in the bottle. So it wouldn't really serve
anyone any any use to to off me. Now. You
mentioned Carl Allen, and I just want to circle back
around again to what I would consider to be the
braver of the New York Post to cover this because
I mentioned I don't think the Times would write it.

(01:08:03):
I don't think the Post would write it. I obviously
people can say, oh, well you look out kicks sold
last year to Fox. I do a lot of Fox News.
I'm not a Fox News employee. For radio. This is
an iHeart production. This is not Fox. But in my
experience with Fox, no one, and I've met Rupert and
Lachlan and everybody else, no one at Fox has ever

(01:08:24):
told me, hey, don't talk about this, don't share your
opinion on X or Y. That just doesn't happen in
my experience. I bet it is similar for you as well.
What was it like working for Carl Allen? How important
is it that the New York Post exists? Because who
else is willing to even have the resources and frankly,

(01:08:44):
the testicular fortitude to actually write a story like this
that could create the massive, you know, blowback like it did. Yeah,
you put your finger ride on. Really the most important
part of this, which is that as a journalist, it's
very easy. You know, you you're health leather excited about

(01:09:04):
a story. Uh, you know, you think it's real you've
you've done your work on it, but it's going to
be a huge bombshell and potentially blow up the election.
And you know what if it's wrong and it blows
up in the face, I have huge ramifications for the
newspaper around the company. So that decision um to be

(01:09:26):
made by you know, the top editors. And Coole Allen
was at the top of the New York Post. Was
incredibly courageous. And uh but you know, I've I've known
him and worked for him off and on, um for gosh,
almost thirty years. I had my first child when I
was a baby editor under him, and um, he's always

(01:09:51):
been like that, balls of steel. Um, he's one of
the real old school newspaper editors and just you know,
hasn't has a nose for a story. He's as canny
as they come, street wise, can smell bullshit a million
yards off. He's incredible and he's the best editor I've

(01:10:12):
ever worked for. And he, um, he just you know,
he just he's willing. He knows that all he cares
about is a story. You know, if a story is
a great story without fear of favorite, doesn't matter whether
it's helpful to the Republicans or the Democrats. He's just
going to go for it. He loves it. And that's
what anyone who's a real newspaper person, Um, that's what

(01:10:35):
That's what they're about. It's not really being immediate person,
it's being a journalist, particularly old school newspaper reporter. And um,
you know, I grew up My father was one of them.
M Cole Allen was one of them. I just grew
up admiring and respecting those old school newspaper men. And
most of them were men, and and you know, it's

(01:10:57):
it's a long gone era. And I think Cole's sort
of the last of those those people because obviously the
Internet has changed everything. But anyway, Cole's just amazing and
it never would have happened without him. And he trusted me,
and I trusted him, and that is because we had
many years of working together. Miranda, I come back to

(01:11:19):
this big question. Why was the FBI so afraid of
Donald Trump? Why was The New York Times so afraid
of Donald Trump? Why was the Washington Post so afraid
of Donald Trump that they were willing to rig elections
against him? In twenty twenty, I'm sure in the back
of your mind. You have thought a lot about this too,

(01:11:40):
because ultimately someone at the FBI had to make the
choice to engage in this rig job, right, and maybe
it's a group of people. What I can never quite
put my finger on is what did they find so
terrifying about this guy? Well, it was that they couldn't

(01:12:01):
control him. If you remember, there was a Chinese professor
after the twenty twenty election, a video that he'd made
leaked out and was soon quickly wiped off YouTube. But
he in that said he was very close to Jijingping
in the hierarchy. And in that video he said, Donald Trump,

(01:12:24):
you know, we've always in China had our friends in
Wall Street, but not but Wall Street could not control Trump.
And that's the essence of it. Wall Street meaning really
the establishment politicians because that's where the money comes from.
And the you know, Donald Trump was completely just. He

(01:12:48):
was just America first. He didn't want to go into wars,
he wanted to end the war in Afghanistan. He was
a threat to the what Eisenhow called the military industrial complex,
really an existential threat. And so you know there's a
lot of gravy trains in Washington are hitched to to

(01:13:08):
that wagon, to having endless wars, and that was one
part of it. Also his belligerence towards China, which you know,
a lot of the elites they make their money from China,
and he made it crystal clear that he was going
to screw them over or make things fear screw them

(01:13:29):
over when it came to trade deals. All of that
got derailed with COVID, which came from China. UM. And
then in their cultural project, you know, the woke ideology
again he was he was blowing that up. And so
in every aspect of Washington bureaucracy, the administrative state, he

(01:13:53):
was starting to dismantle it. Even with the economy, you know,
his tax cuts and soil which proved to be successful
and fueled the economy. Um, nearly part of his until COVID. UM.
That also was a rebuke to the kind of norms
of you know, economic sort of norms in Washington where

(01:14:18):
um he was he was just challenging all those norms.
And he was also an embarrassment to them, I guests,
just with his demeanor. Um. But they you know, they
talked that up. Um. And also, I mean the fact
is Donald Trump's no saint he's no angel he um.
He has a sort of shambolic appearance. People were embarrassed

(01:14:41):
by him. Um. He was a little bit to queens
for the stuck up people in the State Department and
in in Washington. UM. And so I think in every
way he offended their sensibilities, He challenged their um, financial
underpin pinnings, and really their power base. He challenged their power,

(01:15:05):
and so he became an existential threat to the people
who really run this country. We're talking to Miranda Divine,
and I hope you will share this conversation because I
think it's super important, especially if the people you may
be friends or family with are in the fifty percent
of population out there that just doesn't understand the hunter
Biden's story the laptop and has bought into this Russian

(01:15:27):
disinformation argument put out by so many people in positions
of power. A lot of people who are listening to
us right now are red pilled. And I think that
metaphor works so well because it is true, Miranda, and
I'm sure you've experienced this now too, that once you
start to pull the thread here, you recognize how deep
some of these conspiracies go. And if we're really going

(01:15:51):
to be a functioning democracy. It's not things like January six.
That's a symptom of the dishonesty that I think many
people in this country innately feel from their leadership, right.
And I give you tremendous credit because without worrying about
who you were going to antagonize, you simply pursued the truth.

(01:16:12):
And I think you have told I think it's a
more important story, I really do, than Watergate, and it's
symptomatic of where our country has gone that the Washington Post,
which published the Pentagon Papers and was willing to pursue Watergate,
just pretends that this story basically doesn't exist because it
directly attacks their base. Which again, this is a bigger

(01:16:33):
picture story. But I think this has a lot to
do with the subscription model and the fact that the
New York Times and the Washington Post basically make their
money off far left wing people now and they can't
antagonize that base without threatening to destroy the essence of
their business. And even more than that, I think there
may be something sinister about the subscription model that they have.

(01:16:56):
You know, you look at, for instance, the New York Time.
I think of the numbers of things like nine million
subscribers they have. And you know, when the Internet Internet
came into being and basically stole the revenue base of
these incredibly lucrative newspapers, they had to find another source

(01:17:17):
of income or collapse. And many newspapers, as you know,
across the country collapsed. And so for those papers, subscription
models became everything for them, and for the New York
Times incredibly successful. And you know, when you think about it,
I spent a lot of time reading the comments on
columns and stories on the watching The Post and the
New York Times, and they have a certain sameness to

(01:17:39):
them which is reminiscent of the sort of bot activity
that you get in on Twitter. And so I started
suspecting that a lot of these subscriptions because you know,
you can get a subscription to the New York Times
when they do their deals for a dollar six months,
so it would not cost very much for the same

(01:18:02):
people who are buying bots on Twitter to buy you know,
thousands of subscriptions and then set their people to writing
the narrative in the comments. And then when you take
that one step further, and we don't know this because
the New York Times, the Washington Post don't tell us
who their subscribers are, but there are bulk subscriptions, and

(01:18:25):
some of these Bok subscriptions there is suggestions are brought
up by China and other of our adversaries overseas, and
I believe that the Republicans will be looking into that.
Oh that's fascinating as well. When I was practicing attorney
Miranda and I appreciate all your time. I know how
busy you are. I think that's going to be compelling
listening for so many people out there. I used to

(01:18:48):
always end my depositions by saying, what do you wish
that I had asked you that I didn't. Is there
something else you'd like to say to this audience that
I didn't give you the opportunity to close with that
you think is important that they might need to know.
Not really, you've been incredibly forensic and you're questioning. The

(01:19:10):
only thing I guess I just leave with is that
for four decades, Joe Biden has sort of traded on
this mythology that he's honest Joe, that he's a family man,
he's a devout Catholic, that you know, his entire career
was founded on a terrible tragedy where his wife and

(01:19:33):
his baby daughter were killed in a car accident that
injured his two sons, Hunter and Boe Biden, and he
used the photograph of himself being sworn in it their
hospital bed, these two bandaged, injured boys in the foreground,
as the basis of his campaigns ever since, and that

(01:19:55):
elicited a lot of sympathy across the country. But then
when I started doing the book, I thought, what kind
of a man, you know, why did he have to
get sworn in inside the hospital room? Such a great question.
Even at that time of great tragedy and grief, he
had his eye on the political payoff. And then later on,

(01:20:18):
you know, I'm thinking he knew that his son Hunter
had an alcohol and drug abuse problem. I mean, Hunter
was arrested when he was eighteen. He was a troubled
song and and what kind of a father, knowing his
son is a terrible addict, puts him, makes him the
bag man, and puts him in front of this unaccountable

(01:20:41):
torrent of cash from Barisma as well as everything else.
You know, I just my entire I used too many
years ago. I think I'm Catholic. I thought Joe Biden
was an Irish Catholic, sort of tribally like my people.
But by the time I've come to see him as

(01:21:04):
a very sinister Figna, and I think that his legacy,
if nothing else, comes out of all of this, I
think that at least his legacy will be seen honestly
and that he will be seen as one of the
most malign people to become president. Miranda Divine, you deserve

(01:21:24):
all the Pulitzers. I appreciate all the work that you
have done. I appreciate the time Today. I would encourage
people to go follow you at Miranda Divine. If they
want more details, I would tell them to go buy
your book Laptop from Hell, and we appreciate your time.
Keep up your good work and given what the FBI
is up to, stay healthy. Yeah, thanks a lot, Clay.

(01:21:46):
I'm Clay Travis. This has been Thank you. I'm Clay Travis.
This has been wins and losses. She was Miranda Divine.
This was a lot of fun. I hope you guys
will share and listen to more episodes.