With Joe Biden forced out of the presidential race, why should anyone still care about the corruption story that implicated him, his brothers, and his son, Hunter Biden?
Because “the same people in the same crooked institutions that protected him and allowed him and his family to do business and make millions of dollars from our adversaries, particularly from China, are still there,” journalist Miranda Devine declares on the latest episode of the Drill Down podcast. “They’re still committing bad deeds. They still have mal-intent and they still don’t have America’s best interests at heart,” Devine tells co-hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers.
Devine’s reporting on the infamous “Hunter Biden laptop” in October 2020 for the New York Post was heavily censored by social media platforms and savaged as “Russian misinformation” by the mainstream media, national security veterans, and partisan Democrats. It was all completely accurate.
Devine tells what she knows of the Biden family’s corruption in her new book, The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America, which debuts this week.
Indeed, both Devine and Schweizer have been for years the two most prominent reporters on the Biden corruption story.
Schweizer notes that the Bidens’ corrupt family businesses were protected by a press that didn’t want to know the truth, a Justice Department that wanted to allow the statute of limitations to expire, an intelligence community that would say or sign anything to keep Donald Trump from winning a second term, and prosecutors who wanted to sweep the whole thing under a misdemeanor gun charge.
“You’ve got a political class in Washington, DC that is engaged in these kinds of global deals, and a government apparatus that protects them,” Schweizer tells Devine. “Joe Biden, and the Clintons before him, perfected this model of globalized corruption. And if you get away with this kind of thing, everybody’s going to follow and imitate.”
Devine agrees. “Where there’s no accountability for bad behavior, of course it metastasizes,” she says. “All that happens is that the bad guys will just sharpen their tools… they get cleverer at covering up.”
Classic cover-ups such as what she calls the “Dirty 51 letter,” signed by 51 former top US intelligence community executives a month before the 2020 election. That letter claimed the Hunter Biden laptop and her stories about it “had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.”
Devine pulls no punches. The “Dirty 51 letter,” as she calls it, was a clumsy attempt at branding the laptop story as disinformation. And there were five former CIA directors or acting directors who signed that letter, “including the ubiquitous John Brennan, who’s been involved in every dirty trick we’ve seen in the last decade or so.”
“That letter, we now know, was approved at the highest level of the CIA, by Director Gina Haspel and her deputy, before it went out. So, this was not a bunch of rogue operators. It was blessed by the CIA itself,” Devine says. She learned later that the FBI was in on the suppression of her reports as well.
Devine is looking into the two assassination attempts against former President Trump, and noted a JustTheNews story reporting that Ryan Routh, the man arrested for his attempted shooting of Trump in Florida, had been scrutinized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials when he returned from Ukraine last year. While Routh was flagged for further investigation based on comments he made to agents, the Homeland Security Department declined to act.
The nation’s national security organs have come under scrutiny before, she noted, citing the Church Committee in the 1970s, which for a time reined in the excesses of the CIA. But she firmly believes another house-cleaning of the massive bureaucracy that has exploded since the 9/11 attacks is long overdue and critically necessary.
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