By Bruce Bawer
Miranda Devine delivers the definitive account of the Biden crime family.
To me it was obvious from the start that claims about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, although pushed intensely and for a very long time by the leftist media, were nothing but a gigantic hoax. Similarly, I knew that the Wuhan lab leak theory made a lot more sense than the wet-market fable.
In the same way, it was obvious to me for a long time that Joe Biden was the head of a lucrative crime family – even if the Democratic Party, the legacy media, the CIA, FBI, IRS, and Department of Justice insisted otherwise, and even if 51 high-ranking veterans of intelligence organizations asserted that Hunter Biden’s laptop bore all the marks of Russian disinformation.
Seeing through these bald-faced lies wasn’t brain surgery. After all, what other than mammoth corruption founded on influence-peddling would explain Hunter’s extraordinary income from Ukraine, China, and elsewhere, and the conspicuously lavish lifestyle that’s been enjoyed for years by him, his father, and his uncle Jim, none of whom had ever had the kind of job at which people tend to earn enough to afford such luxury?
Even now, roughly half of Americans seem to believe that all the attention that’s been paid to Hunter Biden and his laptop has to do with his love of prostitutes and drugs rather than with high crimes and misdemeanors committed by him on behalf of his dad and other members of the clan. Even now, many Americans seem to be blithely unaware of the mountains of evidence showing that Hunter has long been fleecing foreign firms on Daddy’s behalf. For some reason those clueless Americans, even if capable of accepting that Hunter was up to no good, simply can’t believe that his pop – good old Lunchpail Joe – has ever been guilty of anything. (These same people, of course, are convinced that Donald Trump is the most corrupt politician ever to come down the pike.)
This blindness to facts – or stubborn refusal to pay attention to them – is immensely frustrating. And it must be especially frustrating for Miranda Devine, the Australian-American New York Post journalist who, in Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide (2021), detailed the contents (by turns sordid and criminal) of Hunter’s celebrated computer, the story of which her newspaper broke 20 days before the 2020 presidential election, and who in her new book, The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America, focuses on the cover-up.
To say that Devine tells her story in impressive detail would be an understatement. Like War and Peace, The Big Guy opens with a long list of the main players, just in case you lose track of who’s who. And you will. Reading this book isn’t just like reading War and Peace – it’s like reading War and Peace at the same time as One Hundred Years of Solitude. You have to remember a slew of foreign-sounding names, many of which sound very much alike, all the while following an exceedingly labyrinthine narrative.
To be sure, this tale also involves plenty of Americans, some of them public officials who, when they scented the heady whiff of corruption in the Biden circle, actually did their jobs by digging into the facts and gathering evidence. Others, alas, are people who also held positions of authority but who did their damnedest to put up “roadblocks” or “obstructions” or “delays” or ”logjams” – to use some of the many synonyms that Devine uses to describe efforts to keep the public in the dark.
And boy, was there a lot to cover up. Among the expenses that Hunter tried to write off on his taxes – not that he was quick to pay them, mind you – were disbursements to prostitutes and drug dealers and memberships in sex clubs. During one “crack and hooker bender”in 2018, he spent $8,000 on a single sex worker, $140,000 on a stay in Las Vegas, and $34,000 on a sojourn at the Chateau Marmont in L.A. The Chateau Marmont is legendary for playing host to celebrities on drug binges, but Hunter caused so much damage to his room that he was banned from the place thereafter, which even he suspected was a first.
Part of the reason why Hunter was able to go through a small fortune so quickly was that he had a “sugar daddy” by the name of Kevin Morris, who for reasons that still remain a mystery chose to give him millions of dollars over the years to save him from financial crises (such as the ones posed by the relatively modest monetary demands of Hunter’s baby mama in Arkansas). A 2019 book contract with Simon & Schuster also netted Hunter a $750,000 advance, even though the book (surprise!) ended up selling so few copies that it made back only a tiny fraction of that sum. Then there were his paintings, which brought in at least $1.5 million. People laughed when Hunter first revealed his artworks to the world in 2020, but I didn’t: they’re no worse than a hell of a lot of contemporary art – and, after all, the art market these days is as much about laundering money than it is about aesthetics.
But Hunter’s main sources of mazuma were foreign companies. One of them was Barisma in Ukraine. Another, in Russia, was run by a man named Zlochevsky who said that Hunter, whom Joe Biden had called the smartest man he knew, was in fact stupider than Zlochevsky’s dog. A third was the Chinese energy company CEFC, a leading promoter of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. CEFC put Hunter on its board – and paid him millions – in exchange for his promise to use his father’s name to “open…doors around the world” for the firm.
Collecting loot from all these sources and funneling some of it to family members involved a complex network of bank accounts and shell companies that was designed to make the moolah tough to trace. To illustrate the process, Devine follows the path of a single $5 million payment by a CEFC affiliate to one of Hunter’s firms, HWIII. Over time, Hunter transferred most of that $5 million to another firm of his, Owasco; in addition, he wired some of it to his uncle Jim’s company, after which Jim’s wife, Sara, withdrew a fraction of that sum and deposited it in the couple’s personal account and dispatched a $40,000 check to Joe Biden.
When Rep. James Comer (R-KY), who was chairman of the House Oversight Committee and who “spent countless hours poring over thousands of bank documents from the Biden family,” argued that this and other transactions added up to “a maze of Biden enrichment schemes,” a White House spokesman accused him of “lies and conspiracy theories” while “dark money groups” associated with the Democratic Party poured cash into the effort to discredit and demonize Comey.
But Comey wasn’t alone in tracking down these fishy activities. Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) probed the Bidens relentlessly. So did Scott Brady, the U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh. One of the biggest heroes here is a remarkably dogged IRS agent named Joe Ziegler, who wouldn’t stop trying to bring the Bidens to justice – not for political reasons (he was a gay Democrat) but because he was (gasp!) an honest broker.
Then there’s the magnificent Rudy Giuliani. After Hunter’s laptop, which he’d left at a repair shop in Wilmington and forgot to pick up, found its way into the hands of America’s mayor, he strove mightily to get the authorities to deal with the huge amounts of evidence stored on it, and persevered courageously even after the Biden regime went after him with all it had, bankrupting him and taking his home in a fruitless effort to get him to turn on Trump. But Giuliani, bless him, held firm: a friend of Trump’s for three decades, Giuliani proclaimed him “an innocent man being framed by a group of scoundrels.”
When the FBI raided Giuliani’s home in 2021 (he still owned it at the time), he urged them to take his copies of Hunter’s hard drive, but they refused. As it turned out, the FBI already had Hunter’s hard drive – but they weren’t interested in using it to prosecute the Bidens. (Fun, or maybe disgusting, fact: the password for the laptop was “analfuck69.”)
As for Trump’s attorney general, Robert Barr, whom Devine describes as a lifelong CIA fanboy, he didn’t want to stand up to the CIA if indeed – as seemed increasingly to be the case – it was protecting the Bidens. (“Hey fatso,” an angry Giuliani said to Barr at one point, “you took your oath to the United States, not to your career.”)
Needless to say, the powers that be at the FBI, CIA, SEC, IRS, and DOJ, with few exceptions, were either uninterested in investigating the Bidens or were actively involved in protecting them. Prosecutors in Delaware, notably Lesley Wolf, the Assistant U.S. District Attorney in Wilmington, were especially aggressive about stonewalling investigators.
Meanwhile, in the Senate, skunks like Jamie Raskin (D-NY), Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Terry Sewell (D-GA) not only dismissed evidence against Biden but smeared Giuliani, among others. Ziegler in particular was unsettled by the sheer cruelty with which he, a conscientious public servant – and, as noted, a lifelong Democrat! – was treated by Democratic legislators when he testified about DOJ and IRS sabotage. Among the Republicans on Capitol Hill who “withheld crucial votes so that Johnson was no longer able to issue subpoenas” in the Biden case were the spineless Sens. Mitt Romney (R-UT) and Rob Portman (R-OH).
And that’s just the beginning of the roll of dishonor. When the New York Post ran its laptop story, which should have led to a 2020 election earthquake, both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal treated it as a nothingburger. At NPR, the managing editor explained his decision to ignore it as follows: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.”
And notoriously, Twitter and Facebook both censored the Post’s laptop story. At Twitter, that fateful decision was made by one of its lawyers, Jim Baker, who in his previous post at the FBI had taken part in pushing the Trump-Russia hoax. Baker wasn’t the only former intelligence officer to hold such a position at a social-media company: as Devine writes, “dozens of former U.S. intelligence agents from the FBI, CIA, NSC, and State Department were embedded in senior roles across all the social media platforms.” As Elon Musk said after buying it, Twitter “was acting like an arm of the Democratic National Committee.”
Thanks to these efforts – which, Devine notes, were all part of a meticulously planned Biden White House operation (if only they’d planned the Afghanistan withdrawal half as well!) – the scandalous facts about the Biden crime family fell into a “black hole.” And the cherry on the cake was the letter released just before the last presidential debate in 2020. Orchestrated by the Biden campaign and approved “at the very highest levels of the CIA,” the letter, signed by several dozen intelligence veterans whom Devine calls the “Dirty 51,” contended that the laptop showed every sign of being Russian disinformation – this at a time when the FBI, as noted, had already seen the laptop and confirmed its authenticity.
The scale of the corruption that Devine outlines in The Big Guy is dizzying to contemplate. Yes, the connections can be hard to follow, the names hard to keep straight. But the overall picture is clear – and reprehensible. Hunter Biden is, or at least was, addicted to drugs, drink, and the most sordid kind of sexual behavior, and his father, instead of trying to get him the help he so desperately needed, exploited his delicate condition to use him as a bagman. Joe’s shameless soaking of funds from companies in countries that are America’s adversaries was downright treasonous; but his heartless, nakedly self-serving treatment of his screwed-up son only makes the whole business even uglier.
Moreover, it’s hard to imagine anything more appalling than the readiness of top-level figures in all the major three-letter agencies to lie and cheat and even to do their best to destroy decent citizens – including American heroes like Rudy Giuliani – in order to protect a supremely corrupt politician and his avaricious kin. As Devine quite rightly points out, all this offensive activity is different from run-of-the-mill inside-the- Beltway corruption because it involved “the corruption of institutions that are supposed to keep us safe.”
The silver lining on this massive dark cloud is that Donald Trump is back in the White House and is determined to set things right. As the Biden administration wound to an end, concludes Devine with a touch of hope, “people of integrity were starting to stand up, and it would be impossible to silence them all.” Let’s hope that she’s correct – and that the criminal Bidens and their equally criminal protectors receive at least a fraction of the severe punishment that they so richly deserve.
First published in Front Page Magazine
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2 Responses
One of the best (and rather crude) descriptions I read about Joe Biden was “a turd which stuck to the side of the Senate toilet bowl for 50 years“.
The fact is that corruption in and around the US government started increasing steadily some 30 or so years ago with the large scale scams involving the Clintons. But over the last decade corruption really took off, to the point that it’s become brazen, occurring out in the open, with little or no attempt made to hide it. And the tentacles have spread outside the country. The most recent examples are the vast amounts of money sent to Ukraine and Israel. The leaders of both these countries are well known for their corruption and there is a good argument to be made that they have an interest in prolonging the US-financed wars they preside over to avoid prosecution. No matter. The ‘Ukraine Aid Oversight Act’ bill to institute proper accountability for dollars sent to Ukraine was voted down by Congress 18 months ago; and it seems the US government has a permanently open account to issue blank cheques to Israel (whose citizens, incidentally, enjoy a higher standard of living & far better entitlements than US citizens). What happens to the billions of US taxpayer dollars disappearing into these black holes is none of the public’s business!
Cui bono? Of course politicians, government officials & associated NGOs are the most visible beneficiaries. But behind them, the Intel agencies ensure that no meddling “outsiders” who harbour illusions of righting the ship get to rock the boat. Trump & anyone associated with him are just the latest example. Anyone with might get in the way is smeared relentlessly via the captured corporate media, or compromised until they either change tune or remain silent; and please, don’t mention Epstein! It’s become clear too that powerful individuals in these agencies not only facilitate corruption but participate actively to enrich themselves.
If any modicum of trust in US institutions is to be regained, justice now needs to be seen to be done. People like the Bidens & John Brennan & co need to go to prison. And scoundrels like Zelenksy and Netanyahu must be dumped unceremoniously.