Season 4, Episode One: The Hunter Biden Saga

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Hello, this is season four, episode one of the listening tube. Thank you for tuning in. I'm your host, Bob Woodley. This episode will be a bit different from what you may have heard on the listening tube before. No bells and whistles, no looking back at this week in history. On this edition, we'll take a look at the Hunter Biden saga. From the beginning of his time on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, his use of Secret Service protection, the infamous laptop, the media reaction to it, to the fallout from the Twitter files recently released by Elon Musk. It's a sordid tale of embarrassment, deceit, betrayal, and how our own government is being used against us through coercion, media manipulation, and the willingness of the media to be manipulated. Those are just a few of the reasons why I think it's an important topic. Plus, the network news has decided to not talk about it, which I guess qualifies it as not the headlines. Oh there. That spices things up a little bit. There is much to be revealed, and it will become clear that until the truth is brought to light, there is a danger lurking that threatens the American way of life. We often hear about how badly our democracy is threatened. Well, it is, but not by voting laws or using the wrong pronouns. Now you might be thinking, but Bob, haven't we heard enough about Hunter Biden already? Well, it depends on where you get your news. When Twitter's new boss released internal emails about how the laptop story was quashed, NBC, CBS, and ABC News dedicated exactly zero minutes and zero seconds to the story. Only Fox gave the story the attention it deserves because the liberal media doesn't want you to know how the American people were kept in the dark about how Hunter Biden is peddling his father's influence around the world. The liberal media didn't want the American people to know why they hid the story for two years. And now that the cat is partially out of the bag, the White House press secretary calls it a distraction and old news. Well, it's only old news because the media hid the truth from the American people for two years. Not just the American people, but people around the world who would ultimately be negatively affected by the actions of then Vice President Joe Biden and his son Robert H. Biden, also known as Hunter. Uh but if only the story were just two years old. To tell the whole tale, we have to go back to 2014.

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Oh, okay. We were able to work that one in too. 2014 is when Ukraine underwent a major shift in ideology. Mass protests led the Ukrainian president to flee the country. Within three months, the Bidens had wormed their way into the good graces of the power brokers who remained in Ukraine. Vice President Biden met with Hunter's business partner, a man named Devin Archer at the White House. Five days later, in April of 2014, Joe Biden went to Ukraine. He was described by the press as the public face of the administration's handling of Ukraine. But he wasn't there to represent the United States. He was there to represent his son's financial status. Because the day after he got there, Devin Archer was appointed to the board of Barisma. Two weeks after that, Hunter also joined the board. In between those two occasions, British officials seized $23 million from the London bank account of Barisma's owner, who was a well-known oligarch viewed by many as one of the faces of Ukrainian corruption. But what's twenty-three million dollars when you now have two partners of the Vice President of the United States in your toolbox? You see, the Vice President was now leading the way in helping Ukraine rid itself of its corrupt leaders. Except that one. Because he was paying his son and his son's business partner millions of dollars to sit on a board, even though they had no advisory role. So what benefit did the oligarch see in having two Americans with connections to their vice president? Well, in 2016, Barisma's owner was being investigated by Ukraine's top prosecutor because of corruption allegations. Barisma's owner called in a favor. Vice President Biden threatened to withhold one billion dollars in United States loan guarantees to Ukraine unless the prosecutor was fired. Ukraine's parliament promptly fired the prosecutor, ending the investigation. Some of you may recall that President Trump was impeached for asking the Ukrainian government to investigate this incident on the basis that he was attempting to use a foreign government to influence an American election. The real reason was one of the first cover-ups involving the son of Joe Biden and Joe's role in keeping the money flowing from a Ukrainian oligarch into his son's bank account. Sure, it may have been a coincidence, but it isn't the last one. And you don't have to believe me, it's within the first eight pages of an 87-page report from February 2021 called Hunter Biden: Barisma and Corruption: The Impact on U.S. Government Policy and Related Concerns from the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance Majority Staff Report. I know. The title's almost as long as the report itself. The report starts out as a way to point out how awkward it was having the son of the Vice President of the United States working for a corrupt oligarch in Ukraine while the American government was supposed to be helping Ukraine rid itself of corruption. And it was Joe Biden who was supposed to be leading the charge. So, in a nutshell, unrest in Ukraine is seen as an opportunity by Hunter Biden and his business partner. They find someone who can use the influence of the Vice President of the United States and sell their influence to a high bidder. And it worked. Now you might be thinking, come on, Bob, everybody knows there are laws about that. You can't use your position in government to benefit yourself or your family. Well, that's true. Except that those laws do not apply to the president or the vice president. That's right. The laws that prohibit even the lowliest government employee from receiving any additional benefits from their position suddenly stop right before they can be applied to the top two government positions in the country. Only Congress can hold them accountable. Well, Congress and the vote of the people. So as long as the Democrats stayed in power, Hunter Biden was free to peddle his father's influence around the world. And it appears he did. According to the same report, on page five, Hunter Biden used Secret Service protection to fly to Moscow, Beijing, Doha, Paris, Seoul, Manila, Tokyo, Mexico City, Milan, Florence, Shanghai, Geneva, London, Dublin, Munich, Berlin, Bogota, Abu Dhabi, Nairobi, Hong Kong, Taipei, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Johannesburg, Brussels, Madrid, Mumbai, and Lake Como. Wherever that is. While not all of the trips seemed to have produced fruit, some apparently did. On the same day Vice President Biden addressed the Ukrainian legislature, Hunter's business partner got paid more than one hundred forty two thousand dollars from Kazakhstan. Hunter got more than three and a half million from the wife of the former mayor of Moscow. She made her fortune from shady business deals while her husband was mayor. Hunter had business associations with Yi Jinming and Guangwan Dong and other Chinese nationals associated with the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army. The report says those associations resulted in millions of dollars of cash flow. One of the questions that needs to be answered is how much of that money made its way back to the big guy, who now goes by the title President of the United States? And how much influence did that money have on our policies concerning Ukraine, Russia, China, and the various other places Hunter pitched his father's influence. As long as the Democrats held power, it didn't matter, because as we've already learned, only Congress and the election box can hold the president or vice president to account. It's becoming clearer to me why the Democrat machine panicked when Donald Trump became president. It wasn't that they were so against his policies as they were afraid the truth would be exposed. The more President Trump tried to expose the truth, the more the Democrats threw up roadblocks and distractions like impeachments. It wasn't because they cared about you. It was because they were afraid they would be exposed. As long as the Democrats controlled Congress, nothing would be done. As long as the people didn't find out, they could count on winning elections. When Donald Trump became president, the leaders of the Democrats had to pull out every stop, use every tool at its disposal to turn the country against its own president, to protect itself and continue the influence peddling and backroom deals to which they had become accustomed. If that meant cheating, so be it. The COVID-19 pandemic provided the perfect opportunity. Democrat controlled state governments around the country immediately implemented changes to the voting rules to move the needle in their favor, allowing ballot harvesting and voting remotely, eliminating what few safeguards were in place to ensure an honest and accurate result. Even before that, the Democrat leaders employed the media in such a way that surprised even myself. Having worked in the media my entire adult life, I was shocked at how they treated our president even before he was elected. Witnessing the shock of the media when Trump was elected and how news coverage changed so dramatically certainly caused suspicion on my part. The media has always been somewhat liberal, but the Trump victory escalated somewhat liberal to outright confrontational. President Trump could do no right, and even when he did, they wouldn't tell you. The Democrat controlled House of Representatives kept offering up distractions while the media demonized our president and COVID nineteen offered up the excuse Democrats needed to change the voting rules and get Donald Trump out of office after serving just one term. Order would be restored and the secrets of the Obama Biden administration would be safe once again. All was right in the world, as the Democrats would again be in control and the Hunter Biden influence peddling would become a thing of the past. Everything was in place to ensure Joe Biden would become president. They were so sure of his impending victory that he didn't even have to spend a lot of time on the campaign trail. He could just hunker down in his Delaware basement, safe from COVID, safe from what little right-wing press there is. While Donald Trump was drawing thousands to rallies, Joe Biden addressed dozens of people sitting in their cars in parking lots or separated by circles six feet apart from each other. It didn't matter. The Democrats had everything buttoned up. Joe's victory was in hand. What the Democrats didn't know at the time was that one of Hunter Biden's laptops got liquid spilled on it.

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It was April of 2019 that a laptop computer was brought to a repair shop in Delaware. The owner of the shop got it working again, but the owner of the laptop never came back to retrieve it, despite repeated attempts to contact him. After 90 days, if the computer isn't picked up or the repairs not paid for, the computer becomes the property of the shop. That's what happened. The shop owner, seeing impeachment proceedings of President Trump on television and recalling the laptop with the Bo Biden Foundation sticker on it, looked at the contents of the laptop and was surprised at what he found. Explicit photos of Hunter Biden smoking crack and having sex with multiple women. Among the emails were records of meetings between Vice President Biden and Hunter's business associates, as well as a thank you note from a barisma advisor for introducing him to his father, who claims he had no knowledge of Hunter's business dealings. Biden officials counter by saying there's no such meeting on his official schedule. There was a lot more on the laptop, and in late 2019, the owner of the shop made contact with the FBI. On December 9th, he was subpoenaed to turn over the laptop, which he did, but not before making a copy of the hard drive. Then he waited. Nothing happened. In the meantime, he'd seen President Trump go through impeachment proceedings, knowing there was evidence on the laptop he gave to the FBI that would implicate Joe Biden for the same thing Donald Trump was accused of doing. The computer repair shop owner decided to use another channel. He turned over a copy of the hard drive to a representative of Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, and one of President Trump's lawyers. The New York Post brought the story to the public on October 14th, 2020, just a few weeks before the general election. Surely this revelation must be some kind of political trick to sway votes away from Joe Biden. What are the odds that such a bombshell story would happen just when the incumbent president needs it? There's no way this is a legitimate story. The New York Post had been suckered in by political operatives, peddling a false narrative of the good guy Challenger by making his son look bad. It was all lies. And that's exactly how the media treated it. For the left wing media, it was evil at its finest. A nice try, but an easily seen through web of lies. For the right wing, it was almost too good to be true. So they were careful to not jump on the New York Post bandwagon too quickly. More research was needed, but the election was fast approaching. It was quite the dilemma. But what the privileged few already knew was that the fix was in. As we already know, the FBI had the laptop since December of the previous year. And now they were warning social media sites like Facebook and Twitter that a trove of files would probably be dumped in the weeks before the election and that it will most likely be Russian disinformation designed to discredit Joe Biden. The FBI knew in advance that the Post was going to release the story because they were monitoring Rudy Giuliani's emails. So even though they knew there wasn't much they could do to stop the New York Post from publishing the story, they could get out in front of it and create the illusion that it's all fake before it ever happens. So if it's just a bunch of videos of Hunter doing bad stuff and an email that may or may not mean the vice president met with one of Hunter's business partners, what's the big deal? Why did the Biden campaign want so desperately to keep it under wraps? Millions of people make videos of themselves having sex? Hell that might fill up half the internet. Something like that isn't going to sway the Democrat base. It's not like they're religious fanatics, right? There's not a single Democrat out there going, Oh my, sex and drugs, who would have thought? No. There had to be something more on there that we weren't supposed to see. The FBI knew what was on there, and the New York Post knew what was on there. Hunter Biden may or may not have remembered what was on there, and that was the problem. The FBI knew there was enough on there to launch an investigation, but once an investigation is launched, they won't talk about the investigation. But this time, they went out of their way to make sure nobody else talked about it either. The question they need to answer is why did the FBI trick social media into thinking it was Russian disinformation? Why did the FBI try to discredit the New York Post? Why did the FBI take extraordinary measures to influence the 2020 presidential election? Well, in hindsight, it looks like the Federal Bureau of Investigation set the groundwork for what could be the biggest government scandal in American history. To add icing to the cake, 51 former intelligence officials signed a letter stating that the information cited by the post had, quote, all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, unquote. This letter was clearly created to reinforce the FBI's story to Facebook and Twitter. Joe Biden even referred to it in his debate with Donald Trump leading up to the election. At that very moment, the FBI knew, and all the people who signed the letter probably knew or should have known that the information the New York Post had published was true. The director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, said there was no intelligence to support any claims the laptop involved a Russian disinformation campaign. In the history of political wrongdoing, it's always the cover-up that gets the most people in trouble. More often than not, if a mistake or even a crime is acknowledged, American people are more likely to forgive. It's when you hide the truth after the mistake is discovered that the American people take issue. Fortunately for the FBI, the mainstream media, social media, and the Biden organization, the truth remained hidden until after the election. While many people were happy that the whole Trump nightmare was over and the liberal media could go back to reporting news, the New York Post stuck to its guns, and others joined the posse to investigate the alleged Hunter Biden laptop hard drive contents. At first, most other media sources wouldn't give the Hunter Biden story the time of day, let alone a headline. Some even went out of their way to deliberately criticize the New York Post for a lack of journalistic integrity. But as you know, humans Are a nosy bunch, and there were enough individuals interested in what was really going on to look a little deeper. Eventually, other news organizations began to admit that the post was right. This was real. CBS News confirmed the authenticity of the information. Even the New York Times, which held its liberal stand, had to eventually admit the post story was legit. A closer examination of the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop by a group called Marco Polo found what they claim are 140 possible business-related crimes, 191 sex-related offenses, and 128 drug crimes on Hunter Biden's laptop. An October 29th story on the U.S. Sun says the report has been sent to all 535 members of the United States Congress. The truth, discovered more than two years ago, suppressed by a government entity and shunned by the mainstream media, has seen the light of day, but is still viewed with suspicion or considered old news by the White House. I would point out that the only reason it's old news is because it was hidden from the American people since the FBI took possession of the laptop in December of 2019. Still, it was business as usual for the Biden administration. They continued to keep the media in line, and now the FBI had shown its allegiance. All the messaging was controlled by the liberals and progressives, except for Fox News. Fox News didn't matter because the Biden administration now controlled how the nation's laws would be applied. If your name is Biden, laws might not be applied at all. If all that evidence of crime can be found by a special interest group, why, after having the data for almost two years, didn't the FBI find anything? Odds are they did. Just in time to meet the new boss, who also happens to be the dad of the guy you have all the dirt on. So one could now ask, does the FBI have enough dirt on President Biden to make him do what they want? Or were they in his corner from the start and took measures to ensure his election to president and the continued cover up of his son's exploits? I'm sorry if I sound a little like a conspiracy theorist right now, but this is where my research has led me. Unlike the FBI, I'm allowed to comment on ongoing investigations. The investigation may have ended at that point if it weren't for a business decision made by the richest man in the world. While it may turn out to be a poor business decision, it may turn out to be one of the most important decisions ever made, in that it opened a window into a world that most of us couldn't see. Thought might be there, but hoped it wasn't. Turns out it was. Elon Musk recognized Twitter for what it was and for what it was becoming. At first an echo chamber of extremes, then an affirmation of liberal idealism that was taking over the media. He knows it may fail under his leadership and goals, but he's not in it for the money. Nor is he in it to promote any particular ideal or agenda. He just wants a fair playing field, and it's been demonstrated that the media sphere, and especially the social media sphere, is not a level playing field. And regardless of what goes on behind the scenes of industry and government, the American people want to be heard. Americans are willing to accept that if enough of us don't agree, then the idea won't become reality. All we ask is that every idea gets an equal chance at success, just as every individual has an equal chance at success. Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter was a threat to the imbalance that had been created to keep the American people in the dark about opposing views and alternate solutions. By alternate, I could also mean common sense solutions. But Elon Musk did eventually purchase Twitter, and the liberals and progressives howled in disapproval, encouraged boycotts, threatened advertisers, and even caused a mass migration of employees from the company. All because, as he told his advertisers, he aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world. Oh, I'm sorry. Did you think this was all about your opinion? Well it isn't. Never was and never will be. Twitter is an advertising platform, just like every newspaper, television station, radio station, and wherever else you look or listen. So let me briefly put this into perspective for you. The larger your audience, the more valuable you are to your advertisers, which is your source of income. If you exclude half of America, such as the conservatives, you're limiting your audience. If you open up your platform to more people, you open up your advertisers to more people. So letting more conservative voices on the platform than the last donor did, should create an advantage. If Elon Musk is able to attract more users to the platform, he'll make more money. It seems like a simple equation. So how come Twitter relegated itself to mostly leftist opinions while selectively quashing American conservative viewpoints? Elon Musk had a vision of making Twitter a truly open public square where all voices could be heard, provided those voices weren't inciting violence. One of the ways he could show how open Twitter would be is to show how closed it was before. He decided to start with the mystery of Hunter Biden's laptop. But now, the story isn't about Hunter Biden anymore. It's about how the media and the FBI kept it all under wraps. And while the White House claims it's all old news and Hunter is selling more of his paintings at a New York City show, Elon Musk is releasing internal memos and emails that describe how Twitter was not only a willing participant in silencing those on the political right, but also a tool used by the FBI to discredit and eliminate information that was on the laptop, whether it was evidence of payments to the Biden family from Russia and China, or pictures of lollipops. Even if it was true, the FBI had already planted the seed in Twitter's head that it was still hacked material, which Twitter's own rules prohibit. Twitter deserves a lot of the blame for keeping the story out of the public's reach and for undermining the credibility of anyone supporting further investigation. As Elon Musk said after researching the data for himself, Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene. The evidence of the inner workings of Twitter continues to flow, with three batches of findings so far. First, the Hunter Biden laptop story, then secret blacklists of people and organizations that were throttled in one way or another. The third installment, which I haven't read, is about Donald Trump and the January 6th events at the Capitol. Elon Musk is helping to pull back the curtain on what's been happening behind the scenes of our social media sites and how they conspire with legacy media to control the flow of information that we the people need to make informed decisions about the direction of our society, our country. People should know if the person they're about to vote for is a crook. That remains to be seen, and investigations are already underway. Although the laptop is no longer the whole story, it's still most of the evidence. If it weren't for a computer repair shop owner, the FBI could have sat on this information indefinitely, or who knows, they might have even given it back to him with a stern warning to keep a closer watch over his private information. The laptop has already been linked to a money laundering investigation. The Marco Polo report that I mentioned earlier shows evidence of how Hunter, his dad, and his uncle Jimmy allegedly made six point eight million dollars by offering to become the U.S. frontman for China's Belt and Road Initiative. We talked about the Belt and Road Initiative on this program before. That's part of the Chinese Communist Party's plan to control the world. Our president may have made money promoting it. Senator Chuck Grassley sent letters to the Attorney General, the FBI Director, and the U.S. Attorney for Delaware with details of allegations on which he says the FBI has significant, impactful, and voluminous evidence with respect to potential criminal conduct by Hunter Biden and James Biden, the president's brother, including illegal lobbying and money laundering. And while the president hasn't yet been directly connected to any illegal activity, the fact is none of it could have happened without him. That's how peddling influence works. The peddling is worthless if there's no influence. Based on some of the reported contents of the laptop, the Biden family kept their clients happy. Two attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana are determined to find out, through a lawsuit, what really happened. They have charged that government officials in the Biden administration, including the president, cabinet members, and other advisors and employees of working with social media companies to censor free speech. Among the subjects in question are the origin of COVID-19, the value of wearing a mask to prevent it, and the Hunter Biden laptop story. The two AGs claim the Biden administration violated the First Amendment, took action in excess of statutory authority, and violated the Administrative Procedure Act. Specifically, the Department of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services. Testimony continues this week. There's more to come, not just from Elon Musk and early court cases, but House Republicans have vowed to hold hearings once they assume the majority in the new year. Whatever the results of those investigations, the exploits chronicled on the laptop once owned by the President's son, and the actions taken to hide them has called into question the integrity of a number of our government and private industry institutions, including social media companies, the Department of Justice and the FBI, Homeland Security, members of Congress and the entire executive branch, as well as the Fourth Estate, whose job it is to investigate these things in the first place. Sure, the Bidens may be implicated, the FBI may be exposed, the left wing's backdoor deals laid bare, but the press is who really dropped the ball. The very institution responsible for revealing shady characters in our government or relatives making a living off of government influence peddling are the very institution that hid the truth from the American people. In fact, there's a good chance this is the first time you've heard any of this stuff. As I said at the top of the program, three of the four major networks dedicated no time at all to the story when Twitter exposed the truth about the cover up. The White House called it a distraction and old news. As an informal test, I asked the most liberal guy I know, a true Democrat, union member, all of it, what his opinion of the quote, Hunter Biden laptop slash Twitter, slash FBI slash media blackout thing is. He replied that he's heard of it, but didn't hear anything more about it. So he didn't have an opinion on it at the moment. Nearly two years later, the story is still being stifled. Two years later, the media still can't bring themselves to tell the story. What other information have we been denied? Who's making the decisions about what gets suppressed? Who wrote the letter signed by fifty one intelligence officials saying the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation? Because whoever wrote that letter needs to have the king or queen of disinformation stamped on their forehead in permanent ink. None of the signers should have any type of security clearance issued by the U.S. government. They are all guilty of election tampering, as are specific FBI agents, the ones who convinced Twitter and Facebook that they should be on the lookout for a large drop of Russian disinformation or hacked dirt on Hunter Biden. That's the first level of accountability. Hold responsible those who conspired to hide this information from the public when the direction of our country was at stake. The next level of accountability is a mass correction in our mass media. Both social media and legacy media need to re-evaluate their roles in society. The fourth estate needs to reestablish their roots and return to responsible journalism. The professional journalist needs to treat all politicians as adversaries. Journalism is supposed to be neutral. Let's get back to neutral journalism that informs the American people about the issues that have the most impact on our everyday lives. The next level of accountability is addressing the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop. As the rules for profiting from a government position stop at the vice president and president, only Congress can hold them accountable, that is, until the next election. But if the evidence reportedly on the laptop suggesting our president has taken money from Russia or China or anyone else as part of an influence peddling world tour by his son, then I hope both houses of Congress, regardless of who holds the majority, would do the right thing for the American people. The wheels of justice turn slowly. A two-year delay has already been imposed upon us by nefarious actions of cooperating groups. So the story isn't over. But the book's been opened, and the pages continue to be turned. How it will end, I don't know. But I'll keep an ear out for you. The listening tube is written and produced by yours truly. Copyright 2022. Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. I'm your host, Bob Woodley, for Val Ad Infiniteum.