AN UPDATE ON PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN & US POLITICS

Miranda Devine is currently a New York Post columnist and Fox News contributor. She also works for the Australian media as a Daily Telegraph columnist and a Sky News contributor. Her most recent book Laptop From Hell – Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide has opened up on the scandalous story of Joe Biden’s son Hunter and his lucrative dealings in providing confidential government information to foreign operatives. From her vantage point in New York, on Thursday 3 February 2022, The Sydney Institute held a zoom meeting with Miranda Devine to discuss the early impact of the Biden Administration. The paper which follows is an edited transcript of Miranda Devine’s comments.

AN UPDATE ON PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN & US POLITICS

MIRANDA DEVINE

It’s no great insight to tell you that President Joe Biden hasn’t being doing terribly well. His first year as President could be chalked up to something of a disaster, and the polls reflect that. We had a poll a few weeks ago that had his approval down at 33 per cent. Markedly, he is failing with Independents; I think he had 25 per cent of independents. Hispanics, who comprise 22 per cent of the population, he’s down to about 28 per cent. So, he’s really under water. And he’s underwater on all the issues that are important – inflation, the economy, illegal migration, his foreign affairs capability. Even on Covid, which was his calling card – really, the reason he won the election. He promised two things; he was going to unite the country as a moderate and he was going to beat the virus. He’s done neither. In fact, he’s been incredibly divisive, quite deliberately so.

From his inauguration speech on 20 January, he really maligned half the country. For 75 million who voted for Donald Trump, he [Biden] basically pigeonholed them as white supremacists and domestic terrorists. That was an interpretation that I certainly put on that speech, and so did many other conservatives. But since then, he’s been even more explicit. He gave a speech in Georgia a couple of weeks ago, ostensibly about the voting rights legislation that the Democrats are trying to push through Congress. And he just defined anyone who opposed it – which includes members of his own party, people like Joe Manchin, a senator from West Virginia – basically said that they were nothing better than slaveholders, the equivalent of Bull Connor, white supremacists, and basically racists. So, this has been a curious way of winning hearts and minds.

It obviously, from the polls, hasn’t been working. The polls started to crash for him last August with that botched Afghanistan pull out. Americans wanted the war to end, and Donald Trump had been the one to begin the process. So, it wasn’t that anyone wanted it to keep on going, it was just the sheer debacle that we saw unfolding in front of our eyes. It was Joe Biden’s sole decision to abandon Bagram Airbase, which was part of the problem. Millions of dollars of military equipment and helicopters and planes and weapons. So, he showed incompetence in that entire saga, but also callousness. Which, again, belied the mythology that he’s created around himself that he’s a deeply empathetic man because of his own private tragedies in his personal life which have defined his political career from it’s very beginning.

Probably the best example of the callousness was when the bodies of 13 young military members were brought back to the Dover Airbase in his home state of Delaware for this really touching ceremony that Americans do, which is called the dignified transfer. It’s not really a ceremony, it’s a very silent procession of the coffins being brought out and transferred to vans. The President typically goes there, to the tarmac, and stands with the families and salutes. Joe Biden was there alongside the parents of these young men and women, and he kept on glancing at his watch over and over. It was terrible. It wasn’t caught on camera, but this was something that the parents commented on very bitterly afterwards. So, that redefined the sort of person he was.

There is also his lack of concern for the American citizens and the Afghan allies who were left behind in Afghanistan, and the lies he told about that. So, there was a huge disillusionment that occurred over that episode. After that, his character kept on being redefined away from that honest Joe Biden myth that he’d always had. Then, of course, the economy. It’s always a big deal. Inflation – which is the worst in 40 years here. At first, the Biden administration denied that it was happening. Then they said that it was transitory. Even just recently when Joe Biden gave his first press conference in – I think it was – 78 days – which didn’t go very well. He was trying to gaslight people and tell them, “No, it’s not true the store shelves are empty”. That’s not true. He was also trying to say, “Things aren’t really that expensive”. That’s also not true. Petrol itself has gone up by almost 40 per cent since he was elected.

Obviously, that’s not entirely his fault, but the first thing he did when he came into office – or one of things he did on that first day – was sign an executive order to basically stop the XL Pipeline bringing fuel down from Canada. He banned fracking on federal lands. America was energy independent but because of the green pressures and green virtue signalling, that’s gone by the wayside. Inflation – you have to say, the primary cause of it is the federal government continuing to pour trillions of dollars in unnecessary stimulus into the economy and adding fuel to the fire. That is being hung around his neck. Then there’s the border crisis. Two million illegal migrants came over the southern border last year. That’s the ones we know of. There are others that are called ‘got aways’ which could number up to anything – half a million – no one really knows.

As well as huge quantities of Fentanyl, for instance. The border patrol, last week, said that they had ceased enough Fentanyl coming across the border to kill every man, woman, and child in the country – and that’s just what they found. So, those 2 million illegal migrants that have come across the border from dozens of countries – they’re not just South American, Latin American, Central American countries. We’re having people from the Middle East, Yemen, and some African nations. The word has got out that Joe Biden has laid out the welcome mat, and he absolutely has. The administration is really doing nothing to plug the gaps. The border controls are completely demoralised. In the last week, there’s been a leaked video of conversations with Alejandro Mayorkas – who’s the head of the Department of Homeland Security, and the head of the border patrol – trying to have meetings with their frontline troops.

One border agent turned his back on Mayorkas, the border patrol boss had a vigorous argument with a lot of his troops. One of them said to him “Evil happens when good men do nothing”, and that’s what happening right now. Because the situation is now, the border is so porous that they’re releasing illegal migrants who have criminal records. They’re not testing them for covid. And what they’re doing to prevent the crisis becoming a big media is they’re not detaining them, and they’re not leaving them in those border towns – they’re putting them on buses and planes and flying them secretly, in the middle of the night, around to other parts of the country, including Westchester, about an hour out of New York City.

A very quiet, suburban community – the White Planes Airport, which has a curfew from midnight to 6am. They were flying these plane loads of illegal migrants into that airport. The New York Post broke that. I went up there with a photographer for a few nights last year and photographed and recorded these flights. They came in, and the people were bussed and dropped off in the New Jersey turnpike – at a restaurant stop and bussed out to orphanages and things. So, the illegal migration which the administration is trying to deny is a problem – really, just avoiding the issue – is trickling through the population as a real problem. Then there’s law and order, which are slightly connected. You have all these Democrat cities where the homicide rates have gone through the roof. And this is all stemming from two things; one is the rise of the so called “progressive prosecutors”. These district attorneys in so called “blue cities” [Democrat cities], who have basically rewritten the law.

They’ve dismantled offences. In Manhattan, we have a new district attorney called Alvin Bragg, and the first thing he did was issue a memo saying all these crimes would no longer be prosecuted, or they’d be downgraded to felonies or misdemeanours, including armed robbery. “If no one’s hurt, it’s not an armed robbery”. This creates a revolving door situation where the cops are arresting people and then they’re coming out the next day. Then, on top of that, you have – in New York State, this happened all over – the state legislators in Albany – it was actually a year ago, but it was covered by the pandemic. They did a lot of criminal justice reform, including bail reform, so that people don’t have to pay bail to get out after they’ve been arrested.

So, that’s led to a lot of recidivist violent criminals on the street. Then, on top of that, you had the police – all over the country, but I see it particularly with the NYPD – they’ve been handcuffed. Because, after the George Floyd riots last May – which continued on through the summer, and which were weaponised by the Democrats to create this feeling of chaos as a prelude to the election campaign. After those riots, the police were defunded. Progressive Democrats were behind that “defund the police” campaign. In New York, a billion dollars was stripped from the NYPD. A whole lot of other pressures were put on the police, so they really just did a round watching while shoplifters go and clean out the drug stores, just up the road from me. Crimes are not being policed, not being prosecuted. The homicide rate has gone through the roof in many of these cities. Joe Biden is bearing some of the blame for that and Democrats are.

So, he’s coming to New York this week to talk to the new Mayor, Eric Adams, who’s a former cop, and try and put his imprimatur on getting on top of crime problems. He’s saying, “I put a whole lot of money into my stimulus package that you can use for the police and spend more money”. Which is hilarious considering that during the campaign, Joe Biden was playing footsies, let’s say, with the defund the police movement. He was asked in one interview “Do you think that we should be diverting money from the police into social work”, and so on. He said “Oh, absolutely, we should be doing that”. Now, at the same time, Biden’s cognitive health is not good. It’s obvious to anyone who sees it. Politico had a poll recently, which showed that the majority of Americans have concerns about Biden’s mental fitness.

This is talked about a lot, because any time he gives any speech or media opportunity – which doesn’t happen that much – he’s behind a teleprompter or he has notes that he reads from. He seems unable to string a sentence together without relying on somebody having written the words for him. That’s a problem. He’ll be 80 years old in November. But it’s something that was evident during the election campaign. I was in Iowa, in New Hampshire during the primaries, in early 2020, and you could see then, that he was not terribly sharp, didn’t have much energy. There was no real momentum in his campaign. I think he came 4^th in Iowa and 5^th in New Hampshire, or the other way around. But very bad showing.

He was the only candidate who would have to bring a teleprompter into these tiny little town hall meetings, just giving a stump speech. He’s been a politician since he was 29 years old, you’d think he could manage a stump speech, but he wasn’t able to. You could see from the lacklustre crowds that he was pulling, compared to Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and certainly compared to Bernie Sanders, who had Trump like enthusiasm, especially from young people, wherever he went. He was filling enormous stadiums. Joe Biden was struggling to fill a tiny little movie theatre in Manchester, New Hampshire. That was all obvious. Whatever funny deals happened in South Carolina, thanks to Jim Clyburn – who’s an eminent black Senator down there with a lot of following – that won Joe Biden the black vote and got him the nomination.

We joke and we talk about hiding in his basement, but, effectively, that’s what he did. He allowed Donald Trump and the pandemic to do its magic. He hung every Covid death around Donald Trump’s neck – that was the main attack line from the Democrats. But now Joe Biden has presided over more Covid deaths in America than Donald Trump ever did. Very arrogantly, the Democrats came into office thinking that the vaccine was some sort of magic bullet, and it turned out not to be. Joe Biden used to pull out this card from his wallet all the time and read out the latest death toll number. He’s stopped doing that now. You can see in the polls, he’s now underwater on Covid as well. The vaccine mandates, the mask mandates – they’re being overturned in the courts, and they weren’t popular anyway. All up, it’s been a hell of a year for Joe Biden. He doesn’t show any signs of being able to tack towards the middle where he needs to be.

Following her talk, Miranda Devine was asked to discuss her recent book on Hunter Biden. The response is as follows:

I think the book will be available either this week or next week in Australia. The story of Hunter Biden’s laptop came to the public last October, about three weeks before the election, when the New York Post ran the first of a series of stories about emails contained in the laptop that put the lie to Joe Biden’s continual claim to the campaign, that he knew nothing about his son, Hunter Biden’s, overseas business dealings. Hunter Biden – he’s 52 now – had a raging crack addiction, also a porn and prostitute addiction. He had a problem hanging onto his laptops. The laptop that we got hold of was one of three that I know of that he’s left behind, lost, been stolen. This laptop he dropped off at a MacBook repair shop in Delaware back in April of 2019, a few days before his father announced his candidacy for President. He never came back to claim that laptop, and that became the property, therefore, of the owner of the repair shop.

He eventually gave it to the FBI, and gave a copy to Rudy Giuliani, which is how I came to get a copy of it, and the New York Post. The rest is history. As soon as we published that first story, which was written by my colleague, Emma-Jo Morris – we kept that offline until 5am – immediately Twitter and Facebook, within hours, had blocked it and censored us. Twitter, in fact, locked the New York Post’s twitter account for two weeks, right up until the eve of the election. Facebook said they were censoring it pending fact checking – which, as far as I know, they still haven’t done, because they haven’t contacted any of the other email recipients who I’ve been in contact with to verify whether the emails we published were correct or not.

Then, at the same time, you had John Brennan, the former disgraced head of the CIA – who was involved in the Russia collusion hoax – 50 of his former intelligence and defence operatives, people like Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, who you think would know better, signed a letter claiming that the laptop, and therefore the New York Post’s stories, had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. They didn’t, and these people had never looked at the laptop, they’d never asked us for a copy of the hard drive. We would have happily shown it to them if they’d wanted to see it. That letter was used with great effect by Joe Biden in his next debate against Donald Trump. He claimed that the intelligence community in America had dismissed the laptop and said it was Russian disinformation. It wasn’t. The evidence on the laptop is overwhelming, about the corruption that the Biden family has indulged in for 40 years, in Delaware.

But also, they internationalised that influence peddling operation when Joe became Vice President. It’s not just the laptop – which is not quite enough to create this damning inditement – it’s also the testimony of one of Hunter Biden’s former business partners, Tony Bobulinski, who came out before the election to verify what we had published and who also handled over the contents of all his devices to the FBI. I also have those contents – that’s the other part of the jigsaw puzzle. Another part of the jigsaw puzzle, which I put together in the book, is a very good investigation done by two Republican senators; Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, into Hunter Biden, corruption and Burisma, which is the name of the corrupted Ukrainian energy company that was paying Hunter $83,000 a month to sit on its board.

The senators there had access to treasury department documents – the so-called suspicious activity reports that track money coming into American bank accounts from suspect sources like Russian oligarchs or Chinese state-owned enterprises, etc. If you put all that together – and this is not a story about Hunter Biden, it’s a story about Joe Biden and how he is compromised in his dealings with countries like Russia, China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Romania and so on. Countries where his family profited enormously, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, using his name to open doors. Joe Biden was involved in that. It has been alleged that he was getting a cut of the action. That was 10 per cent for the “Big Guy”, which was one of the names that Hunter and his partners have been alleged to have used to refer to Joe, because they didn’t often refer to him by name.

Hunter also referred to him as “My Chairman”. This comes not just from the laptop but from Tony Bobulinski’s encrypted messages, which the FBI has, and I have. Also from what Tony Bobulinski, himself, has attested to. There’s also evidence, that I found on the laptop, of co-mingling of Hunter Biden and Joe Biden’s finances. Shared bank accounts, shared debit cards. Also, some evidence – not a lot, but a little bit – that Hunter Biden was paying for Joe Biden’s bill. For instance, a monthly AT & T phone bill, and maintenance on one of his homes in Delaware. Painting, replacing shutters, rebuilding a retaining wall, putting in a new air conditioning system on a cottage on the grounds that Joe Biden used to rent out to the Secret Service. A few thousand dollars here and there that had to be paid to local contractors.

That’s evidence that implicates Joe Biden, and the FBI is doing an investigation – we only found out after the election – into Hunter Biden for allegations of tax evasion, money laundering and, it’s believed, some of his foreign dealings. Just yesterday, I was given a copy of a subpoena that was issued by the US Attorney in Delaware, a man called David Weiss, in May of 2019, just after Joe Biden announced his candidacy, and just after Hunter Biden abandoned his laptop at the Delaware repair shop. This subpoena was for the bank records of Hunter Biden, his uncle Jim Biden, Joe Biden’s younger brother, and two of Hunter’s business partners, Devon Archer and Eric Schwerin. It was their bank records from JPMorgan Chase that were being subpoenaed, and any transactions that might have originated with the bank of China, which is where a lot of the money that flowed into bank accounts associated with the Biden’s and their business partners.

That was happening before the election, and that investigation was paused just as the campaign was heating up. That’s been publicised by Politico and so on, quite well sourced, that David Weiss decided, as did Bill Barr, the attorney general, that these investigations should not become common knowledge because they didn’t want them to get embroiled in partisan election politics, which I supposed is understandable.

I cite some polling that was done by the Media Research Centre after the election which shows that about half of Biden voters had no idea about these investigations. They had no idea about the scandals that had been uncovered through the laptop. About 10 per cent of them would have changed their vote if they’d known. In an election that was decided by about 45,000 votes in a handle of battle ground states, that could have made a material difference.