Is Hunter Biden Being Investigated By His Father’s Justice Department — Οr Protected By It?

At the moment, Joe Biden's approval ratings are at an all-time low. His prospects don't look particularly good. Pundits are saying that it might be the Democratic Party itself may be looking to get rid of him. And the whole issue with the Hunter Biden laptop scandal could be used as material to achieve this end. And this is getting a lot of coverage in media. Even mainstream media seem to be onto this, indicating that an investigation into this laptop could be ahead of us. I think that's a questionable thesis. I've heard it too, that they're going to use the laptop and whatever's found on the laptop and Department of Justice actions regarding the laptop to get rid of Joe Biden. I doubt it. But let's look at the details and figure out why. I'm Brendan Falun. And I'm Lee Smith. And we're Over the Target. I just want to start by reading a little bit from an Epoch Times article here, Lee, which points to one of the major pieces in this jigsaw puzzle about why this investigation is important. In March, Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley presented bank records on the Senate floor, showing that China Energy, this is a now defunct firm, made payments to Hunter Biden. And this included a $100,000 wire payment that was made to one of Hunter Biden's companies. Then there was also a wire payment of $5 million that was made to a company that Hunter manages and invests in. And this was made by a company associated with the Chinese energy company that I just mentioned. Senator Ron Johnson was recently with Fox talking about this. We can take a quick look at this clip. Now we're finding out from these whistleblowers that the FBI actually had, you know, I don't know what you would call it, but individuals specifically taking derogatory information against Hunter Biden, downgrading it to end the investigations. We need answers. And Christopher Wray, Attorney General Merrick Garland, these people have to come clean and tell us what we know. We may need a special counsel on this one. Yeah, I'm not as optimistic about charges against Hunter Biden, though I certainly appreciate Senator Johnson's optimism. The reason I'm less optimistic, I think, is if you look at the history of Hunter Biden's laptop and how this was covered up by a confederation, including the media, Democratic Party, political operatives, as well as American intelligence services. You mentioned a media cover up there, Lee, but recently, like even the big media, Washington Post, New York Times, have kind of picked up their game and they've started to look at this. I mean, maybe the Washington Post has gotten a little bit sloppy in recent times, but I mean, they seem to be picking it up there. There's been some coverage of this in their reporting. Interesting issue you raise in a March 2022 article. In fact, the Washington Post did indeed confirm a large amount of the data on Hunter Biden's laptop. I believe they confirmed about 22,000 emails from Hunter Biden's laptop. However, the reasons for that, it's not because they were looking to get on a big story. There are other reasons behind that. Namely, they wanted to get out in front of what they perceive to be more bad news possibly coming to Joe and Hunter Biden. Lee, I imagine that you're referring to this latest trove of information. I wouldn't say trove. It's more like a little bit that's been leaked out since the source of this laptop material. I understand he went to Zurich to a cyber expert to try and recover information that was believed deleted from the laptop. Yep, that's exactly right, Brendan. That's what happened. A gentleman named Jack Maxey, who used to be a co-host of Steve Bannon's War Room, Maxey got a hold of a copy of Hunter Biden's hard drive. He got a whole bunch of information off that. He went to the Washington Post. I just want to make sure you and our audience is sticking with me. The chronology is a little twisted, but let me see if I can explain it clearly enough. In June 2021, Jack Maxey took a copy of Hunter's hard drive from the laptop to the Washington Post to walk them through it, to say, here are the different things we found on the laptop we think are problematic. Again, that's June 2021. The Washington Post doesn't do anything with it for nine months until Maxey calls up the Post as well as the New York Times, he says, and to alert them to the fact he's going to Switzerland to meet with a computer expert there named Vincent Kaufman, who said he might be able to retrieve some of the erased information from Hunter's hard drive. That's when the Washington Post got on the story. That's when the Washington Post hired two of their own investigators, two independent investigators, who were able to confirm more than 20,000 of the emails, while also withholding judgment on the rest, saying it's too difficult to figure out. They appear to be tampered with. We don't know. The hard drive has been copied so much. The chain of custody is very confusing. What the Post was looking to do was, they were looking to get ahead of potentially even worse information coming down the road since Maxey was going to Switzerland to get more information, more data off of Hunter's laptop. This is extremely telling. If that's the case, that three days, like a number of days after they're informed that Maxey's taking this information to Zurich, the reporting comes out. It's extremely suspicious. And then the Washington Post two weeks after the New York Times. One thing I'm wondering is, why did Maxey go to the Washington Post with this? Why, of all the publications, knowing something about the way they operate, why would he go to them with this? Well, I mean, you know, remember this, the reporting from Hunter Biden's laptop first started to arise in October 2020, a month before the election, right? And it was in the New York Post, right? And it was dismissed by the press using as a source this letter signed by 50 U.S. former intelligence professionals saying it bears all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. And the press used that to dismiss everything that came off of Hunter's laptop. But Maxey deserves credit for going to the mainstream press and showing them evidence saying, look, this is real. You guys dismissed this before. You should take it seriously. Here's the information. This is the son of the president of the United States. This is not good for American national security. I want to show you I'm an honest guy and I expect you to be honest in exchange and take what I show you with some amount of seriousness. So again, all credit to Jack Maxey for having more faith in the press than you and I express an awful lot of the time. There's an expectation there on Maxey's part and also Kaufman, the cybersecurity expert, who I understand really without Maxey's go ahead released a little bit of this information because he was concerned about it and expected that something would be done. People still, to some degree naively, think that there will be justice and these things will be followed up. Well, look, it's an important thing that Americans continue to express optimism and hope. But the other important thing is to remember the track record, to understand where we are, right? And so we need to understand the role that the press played previously regarding the Hunter Biden scandal. So now when we see press reporting coming out of CNN about how the Justice Department is moving toward an indictment, that's the context we really need to see this in. But let's talk about the laptop again for a second because this is very important. The different stuff that was coming off there, most of it is the kind of imagery that we've seen before Hunter Biden's scandalous behavior, whether it's about substance abuse or sexual images. Maxie told me, though, a couple of weeks ago, for a story that I reported, Maxie told me that he saw some images that suggested there were other pieces of data on that laptop that worried him. He stopped looking at these pictures. He said they were images of girls in suggestive poses. He didn't go any further than that, but it concerned him enough that he stopped looking, advised Vincent Kaufman, according to Maxie, to stop looking as well. And Maxie started contacting different sheriffs around the United States. As he put it, he thought that no one should be looking at these images without the cover of law. It had to be done in a legal, a lawful manner, depending on the information, the data that's on those hard drives. And I understand as far as Maxie going to the sheriffs about this, there is some potential for this to be followed up. I guess we'll wait and see what happens there. One thing I think we could clarify for our audiences is just where this starts, Lee. And I know that we've featured on our program before a certain announcement made by Joe Biden in 2018 at a council on foreign relations. Maybe we could take a look at this for a second. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor, and they didn't. So they said they had, they were walking out to the press conference and said, no, I said, I'm not going to, we're not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You're not the president. The president said, I said, call him. I said, I'm telling you, you're not getting a billion dollars. I said, you're not getting a billion. I'm going to be leaving here. I think it was what, six hours. I look, I said, I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor's not fired, you're not getting the money. Joe Biden is speaking quite proudly about something that he achieved here in his diplomatic relations with Ukraine. Can you explain this for us? What's happening here? If you're watching this on YouTube, you can find the full episode of Over the Target on Epoch TV. 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