"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 40

In this episode: Hunting the Bidens

February 5, 2024

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 40

How did Hunter Biden’s laptop, a digital chronicle of misadventures by President Joe Biden’s troubled son, become a political flashpoint and help spark potential impeachment proceedings? What personal and business secrets buried in the old computer are being weaponized against the Biden family during the 2024 campaign? Are any of them cause for concern about our government’s integrity or our national security? And how does the Hunter Biden saga stack up against corruption allegations against other White House families, including the Trumps?

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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If you don’t pay too much attention to political news or tend to block it out as much as you can, the story of Hunter Biden and his laptop computer — currently the subject of multiple investigations — can sound like just the annoying, blustering background noise — very loud noise — of a highly polarized country.

ARCHIVAL News Footage (montage on all sides, a noisy crescendo):

Speaker Kevin McCarthy: ...cover up the actions of a politically associated family.

Rep. Nancy Mace: Who bribed Hunter Biden to be here? What are you afraid of?

Hunter Biden: I’ve been the target of the unrelenting Trump attack machine.

Rep. Robert Garcia: In stark contrast to the Trump Crime Family.

And mostly, it is just noise. But for all of the critics of the Bidens and their completely predictable hyperbole….

ARCHIVAL Rep. James Comer: This is like an organized crime unit.

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives leading the charge have not shown any convincing evidence of their main accusation — that Joe Biden, during either the time he was vice president or president, benefited financially from Hunter’s business deals…Or that he steered U.S. foreign policy to help enrich Hunter or his business partners. Even right-wing FOX News, which has covered Hunter Biden as aggressively as House Republicans have investigated him, has made this point:

ARCHIVAL Fox News Steve Doocy: The House Oversight Committee has been at this for years, and they have so far not been able to provide any concrete evidence that Joe Biden personally profited from his son Hunter's overseas business.

And for all of Hunter Biden’s defenders and their predictable downplaying…

ARCHIVAL Rep. Jared Moskowitz: The only thing they have uncovered is that Joe Biden is the father of Hunter Biden. That’s it.

…There are some questions that beg for an answer. Why did the mainstream media take so long to really cover this story? Why did so many high-ranking former U.S. intelligence officials knock it down as Russian disinformation? And why did Big Tech suppress it on social media? Were they all in on a big conspiracy?

ARCHIVAL Emma-Jo Morris: It exposed the unholy alliance between the intelligence community, social media platforms, and legacy media outlets.

Or are there more plausible, rational explanations?

(Theme music)

And what’s at risk to U.S. national security when family members try to trade on their access to top government officials?

ARCHIVAL Reporter Mike Allen: When you’re Vice President, isn’t there a higher standard? Don’t you need to know what’s happening with your family?

Joe Biden: No.

Mike Allen: Don’t you need to put down some guardrails?

Joe Biden: Unless there was something on its face that was wrong. There’s nothing on its face that was wrong. Look, if you want to talk about problems, you know, let’s talk about Trump’s family.

How does Hunter Biden’s saga compare to past First Family follies or the deal-making by Trump and his children while they were in government?

With the Republican-controlled House of Representatives planning to spend many more months and taxpayer dollars investigating the Bidens and with the topic likely to be a drumbeat throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, it’s time to clear through the noise and zero in on a few worthwhile questions.

I’m Peter Bergen…If you haven’t been paying too much attention to the Hunter Biden story, this episode of In the Room is for you.

(Theme music)

Hunter Biden, now 54, is President Joe Biden’s only living son. He’s facing intense public scrutiny, criminal charges, and congressional investigations into whether his foreign business dealings enriched his dad and harmed the United States.

ARCHIVAL Rep. James Comer: We need to know whether Joe Biden is compromised by these schemes and if our national security is threatened.

That’s Kentucky Republican Representative James Comer, who chairs the House Oversight and Accountability Committee and coined the really memorable phrase Biden Crime Family.

ARCHIVAL Rep James Comer: This is an influence-peddling scheme to enrich the Bidens.

Hunter is the focal point of a Republican Party strategy to diminish and possibly impeach President Biden — an inquiry launched last year by the former U.S. House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy.

ARCHIVAL Speaker Kevin Mccarthy: These are allegations of abuse of power, obstruction, and corruption.

Democrats call the congressional inquiries a fishing expedition, and President Biden has consistently denied any connection to Hunter’s money-making schemes.

ARCHIVAL Reporter Peter Doocy: Have you ever spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings?

Joe Biden: I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.

The linchpin of this scrutiny is Hunter Biden’s old laptop computer, which he abandoned in a Delaware repair shop.Then copies of its hard drive fell into the hands of Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign.

ARCHIVAL Rep. Elise Stefanik: And Hunter Biden's laptop from hell, it has everything. It's a hell hole and cesspool of corruption and criminal conduct.

The saga began almost five years ago — in April 2019, two weeks before Joe Biden announced his presidential campaign — when Hunter went to the Mac Shop, a computer repair store in Wilmington, a few miles from the Biden family residence.

ARCHIVAL PBDPodcast / John Paul Mac Isaac: It was a Friday night, about 10 minutes before closing, and Hunter came in with three liquid-damaged Macbooks.

That’s John Paul Mac Isaac, the shop owner. In 2022, he explained to Patrick Bet-David, host of the PBD Podcast, what he was thinking that night when Hunter came in.

ARCHIVAL John Paul Mac Isaac: The 15-inch Macbook Pro had a Beau Biden Foundation sticker on it. So, I kind of instantly assumed that these were his deceased brother's laptops. I didn’t discover until I started doing the data recovery the following day that this was not his deceased brother’s laptops; these were actually his.

The story of Hunter and his big brother, Beau, is fairly well known. They were little boys, just under 3 and 4, when they were seriously injured in a car crash that killed their mother and baby sister, back in 1972. Their father, Joe, had just been elected to the U.S. Senate, and he took his oath of office in their hospital room.

ARCHIVAL Joe Biden: If there’s a conflict between my being a good father and being a good senator, which I hope will not occur, we can always get another senator, but they can’t get another father.

Michael LaRosa: It's safe to say that they were each other's closest friends, best friends.

Michael Larosa is a public affairs consultant who worked as a press secretary for the Biden 2020 campaign and in the Biden White House. He was primarily assigned to the First Lady, Jill Biden. She married Joe Biden in 1977. The boys called her, simply, Mom.

Michael LaRosa: They don't use, and they have never used the term stepson or stepchildren. Hunter and Beau were her kids, are her kids and her sons.

Beau was a rising political star: Delaware’s attorney general, planning to run for governor. When Beau died of cancer, in 2015, at the age of 46, the tight-knit Biden family was devastated.

Michael LaRosa: What I can say about that gaping hole inside the family is that it still exists.

Hunter, who’d struggled with alcohol and drug addiction much of his adult life, completely derailed.

ARCHIVAL Hunter Biden: I spent more time on my hands and knees picking through rugs smoking anything that even remotely resembled crack cocaine. I went one time for 13 days without sleeping, and smoking crack and drinking vodka exclusively throughout that entire time.

Hunter’s descent into the abyss occurred during the end of his father’s tenure as Barack Obama’s vice president. The pain of losing Beau was one of the reasons Joe Biden didn’t run for president in 2016. In 2020, when he won the Democratic nomination to face President Donald Trump, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Hunter, along with his sister, Ashley, introduced their father at the virtual national convention.

ARCHIVAL Joe Biden campaign ad / Hunter Biden: He’ll listen. He’ll be there when you need him.

Ashley Biden: He’ll tell you the truth even when you don’t want to hear it.

Hunter: He’ll never let you down.

Ashley: He’ll be rock steady.

Hunter: The strongest shoulder you can ever lean on.

During the campaign, the public started hearing about Hunter’s personal problems and his business dealings. Trump brought them up in a presidential debate.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: Hunter got thrown out of the military. He was thrown out, dishonorably discharged—

Biden: That’s not true.

Trump: For cocaine use. And he didn’t have a job until you became vice president.

Biden: None of that is true.

Trump: Once you became vice president, he made a fortune in Ukraine, in China, in Moscow.

Biden: That is simply not true.

Trump: And various other places.

Biden: My son. My son—

Trump: He made a fortune, and he didn’t have a job.

Biden: My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people we know at home, had a drug problem. He’s overtaken it. He’s, he’s fixed it. He’s worked on it, and I’m proud of him. I’m proud of my son.

Trump: But why was he given tens of millions of dollars?

Biden: He wasn’t given tens of millions of dollars.

Trump: He was given tens of millions of dollars.

Biden: That’s been totally discredited. Totally discredited.

This probably sounded pretty opaque to most people watching. Trump was alluding first and foremost to Hunter’s time on the Board of Directors of Burisma, a privately owned natural gas company in Ukraine. That gig began when his father was vice-president, in 2014, and lasted five years, with Burisma paying Hunter around four million dollars. Though he lacked any experience in the energy industry, Hunter claimed he was qualified for the job. He was a lawyer and lobbyist, and he ran his own consulting business. He’d worked for the U.S. Commerce Department and Catholic Charities, chaired the World Food Program USA, and served on the board of Amtrak.

Yet, it seems very likely that Hunter got the Burisma gig not so much because of his resume, but because of who his father is. When he was asked by a reporter, in 2019, whether he would have been invited to join the board if he had had a different family name, Hunter had this to say:

ARCHIVAL Hunter Biden: I don’t know. I don’t know. Probably not. I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden.

It’s not just that his name probably helped get him the job. Presumably, Burisma figured his name might translate into access and influence. So, the fact that as vice president, Joe Biden led the Obama administration’s policy-making on Ukraine — that was not a good look. During the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden insisted there had been no conflict of interest.

ARCHIVAL Joe Biden: I never discussed a single thing with my son about anything having to do with Ukraine. No one has indicated I have.

Even without influencing public policy, a fundamental question about Hunter’s business dealings was whether he parlayed his name and his relationship with his father into riches for himself. To give you a sense of how subtle this can be, listen to Hunter’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle. After their divorce in 2017, she said this in her memoir:

ARCHIVAL Kathleen Buhle (narrating memoir): From the moment Joe was announced as Barack’s running mate, people started treating us differently. When Joe was a senator, people had taken an interest in us, but now we were on a whole new level.

There’s also the account of Hunter’s former business partner, Devon Archer, who was subpoenaed to testify behind closed doors before the House Oversight Committee last year. Archer told the committee he’d heard Joe Biden call Hunter around 20 times over a decade when Hunter’s business partners happened to be with him. Archer said Hunter tended to put his father on speaker when those calls came in.

Democratic New York Representative Dan Goldman was in the room for Archer’s testimony.

ARCHIVAL Rep. Dan Goldman: And they never once spoke about any business dealings, as he described it. It was all casual conversation, niceties, the weather, what's going on. There wasn't a single conversation about any of the business dealings that Hunter had.

Archer later spoke to Tucker Carlson for his broadcast on X.

ARCHIVAL Devon Archer: I can definitively say at particular dinners or meetings, he knew there were business associates, or if I was there, I was a business associate too. I don't know if it was an orchestrated call-in or not. It certainly was powerful, though, because, you know, if you're sitting with a foreign business person, and you hear the vice president's voice, that's prize enough. In the rearview, it's an abuse of soft power, I'd say.

(Music)

Hunter’s laptop, with its business records and correspondence, and more than 200 gigabytes of personal data, would provide a roadmap for investigators in the US Congress, the I-R-S, and the Justice Department.

As House Republicans do the math, having also obtained thousands of bank records, they say: Hunter, his family members, and his business associates allegedly collected 24 million dollars in the 2010’s from foreign entities in Ukraine, China, Russia, Romania, and Kazakhstan.

Ohio Republican Representative Mike Turner chairs the House Intelligence Committee.

ARCHIVAL Rep. Mike Turner: This is a great concern, because you have foreign individuals that are making payments to the son of the vice president, now son of the president, and obviously, they're buying something. They weren't buying his business advice. They were buying influence.

In that context, the question that Representative Comer has asked is a fair one:

ARCHIVAL Rep. James Comer: Is our President compromised because of the millions and millions of dollars that his family has received from foreign nationals?

Questions about Hunter’s activities and communications stored in his laptop have been building blocks to the impeachment inquiry now facing the president.

ARCHIVAL Rep. James Comer: Remember, our investigation is of Joe Biden. It always has been, and the President’s son, obviously, is a person of interest.

But as a person of interest, Hunter Biden is the star of this saga. Republicans are pressing to know why Hunter founded or partnered with as many as 20 companies after his father became vice president. And what exactly did he do to earn his income? Florida Republican Representative Byron Donalds worked in the banking and finance industries before coming to Congress.

ARCHIVAL Rep. Byron Donalds: The Biden family doesn’t really have a business. There is no business structure around this family — except politics.

But many of House Republicans’ findings, so far, appear to be overhyped. Remember that 24-million dollars they said Hunter, his family, and his associates earned during the decade examined? It turns out only 7 million dollars went to Hunter — still a lot of money, but the majority went to his associates. House Republicans have also flagged bank checks from Hunter to his father as suspicious, but they have a perfectly good explanation which isn’t about corruption. For example, Hunter gave his father four thousand dollars as payback for a loan to buy a Ford Raptor truck. And Republicans have not shown any quid pro quo — any official acts that Joe Biden took that might have been influenced by his son. Even the current Republican House Speaker, Mike Johnson, has admitted that the probe has a lot left to prove.

ARCHIVAL Speaker Mike Johnson: There is a lot of smoke here, and Congress has the responsibility to find the fire, if it exists, and that's what they're doing right now.

(Music)

Impeachment is usually about the actions of the U.S. president when he’s in office. But the questions about Hunter’s business dealings revolve around the years when his father was a private citizen or Obama’s number-two.

Richard Painter: There's nothing that the then Vice President of the United States can do to control the decisions of his adult son. We have, as parents, enough trouble controlling the decisions of our teenage children.

Richard Painter served as a Chief White House Ethics Lawyer under President George W. Bush, whose brother, Neil, was the last presidential son to create a major headache. Neil’s business dealings caused trouble for their father, George H.W. Bush, when *he* was president.

Richard Painter: In the Bush administration, we were aware of the issues that President George H. W. Bush had had with Neil Bush and the Silverado Savings and Loan.

Silverado was a Colorado savings and loan bank that Neil served on the board of. When it went bankrupt, costing taxpayers a-billion-dollars, federal regulators accused Neil of gross negligence for failing to stop Silverado from making improper loans and for violating conflict of interest rules. In an election year, 1988, Neil Bush became the poster boy for the savings and loan crisis that cost U.S. taxpayers more than 120-billion-dollars in bailouts, and that hurt his father’s campaign.

Painter, who’s now a professor at University of Minnesota Law School, told me that Neil’s troubles became a teachable moment for the next Bush White House.

Richard Painter: So, come around time for the George W. Bush administration, we made it really clear, we're going to have no Bushes in the administration. None of the Bush family or people say, ‘Well, I know so and so in the Bush family. I want to meet the ambassador to such and such a country.’ No, we're not going to play that game. There's one Bush, George W. Bush, President of the United States, and we're not going to have family members or people who say they know family members getting special access, whether it's to the White House or to any of the executive branch agencies or the embassies. And we had a couple of those calls, they refer to my office, and I’d get on the phone with an ambassador or somebody else and say, ‘Hey, look, this is the deal — no Bushes. This is not a family retreat.’ And you know, they want to have the clam bake or whatever up in Kennebunkport, that's great. But that's not this White House, and that's not your embassy, so we're not doing that.

Michael LaRosa: They're strikingly similar in a lot of ways.

That’s former Biden aide Michael Larosa, again.

Michael LaRosa: Like many family members of politicians and presidents, Hunter sat on the board of a private company and gave advice and perspective. Hunter was not an expert in energy. Neil actually was in the oil and gas business, but was sitting on the board of a financial institution of which he had no prior experience in as a young 30-year-old. He was put on there for his perspective, and they were the two sons of sitting vice presidents who would eventually run for president.

Peter Bergen: But is that a sort of whataboutism?

Michael LaRosa: The point of that is to say many people might find it unseemly that children or family members of politicians or presidents can profit and gain lucrative opportunities that others might not, just because of their last name. It's also a tale as old as time, right?

Indeed, it is. Members of presidential families involved in shady financial schemes are as old as the White House itself, going back to the John Adams administration. In modern times, one of FDR’s sons and one of Richard Nixon’s brothers were involved in embarrassing business deals. Jimmy Carter’s brother, Billy, marketed Billy Beer and was paid more than 200-hundred-thousand dollars by the regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to develop contacts and be an intermediary on potential oil deals. That prompted a Senate investigation. To give you a sense of how everything old is new again in Washington: Joe Biden was on the Senate committee that investigated Billy Carter.

Bill Clinton’s brother, Roger, was investigated for trying to cash in on pardon requests. Hillary Clinton’s brother, Hugh Rodham, did cash in but then returned the money.

Richard Painter believes the Bidens — and the Obama White House — had a choice when Hunter was offered the lucrative Burisma post.

Richard Painter: Then-Vice President Joe Biden, in retrospect, should have recused from everything having to do with Ukraine, if his son, Hunter Biden, was going to go and get involved in business ventures in Ukraine, whether it's being on the board of a Ukrainian gas company or something else.

That didn’t happen. Joe Biden remained in charge of Ukraine policy in the Obama White House. At a minimum, that gave the appearance of a potential conflict of interest. It also suggested pretty bad judgment.

So, when Ukraine became the centerpiece of Trump’s first impeachment — in the months after Hunter Biden had dropped off his laptop at John Paul Mac Isaac’s repair shop — Mac Isaac started to believe he had uncovered evidence that Trump could use to defend himself and to justify the pressure Trump had applied on Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.

As Mac Isaac disclosed in his book, as he recovered Hunter’s files, he immediately started perusing explicit photos and videos that caught his eye — and some documents. One of the first he looked at was called income.pdf, revealing Hunter’s earnings for several years. Mac Isaac viewed the high-paying Burisma job as a pay to play scheme to get Hunter to influence his father and policy toward Ukraine.

After 90 days, Mac Issac took an even deeper dive, having decided the computer now belonged to him; his repair agreements say so. He spent months organizing the laptop files, because Hunter never came back to claim it and never paid the $85 repair fee.

ARCHIVAL PBD Podcast / John Paul Mac Isaac: He hired me to recover data from his laptop, and he never paid, and he never came and picked it up, so I had permission, and when, when he failed to collect it, and it became my property, I tried to hand it over to the authorities.

Mac Isaac eventually did hand over the laptop…to the FBI, in December 2019, but not before he copied the hard drive for himself and others, including Hunter’s personal messages, naked selfies, and explicit photos with women.

ARCHIVAL John Paul Mac Isaac: I saw a lot of compromising, a lot of embarrassing material in the laptop, and I realized that there’s probably going to be a member on his staff or a Secret Service member that’s going to find this piece of paperwork authorizing me to recover data. Then I’m the only one on the planet that knows about that behavior.

Mac Isaac became paranoid, as he explained to the PBD podcast.

ARCHIVAL John Paul Mac Isaac: I thought my days were numbered. When it became my property, and I’m thinking, ‘Somebody’s going to kick down my door,’ I’m waiting for it to happen.

After the F.B.I. took possession of the actual laptop, Mac Isaac wanted to publicize its contents, but he also wanted to remain anonymous. So, in the spring of 2020, he says, he asked his father and uncle to contact a few conservative members of Congress and the media. But no one replied.

ARCHIVAL John Paul Mac Isaac: I wanted to have nobody know I existed. But I wanted the truth to get out, and then I realized the only way that was going to happen was if I knocked on the door of the lawyer for the President of the United States, and that worked.

President Trump’s personal lawyer at the time was former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. His office responded right away to an email from Mac Isaac. Mac Isaac then Fed-exed a copy of the hard drive to Giuliani’s lawyer, who shared some of its contents with the New York Post, a conservative-leaning tabloid.

The first Post story was published on October 14th, 2020, just three weeks before Election Day. It alleged that Hunter had helped a top Burisma executive get a face-to-face meeting with his father in 2015, when he was vice president. The implication? That Joe Biden, in the Obama White House, may have bent foreign policy to benefit his son’s business deals.

A thank you to Hunter from that Burisma executive was one of the emails from Hunter’s laptop cited in the New York Post article. But Biden’s staff and Hunter’s lawyer denied any such meeting ever happened.

The second Post story, published the next day, focused on a business deal Hunter had pursued with an energy company in China. That article included a 2017 email that’s become an absolute focal point for Hunter’s critics. It was sent by one of Hunter’s partners to Hunter and two other partners. The subject line was Expectations, and it listed each partner’s initials with their proposed equity stake — 20% each for the four partners, plus 10% for Joe Biden’s brother, Jim, and quote, 10 held by H for the big guy.

Trump seized on the New York Post stories on the campaign trail.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: Ten percent held by Hunter for The Big Guy. I wonder who the big guy was? The big guy!

Of course, Trump and his supporters alleged — and still do — that ‘the big guy’ had to have been Joe Biden. That allegation was repeated in 2020 by a Hunter business partner copied on the China deal email, Tony Bobulinski.

ARCHIVAL Tony Bobulinski: I’ve heard Joe Biden say that he’s never discussed business with Hunter. That is false.

Bobulnski said that the proposed allocation of equity in the email published by the New York Post was correct.

ARCHIVAL Tony Bobulinski: There’s no question that H stands for Hunter, big guy for his father, Joe Biden. In fact, Hunter often referred to his father as the Big Guy or My Chairman.

But another partner — the one who actually wrote the email mentioning ‘the big guy’ — contradicted Bobulinski. He told the Wall Street Journal, quote: I am unaware of any involvement at any time of the former vice president. The activity in question never delivered any project revenue.

As Election Day 2020 approached, the Hunter laptop stories didn’t get much pickup in the press beyond the New York Post, and that fueled right-wing suspicions of a liberal or deep state cover-up, a belief in a coordinated response by the mainstream media, Big Tech, and even former high ranking officials in the U.S. intelligence community, to suppress information damaging to the Bidens.

ARCHIVAL Emma-Jo Morris: What was more scandalous than the reporting itself, though, was the fact that it exposed the unholy alliance between the intelligence community, social media platforms, and legacy media outlets.

That’s Emma-Jo Morris, one of the New York Post reporters who co-authored the first stories about Hunter’s laptop. She’s now the political editor at the right-wing website, Breitbart. She testified at a House hearing last year.

ARCHIVAL Emma-Jo Morris: The stories were not based on hacked materials, nor were they Russian disinformation, and despite those claims appearing to come out of thin air at the time, we would eventually learn that they actually didn’t come out of thin air at all.

Let’s pick apart this theory a little — the idea that legacy media, social media companies, and the intelligence community were all in on an effort to discredit and suppress the Hunter Biden story — starting with the mainstream media.

Why did news outlets initially downplaythe Hunter laptop story? Simply put, journalism standards. Giuliani and the Trump campaign leaked copies of the laptop documents exclusively to the friendly New York Post, which generated the headlines they wanted. Other major newspapers and TV networks could not immediately independently verify the information.

It wasn’t until 2022 that media outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS News, and NBC News got a hold of copies of the hard drive and were able to verify the contents were real. They hired experts to examine the thousands of documents, emails, photos, and videos and whether they had been tampered with.

(Music)

How about the accusation against the U.S. intelligence community being part of a conspiracy to discredit the initial laptop reports? That hinges on what happened five days after the first New York Post story was published, when 51 former, high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials released a letter saying that the purported Hunter emails had quote, the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation. In other words, they might be fake. Although the signers of the letter did hedge a bit, they wrote, quote, We do not know if the emails…are genuine or not and…we do not have evidence of Russian involvement…Our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.

Having lived through the Russian disinformation campaign of 2016, intended to damage Hillary Clinton and in doing so boost Donald Trump, the former US intelligence officials who wrote the letter had reason to be suspicious.

Mike Vickers: We knew that the Russians had intervened and were continuing to intervene in the general sense, and this looked like it had the earmarks that this might be one element.

That’s Mike Vickers, a career U.S. military and intelligence official who was one of the signatories to the letter. He served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, including as Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence during Obama’s first term. When I interviewed Vickers about his memoir last year, I asked him how he came to sign the letter without knowing for sure if the laptop emails were or were not Russian propaganda?

Mike Vickers: The letter was carefully worded that nobody has any knowledge that that was the case. I mean, it's one, one of the reasons I agreed to sign it, and there were a lot of Russia experts among that group who'd spent their whole life working on that. So, I think the letter speaks for itself. I don't think any American should want the Russians intervening, but it's a lesson also that, you know, you can be right about the broader picture, that they are doing things but doesn't mean they're doing this thing necessarily.

Peter Bergen: So, do you regret signing the letter now?

Mike Vickers: Well, I generally don't think that group letters, you know, if you, if you want to say something, say it for yourself, but even if it's a group of people you greatly respect, if you're not the author of it, you know, you ought to be a little wary.

(Music)

And what about the accusation that social media companies like Facebook and Twitter were also part of the conspiracy to quash the story?

Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in 2022: the story had, quote, fit the pattern of an earlier F.B.I. warning.

ARCHIVAL Mark Zuckerberg: The background here is the F.B.I., I think, basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, 'Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. There was, we thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump of, that's similar to that. So, just be vigilant.’

Facebook limited how much its algorithm shared the New York Post articles — for a week — so third-party fact-checkers could vet the reporting. Still, the story reportedly received 54 million views on Facebook in that first week.

Twitter suspected that the laptop content might have been illegally hacked. It blocked links to the New York Post articles and temporarily froze the newspaper’s account.

ARCHIVAL Yoel Roth: It isn’t obvious what the right response is to a suspected but not confirmed cyberattack by another government on a presidential election.

That’s Yoel Roth, the former head of Twitter’s Trust & Safety Unit. He told a House committee, at first glance, his team thought the Hunter laptop story was a replay of Russian accounts stoking division and disinformation. But in hindsight, he said, Twitter made a mistake.

ARCHIVAL Yoel Roth: I believe Twitter erred in this case, because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016.

Though it may have erred, former Twitter lawyer James Baker said the company didn’t violate the First Amendment, which after all, only prohibits government censorship.

ARCHIVAL James Baker: As a private entity, the First Amendment protects Twitter and its content moderation decisions.

Still, the F.B.I. didn’t help the social media companies assess the validity of the laptop contents, according to Congressional testimony by an F.B.I. Section Chief, despite having been in possession of the laptop for nine months. When Facebook and Twitter asked the F.B.I. for guidance, the F.B.I. said, in effect, no comment. Nonetheless, within 24 hours of the block, the New York Post’s account and the articles were back up on Twitter.

It now seems fair to say the idea that the mainstream news media, major social media platforms, and the intelligence community were all in an unholy alliance to protect the Bidens and censor the laptop is overwrought. But for Hunter Biden, his next wave of troubles was about to begin.

(Music)

A year before Hunter abandoned his laptop, in 2018, the *Trump* Justice Department began investigating him for tax evasion. David Weiss, the U.S. Attorney for Delaware appointed by Trump — and atypically kept on the job by Biden — reached a plea bargain with Hunter for failing to pay more than 100-thousand-dollars in back taxes. Having paid up with interest and penalties, Hunter would be sentenced to two years’ probation.

Hunter would also avoid prosecution on a gun charge…for having lied on a background check form when he bought a Colt Cobra revolver; he had checked the box affirming he wasn’t an illegal drug user, even though he was actively using crack cocaine.

Republicans denounced the plea agreement as a sweetheart deal. IRS Agents testified at House committee hearings that Weiss had slow-walked the five-year investigation and was stymied by Biden’s Justice Department headquarters. Missouri Republican Representative Jason Smith chairs the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.

ARCHIVAL Rep. Jason Smith: The DOJ and the IRS gave preferential treatment to the president’s son during a criminal investigation into his taxes. Americans should not have to accept two tiers of justice in this country — one if your last name is Biden and one for everybody else.

When Hunter appeared in Wilmington federal court last year before an inquisitive, Trump-appointed federal judge, the plea deal quickly fell apart. U.S. Attorney Weiss then asked to be elevated to Special Counsel status, and Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, agreed, as he put it, in the public interest. Weiss soon refiled much more serious gun and tax evasion charges.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Tonight, the legal jeopardy for the President’s son. The 56-page indictment that accuses Hunter Biden of a $1.4 million tax evasion scheme.

Weiss accused Hunter of failing to pay taxes over four years and said Hunter had sufficient funds to pay, but he chose not to, even after regaining his sobriety. For example, the indictment said that Hunter bought a Porsche and spent 17 thousand dollars a month on a lavish house in Venice Beach, California.

ARCHIVAL Reporter: Special Counsel David Weiss insisting that during that time Biden was living an extravagant lifestyle: spending on drugs, escorts, and girlfriends, luxury hotels, rental properties, exotic cars, clothing. In short, everything but his taxes.

More than 10 million Americans fail to pay taxes every year, and most cases are resolved with a civil settlement. Hunter’s defense attorney, Abbe Lowell, said Weiss had bowed to Republican pressure and that based on the facts and the law, if Hunter’s last name was anything other than Biden, the charges…would not have been brought.

ARCHIVAL Abbe Lowell: He certainly did things that he’s not proud of. But wait — what happened since? He got himself sober in 2019, and he paid all of the taxes that are owed in this indictment more than two years ago with interest and penalties. Nobody in that position would be charged the way he was yesterday. Nobody.

Besides defending himself in court, Hunter is on offense. He sued John Paul Mac Isaac, the man who released his laptop contents to the world, for invasion of privacy. Hunter also defied a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee for a closed-door deposition, saying he preferred to answer the committee’s questions in a public hearing. When the committee rejected that idea, Hunter spoke to reporters outside the Capitol.

ARCHIVAL Hunter Biden: For six years, MAGA Republicans have impugned my character, invaded my privacy, attacked my wife, my children, my family, and my friends. They've ridiculed my struggle with addiction. They belittled my recovery, and they have tried to dehumanize me, all to embarrass and damage my father, who has devoted his entire public life to service. Let me state as clearly as I can, my father was not financially involved in my business — not as a practicing lawyer, not as a board member of Burisma, not in my partnership with a Chinese private businessman, not in my investments at home nor abroad.

Hunter didn’t address his pending criminal charges, but he did say this:

ARCHIVAL Hunter Biden: In the depths of my addiction, I was extremely irresponsible with my finances, but to suggest that is grounds for an impeachment inquiry is beyond the absurd. It's shameless. There is no evidence to support the allegations that my father was financially involved in my business, because it did not happen.

Later that very day, the House of Representatives voted officially to authorize the impeachment inquiry. You won’t be surprised to hear that it was a 100-percent party-line vote.

ARCHIVAL C SPAN / House Vote: On this vote, the yeas are 221, and the nays are 212, the resolution is adopted. (gavel smack). Whoo!

But in the Democratic-controlled Senate, articles of impeachment would be dead on arrival. Even Republicans who’ve investigated the Bidens, like Iowa Senator Charles Grassley, have been skeptical.

ARCHIVAL Sen. Charles Grassley: And I’m going to just follow the facts where they are, and the facts haven’t taken me to that point where I can say that the President is guilty of anything.

Richard Painter, who worked for Republican President George W. Bush, shares that view.

Richard Painter: I am concerned about the appearances of sons and daughters of prominent politicians going around and scaring up business with people who want something from those politicians. It's a common problem. I just don't see any evidence of a quid pro quo, of official action in exchange for anything connected to Hunter Biden. So the Biden family did not cross the legal lines.

Peter Bergen: You don't think other than the appearances that this didn't look kosher, it’s not illegal?

Richard Painter: It was not illegal. I wish that the vice president made a decision to recuse from matters involving Ukraine, if he could not persuade Hunter Biden to do something else other than join the Burisma board. But there's no requirement that that be done. The financial conflict of interest statute in the federal government does not apply to the financial interests of one's grown children. You know, at the end of the day, he didn't violate the law, and I don't see any evidence of any influence in the Biden administration on the part of Hunter or anyone Hunter’s associated with.

Peter Bergen: But as a chief ethics officer in the George W. Bush White House, you were quite firm when these kinds of potential entanglements came up, that there was no sort of special access for other members of the Bush family?

Richard Painter: Well, there has to be evidence of quid pro quo to prove a violation of the bribery statute. But there are lots of situations that fall well short of quid pro quo, where the job of the ethics lawyer is to say, ‘No. This doesn't work. This doesn't pass the smell test.’ May or may not be technically legal, but doesn't pass the smell test. And I had to do that all the time in the Bush Administration, and there's some people who liked me because of it, and then there's some people who didn't like me because of it. I believe the President was grateful.

One big irony here is that Joe Biden doesn’t need any money from his son, Hunter. The President and First Lady are rich in their own right.

Michael LaRosa said their wealth, earned as private citizens, has been publicly disclosed.

Michael LaRosa: When they left the vice presidency, both Joe and Jill Biden signed contracts for book deals, and both of those book deals combined came up to

17 million dollars. They also were on the paid speaking circuit.

Peter Bergen: So, suddenly, they're making serious money?

Michael LaRosa: They were very comfortable, I would say. But they're also not the exception to this. You know, Ronald Reagan made millions off of paid speeches.

Peter Bergen: Yeah, I remember that well, when Reagan went to Japan and got two million dollars for a speech, it was a huge controversy. Of course, now that seems rather quaint.

Michael LaRosa: Right. (laugh).

Peter Bergen: But obviously, the Obamas gotaround 65-million-dollars for their book contracts, and that turned out to be a very good investment.

Michael LaRosa: Exactly.

Peter Bergen: So, the overall construct that Joe Biden somehow was getting paid off by Hunter Biden–

Michael LaRosa: Oh, it's ridiculous.

Of course, being comfortably rich doesn’t mean you don’t want to get richer. Donald J. Trump often boasts about being a multi-billionaire, and he continued to own the Trump Organization as a candidate and as president. When Trump took office in 2017, Richard Painter, a lifelong Republican, sued him, as a plaintiff in a lawsuit led by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, over the money the Trump Organization was earning from foreign sources.

Richard Painter: The Founders, when they drafted the Constitution, put the Emoluments Clause in there saying specifically that no person holding a position of trust with the United States government can receive any gift or title or profit or benefit. That's the word emolument — it means profit or benefit — from a foreign government while in office. Nobody, not the president, not a member of Congress, not a secretary of state, nobody holding a position of trust in the United States government could do that. And we never had a president who was receiving emoluments — profits and benefits from dealings with foreign governments — until Donald Trump. And when he won the election, we called on him to sell off the Trump Organization assets abroad. They were accepting money from foreign governments, and there would have been many ways to do that, and Donald Trump adamantly refused, and that's why we took him to court.

The lawsuit never made it to trial and was dismissed as moot when Trump exited the White House. But Democrats on the House Oversight Committee recently issued a report, based on documents from Trump’s accountants, that found Trump's hotels and condos received at least 7-point-8-million dollars from 20 foreign governments and entities, including 5-and-a-half million-dollars from China, while Trump was in the White House. Saudi Arabia was the second biggest spender, followed by Qatar, Kuwait, and India.

Then there’s his children. Throughout his father's presidency, Donald Trump Junior, personally promoted Trump-branded projects overseas, such as the Trump Tower in Delhi - and, along with his brother, Eric, opened a golf course in the United Arab Emirates.

What was even more eyebrow-raising — Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, worked in the West Wing as senior advisers, while earning tens of millions of dollars a year in their private businesses, mainly a fashion line for Ivanka and real estate for Jared. The House Democrats’ report highlighted how Ivanka won trademarks to license her brand in China after dining with the Chinese President. Xi Jinping. at Mar-a-Lago. Afterward, the report notes, President Trump announced U.S. sanctions on Chinese cell phone maker ZTE would be reversed.

I asked Richard Painter about all this Trump family business.

Peter Bergen: As you recall, President Trump's first foreign trip was to Saudi Arabia. It was regarded as unusual because typically an American president on a first presidential trip visits a close American ally like Canada or Mexico, a democracy, not an absolute monarchy. And as a result of that trip, the Trump administration aligned itself very closely with Saudi Arabia's blockade of Qatar and other kind of foreign policy goals of Saudi Arabia. Flash forward four years, Jared Kushner, who has the distinction of making the worst real estate investment in Manhattan's history with 666 Fifth Avenue building, then gets a $2 billion investment in his investment fund after he left the White House. I mean, what do you make of that?

Richard Painter: Well, it looks like a kickback. Now, proving the quid pro quo is going to be awfully hard. What we do know about Jared Kushner is when he was in the White House, he was doing a lot of Middle East policy, including organizing a $110 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia, Jared Kushner apparently got on the phone with the chief executive officer of Lockheed Martin and persuaded her to cut the price for Saudi Arabia on this arms deal. If that doesn't look like a payoff or emoluments, I don't know what that is. And I've called on the United States House of Representatives and the Senate to investigate that, and I know the House now won’t investigate anything unless somebody is a Democrat. I mean, that's the sad situation we're in. These investigations are partisan, instead of focusing on, ‘Was the law violated?’ And our national security is at stake here.

Hunter Biden is now scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee at the end of this month. His trial on tax evasion is scheduled for this summer.

2024 will surely be one of the most contentious years in American politics, and at the heart of that will be the continuing saga of Hunter Biden, who acts as something of a Rorschach test…for Republicans, who see him as the avatar of the supposed Biden crime family, and for Democrats, who see him as having overcome his long struggles with addiction, making restitution for all his unpaid taxes, and being the victim of…a witch hunt.

If you are interested in some of the issues and stories that we discussed in this episode we recommend: The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and The Struggle for America's Future by Frank Foer, and Beautiful Things: A Memoir by Hunter Biden. They are both available on Audible.

CREDITS

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA

This episode was produced by: Phil Hirschkorn

With help from: Holly DeMuth

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

And our staff also includes:

Alexandra Salomon

Erik German

Laura Tillman

Luke Cregan