CLAY: We bring in now Miranda Devine, New York Post writer, author of Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide. Miranda, our audience already had seen enough to believe that the laptop was authentic. Did you take any…? Thanks for joining us, by the way.

Did you take any validation in the New York Times, after 17 or 18 months, finally acknowledging that the laptop was real, buried down in their article about Hunter Biden paying off his $1 million tax bill, or were you just still angry that we’re even in the position where the New York Times is allowed to validate anything?

DEVINE: Well, look, it’s no vindication, I have to say, for anyone at the New York Post, for your listeners, for my readers. Everybody knew that this was a legitimate laptop. We never would have published those emails back three weeks before the 2020 election if we hadn’t done our due diligence. So this is only news to the readers of the New York Times and I guess CNN viewers and MSNBC viewers and that half of the population that chooses to read and view left-wing organs.

But I feel sorry for New York Times readers that they were kept in the dark for all this time. I guess it’s a bit of a shock now for them. (chuckling) I guess they’re scrambling to try and figure out what’s going on. They were told that the laptop was “Russian disinformation.” Joe Biden told us that. Joe Biden told them during, told all of us during the election campaign that he knew nothing about Hunter Biden’s business dealings. He had never met any of his overseas business partners, and that was all a lie.

BUCK: Miranda, it’s Buck. I want to know… It’s important that everyone understands, it’s not that there’s some new reporting that’s come to light from the New York Times and others. They were just telling us what you and others had known for a long time, which is that this was true and real. What do you think, though? There was such a concerted suppression campaign here from the very heights of Democrat-aligned journalism.

What was the part of the story, when it comes to Hunter Biden, that was the most damaging or they were the most worried about? Because there’s the personal stuff. Hunter in the photos and the drug addict and being a mess. Then there’s all that Ukraine and Burisma and China raising funds and “10% for the Big Guy.” What was the part of it that they were the most worried about?

DEVINE: Look, they don’t care about the Hunter Biden personal depravity and peccadillos. In fact, they’re encouraging people to talk about that. Hunter wrote his memoir, Beautiful Things all about his crack habit. And Joe Biden talked about his son’s drug addiction. That’s what they want you to focus on, and then they can say, “He’s a private individual. We didn’t vote for Hunter Biden to be president.”

That is just a distraction mechanism, because the laptop and Tony Bobulinski’s corroborating material and testimony is not about Hunter Biden. It’s essentially about Joe Biden. Joe Biden was orchestrating — abusing his power, as vice president for eight years — to enrich his family and himself, to get tens of millions of dollars from countries like China and Russia and Ukraine, just to name a few, that are in the news at the moment for obvious reasons, and that are our most serious adversaries.

And this puts the president of the United States in a compromising position. And the fact that he’s not told the truth about it, the fact that people like Adam Schiff, Democrats and their media allies and Big Tech allies have gone to such lengths to cover up the story, to traduce the reporting, to call us agents of the Kremlin. Anybody who tries to talk about this truth, this very important issue of national security, is just dismissed as a right-wing nut job pedaling Russian disinformation.

And chief among those critics were the 51. I call them the Dirty 51, these are the former high-ranking intelligence officials such as former CIA director under Barack Obama, John Brennan, James Clapper, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, you name them. They all came out with that list before the 2020 election just five days after our story ran, claiming that it was all Russian disinformation.

Of course, it had weasel words in it, which they’re trying to use now and say, no, that’s not really what they said. No, that’s exactly what they wanted everybody to get the impression, to take away, and it is exactly what Joe Biden did when he stood up at the debate against Donald Trump a couple of days after that letter came out and declared that it was a Russian plant, the laptop was a Russian plant, that our story was a bunch of garbage, so said these really esteemed intelligence people.

CLAY: Miranda, we had an interesting discussion to start the show about why now. Why is the New York Times…? After basically buying into the lie that this was Russian disinformation and not covering it, why are they now, even though they buried it…? I’m still old school, Miranda, and read the actual newspaper.

DEVINE: (chuckles)

CLAY: They buried it like 20 pages back into the physical front section of the newspaper. Why do you think the story came out now?

DEVINE: Two reasons. One is, there still are some legitimate journalists at the New York Times, believe it or not. There were people there who knew, who had talked to Tony Bobulinski last year. They knew the laptop was real, and I think there must have been some sort of internal friction. But the reason for this particular story was not to backtrack on their previous rejection of the laptop. Their admission that the laptop was real came in paragraph 24.

The real story was basically rehearsing a defense for Hunter Biden of these upcoming expected indictments from the U.S. Attorney in Delaware. And he’s been investigated, well, since at least 2018. The New York Times says it was previous to that. But we know since 2018 he’s been investigated for alleged tax evasion, money laundering and violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

These are serious criminal charges if they were to be brought, and Trump was fully destroyed really by the Farah allegations. Paul Manafort spent time in jail, and there’s others in the Trump orbit who have had these issues. That was a never-used or very little-used law before. Now it’s become a big deal since the Trump era.

It would be very ironic if it ended up being used against Hunter Biden. So they’re obviously sweating. We haven’t seen much of Hunter Biden in recent weeks, and the grand jury there in Delaware has been subpoenaing his bank records. They’ve had… His baby momma went and testified to them for several hours last week. Lunden Roberts, the Arkansas former stripper who was the mother of his now 4-year-old daughter, that she had to go to court to prove paternity of, and her lawyer has handed over a whole cache of documents, financial documents, to the grand jury.

And reading between the lines of the New York Times, it seems that the grand jury has actually been using at least some emails that were on the laptop, if not the entire laptop. And we know the FBI has had the laptop, Hunter Biden’s laptop, since December 2019, when John Paul MacIsaac, the owner of that MacBook repair shop, handed it over to them. That’s only one of three laptops that we know of that Hunter lost.

CLAY: Miranda, Buck and I were discussing in the first hour — and I’m glad you went through that issue; we also have Durham probe going on — I think Hunter is going to be indicted for some charges. Buck took the other side. We have a steak bet on it. If you had to project, do you like my argument that he will be indicted for some charges or Buck’s argument that he will not? Which side do you think is more likely?

DEVINE: I think he probably will be for two reasons. One is that Lunden Roberts’ lawyer is certain that he will be, and another is because in this sort of rehearsal of his defense through the New York Times, I’ve talked to seasoned tax lawyers about this, and they say these are not excuses. I mean, saying that you paid a million dollars-worth of overdue tax after an investigation started does not get you out of the trouble.

And similarly, retroactively applying for foreign registration. I don’t know why he would be allowed to do that, and the others wouldn’t be allowed to do that. So there’s ample evidence on the laptop — also, the Chuck Grassley/Ron Johnson Senate investigation where they have the money trail, documents I wouldn’t have been able to access.

But this is from the Treasury Department and their suspicious activity report that banks have to file. There were a lot of those to do with all the money coming in — tens of millions of dollars coming in –to bank accounts associated with Hunter Biden, his uncle Jim Biden, Joe’s younger brother, and their partners. The crucial thing to remember also is that Joe Biden can’t pretend that he knows nothing about his family, this influence-pedaling scheme, because he lied about meeting Hunter’s business partners.

He met several of them. He met Chinese business partners. He met Russians, he met Khazakhstanis, he met Mexicans. He met them in Beijing and Washington, D.C., invited them to his own home. He brought them on to Air Force Two. So he’s intimately involved. And not only that, there is evidence on the laptop — not a lot, but there is some evidence on the laptop — that he financially benefited from Hunter’s business dealings overseas.

And that is both commingled bank finances, shared debit cards, shared bank accounts. And also Hunter was paying some of Joe’s household bills. Maintenance and upkeep on one of his Delaware mansions, an AT&T phone bill every month. So that shows that Hunter Biden also, when he complained bitterly to family members that he had to give so much money to support the rest of the family, and at one point he said, “I have to give half my salary to Pop,” which is Joe Biden. So there’s a lot of evidence there, and you wonder if Joe Biden paid tax on that money that he received.

CLAY: Miranda Devine, author of Laptop from Hell and editorialist over at the New York Post. Miranda, thanks so much.

DEVINE: Pleasure. Great to talk to you both.

CLAY: Buck, are you getting’ nervous?

BUCK: Not at all, man.

CLAY: You can be honest! She took my side there. It’s gonna be a great steak.

BUCK: She’s looking at it, in my opinion, from the perspective of what should happen based on the evidence in a country where the evidence makes prosecutorial decisions. I’m looking at it from the prism of he’s the sitting president’s son. The Democrats run the legal apparatus like they do the media in many ways, and David Weiss — the U.S. attorney for Delaware?

Does he want to see his life destroyed? Does he want to see…? That’s how the Democrats play. They’re like a Mafia play. That’s how they play. They play rough. Clay, will he pay a fine and maybe an admission? But criminal indictment? That’s the real question. Is he criminally indicted with something that would seek to send him to prison? No way. No way. No one will do it. They won’t do it.

CLAY: That steak is going to melt on my tongue like butter!

BUCK: We’ll see, buddy. Do we have to put an end date of this? Like end of this year? We have to have a statute of limitations on the bet here.

CLAY: I think it’s only one year, because my thought is that they will not necessarily want to bring the charges right before the midterm, because then it seems politically motivated, even though Biden is not on the ticket himself. So I think they’ll have to do it soon — meaning in the next month or two — or they’ll do it next year, after the midterm’s have already happened.

BUCK: It will be a bold move to indict the sitting president’s son. But let me ask you this. We don’t have to bet on this. But does Joe Biden pardon him right away?

CLAY: He’ll pardon him if he’s not running for re-election. I don’t think he would do it right away because I think the positive would be if you’re Biden, Hunter Biden, these kind of things take years. And I don’t think Joe Biden’s going to run increasingly in 2024. So I think on his way out the door, yes, he could pardon his son.

BUCK: It would be amazing. Almost everybody would have gotten away with Russia collusion and all the lies and all those machinations. And the guy that gets caught would be not for that but something else from the Democrat camp, would be Hunter Biden. Hmm.

CLAY: The wild thing is everything that the Democrats have been alleging against Trump in their fevered dreams, Biden’s family did it. That’s the crazy thing. And they’re not even willing to cover it even though it’s happening right in front of their faces.

BUCK: A fine would be a push? Is that what you would call it if he just pays a fine?

CLAY: Charges. He doesn’t have to be convicted if the charges come down.

BUCK: The criminal charges, not civil charges?

CLAY: Yes, criminal charges.

BUCK: All right, fine.

CLAY: It’s going to be great. Going to melt like butter. He’s going to get charged.