#264 Hunter Biden - His Answer to the Laptop Claims, Burisma, White House Coke and Pardons

38:00And my response to that was, bring it on. Like, you want to go through a discovery process with me in which I get to depose you, the president, and every person that you were associated with while you were friends with Jeffrey Epstein. Like, you want to do that, then I'm willing to do that. I'm going to need a GoFundMe, but you know what I mean? But I'm willing to do that. And I never heard from them again. Okay. And I didn't say anything that Michael Wolff didn't, but they continued to send Michael Wolff letters. Whatever you think about Michael Wolff is that Michael Wolff basically said is that threatening someone with a lawsuit that is engaged in protected speech, particularly when who you're speaking about is a sitting united states congressman which basically you can say whatever the fuck you want about him no matter what that's that's america you know what i mean seriously is that it's called abusive process and and potentially tortious interference meaning that he's interfering he's attempting to interfere with your business so but if you if you want to engage him, you could potentially, and I'm not positive, but preemptively sue him for fucking with you.

39:25And it seems to me that I saw his response, and I don't know Dick Crenshaw from anything. I think Dan had a bad night. Oh, he really had a bad night, and I don't get it. Like what, like if you're going to, if you're going to respond after you made a threat of a lawsuit, then you file the lawsuit. If you truly believe that you want to go through the process of sitting down for a, you know, however many day deposition and going through every stock trade that you've made since you became a United States Congressman. and the information that you may have received or not received as it related to the companies who stock your trading along with what you said to every member of SEAL Team 6 and what they said back to you when you said, I've been talking to my boys at 6.

40:16It's like, I'll tell you what, I don't see how any reasonable person that would receive a text like that would not think, Like, are you threatening me? And I don't know anybody that reasonable. And I certainly know that there's not a jury in the world that wouldn't believe that. So the notion that that is unreasonable for you to come to that conclusion or thought that maybe that's what he was trying to say. And anyway, it's just a number one, you got nothing to worry about, but it may be an opportunity for you also. That's good to hear. kind of kind of the way that i view these things i don't really enjoy legal warfare but i gotta be honest this one you know it's like oh no it's horrible let's do the discovery dan yeah i would i would love to dive into your financial history as a congressman yeah yeah you know what it's much more by the way and it's much broader than that okay i had a guy that he's also like actively threatening to kill people online yeah like he threatened to kill or he's like if i ever see tucker i'll kill him i saw that and then he said yeah i'm not joking no i know so why wouldn't i take but uh i don't know see that's the thing that i don't get is um uh anyway you know the broader picture is this license that people think that they have particularly in congress to be to hide behind the speech and debate clause.

41:45Now, the fact of the matter is, is if he had been smart, he should have gone to the floor of the House of Representatives and he could have talked about you as much as he wanted to. But the idea that he would send you a private DM with that kind of oblique or direct threat, who knows? His boys at six. Yeah, exactly. I mean, like, I don't have any insight into your world other than having watched you, having watched the men. You know, I just watched that interview with Jocko and a number of others that you have interviewed, many of which are, you know, right to the till of the hunt. but you don't come i come away with the impression of this is the one thing that they care about more than anything is uh is are there the bond that they have with each that you guys have with each other and like a code of loyalty that that means and i can't imagine anyone would have been um too impressed with somebody saying that publicly or privately to the other member and not just go like well that is really weak sauce man and i maybe i'm maybe maybe i'm i'm reading way too much into anything i think i think are you familiar with polymarket only from listening like a predictive yeah i mean i literally from listening to some prediction prediction market They only give...

43:30They actually did a thing on this. They only give Dan a 9 % chance that he actually sues me. So, I think... I mean, we both battled addiction, right? I've spent many a nights where I've made shitty decisions and woken up the next morning going, oh, fuck. I think Dan did that two nights in a row. Yeah, by the way, I really do too. You know? You know, and so in that sense, I have a little bit of a, like, maybe somebody in his life. Yeah. You know. I feel bad for him, too. I hope Dan can put the bottle down. I mean, he can't even do international travel right now because he's such a fucking lush.

44:14Is that true? It's really bad. It's really bad. No. He's not allowed to travel. Do you know how many defamation suits I'm involved in right now? you're sucking me into another one i can't afford it man no it's it's real it's a real thing it's a real thing okay maybe you'll get a letter to ryan i would like to see each other in court exactly i sued a guy okay you know patrick byrne the overstock guy uh-huh okay he um he wrote this thing and said that um i was the person responsible for releasing the eight billion dollars in sanctioned Iranian money that was being held by the South Koreans. And I took a 10 % fee for doing so and put it into, you know, bank accounts around the world.

45:00And that was the money that was used to fund Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7th, resulting in the death of 1 ,400 people. You know how many things people have said about me that are like, I mean, on your show, by the way. I'm aware. I know you are, motherfucker. yeah i know um and and so he says this uh craziness okay and i'm like i said to one of my lawyers i was like just just please can we like can someone help me sue this guy and anyway found somebody to do it and uh continuously an incredible lawyer dick arputlian and we went to and he said i'm gonna get him and i'm gonna go after him and this is burn he goes on all these shows and he He says he has tapes and he has the FBI informant and he has the former DEA agent and he's got the Iranian spy who he's going to bring.

45:57He doesn't even show up to the trial. He refuses to come to the trial. Are you serious? He fires all his lawyers the day before we're supposed to begin picking a jury. He doesn't produce anything. Okay. He literally doesn't produce anything. A default judgment is filed against him. But now I'm like two years into this. I mean, it's been since then. Are you serious? Two years into this, and we still don't have a full thing. And the court is going to decide about punitive damages. And so in between the time he gets the default judgment and the court is going to decide, he goes back on Alex Jones and repeats the entire thing over again.

46:34Are you serious? Over again. Yeah. They just do this stuff with impunity. But the whole reason I tell this story is this, is your instinct is right. It's awful. Litigation sucks. I've been, look, I've been tied up in criminal and civil and in courts and, you know, I mean, like, I got, I don't know, 14, 15 million dollars in debt that I have no idea that I'm going to be able to pay off. I have, you know, I mean, millions of dollars in debt that, you know, nobody's riding to the rescue for Hunter Biden. My dad, you know, entered the presidency as the poorest man to ever take the office. And he left the presidency, you know, not poorest.

47:23I mean, which he's fine. But, you know, like he has no we have no generational wealth. I don't have any, you know, despite what these guys say, like there's no billions of dollars buried underneath my dad's house. and teleware and so in order what i think these people rely on is they are so uh they either have the money and they just hire people to go harass people through the legal process like trump does that a lot i mean that's for real um and uh or um uh or they just don't care and because litigation even civil litigation like what you're talking about it just overwhelms your life i mean the depositions that you have to sit through and they prepare for and then you got to go through you know if you're suing for damages and you got to sit down with a psychologist of their choice to go through your entire life and you know i mean just a it puts it puts you in a really uncomfortable position and then you're dependent upon the idea that your lawyers are going to have a make you You know, be able to make it through the process, the motions process and the motions practice.

48:34And, you know, and all and three years later, you wake up and you go, what the fuck did I do this for? You know, and so my suggestion is this, is that I think that you got the response.

48:56I think you won already. okay and i know that you didn't enter this with the intention of winning anything is that you were stating a fact based upon your own personal experience and obviously the personal experience of some of the people in the community that you come from that have a real disdain for this guy and the way that they treated um they were treated by him um in his position of authority and so you speak a truth what you believe to be a truth or ask a question that's worthy of asking about anybody that is in a position of power, which is the right of every American to do. And you do that.

49:32And his response is to send you a letter from his lawyers to tell you he's talking to his boys at six and then to get on and saying, you know, that you're a liar and this and that. And so we'll just let it go now. And challenge me to an interview. Yeah. The funny thing is, Hunter, I invited him on the fucking show in the original. And then after that, he challenges me to an interview. It's like, well, Dan, you didn't really have to challenge me. I know you feel tough doing it. I'm sure you feel real tough doing it in front of your six followers that aren't bashing you right now. But I already fucking invited you, so you didn't have to do that.

50:12Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's my point, is that if he thought that there was a value in him actually sitting down with you, then he can get on a plane like I did fly his ass into Nashville and come to the studio and sit down with you you know and so I don't think that's going to happen though Sean we'll see man I fucking hope it does I'm just taking bets we'll have to look at Polymarket after this I know right I think they're going to do another one I'll bet they do another one what we're going to really I want to look at is Polymarket right now whether or not you're going to get cancelled after you air this interview with me i'll bet the answer's no no but uh all right hunter i want to get in i want to get into your story so everybody starts with an introduction hunter biden son of the 46th president of the united states joe biden and the late neelia biden in the anniversary of her death is tomorrow that happened 18th two days 53 years ago yeah that's right i'm really sorry man and survived a car accident in 1972 that killed your mother and babysitter.

51:24Worked as a lawyer, businessman, lobbyist, and naval officer, a recovering drug addict who's been sober for over six years. Like I said earlier, congratulations. Thanks, man. You've turned art into a form of therapy and recovery from addiction, author of the best-selling memoir, Beautiful Things, happily married to Melissa, and you're a father of five children. you have lived one of the most scrutinized, polarizing, and chaotic American lives of the last decade. So, once again, welcome to the show. And just a couple of things to crank out. Everybody gets a gift. A couple gifts. So those are Vigilance League gummy bears made here in the USA, up in Michigan.

52:12Legal in all 50 states. so you're not going to sabotage your sobriety. But, and then I got just - I've heard of these. What's the principal ingredient of these? It's just sugar. It's literally just sugar, man. I was going to do CBD gummies because I have sleep problems. Yeah. And then my marketer was like, you're going to get sued for catering CBD to kids and gummy bears. And I said, fine, we'll just do fucking - I'm all for sugar, man. Right on. Thank you. And then I got you something else. And this is, so I know you grew up Catholic. I don't know where you stand today, but that is from one of my friends, a really good friend of mine over at SEAL Team 6, was at SEAL Team 6, and he has since retired, and he calls those the Warrior's Rosary.

53:07I love this. Thank you very much. You're welcome. It means the world to me, for real. You're welcome. and uh i carry one of those around with me everywhere for protection in fact mine's in my pocket right now so thank you my dad wears one on his uh on his wrist no kidding yeah so he says right on man um this means a lot to me i brought you a gift um that's in the uh yeah it's in the other room but uh i'll show you at the break perfect perfect painting um but i really really appreciate this is really meaningful thank you very much you're welcome yeah and then the last Last thing before we get into it, I have a Patreon account.

53:43It's a subscription account, and it's turned into one hell of a community. And so what do I, I offer them the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. And this is from Ian Lane. You've spoken openly about addiction, loss, and recovery while living under intense public scrutiny. How do you reconcile taking personal responsibility for your actions while also resisting being reduced to your worst moments? Yeah. You know, I was talking to some of you guys before we came in here, and one of the things that I was, I think that people would be the most surprised about me is that the past six years of my life, since I got clean and sober, those years in which all of this scrutiny um i mean descended upon me like you know people say you know you must be used to this your dad's been in politics so like there's nothing nothing that i've ever experienced or i know anybody else that's ever experienced i mean i was on that i think the cover in the new york post more times in one year than anybody in the history of the paper going back to like 1780 and none of it was good are you serious i didn't know that at one point uh the new york post was uh was publishing uh like 2.5 articles about me a day wow for like months months months long periods of time and um and again none of it was good and then you daily mail and you had the whole kind of right anyway my point being is this is that there's scrutiny and then there's just like complete and utter like you know living in a glass house naked um uh you know and with the lights on 24 7 and and that's what it was like and so it forced me to make a decision particularly in early recovery which was this when I wake up in the morning, do I want to live or do I want to die?

56:03And when you choose to live, it's not that you realize you're making the choice not on your terms, on life's terms. I choose to live on life's terms. Whatever comes my way is I got to make a choice. Because when I say live or die, I mean this, is that I still am absolutely certain that if I touch a drink or a drug, I'm dead. It's a matter of life and death for me. Now, I think that you can relapse and people have been able to, but I don't think that I can. And so I was given that gift of utter, complete desperation to remain clean and sober. and you've been through it and that's a beautiful thing to have and the other thing that it did for me is it forced me on a daily basis to realize how fucking lucky I am you know

57:12I don't know I mean I talk about it in my book and uh but it i was making a decision on a daily basis to kill myself but it was the coward's way how would you have done it well drinking and drugging to the degree that i was i was drinking a you know a handle of vodka a day i mean which is worse than you know the the amount of crack that i was smoking the the problem with the crack is the positions that you put put you in in order to get it. That was the most dangerous part about the crack. The most dangerous part to my physical body was alcohol, by far and away, in terms of the way in which it impacts every organ in your body.

57:59And, you know, it's the only drug that you can die from other than benzos for withdrawing from. And so that's what I was doing to myself. And when I got, when I accepted the miracle of believing that there's something greater than myself that could help me get clean and sober.

58:37I lived in with that realization at the front of my brain every morning that I woke up and still do so despite the perspective that anyone would have from the outside world understandably whether you love me or you hate me I would suggest if you hate me you don't know me get to know me then you can hate me um but uh regardless is that it has been um the last six and a half years despite everything that has gone on has uh been uh the most incredibly difficult but fulfilling um a period of my life yeah i i i feel

59:29I know, um, I know myself better than I've ever known myself in my whole life. Now. And I'm still learning. But I feel more comfortable in my skin today than I've ever felt in my skin. good for you yeah for you man man just you know doing the math and thinking about the last six years you know of what what what what we've what we've been through in this country and then to think about what what you have been through in your first six years of sobriety i I mean, holy shit, dude, that is your dad's campaign. Four years in the White House, and then the first year of the Trump administration. I mean, wow.

1:00:23That's a lot to go through for your first six fucking years of sobriety. Yeah. Congratulations. I appreciate it, man. I'm really, you know, I have to say, I know that I haven't handled it all. you know I'm

1:00:44by no stretch of any imagination remotely perfect to say the least but I am really proud of at least that I'm proud of my I'm proud of my recovery good should be alright Hunter are you ready? I'm ready, man. Where did you grow up? I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. You know, Wilmington is about 30 minutes outside of Philadelphia, south of Philly. And Delaware is, as everybody knows, a really small state. And when my dad was 29 years old, And he ran against a three-term incumbent senator, a guy named Caleb Boggs, who then became a friend of my dad's after. But nobody thought that he would win. He was 29.

1:01:48He was too young to be sworn in when he was elected. And it was 1972, and he won by a few thousand votes. and he became the youngest ever elected member of the United States Senate that wasn't appointed as they were before like 1935.

1:02:10And despite the fact that my dad was a United States senator, Delaware's a really small state, and when my mom and my sister were killed in that accident, my brother and I were in the back seat. and um and it's amazing i just got a letter from uh someone it said the woman and i literally just got it and when i was on i just saw it for the first time on the plane the woman and i didn't even know this story that was on um she was an off-duty nurse and she uh and she would she drove by the scene in which we got uh struck by a tractor trailer that was coming down a hill on this like four lane road or two lane road and my mom pulled out into the intersection i guess um and uh and we bow and i were trapped in the car and according to this note that i just got everybody assumed just thought that we were dead and so we were in the car for an extended period of time and the nurse came onto the scene she just was passing by and she's the one that reached in and gave us the first aid to save our lives whoa and i never met her and you just got a letter from her just got a letter from one of her family's members saying that she just passed away and that she thought that I would want to know.

1:03:46Isn't that amazing? Wow. Wow. Yeah. It's amazing. And, um, literally I only tell the stories that, uh, it was a really, really violent and horrific, um, event. My brother ended up in the hospital. Both of us ended up in hospital for extended period of time my biggest issue was i had serious brain trauma and my brother was basically in the cast a body cast for you know interaction for a long time and um and uh uh but the amazing part was is that the delaware is small state i mean the state adopted of us you know they i mean really like i have more aunts and uncles than i grew up with that i mean uh and in that respect um you know my dad came from a normal middle class family and he entered the united states senate a normal middle class guy and you know i said he made a um he made a vow in 1972 because it was right prior to the beginning of watergate and he had spirit now and he made a he he made a pledge that he would never own a stock at our bond and he hasn't other than through whatever retirement account that he has with the united states government wow and he's got damn money because I have some legal bills that I could use some of the stocks in a bond.

1:05:32But my point was that, you know, despite the fact that my dad was a United States senator my whole life, Delaware's a really small place. And so, you know, if I got pulled over for speeding, my brother and I on our way to school, you know, it wasn't like, Oh, it was like, your dad, Joe's gonna kick your asses. You know what I mean? That was kind of the way in which we grew up. Because my dad commuted every day. He decided that my aunt moved into the house. And my uncle, my uncle built an apartment above the little garage that we had. And he moved in for a period of time. And we spent almost every other day, at least, with my grandparents.

1:06:17and so we were raised and then we got remarried when I was seven, Bo was eight and so I had a pretty normal life you know and out of that tragedy I kind of gained a whole kind of extended family that maybe I wouldn't have otherwise. It was a beautiful thing. Yeah. Yeah and my relationship with my brother you know i i literally i think i one way or another except when he was in iraq for a year to talk to him my brother at least once a day really yeah and we were um inseparable and we used to fight and beat the out of each other like brothers too but yeah yeah it was the the closest thing i had in the world what kind of stuff were into as a kid sports you know sports yeah what kind of sports i played football but you know when i was much younger um you know i played everything but then in high school football yeah but we did everything you know what i mean i mean we spent we how old are you 43 yeah so i'm 55 so you you're the tail end i mean you're actually no you're not but like we spent our lives outside like from you know The rule was when the street lights went on, you had to come in.

1:07:46Yeah. And so we just literally, whether it was summer, winter, it didn't matter. We spent our entire time outside on BMXs and skateboards and the pond behind the house. And all we did was shoot BB guns at each other. Nice. Yeah. What, I mean, what's it like growing up in politics and the political elite? That's what I'm trying to say, is that for us, I didn't grow up in D.C. Yeah. You know, my dad never, he never had, I never experienced that, you know, D.C. insider. And that's maybe why I have such an amazing disdain for the people that continue to, like, you know, One of the things that you realize about D.C.

1:08:34and about being a United States Senator, you know, in Congress is that, you know, there are a lot of people that give the true blood, sweat, and tears to become elected. But there's like a permanent power class in D.C. And I'm not talking about like some shadow government. I mean, they're identifiable people that go from administration to administration, that go from, you know, working for one think tank to another. And my dad was never a part of that. You know, he, you know, I mean, he came home every night. He famously hated to fundraise. And he didn't need to fundraise that much because, you know, come from a state of, you know, just under a million people.

1:09:24And so, in many respects, a very, very normal life. I went to a little Quaker school and then I went to St. Edmunds Academy and I think I got more demerits than anyone in the history, according to somebody I just saw, in the history of that school. And I went to the Catholic high school that my dad went to and then I went to Georgetown. I worked for the Jesuits Volunteer Corps when I got out of school. It's like Domestic Peace Corps, you know what I mean? But in terms of growing up in politics, the only thing that I can say is that we had an incredible, we had a rule, which was, it was based out of the accident, is that Bo and I could go with my dad anywhere if we asked.

1:10:13um and we also knew enough not to take advantage of it to the degree that it was became like to get out of you know the math test or something like that but we did take advantage of it to the degree we went everywhere with my dad that's really me bone my dad like everywhere and um and the rule was you know you speak when you're spoken to and if you're going to sit in a meeting you, you know, since we were five years old, you go up and you shake somebody's hand. You say, nice to meet you, sir. Nice to meet you, ma 'am. And then if you want to stay in the room, then, you know, you sit and you sit quietly until you're spoken to.

1:10:53And we loved to do that. Really? Yeah. So we were, you know, we were with my dad. We went everywhere together. Everywhere. And And what a gift, you know? I mean, like, and so we would go, get on a train with them, and we'd go and we'd go and sit in the cloakroom while he would go out and, you know, on the Senate floor. But then we would leave. So unlike other United States senators and their families or congresspeople that move their families to D.C. and get a, you know, house in Georgetown and go to St. Albans and go to all the same restaurants. Bo and I, like, you know, were a little shadow of a United States senator, but then we'd get back on the train and go back to Delaware.

1:11:46And so, in that respect, it was a really unique kind of life. And one that I never didn't have. My dad's so proud. So you were like really close with your dad. Oh, he was so proud. You know, the thing he loved to do more than anything is take people. He would literally, we would be walking in the Senate, and he would run into some tourists from Jiminy. I mean, like, it didn't matter what state. And because they'd be like asking somebody how to get somewhere. He'd go, come on. and he would take them and he would take them to all these corners of the Capitol and show them like the, you know, the chambers that nobody gets to go in.

1:12:32And if the Senate wasn't in session, he'd take them to the, you know, to the Senate floor and open other senators' desks for them. It'd just be some like Republican, you know, you know, tourists from, you know, Des Moines or, you know, Omaha. I mean, literally. And I love that with my dad. He just so proud. He knew every story of every, you know, of every great person that had come before him. And I got to sit, you know, spend a lot of time with people that have names that nobody would remember, but they were kind of like our babysitters to Bo and I. and people that would kind of be shocked in terms of the politics, almost all of them, not all of them, but a great deal of them, Republicans, very conservative Republicans.

1:13:30I mean, I suggest if you want to read something about the way in which my dad served as United States Senator, go read his eulogy for Strom Thurmond. Okay. And for whoever listened to this, Strom Thurmond, you know, started the Dixie Crab Party because he broke from the Democratic Party based upon their

1:13:53position on civil rights and on the Voting Rights Act. And over a very, very long period of time, Strom Thurmond very much changed. But he led a career that was incredibly divisive as it relates. But my dad was able to work with them. And he was able to work with people like Jesse Helms. And I think that he had more success in terms of bipartisan legislation than any president in modern history. And one of the reasons is because he was trusted by Mitch McConnell and the people that had worked with him for decades in the Republican Party. But anyway, that was my life. And so it was very, very normal in the respect of, like, you know, I went to Catholic day school.

1:14:52I went to a Catholic high school my dad went to. I played football. I got in trouble. I, you know, got in fights, you know, made it through, and not completely unscathed, but, you know, with an incredibly tight-knit close family. And pretty idyllic childhood combined with this experience that I don't know of anybody that I know of that had, at least during that period of time. as a kid because it was able to witness some of the things that bow and i were able to witness it that's interesting yeah it was really really amazing yeah

1:15:44how was it when how are you and jill's relationship are you are you very close very close yeah how was it when she came to the came into the picture when you were a kid sounds like you were about five yeah and so my mom i was just about three i was a month or so away from uh from turning three when my mom died and beau was just before his fourth birthday we're beau and i were a year and a day apart february third and fourth and um and uh my sister was 13 months younger and she obviously passed in the accident and I guess my dad and my mom met like a couple years later and then I think famously my dad asked my mom to marry him like five times before she said yes and she explains it this way is that she was so in love with Bo and I.

1:16:48And she loved my dad. But she just, she was so scared that she would, that it was so, and I love that about her. I said, and I don't want to speak for my mom, but she was, but yeah, my mom is, Bo and I asked her. We literally got our dad by the hand went into the um uh into the room and we said will you marry us it was our idea to do it yeah that's how yeah wow that's it i think that's when she finally said yes with the assist from bone i yeah do you remember doing that i 100 remember no kidding yeah yeah that's cool man yeah yeah and so when people said call her my my stepmom or refer to joe is that she's my mom I mean, I have my, you know, Bo and I always referred because from the age of his mommy, it was mom.

1:17:51And my mom has always been incredibly reverential about my birth mom, Amelia. And has always given us a space to honor that. and you know it's a hard thing to do yeah we did it yeah i credit all that to my dad too you know being able to thread that needle i'll tell you what you know he's the best dad i've ever read about heard about and i swear to god i'm not just saying that is it um you know it's not an easy job and uh and uh and i'm sure he thinks he's made mistakes but but i don't um anyway so yeah that was kind of what it was like growing up so i got no excuses sean right i got you all my ups are my own that's what i've come to the determination of hey that's a good way to be right yeah man extreme ownership but that was one of the questions is i I think you said is the accountability piece of it.

1:19:03Yeah. And I'll tell you what. I, you know, last six years, you know, I mean, I know that we'll get to this part because it's the end of the, or at least the end of the beginning of the story is the pardon. But I think that, you know, I paid a price. Definitely paid a price. Maybe people don't think it's enough. And I don't think they will ever think that it's enough. But I promise you, and maybe you know this too, is that nobody can hold you accountable more harshly than you hold yourself. Yeah. And I've been there. and I'm over it and I'm done with it and I'm not going to live in that guilt and shame anymore.

1:19:55Good for you. And I am, I'm at peace and knowing that I'm still trying to figure things out, you know what I mean? I try to do the next right thing but sometimes I fuck up still. I think less and less and never because of not trying. What kind of... What are the discussions like at the Biden dinner table nowadays? I mean, do you guys talk about politics? Do you talk about all this shit? Can you believe he fucking said that? Really? Or do you guys totally just... No, we're just like any other family. Not at all. I mean, Jesus Christ. I say to people, you know, I mean, here's the bullshit. Is this.

1:20:48Is... And maybe we'll get to this. at some point, but I don't want to spend time on it because like in defense. My dad got old. He got old in front of people's eyes. He literally lost a step, like literally lost a physical step. But he didn't lose a step in terms of his capacity and his capability in terms of his intellectual ability to be the president of the United States. So all this bullshit about, you know, Joe Biden didn't know what was going on and did, I mean, find one person to go on the record, one person that is actually worked for or worked with Joe Biden. like here's my problem with jake tapper okay who wrote a book um you know uh well the other guy wrote the book and jake tapper slapped his name on it but wrote a book without one single on the record source to say that it was a kind of open secret that joe biden was mentally incapacitated find one person Sean and that's the thing but what you did see is this you saw someone become physically less robust and more frail you saw him the way that he walked and his shortened gait you saw his movements become stiffer you saw a slower speech and um and that's called getting old and it happened you know i mean and i don't know if you have parents but you know i was i was shocked by it i mean i and i don't know there's one of these other things where just i think people just need to use your common sense is it it's not like it's unique now here's the thing does that mean that uh he should have stepped aside shouldn't have stepped aside um you know the debate was like a like it it blew up the whole thing it blah blah blah blah blah all of that stuff but the the fact of the matter is is that I'm sitting here having this discussion about, you know, my dad when, I mean, are you kidding me?

1:23:22I mean, I've watched the president, current president. I mean, I've literally watched him. we all have fall asleep in a press conference that is his in the oval office multiple times now and that's not you know and by the way i don't think he has dementia and i'm not saying that at all but he's getting old too and i think that we you know do you i mean how do we even start talking about this did i just bring this up you just brought it up So I actually wasn't planning on talking about this. I knew he would do it. I mean, I will say that, you know, and I just, Hunter, I want to be able to speak without offending you, you know?

1:24:11And so I'm just, I'm going to be blunt. But, you know, I mean, I have seen your dad on air fumble his words and seemingly forget what he's talking about. but i don't think that that is i don't think that is i'm not attacking your dad i'm not yeah i think that i think there are a lot of people that have spent way too many way too many years in politics i think mitch mcconnell is one of those people i mean when you watch mitch over the past year or two there's been several examples where he totally blanks out completely that's a very different thing sean and by the way yeah no i think i think that i think there are a lot of people in government right now president included yeah who are too fucking old to be there but but so you come from it and the reason that i'm sitting here is i've heard you say that and you don't come from it with the cruelty and or a bullshit or may having to make things up or to say you personally know like i've seen somebody you guys sit here and say Like, oh, yeah, everybody knew that he had X, Y, or Z.

1:25:19And it makes you so angry as a son. But I've never heard you say that before. And I can say to you, is that I totally, completely can appreciate the position that you have about that. Now, I can go through a series of rationales for why my dad decided to run for a second term. Okay? Number one, he's the only guy that was able to beat Donald Trump. And this is what people, I think, that I sit and I listen to these, you know, these Democratic pundits that have made millions of dollars off of just breathing hot air into a microphone and living off of the fact that they, you know, they carried Barack Obama's bag.

1:26:14Do you know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Or taking credit for, you know, running his campaign like David Axelrod does. Nobody made Barack Obama except Barack Obama. But they sit around and they act as if they know things that other people don't. And they make, you know, he should have just, he shouldn't have run for a second term. Wouldn't they know better about the reality of the politics of the presidency? which is this, is that Joe Biden got 81 million votes. He got more votes than anyone that has ever run for president of the United States by 7 million votes, more than anyone that's ever run. He had a higher voter participation rate than any time since 1900.

1:27:07Okay. And he came into the presidency and in a two-year period of time, he passed more bipartisan legislation than any president since Lyndon Johnson, since 60 years ago. Okay? He passed the PACT Act and the Chips and Science Act. I mean, just go down the list. He passed the Infrastructure Act and then he passed the IRA. He passed more legislation on a bipartisan basis, by the way, than anybody. He would have passed immigration reform if Trump hadn't kivoshed it at the end. And so he goes into the midterms and he has the most successful midterms of any president since FDR. He limits the losses in the House of Representatives to single digits.

1:27:55He gains a seat in the United States Senate, which hasn't happened since 1932, and he picked up more governorships in state houses than any president since FDR, since 1932 also, who worked with supermajorities. So after that, what's the decision that you make as a president of the United States? Because if you say that you're not going to run at that time, what ends up happening is you become a lame duck. You use all the power of influence that you have. And so based upon that success and based upon the feeling that while he was losing a physical step, while his speech slowed, that he still had the capacity to be able to make the most important decisions that had led to the successes that he's had up until that point.

1:28:43He decided that he was going to run again. And he ran. And then what happened was, is every little thing, every time he went up the steps of Air Force One, and if he used the short steps instead of the long steps, and if he stumbled when he was walking to the podium, and if he tripped over a word of a president that he was talking about India and not Iraq. And every single thing became a New York Times level two-page expose. The New York Times wrote over 120 separate pieces on Joe Biden's age in a 11-month period of time. Fox News didn't stop talking about it. And so here you are, is it, you can't run away from the impression and then comes the debate.

1:29:38And that was a complete and utter disaster. And he recovered in the debate. If you go back and watch the debate, he recovered in the debate and was able to, you know, get through the debate, but it reinforced every preconceived notion that people had whether you loved him or hated him. So then he's got to make a decision about whether or not he's going to stay in the race. And the primary's over. He'd overwhelmingly won. He'd gotten a challenge from Dean Phillips. Anyone could have run against him. Anybody in the party could have run against him. And no one did. Why didn't they? Because he had the most successful presidency of any Democrat or any president in his two years, in the three years that he was there, regardless of whether you think so or not, in terms of whether the affordability or whether he'd gotten inflation down enough or anybody, but just in terms of the brass tacks.

1:30:34I mean, look at what he did as it relates to NATO. He was able to negotiate a, you may disagree with us strengthening NATO, but he was able to bring Sweden and Finland into NATO, the first separate new members of NATO since the pact was created in 1948. I mean, whatever your position on the things that he did, he did them exceedingly well and accomplished them. And he had mistakes like every other president's had. Some that I may disagree with, but absolutely 100 % had some real failures also. What do you think some of those failures were? I think one of the failures was the way in which they executed the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

1:31:21I think it was an obvious fucking failure. I think 13 Marines are dead. I think that there was a better way to do it. And I think that, and I can blame it on his generals. I can blame it on the people, the way in which we did it. But my dad always knew this also, is that the buck stops with him. I think that that was a failure. I don't think leaving Afghanistan, I think leaving Afghanistan was the right thing to do. I think that in terms of the 20 years of blood that your brothers gave for an endless war in$8 trillion is that there is a never-ending lust to continue to sell material and our blood, sweat, and money to a country that has never been anything but a killing ground for empires.

1:32:16Mm-hmm. So, regardless of whether you believe that or not, the execution of the withdrawal resulted, I think, in... And by the way, you can blame part of it on Trump and that he let all those people out of the prison and Taliban, but you know what? But it stops with the president, and that's what he said. That was a mistake. Well, how does he feel about that now? Same way that I do. Is that those lives literally are, you know... I mean, I don't think that there's anything that is more, and I don't want to speak for my dad, but I know my dad. You know, is crushed by that. Crushed by it. Just absolutely crushed.

1:33:04And I don't expect, when do we lose? idea that that would be a surprise to anybody like for instance i disagree with george bush on a lot of shit when he was president but i never ever ever questioned whether or not um he um uh was a patriot you know or by the way i i guess i i who could patriot what what does that even mean is that is that if he could he would do anything that he could to protect people that we send to serve in harm's way for our freedom I just believe that and doesn't make it any easier for the people that have lost people for the families that have lost people for the brother the sister, the dad you know I mean shit I don't know for certain that my brother's brain cancer was the direct you know result of the burn pits that he lived by for a year in Iraq when he was there but I bet you had something to do with it well I bet it had something to do with it that's not like being shot I'm positive it had something to do with it but I mean like I don't want to the point being is um I don't know I think that there's a lot of things that you can't imagine the kinds of decisions that you have to make as a president and that if you have a heart and you care it just must be so overwhelmingly beyond comprehension difficult I cannot fucking stand the way the Afghan withdrawal all happened yeah it it it it i don't even want to talk about it because it's it's it's it's going to get me into a really dark place yeah but i will say that um you know when you have to make a decision on whether when you have to make a decision and whatever decision you're going to make people are going to die yeah because of the decision that you made yeah that would be a really fucking tough call yeah so i will i will give him that yeah but yeah but the way that went down is uh i don't disagree with you sean and i don't think that uh and i again i know it's speak for my dad but I would say this is that um uh I I I hear your anger and and I'm not here to tell you that you shouldn't be angry you know and one of the things is this is that I don't think that uh uh one of the things my dad taught me that he learned from a guy named mike mansfield he talks about it all the time so it's not like it's a story that is um it's one thing to question um uh a man's judgment and that's okay you say i think he used poor judgment this decision that you made but to question their intent um question their uh whether or not they came to the job of whatever they're doing um uh out of some you know mal intent or because they're just bad people is um you never get anywhere but you can question their judgment you know question their judgment whether they made the right judgment or whether they were convinced by other people or maybe there's, you know, whatever the circumstance.

1:37:11I don't know. But I hear your anger about that and I don't have any response to it other than the fact that I know that my dad came to from a position of that 20 years was enough and it was not in the interest of anyone in the United States, particularly those that are serving, to continue to turn people through. The 1 % that have decided that they are going to be a part of protecting this country by holding a gun and climbing into helicopters and putting themselves in harm's way. We track our sleep, fine-tune our macros, and try every biohack under the sun. But the truth is, your peak performance starts at the cellular level.

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1:39:15and access to an entire tactical training library you will not find anywhere else. And the best part? Patreon members can ask our guests questions directly. Your insights can help shape the show. Join us on Patreon now, support the mission, and become part of the Sean Ryan Show's story. Well, let's get back to you. Yeah, man. Georgetown University. Did your dad ever, or your mom, I mean, did they ever talk about what they wanted you to be? Did they want you to get into politics? Did they want you to be an attorney? No, no. My dad wasn't like that. I mean, I kind of, you know, I always wanted to write and paint.

1:39:59I mean, literally, it's all... No kidding. You were always into it. Yeah, from the time I was a kid, yeah. And I think the truth of the matter is that I never had the courage to do it. I mean it takes a lot of courage um and people may think that that's a exaggeration but to put yourself out there through whatever creative process that you're like privately engaged in you know I mean it takes a lot you know what I mean and like it's like you know I'm always amazed by people that can get up and dance in front of other people I was never that guy and but I really mean it I mean and instead of seeing it as like oh they're goofy I look at them and I go god I I wish I could do that.

1:40:38Well, one of the things that I knew that I loved to do, but I didn't ever have the courage to do openly. I mean, openly in the sense of, like, share it with beyond, you know, my brother, was to paint and to write. No kidding. Yeah. When did you start that? Oh, since I was a kid, a little kid. Yeah. I mean, I think my aunt always used to tell me this story that But my mom, my birth mom, said that I was the poet and Bo was the politician. And so maybe that was ingrained in me through that kind of a thing. But that was, and I think that I denied myself that. And so, by the way, you know, so I went to Georgetown.

1:41:32And Georgetown was okay. But I had a, everybody gets a Jesuit. When you move in to your freshman dorm, Jesuit lives on your floor. A guy named Ted DiZiak. And Ted DiZiak had started the Jesuit International Volunteer Corps. And it was like a, similar to the Peace Corps, but it was kind of branded as a, under the Jesuit order, but only in the senses, non-ecumenical, it wasn't like a, you know, out proselytizing, it was like working in the community, social justice thing. So they had a program in Dangriga, Belize, and they had a program in Micronesia, and they had a program in Nepal. And not a program, they had volunteer opportunities in those places.

1:42:23And so Ted And I became close with Father Dziak, and he, along with nine or I think ten other students, started a summer program, which is now in like, I don't know, 13 different countries. And there's a summer volunteer program for like 20 Jesuit universities all over the world. But we started it in Jesuit International Volunteer Summer Program in Belize. and so when I graduated from college that's what I wanted to do and I thought I was going to go into the Peace Corps um and uh and another uh guy that I was friends with Bill Watson another Jesuit priest um this is a young really brilliant uh guys um you know PhDs in philosophy and just amazing amazing individuals really dynamic people that have lived all over the world And he suggested that I not go, there's no need to go outside the United States.

1:43:28He said if I wanted to serve, there was plenty of communities to serve here. And so I did the Jesuit Domestic Volunteer Corps, the JVC, Northwest. I ended up in, I was supposed to go to an Indian reservation in eastern Washington State. and I ended up going to Portland, Oregon and rented an emergency services center for people that basically families that didn't have enough money to turn on their utilities, to turn the lights or the gas or people with small or groceries. And I sat in the basement of a St. Vincent de Paul church in, you know, up Martin Luther King Avenue in northwest Portland. And people would come in and I'd figure out how to get them groceries or go advocate for them to get their, you know, their utilities turned back on or make sure their kids could get to somewhere with heat until we figured it out.

1:44:34And then I did that for a year. And that's where I met my first wife and we had Naomi shortly after that. How'd you meet her? Yeah, she was also a volunteer. She was in there. Yeah.

1:44:52And then Naomi, and then I kind of realized that we're about to have a baby and, you know, 80 bucks a month wasn't going to cut it. That's what you made as a volunteer. Now, you got to live rent-free in a house with other volunteers, but you got 80 bucks a month, and everybody pulled their money for groceries. And even in 1992, 80 bucks a month was pretty rough. But it was an amazing experience. But then I decided I needed to go back to school. And so I went to, I applied to two places. My brother was at Syracuse, and I applied to Syracuse because they had a famous writing program at Syracuse.

1:45:46And two schools, one was the university program and Syracuse's program. And so I got into that writing program. But then I also got into Georgetown Law School and Duke. And I didn't know how I would be able to have a baby. I was 23. I thought I got to be near family. Man. And so we went to D.C. And I went to law school. And then I transferred because I didn't get into Yale when I first applied. But the dean had told me that if I do really well in my first year, um i would make it to i could i could apply to transfer and so like i i got in i i was one of 10 people i don't know like 5 000 that applied to transfer but i did really well and um i had my i had naomi on the day of my last exam on december 21st uh my civil procedure exam and professor have an athlete let me out of the exam but to go have the baby no kid yeah and uh and and i took it after christmas right on but i did well and uh and then i went to yale and we lived in a basement apartment on court street and i think we're the only um i'm the only person that uh got to cut the line at sally's pizza because flow was a famous flow who sat this famous pizza place in new haven who has the best piece in the world.

1:47:28I mean, I look like a kid. I mean, when I was 23 years old, walking around with Naomi, I mean, I went everywhere with her. And, yeah, I mean, I look like I was 16. People used to stop us all the time and go, now, when you get home, tell your parents that your little sister needs to, you know, do this, that, or the other thing. how old is she now she's 31 and she just had my um not just 10 months ago 11 months ago she had uh willie willie my grandson congratulations yeah man how is it being a granddad uh it's uh it's the best it's incredible yeah yeah it's uh and she's the best i mean i she's um she's an incredibly accomplished woman uh her husband is a i love a lot and um and uh he's a public defender he served in uh uh he was an active duty um jag officer uh for uh uh for about two years when he got out of law school and he's in the reserves now and um and he's now a public defender and uh in LA and Naomi's a fifth year associate in a big law firm.

1:48:50Yeah. Where do we go? Where do we go from here? Well, after that, um, I had a decision to make and I had a lot of debt. And, um, so I had my law school debt and I had my college debt. And so, and at the time, I remember it was like$140 ,000, you know, between law school and Georgetown. Because I'd taken out loans to go for both. My dad couldn't afford it. I remember my dad gave me the, for my first semester, he gave me the check. It was$7 ,500 for my first semester at Georgetown. And he said, this was more money than, I think, than my entire college and law school combined. It was$7 ,500. And you think about it today.

1:49:43And that was my dad. My dad had to, in order for us to do that, he, I remember distinctly, he bought an old property in Wilmington, in this little part of Wilmington called Greenville. and he this old beat up a house a beautiful house but he bought it for like a hundred thousand dollars but it had like five acres and so like he sold off pieces of property to pay for you know my first year of college but then we took out loans and so then i was married and then i had law school loans and the only way i was living off it was the money i would make as a summer associate so when i was getting out of law school what i thought i would do is to spend a few years and do with a lot of people that I was working with then, is instead of going to the public service directly, is go work in the banking world.

1:50:32And I was going to go work. I got an offer from Goldman Sachs and a bunch of others, and I couldn't see how I'd live in New York City with a baby. Just didn't, I mean, and I met somebody in Delaware that was running a big bank there, and they convinced me to go work in Delaware. And I went to work for a bank in Delaware, and I was in the executive management program, And after about two years of it, I just like, I was like, I couldn't do it. And not because it was a wonderful place to work, but it's just like, it's just like my heart was in it. And so I went down and I, I served in the Clinton administration the last two years of it.

1:51:14And I was executive director of e-commerce policy for the department of commerce when they used to call it e-commerce. How was that? It was a great experience. I worked for Bill Daly for two years, and I traveled the world with him, and e-commerce at the time was a new thing, and there were real questions about privacy, a lot of stuff that still hasn't been resolved to this day. But it was a big job, and my title was a lot bigger than my ability to affect anything, but it was a great learning experience. You know, when you were growing up, especially, I don't know, maybe from teenage years on, I mean, your dad's a senator.

1:51:57Yeah. You know, and I would imagine that a lot of people would try to use your dad's kids to get to him. For example, the bank that you worked at, I know I have, that they were a major donor to your dad's campaigns. I mean, would they ever... What type of people would try to use you to get to your dad? How would they do that? Well, I mean, that's the thing, is that the reality is this, is that... You come to the understanding that I don't really think that there's an industry or a profession that a United States senator doesn't have some influence over. And so, you know, the question is whether or not there's ever been an instance in which I've asked my dad to do anything on behalf of somebody that's employing me or paying me.

1:53:05And the answer to that is no. And the proof of that is this, is that you have my digital footprint. Everybody does. The entire world has literally the entirety of my digital footprint. Every text message, every email, every phone voicemail, every photograph, everything. And some of it, not even real, but everything for over 25 years, going back to 2000. and i challenge you to find one time in which you will find one communication from me or a communication from someone uh uh in in my dad's in in a position of authority in my dad's office and what you said you know i need you to do this because i'm getting paid i'm not accusing you of i know but but here's what i'm what i'm saying is is that everybody else is you may not be accusing me to that but my response to it is this is that unlike anybody else i'm the most transparent motherfucker you ever met right on i mean come on man yeah you got it all everybody i'm not you i'm not i'm not but you got it they got it all everything they got it all not only they get it all but they spent seven years investigating me with every single alphabet agency in the country and in the world, everybody.

1:54:36And what did they come up with? Is that I didn't pay my taxes on time for a two-year period of time in which I was a inveterate addict and I wrote a book about it and then paid my taxes with penalties and interest. And during that time, when I wrote a book, is that I bought a gun. That's it. Now, every other accusation, and I know where you're getting to and not where you're getting to it's not it's a it's a um i think a an incredibly fair question particularly at a time in which there is just such open corruption is what you know like the impression that i think that the new york post and everybody else or even tucker for that matter has tried to leave people with is that i've been drifting off the coattails of my father and my brother and that i am you know like i went back and i worked for mbna mbna which is the largest credit card bank in the United States.

1:55:31And at that time, and like any other bank, they had significant interest before Congress. I worked in the general counsel's office in MB &A. You know, I don't know what to tell you is that there's a largest employer in the state of Delaware. I wanted to live in the state of Delaware. Now I could have gone to work for Bank of America, or I could have gone to work for Goldman Sachs, or I could have gone to work for JP Morgan, would they have any less of an interest? It doesn't mean that any of those banks weren't major donators also to your dad's bank. They all were. But by the way, what I'm saying is that there is a...

1:56:15Here's another major donor to my dad is the trial lawyers. So if I went to work with the trial lawyers... Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And by the way, I'm not saying like, whoa, it's me, oh my God, my choices are so limited and things like that. I'm saying this. The question becomes, is there any instance in which I was credibly accused of in any way of using my relationship with my father to influence him on behalf of a client, on behalf of somebody that I was being paid by. And I can not only say no and hope that you believe me, but I can say not only no, go look. You can look at every email that I ever sent.

1:57:13You can look at every text message that I ever sent. So I'm not sitting here telling you and hoping that you believe me. And that's what I was talking about I think earlier is one of the real gifts of the last six years is is that I got like I got nothing to hide Sean I mean it is all out there for anybody that wants to um you know uh look at it now you can continue to people can continue to lie about me it makes shit up

1:57:47hunter i just want you to know that i didn't mean any that's not where i was going with this question no i didn't think you were going there i took it there and the reason i took it there is because i found it an enormous opportunity to talk to somebody who uh uh would would listen about it without being defensive about it well i'm i'm gonna tell you the tough questions that i'm gonna ask you before we get there i'll tell you what they are i'm gonna ask you some tough questions about Burisma. I'm going to ask you some tough questions about the laptop. I'm going to ask some tough questions about, actually not even touch, tough questions.

1:58:25I'm just going to ask you to tell the story about your brother's ex-wife and you. And I think we'll have a really good discussion about addiction. And I think the last tough questions will come towards the end when we get to the pardon. And other than that, we're just having a discussion. And so with that question, what I was actually, what I was trying to get to is your old man is is in a and is a position of major influence and through my journey here just as a fucking podcaster i can see how people use my wife to get to me and i am anticipating on how they're going to try to manipulate my kids when they're old enough to get to me because i know it's going to fucking happen because i'm i'm starting to see like how people are and and when you're in a position of influence and how people turn and and and change as that happens and so what i'm what i'm asking you is you know how how would people approach you how would they try to manipulate you to get to your dad and how would that make you feel well i think that there's uh that um at least in my experience there's uh

2:00:02there were two obvious ways in which that would happen but there were the one way is just a full frontal assault you know which was easy to say like i have no interest in speaking to you you know where people would come and say hey can you talk to your dad about x you know i think it could be really cool for you you know what i mean and uh it's like you know this could be really great or or, and that was an obvious, it's an obvious no. It's an immediate, at least in my experience, is like, no, like I don't do that, and I really don't do that, and I never did do that. And regardless of whether anybody believes me or not, that 100 % was the bright line rule in anything that I did in my professional career, and everybody knew that.

2:01:05And then the other way, however, was the much more insidious way, which I'm sure that, you know, whatever level that you're talking about in terms of your own familial relations and as you become more influential or as your influence has grown, is just a much more insidious way. How about people that you believed to be honest, straightforward, um uh interesting um uh in which uh you figure out though at some point that they have an agenda and they have an agenda that's all about them and not about uh uh you personally but about what you what your wife can do for them as it relates to you. But you find that out pretty quickly.

2:02:08And, you know, and that's really kind of easy to figure out at some point when my dad was a United States center.

2:02:21Because I was, you know,

2:02:28highly aware of it my whole life is that he had the capacity to do things like for instance um getting people into the naval academy the united states senator as you know it's the capacity that they have a a um they get to choose what is it two candidates per year shit i don't know yeah i think that's how it works and jeremy or anybody else can explain it better but they have a i think every united states senator has the um on an annual basis picks two for every service academy they can appoint two people and so a lot of the things that my dad did as it relates to things like that realizing that there's an enormous room for abuse of that is like he created a independent panel of people and took the decision out of his hands to be able to do that.

2:03:19And I just use that as an example of the ways in which, you know, and one of the rules in my family, not just didn't apply to me, it applied to anybody in my family, is that if you're working for somebody, if you're getting paid for somebody, don't come into my dad's office and ask anybody to do anything on behalf of those people that you're being paid to work for, regardless of how good the cause is, regardless of how um uh how righteous you may feel that it is but that was the rule and um and so uh those are the two kind of obvious ways that um one less obvious one in which you know um there's there's like a level of seduction that uh that occurs um and where people sometimes I'll even unwittingly overstep a boundary that at least that I would have or anybody else in my family would have.

2:04:21And then there's the ways in which I now only, in retrospect, have become kind of fully cognizant of that are much, much more sophisticated it in terms of the ways in which you can be manipulated by people. Sometimes wittingly, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes, you know, but I think that there's much more sophisticated ways of doing that. Could you give me an example?

2:05:02Yeah. Want to get to Burisma? Yeah, let's get to Burisma. Okay. So here's the, you know... Could you start off with just describing what is Burisma? What was it? But let's step back from Burisma, okay? Okay. All right. Is this, is that I leave the Commerce Department in that job, okay? And I was, you know, I worked at the end of the Clinton administration from 1998 to, you know, left in January of 2001. And I started a law firm, my own law firm. And I did kind of advisory work for, as related to the, you know, what I knew about privacy in the new world of e-commerce. And there was an enormous amount of opportunity in that at that time because it was the dot-com bubble.

2:05:55And so I had a lot of people that I had gone to college with and law school with and on papers that were like killing it. You know what I mean? They started.com, whatever, and there was an enormous need for legal representation and understanding of the kind of regulatory framework that these new e-commerce entities were going to operate. And so I started a law firm with that in mind. And then, you know, it was the.com bubble burst. And I had a friend, a Jesuit priest who had become president of St. Joseph's University at the time. And they had a program in which they got an earmark, what they called it at the time, for a program in which they sent their graduate education students into the poorest school in Philadelphia.

2:07:06in which they sent basically student teachers in to fill in the gaps in Overbrook High School, in the Overbrook school system. And they'd been doing it for years. And if you know anything about Jesuit universities, they're the oldest organizations almost, I mean, they're almost always the oldest community organizations in any city that you go to. So whether it's St. Joe's in Philadelphia or whether it's been there for 120 years or Georgetown University was been there for 200 years or University of Denver that's been there for you know I mean you go down to the University of San Francisco been there 140 years Detroit Mercy had been there for you know it's the only university left inside the city limits of Detroit.

2:07:52So Father the president of the university asked me if I could help him do that and I did and I helped him and kind of navigating Congress, the House of Representatives, in terms of figuring out who his representatives were. I think it was Chaka Vata at the time and where it would go in an earmark. And they got the, I don't know what it was, $50 ,000 a semester to be able to send students to fill in the gaps in this impoverished school system. And then he referred me to the president of Detroit Mercy. And Detroit Mercy was the only, it was a dental school, but it was the only dentist in the entire city of Detroit at the time.

2:08:43So every other dentist had moved out to the suburbs. But within the city limits of Detroit, there literally was not one dentist office. And so what they wanted to do is they wanted to take their dental school, which was serving the community at the time, free, and do mobile dental clinics so that they could do preventative care throughout these neighborhoods. And so I helped them to get the money for that. And then I went to and then I got referred to Xavier and Xavier University. They had a veterans program where they took disabled vets that were coming back from from Iraq and Afghanistan. And this is like 2004 at the time.

2:09:23and the veterans community in which they gave them a, they enrolled them at Xavier University, but they also had them do community work as it related to, I forget what the exact, what it was, but it was for disabled vets in Xavier University. So I helped them get money to do that. And the list goes on. And I ended up representing like, I don't know, I think it was at the height of it, like 14, 15 Jesuit universities. And that was my entire practice. I was really proud of it. Wow. Wow. That's solid work. And then at that time, I went on the board of Amtrak. I became the vice chairman, and I actually got elected to be the chairman of the board of Amtrak after serving on it for over six years.

2:10:09And I had, by that time, gone on to the board of the USUN World Food Program, which was the largest humanitarian organization in the world, serving 80 million people a day in 72 different countries, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. And I had eventually became chairman of that board. I was vice chairman of the board for Truman National Security Project, which put veterans that were looking to enter political office, and we supported them. The Center for National Policy. I became an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in master's program and I taught a course called The Art of Advocacy in outside of government.

2:10:56It was the idea that you could, the way in which you could use your influence to be able to do good things for good people. And so one of the case studies that we used for that was the creation of PEPFAR and the way in which you had bipartisan support to institute a policy which eventually has saved over 25 million lives. Wow. And I taught that class for four years. And then my dad ran for president, lost. And then Obama picked him to be vice president. And in so doing, he had a group of people that I find to be really distasteful and hypocrites. but they said that I needed to give up my, because it was, you know, I was working for these universities, but I was assisting them both in the legal and the policy perspective and lobbying to help them get money to do these programs.

2:12:06And, you know, so, you know, it was, you know, I was a lobbyist. and um and so i voluntarily but with a lot of pressure from them none from my dad had to give up that business and um and so i basically started back in square one and i started a consulting firm because i also stepped down from the board of amtrak because they said that that was a conflict of interest uh and they were concerned that it was conflict of interest so you had to shut pretty much everything down shut everything down back that your dad just took VP. And I had to rebuild. And I didn't have any savings. Three girls, all in private school at the time, and, you know, don't have any money.

2:12:47And so, anyway, regardless, not in any different position than a lot of people, is I had to figure it out again. And so, what I did is I started a consulting company, but mainly focused on infrastructure in rail, because I knew a lot about rail by this point, having served on the board of Amtrak for as long as I did. And there was a lot of potential private projects that were going on that, you know, have all fizzled out over the years. But I worked, I represented a really old, large, Midwestern infrastructure firm, like guys who actually, you know, dig the tunnels and build the rails. And I advised them from projects anywhere from Baltimore to Beijing if they were interested, with just an understanding of how the process works.

2:13:42And so that was what I did. I was consulting on basically infrastructure projects and things like that. And then I began to consult for

2:13:57groups that were looking to raise capital. So infrastructure private equity firms that were looking for institutional capital to put into the private equity firms to be able to invest in infrastructure projects, mainly all domestic. And so I partnered with someone that had a long long-term experience. One of my partners got a Series 7. We started an investment advisory firm and on top of the infrastructure advisory firm. And that's what we did for, you know, as I taught, as I was chairman of the board of the World Food Program, as I was vice chairman of the board of the Center for National Policy, the Truman National Security Project.

2:14:36You know, I was on the board of Catholic Charities. I was on the board of about, I think, at least a dozen, if not more, you know, small, medium, large major institutions. And so, you know, I mean, for instance, on the Board of Amtrak, I was the chair of the Corporate Governance Board for a six-year period of time. And I also took a job as the of counsel to, at the time, I think was probably the most significant law firm in the country, which was Boyce-Shiller Flexner. and I was of counsel and I focused on corporate governance. Yeah. And so that's when we come to Burisma. And the way that Burisma came to me was through a partner, a guy that I, not a partner as much as a potential partner who I had a great relationship and then And anyway, it doesn't matter.

2:15:44He just got a pardon from Donald Trump. What did he get pardoned for? No, he ripped off some Native American tribe and some bond deal that he did with some grifter. And anyway, a huge disappointment. But anyway, he introduced me to Burisma. And Burisma, this is right after the Russians, I mean the Russians had already taken Crimea, but they had made inroads into Donbass and Donetsk. And remember, that significant incursion past Crimea into the eastern part of Ukraine. and Burisma was the largest independent, completely independent natural gas driller in Ukraine. And NAPTGAS, which is probably one of the most corrupt organizations in the world, is the state-owned natural gas entity in Ukraine.

2:16:48And one of the things that is beyond the potential rare earth minerals, the most lucrative commodity in Ukraine, other than the level of education of their population, is natural gas. And Burisma was under direct threat from Putin. I mean, that's what basically why Putin wants that particular part of Ukraine also is the natural resources and also the fact that he runs pipelines through Ukraine to Europe. And there was a board member who's a guy named President Kwasniewski who is the first democratically elected president of Poland outside Lech Walesa, after Lech Walesa, who wasn't democratically elected, but the...

2:17:42uh in a and a champion of democracy and and uh in a uh in uh in a post-sylviet um europe uh eastern europe and he was on the board and he made an argument to me that um they were worth representing because i said that i would talk to them if they wanted to talk to me about um uh representation through boyce shiller and there was an enormous amount of of subject matter expertise in boyce Schiller. Um, there are two partners that were very steeped and that have worked both at the CIA and the state department and in, uh, in, uh, in the last administration that were very steeped in, uh, uh, Ukraine and issues as relates to Ukraine.

2:18:26And that's what lawyers do. And so I said, you should talk to them. And they did. And they, and I, um, and they came in through me as a, um, you know, the referring partner, um, uh, or, you know, of council member, you know, and And in talking to them, you know, I became convinced by President Kwiatkowski that I should join the board. And he said, look, the CEO of the company is not a, is no, you know, angel, but he's not one of the bad guys. He's a guy that's under threat from the real bad guys. the Dmitry Fertash's of the world who were controlling nap to gas and um uh and you know was wanted up until like think like three days ago um uh you know extradited by the United States for uh for I don't know 47 different rico charges and bribery and is connected directly to um you know to Putin who had been basically siphoning all the money of nap to gas back into Russia those are the people that he was, that the CEO of Burisma were set up against.

2:19:41And they were like wolves at the gate and trying to take over Burisma. And he said, you know, and you just simply by being on the board would be a message. It would be a message. And I'll tell you what, is that it is well worth your while. and so two things is that i did believe in it i'd done a crow report and i'd done a uh nordello um uh security report on the firm while i was at boy schiller and working for them as an attorney for the about two month period of time before they asked me to go on the board and then he made a real push for me to go on the board and i made the decision to go on the board and this idea that i didn't have any expertise i didn't know what i was talking about or that i didn't have any experience with boards or that i didn't speak ukrainian or i didn't know about i mean it's all bullshit all complete and utter absolute bullshit in which they try to paint me as not having as much experience as you know don jr who just got a 695 dollar contract from a 695 million dollar contract for a startup private equity firm for a startup drone company that he's you know with 30 employees you know in like i mean i i am uh almost beyond offended uh you know the idea that certain people in the in that world have painted of me as being a near-do-well you know kind of drifter that you know that's kind of the board was it a mistake to go on the board Yeah.

2:21:23Yeah. It was absolutely a mistake, not because of anything that I did that I am embarrassed about or in any way whatsoever feel conflicted about as it relates to what I did for Burisma, but because of the political position that it put us all in. They use that as the toe in the door to be able to call my family, the Biden crime family, without any evidence. The person that said that Joe Biden took a bribe to protect Burisma is sitting in a jail cell. Sitting in a jail cell for lying to the FBI. And meanwhile, it still is this like lingering question that people have about Burisma. So I guess before I continue to just like go on, is that what do you think happened in Burisma?

2:22:23I mean, I think that, I mean, look, just a little more context for on Burisma. I mean, Burisma, would it be fair to say that Burisma could have potentially supplied the vast majority of natural gas to Europe? No. No? No, absolutely not. Burisma is almost all of Burisma's natural gas supply that production was internal to Ukraine, Ukrainian industry. Which, okay, yeah, but that could have supplied, that could have been a major supply to all of Europe, correct? Well, only if they wanted to drain Ukraine of the vital natural gas that they need to run their economy. But yeah, but no, Burisma did not have the capacity, was not large enough to supply all the natural gas needs of in any way, shape, even remotely of the needs of Germany alone.

2:23:28The production was not nearly that big. No. Could it have been, though, if we built up the infrastructure? Were the resources there that could have implemented that kind of infrastructure? If you built up the infrastructure of Nafti Gas, the state-owned company, potentially. Yes. But not even remotely for Burisma. No. I think that if I was the owner of a company that had that kind of resource, I would very much want the President of the United States son on my board. Oh, by the way, Sean, I don't, there's no doubt. Or Vice President at that time. But by the way, not for any specific endgame like that.

2:24:15I'm absolutely certain that that was not. I think that what he was afraid of is that he was going to get killed. I'm positive that the CEO was not by anybody in the United States, is that he was going to get killed by Putin. And so he 100 % thought that by bringing me on board, number one, is that I was absolutely qualified. Number two, is that I've demanded that we'd be transparent about it. You realize I went on the board and I put out a press release saying that I went on the board. I wasn't hiding it from anybody. and who else was on the board. And I'm absolutely certain that part of the reason that he wanted me on the board was for protection.

2:25:00He thought that if at least that he was associated with that name, that it would give him some protection from the Russian forces writ large that were out to literally bury him. So I don't have any doubt about that. Was there some, all I know is this, is that I served my five years on the board, no one ever asked me to do anything that my dad had any control of. In three of the years in which I was on the board, three and a half of the years in which I was on the board, my dad wasn't in office. i took that job because it afforded me the opportunity to do two things number one is that i felt incredibly comfortable serving on a board just from a capacity and the confidence of being able to be able of uh of value that i was being paid to do something that i had the capacity and was capable of doing number one and number two it gave me freedom because they paid me a fucking lot of money.

2:26:06And my brother had just been diagnosed with cancer, and an incurable form of cancer. And so it gave me an enormous amount of space to be able to spend time and do that. And I'm not saying, like, I did it for my brother. I'm a saint, and that's the only reason I did it. That's bullshit. I did it because it paid well, and I knew what the lines were. And that's what I I did. Do you think that it would have been in our intelligence agency's best interest for you to be on that board? No. Not that they manipulated you, just do you think it would be in their best interest to have you on that? In our intelligence?

2:26:51I think it ends up being that it was in a lot of people's best interest that were not mine, nor my father's. So it could be that all of these things are true. at the same time. What being, all of what things? That intelligence agencies wanted you in there, that the guy that wanted protection, he wanted you in there for protection and also wheeling and dealing in the future. Yeah, I think that I think that all these things, you know, could be true at the same time. Yeah, no, I think that you're right. And, you know, I refrain from doing this in terms of like the whataboutism is that I didn't go work for the Ukrainian government.

2:27:35I didn't go work for, for instance, the Saudis. I didn't go work for the Albanians. I didn't go work for the Serbians. I didn't go work for the Emiratis. I didn't go work for the Qataris. I didn't take money for the purposes of changing U.S. policy as it relates to weapon systems or individuals that were murdered or anything like that. And I got paid an amount that I was transparent about what I got paid. I served my five years on the board, three of which were when my father was not in office in any shape or form. And then I left. And so whether those things could have happened as it relates to me, sure.

2:28:22Are those things happening not just in front of our faces, but like you might as well be coming and slapping us in the face. Jared Kushner is right now negotiating a peace deal with the Ukrainians and the Russians with direct interest as it relates to the energy interest inside of Russia and their partners, whether it's in India, Saudi Arabia, or what's about to happen with Nord Stream pipeline. A direct interest of which he's been taking$2.5 billion from partners to impact those changes. I served on a board for two years. You have every email that I've ever sent, every text message that I've ever sent, every single communication that I have ever had, including during that period of time.

2:29:16And there is not a single communication other than the one thing that they hung their hat on is a guy that was in Washington, D.C. at the time, was the secretary to the board, said, hey, Hunter, thank you. It was nice meeting your dad. And when she was walking out of a restaurant and my dad was walking into a restaurant with me and I introduced the two of them. And that's it. They started an impeachment investigation over this. I think one thing, one question that a lot of people have is the 10 % for the big guy remark. Not from me. And I'll tell you exactly what it was. It's from a guy named James Gilliard, along with Tony Bobulinski, who claims to have known me so well.

2:30:06You know how many times I met Tony Bobulinski? Maybe four, maybe three times. in which I told him to go fuck himself and that I wouldn't do business with him in which they're negotiating a deal not having, by the way, anything to do with Burisma. Nothing to do with Burisma. It had to do with an entity that was starting a U.S. entity of a Chinese energy firm in which they wanted to partner and create an investment vehicle. and James Gilliard sends a email, not me, sends an email to six other people, including Tony Bobolinski, in which I'm CC'd on, in which he proposes equity splits, of which he says 10 % for the big guy.

2:30:57And I don't know what James Gilliard was referring to, But I know this, is that that structure, that proposed group of people, a proposed partnership to do like an energy, number one was occurring when my dad was out of office and was not a candidate for president and was two years away from being vice president and his career public service, according to everybody else, was over. So number one, who gives a fuck? Who gives a fuck? Number two, I didn't say that. And number three, it never happened. So 10 % for the big guy, go fuck yourself. My dad has been, my dad has given, what, 32 years, 40 years of his tax returns.

2:31:48You have every tax return I've ever had. Every one. You can go find them on the internet. I had the DOJ. I had the FBI. I had crim tax. I had the oversight committee. I had the judiciary committee. I had the ways and means committee in both the House and the Senate. I had the U.S. Attorney's Office in L.A., in D.C., in Baltimore, in Delaware, in Pittsburgh. All investigate me. Holy shit. All of them, at the behest of Donald Trump beginning in 2017. And what did they come up with? So, you think that there is like some hidden 10 % for the big guy because this motherfucker, Tony Bobolinski, who's some, you know, wannabe soldier who tried to convince me that he was a part of the, did what you did?

2:32:46Was one of those guys? Yes. Maybe he is. I don't know. But all I know is every guy that I've ever met that did what you did never told me that they did what you did or tried to impress upon me that they did. And that's why I told Tony to go fuck himself. and never did a deal with anybody that suggested 10 % for the big guy, which, by the way, again, occurred when my dad was neither vice president nor president and was never going to be in public life again, even if he was. So I'm not banning James Gileard. If James Gileard sent that and his intent was, maybe he's going to be able to get the former vice president of the United States to be somehow involved in this, then why wouldn't he be able to say that?

2:33:30Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? He's selling... I mean, I will be surprised if when they leave this White House that the copper pipes are still in the walls. I'm not joking. It is the most openly corrupt in everything that they do, Sean, is projection or confession. So I'll say it to you again. Is that I believe that it was a mistake because I was very, very naive about what a viper's den Ukraine is. What an absolute, like, talk about a, like, a level of corruption that I, that I am still staggering. Because they're part of a, of a kleptocracy, of a greater kleptocracy, which is, you know, I mean, what?

2:34:19Russia is nothing more than a, you know, a country mask, a gas station masquerading as a country, as John McCain used to say, with one person that is the ultimate Don of all Don's. And I don't mean Trump's. I mean Don's. And that's Putin. So getting involved in that, anyway, even though it was through a private company, even though I served on the board, even though you have every communication I've ever had, even though you have testimony, thousands of hours of testimony from anybody that's worked for my dad, Under oath, by the way. Under oath. So, when Tony Bobulinski, under oath, went before the Oversight Committee, what did he have to say?

2:35:12What did he have to say? What crime under oath did he accuse me of? He didn't. He didn't, because he was under oath. But then you know what he did? he went on to Fox News and Tucker Carlson and accused me of crimes and then Devin went to you know to Tucker and he literally stuck his lips around the ass of Don Jr. and Eric and he got a pardon out of it and so did his partner that ripped off the Indian tribes to the tune of millions and millions and millions of dollars of which they were absolved from having to pay back, I think it was like close to$100 million. I don't know the exact number, so, you know, don't sue me.

2:35:55I really don't. And I don't know anything about it other than is that everybody under oath, everybody in the court of law, look, I was, I had a special prosecutor. There was a independent investigation from a special prosecutor, the only U.S. attorney left in the United States that was appointed by Donald Trump that my dad left in place. And when he was a U.S. attorney in Delaware, he came to the conclusion that no charges should be brought against me. And I went to a, we came to a resolution in which I was going to plead guilty to two misdemeanors of failing to file my taxes on time because I'd already paid them back with penalties and interest.

2:36:44I paid over$800 ,000 in interest and penalties. Because during 2016 and 17 or 15 and 16, I forget, because the years, is that I literally was out of my mind. And I thought that it was being taken care of me, whatever the reason I didn't pay my taxes. And when I figured out that I did in 2019, when I came out of recovery, the first thing that I did, I went to an accountant and I said, you know, I got to figure out my taxes. And they gave me the number at the end of the day. And as soon as I got the number of what I owed with penalties and interest, I went to the United States government and I borrowed the money and I sent them the check.

2:37:27Four years later, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, five years later, three days before the statute of limitations ran, they charge me after coming to a negotiated settlement with me and a plea deal. They blow up the plea deal because MAGA went nuts and they decide to charge me with seven counts of tax evasion that would have resulted in over 35 years in prison for taxes that I paid with penalties and interest. I can't find one single case as precedent in which someone similarly situated was ever charged. Roger Stone didn't pay taxes for, I think, like eight years and had secret bank accounts. At the same time, secret foreign bank accounts, I believe.

2:38:19And I'm like, I don't know, Roger. So, you know, again. And they came to a settlement. The United States government never informed me that I was being audited. They never audited me. I informed them. We called them and said, hey, we can't find the transcripts my accountants did for 2017 and 18. I forget what the two years are. They're 17 and 18 because I went into 19. and said and they said huh and then we figured out that my accountant had done the taxes and sent them to an office that was empty and then he died my accountant so i got a new accountant in la when i came out of my two years of like you know uh my crack addiction and i took care of the wreckage of the past and i took responsibility for what i did and that's why they decided that they were not going to charge me because they couldn't find any criminal intent in what I did or any way in which I was truly trying to evade my taxes because I came to them.

2:39:28But they blew up the plea deal and they not only charged me with that, but then they charged me with a 922 G3 violation that's never been used against anybody except me, other than people that go and purchase a gun in the commission of a violent felony in which they also find that they can show that they were addicted to a substance or user of a Schedule 1 substance. Shit. Ever. How many people that you know smoke pot and own guns? Regularly. A lot. A lot, right? They're all in violation of 922 G3. Every single one of them. They charged me with three different charges under that. Again, 35 years in prison.

2:40:19Three-time charges. No, I challenge anybody out there. Find anyone else. And by the way, the Supreme Court's about to overturn the constitutionality of 922 G3 based on Second Amendment and Bruin and the case Amani. And so it's not going to even be, I think, constitutionally viable within the next four months. Wow. But they took that and they charged me with it. Now, how fair do you think that that is when the only way that they became informed of the fact that I purchased a gun is through a group message from the gun shop owner, Don Jr., and a former state police officer that heard a story about me throwing away, someone throwing away a gun that I'd purchased 10 days before that I owned for 10 days in a lockbox in my truck that was never loaded and never fired.

2:41:16five years later. Wow. Five years later. And that's how that came about? Yeah. A conversation with three people. Yeah, according to the... There's this incredible investigative reporter that dug up all of this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Shit. Incredible. They put it on some right-wing blog. And then the U.S. attorney came to it, and you know what the U.S. attorney did? Is they came to the right decision after three years of that investigation, in which they'd been investigating me for over five years. And they came to first a non-prosecution agreement, and then it was called a diversion agreement, saying technically they believe that I violated the law, so I would agree not to buy a gun.

2:42:08They spent three years investigating whether you did any drugs when you bought that weapon. They never found that I did drugs when I did that weapon. You know what they did? They put me in front of a jury, and they took my book, and they played the audio version of my book in which I talk about my addiction during that period of time. And they just mash it all together. Now, 922G3 under any standard is a state of mind question, right? Are you addicted to, or are you a user of a controlled substance?

2:42:50Well, I may have been an addict in the past. Am I an addicted to, or a user of a controlled substance? Right now, if I went to your range and fired a gun, would I be in violation of 922G3? No. No? Well, according to their standard, I am. And I will forever be. Have you had or do you have friends that have struggled with alcohol or illegal substances that have owned guns during that period of time?

2:43:26Yes, I do. And do you know people personally that may have had substance abuse problems that owned guns at that time? And do you believe that the federal government should have the right to put him in jail for 10 years? If on a form they said when they bought the weapon that they truly believed that they had overcome their addiction. Because no addict believes that they're an addict when they're not using.

2:43:54But it didn't matter. They wanted to get me for something, so they got me for something. And what they did is they put, they embarrassed me. They spent the entire trial. And for instance, you said that you wanted to talk about the relationship that I have with my sister-in-law. Like, my God, I'll tell you what. They put her on the stand. Talk about my addiction. It was fucking awful. It was awful. And one of the most difficult things for me in my entire life is how much I fucked that up. I mean two people in a state of grief out of their fucking minds me in particular thinking that they had found the solution to to the to the bleak you know the positions that they found themselves in and the brother that the thing that they love the most.

2:44:46and that's all I can say and it was an enormous mistake and I take full responsibility for it and I am beyond embarrassed what I put my family through beyond embarrassed what I put my family through but in the moment it was not some like sick whatever it was literally grasping for some like for life for grasping for something grasping for some chance at like at at living again but you know what like you judge me not you just anybody do you've never known anybody to be able to go through like a grief like that and and it's fucked up you do fucked up things because i certainly did and i've been paying for them i've been paying for them for a long time now and i'm done I'm done killing myself over it.

2:45:43I think that there is a side to what happened there that nobody's heard. And that's why I want to bring that up. Because I think that is part of your redemption. I think people need to hear that. Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. Because the way it's described in there is definitely not the way it's described in the media. No. You know, and, you know, without injecting my opinion on anything, I think it's going to change a lot of opinions. when they hear when they hear you know when they hear all of the details when they hear the story when they hear why when they hear what you were going through when they hear what she was going through it just paints it's just it's just a it's a different picture than than what has been portrayed through the media yeah you know and i will i mean i we can talk about it but i will tell you this is that um many ways part of it's not my story to tell and the level of pain uh that um i it in uh that that caused my family and and and by the way and it still does in terms of is something that is really, really, really, really

2:47:21it's tough. But I can tell you this it was not I almost don't feel like I owe I understand what you're saying is owe these people that judge think that they have a judgment about it an explanation in any way other than this is that the two people desperate to find a way out and it and and clung to each other as being the nearest thing to the thing that they both valued the most in the world and lost and that's the answer to that and and And it was an attempt to keep something alive that was permanently dead. And just a gigantic miscalculation about the way in which that would impact the ecosystem of the rest of my family.

2:48:31and

2:48:35and I am all I know is this is that

2:48:48it is not

2:48:53it has been harder on everybody else than it has been on me and uh

2:49:04but i think that we're you know in a place that's very different now in which been a lot of healing but you know uh i take full accountability for that is beau's death what sent you down the path of addiction? Hmm. I think that what it did is it sent me down the path of addiction. Anything, I think, I don't know if you, your experience as it relates to addiction to people in your life, your own life, is that you don't need much of an excuse to use. You know, it could be sunny, it could be raining. You could be up, you could be down. But what Bo's death did do to me was it sent me down a path of nihilism that I'd never experienced before and which nothing mattered.

2:50:05And when it all fell apart and in the immediate aftermath of Bo's death, there was a sense of real purpose. but then um my marriage of 22 years um began to falter and i ended up on my own uh for the first time in my life uh literally in terms of living alone for the first time in my life because remember i i i left i went to college um the jesuit volunteer corps got married had a baby had two more and you know and uh and uh and i in that period of time directly after bo's death is that i didn't have the availability of my my dad uh for the first time in my life and that he was so like me i mean grief is a is a solitary journey in many ways as much as you try to cling to people.

2:51:00I think one of the reasons that people, when they lose a child or, you know, a couple is that they sometimes lose each other. And for a period of time there, I felt like I'd lost my dad. I felt like I'd lost the entire structure of my existence. And so, you know, and I grasped towards one thing that was, and not in a nefarious, purient way in any way, to someone that was the nearest thing to what my brother was. And I did grasp for each other. And my addiction completely, 100%, fucked that up. And it was awful. And so I do know that Bo's death didn't make me an addict. but um but by my own actions by uh my uh by the circumstances that i found myself in uh by the depth to which i didn't think that there was a a way out um it certainly um uh was a factor what sent me down a rabbit hole that i'd never gone before which was completely wanting to disappear from the face of the earth.

2:52:37It was awful. You know, I think that people have this vision of, you know, that it's kind of funny when Marjorie Taylor Greene, like, shows pictures of me and, you know, naked and, you know. By the way, 90 % of which is, like, aren't selfies. People taking pictures of me passed out in the bathtub with a crack pipe. You know, I wasn't taking pictures of myself. you know, remotely while I was, you know, passed out. And, you know, but whatever the case may be, is I don't do anything but cry when I think about those times. Not for anybody but myself. I mean, it was truly demoralizing. I mean, I am...

2:53:25What people I don't think fully comprehend about addiction, if they're not the direct addict that sometimes can take you to a place in which all you're doing is thinking about getting high or thinking about how you're going to get high, thinking about how you're going to cover up getting high, and thinking about how you're going to come down from getting high. And then it becomes just this round-the-clock thing in which it's not even about getting high. It's about not dying. It's literally about the feeling that if I don't, I cannot get up from this bed unless somebody hands me a drink in order for my body to function.

2:54:07And that's the level to which I found myself for a long period of time. I mean, relatively, in anyone's life. Like the fact that I didn't die, I believe, is a miracle. how many times do you think you were close to death dozens dozens whether it was by um you know like finding my places in which people were pulling guns on me to um uh to putting one time i woke up in a uh you know face down in a pool you know

2:54:47I don't even remember that, but that's what they told me. You know, I, by anybody's standards, was, I mean, I talk about it. Very descriptive. Very descriptive in the book. And the reason is, you know, people kind of make fun of me about that. when i talk about like i searched the carpet uh for drugs and the point of the story is not that it's some funny story for you to laugh about and you know laura ingram to go hi hi he's a crackhead and you know donnie jr and you know these guys are all tough guys that you know like you know because they go to ufc fights um i tell those stories because you know what i think i know I'm positive that people write me and say thank you.

2:55:46Thanks for sharing that. Because in the program that I come from, is that the one thing that keeps you trapped is your secrets. It's the things that you did in the dark that nobody else knows about except the people that you were in that motel room with, like crawling around on the floor for hours looking for crumbs of crack cocaine until your hands and your fingernails get bloody.

2:56:19If I can tell you that in front of everybody and write a book about it and my dad's the President of the United States and I came from a place of incredible privilege what I'm trying to tell you is that you have nothing to be ashamed of if you've then figured out how to get clean and sober all i have is respect for you doesn't mean that i don't think that you should be held accountable for the shit that you did that was stupid while you were high but i want to tell you something is that if you were me if you were me you know calling through the cut down in, you know, at 3 a.m. in downtown L.A., you know, with a gun to your head, begging somebody to sell you crack, and you made it out of that?

2:57:16Fucking more power to you, and fuck anybody that fucking would make fun of you for it, that you can't talk to anybody about it. Fuck you. And fuck all those people that judge over it. You can judge me for the decisions that I made and for the fuck-ups, but I've been paying the price. And I take responsibility for those things. And I fully, fully have been transparent about it. for the pure purpose is that we are only as sick as our secrets, man. And I know that what the gift that has been given to me is that I don't have any more secrets. Not a one. Not a one. Wow.

2:58:21I live the same fucking way. I was not expecting to like you this much.

2:58:29Well. I mean, dude, I just... We got a lot more time. I still can fuck that up. I promise. I mean, I just... I mean, I'm not fucking around, man. I live by that. I have talked about damn near everything publicly. And I don't have any secrets left. Yeah. But I've talked about how fucked up I was on my cocaine addiction, on my benzos, on my sleeping pills, on my booze, on my woman eyes, all of it. It's all fucking out there. And you know what I realized is every fucking skeleton in that closet that you release out into the world, it's like freeing part of your soul, man. Yeah. Because what are you going to do?

2:59:13Freedom, man. Come at me? I don't give a fuck. It's all out there. Yeah. I got nothing left to lose, buddy. And by the way, it doesn't mean that you're fucking proud of it. What it means is that you're free of it. You're free of it, and it also sets an example for others to follow. And just like you just said, coming from where you've come from, with your dad being the president of the United States, I mean, that is a tremendous amount of shame because of the expectations that have been put on you by society because of the position that your family members are in. Yeah.

2:59:57And so to come out and to have the courage to say, yeah, I fucked this up. This is what happened. This is the description. This is how I saw it, and this is how I lived. And to be that open about it, I mean, I know how much courage that is. Thank you. Actually, maybe I don't because I don't have any family members in that type of a position. But I mean, but I'm in an influential position and to come clean on all of those things. And I mean, shit, just the other day, I had to do something where I fuck something up. And I talk shit about somebody that I, a group of people that I shouldn't have. I had to come clean.

3:00:34I did it. Also did the same damn thing to Kamala Harris, who I couldn't fucking stand. And I did a public apology. Anyways, addictions. and and all of that all of that all of that stuff and how bad it gets and yeah scrounging around for drugs and going to get more and the thrill of finding it and all i mean i could i could fucking get i could i could go for days about that stuff but um and maybe we will yeah but i do want to commend you you know for coming clean and and and being that open about it because most people will never see that kind of courage. I really appreciate that, man. And I really mean it.

3:01:15I know that you're surprised by that, but coming from me, that means a lot. Thank you. You're welcome. Yeah. Let's take a break. Yeah, man. My days don't slow down. Between work, the gym, and time with the kids, I need eyewear that can keep up with everything I've got going on. And that's why I trust Roka. I've tried plenty of shades before, but these stand out. They're built for performance without sacrificing style. I've put them through it all. On the range, out on the water, and off-road. They don't quit. They're lightweight, stay locked in place, and are tough enough to handle whatever I throw at them.

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3:03:49All right, Hunter, we're back from the break. Yeah. Getting ready to dive into the life of a crack addict. Absolutely. Mine was Coke. Yeah. But I'll dive in there with you. Same thing, just a little bit different. Yeah. Well, you started with Coke, right? Yeah, I mean, basically. But when I really, I went straight to crack when I decided that I was going to drop off the face of the earth. Go full time? Yeah. Yeah. Did you do, did you, I'm just curious, did you partake in any drug use as a child? Yeah. I, you know, I tried everything, but I didn't, nothing stuck. Nothing stuck like alcohol. Nothing.

3:04:41Yeah. I mean, I had tried Coke. You know the one drug that I'm 100 % certain that I'm incapable of handling? Which one? Pot. Really? Are you serious? I mean, like a great addict is like, I am absolutely certain of it. because after 400 failed attempts, and being curled in a ball, like, you know, hugging my, you know, on the tile floor in a bathroom, it literally makes, it's one of the only drugs I clearly cannot in any way metabolize without it literally turning me into a complete and utter incompetent. I just turn into a total fat ass on that. Can't stop fucking eating. I mean, I literally become so anxiety-ridden.

3:05:38It's really... Well, that happens, too. My friend Eddie Gallagher posted a diagram of a joint once, and it was basically like, you know, the first little bit, it's all good. The next little bit, maybe a little bit of paranoia. The next little bit, oh, shit. And then the last little bit is like, the CIA's fucking coming to get... And I was like, damn, dude, that's like right on the money. Yeah. but you know i don't i don't want to make like a joke out of the whole situation but you know i but sometimes you kind of have to that's just how you get through it and um at least for me i've got really dark dark sense of humor but you know with with with with with my addiction i i i mean i was i was a boozer since high school but i didn't do any hard drugs until my 30s yeah I mean, I had tried.

3:06:34There was no real, you know, prevalent availability. And, you know, I played sports and so, you know, football season, you know, we tried not to even drink and, you know, and high school. and um and i uh but i tried uh cocaine when i was in high school and then not throughout college uh it dabbled uh maybe and uh but it wasn't really around it was almost my problem was alcohol um and um and it remained alcohol until i walked into that park which i described in the book is you know i left a um i was in a an outpatient program which i was committed to and i relapsed and um and i was in the middle of a divorce and uh and separated and i had spent uh i'd done everything to try to get back and i'd gone to um uh like 45 days of a inpatient program and then i did uh about three months of a sober coach in which i blew into a um breathalyzer that took your picture whenever the sober coach would call um with the commitment uh with uh that if i failed it that i would go back into uh into treatment and um and i did that and then that wasn't good enough for um for whatever reason um and so then i committed to doing an outpatient program which was uh five days a week and um you know uh about five hours a day from like eight to two and um and I and I relapsed and and I told them that I relapsed and they wanted me to take a they wanted me to to pee in a cup and I said look I relapsed I used cocaine and but I drank primarily and I used cocaine but that's what I did I'm telling you the I didn't want it as any part of a record in which the people don't fully understand is the kind of the uh it's the the conundrum that some addicts find themselves in in in treatment facilities that are also facing like legal issues or divorces or things like that is that it's not protected by HIPAA so you can go into a rehab and be in the middle of a divorce and have all of that of those records gotcha they can be subpoenaed or if you're in a civil case i mean like so many which is a real um uh i think oversight on the part of people as it relates to privacy and getting people to be as honest as possible and so i was like look i'm telling you i relapsed i mean what's the difference if you have a they said well you can't come back if you don't take the test and i said but I'm admitting to you what I did.

3:09:55And they said, no, it's just our policy. Unless you, unless you submit to the test, you can't come back. So I walked out and, and it was in downtown DC. And I went over to a park, Lincoln Park. And, you know, not far from the White House. my dad at this point was not in office or anything but it was between the apartment that I was running and Shaw and and I saw somebody in the park that I'd recognized from literally years and years ago but she was kind of a famous person and it was bicycles everybody called her bicycles and I said to her can you give me a crack and she did you know and And when I say she was a kind of a very well-known, like, homeless, semi-homeless kind of drug user that bicycled up and down.

3:11:03Like a character almost. Yeah, she was a total character. Everybody knew her. And not everybody didn't know her. I knew her. Knew of her. and um you know five months later she was you know uh the keys to my apartment and and uh we'd become uh using buddies for an extended period of time and um uh and it it's a you know uh it's it's everything that they say that it is um And nobody fully, I think, captures the power of crack cocaine nor explains it correctly. It's all so wrapped up in a lot of prejudice and bias based upon kind of the racial profile that people that you know sort of crack addicts and you know at least if you're from my generation of in 90s in which if you know he was introduced to the streets and just tore communities apart and the thing that truly tore communities apart was not necessarily the addiction it was a response to it and um and so anyway long story short is that's you know i i i actively sought out the thing that I thought was the most destructive thing that I could do to myself at that moment in time beyond physically harming myself.

3:12:36What was it that took you to rehab? What was it that made you want to get better? Like what was the realization? Finally, at the end, I mean that was in 2000, I think what, I get my years a little bit mixed up, but that was a year after post-death 2016 where I basically stayed sober and and attempted to stay sober for that year period in which I was under the care of somebody a professional and the thing that wanted me to to stay sober and clean is my family is that you know I have I my um uh uh my three oldest daughters are my whole world. And I was an enormous, you know, I was like a constant presence in their life because for the vast majority of it, I was clean and sober.

3:13:40And I was not a user or a drinker in that I would ever kind of do it around them. I don't think that there are more than maybe a handful of times and i i can't speak with them all i can say is this is that i was a very present parent um and then all of a sudden i was gone all of a sudden i was

3:14:10completely unavailable and i don't think there's anything more uh traumatic that you can do than that. And so to be there and then not be there. Have you been able to redeem yourself to your daughters for that? I can't be the judge of whether I've redeemed myself, but all I know is that we have a very, very, very close relationship. And again, I think the worst thing that I could possibly do is speak for anybody else that has uh suffered because of somebody else's addiction that's one of the things that i'm 100 certain is uh is i never want to do but all i can say is that um you know it is a uh it is a constant work in progress because of the fact that um i'm bound and determined to at least um uh make up for any of the of all of that lost time that neglect because I don't and I don't

3:15:28I know this I know my daughters love me deeply and have been there for me and are beyond Melissa the

3:15:45singular thing that made me think that there was something worth living for.

3:15:56And, but you know, cause a lot of pain, you know. Who do you think you hurt the most? beyond myself?

3:16:14Definitely my daughters. Yeah. And again, the reason being is that they were older, but they had just lost their Uncle Bo to them was everything. And I mean he was as present in their lives as he was in mine. And you know my brother was not perfect but he was about as close to perfect as he can be as a human being. And I really mean that. And I challenge anybody that knew my brother that didn't feel the same way, almost universally. And I know that people talk about people in death as if they are something more than they were. But in my brother's case, I couldn't say enough things that could fully describe what an extraordinary human being he was.

3:17:16And when I graduated from law school, my brother moved in with me and my wife and my two daughters. And he took the third floor of the house that we renovated, this old farmhouse. And he just was never present in their lives also. So the one thing that was probably the most, not intentionally cruel, but cruel is that they lost their Uncle Bo and then they lost me at the same time. and i became so wrapped up and selfish in my own grief and um and uh i don't think that there is is it that um there's anything that i ever can do to make up for that um and those are some of the things now do i believe that they've forgiven me for that absolutely i mean i i i know they adore me and i really mean that and i i know that but but it's not up for me to be able to determine whether i've ever made up for what i um that that that level that deep deep level of hurt that children more than anybody ends up experiencing for a parent that um that has suffered from addiction do you think they're going to watch this oh yeah 100 yeah what would you say to them right now oh everything i've already said to their face is to them personally i mean i i call my i call them almost every day finnegan and i have been in a little bit of a fight about that but yeah but um is that they are each in uh in their own way extraordinary people that i am immeasurably proud of.

3:19:13And they have been a greater source of strength to me than they will ever fully appreciate. Yeah. I'll bet they'll love to hear that. Yeah. I tell them all the time and then they, you know. And maybe they call me back, maybe they don't. There's daughters. And then I get my dad calls me. He goes, have you talked to Maisie? you talk to me I'm like Jesus Christ dad yeah I tried I tried her well I called her I got her I got her on the phone the only thing that makes me mad about my dad is she's an even better grandfather than he is even a parent but yeah they're they're extraordinary women and you know one of the things about you know the like all of this is you know I'd sometimes get down and be like what the fuck these people are awful and they're ruining my life and they're doing this and you know and and um and I think like this isn't hard on me it's them how hard is it on them how hard is it for them to walk in to work as grown women

3:20:40and working in New York City in an office building and everybody know who you are and your dad's on the, you know, for no apparent reason other than just to shame me on the front cover of the New York Post with a crack pipe dangling out with shirtless with a woman standing behind him and then again the next day and then again the next day and then And so I always, always, or at least when I start to feel sorry for myself, be like, fuck. Like, God damn, how lucky am I? How lucky am I that they still pick up the phone? Never stop loving me. I don't deserve that nobody deserves that but I have it and and it's an incredible thing

3:21:51it's a good way to live yeah it's a

3:22:01but god you know I still fuck up. I still don't do it the right way. I still let people down. I mean, the only thing that's different now in my life is that I truly don't start from a position of what's in it for me first in terms of what can I get to alleviate this pain. like I like um uh I at least know that uh that uh uh

3:22:35that I'm not ashamed of the mistakes that I make today do you know what I mean it's because I'm I I am certain that I'm trying to be the best person I can be, and I'm doing my best at it. Do you know what I mean? Like I'm trying every day. And I know that I'm failing, but it's not, you know, I'm at the same time I'm comfortable with who I am, and I don't think, I think a lot of my life, although I wouldn't admit it, is I felt lesser than. for whatever reason. I don't know what it, you know what I mean? Like, I just, like, you know, uh, uh. Lesser than who? Anybody. Didn't matter. Felt alone in a crowd, you know?

3:23:29I felt like I, like, for instance, like, with art. Like, I wanted to be an artist, you know? No, I ended up going to Yale Law School and, you know, having a pretty successful career and doing the things that I did. But, you know, like I just never, you know, like I felt like I'm not good enough. You know, I don't want to show people, you know, you know, my stupid, you know, you know, I mean, I don't know whether it was my poetry or my paintings or my, you know, but that's the person that I wanted to be. and I didn't have the courage when I was that age to do it. And I had to be completely, utterly broken, humiliated, and dehumanized in order for me to say to myself, fuck everybody else.

3:24:19Just be who the fuck you are. You know, I mean, everybody tells me to stop using the fucking F word so much, but fuck you. You know what I mean? I get told that every time too. You know, it's like, I don't know. Like, I don't have to be anything except exactly who I am. And I don't owe you any explanation. But I owe myself, to be radically honest, with when I fuck up and what is my responsibility and when I should say sorry to somebody. but the one thing I know about anybody that's ever come into um you know into recovery decided that they're going to stop using or they got to stop drinking and you know a lot of people can drink and use responsibly but anybody that I know that decided not to they didn't come in on a fucking winning streak man they didn't decide to stop drinking because you know things were so good But when they put that down, and what fills that hole?

3:25:31And for so long in my recovery, I didn't have anything to fill that hole because I didn't feel whole. I didn't feel like I was being honest with myself about who I wanted to be or anything. What got you there? the complete and utter uh you know destruction of my ego psychedelics no i think that the um i think that everything was a little bit of a step towards that but ultimately at the end of the day the gift that was given to me was given to me by the most horrendous people in the world is the people that you know stole my digital images and put them in the new york post and Miranda Devine used me to cash her checks and the Daily Mail.

3:26:23All of that. The worst humiliation, I think, in a modern digital age. That's what you mean by destruction of the ego. Yes, completely. Because you have to decide, is that you? And if it isn't, then who are you? Then who the fuck are you? And you realize is that I used to, I in the past would think, I think that a lot of addicts do this. Like I watch you, okay? And I would put you on this pedestal, okay? Somebody that I respect it. Somebody that's served. Somebody that put themselves physically in harm's way on behalf of other people. somebody who had the discipline and the courage to do the things that you did.

3:27:18And so that's your outward persona. And I would compare myself to you. And I would think, I'm never going to live up to that. And then something in your life happens, like they completely dehumanize you through, you know, I mean, by the way, imagine if I was a woman. Imagine if I was Ivanka Trump. And I know that sounds really, but just say they released one, you know, nude selfie of how crazy would people fucking go about the violation of privacy that is. How insane would they go? Rightfully so. But I was the crack addict degenerate son of the former vice president of the United States. And I was fair game in the world.

3:28:10and and I had a decision that I had to make is when I would think I would become obsessed with the idea like I how do I ever earn your respect again and then I realized and I don't know whether I like it was like a like a there was no like light bulb moment it wasn't like being struck by lightning but just gradually I just realized like every day that I got out of bed and I put one foot in front of the other and I sat down and I painted and I shared what I made in my creation with the people around me and then a wider group of people and then pick up the phone and call somebody else that was sick and suffering and would try to be of service to somebody that was looking for a way out.

3:29:03Just as long as I was true to myself and tried to make amends with the people that I needed to make amends with, as long as I fucking did that, I could get to the next day.

3:29:17I don't know if I'm explaining it in any way that makes sense. But they completely deconstructed me. and that humiliation and dehumanization which was a full-time 24-7 campaign that was directly coordinated you know right from the president i mean the whole where's hunter thing i mean you don't know what kind of havoc that wreaked in my life man when he started to say where's hunter in front of 70 ,000, 50 ,000, 30 ,000, whatever crowd side he made up in his head, and they aired it on every single cable channel and played it over and over again on Fox News. Surprise, surprise. People showed up at my fucking house with bullhorns in the middle of the night and followed us.

3:30:09I don't have any security. My wife is pregnant. They ran her off the road twice. I mean, it has real-world consequences, man. And then so we moved a second time in the middle of the night. And we were in Venice and we lived on the canal. And one of my friends had put us in this place until they found us there. And then they got canoes and they sat out in the canal this far away, as far away as that wall with the bullhorn for hours on hours and hours with the six month old screaming, yelling for me to come out. And then they got a billboard truck and they parked the billboard truck, a full size billboard, digital billboard truck and ran in front of and sat in front of the house and ran all of the pictures from the laptop i mean naked of me smoking crack of me being you know a criminal for a week for 10 days for two weeks until we moved and then they followed us there and so it had real real world consequences but put me in the position of having to make a choice every day.

3:31:16Am I that? And if I'm not, who am I? Who am I? Am I the character that Tucker Carlson makes me out to be? Or, you know, am I, am I, who am I? And I think that I've answered that question. I think that that's for me. And, you know, I guess the one thing I've learned is this, you know, you talk about that book that you recommend to everybody, which is basically the red letter words of Christ. Do you want one? I'd love one. I already have it on a book on tape. I had it before you said that I'd gotten it and on audio. I'd love the hard copy. But what's the thing, what's a singular message of Christ?

3:32:16Love. In my opinion, love.

3:32:20Love one another, love your neighbor, and love God. And do not judge unless you want to be judged. but more than anything it's just love and and and that's what I think like what's the real epiphany is that the first place that you gotta love is yourself and if you're gonna love yourself you gotta be honest with yourself because if how do you love the person that's keeping the secret about the thing that you're ashamed of you just can't it's impossible and i figured out how to love myself and that doesn't mean that i i don't fuck up and and and uh you know i certainly uh feel every day at uh applying the the, at least the way in which, by the way, I think that you find the same lessons in, not just in the red letters of Christ, the actual words that he spoke, I think you find it in the Bhagavad Gita.

3:33:46I think you find it throughout all the Upanishads. I think that you find it in all of the most sacred texts. Is that it comes down to one thing. And you asked me before, is how are we going to find our way out of this as a country, as a people? Is the only way I know is the thing that people are desperate fucking for is connection. It's the only way. and and that's what each one of these messages is about of all of the sacred text is that we are all connected we know whether we think it or not i mean literally down to the scientific level that carl sagan would um uh uh has taught us is that literally we are stardust and we are all connected And we are not just in the metaphysical sense, but in the actual physical sense.

3:34:51And unless, for me, and I'll just go back to me, is that unless you figure out a way to love yourself, then all you're going to end up doing is hurting other people. Anyway, I don't know if that makes sense to you. That makes sense. I mean, we had a conversation offline about psychedelics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we talked about 5-MeO-DMT. Yeah. And we had, I guess we can't say the exact same experience, but we had the same experience. And that experience, however you arrive there, is probably different. But... I don't think so. When you arrive, you feel the oneness. You feel the connectivity. You see that everything's connected.

3:35:43I mean, you described it the exact same way that I described it. When I took it, I don't know if you were blindfolded or if you weren't. For the 5-MeO, I was. For the IvoGain, I was not. I took the blindfold off for the 5-MeO. Oh, you did? Yeah. and i had no visualizations no hallucinations none of that yeah what i did have was a very profound intuitiveness and it showed me i could feel i could feel the flow of energy going through everything. I could feel it coming through the ocean, onto the islands, back into the ocean, onto the beach, up the trees and the grass and the birds and the air, everything.

3:36:35It became everything is one, everything is good, and if there's something bad, then it would have been like a spotlight in the dark. You would have been able to point it out immediately. I mean, like... Yeah. And that's what I felt. And that's what you described. And so, you know, when you're talking about...

3:37:02judgment and ridicule and all of these things, I mean, in the end, I mean, if you're spewing that shit into the fucking ecosystem, into the world, it's gonna come back on you. And if you spread goodness throughout the world, then that also is going to come back on you. And that's one of the major life lessons, I think, that I learned that day, probably not even realizing that I learned it that day. But, you know, it showed me that if I treat you like shit or put anybody else in front of me and I treat that person like shit, that's treating myself like shit because that's got to fucking come back to me.

3:37:48Yeah. because it's all connected yeah does that make sense it makes total sense and and

3:37:59and it's uh it's this the uh that experience um for me didn't have the same level kind of a profound immediate effect as related to my um uh sobriety but but it was a it here's a really interesting part about it it's the only drug that I know that I haven't um uh that I've taken and enjoyed that I haven't craved do you have that I mean I don't feel like the desperate need to try 5-MeO again you know I've done it a handful of times yeah I do it I do it maybe once every couple years to yeah yeah and I guess my point about it no I I don't crave it because I have a very healthy respect for it and a tremendous amount of fear.

3:38:53Okay. Yeah. And that's what I was about to say is that I think that I came to that experience with Ivogamyn 5-MeO with the right respect for and reverence for the plant medicine time. I tried to ayahuasca in a different environment for the same purpose and had a very, very, very horrible dark experience. But I came to it with a very insincere... Intentions. Intentions. And both ostensibly in an attempt to find sobriety. I think that there is so much incredible promise in some of these plant medicines as it relates to people that suffer from PTSD, particularly in the studies that they've done in the communities.

3:39:49I know that you talked to Governor Newsom about that and they're making some real inroads. um but um but just all i can talk about it is from the personal experience and how it informs me as like you know what was the thing that made me ready i don't know the combination of uh of attempts that i made that all led up to me being um open and willing to like like look in melissa's eyes and when she said this ends now to say okay to a stranger and put myself at the mercy of someone to trust that they um are going to help me do the hard work um but anyway um I think people are desperate to be connected and I think that that is um uh both a beautiful thing and one of the things that has exposed people to and made them very easy targets, including myself, to the algorithms that I, you know, bent to the need to be a part of something.

3:40:57Easiest thing to be a part of is hate, you know? It's the easiest thing. It's really easy to get people to band together.

3:41:15to blame somebody else, whether it's a group or an individual, you know? And that's why I give people a real break and I kind of understand, like, I can imagine, I don't read the comments anymore, but I was in, I'll give you an example. Is that Bowie was about, not about, he was a year and a couple months old, or a few months old and it was a halloween of 2021 and so he's like this big and he's in a one of those like zip up chewbacca costumes it was like the cool he was the cutest thing you've ever seen in your life and we went with my uh with melissa beau and my father-in-law who was visiting from south africa and my mother-in-law had just passed three months earlier to glioblastoma like my brother did almost exactly five years apart from my brother six and um and lee my father-in-law we went to this little place in cornell uh which is like in the mountains behind malibu and i mean you know it's it's rural i mean it's as rural as out here that part of california and there's this little place now the outdoor seating and it was like that you know that in between time with covet and um and i put bowie on my shoulders and it's one of those beautiful it's halloween day and it's like around four o 'clock it's a magnificently beautiful ball day and we're walking to the car and this couple comes like bursting around the side of the restaurant because all the tables were outside and is the the woman has a phone out she's filming me with just rage in her eyes.

3:43:07And the guy, who's about my size, gets this far from me, which means he's this far from a one-and-a-half-year-old. It's the most accused little thing you've ever seen in your life. And he's screaming, You fucking criminal! You should fucking be executed! You fucking criminal pedophile! I mean, and he's screaming. And the woman's screaming the same thing. And Melissa goes to step in front of us, And at this point, we have Secret Service. And the Secret Service, I jump in. And we're two feet from the car. Put us in the car. And we go away.

3:43:44And it was the first actual physical altercation that I nearly came in. And it really shook my father-in-law.

3:43:57And everybody went to bed. And I'm up. And I'm flipping through my phone. and my Apple feed, and there's this story that was out that day about a woman that was a school teacher in Orange County, I think, or I forget whether it's Ventura County or Orange County, eighth grade history teacher, and one of her students videotaped her class. And in her class, for close to the 45 full minute of the class, she was teaching her class that Hunter Biden was running a pedophile ring in China and that he'd taken billions of dollars and that he was responsible with George Soros for being a part of the conspiracy to release COVID at the Wuhan lab and just went through everything, every conspiracy, everything in the New York Post, everything that Sean Hannity gave a little bit of life to, and every one of those things.

3:45:06And it made me realize this.

3:45:10If you believe that about me, if you really believe that about me, wouldn't it be incumbent upon you to get up from your fucking lunch and fucking scream at me, at the least? if you truly believed that I was running a pedophile ring,

3:45:34wouldn't it be incumbent upon you as a decent human being to confront me? And it made me realize, like, what do we fucking do? What do we do now, man? Because I can come here and I can talk to you and I can make it clear and I can say, But you know what? There is so much money to be made in that hatred, in those lies. The realization that how do I combat that? How does anybody combat that in this moment in time? you can say a lot of things about my dad you know that i don't have any problem with about his policies or whether you think that he was too old or whether you think that he whatever but you know what to say anything other than my dad is the most incredible father i've ever met in my entire life and there's a decent decent human being that has real empathy and cares about people.

3:46:40Like, you know, like, I can, I don't have any problem with you criticizing, but you know how many, how, how many people believe that my dad is a pedophile? Because some motherfucker stole my sister's trauma diary and sold it to Don Jr. and took things in the trauma diary because she had faced sexual violence when she was, that's my sister's story, and then created an idea that my father was a pedophile. Do you know how much that lives in that world? And how much directly comes from the Trumps? Directly comes from literally people like Don Jr., who was directly involved in that, who was directly involved in contacting the owners of the gun shop to have them go to the state police to doctor a...

3:47:46They doctored the form. The actual form? It's not the actual form I filled out. What do you mean they doctored? When I went in to buy the gun, you have to come up with it. You have to have an ID. you have to have a state id and i didn't have one and they said no problem and so when the d the the um when uh atf came to get the form after they were like supposedly tipped off by uh you know they actually they forged the form the actual form of which i was charged with as the crime for filling out incorrectly it wasn't the the the the form that the d that that the uh department of justice used to prosecute me was not the actual form the gun shop owners actually uh um uh forced it how do you know that oh it's part of the record you can go look at it in the record go look at the reporting from the empty wheel and the actual documents.

3:48:55I'll show you the documents. I'll show you the two different things. We tried to get them introduced in court and the judge said it was irrelevant. How is it irrelevant? Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I mean I literally I will show you so you can put it up on the thing. Two separate forms. We'll put it up. You have the forms? Yeah. We'll put them up. Yeah. I'll get my lawyers to send them to you. And that's the point, is that my point is that they're literally directly involved in that. And if you can make people believe the worst possible thing, what's that called? that um i always i literally have a a mental break but the idea being is that if you can convince people even a very small subset that uh that someone is the the worst thing that you could possibly say what's what worse could you say about somebody other than that they're a pedophile right i don't think of anything that i can possibly think that there's more like agrees but if you can convince even five ten percent of the population that somebody's that that they think somebody could be a pedophile then you certainly can uh convince 35 of the population that you just flood the zone of that shit with that they are a um that they're corrupt or that they were part of some bribery scheme.

3:50:33Even if that bribery scheme turns out to be a concoction by a guy that was working with Russian intelligence that is sitting in a jail cell out in California right now in a federal penitentiary. They're going to blow the whole thing up. But that's what they do. and um anyway I guess my whole point and I'm now talking too much and losing the train of thought is that um people are desperate for connection and when they find connection in a cause of a common enemy um they feel a part of something and what we've given each other, not you and me, but this country that we're living right now, all we've given each other is people to think of as enemies.

3:51:38Yeah. And it makes me really, and I don't mean this in any saccharine way, It is probably the most devastating, emotionally devastating thing other than the death of a family that I've experienced in my life. It's a feeling that this thing that my family has given 50 years of our life to is, I'm about to lose it. I really feel that and I don't think that that's kind of you know melodrama you know I listen to you and I listen to other people that are on the other side of this that that say the same thing and I kind of look at them and I think like god can you not see that we're trying to figure out the same thing can you not see the humanity in me because I'm not the person that high school that eighth grade teacher informed by Alex Jones and, you know, Jesse Waters would have you believe that I am.

3:52:50Promise you I'm not. Spend a minute. Because those motherfuckers, they got one thing that they're doing. They're making money. As we all suffer. they are they're just laughing all the way to the bank

3:53:26yep

3:53:34it's a damn shame

3:53:39You know, driving with a friend of mine, he's a really close friend, he's had some real health problems, and I came back in Delaware and I took him out to lunch and we drove by one of those like huge American flags. And they used to fill me with an enormous sense of pride.

3:54:11And I'm driving by it and he goes, it's Jesus Christ. And I don't know of anybody that's more patriotic than this person. He's like, makes me cry.

3:54:26Makes me cry.

3:54:32And I am thinking, who did I fucking let take that away from me? I got mad at myself.

3:54:48You know, I get so angry and I find that the things that I get angry about are from the perspective of a son. You know, like, I really went off on George Clooney. And I really went off on the Pod Save America guys. And the reason I did is because I think they're a bunch of fucking arrogant fucks. I do. I think that Jake Tapper is a pompous, arrogant fuck.

3:55:22But you know what? I think they love this country. I don't think that they're bad people. I think they're just arrogant fucking fucks. From my own personal experience. And my point is that, like,

3:55:46when did I allow

3:55:54anybody to steal that pride from me what what is with jake tapper oh he's such a he's such a i mean look i almost got in a fight with jake tapper at the super bowl in i forget when it was i mean the first eagle super bowl uh not the first but uh when it must have been it was shortly after my brother's death and he had done something that i thought was totally fucked up and i told him i would fucking if we weren't in front of a lot of people i would knock him the fuck out and this is how much of a pussy is he called my dad and demanded an apology what yeah he's a grown fucking man he called one of my dad's staffers and he goes and he said i felt threatened and hunter owes me an apology and by the way i i i felt incredibly justified i'm not to tell this story because it's too convoluted.

3:56:48But just that, that's who Jake Tapper is. I mean, you know, he talks big, hides behind a pen and a desk. And I don't think that he contributes in any way to the discourse or provides any real journalism whatsoever. And so I'm allowed to have my own personal feelings, but my whole point of it is that, like, who cares, though? Is he the one that kind of like... Did he write a book about your dad's cognitive decline and released it like right at the very end of the administration. Yes, right at the end, like within two weeks of the... Way to jump on the bandwagon, bud. Yeah. You're about three years and six months too fucking late.

3:57:25Yeah, no sources. No on-the-record sources. No shit? None. Wow. Nobody on the record will go on the record. But, you know, he was certain and he was absolutely this and that and the other thing. He's just so full of shit. Anyway. He really came around to the narrative early on that one. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But my point is, this is so a world of incredibly disingenuous. But I don't know what it is that is like, I'm at a loss about what it is brings it together. and that brings us back to this conversation, is that at the very beginning, you're saying to me, I can't believe that you like this.

3:58:16Like, what don't you get? Is this. Is that I don't get any of that from listening to you. Even though, even when you platform people that I think are fucking out of their mind, and I don't say platform, but you know what?

3:58:36From probably the majority of your audience are thinking exactly that about me right now. Guarantee you that I think of that. Yeah, I guarantee you.

3:58:47But I don't know. I don't know how we fix it. I don't know. Well. Let me, uh, give me a second here. I'll tell you how we fix it.

3:59:04I thought you were going to get that gun in the corner. I said, what the fuck? That would be method number two. I literally thought that you were going over to pull that Glock off the fucking... I said, Jesus Christ. He's getting real here. I got something for you, buddy.

3:59:26What is today, the 16th? 16th.

3:59:37great oh oh dude i it's a it's a drawing i did that's a drawing yeah so it's um anyway it's my it's my version of an eagle you can you gotta get you gotta put it in a amazon frame and put it in the bathroom somewhere yeah yeah that's not going in than Amazon. Are you fucking kidding me? Anyway. Dude, thank you. Well, this is awesome. Thanks, man. I always wanted some Hunter Biden art. Thank you. Yeah. That is awesome. Of course, the next one, according to the New York Post, is at least a half million dollars. I'll be expecting that. You can pay me in Trump's Cookville Bernstein. I don't have any of that, but here you go.

4:00:38Jesus Calling. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. That's the only thing that fixes this. Yep. Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. This is fucking awesome. Cool. Thank you. Glad you like it, man. A lot of dark stuff going on in the world right now. And it's to the point where I don't even believe my own eyes anymore because I cannot verify what people are saying about all the political violence, the division. I partnered with this production company called Ironclad, and we're doing an eight-part audio series on PSYOPs, on why foreign countries, governments, maybe even our own government would conduct a PSYOP on its own people.

4:01:29And I just think that this series is going to be extremely important because it's going to open the eyes of people on why these things happen. You can head over to PSYOPshow.com, order it today. I think you're gonna get a lot out of this who's pulling the strings Who's pulling them?

4:02:12Thank you.

4:02:30My explanation as it relates to Don Jr's involvement with my sister's diary is that I believe but the person that stole it initially brought it to a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago

4:02:47and got it to Don Jr., who I think was the one who eventually connected them with the people at Project Veritas. And then they just weaponized it.

4:03:01Do you mind if I ask, what was the, I mean, I'm just curious, What was the conversation within the family when that came out? The... The... Oh, just got like the... The journal. Like, barbarity of these people. They don't really mean it. It's like... Like, how do you get away with that? and not pay for it. I mean, like, again, like, let's move this into the laptop, okay? It's the same thing, and writ large, you know, in which you steal someone's digital life, and you turn it into whatever boogeyman that you want to. Mm-hmm. And just from, let's just go to the most basic level of how wrong that is, of what an incredible invasion of anyone's privacy, that is.

4:04:34And for instance, is it, if I stole your phone, you have an encrypted phone, and I was able to then cobble together or broke into your iCloud, of which I know that they did, or um uh and cobbled together whatever they ended up calling a laptop okay and then um uh and was able to through the the worst period in your life okay which you talk openly about you talk openly about you know um uh you know your issues with um uh substances that that didn't make you proud of who you're being and try to change. And I took those moments and I, uh, uh, and I took the, the, uh, every photo that was taken of you during that time in the worst period of your life and, and made a monster out of you in order to, And I know that was never about me.

4:05:46It was about my dad. And it was to destroy my dad. I think that the thing that they truly thought, I think that the thing that Steve Vannon and Rudy Giuliani believed was that they would be able to repeat history in the same way that they, and do the same thing that they did to Senator Muskie in 1972. And they broke into his wife's psychiatrist's office. They stole their private notes. They revealed that she struggled with alcoholism and every other embarrassing thing about her. and edwin muskie everybody knew um who was a decent hard-working um blue-collar senator from uh new hampshire uh that uh that by all accounts was the only guy that could beat nixon at that time and they um and they broke him they broke him because they knew there was nothing that he cared about more in this world than his relationship with his wife and his wife and his family and they He cried on stage and talking about her in a time in which that was the end of somebody's political career, and he had to drop out of the race.

4:07:08And that was what their intent was with me. It was never about—because there is no evidence of corruption in the laptop. None. Tell me what you think the laptop is. I mean, what do I think the laptop is? I think that the... I think that... I found out about the laptop, I think the first time I found out about the laptop, I interviewed this guy, Peter Schweitzer. And that was, if I remember correctly, this was years ago, that was a major part of the interview. He actually gave me a hard drive of the laptop. Yeah. And said that this had been scrubbed, to take all the kiddie porn off of it. Otherwise, I couldn't have this.

4:07:59It would be illegal. Yeah, exactly. I never opened it because I was... Yeah, but that's my point, is that's the shit that they did. That's what they... And then, of course, all the pictures of you with hookers and the Burisma emails, and apparently it was all on there. Yeah, but for instance... In the fact that you had dropped it off to a laptop repair guy. Yeah, but for instance, just that. is that remember the first thing that Rudy Giuliani did, it's called eliminationist rhetoric, is that he went to the steps of the Newcastle County Courthouse in Delaware and stood on the steps and demanded a meeting with the chief of the Newcastle County Police in Delaware and the state police and the attorney general and the U.S.

4:08:46attorney. And he said basically he pulled a, you know, one of those, I have here in my hands a evidence of, you know, mistreatment of children and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's just all complete and utter bullshit. So Peter Schweitzer, the bright part, he said they had to scrub it of, you know, of images of children. Let me ask you a question. Do you think those images would have come out by now? I mean, it is absolutely insane in a complete and utter fabrication, a complete lie. Completely. But that's where they started because they realized that it didn't have any evidence of the corruption that they then concocted about a bribe or my, you know, billions of dollars flowing through.

4:09:42Like you say, the Burisma emails. Yeah, there were emails from and to Burisma from me as a board member of a company in which I served on and I was transparent about. And I actually put out a press release about in which show no evidence of any, any whatsoever criminal activity. Any involvement of my father. Not one single communication between me and anyone in my dad's staff or my dad or anyone about me asking for a favor on behalf of a client. Not one. Not a single one. So what they originally revert to? They originally reverted to basically accusing me of the worst thing that you could possibly ever accuse anybody of.

4:10:29That. Child porn. Yeah. I mean, imagine having to wake up from that, wake up the next day from that. And thinking, even if one of the people that you respect in the world believed that that could be true. Like, oh my God. Like, how do you ever get out of bed? And then how do you defend yourself, Sean? When you go out and do this, you go, I'm not a pedophile. I'm not a pedophile. Like, literally, like I don't beat my wife. You know what I mean?

4:11:19And that's what they did. And then they just repeated it over and over again until it kind of played out until at least some responsible journalists said, okay, like, we're not going to keep repeating this. because it's patently false and there's zero evidence of it. So then they moved on to the next thing. They moved on to the next thing that I was a, you know, the next thing was a, like, a symbiotic relationship between the Russian GRU and, like, Steve Bannon and Gao, the Chinese billionaire, you know, that ran the Chinese, that cult, in which what they determined then was, is that I was funding weapons labs in Ukraine with George Soros to infect migratory birds to murder the population in Russia.

4:12:10And that was the whole thing. That got me sanctioned by the Russians. They did like a two-and-a-half-hour press conference on it. And then it just comes around. And then in the right-wing podcast ecosphere, from Alex Jones back to, you know, Russia, back to Chinese operatives, back to Gao, back to Bannon. And then they recycle it again. And then what ends up happening is that the New York Post and Sean Hannity, you know, give it some credence. They don't do it in a way that is completely absurd, but they report on the accusations. And then the New York Times writes a story about the story. And then it gets on CNN and Jake Tapper does a piece on, well, this may not be true, but clearly there's, you know, Hunter Biden's corrupt.

4:13:07So what the fuck are you talking about? And what do you do? So I started the day as a pedophile and I went to bed as a as some super spy that is providing billions of dollars in funding for weapons labs. And I woke up the next morning being accused of of something else. And it and it became almost impossible. So what I can tell you about the laptop is that there is no laptop. That's bullshit. What was provided out there, what... There was no fucking laptop? There is an actual physical laptop that somebody had. But the guy that said he had the laptop, the existence of the search for the laptop came before he was even a twinkle in Rudy Giuliani's eye.

4:14:07There were people... Talk to LeB Parnas. Lepfarnas literally went to Ukraine to get a laptop from Dmitry Fertash, to get a hard drive, Hunter Biden's hard drive from Dmitry Fertash and Andrei Dirkacz in Ukraine, in Austria, four months before John Paul MacIsaac ever even, nobody ever existed. it and so what they did is they cobbled together stolen concocted fabricated mishmash of digital information largely which is you know thousands and thousands and thousands of emails for 20 from 25 years i mean no laptop could have held all of that and so what they did is they just they they put it all together and then they talk about it i mean john paul mcissaick who is literally blind has no there's no videotape of me ever dropping off a laptop there's no so whatever you never dropped off a laptop I have no recollection whatsoever of ever dropping off a laptop to John Paul McIsaac to his shop and so what he did though let me just put it this way say I did say I took my laptop in to get repaired okay and you're John Paul McIsaac And what he says is he reads and he goes to repair the laptop, but then he starts to read the files in the laptop.

4:15:38And he reads a file and he sees files about Burisma. By the way, a board of which I'm on, of an independent private Ukrainian company in which I am a board member doing corporate governance as an attorney. and he says that the only thing that he can think of doing is calling Rudy Giuliani. He's a laptop repair shop owner in Wilmington, Delaware, whose store is three and a half miles at most from where my parents live, where everybody knows my parents live. So if he had a laptop that he wanted to return, he thinks that the best thing to do is call Rudy Giuliani's Rudy Giuliani's lawyer, Bob Costello, and give it to my sworn enemy?

4:16:30Who then take it, and in it, I will once again ask you this question. What crime has anyone ever... But there was no laptop, right? No. He took a hard drive. He took whatever he said. He said that he had a damaged laptop, and what he did is he downloaded a hard drive, And then he gave that hard drive to Bob Costello. And then from that hard drive, you have people like Patrick Byrne and Jack Maxey and a whole bunch of other people. Like I could list the names that come together. There's one woman that's like known as Cat Lady or something like that, literally. And what they say that they did is they cobbled together all of this digital material that was floating out everywhere.

4:17:15that had been stolen from phones, that had been taken from the dark web, that had been taken from the hard drive that John Paul MacIsaic. They consolidated it all. And they consolidated it all, and they made it out to be this thing. And so then the story doesn't become about the laptop at all. Because there's nothing in the laptop other than a record of me being a degenerate. A degenerate drug addict. At the worst moment in my life. At the worst moment in my life of people clearly, me not taking selfies, of people clearly taking pictures of me in the rooms that I found myself in. Smoking crack, doing drugs, doing whatever.

4:17:54Nothing criminal, other than, obviously, drug use. And what other people would think is, you know, abhorrent behavior. I mean, whatever. Having sex with women. And so they take that, and then you can say whatever you want. No one read the stories. When you put me naked on the front page of the New York Post over and over again with a crack pipe in my mouth, it becomes like gold. And Miranda Devine said it was the most read, the most followed story in the history of the paper. She's written and sold two bestselling books based upon that. And it's all about the pictures. It's like sex, drugs, and politics, man.

4:18:43And that's what they did. So then it became about the cover-up of the laptop story. You know why Twitter took down that story? Because non-consensual pornography. it's because under what is the law today that was pushed by melania trump it's revenge porn you're not allowed to take a picture that is stolen from somebody's digital material of them in in in uh naked and um uh with with another person and publish it i mean you're not allowed to do that it's a crime But in my instance, and so that's what the New York Post story ran, and the initial story, and it had naked pictures of me in there. And under the terms of Twitter, they took it down when I objected to it.

4:19:38So you got to take that down. And so they took it down. And then that became the hobby horse for everybody, is that it was an issue of free speech. and how the deep state, you know, buried the story. What story? That I was a drug addict? And that I was in rooms in which people took pictures of me and I took pictures of myself?

4:20:09Because otherwise, I've sat across from journalists. I've sat across from detractors. and I don't know of anybody that's kind of at least more informed than you are in terms of the the number of people that have come through uh this studio that have had an opinion about it and I know that you prepare and you have a team that prepares does anyone of your team ever been able to tell you of any crime other than crimes of uh of uh as it relates to illicit drug use that is on the laptop. And I mean, wouldn't you have, if there were, wouldn't you come? And by the way, obviously, like, it's all there, Sean.

4:20:54Like, there's nothing more to show. So there's not a single instance of a crime. And I told you, is that I got investigated by Crim Tax and Maine Justice. I got six years of investigation of the U.S. Attorney in the state of Delaware, in Pittsburgh, in Baltimore, in the Baltimore field office, of the Philadelphia Field Office, the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles, the House Ways and Means Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, the House Oversight Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee, Oversight Committee, all of every one of them, and probably a number of foreign foreign intelligence agencies.

4:21:36Not a single criminal act has been even accused of me that is based on evidence from the laptop. So the irony is, is that the thing that they hang around my neck as being this, you know, this great sin, the laptop, is in actuality evidence of the absolute bullshit of their accusations. Wow. So they say that I was engaged in some type of bribery in Ukraine. Now, the person that stated that to an FBI agent in an FD-1023, a confidential informant statement, was then arrested by the same special prosecutor that was prosecuting me because they blew up my plea deal because you had congress come to them come to the u.s attorney and say this is bullshit we know that he was engaged in in bribery because we have an fd 1023 a private content confidential thing uh a an informant that claims that he was engaged in bribery and has evidence of it so they they blow up my my plea deal okay because of that and they pretend like it well it was because some confusion as it relates to you know i had immunity everybody gets immunity when they do a plea deal why would you enter a plea deal if you didn't get immunity from the federal government that they weren't going to come back and, you know, charge you with something else.

4:23:20And so they blow up the plea deal and they bring this guy in, the informant, Smirnoff. They bring him in and they say, OK, tell us about this bribery. Tell us about this FD-1023 that you have members of Congress out there waving around as evidence of Joe Biden's corruption. and he basically breaks down and says like it's all bullshit he was encouraged to do so by others he was encouraged to do so by people in intelligence in um russian intelligence that's the story go read the story about smirnoff who's sitting in jail serving a sentence for lying on the fd-1023 well now that that story blows up what do they do three days before the statute of limitation runs on these charges they charge me with the with the things that they had just come to a plea with me on

4:24:24anyway man the laptop once again you know there are people out there that have just dined out on this, you know, the laptop. And it become a kind of buzzword for, you know, corruption. Of some kind of like, you know, epic, you know, roadmap to the Biden crime family. Tell me, other than me being a evidence of me being a crack addict, what the laptop tells you. Because not a single person that comes from a good place, like you say, well, you know, 10 % from the big guy. Somebody sent me an email about a deal when my dad was not vice president of the United States and when he was not president of the United States, in which they proposed, if that's what they meant, that my dad, the big guy, would get 10 % of the deal, of which I never entered into the deal with them and never did a deal with them.

4:25:35It's funny how those details don't make it in. And so, you know, all of this bullshit about, like, for instance, like, you know, 35 former, you know, they harp on all the time. And then it became about free speech. Well, then it became about the big cover-up of the story, you know? remember that and they had hearings on it and they you know they uh after um uh elon bought uh twitter and turned it into x and they had that matt whatever that reporter's name come on he said you know lamented the fact that you know the story was taken down and the reason it was taken down is because the deep state and cia and you know the remember remember when the story was taken down.

4:26:20In the Trump administration, my dad wasn't president when the story was taken down. He wasn't vice president when the story was taken down. Trump controlled all levers of government. Twitter took down the story because it violated their own revenge porn laws, because it was publishing pictures of me naked with other people having consensual sex, but without my consent, which is an absolute and complete violation of any of the rules of Twitter or even X as it stands now. That's why they took it down. Let me ask you that. Anybody that's listening to this, if somebody stole your phone for whatever reason and decided that they wanted to accuse you of other things, but the way they were going to do is they were going to show you and your wife having sex naked in their bedroom.

4:27:16Do you think they should be able to do that and put it up on X right now? No. And in that, accuse you of other things? Say, you know, Hunter Biden accused of bribery without anything to back it up, but then show a picture of you in a motel room doing drugs. naked with a woman. Does anybody have the right to do that? Do you think that X shouldn't have taken that down or that Twitter shouldn't have taken that down? Because I'll tell you what it did is that Bannon's a genius because then that became the story and that became the cover-up and that became the thing that was the great injustice, which led into the whole J6 thing and to stop the steal part of it.

4:28:08And if they had just let the story of Hunter Biden's laptop come out, they actually, that's where the, how the election was stolen. Is that if the corruption that the laptop proved, well, I keep coming back to, what did it prove? And I keep coming back to like the idea. I don't know of anybody that is more informed in terms of the people that they have spoken to than you. Has anybody been able to tell you what Hunter Biden's laptop proves? No. I know. And so here I am, six years later, Sean, and I'm still talking about a fucking laptop that actually is not even a laptop. It's an amalgamation of concocted digital material that has been stolen from me over the course of 22 years, and some of it fabricated.

4:29:00And all you got to do is just add a little bit here and there. I mean, that's what Gao did, and there's tapes of it. There's tapes of Gao talking to Bannon the night before the election in 2020, in which he's talking about how they've taken the hard drive to New Zealand and they're manufacturing pictures of me with children in China. Are you serious? Yes. There's literal. I mean, you literally have Gao. I mean, go to the Mother Jones. Do you have access to that? Yeah. Go to Mother Jones. It's all unreported, but nobody listens. I mean, literally, there are tapes of Bannon, Gao, and others sitting around talking about how they've stolen the laptop, how they've stolen the hard drive, and how they're manufacturing images.

4:29:44Because they can do any, you can say whatever you want at this point. Go listen to the tapes. They're literal tapes. He was very close to winning outright then and shutting down Trump. The hard drive from hell stopped his momentum.

4:30:04Then the other thing is the way we blunted, the way we drove up Biden's negatives, the only thing that stopped momentum was the hard drive from hell, right? And two parts of that were Luda's editorial creativity over the pictures. And really the CCP involvement, that's what shocked the American people. Sleepy Joe, he never drove up Biden's negatives. It was only when we got the hard drive, we got it to you, that in the post, if you look, here's where the Biden's fucked up. From the day the post story came out, and then you started pumping out, we got you the stuff, and you started just dumping it out.

4:30:44And then the internet started picking up, and they suppressed it. Remember, the best thing that happened to us was Twitter and Facebook suppressing it, because then everybody wants to see it. Remember, we hammered this guy every day for 10 days with the worst pictures in the world, drug addicts, taking money from CCP, from Chinese spies. No response. No response. And the negatives just keep going up because people are sitting there going, I didn't know that about Joe Biden. But Joe Biden, nobody, not one person came out and said, those pictures are not true. Right? Nobody came out and said anything you're saying is not true.

4:31:19Even the wildest allegations, when Trump got COVID and when Trump had that first debate within that one week period, Biden could have put him away. The campaign would have been over. Biden would have won with 500 electoral votes, but they didn't do it and we were able to stop it. So now I'm not saying Trump's going to win, but we have a fighting chain. These are legit. A ton of 100 percent legit. 100 percent. I mean, I would believe Mother Jones, but they wrote a hit piece on me that's complete bullshit. Well, by the way, by the way, the tapes exist. And I will send you the link to the Mother Jones article with the physical tapes that no one's ever denied actually exist.

4:32:02By the way, with Bannon's partner, Miles Kwok, who, by the way, is in prison for the next 45 years. years from stealing over 1.8 billion dollars from uh uh from uh chinese uh dissidents do you know why this is the one that lit his fight his his apartment on fire when the fbi raided it in the sherry netherland or and on park avenue wait what yeah they rated his they they rated his apartment he had the penthouse as his sherry netherlands or you know that one right on park avenue and the fbi came in and all of the um all the hard drives went up in flames and uh and and burned the whole um penthouse apartment on park avenue by the way steve bannon's partner who at the same time at that exact same time steve bannon is sitting with jeffrey epstein coaching him about how he can uh you know fool the american people into the fact that he's not really a fucking pedophile.

4:33:08That's Steve Bannon, who concocted this whole thing, who put this whole thing together and handed parts of it off to Rudy Giuliani. I mean, it's all there. Talk to Noel Dunphy, his assistant. Talk to Lev Parnas. I mean, Lev Parnas says the entire Russian thing, the entire thing about Ukraine and the rivalry and the corruption of the Biden family. He was the guy that Giuliani literally deputized, that Trump literally deputized, to go to Ukraine and dig up dirt on me. Talk to Leopardis. Leopardis says it's all bullshit. We made it all up. And we sat there with John Solomon

4:33:57and Ken Vogel of the New York Times and Rudy and what's his name? I'm going to get names wrong and I'm going to get sued. But my point is, it's all there. I'm not making any of this shit up. Bob Costello, they literally went to Ukraine and took a dossier and filmed it with OAN from a guy named Dirkatch, okay, who was a known Russian GRU agent, and I swear to God I'm not making any of this even remotely up, who's wanted for treason, who fled to Russia and now serves in the Duma in Russia as a Russian senator. He's the one that came up with the bullshit bribery thing. Are you fucking kidding me?

4:34:50No. And by the way, this is the thing that drives me insane. You can, Ru Giuliani with an OAN film crew with Durkacz, who is literally has been tried in abstentia and convicted of treason inside of Ukraine, who has fled Russia and has made it clear that he is a Russian agent. He was sanctioned and convicted in abstentia or charged in the United States for being a GRU agent. That's where Giuliani was getting all of his information. He's the one that told them that Dmitry Fertash wanted to sell Hunter Biden's laptop five months before this, you know, what's his name ever existed. The laptop repair shop guy.

4:35:40Wow. And I can 100 % give you each one of these things. I can give you the tapes of the Mother Jones, of the conversation between Bannon Gow and the four or five other people that were in his apartment the night before. That's when Bannon says that, you know what we're going to do? When he loses the election, we're just going to say it's stolen.

4:36:06That's what we're going to do. He lays out the entire Stop the Steal effort. This shit's 100 % real. 100 % real. It's not that 11 labs that can clone the blue. 100 % real.

4:36:24100 % real. And so all of this stuff exists, but you know what? Nobody gives a fuck about me in the aftermath of what happened with J6. Nobody gives a fuck about what they did in terms of what I'm talking about, in terms of the complete dehumanization of me. And so then I became the pariah by everyone. nobody in the democratic party stepped up except for maybe a couple people that um uh that that like stood by me you want to figure out who's your friend here's another gift that they gave me i know who's really my friend because if you were willing to stand with me or even be seen with me or be associated with me with any way for a period of time, there was nothing in it for you.

4:37:18Absolutely zero nothing. The biggest regret that I have is I allowed them to think that I couldn't be around my dad because I would rub off, because I would bring... By the way, like, for instance, like this bullshit, you know, the cocaine in the cubbyhole in the West Wing. We were talking about it before. Like, on what fucking planet am I walking in off of West Exec Avenue with my own Secret Service detail stopping by the cubby in the situation before you go into the situation room and deciding that I'm going to put a baggie of cocaine into the cubby hole before I make it on my way to the residence.

4:38:19In what world? In what world does that make even the most insane drug addict sense of anything? But you know how many people fucking believe that? You've had guests on here who come and accuse me of actually that being mine. But that could be, I wasn't even there. you know how much time I spent in the White House over the course of the four years I'd say no more than maybe 8 to 10 days a year the entire time that my dad was in office and this is a family that does everything together you know how hard that was for me not to be there just to be there for him like he didn't have my brother and then he and then basically virtually lost me because i allow people to to you know i mean people around him that i'll never forgive for not pushing back

4:39:21and then you start to think well you're the drug addict hunter you're the one you're the one that put yourself in those rooms you're the one that um allowed those pictures to be taken or took you're the one that um you know that uh allowed your stuff to be stolen or lost you're the one that um embarrassed the family you know so that's just to stay away fuck that man you know i figured out that you know a while back is that that was exactly what they they uh uh what they wanted is for me is for me to to fail is for me to relapse i truly believe that what they really wanted to happen is they wanted to make it impossible for my dad to emotionally even remotely um uh mount a campaign or to um uh or to govern knowing that there's only one thing that he cares more about than this country and as i think everybody should is their family it's his family and and i refused i refused to allow them to do that and i knew there was one way the fastest way to fail is to not figure out how to be clean and sober for good.

4:41:05But I'll tell you what. They're good at it. And I sit here and I talk about like the laptop or I was on the board of a company, Burisma. You see what they're doing, man? I don't care what you think about anything. I don't know how you can look at what they're doing and the way in which they are profiting off the presidency, directly profiting and directly. Don Jr. opened up a club in Georgetown called the Executive Club, and he's charging people a$500 ,000 initiation fee to join the club with the stated purpose of the club being it is the place where you can come and rub shoulders with the decision makers in his father's administration.

4:41:52Half a million dollars, the second most expensive club in the country. Are you serious? I'm pondering if it's not serious. Half a million dollars to join. So they opened a club. They opened a club, and on opening night of the club, they had half the cabinet there. Of the club, a half a million dollar initiation fee for a private club run and owned by Don Jr. called the Executive Club. And they state the purpose. It's the place to go to be able to be with the people that are the greatest influence within the administration, cabinet members. He has a private equity company. Don Jr. has a private equity company.

4:42:32It's just in the New York Times and in the Washington Post and in the Wall Street Journal and in every newspaper on page 14. of which his private equity company has a majority, I think, majority stake in a startup drone company that's never produced a drone, has 13 or 30 employees, I don't know. They got the largest loan guarantee of$695 million that the Pentagon has ever issued. And that's just one of the companies in which he has, his private equity firm has invested that has contracts with the Pentagon. Just one. you want to talk about they talk about me doing foreign business what fucking foreign business are you talking about i had a partner who was chinese as part of a private equity company and we were going to invest in natural gas in the united states and in an industry that i knew of and it fell apart and it didn't happen and i worked for on the board of a ukrainian gas company and as a lawyer, I represented a guy that was from Romania for a three-month period of time.

4:43:39There's my foreign business. I never had any business with any foreign government, ever, ever. They're building towers in Saudi Arabia. They're building towers in the UAE. They're doing spas and golf courses and residential properties in Qatar. They're doing they're building on government property that they bought through jared kushner's fucking private equity fund a um a government-owned island um in albania i think it is and they're doing a one of the last public spaces in in serbia a deal directly with the government and that's just the tip of the fucking iceberg well don't forget about gaza and jared kushner is basically not basically has flat out stated that Gaza is all about a real estate play.

4:44:40In which it is the best beachfront property in the Mediterranean. And they're going to redevelop Gaza. And where are they going to get the money to do it? They're going to get the money from the Saudi royal family. They're going to get it from the Emiratis. They're going to get it from the Qataris. They're going to get it from the Russians. They're going to get it from the oligarchs, from Blavatnik, from all of these guys, from Dmitry Firtash, who has been wanted for extradition in Australia and the United States for the past 10 years. And all of a sudden he's off the extradition list. But by the way, he's doing a deal with Naftagas and the Saudis and Don as it relates to the pipeline.

4:45:27as jared kushner and what's his name witkoff who has zero experience everybody says that i don't have experience i was a fucking adjunct professor at georgetown university school of foreign fucking service i'd served on like i don't know 19 different boards i was the chairman of the board of the largest humanitarian the largest support group for the largest humanitarian organization in the world i had traveled the world i had been to every fucking all the places that you were jumping from? I've been, not with a gun, but there in the refugee camps and everywhere else. And they said that I didn't have experience as a Yale fucking educated lawyer.

4:46:11What experience does Don Jr. have in anything other than being handed a check in an office by his dad. Name one. Jared Kushner had the biggest real estate failure in the history of real estate in New York when he bought the 666 building on 5th Avenue. It had to be bailed out by the Qataris when Trump was president. and we're wondering like whether Hunter Biden

4:46:57I don't get it man I really don't and I sit here and I think like well shouldn't that make you fucking mad shouldn't that make everybody mad forget about me forget about whether you think I'm a fucking you know crook or whatever whatever you want to believe they're doing it right in front of her face i mean the new yorker you know assessment of how much money that they've made over the in the in the first 10 months it's like what three 3.4 billion dollars that they can identify and the and the increase in the wealth of the trump family in nine months and by the way it's not like we didn't that they're not like directly telling us this and I don't know understand like if okay so if I give myself um or give the people that voted for him the widest latitude with the belief that like what you said is because they gave a shit about things they gave about shit about the prioritization of what's wrong in the United States rather than what's wrong overseas of us um of us taking care of vets instead of taking care of illegal immigrants of all of the shit that you wanted me to give them the latitude to believe that that's why they voted for donald trump shouldn't this make you really fucking pissed off hunter i've been pissed off for a long fucking time yeah i know but but i mean i'm not just talking about you and i don't want to get you in trouble but i can i can like almost feel like the the resistance from your audience of this message coming from me but let me give you this one he's in the fucking epstein files man yeah and that's the reason that we're not getting them and it's like like what are we even talking about susie wiles came out today in a vanity fair article have you read that no it says that he she his chief of staff said that he acts like an alcoholic and that of course he's in the epstein files and that pam bondy completely screwed this thing up and totally screwed them all.

4:49:05That's his sitting chief of staff on the record in Vanity Fair that came out today. And what are we supposed to be distracted by? We're supposed to be distracted by the absolute ugliness of someone taking the barbaric murder of a beloved liberal. He's a beloved liberal, but he made like the movies of my, that made my generation, A Few Good Men, Misery, Stand By Me, When Harry Met Sally. Like, my God, just as an artist alone, like, Jesus God, let's give the guy the reverence that he's due for gifting humanity the Princess Bride as a movie. and he says that basically he was murdered because he was infected by trump derangement syndrome yeah we'll basically throw the uh tweet or whatever you call it on truth social i don't um yeah whatever whatever that it will throw it up on screen so everybody can read it i think the response that i saw from that was fucking horrendous and and i wanted to bring this up a little earlier but you know when you're talking because you see you seem surprised at what people believe and i can see how you would think that from from your vantage point from your perspective but i'll give you the perspective of everybody else yeah and so the perspective of everybody else is yes you know we saw we saw you know whether they're true whether they're not fucking true i don't i don't know you know i don't i just i just don't have the insight and i'm not i'm not the person i think a lot of people are painting things as fact now that are all complete bullshit it makes it damn near fucking impossible to find what's if there is any real truth anymore yeah But what we see is we just see corruption that's never corrected and there are never any consequences.

4:51:19We see Eric Swalwell fucking Chinese spies still sitting in there. We saw all the corruption with Trump and whether you believe it, whether you don't believe it, whether you think he's guilty, whether you don't think he's fucking guilty. they went at him hard nothing happened whether you believe the stuff that happened to you whether you don't believe it you know what i mean whether the laptop's real whether it's not what doesn't matter barisima stuff nothing happened the stuff you know when your dad was president i can't think of any examples off the top of my head i know there's a thousand people are gonna get i gotta stop you but i get it but what i'm saying basically is you never see you never whether it's true or not true you never see any fucking accountability on the democrat side on the republican side i don't right now you brought it up yeah the epstein files we've been talking about this for i don't know how many years now and and and and and trump was a big part of that and the republican party was a big part of that well now we got the presidency we got the house and we got the fucking Senate and we still have zero Epstein files.

4:52:33And I sat right across from the fucking current director of the FBI and listened to him spew lie after fucking lie after fucking lie to me, not even realizing he was going to get director of the FBI while he's sitting in front of me. But he did fucking get it. and he told us all what he was going to do if he did get it i don't see anything i don't i don't see any differences in in so you see what i'm saying which is just i know but pass the buck pass the buck this guy's guilty this guy's guilty i never never i mean we just never fucking see any accountability and so then and then it then it becomes the political elite class, the oligarch class, which you are part of, whether you got a lot of money or not, been in politics for a long time, and you see what I'm getting at.

4:53:30You see people, you see a population of people that are getting beat to shit with fucking - The most offensive thing that you've ever said to me - With, with, with, with - I'm an oligarch, oh my god. With, with, all right, I get it, I get it, I get what you're saying. Is it the perception of that? But here's what I want to say to you. There is truth, John. And the fact of the matter is, is that the only people that are benefiting, this is how I started off when we started talking five hours ago. Who's benefiting? Them. Yeah. I sure as hell not. I see that. And I'll sit here and answer any question.

4:54:10Like, for instance, let me just stop you on one thing. Like Eric Swalwell, that whole thing. Bullshit. There is the truth. It's bullshit. It's a total bullshit story. He didn't fuck a Chinese spy. He 100 % did not fuck a Chinese spy. 100 % completely concocted. Have Eric on. Have Eric on this show. And I promise you, it's absolute 100 % bullshit. But here's the thing. We are all a victim of our algorithms. and so are you and so am i and i'm not i'm not like pointing the finger no i'm aware and i don't that's my story about the people that came up to me at the you know screaming in my face is it but there is a truth sean but who's benefiting who's benefiting from turning us all like i mean like at each other's throats of like concocting this bullshit i'll tell you that To begin with, it's our adversaries.

4:55:11And then on the second, it's the people that really control these fucking things. And it's not political people. It is the people that control billions and billions and billions of dollars. And those are the people that are benefiting. 100%. Do you think that Mark Zuckerberg gives a fucking shit about any of this? Do you think that in any way? No. I mean, let me point this out. There's a whistleblower. You want to talk - We just watched every single tech, billionaire, whatever you want to call him, literally switch from the Biden administration right into the Trump administration. They're all there.

4:55:58They were all bitching about Trump before. But here's the thing. They hated my dad. What did we do? We brought in the whistleblower. We tried to, we, not we, I don't have anything to do with the fucking part of it. And I agree with you. Nobody's fucking held them accountable. If you really wanted to be able to hold the social media companies accountable, make them liable like everybody else for fucking killing little girls because driving them to suicide. I mean, they literally testified before Congress in the whistleblower and showed how they manipulated the algorithm to send our children into depression and suicidal states.

4:56:30And you know what? They didn't change it even when they were notified of it and even when they became aware of it and even when they saw that people were taking their lives, teenagers, kids, they did nothing about it. And we have the facts and the data and all of an actual witness testimony that they did this. What did they do? Not a damn thing. And did anyone hold them accountable? Anybody in Congress? You know why? Because the biggest fucking problem that we have in this country is money. Is money in our politics and money in our media. And that's nothing new. But if you want to find a common enemy, you know, I don't understand how they don't realize that people are going to pick up some fucking pitchfork soon, man.

4:57:20Maybe they do realize it. Well, I'll tell you what. maybe that's why they're building their bunkers and their billion dollar yachts and their hidden structure i don't know but it is it at some point i think what i was saying before is that there is this uh there is going to be this unholy union between radicals that both come to the same conclusion, is that no one can be trusted. And everyone is the enemy. And chaos is the only answer. Violence is the only answer. And that's what we're being driven towards. And I really, truly believe that. But there is a truth. There is a truth about, for instance eric swalwell that i know and i know to be a lie there is a truth about let me give you an example the fucking case against donald trump as it related in new york was bullshit i think it was a bullshit fucking case i think he's a crook i think that he i think that he stole um uh documents i think that was a real case i think he tried to overthrow our government I think that he tried for a fucking coup.

4:58:47I think that was a real case. But the case in New York was bullshit. If you're going to charge him, you should have charged about 14 other real estate magnets in New York for the same fucking shit that he's doing. But what we do is that we allow ourselves to be driven by our algorithms to believe things that just are not even remotely true, which then we all give up. Like you just said, nobody's held accountable. You know why the Biden Justice Department did not? This is the explanation that I have. Why did Joe Biden not demand the release of the Epstein files if it was such a big deal to Democrats?

4:59:29I don't know. The same reason that Joe Biden didn't demand that they drop the prosecution of May. Because he didn't involve himself with the Department of Justice. Because as every other president before him, other than Richard Nixon, who resigned because of it, He didn't direct the Department of Justice to do one thing or another. Why didn't Merrick Garland do it? I guess as good as mine. I don't know. But I will tell you this, is that now we're here after we have an FBI director, a deputy FBI director, an attorney general, and several other people that are in his cabinet, and And the president himself, who largely got elected through the energy of the people that wanted to have, for absolutely the right reasons, these files released, regardless of whose names were in it.

5:00:22And they haven't released it. And they fought it tooth and nail. And then they had to get legislation. And then they passed the legislation. And he said, don't sign it or don't vote for it. And then he said, go ahead and vote for it. and then we have reports that there's what a hundred FBI agents that spent thousands and thousands of hours of scrubbing his name from the files oh I'm sure they did yeah and now we can't trust anything that's going to come out and who fucking loses the children not like it's an insignificant thing in any way and they talk about these you know these young women they weren't young women fucking 14 year olds.

5:01:05Kids. Kids. Hundreds of them. Entire networks that they developed. What do you think that was? What do I think that was? What do you think this whole Epstein debacle was? Do you think this was a... I don't even fucking know at this point. And I really mean it. It's like, I will tell you, is that the only thing that is clear to me is this. Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump during a period of his life were fucking thick as thieves. And Donald Trump has tried to pass this off as being what Palm Beach was in the 90s. Okay, and that may be his view of it. But I've seen enough evidence of Donald Trump and his team modeling agencies and what he said on Howard Stern about how he would go into the back of these Miss Teen USA pageants and walk up to the girls naked.

5:02:11They were talking about girls when he's talking about doing that. And wonder whether or not Donald Trump in his mind has come up with this concoction that it was all just what they did in the 90s. It was models. I mean, that's what Michael Wolff says. Michael Wolff says that the justification in Trump's mind was, is that they were models.

5:02:37Wow. 14, 15 years old. I mean, we have a president that has been that has been credibly accused by over well over a dozen and a half women, if not more, of sexual assault. And we're wondering whether or not as he fights tooth and nail for the Epstein files that all of his supporters demand it be released so that they could nail Bill Clinton to a cross. And he won't release him. Why? Out of the kindness of his heart for the people that make it hurt? Have you ever known the president to act out of anything but his own self-interest? Mm-mm. Ever? And so we're sitting here and acting as if, like, okay, I'm willing to believe that people can vote for him and support him and overlook the kind of the personal cruelty of his politics.

5:03:39Because by the way, according to everybody, Donald Trump is an incredibly charming person in person. He really supposedly is. He is. You know, I know that he, like, I think he told my dad when he came to the White House, he's like, Joe, we would have been best of friends if it weren't for politics.

5:03:58And so I don't know what kind of sociopathic mind is able to do those things. And then the next day say that Joe Biden is a, you know, the worst human being to have ever lived. And, you know, a corrupt, senile, you know, criminal. Well, I mean, I talked about this with Megyn Kelly, too. She talks about her account. I don't know if you remember that whole debacle back a handful of years ago. But she pretty much says the exact same thing. Yeah, man. And so I don't, you know, just where have we gotten to, man? I don't know. I want to tell you something, but I don't want to offend you. Yeah. And, but I'm going to say it.

5:04:54Yeah. You know, the thing that makes you look really guilty, and after sitting here with you for six and a half hours now with the breaks and everything, I find you to be a very genuine person, and I believe you. The thing that makes you look very guilty is the pardon. the pardon from was it 20 2014 to yeah what 2020 24 or whatever can i tell you why yeah makes me look guilty is because i was found guilty and that's what a pardon's for but it was a blanket pardon yeah because you have to be able to go back because the charges stemmed from over seven years ago. So they went all the way back to 2015 for my taxes.

5:05:52That's what I was charged with. It's now 2025. Those are the crimes that I was pardoned for, in which I pled guilty to not filing my taxes on time and incorrectly identifying business expenses as personal expenses as business expenses. That is all it's for. Yeah. There's like eight different charges for over two different years. But yeah, that's what it is. Those are all that the charges are for. And then there's the gun charge that went back to 2017. So it goes back to the beginning of their investigation as it relates to my tax investigation, which was back to 2014, I believe. And so 2024, it goes back 10 years.

5:06:38And that's the blanket pardon. It's for those crimes. And when you give someone a pardon, that's the pardon that you give them. And the reason to give me the pardon is this, which I make no apologies for anymore, is this. Do you think that under the Donald Trump Department of Justice that I would have gotten a fair shake as related to what I knew that I would get a fair shake for? which is I believe that I would have won the appeal and that 922 G3 is going to be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court which would nullify my conviction. And I believe that I would have won on an appeal in the way in which they brought the tax case against me.

5:07:24And during that period of time, however, I would have been under the auspices of the Bureau of Federal Prisons which is controlled by Donald Trump. and controlled by Pam Bondi, and controlled by the people that have been saying for over eight years at that point that I was literally the spawn of the devil. And the demand, even if it wasn't in their interest, the demand from their most vitriolic and hateful followers would have been the same way that they blew up my plea deal, is that I needed to be in jail at that time, that I shouldn't be held on release, that I should be charged with other things, that they really are just letting me off easy, that, you know, I was engaged in bribery, or I was, you don't think that they would have used me if I was under the thumb of the federal government and the federal bureau of parole to silence my dad or silence anybody in my family or silence the people around me because that's what they're doing right now to everybody else and so i don't make i i don't apologize for it and then just a poorly on a human level my dad's 83 years old i'm 55 even if you think that i fucked up even if you think that i am uh there is not a there's not a legal commentator in the world that would say to you that as a first-time offender I would have ever received a jail sentence for a nonviolent crime of owning a gun for 10 days and lying on a form or for failure to pay my taxes on time and take, after paying penalties and interest full penalties and interest,$2.8 million that I would end up serving any time but do you think that I wouldn't have served time?

5:09:28That it wouldn't have been an enormous amount of pressure to do that? Can I tell you what I think? And that they wouldn't have been able to violate me on a parole if they decided that they wanted to take a pee test and tell me that I was, you know, a junkie? Would anybody ever believe me?

5:09:43I think that, no, they wouldn't believe you. No, I don't think you would have received a fair trial. and with that being said i don't think anybody in the trump family would have received a fair trial no i agree with you i 100 agree with you i do i think that we no longer have a fair and just justice department tell you what man i don't think i i i i won't i won't argue that with you i won't argue with that with you and i and i i loathe to think that that i'm in any way associated uh with um with that because that's the truth of the matter too sean it's fucked up yeah it's fucked up and that i you know like that my dad gave me a pardon you don't think that that like really makes me like feel like fuck like i'm the poster boy for for that i'm the poster boy for you know the the elite son of the president who got a um who got something nobody else could possibly ever get simply by by the fact of his of his birth no matter how much he fucked up he got he got away with it and to your point you got these guys sitting here trying to figure out how they're going to fucking um uh make ends meet to make it to the end of the week and that are getting um you know it just got pulled over by some fucking state cop that's giving them a fucking hard time and they come back and they turn on Fox News or they put on the Sean Ryan show and here's fucking Hunter Biden.

5:11:20Like he got a pardon, he got something I didn't. It would piss me the fuck off too. I get it. I mean, what do you want me to do? Like I said, I hope you don't take that the wrong way. I don't take it personally at all. And it's like literally, it's one of the things I keep coming back to you about like what i it's like i've been forced into the into uh either deciding that i i truly can't exist in any healthy way whatsoever if i gave a shit about what other people think beyond the people that i um uh know that i owe a um uh owe them my respect and that may be people that i meet like you the people that i watch that i want to earn their respect like you like i said i don't think there's anybody that i learned in my family that we should respect more than the people that uh and i'm not i'm not blowing fucking smoke and like you know what i mean like oh i love the you know i love guys that you know i didn't serve well i did serve i got kicked out of the navy and um and uh but and to know that uh that that's the perception is that i i gotta get out of bed in the morning just try to do the fucking right thing that's all i can do yeah but i'm not gonna apologize i'm not gonna apologize for uh i will apologize for a lot i will apologize to my family i will try as my friend i will apologize to the people in the community that i care about in which i you know like i i mean i have a lot of people that i've apologized to i've spent i've spent five years making amends trying to make amends and i still owe a lot more amends to a lot of people that i haven't been able to make amends with or had the bravery or the courage enough to do yet and it's just personal stuff and um But what I won't apologize for is for things that I did not do.

5:13:32For bullshit conspiracy theories that the laptop. I won't apologize for Burisma. It may not have been the smartest thing to do in retrospect in light of the fact that they tried to impeach my father over it. But I'm not going to apologize for it. I know what I need to apologize for. I've done a lot of it, and I've still got a lot to go. But God, I hate, I hate, and I'm fully, fully aware of every room that I walk in. they're like walking with your guys you know and i see that you put together a team of people that are like they're they're buttoned up from the guy that picked me up at the airport to um you know to jeremy like they're they're buttoned up guys and i mean you just get a sense in that and i bet you they don't fucking think that i'm a decent human being before i walked in here i know i walk into that room with the incredible advantage of incredibly low expectations.

5:14:52Because they not only think that I, you know, a near-do-well and somebody that's been given all of the advantages of the world and squandered them, but they also think that I'm sleazy on top of that and that, you know, I'm a part of the problem. and that's and and you know it is a beautiful thing to be given the space to try to um uh uh give them a different impression what do you think they think now oh uh i don't know i think that um they think that i probably fucking talk way too much and that they're thinking, when is he going to shut up because we want to go home and eat dinner with our families?

5:15:38I think that that's what they're thinking at this point is that I've just literally tired them out. I have submission by verbal diarrhea. That's what I think they think. No, I don't know. You know what I think they're thinking? What? Motherfucker, we got fooled again. Yeah. I'll tell you, you know, I wish that I had the energy to go one by one by the people that, I don't really mean this, you know, the people that remind me of my brother.

5:16:18Um, anyway.

5:16:28What would you say to Beau? I say it to him all the time.

5:16:35Just talk to him all the time.

5:16:46Try and...

5:16:50you know... One thing that I never, ever, single thing that I never doubted in my life was the love of my brother.

5:17:22yeah

5:17:27and he could beat the shit out of me and I could you know I mean we were brothers you know I mean I don't know we uh and we fought and and uh but never in my life uh you know would ever, ever doubt that no matter what, sorry, is that

5:18:03that he would jump off a bridge for me.

5:18:18yeah sorry it's been 10 years I'm still crying over it but not bad tears I promise you it's like I feel so incredibly lucky

5:18:36to have that relationship and still have it. I really mean it. I still have it. I mean, that's the one thing that I'm positive of is that is that I am in my best moments, I'm fully 100 % connected to that. And God,

5:19:03what a gift you know you talk to him often yeah I mean all the time there's not a day that goes by and I don't mean in a melodramatic macabre way it's just that I went through a period of time where I did everything in my power to drown out his voice in my head. I mean, I literally, you know, I, in that period of time, I tried to smoke him out. I couldn't do it. And, but there's never a moment, and I don't, and I really don't mean it in a melodramatic way, there's never a moment that I'm not having a conversation. You know? And, uh,

5:20:05usually, you know, he's telling me to shut up.

5:20:13Stop talking. Have you ever gotten anything back from him? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I really mean it. I mean, I, I, I, uh, and I, I don't think this is, like, I, uh,

5:20:30100 you know uh and i and i don't mean it in like some like you know uh you know cinematic you know ghost kind of thing like my brother's hovering over my shoulder it's just that his voice is in my head like i can hear him talking to me and i don't mean that it's kind of coming out of left field it's like when i have a conversation and want to figure out how to do things is like you know i can hear him uh kind of uh whether it's the echo of it or you know and there's never a time that i don't feel um uh i feel the same thing about my mom you know um uh

5:21:17I don't think that people leave us. I think that whatever that energy is, it becomes only discernible to us to the degree with which we try to tie ourselves in with the rest of the uh whatever sentient thing and i mean everything and um i don't know i'm now i'm getting uh yeah people can truly think that uh i'm talking to ghosts but no i i really mean i talk to my brother all the time i talk to him man yeah i don't give a fuck what people think yeah no i don't i truly don't i'm giving you an out to be able to say, well, he was a little crazy at that point. But yeah, I talked to him all the time.

5:22:16Talked to him all the time. I used to write to him in those moments and just to write it down and, you know, and the messages I get back aren't, you know all sunshine and roses a lot of it's tough love a lot of it's telling me you know the only thing what i hear from my brothers the only thing that'll save you is radical honesty with yourself you know um and he's right in i said to you guys out there i said you know i just don't like i i don't I don't feel like, I hope it is not coming off as like I'm like, like in any way being like defensive. But I at the same time want to be able to tell the truth.

5:23:19And the truth is, is that I fucked up a lot of shit. My life, my family, my, um, I, I created in, in, you know, um, you know, um, Jake Tapper went on some show in, in after I, I criticized him for the book that he wrote and he said, you know, Hunter Biden is demonstrably a scumbag. I think he used the word scumbag or sleazeball or something like that who dated his brother's wife and cheated on her brother's widow and cheated on his wife and abandoned his children and went through this whole list of things and is a known crack addict who's been a long-term addict and went through this whole fucking list of things.

5:24:22And, you know, yeah, I was a crack addict. showed really poor judgment when I was addicted to drugs. I had, I made real mistakes in my personal life. Never had an intention of cruelty or some kind of venal, you know. I think all of it basically out of grief and trauma and loss and desperation, and selfishness to try to fix that whatever hole was in my heart.

5:25:09But haven't we all? And I really mean this. Haven't we all? Lord knows I have. And, you know, I would say to people like Jake, you know, you cast the first stone, you know? like like man like who the fuck are you or anybody else for me to judge you now I've had the gift of making it all for everybody to judge I mean the gift of like realizing that no one else's judgment defines me. I'm just honored that you gave me the space and I really mean it to spend six hours because who the hell fucking cares, Sean? I mean, who am I? But it really means the world to me that, like, you know, you let everybody else, but more importantly to me, it was just meant to me be able to sit with you.

5:26:21Thank you, man.

5:26:30I think that's what it's all about, man. Redemption and owning your shit. It's the greatest story in the history of the world. The redemption story. You got a hell of a story, man. I still got a long ways to go. You want to end this with a prayer? Yeah. You want to lead it? the prayer that I always say is Hail Mary because I'm a Catholic boy so Hail Mary full of grace the word is with thee blessed art thou among woman blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus Holy Mary Mother of God pray for our sinners now at the hour of our death Amen Amen Amen Yeah Honor Thanks man Thank you man Appreciate it What a fucking interview dude Thank you

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