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

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Hunter Biden. Welcome to the show, man.

Thanks man. Big fan.

I can't believe you're a fan.

Why? I don't know, it's just.

It's just. I just never. It just. It's wild to me that you're a fan.

Yeah, man, we're.

I'm finding. So, I mean, I pretty much interviewed almost everybody that's on the Trump admin now.

Yeah.

And that kind of. I think people may, I don't know, people got maybe the wrong impression of me that I agree with everything that that side of the aisle says and I don't. But, but you know, we did.

I'm going to get you in trouble. I got the. I got the exact opposite.

Right on. But, but yeah, I don't know. There's just some, you know, who else. Elizabeth Warren's team listens to my show a lot. That really, really surprised me.

Okay, so here, here's why is that you're a great listener and I think that the, the authentic way in which you listen and respond leads me to believe that, that you're just open. Like you're open to information and you're not judging it as it's coming over the transom. Unless it's just fucking outrageous, you know, know, or somebody's being hateful or, Or Lying, insincere. And, you know, I was saying to you, those guys out there, I watch you do the. I've watched everything. Not everything, but I've watched. I really do. I. You know, I. I listen to you while I paint. And, and the, the thing that always comes across to me with you is that fundamentally you have, like, a core set of beliefs of values, and. And they're the same values I have. I mean, and maybe that's a shock or a surprise, but, you know, I was saying to you guys out there, like, we all think that, you know, if you're Republican or Democrat, you know, that we got nothing in common. But I will tell you what. I was raised. What My, my. What, what. What I. What I try to, you know, I mean, obviously I.

I try and I've failed in many. In many respects and, And. And failed in my addiction and sometimes fail in my sobriety in being the man that I aspire to be. But I care about my family, I care about my friends, I care about my community, I care about my country, and I care about my faith. And I'm maybe being presumptuous, but I think that's what you care about. And I don't mean that like some saccharine. But our prescription of how to make all those things better may be different, you know, and those are the things that we used to argue about.

Yeah.

You know, my. You know, I'd grown up, you know, the majority of my friends were all Republicans, you know. You know, I aspired. You know, I mean, my heroes were the guy, you guys, you know, the people that serve, like my brother, like you, like, you know, and. And so anyway, my point is, I don't think. I don't know why you'd be shocked other than by the. The impression that's been left about me, I think. I don't know.

I think I'm shocked because I'm dealing with this, man. You grew up in this. In politics, you know, and, And I.

Didn'T grow up in this, though, Sean.

Yeah, you're.

That's true.

I mean, I guess what I'm getting at is. It's just. Man, it's so politicized now, and so you think that. I mean, you think that the Republican, Democrat, which I don't even know what it means to be a Republican anymore, to be honest with you, think everything's just so far base now that I don't. I don't even know. I have. I have conservative values, and that's all I can say anymore, you know, But. But it's just become so divisive that this. It appears that the decision has already been made for you to most people on who you can associate with, who you can watch, who you can take information from and who you can't. And while I don't, I don't and will never again fall into those fucking lines. I think a lot of people, you know, I think a lot of people can't. They can't see past. And some things have happened to me, too, you know, since I've been in this game of podcasting and started diving into politics. And, you know, what I've realized is that, you know, whatever the mainstream media determines, the narrative is going to be about you. That's what it's going to be, whether it has.

Exactly.

Right. But I mean, you know, I am not a maga cultist. I don't agree with everything that. That. That comes out of that whatever political movement. In fact, as time moves on, I've agreed with less. Less and less and less of it. But, you know, but if you look at the mainstream media, the first thing they put in front of my name every single time is Maga Influencer, Maga Podcast or Mega Podcast. Mega Maga Podcast or Shawn Ryan. It's like where you come. Where you can come up with this.

But. But. So anyways, well, maybe I missed some interviews. That's. That's why start getting nervous.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think you've missed much.

No, I haven't.

I've watched my heart on my sleeve.

I have, like, I have. I have, you know, serious disagreements with, you know, with people that have been really, really, I think, objectively, like, cruel to me. Like Tucker's been objectively cruel to me. I know that you're friends with Tucker. I used to be. I used to know Tucker. I wasn't friends with Tucker. But, you know, I think that we're all. Look, we should all have a common enemy. And the truth of the matter is it's not any politician or federal government worker, you know, who's benefiting right now. Who, you know, whether the Democrats are in control of Congress or whether the Republicans are. Who ultimately seems to be benefiting.

Well, I can tell you who's not benefiting.

Not normal people.

Yeah.

Not regular guys. Not the guys you served with. Not the guys that I went to high school with. Not the, you know, nobody that I know. You know, the people that are benefiting. The people that seem to have always some way avoid the consequences and. And when. And that's you know, the point. 1%, and it's not even the 1% anymore. I mean, it's like literally the. You know, And I'm not saying, you know, all billionaires are evil. I'm not saying that. I promise you. But I am saying that from. From my vantage point, we are all the victims of the algorithms that they have caged us in, every one of us, and we are. Are. Why are we all so mad at each other, Ken? I don't understand this. Bad politics never used to be like this. It didn't be like, I'll tell you why. Where's my. Like, pick up your phone, man. And then. People are incentivized. People that we used to trust are incredibly incentivized in a very perverse way to make me hate you, to label you. Sean, you're. You're a vet, special ops. You have a inside view of that. You have conservative values.

And so therefore, you know, at one point or another, you supported, you know, some of the things that Donald Trump was saying and, you know, and the people that surrounded him. And so therefore, you know what you are? You're my enemy. You're my enemy. I shouldn't be sitting here. Yeah. You know what I mean? You're. I. The one thing I've come to the conclusion of, because my own experience is to all such a bunch of. Such a bunch of. I wish people would just wake up.

I know, man.

Wake up, man. Remember your neighbor. Remember your neighbor, who, by the way, may have voted for Donald Trump, but didn't vote for this. Didn't vote for this. Now, I could have told him maybe. Do you know what I mean? But I am. I'm so. I saw one of your shows where you talked about, like, some days it feels like we're really on the verge of real violence. Not this. What do they call it? Stochastic violence. Not. Not these kind of the. The seemingly endless violence that we witness as it relates to what just happened to Rob Reiner, to his son, or what happened to Charlie Kirk, or what happened to the. The students at Brown University, or what happened to the. The people celebrating Hanukkah on Bondi beach, you know, and by the way, that was all what, except for Charlie Kirk, within the past day. Day. But beyond that violence, I saw you talking to somebody about it. Like, are we going to be picking up guns?

Well, what I think what you're referring to is, you know, you see all this talk about revolution, you know, civil war, all this type of shit, and I mean, if you think. If you think about, you know, how would you, how would you destroy the United States of America? I mean, I don't think that you destroy it by, by kinetic war. I don't think you nuke it. I don't think you send in troops. I don't think you, you know, do a naval battle, you divide them. Because I mean, there are more guns in this country. And I'm a gun order and I'm a fucking pro. 2 a guy. Don't ever try to take my damn guns. But yeah, you know, but okay. I mean, there are so many here that if, if, if there was an adversary that was successful in dividing us, so much so that it actually ended up in kinetic war, nobody could come in. You can't even send a country to come in here to aid because there are so, I mean there are so many guns. And I spent 14 years in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, all over the Middle East.

They don't have half the damn guns that we have in this country. And that place is, I mean there are places there that you just, I mean you, you're dead if you go outside and maybe you're dead if you don't go outside. And this here, yeah, would be way worse, way worse than that. If, with, when, when the desperation sets in, people start getting hungry, cold, they need warm clothes, they need food, they need water, they need medication. Like when the system breaks down, this will be the most dangerous place in the entire world.

Without agree. And so, you know, that's why I asked the question who's benefiting? And one thing I know that who's benefiting from what's happening in our country right now is the immediate answer to that is our, is our, is our adversaries, our most obvious adversaries. Russians, Chinese and a cadre of other actors that I think sometimes pretend that they're our allies but would, would just as well see us burn. And then who else is benefiting? The only people that are, are doing better and have consistently amassed wealth to a degree that has never been seen before in human history are the oligarch class of the, the, the Elon Musks and the Peter Thiel's and you know, and a whole host of other people. And I'm not just, just picking them out, you know, and Jeff Bezos and you know, and, and, and so there's a very, very, very finite, infinitesimal in terms of numbers, people that are, that are benefiting to a degree that we've never witnessed before, except one other time, which was in the turn of the Century, in like the 1900s, early 1900s, late 1800s, and with, you know, the, the, the Gilded Age and, and, you know, J.T. rockefeller and, and the Standard Oil and in that period of time.

And I think to myself, well, what's the solution right now? What do I. What, you know. Well, I think first, first thing is, is the realization that, you know, there's no, there's no savior coming. There's no. Christ character of some political bent that is going to come and, you know, fix everything and gonna allow people to begin to talk to each other across the fence and, you know, across the dinner table in any, you know, near future we have. But if the, if the problem can't be solved politically, then how's it going to be solved? Because it ain't getting any better. And if you have. If these people that I, that I watch on your shows and, you know, I'm a arnchair expert like everybody else on AI, but if you just listen to the people that are actually building these things, you know, what is it? They think that there's a 20 to 30% chance that super intelligence could cause a mass extinction event. And they think that we're going to reach AGI in the next three years. And that AGI basically means that we're going to have anywhere from 70 to 90% unemployment.

And you know, and so at a time in which we're as a human race making an evolutionary step that is never. That supersedes every other evolutionary step that's ever occurred before, what is the most important thing that we could have? Leadership. And what do we have? We have utter and complete chaos right now. And at least from my perspective, and I don't, you know, like. So I think, well, what can we do? I listen to you. I listen to you talk to people that. I don't disagree that I don't necessarily obviously in any obvious way agree with some of, by the way, who have been. Been really cruel to me personally. But I listen and try to figure out, is there any way that we can see eye to eye? Because we all need to wake up, man. Because what's the alternative? What's the alternative other than vision that you just talked about?

Well, I think the unfortunate thing, Hunter, is a lot of people are hoping for that to happen, but they've never lived in that, so they don't know really what that's going to be like. And I don't even know what the.

That's going to. There's a lot of tough guys out there, but a lot of Tough guys that, that think that they, you know. You know, they think that they. Because they own some of the guns that you've shot in places where they will never have been. Including myself, like, you know, let me give you an example. And I know that we're not. Like, the one thing I promised myself that I wouldn't do is like, I think people are so sick. Like, who gives a. What Hunter Biden thinks about politics right now? And, And. But I can tell you just from my. I can only talk about it from my personal experience and being witness to it at. In a. In a very intimate way and being a victim of it in some ways and not a victim of it. That's a. That's a pretty lame way to say it. Being trapped by it, caged by it in many ways, not by any choice of my own. The president just put out that tweet, okay. Or what the. Whatever they call it about Robert Reiner, okay. And somebody trying to break down the.

I don't know what the. That was.

They're storming the gates. They know I'm in here. They're going to rip you off air. Yeah. Well, anyway, the President put out that true social thing, and everybody's like, God, it's just in such harmful taste. And beneath the President, you know, he basically. Basically blaming Rob Reiner's murder and his wife Michelle's murder on the fact that he is a Trump derangement syndrome. Everybody says, you know, just like, has he lost his mind? Does he have, you know, dementia and this and that? And, you know, he's. And I think he knows exactly what he's doing. What he's doing is this. What he's always done is he's given people permission, structure. Rob Reiner died violently because he opposed me. And I wish his family well rest in peace. That's what he's saying. And in so doing, I think what he's basically saying is, you know what, like, stand in my way and this is what happens. And so 90% of people, I really believe, 90% of people, even his supporters, 90% of his supporter goes like, oh, why did you say that? That's so cruel. 10%. What they hear is he got what he deserved. And I see him do that over and over again, and it really worries me.

And by the way, I don't Saying that there are people on the, on the left that do the same goddamn thing. Mm. And it is, you know, it's. It. It turns my stomach then. Yeah. Really. Difference is, is the President. President has a responsibility the most important responsibility of a president is not the, you know, other than, you know, the question of, you know, the deployment of force is the tone that he says for the country more than any law, more than anything. It's just the tone that he sets.

I'm with you. I mean, it's, you know, it's just. It's. It does, though. It comes from, you know, it's not just him, you know, I mean, with the. With the Charlie Kirk stuff and with the, you know, other assassination attempt on him and Butler, which actually they shut down the investigation on that for whatever reason, I don't know why you wouldn't want to know who tried to kill you, but whatever. Right. Nothing to see here. But, you know, I mean, when you. When you have, you know, when you have a political party that's continuously saying you're a Nazi, you know, a fascist Nazi, fascist Nazi, he's like Hitler, you know what I mean? And then you got assassination attempts all over the fucking country.

And it's just. It's, it's. It's. It's. I know, but like I said, look, I don't want to get into, like, the argument over the. And I really mean it, but, like, I hear you. I hear what you're saying, but part of me also says, you don't want to be called a fascist. Don't act like a fascist. And what I mean by fascism is this is deputizing a largest federal police force in history to go on America's streets masked, without warrants and drag pregnant women out of their cars in the snow and kneel on their backs of sending people to prisons, death camps in El Salvador with no due process. I promise you that I believe this with all my heart, is that you and I don't have any. Any distance between us and what we think about immigrants and immigration. How many immigrants do you serve with? How many what immigrants did you serve with? Quite a few. Quite a few amazing people. Right. How about in your personal life, how many people around here or that are in this community that you're in or when you were growing up, that are from immigrants, by the way.

Some, by the way, that may have bent the rules to be able to get in here, and they shouldn't have, and they should probably leave if they did. But I don't think that we have any disagreement that one of the things that makes this country an incredible country is immigration.

Yeah.

30% of every new business in the United States annually is started by an immigrant. 35% of the Fortune 100 CEOs in the United States of America, top 100 companies in America are immigrants.

I did not know that.

Yeah.

You know, I don't think. I guess I shouldn't. I can't even say. I don't think anybody for myself, you know, with the immigration thing. I think. I think for me, for me, the issue with the immigration stuff is, is how it's prioritized. So I'll give you an example. I know we need immigrants. I mean, we built. I mean, we're building a studio. ICE rolls through town. We could get anybody to fucking work to finish building this out. And this is only. This is about three months old, but point being, I mean, we have to have them. You know, they. We have to have them. They are the. I mean, they just. They are the worker base now.

It just is also the engine to our economy.

But what I will say is it comes to the prioritization, the stuff that I'm talking about. I mean, I think what. For me, specifically, I got no problem with immigration. And I think what's going on right now is also a disaster. I think, you know, I think that before we, before we go in and, and deport every single person that's come here, I. I think we need to fix the actual. The system. This system on how you get in. It's up. People can't get in.

Good.

People can't get in. You know what I mean? But what, What's. What's happened? From my, from my perspective, what I see is, you know, you look, Hunter, we got all these guys coming home and women, you know, from, From Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, 20 plus years of war, right? Most of these people can't even get help in the va. Can't even fucking get that. You know what I mean? Everybody knows there's a veteran suicide epidemic. It's 22 a day. It's been going on for more than a decade. You know, we have a major suicide epidemic going on with veterans. We have a major addiction problem going on with veterans. Ptsd, traumatic brain injury, I mean, you name it. Our people that spent 20 plus years protecting this country can't get the help they need. But if you flip on the news, all you see is free hotels for immigrants in New York. But, Sean, free health care, man, like, we, we. That's real pain, fighting for this country.

You know what I mean? If that's, if, if, if that's the dichotomy that you're presented with. Okay, but again, I'll say this. You know what? That's your algorithm, man. Okay. Because here's the deal. Is that no one that I know of, okay, That would say that they're a Democrat. I don't even know if I'm a Democrat anymore. I don't know if I'm part of any political. Because it's just like pox on all your houses, in my opinion. But not that you shouldn't engage in the political process is like, I'm just talking about the parties. I think it's like imperative that we don't give up on politics as a solution. We got to. Because what's the alternative? I mean, truly, if, if the politics and process aren't a solution to our problems, that the only solution to is who, who, who wins in a zero sum game? Who wins guns and that violence that you talked about. But if you think that. And again, I don't want to make all this about political, about, you know, I know that there, that, that, that the people that you've brought through here really, really care about the issues that you just talked about.

I care about them. I know my dad did. I know, I know 100% he did about veterans, about what's happening at the VA, about the addiction problem, about the suicide rate among veterans. I'm absolutely certain that he did. And so that's, you know, that's why he did the PACT Act. That's why he did a whole host of other things as it relates to veterans. But I'm not going to like, see, I don't want to get into my dad's policy prescriptions because then everybody just like turns off.

Yeah.

But I can say this is, this is that nobody right now is in any way making even remotely a credible argument that if we, you know, if we stop giving immigrants free hotel rooms, then we'd be able to prioritize veterans instead. Like, what a bunch of bullshit. Like, of course that's what you prioritize. Yeah, of course that's what you do. And not only that is this is it. Okay, let's agree with this. It's a, the system is fucking broken, Completely broken. So let's get together and do a bipartisan legislation as it relates to it. And let's get the most conservative senator in the United States, one of the most conservative senators in the United States Senate, to come up with a plan that his caucus will accept and that he can sell to the, to the Democrats. And let's, let's, let's create a piece of legislation that a president, sitting president will sign into law that'll at least begin to address Some of these problems, some of the inequities on both sides that are occurring. And what do we do? James Inhofe did that. Republican Party in the United States Senate did that. They got an agreement with the Republicans in Congress and the House side that they would, that they would vote for the legislation.

And then Donald Trump stepped in six months before the election and told them that he was going to primary every single one of them that voted for that. Because we're addicted to the problem and the people. When you say, you turn on the TV and what you see is a sea of disinformation, some of it real, about the, you know, you know, over abundance of, you know, of resources that immigrants are taking out of the United States. And what do I see when I turn on my TV or open up my phone? I see the exact opposite. And so we're both addicted to the problem and nobody's talking about the solution. And there's not somebody in politics right now that I, that is, you know, I think there are some people, but I, I don't think that we should expect somebody to come in and save us.

I don't either. I'll be honest with you. I have given up.

Yeah. Like, I just, I, but here's my problem. My problem is, and I guess this goes to the, the reason why I, Why when you said you're surprised that I. Listen, I, I'm, I'm, I'm surprised that I'm not surprised. I understand where you're coming from on that is this is. Don't you think I want to. Sorry, I said, don't you think I want to figure out solutions to the immigration issue?

I think a lot of people do.

Let me ask you a question. Don't you think Gavin Newsom wants to figure out. Now, I assume that anybody that's running for president, if they could fix the immigration issue, would try to fix the immigration issue because we need immigration. We need a vibrant immigration. But we don't want immigrants that are coming here illegally draining us of resources and being prioritized above people that are actual, literal heroes, that are coming home, that are, that are still recovering from 21, 20 years of endless war or anybody else in our society. Right. But nobody's. Everybody's talking past each other.

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I mean.

You know when you talk about nobody's coming to save us somebody, I mean there is no Christ like figure coming. But, but then you also say we can't totally abandon politics as a way to fix the problem. I think, I think that's what you said.

I. Yeah, I know and it's, it's. It. I mean I, I realized the. That it is a oxymoronical I guess right. So it. That. But I'm, I'm. I'm trying to figure it out and the only thing that I can think of is conversations like this and not that I'm some that in. In any way important but I really, really think that some people that have skin in the game whether by any virtue of. Of what they're doing in terms of their professional life or their political aspirations or that have been thrust into it whether they chose to or not me have an obligation to say I find that there are more that I have more in common. I'm positive that I have more in common with Sean Ryan who's considered by whoever incorrectly as a MAGA influencer than I do than I. Than I don't have in common with them.

Well, I appreciate that. Thank you.

I think that I. I think I just you over. I think there's a chance upon on the edit that you're going to want to take that part out but. No, but I'm being serious. Is it.

I think we all have a lot more in common with each other than we don't. And so I'm 100% with you on that. But you got to have a conversation to find out the answer, and people aren't doing that.

Well.

Hunter, I want to do a life expose on you and starting from birth all the way to now. And obviously there'll be some tough questions, but I think, I think we will hit every array of emotions out there. I think we'll get some laughs, some sadness, some happiness, some anger, and I think it's going to make a great interview. So once again, I just, I just want to say thank you for coming. I've, I've really been looking forward to this.

So.

But, but in other news.

If you.

See my beef with Dan Crenshaw, he's going to sue me, Hunter. I know he's going to sue me.

I'm sorry, buddy, but. So I would.

So you're a Yale educated attorney?

Yeah.

Can you give us a, can you give us a legal analysis breakdown of the Dan Crenshaw lawsuit against Sean Ryan?

Well, technically I've been disbarred. So I have to say I saw that. I have to say that is very technically meaning I've been disbarred. So look, to be serious about it, is it like, like, what are you even talking about? I followed this and, and it's the same. I don't know whether that these people that are. Become so high on their own supply think, and the people that like, are like the, the sucker fishes that attach to them. Like these lawyers think that in any way that sending you a letter, demand letter, was going to do anything but make you say, fucking try me. I mean, what the hell, man? I mean, look, I, there's a, there's a bunch of things that you could do. Like, number one, it seems to me that you, you, you potentially could sue him right now.

Really?

Yes. And that's, for instance, that's what Michael Wolf did with the first lady, is that she continued to threaten him and continue to threaten him like they threatened me. And my response to that was bring it on. Like, you want to, you want to go through a discovery process with me in which I get to depose you, the President, and every person that you are associated with while you were friends with Jeffrey Epstein. Like you want to do that, then I'm, I'm willing, 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 Wolf didn't, but they continued to send Michael Wolfe letters. Whatever you think about Michael Wolf, is that Michael Wolf basically said, is that threatening someone with a lawsuit that is engaged in and 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 America, you know. What I mean? Seriously is that it's called abusive process and potentially tortious interference, meaning that he's interfering, he's attempting to interfere with your business.

So, but if you, if, if you, if you want to engage him, you could potentially, and I'm not positive, but preemptive, you know, preemptively sue him for, with you. And, and, and, and it seems to me that I, I, I saw his response and I don't know, didn't crunch off or 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 gonna, if you're gonna 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 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, you know, my boys at 6, it's like, I'll tell you what, I, 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, number one, you got nothing to worry about.

But it may be an opportunity for you also.

That's good to hear.

It's 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, and it's much more, by the way, and it's much broader than that. Okay. I had a guy, 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. And then he said, yeah, I'm not joking.

No, I know.

So why wouldn't I take. But I don't know.

See, that's the thing that I don't get is. 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. Now, 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, you know, with. With that kind of like oblique or direct threat. Who knows?

Just boys at 6.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, like, I don't have any. 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, are right at 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. 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 too impressed with somebody saying that publicly or privately to the number and not just go like, well, that is really weak sauce, man. And I. Maybe I'm. Maybe I'm. I'm reading way too much into anything, I think.

I think. Are you familiar with Poly Market?

Only from listening.

It's like a predictive.

Yeah, I mean, I. Literally from listening to some of the prediction.

Prediction market.

Yeah.

They. They only give. They actually did a thing on this. They only give Dan a 9% chance that he actually sues me. So I think, I mean, we're both, we're both. 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, by the way, 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, I have a. 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 lush.

Is that true?

It's really bad.

It's really bad. No, he's not allowed.

He's not allowed to travel.

I'm involved in right now. You're sucking me into another one. I can't afford it, man.

No, it's, it's, it's a real thing.

It's a real thing. Okay. Maybe you'll get a letter too. I'll see you.

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, he wrote this thing and said that I was the person responsible for releasing the $8 billion in sanctioned Iranian money that was being held by the South Koreans. And I took a 10% fee for doing so and, and put it in, you know, bank accounts around the world. And that was the money that was used to fund Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7th, resulting in the death of 1400 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. And, and so he says this craziness, okay? And I'm like. I said to one of my lawyers, I was like, just, just please can we like, can someone tell me sue this guy? And anyway, found somebody to do it and contingency. Incredible lawyer Dickhart Putlian. And we went to and he said, I'm going to get him and I'm going to go after him. And this is Bern. He goes on all these shows and he says he has tapes and he has the FBI informant and he has the, the former DEA agent and he's got the, the, the, the Iranian spy who he's going to bring in. He doesn't even show up to the trial. He refuses to come to the trial.

Are you.

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. And. But now I'm, I'm like two years into this. I mean, it's been since.

Are you serious?

Two years into this and we still don't have a full thing. And like, 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 to decide, he goes back on Alex Jones and repeats the entire thing over.

Are 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. I. Look, I've been tied up in. In criminal and civil and in courts. And, you know, I mean, like, I. I got, you know, I don't know, 14, $15 million in debt that I have no idea that I'm going to be able to pay off. I. I have, you know, I mean, millions of dollars of 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 the. You know, not poorest. I 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 in Delaware. And so in order. What I think these people rely on is they are so 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. And, Or. 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 to 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 to. 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 make, you know, be able to make it through the process, the motions process and the motions practice and, you know, and all. And. And three years later, you wake up and you go, what the. Did I do this? You know, and so my suggestion is this, is that I think that you got the response. I 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.

They were treated by him 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. And his response is to send you a letter from his lawyers to tell you he's talking to his boys at 6, and then to get on and saying, you know, that you're a liar and this and that. So we'll just let it go now.

And challenge me to an interview.

Yeah.

The funny thing is, Hunter. Yeah, I invited him on the fucking show in the original thing. 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, you know, six followers that aren't bashing you right now. But I already invited you, so you didn't have to do that.

Yeah, 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 hope it does.

I'm just taking bets. We'll have to look at Poly Market after this.

I know, right? I think they're going to do another one. I'll bet they do another one.

Well, what we're going to really, I want to look at is Polymarket right now of whether or not you're going to get canceled after you air this interview with me.

I'll bet the answer is no.

No. I bet you.

I hope so, but. 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 Nelia Biden. And the anniversary of her death is tomorrow. That happened two days, 53 years ago.

Yeah, that's right.

I'm really sorry, man.

Yeah.

And survived a car accident in 1972 that killed your mother and babysitter. Worked 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 is a form of. 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. So those are Vigilance League Gummy Bears. Made here in the USA up in Michigan. Legal in all 50 states. So you're not gonna sabotage your sobriety.

But.

And then I got just.

These. Are these. What's the. What's the. The principal ingredient. These. It's just sugar.

Okay. Literally, just. Yeah. 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.

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 Warriors Rosary.

I love this. Thank you very much.

You're welcome.

Means the world to me. For real.

You're welcome. And 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. On his wrist.

No kidding?

Yeah. So he says.

Right on, man.

This means a lot to me. I brought you a gift. It's in the. It's in the other room, but I'll show you at the break.

Perfect.

Perfect meaning. But I really, really appreciate. This is really meaningful. Thank you very much.

You're welcome.

Yeah.

And then the last thing before we get into it, I have a Patreon account. It's a subscription account, and it's turned into one hell of a community. And so what do 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. 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, 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. Right. No. Anybody else that's ever experienced. I mean, I was on the, I think the COVID of 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 the New York Post was. Was publishing like, 2.5 articles about me a day.

Wow.

For like, months. Months. Months. Long period of time. And. And again, none of it was good. 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, you know, in 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? And 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. 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 lucky I am. You know, I don't know. I mean, I. I talk about it in my. In my book, and, and. 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, was alcohol, by far and away, in terms of the way in which it impacts every organ in your body. And you know, the only drug that you can die from other than benzos for withdrawing from. And, 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, I lived in, in with that realization at the front of my brain every, every morning that I woke up and still do. 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, I would suggest if you hate me, just you don't know me.

Get to know me, then you can hate me. But regardless. Is that it has been the last six and a half years, despite everything that has gone on, has been the most incredibly difficult but fulfilling a period of my life. Yeah, I, I, I, I feel, I know, I know myself better than I've ever known myself in my, 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. Good 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 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, that's a lot to go through for your first six years of sobriety.

Yeah.

Congratulations.

I appreciate it, man. I'm, I'm really, you know, I have to say I know that I haven't handled it all, you know, I'm, I'm, I, by no stretch of any imagination when remotely perfect to say the least. But I am really proud of at least that.

Good.

I'm proud of my, I'm proud of my recovery.

Good. Should be.

Yeah.

All right, Hunter, you ready?

I'm ready, man.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. You know, Wilmington is a, is about 30 minutes outside of Philadelphia, south of Philly. And Delaware is as everybody knows, a really small state. And when my, my dad was 29 years old, he, he ran against a, a three term incumbent, uh, senator guy named Caleb Boggs, who then became a friend of my dad's after, but that nobody thought that he would win. He was 29, he was too young to be sworn in when he was elected and it was 1972 and he, 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. And, and despite the fact that my dad was a United States senator, you know, Delaware is 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, and it's amazing, I just got a letter from 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. She was an off duty nurse. And she, and she was, she drove by the scene in which we got struck by a tractor trailer that was coming down at Hill on this like four lane road or two lane road. And my mom pulled out into the intersection, I guess, and, and, and we, Bo 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 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. Isn't that amazing?

Wow. Wow.

Yeah, it's amazing. And literally that I only tell the story that it was a really, really violent and horrific event. My brother ended up in the hospital, both of us ended up in the hospital for extended period of time. My biggest issue was I had serious brain trauma and my brother was basically in a cast, a body cast for, you know, interaction for a long time. And, and, but the amazing part was is that the Delaware is a small state. I mean, the state adopted us. You know, they, I mean, really, like, I have more aunts and uncles than I grew up with. I mean, and in that respect, 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, he made a vow in 1972 because it was raped prior to the beginning of Watergate and he had Spiro Agnew and he made a, he, he made a pledge that he would never own a stock or a bond. And he hasn't Other than through whatever retirement account that he has with the United States government.

Wow.

And he's goddamn money. Because I have. I have some legal bills that I could use, some of the stocks. But my point was, is that, you know, despite the fact that my dad was the United States senator my whole life, Delaware is 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, Your dad, Joe's gonna kick your asses. You know what I mean? That, like, that was kind of the way in which we grew up because my dad commuted every day. He decided that my aunt moved in into the house, and my uncle. My uncle built a 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. And so we were raised. And then we got remarried when my. When I was seven. Bo is eight. And. And so I had 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 literally, I think one way or another, except when he was in Iraq for a year, I talked to him, my brother, at least once a day.

Really?

Yeah, we were inseparable. And we used to fight and beat the. Out of each other like a brothers, too. But. Yeah. Yeah, it was the closest thing I had in the world.

What kind of stuff were you into as a kid?

Sports, you know.

Sports?

Yeah.

What kind of sports?

I played football, but, you know, when I've My much younger, 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, you know, when the street lights went on and you had to come in. Yeah. And so we just literally. And whether it was, you know, summer, winter, it didn't matter. We spent our entire time outside on BMXs and skateboards and, you know, in the pond behind the house and, you know, all we did was, you know, shoot BB guns at each other.

Nice.

Yeah. What. I mean.

What'S it like growing up in. In. In politics and the. In the political.

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. and about being the United States Senator, you know, in Congress is that, you know, there are a lot of people that give the. 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 or. I mean, they're identifiable people that go from administration to administration, that go from, you know, you know, working from. For, you know, 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. And so in many respects, a very, very normal life.

You know, I went to, you know, 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, you know, the Catholic high school that my dad went to, and then I went to Georgetown. I worked for the Jesuit Volunteer Corps when I got out of school, 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. The accident is that Beau and I could go with my dad anywhere if we asked. 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 bowing my dad, like, everywhere. And. 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, when, since we were five years old, you'd 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, you know, you sit just, you sit and you sit quietly until you've spoken to. And we love to do that.

Really?

Yeah. I mean, 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 the train with them, and we'd go and we'd go and sit in the cloak room while he would go out and, you know, on the Senate floor. But then we would. 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, you know, St. Albans and, you know, go to all the same restaurants Beau and I like, you know, we're little shadow of a. Of the United States Center. But then we get back on the train and go back to Delaware. And 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. You were, like, really close with your dad?

Oh, he was so proud. He, you know, the thing he loved to do more than anything is take people. He would literally, he. 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. And if the Senate wasn't in session, he'd take them to the, you know, to the Senate floor and open other senators desk. For him, it'd just be some, like, Republican, you know, you know, tourists from. From, you know, Des Moines or, you know, or, you know, Omaha. I mean, literally. And. And I love that with my dad. He just so proud. He knew every story of every, you know, of every. Of every great person that had come before him. And I got to sit, you know, spent a lot of time with people that. Names that nobody would remember, but they were kind of like our babysitters to Beau and I.

And people that would. 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. I mean, I suggest if you want to read something about the way in which my dad served as a United States senator, go read his eulogy for Strom Thurmond.

Okay.

And for whoever listening to this is Strom Thurman, you know, started the Dixiecrat party because he broke from the Democratic Party based upon their position on civil rights and on the Voting Rights Act. And over a very, very long period of time, Strom Thurman very much changed, but he led a career that was incredibly divisive as relation. But my dad was able to work with him 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, is because he was trusted by, you know, Mitch McConnell and the people that had worked with him for decades in the Republican Party. But anyway, that, that was my life. And so the, it was very, very normal in the respect of like, you know, went to Catholic day school and went to a, the Catholic high school my dad went to, 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, 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 that was able to witness some of the things that Beau and I were able to witness.

That's interesting.

Yeah, it's really, really amazing. Yeah.

How 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, from turning three when my mom died. Bo is just before his fourth birthday. We're. Beau and I were a year and a day apart, February 3rd and 4th. And, and my sister was 13 months younger and, and, and she obviously passed in the, in the accident. And I guess my dad and my mom met like a couple years later. And then I think, you know, 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 Bonai and she loved my dad, but she just, she was so scared that she would, that it was so. And I love that about her. Is it. And I don't want to speak for my mom, but she was, but yeah, my mom is, is I. Bo and I asked her. We literally got our dad by the hand and went into the, into the room and we said, will you marry us? It was all right to do it. Yeah.

That's.

Hell, yeah. Wow. That's. I think that's when she finally said yes with the assist from Bo and I. Yeah.

Do you remember doing that?

I I 100 remember.

No kidding.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's cool, man.

Yeah. Yeah. And so when people said call her my, my stepmom or for Joe is that she's my mom, I mean I have my what you know, Bo and I always referred because from the age of his mommy it was mom and, and, and my mom has always been incredibly reverential about my birth mom, my Neilia, 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 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, you know, it's not an easy job. And, and, and I'm sure he thinks he's made mistakes but, but I don't anyway, so yeah, that was kind of what it was like growing up. So I got no excuses, Sean.

Right, Gotcha.

So all my fuck 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.

That was one of the questions is I think you said is the accountability piece of it. Yeah. I'll tell you what I, 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, but I, I, I, I, I think that you know, I, I, I paid a price. Definitely paid a price.

Yeah.

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. And I am, I'm a 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 up still I think less and less and never because of not trying.

What kind of what, what are the discussions like at the Biden dinner table nowadays? I mean do you guys talk about politics? Do you talk about and you believe he Said that? Really? Are 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. Is this is. And I know maybe we'll get to this at some point, but I don't want to. 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, you know. 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 I. 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 in, his shortened gait. You saw his movements become stiffer. You saw a slower speech. And. 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. This is one of these other things where just. I think people just need to use a common sense. Is it. It's not like it's unique. Now, here's the thing. Does that mean that he should have stepped aside? Shouldn't have stepped aside? You know, the debate was like a. It. Like, it. It. It blew up the whole thing. It. Blah, 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? I 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.

Gotcha. I knew he would, I mean, will.

Say that, you know, and, and, yeah, I just. Hunter, I want to be able to speak without offending you, you know, and, and 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. I think there are a lot of people that have spent 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 Blanks out, by the way. Yeah, no.

I think there are a lot of people in government right now, President included, who are too old to be there.

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 a cruelty or a, or having to make things up or to say you personally know. Like, I've seen somebody, guests sits here and say, like, oh, yeah, we. Everybody knew that he had X, Y or Z. And I just, it makes you so angry as a son. But I've never heard you say that before. And, 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. Do you know what I mean? Or taking credit for 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, well, he should have just, he shouldn't have run for a second term when 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. Okay. 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, and I mean, just go down the list. He tries 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 kiboshed 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. He 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 super majorities. 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, he decided that he was going to run again. And then he. 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 of that he was talking about the.

He's 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 100, I think in 20 separate pieces on Joe Biden's age in a like 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. And 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 you. The affordability or whether he had gotten inflation down enough for anybody, but just in terms of the brass tax. I 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. And he had mistakes like every other president has 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 the failure. One of the failures was the way in which they executed the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I 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. Mm. 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 it those lives literally are, you know, I mean I don't think that there's anything that, that, that is more and I don't want to speak for my dad, but I know my dad, you know, it's crushed by that. Crushed by it. Just absolutely crushed. And, and I've been, and I don't, and I don't expect, I don't think 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 he was a patriot, you know, or by the way, and I, I guess I, who could Patriot. What does that even mean? 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, 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, 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.

Better had something to do with it.

That'S not like being shot. And I'm positive it had something to do with it. But I mean like, I don't want it like that. The point being is, 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 is just, must be so overwhelmingly beyond comprehension difficult.

I cannot stand the way the Afghan withdrawal happened.

Yeah.

I don't even want to talk about it because it's, it, it's, it's going to get me into a really dark place.

Yeah.

But I will say that, 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 tough call.

Yeah.

So I will, I will give him that.

Yeah.

But, yeah, but the way that went down is I don't disagree with you.

Sean, and I don't think that. And again, I'm not going to speak for my dad, but I would say this is that. 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 it. I don't think that. 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, it's one thing to question a man's judgment, and that's okay. You'd say, I think he used poor judgment. There's a decision that you make, but the question their intent, question their. Whether or not they came to the job of whatever they're doing out of some, you know, mal intent or because they're just bad people is you never get anywhere. But you can question their judgment, you know, question of judgment, whether they made the right judgment or whether they were convinced by other people or maybe there's, you know, whatever the circumstances. And I don't, I don't know. But I hear your, 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, to, to churn people through the, the 1% that have decided that they are going to be a part of protecting this country by holding the gun and, you know, climbing into helicopters and putting themselves in harm's way.

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Yeah, Man.

Georgetown University. Did your dad ever. Or your mom. I mean, what did they. 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. My dad wasn't like that. I mean, I. I kind of. You know, I. I always wanted to write and paint. I mean, literally, so.

No kidding.

Yeah.

We're always into my time.

I was a kid. Yeah. And. And. And I think the truth of the matter is that I never. I never had the. The courage to do it. I mean, it takes a lot of courage. 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? 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, instead of seeing it as like, oh, they're goofy, I look at them and I go, God, I wish I could do that. Well, one of the things that I. That I knew that I. I love 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 into. Right. No kidding. Yeah.

When did you start that?

Oh, since I was a kid. A little kid. Yeah. I mean, my. I think my. My aunt always used to tell me this story that my. My. My mom, My birth mom said that. 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. I. And I think that I denied myself that. And so I. By the way, you know, so I went to Georgetown, and Georgetown was okay, but I. I had a. Everybody gets a Jesuit. When you move in to your freshman dorm, Jesuit lives on your floor. And a guy named Ted Dziak. And Ted Dziak had started the Jesuit International Volunteer Corps. And it was like a. Similar to the Peace Corps, but it was kind of a branded as a. Under the Jesuit order, but only in the sense it's 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 program in Micronesia and they had a program in Nepal and not a program.

They had volunteer opportunities in those places. And so Ted Dziak and I became close with Father Dziak and, and he, along with nine or I think 10 other students started a summer program which is now in like, I don't know, 13 different countries and is a summer volunteer program and like 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 that was going to go into the Peace Corps. And another guy that I was friends with, Bill Watson, another Jesuit priest, these are young, really brilliant guys, PhDs in philosophy and just amazing, amazing individuals, really dynamic people that lived all over the world. And he suggested that I not go. There's no need to go outside the United States is that 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, in Eastern Washington State. And I ended up, that ended up going to Portland, Oregon and rented emergency services center for, for people that basically families that didn't have enough money to like turn on their utilities, to turn the lights or the gas or main, you know, people, people with small or, or groceries.

And I was the, you know, I sat in the, sat in the basement of a Saint Vincent de Paul church in, you know, off 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. And I did that for a year and, 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. And, and, and 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. And even in 1992, 80 bucks a month was pretty.

Pretty rough.

Pretty rough. But it was amazing. It was amazing experience. And. But then I went to. I. I decided I needed to go 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 program for writing program at Syracuse and two schools. One was University Iowa program and Syracuse's program. And so I got into that writing program and. But then I also got into Georgetown Law school and, And Duke and. And I didn't know how I would be able to raise a. Have a baby. I was 23. I thought I gotta be near family, man. And so we went to D.C. and I went to law school. And then I. And then I. 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, 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 I had my. I had Naomi on the day of my last examination, on December 21, my civil procedure exam. And Professor Abernathy let me out of the exam to go have the baby.

No kidding?

Yeah. And. And I took it after Christmas.

Right on.

But I did well. And. And then I went to Yale and we lived in a basement apartment on Court Street. And I think we're the only. I'm the only person that got to cut the line at Sally's Pizza because Flo was the famous Flo who sat this famous pizza place in New Haven, his best pizza in the world. I 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 looked like I was 16. People used to stop us all the time ago. Now, when you get home, tell your parents that your little sister. Damn. Needs to, you know, do this, that or the other thing.

How old is she now?

She's 31. And she just had my. Not just 10 months ago, 11 months ago, she had Willie. Willie, my grandson.

Congratulations.

Yeah, man.

How is it being a granddad?

It's. It's the best. It's incredible. Yeah. Yeah, it's. And she's the best. I mean, I. She's she's an incredibly accomplished woman. Her husband is a. I love a lot. And, and he's a public defender. He served in, he was an active duty JAG officer for, for about two years when he got out of law school. And it's in the reserves now. And, and he's now a public defender and in la and now he's a fifth year associate in a big law firm. Yeah.

Where do we go? Where do we go from here?

Well, after that I had a decision to make and I had a lot of debt. Debt. And so I had my law school debt and I had my college debt. And so, and at the time, 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. I remember my dad gave me the, for my first semester, gave me the check 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. And that was my dad. My dad had to, in order for us to do that, he now remember distinctly, he bought an old property in Wilmington, in this little part of Wilmington called Greenville. And he this will beat up a house, a beautiful house. But he bought it for like $100,000, 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 what a lot of people that I was working with then is instead of going to public service directly is go work in the banking world. And I was going to go work, I got an offer some Goldman Sachs and a bunch of other. And I couldn't see how I'd live in New York City with a baby. Just didn't. I mean I, 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 bank in Delaware and I was in their 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 wasn't until. And so I went down and I. I served in the Clinton administration the last two years of it, and 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 Daley for two years, and I traveled the world with him. And E Commerce at the time was a new thing. And there's real questions about privacy, a lot of stuff that still hasn't been resolved to this day. But it was a big job, and that my title was a lot bigger than my. 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, 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're a major. A major donor to your dad's campaigns. I mean, would that. Would they ever.

Who. Who.

What. What type of people would try to use you to get to your dad? How would they do?

Well, I mean, that's the thing, is that the. The reality is this, is that you come to the understanding that I don't really think that there's a. That there's an industry or a. Or a profession that a United States senator doesn't have some influence over. And so, you know, the question is, 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. And 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 in. In my dad's 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 anything.

I know. But here's. What I'm saying is, is that everybody else is. You may not be accusing me of that, but my response to it is this, is that unlike anybody else, I'm the most transparent 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. I'm not. But you got it. They got it all. Everything. They got it all. Not only they got it all, but they spent seven years investigating me with every single Alphabet agency in the country and in the world. Everybody. And 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, I think a. An incredibly fair question, particularly in 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 MB and a mba, which is the largest credit card bank in the United States.

And at that time, and like any other bank, they had significant interest before Congress. I worked in the general Counsel's office in mbna. You know, I don't know what to tell you is that there's the 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 J.P. morgan. Would they have any less of a interest in.

It doesn't mean that any of those banks weren't major donators also to your dad.

They all were. But by the way, but by the way, what I'm saying is, is that there is a. Here's another, you know, another major donor to my dad is the trial lawyers. So if I went to work with the trial lawyers and, and by the way, I'm not saying like, whoa is me. Oh my God, my choices are so limited and things like that. I'm saying this is that, you know, 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. You 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 it. I got like, I got nothing to hide, Sean.

I mean, it is all out there for anybody that wants to, you know, look at it now. You can continue to. People can continue to lie about me and make shit up.

Hunter, 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 would, would listen about it without being defensive about it.

Well, I'm, I'm going to tell you the tough questions that I'm going to ask you before we get there. I'll tell you what they are. I'm going to ask you some tough questions about Bursimo. 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. I'm just going to ask you to tell the story about your brother's ex wife and, and you. And I think we'll have a really good discussion about addiction. And they 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, with that question, what I was, 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 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 happen because I'm starting to see like how people are and when you're in a position of influence and how people turn and change as that happens.

And so what I'm asking you is 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 that, at least in my experience, there's There were two obvious ways in which that would happen, but there were the, the one way is. 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 like, you know, this could be really great. Or. And that was an obvious. It's an obvious. No, it's not. 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, 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. And 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 more, in a much more insidious way about people that you believed to be honest, straightforward, interesting.

In which 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 you personally, but about what you. That what your wife can do for them as it relates to you. But you find that out pretty quickly and, and you know, and that's really kind of easy to figure out at some point when, when my dad was a United States Senator. Because I was, I was, you know, highly aware of it my whole life is that he had the capacity to do things like for instance, getting people into the Naval Academy United States Senator, as you know, is the capacity that they have a. They get to choose, what is it, two candidates per year.

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. 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. And I just use that as an example of the ways in which, you know, and one of the rules in, in, in my family not just didn't apply to me, applied to anybody in my family is that if you're, if, if you're working for somebody, if you're getting paid for somebody, don't come into my. Don't come into my dad's office and ask anybody to do anything on. On behalf of those people that you're being paid to work for, regardless of how good the cause is, regardless of how. How righteous you may feel that it is. But that was the rule. And it's.

So those are the two kind of obvious ways that. One less obvious one in which, you know, there's. There's like a level of seduction that, that occurs 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. And then, and 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 in terms of the ways in which you can be manipulated by people, sometimes wittingly, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes, you know, you know, it. But, but I think that there's much more sophisticated ways of doing that.

Could you give me an example?

Yeah. You want to get the burism?

Yeah. Let's get to Barisma.

Okay, so here's the, the, the, you know, I.

Could you start off with just describing what is Maurismo.

Okay.

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 2000, 2001. And, and I started. I started a law firm, my own law firm. And I. 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 enormous amount of opportunity in that at that time because it was the dot com bubble. 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 were, you know, they started dot com, whatever and it was, you know, and there was an enormous need for legal representation and understanding of the kind of regulatory framework that these new E Commerce, you know, entities were going to operate. And so I started a law firm with that in mind. And then, you know, it was the dot com bubble first.

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, and for a program in which they sent their graduate education students into the poorest school in Philadelphia in which they sent basically student teachers into 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. They're the. 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, which been there for 200 years, or University of Denver, that's been there for, you know, I mean, you go down the list. 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. The. The city limits of Detroit. It. So Father that at the president of the university asked me if I could help him do that, and I did.

And I helped him in kind of navigating Congress, the House of Representatives, in terms of figuring out who his representatives were. I think it was Chaka V at the time and where it would go in a. In a. In an earmark. And they got the. I don't know what it was. $50,000, you know, a semester to be able to send students to fill in the gaps in this impoverished school system. And then he referred me to a. The president of Detroit Mercy. And Detroit Mercy was the only as a dental school, but it was the only dentist in the. The entire city of Detroit at the time. So every other dentist had moved out to the suburbs. But within the city limits of Detroit, there literally was not one dentist office. So what they wanted to do is they wanted to take their. The 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 that this is like 2004 at the time. And 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. Yeah, that's solid work.

And then at that time, I went on the board of Amtrak. I became the vice chairman and actually got elected to be the chairman of the board of Amtrak after serving on it for over seven, six years. And. And I had by that time gone onto the board of the U.S. uN 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 center, 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 the. At Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in the master's program, and I taught a course called the Art of Advocacy in and Outside of Government. It 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 use 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. And then my dad went for president, lost, and then Obama picked him to be. 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, they, they said that I needed to give up my. Because it was, you know, I was working for these. But I was assisting them both in the legal and the policy perspective and lobbying to help them get money to do these programs. And, you know, so, you know, it was, you know, I was a lobbyist, and, and so I voluntarily, but with a lot of pressure from them, none from my dad, had to give up that business. And. And so I basically started back in square one, and I started a consulting firm because I also stepped down from the port of Amtrak because they said that that was a conflict of interest, and they were concerned that it was conflict of interest.

So you had to shut pretty much everything down.

Shut everything down.

The fact that your dad just took.

VP and I had to rebuild. And I didn't have any savings. Three girls, all private school at the time and you know, don't have any money. And 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 as it would that, you know, evolve 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, and build the rails and, and I, and I, and I advise them from, you know, projects in anywhere from Baltimore to, you know, Beijing if they were interested, but just an understanding of how the process works. And so that was I, that was what I did. I was consulting on basically infrastructure projects and things like that. And then, and then I began to consult for groups 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 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. As I taught, as I was chairman of the board of the World Food Program, as I was vice chairman of the board of center for National Policy, the Truman National Security Project, 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 board of Amtrak I was the chair of the corporate governance board for six year period of time. And I also took a job as the, as the. Of counsel to at the time I think was probably the most significant law school law firm in the, in the country, which was Boyce Schiller Flexner. And I was of council Boy Shielder Flexner and I focused on corporate governance. Yeah. And so that's when we come to Barisma. And the way that Burisma came to me was through a partner, a guy that I not a partner as much as a what I potential partner who I would.

I had a great relationship. And then anyway, it doesn't matter. He just got a pardon from Donald Trump.

What did he get pardoned for?

No, he. He ripped off some. A Native American tribe and some bond deal that he did with some grifter and anyway, I mean a huge disappointment. But anyway, he introduced me to the, 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 they were that, that significant incursion past Crimea into the, into the eastern part of Ukraine. And Burisma was the largest independent, completely independent natural gas driller in Ukraine. And NAP Gas, which is probably one of the most corrupt organizations world, is the state owned natural, natural gas entity in Ukraine. And one of the things that is beyond the potential of rare earth minerals, the most lucrative commodity in Ukraine other than the level of education of their other 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, to Europe. And there was a board member who's a guy named President Kozniewski who is the first democratically elected president of Poland outside like Valencia, after, like Walesa, who wasn't democratically elected but the, in a.

And a champion of democracy and in a, in a post Soviet Europe, Eastern Europe. And he was on the board and he made an argument to me that they were worth representing because I said that I would talk to them if they wanted to talk to me about representation through Boyd Schiller. And there was an enormous amount of subject matter expertise in Boyd Schiller. There are two partners that were very steeped and that had worked both at the CIA and the State Department and in, in the last administration that were very steeped in Ukraine and issues as relates to Ukraine. And that's what lawyers do. And so I said you should talk to them. And they did. And they came in through me as the referring partner of council member. And talking to them, I became convinced by President Kluvneski that I should join the board. And he said, look, the CEO of the company is no angel, but he's not one of the bad guys. He's a guy that's under threat from the real bad guys, Dimitri Firtaches of the world, who were controlling NAFTA Gas and was wanted up until I think like three days ago, extradited by the United States for I don't know, 47 different RICO charges and bribery and is connected directly to Putin who had been basically siphoning all the money of NAFTA gas back into Russia.

Those are the people that he was that the CEO of Barisma were set up against and they were like wolves at the gate and trying to take over Prisma. 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 Kroll report and I'd done a Nordello 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 that. I mean it's all, all complete and utter absolute in which they try to paint me as not having as much experience as, you know, Don Jr.

Who just got a $695 contract from a 695 million dollar contract for a startup up 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 almost beyond defended, 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, yeah, 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 prisma, but because of the political position that, that, that put us all in. They use that as the, as the, 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 like, you know, 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?

I mean, I think that, I mean, look, just a little more context for on Barisma. I mean, would it be fair to say that Burisma could have potentially supplied the vast majority of natural gas to Europe.

Europe? No, no, no, not absolutely not. Brie Smith. Almost all of Breesma'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 do all of Europe, correct?

Well, only if they wanted. If they wanted to drain Ukraine of the of the vital natural gas that they need her economy. But yeah, the, the but no, Burisma did not have the capacity was not large enough to supply all the natural gas needs of of in any way shape close even remotely of of the needs of Germany alone. Okay. The production was not nearly that big. No.

Could it have been though with if we built up the infrastructure were the was if you build up resources there that could have implemented that that kind of infrastructure.

If you build up the infrastructure of NAFTA Gas, the state owned company, potentially, but not even remotely for Briezmann.

No, I think that, I think that if, look, if I was the owner of the, of a company.

Yeah.

That had that kind of, that kind of resource.

Yeah.

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. Yeah. But by the way, not for any specific end game like that. I'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 of not 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 demanded that we 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 the, that part of the reason that he wanted me on the board was for protection. But he thought that if at least that he was associated with with, with that name that it would give him some protection from the, the forces of the Russian force forces writ large that were out to literally bury him.

So I don't have any doubt about that. Was there Some of. All I All I know is this, is that I serve my five years on the board. No one ever asked me to do anything that my dad had any control of. And three of the years in which I was on on the board, three and a half of the years 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 build 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 and my brother had just been diagnosed with cancer and a 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. I did it because it paid well and I knew where the lines were and that's what 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, I now, not that they manipulated you, just. Do you think it would be in.

Their best interest to have in our, in our intelligence? I think it ends up being that it was in a lot of people's best interest that, that were not mine nor my father's.

So it could be.

Yes.

That all of these things are true at the same time.

What being what all of what things?

That intelligence agencies wanted you in there. That, that, it, that the, the, the, the, the, the guy that wanted protection. He wanted you in there for protection and also wheeling and dealing in the future. Yeah, I think that all these things, you know, could, could, yeah. Be true at the same time.

Yeah, yeah, no, I, I think, I think that you're right. And, and you know, I, I refrain from doing this in terms of like the whataboutism is that I didn't go work for the Ukrainian government. I didn't go work for, for instance, the Saudis. I didn't go work 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 US policy as it relates to weapon systems or individuals that were murdered or anything like that. And I got paid a 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. Are those things happening not just in front of our faces, but like. 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.

The energy interest inside of Russia and their partners, whether it's in India, the Saudi Arabia, or what's going 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, and 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 of the board, said, hey, Hunter, thank you. It was nice meeting your dad. Dad. In which he 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. I think he 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.

For me, and I'll tell you exactly what it was, is from a guy named James Gilliard, along with Tony something. Yeah, Tony Bobulinski, who claims to know me so well. You know how many times I met Tony Bobulinski? Maybe four, maybe three times, in which I told him to go 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. With. With prisma. Nothing to do with Burisma. It had to do with a entity that had a. Was starting a US entity of a Chinese energy firm in which they wanted to partner and create an investment vehicle. And James Gillard sends a email, not me, sends an email to six other people, including Tony Bumolinsky, in which I'm cc'd on, in which he provided. Proposes equity splits of which he says 10% for the big Guy. And I don't know whether what James Gillard 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. You have every tax return I've ever had? Everyone. You 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 LA and D.C. and excuse me, in Baltimore, in Delaware, in Pittsburgh, all investigate me. Holy. 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 Tony Bobulinski, who some, you know, you know, wannabe, you know, soldier who tried to convince me that he was a part of the. Did what you did, was one of those guys. Maybe he is. I don't. 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 try to impress upon me that they did. And that's why I told Tony to go fuck himself. They 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 Gilliard. If James Gilliard 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, you know, somehow involved in this, then why wouldn't he be able to say that? Are 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. Russia 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 dons. And I don't mean Trump's. I mean. And that's Putin in which. 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 from 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? What? He had to say. What, 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, Tucker, and he literally stuck his lips around the ass of Don Jr. And Eric, and he got it, and he got a pardon out of it, and so did his partner that ripped off the. 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. I 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 of 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 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 had already paid them back with penalties and interest. I 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 an accountant and I said, you know, I got to figure out my taxes. And they gave me the, 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. And I. And I sent them the check. Four years later, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23. Five years later, three days before the statute of limitations were in, the. 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 decided 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. And I'm like, I. I don't know, Roger. So, you know, again. And they came to a settlement. They never. 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 17 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, 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 it or any way in which I was truly trying to evade my taxes, because I came to them, but they blew up the plea deal, and they not only charged me with that, but then they charged me with a 922G3 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 it, to a substance

or user of a. Of a Schedule 1 substance, ever. How many people that you know smoke pot and own guns regularly?

A lot.

A lot. Right. They're all in violation of 922G3, every single one of them. They charged me with three different charges under that. Again, 35 years in prison, three different charges? No, I, I challenge anybody out there. Find anyone else? And by the way, the Supreme Court's about to overturn the, the constitutionality of 922G3 based on Second Amendment and Bruin and the case Amani. And so it's not, it's not going to even be at, 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. Five years later.

Wow.

Five years later.

That'S how that came about.

Yeah.

A conversation with three people.

Yeah. According to the. There's this incredible investigative reporter in that like dug up all of this stuff. Stuff. Yeah, yeah, incredible. They put it on a, 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 and after three years of that investigation in which they had 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.

And they 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 and watch 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, Are you a user of a controlled substance? Well, 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 922 G3?

No.

No. 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?

Yes, I do.

And do you know people personally that may have had substance abuse problems that own guns at that time and do you believe that the federal government should have the right to put them in jail for 10 years. If on a forum 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. But 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. 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 awful. It was awful. And one of the most difficult things for me in my entire life is how much I that up. I mean, two people in a state of grief, out of their 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, the thing that they loved the most.

And that's all I can say. 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 living again. But you know what? Like, you judge me. Not you, just anybody. You've never known anybody to be able to go through like a grief like that. And it is fucked up. You do fucked up things. 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.

I 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. 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, we can talk about it, but I will tell you this is that many ways part of. It's not my story to tell. And the level of pain that I. In that. That caused my family. And by the way, it still does in terms of. Is something that is really, really, really, really. It's. It's tough. But I can tell you this. It was not. And I almost don't feel like I. Like I owe. I understand what you're saying is, oh, these people, the judge think that they have a judgment about it, an explanation in any way other than this is it. The two people desperate to find a way out and. 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 it's just a gigantic miscalculation about the way in which that would impact the ecosystem of the rest of my family. And I am. All I know is this. Is that.

It is not. It has been harder on everybody else than it has been on me. And. But 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, I take full accountability for that.

Is Bo's death what sent you down the path of addiction?

I think that what it did is it sent me down the path of a dick. That there's 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 Beau's death did do to me was it sent me down a path of nihilism that I'd never experienced before, in which nothing mattered. And when it all fell apart and in the immediate aftermath of Beau's death, there was a sense of real purpose. But then my marriage of 22 years began to falter, and I ended up on my own for the first time in my life, literally in terms of living alone for the first time in my life, because, remember, I. I left. I went to college, the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, got married, had a baby, had two more. And, you know, and. And. And I, in that period of time directly after Beau's death, is that I didn't have the availability of my.

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

It 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, you know, by the way, 97 of which is like, aren't selfies. People taking pictures of me passed out in the bathtub with a crack pipe. You know, I, 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, when I think about those times, not for anybody but myself. I mean, it was, it was, it was truly demoralizing. I mean, I am what 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 just 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, if I don't, I cannot, I cannot get up from this bed, unless somebody hands me a drink in order for my body to function. And. And that's the level to which I. 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, you know, like, finding my places in which people were pulling guns on me, to. To putting. One time I woke up in a, you know, face down in a pool, you know, and I don't remember that, but that's what they told me. You know, I, by anybody's standards, was. I mean, I. I talk about it very descriptive, very descriptive in. 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 for drugs. And the point of this story is not that it's some funny story for you to laugh about. And, you know, Laura Ingram to go, ha, ha, ha, he's a crackhead. And, you know, Donnie Jr. And, you know, these guys are all fucking tough guys that, you know, like, you know, because they go to UFC fights. I tell those stories because, you know what I think I know. I'm positive the people write me and say, thank you. Thanks for sharing that. Because in the program that I come from, is that the one thing that keeps you trapped is your secrets.

These are 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 till your hands and your fingernails get bloody. If 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 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 3am in downtown LA, you know, with a gun to your head, begging somebody to sell you crack. And you made it out of that fucking, 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, that I made and for the fuck ups, but I've been paying the price and I take responsibility for those things. And, and I, 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 to. I don't have any more secrets. Not a one. Not a one.

Wow. I live the same way. I was not expecting to like you this much. Well, I mean, dude, I just.

We got a lot more time. I still can find. I could, I could that up, I promise. I mean, I could.

I, I just, I mean, I'm not around, man. I, 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 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 out there.

Yeah.

And you know, and when you, when I realized is every, every skeleton in that closet that you release out into the world, it's like freeing part of your soul, man.

Yeah.

Because what do you come at me? I don't give a. It's all out there.

Yeah.

I got nothing left to lose, buddy.

And by the way, it doesn't mean that you're proud of it. Yeah. What it means is, is that you're free of it.

Right.

You're free of it.

And it also sets an example for others to follow. And just like you said, just like you just said, you know, 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.

And so to come out and to have the courage to say, yeah, I. 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 that I know how much courage that is. 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 do to. To come clean on all of those things. And I mean, just the other day I had to do something where I. Something up and I talk about somebody that I. A group of people that I shouldn't have. I had to come clean. I did it. Also did the same damn thing to Kamala Harris, who I couldn't stand. And I did a public apology. Anyways. Addictions and all of that. All of that. All of that stuff and how bad it gets and. And, yeah, scrounging around for drugs and going to get more and the thrill of finding it and all. I mean, I could get. I could. I could go for days about that stuff, but.

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, Ben. And I really mean it. It. I know that you're surprised by that, but coming from you, that means a lot. Thank you. You're welcome. Yeah.

Let's take a break.

Yeah, man.

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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 and.

Same thing, just a little bit different.

Yeah, well, you started with coke, right?

Yeah, I mean, basically. But the, when I really, I went, I went straight to crack when I, like, decided that I was gonna drop.

Off the face of the earth, go full time.

Yeah, yeah.

Did you do, did you, I'm just curious. Did you, you partake in any drug use as a child?

Yeah, I, I, I, you know, I tried everything, but I had, I didn't. Nothing stuck. Nothing stuck like alcohol, Nothing. Yeah, I mean, I had tried coke. I, you know, I, you know, the one drug that I'm 100 certain that I'm incapable of handling.

Which one potential, really, it's just serious.

I mean, like a great, like a, like a great addict is like, I am absolutely certain of it. Because after 400 failed attempts, curled in a ball like, you know, hugging my, you know, on the tile floor in a bathroom, I, it literally makes it, it is the, it's one of the only drugs I clearly cannot in any way metabolize without it literally turning me into a, A complete and utter incompetent.

I just turn into a total fat ass on that. No, I can't stop eating.

I mean, I literally become so anxiety ridden. It'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 is. It's all good. The next little bit, maybe a little bit of paranoia, the next little bed. Oh, the cop. And then the last little bit is like the CIA is coming to get. It's like, damn, dude. That's like right on the money. 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 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 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 it. There 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. And I. But I tried cocaine when I was in high school and then not throughout college. I dabbled maybe, and. But it wasn't really around. It was almost. My problem was alcohol, and it remained alcohol until I walked into that park, which I describe in the book is, you know, I left a. I was in an outpatient program which I was committed to, and I had relapsed, and I was in the middle of a divorce and separated, and I had spent. I'd done everything to try to get back, and I'd gone to like, 45 days of an inpatient program, and then I did about three months of a sober coach in which I blew into a breathalyzer that took your picture whenever the sober coach would call with the commitment, with that if I failed it, that I would go back into. Into treatment. And. And I did that. And then that wasn't good enough for under.

For whatever reason. And so then I committed to doing an outpatient program which was five days a week and, you know, about five hours a day from like eight to two. And. 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 use 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 people don't fully understand is the kind of the. It's The. The conundrum that some addicts find themselves 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. That can be subpoenaed or if you're in a civil case, I mean, like, so many. Which is a real, 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, the. 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. And 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 it was in downtown D.C. 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 an office or anything, but I, it was between the apartment that I was renting and Shaw and, and, and I saw somebody in the park that I recognized from literally years and years ago. But she was kind of a famous person and it was Bicycles. Everybody called her Bicycles. And, and I said to her, can you give me crack? And she did. You know, and when I say she, she was a kind of a very well known, like homeless, semi homeless kind of drug user in that, like bicycled up and down like a character almost.

Yeah, she. Total character. Everybody knew her and not everybody didn't know her. I knew her, knew of her and you know, five months later she was, you know, got the keys to my apartment and, and we'd become using buddies for an extended period of time. And it, it, it's a, you know, it's, it's every thing that they say that it is. And nobody fully, I think, captures the, the power of crack cocaine nor explains it correctly. It's all so wrapped up in, in a lot of prejudice and, and bias based upon kind of the racial profile that people that, you know, crack addicts and, you know, at least if you're from my generation in 90s in which if, you know, it was introduced to the streets and just tore communities apart. And the thing that truly tore communities apart was not necessarily the diction, it was a response to it. And, and so anyway, long story short is that's, you know, 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.

What, what was it that, what was it that took you to rehab? What was it that made you want to get better?

Like, what was the realization finally in the, at the, at the end? I mean, that was the, that was in 2000, I think what. I get my years a little bit mixed up. But that was two, like, that was a year after post death 2016, where I basically states over 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, my, my three oldest daughters are my, are like they were my whole world. And, and, and they, and I was an enormous, you know, I would like a constant presence in her life because for the vast majority of it I was clean and sober. And, and I was, and I, and 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 for them. All I can say is this, is that I was a very present parent and then all of a sudden I was gone.

All of a sudden I was completely unavailable. And I don't think there's anything more 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, that we have a very, very, very close relationship. But again, literally, I think the worst thing that I could possibly do is speak for anybody else that has suffered because of somebody else's addiction. That's one of the things that I'm 100% certain is I never want to do. But all I can say is that, you know, it is a, it is a constant work in progress because of the fact that I'm bound and determined to at least make up for any of the, of all of that lost time, that neglect, because I don't. And I, and I don't. I know this. I know my daughters love me deeply and have been there for me and are beyond. Melissa. The singular thing that made me think that there was something worth living for and, but, you know, cause a lot of pain, you know.

Who do you think you hurt the most?

Beyond myself, Definitely my daughters. Yeah. And I, and again, the reason being is that they were older, but they had just lost their Uncle Beau 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. And 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. In their lives also. So the one thing that was probably the most. Not intentionally cruel, but the 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 I don't think that there's anything that I ever can do to make up for that. And so those are some of the things. Now, do I believe that they've forgiven me for that? Absolutely. I mean, I know they adore me, and I really mean that, and I know that. But it's not up for me to be able to determine whether I've ever made up for what I. That. That. That level, that deep, deep level of hurt that children more than anybody ends up experiencing for a parent that. That has suffered from addiction.

Do you think they're gonna 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 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 is that they are each, in their own way, extraordinary people that I am immeasurably proud of, and 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 get. My dad calls me. He goes, have you talked to Maisie? You talked 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 he's an even better grandfather than he is even a parent. But, yeah, they're. 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 sometimes get down, like, what the. These people are awful, and they're ruining my life, and they're doing this, and, you know, And I think, 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 and 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 crackpipe dangling out with shirtless.

With a woman standing behind him. And then again the next day, and then again the next day and then again the next day. And, and so, So I always, always, or at least when I, When I start to feel sorry for myself, be like, like, God damn, how lucky am I? How lucky am I that they still pick up the phone, Never stop loving people. I don't deserve that. Nobody deserves that. But I have it. And. It's an incredible thing.

It's a good way to live.

Yeah, it's a. But, God, you know, I still. 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, 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. I at least know that it, that the, That I'm not ashamed of the mistakes that I make today. Do you know what I mean? Because I'm. I, or I am, I'm certain that I'm trying to. 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. 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 Felt lesser than. For whatever reason, I don't know what it, what, you know what I mean? Like, I just, like, you know.

Lesser than who?

Anybody, didn't matter. Felt alone in a crowd. You know, I felt like I, I like, for instance, like with art, like I. I wanted to be an artist, you know. No, I ended up going to Yale Law School and, 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, everybody else, just be the who the you are. You know, I mean, everybody tells me to stop using the F word so much, but you. You know what I mean, too. You know, it's like I. I don't know. Like I don't have to. I don't have to. 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, you know, into recovery decided that they got to stop using her, 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 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 are they going to. What are they going to, you know, what fills that hole? And for so long in my recovery, I didn't. I didn't have anything to fill that hole because I wasn't. I, I. I didn't feel whole. I didn't feel like I was being honest with myself, no matter who I wanted to be or, you know, anything.

What got you there?

The complete and utter, you know, destruction of my ego.

Psychedelics.

No, I think that the. 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, you know, to cash her checks. And, you know, and the Daily Mail, you know, I mean, like, all of that, the worst humiliation. I think that 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, and I would, and I would. And I would put you on this pedestal, okay? Somebody that I respected, somebody that 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. And so that's your, your outward Persona. And I would, and I would compare myself to you, and I would think, I'm never going to live up to that. And, and, 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, just say they released one, you know, nude selfie of, of. How crazy would people 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. And, 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, you know, looking for a way out. And just as long as I was true to myself and try to make amends with the people that I needed to make amends with, as long as I did that, I could get to the next day.

I don't know if I'm explaining it.

No.

In any way that makes sense, but they completely deconstructed me. And that humiliation and dehumanization, which was a full time 247 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. I didn't have any security, my wife was 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 a 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 with, in front of, and sat in front of the house and ran all of the pictures from the laptop up. I mean, they could. 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 it put me in the position of having to make a choice every day. Am 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. But that's for me, you know, 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 on audio. I'd love the hard copy. But what's the thing? What's a singular message of Christ in my opinion? Love. Love 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, I 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 up. And, and, and you know, I certainly feel every day at 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.

I think you find it throughout all of 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. Is the only way. I know is the thing that people are desperate 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 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. And. Unless for me, it'll just go back to me, is that unless you figure out a way to love yourself, then all you're gonna 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 Mao DMT.

Yeah.

And we had, I guess we can't say the exact same experience, but yeah, we had the same experience. And that experience, however you arrive there, is probably different, but I don't think so. When you, when you arrive, you feel the oneness, you feel the connected, the connectivity, you see that everything's connected. I mean, you, you described it, you described it the exact same way that I describe it when I took it. I don't know if you were blindfolded or if you.

Yeah, the five meo. I was. For the ibogaine. I was not.

I took the blindfold off for the five 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 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 in the air. Everything, it 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.

Yeah.

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 judgment and ridicule and all of these things, I mean, in the end, I mean, if you're. If you're spewing that into the ecosystem, into the world, it's going to come back exactly on you. And if you spread goodness throughout the world, then that also is going to come back on you. And that's. 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.

No. Yeah.

You know, it showed me that.

If.

I treat you like. Or put anybody else in front of me and I treat that person like, that's. That's treating myself like. Because that's gotta come back to me.

Yeah.

Because it's all connected.

Yeah.

Does that make sense?

It makes total sense. And. And. It's. It's this. The. That experience for me didn't have the same level, kind of a profound immediate effect as related to my 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. 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.

I've done it a handful of times.

Yeah.

I do it maybe once every couple years to.

Yeah, yeah.

Clean myself out.

My point about it.

No, I don't crave it because I have a very healthy respect for it and a tremendous amount of fear.

Okay. Yeah. And that's what I was about to say is that I think that I came to that experience with ibogame and 5 Meo with the right. Respect for and reverence for the plant medicine time. I tried 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. 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. I know that you talked to Governor Newsom about that, and. And they're making some real inroads. But. 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, of attempts that I made that all led up to me being 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 are going to help me do the hard work.

But anyway, I think people are desperate to be connected and I think that that is both a beautiful thing and one of the things that has exposed people to and. And made them very easy targets, including myself to the algorithms that I, you know, been to the, to the need to be a part of something. Easiest thing to be a part of is. Is. Is hate. You know, it's the easiest thing. It's really easy to get people to, to band together, to, to 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. Give you an example is it. Bowie was about. Not about. He was a year and a couple months old, a few months old and it was a Halloween of 2021. And so he's like this big and he's in a. In one of those like zip up Chewbacca costumes. It was like the cool. He was the. The cutest thing you've ever seen in your life. And we went with my. With Melissa Beau and my, 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 Lee, my father in law, we went to this little place in Cornell which is like in the mountains behind Malibu. And I mean, you know, it's rural. I mean it's as rural as out here, that part of California and there's this little place, the outdoor seating. And it was like that, you know, the in between time with COVID and, and I put Bowie on my shoulders and it's one of those beautiful. It's Halloween day and it's like around 4 o'. Clock. It's a magnificently beautiful fall 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, which is rage in her Eyes. And the guy who, about my size is like, gets like this far from me, which means he's this far from, from a one and a half year old. It's like the most cutest little thing you've ever seen in your life. And he's screaming, you criminal, you should to be executed, you criminal pedophile, you. I mean, and is 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, like jump in and we're two feet from the car, put us in the car and we go away. And it was the first actual physical like altercation that I nearly came in and it really shook my father in law and. 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 schoolteacher in Orange County, I think, or I forget whether it's Ventura county or Orange County. 8th 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 had taken billions of dollars and that he was responsible with George Soros for, for being a part of the conspiracy to, to release Covid at the Wuhan lab. And like, and just went through like everything, every conspiracy, everything, The New York Post, everything that Sean Hannity like gave like a little bit of life to, and every one of those things, and it made me realize this.

If you believed that about me, if you really believed 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, wouldn'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's. There is so much money to be made in that, in that hatred, in those lies and 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 is a decent, decent human being that has real empathy and cares about people.

It's like, 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 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. And then. And then created a idea that. 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 is directly involved in contacting the owners of the gun shop to have them go to the state police to doctor. They doctored the form. The actual form. It's not the actual form. I filled out. What do you say when I went in to buy the. Buy the gun? Okay, 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.

When ATF came to get the form after they were, like, supposedly tipped off by, you know, the. They actually. They forged the form, the actual form of which I was charged with the crime for filling out incorrectly. It wasn't the, The. The. The form that the d. That. That the Department of Justice used to prosecute me was not the actual form. The gun shop owners actually forged 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 reporting from the empty wheel and the actual documents. I'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 a 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. My point is, 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 I always. I literally have a mental break. But the idea being is that if you can convince people, even a very small subset, 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 of that is worse, like egregious. But if you can convince even 5, 10 of the population that somebody's. That, that they think somebody could be a pedophile, then you certainly can convince 35% of the population that you just flood the zone of that with, with that they are a, that they're corrupt or that they, that they were part of some bribery scheme, even 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 in, in, out in California right now in a federal penitentiary, you're going to blow the whole thing up.

Up. But that's what they do. And anyway, I guess my whole point, and I'm now talking too much and losing a train of thought is that. People are desperate for connection. And when they find connection in the cause of a common enemy, they feel a part of something. And what we've given each other, not you and me, but this country that we live in right now, all we've given each other is people to think of as enemies. And it makes me really. I don't mean this in a 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 is a feeling that this thing that my family has given 50 years of our life to is I, I'm about to, we're about to, 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, promise you I'm not spend a minute. Because those, 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.

Up. It's a damn shame.

You 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, and I took him out to lunch and we drove by one of those, like, huge American flags. And that used to fill me with an enormous sense of pride and driving by it. And he goes, he goes, jesus Christ. And I don't know of anybody that's more patriotic than this person. And he's like, makes me cry. Makes me cry. And I'm thinking, who did I fucking let take that away from me? I got mad at myself. You know, I get so angry. And I find that the thing 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, is a, is a pompous, arrogant fuck. But 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 bucks. From my own personal experience, and my point is it like, when, when did I allow. Anybody to steal that pride from me?

What, what is with Jake Tapper?

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. Not the first, but it must have been. It was shortly after my brother's death and he had done something that I thought was totally up, and I told him I would, if it weren't in front of a lot of people, I would knock him the out. And this is how much of a pussy is. He called my dad and demanded an apology. What? He's a grown 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 going to tell this story because it, that it's, it's, it's too convoluted, but just that that's who Jake Tapper is. I mean, you know, he talks big, hides behind a pen and a desk, and, and I don't think that he contributes in any way to the, to the discourse or provides any real journalism whatsoever. And so I'm allowed to, to have my own personal feelings.

But my whole point of it is, is that like, who cares, though?

Is he the One that kind of like. Did he write a book about your.

Oh, yeah, Cognitive Decline and released it.

Like right at the very end of the event?

Yes, right at the end. Like within two weeks of the.

Way to jump on the bandwagon, bud.

Yeah.

You're about. And by the way, three years and six months too late.

Yeah. No sources? No. No on the record sources? No. None. Wow. Nobody on the record will go on the record, but, you know, he was certain and he was absolutely this and that. The other thing, it's just so full of.

Anyway, he really came around to the narrative early on that one.

Oh, yeah, yeah, exactly. But my point is this is so a world of incredibly disingenuous and. 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. Like, what don't you get is this. He said, 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? From probably the majority of your audience are thinking that you exactly that about me right now.

Guarantee you there.

Yeah, guarantee you. But I. I don't know. I don't know how we. How we fix it. I don't know.

Well, let me second here. I'll tell you how we fixed it.

I thought you were going to get that gun in the corner, so what the.

That would be a method. Number two.

I literally thought that you were going over to pull that Glock off the. Jesus Christ. He's getting real. Here, I got something for you, buddy. What is today?

The 16th.

16Th. Great. Oh, man. Oh, dude, I. This is a. It's a drawing I did.

That's a drawing?

Yeah. So it's. Anyway, it's my. It's my version of an eagle. You can. You gotta get. You gotta put it in a. In a. An Amazon frame and put it in the bathroom somewhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's not going in an Amazon. Are you kidding me? Anyway, dude, thank you. Well, this is awesome.

Thanks, man.

I always wanted some Hunter Biden art there.

You got it.

Thank you.

Yeah.

That is awesome.

Of course, the next one, according to the New York Post, is. Is at least a half a million dollars. I'll be expecting that. You can, you can pay me in. In Trump cryptocurrency.

I don't have any of that. But.

Okay.

But yeah, here you go. Jesus calling.

Thank you, man. I appreciate it. I appreciate it.

The only thing that fixes this.

Yep. Yeah. Thank you.

You're welcome. Thank you. This is awesome.

Awesome. Cool.

Thank you.

Glad you like it, man.

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 partner 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. And I just think that, 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 because you're going to get a lot out of this. Who's pulling the strings? Who's pulling them?

My explanation as it relates to the Don Jr. S involvement with my sister's diary is that I've been, I believe, with the. They. The person that stole it initially brought it to a fundraiser at Mar A Lago and. Got it to like Don Jr. Who I think was the one who eventually connected them with the people at Project Veritas and then they just weaponized it and.

Do you mind if I ask what was the. I mean, I'm just curious. What was the conversation within the family when, when that came out? The, the, the. The.

Like the journal like barbarity of, of these people. They don't really mean it. It's like, Like how do you get, how do you get away with that and not. Pay for it? I mean like again, like, let's move this into the. The laptop. Okay. This is 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. And, and, and just from. Let's just go to the, to the most basic level of, of the. Of how wrong that is of what it. What did a. What it. What did a incredible invasion of anyone's privacy. That is. And 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. And cobbled together whatever they ended up calling a laptop. Okay. And then. And was able to through the, the worst Period in your life. Okay. Which you talk openly about. You talk openly about, you know, you know, your issues with substances that didn't make you proud, who you're being and try to change.

And I took those moments and I, and I took the, the, every photo that was taken of you during that time in the worst period of your life and made a monster out of you in order to. And I know that was never about me. It 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 Bannon 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 the, their private notes, they revealed that she was a. Struggled with alcoholism and you know, every other embarrassing thing about her and Edwin Muskie. Everybody knew who was a decent, hard working, blue collar senator from New Hampshire, that, that by all accounts was the only guy that could beat Nixon at that time. And they, 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, his family.

And they broke him. And he cried on stage and talking about her in a time in which that was, you know, the end of somebody's political career and he had to drop out of the race. And that was what their intent was. With me, it was never about. Because there is no evidence of, of, of corruption in a laptop. None. Tell me what you think the laptop is.

I mean, what, 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 is years ago. That was a major part of the interview. He actually gave me a hard drive of the laptop and said that this had been scrubbed to take all the kitty porn off of it, otherwise I couldn't have this. It would be illegal.

Yeah, exactly.

I never opened it because I was.

Yeah, but that's my point is that's the, that they did.

That's, that's what they said. And then, and then of course, all the pictures of you with hookers and the barisma emails and apparently it was all on there.

Yeah, but, but for instance.

And that you had dropped it off to a laptop repair guy.

Yeah, so. But for instance, just that is it. Remember, the first thing that Rudy Giuliani did, it's called eliminationist rhetoric, is that he went to the steps of the New Castle County Courthouse in Delaware and stood on the steps and demanded a meeting with the. The chief of the New Castle County Police in Delaware and the state police and the attorney general and the US Attorney. 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. It's just all complete and utter bullshit. So Peter Schweitzer, Breitbart, he said they had to scrub it of, you know, of. 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 might, you know, billions of dollars flowing through. Like 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. That 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 believe 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? Where do 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? And 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, if you keep.

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, and like Steve Bannon and Gao, the Chinese billionaire, you know, that ran the Chinese, that, that, 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. That was the whole thing that got me sanctioned by the, by the Russians. They did a, like a two and a half hour press conference on it. And then it just comes around and the right wing podcast, Ecosphere, from Alex Jones back to 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 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.

It's like, what the 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 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 the.

There was no fucking laptop.

There is an actual physical laptop that somebody had, but the guy that had 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. There were people talking about Parnas. Le Parnas literally went to Ukraine to get a laptop from Dimitri Firtash, to get a hard drive, Hunter Biden's hard drive from Dimitri Firtash and Andrei Dirkacz in Ukraine, in Austria, four months before John Paul MacIsaac ever even. Nobody ever existed. 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 McIsaac, who is literally blind, has no there's no videotape of me ever dropping off a laptop. There's no. So what?

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. In the laptop. And 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, who. 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, who 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 that had been stolen from phones that have been taken from the dark web, that had been taken from the hard drive that John 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 in my. In. At the worst moment in my life, at the worst moment of 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, nothing 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, 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, the most followed story in the history of the paper. She's written and sold two best selling books based upon that. And it's all about the pictures. It's like sex, drugs and politics, man. And that's what they did. So then it became about the COVID up of the laptop story. You know why Twitter took down that story? Because non consensual pornography. It's because under what is law today that was pushed by Melania Trump is revenge porn. You're not allowed to take a picture that is stolen from somebody's digital material of them in and naked 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. It. So 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 then I was in rooms in which people took pictures of me and I took pictures of myself. Because otherwise I've sat across from, from, 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 this studio that have had a, 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, of as it relates to illicit drug use that is on a 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.

Like 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 Crimtax and Main 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, in 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 operative, you know, foreign intelligence agencies. Not a single criminal act has been even accused of me. That is based on evidence from the laptop. So the irony is that the thing that they hang around my neck as being 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, that, that, that stated that to an FBI agent in an FD 1023 A. 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 bribery because we have an FD 1023, a private confidential thing, an informant that claims that he was engaged in bribery and has evidence of it. So they blow up my plea deal, okay, because of that. And they pretend like, 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. And so they blow up the plea deal and they bring this guy in, the informant, Smirnoff. They bring him in and they say, okay, tell us about this bribery, but tell us about this FT 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. He was encouraged to do so by others. He was encouraged to do so by people in intelligence, in 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 charged me with the, with the things that they had just come to a plea with me on. Anyway, 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, to the Biden crime family. Tell me, other than me being a evidence of me being a crack addict with the laptop tells you. Because not a single person that is at least comes from a good place, like you say, well, you know, 10% from the big guys. 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 the them and never did a deal with them.

It's funny how those details don't make it in.

And so you know, all of this about, like, for instance, like, you know, 35 former, you know, that they, they harp on all the time. And then it became about free speech. Well, then it became about, about the big cover up of the story. You know, remember that? And they had hearings on it. And they, you know, they, after Elon bought Twitter and turned it into X and they had that, 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, remember, remember when the story was taken down in 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. Is 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 room, do 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 it Bannon's a genius. Because then that became the story and that became the COVID up, and that became the thing that was the great injustice which led into the whole J6 thing and the stop the steal part of it. And 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. If the. If the corruption that the laptop proved. Well, I keep going back to what does 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. Is 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 laptop that actually, it's not even a laptop. It's an amalgamation and con. Of. Of concocted digital material that has been stolen from me over the course of 22 years. And some of it fabricated. And 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 gal 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 because they can do anything. You can say whatever you want at this point. Go listen to the tapes. There's literal tapes.

He was very close to winning outright then and shutting down Trump, that the hard drive from hell stopped his momentum. Then. 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, were Luda's editorial creativity over the picture 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 and got it to you that in the Post, if you look, here's where the Bidens fucked up from the day the Post story came out. And then you started pumping out, we got you this stuff and you started just dumping it out. And 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 addict, taking money from ccp, from Chinese spies.

No response, Nothing.

And the negatives just keep going up.

Because people are sitting there going, I.

Didn'T know that about Joe Biden, but Joe Biden, not one person came out, said, those pictures are not true.

Right?

Nobody came out and said anything you're saying is not true. Even 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 chance.

These are legitimate, a ton of 100% legit. 100%.

I mean, I would believe Mother Jones, but they wrote a hit piece on me that's complete.

Well, by the way, by the way, the tapes exist. And I, I, I will, I will send you the, the link to the, to the, to the Mother Jones article with the physical tapes that have never, no one's ever denied actually exist. Oh, by the way, with Bannon's partner, Miles, who, who by the way, is, you know, in, in prison for the next, you know, 45 years from stealing over one point like $8 billion from, from Chinese dissidents.

Do you know why?

This one that let us fight his, his apartment on fire when the FBI raided it in the Sherry Netherland or on Park Avenue.

Wait, what?

Yeah, they raided his, they, they raided his apartment. He had the penthouse as a Sherry Netherlands or you know, that one right on Park Avenue. And the FBI came in and all of the, all the hard drives went up in flames and, and, and burned the whole 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, you know, fool the American people into the fact that he's not Really a fucking pedophile. That's Steve Bannon, who concocted this whole thing, could 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, talk to Lev Parnas. I mean, Lev Parnas says the entire Russia thing, the entire thing about Ukraine and bribery 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 Lepardis. Leopardis says it's all bullshit. It. We made it all up. And we sat there with John Solomon and, and Ken Vogel of the New York Times and, and, and Rudy and what's his name.

I'm gonna get names wrong and I'm gonna get sued. But the, My, my, my point is it's all there. I'm not making any of this up. Bob Costello. They literally went to Ukraine and took a dossier and filmed it with Oan from a guy named Durkatch, 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 kidding?

No, it's. And by the way, and this is the thing that drives me insane, you can. It's Rudy Giuliani with an Oan film crew with Durkatch, who is literally has been tried in abstention and convicted of treason inside of Ukraine, who has, has fled Russia and has made it clear that he is a Russian agent. He was sanctioned and convicted 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 Dimitri Firtash wanted to sell Hunter Biden's laptop five months before this, you know, what's his name ever existed, the laptop repair shop guy. Wow. And I'm, I, I, I'm. 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 Gal and the. 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. That'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 100%.

Or any of that 100% real. 100% real. And so all of this stuff exists. But you know what? Nobody gives a. About me in the. In the aftermath of what happened with J6. Nobody gives a fuck about a. What they. What they did in terms of what I'm talking about, in terms of, like, 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. 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. You absolutely zero. Nothing. The biggest regret that I have is I allowed them to think that I couldn't be around my dad because of. Because I would rub off, because I would bring, by the way, like, for instance, like this, the. You know, the cocaine in the cubby hole in the. In the West Wing.

We were talking about it before. Like, on what planet am I walking in off of West Exec Avenue with my own Secret service detail stopping by the cubby in the situation for that before you go into the situation room and deciding that I'm going to put. Put a. A baggie of cocaine into the cubby hole before I make it on my way to. To the residence? And what world. And what world does that make even the. Even the most insane drug addict, like, sense of anything? But you know how many people believe that you've had guests on here who come and accuse me of actually that. Of 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 eight to ten 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 allowed people to.

You know, I mean, people around him that I'll never forgive for not pushing back. And 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 allowed those pictures to be taken or took. You're the one that, you know, that allowed your stuff to be stolen or lost. You're the one that embarrassed the family. You know, so best just to stay away that man. And you know, I figured out that, you know, a while back is that that was exactly what they, they. 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 mount a campaign 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 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.

But 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 in 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 Club. And he's charging people an 8 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. Half a million dollars. The second most expensive club in the country.

Are you serious?

And Ponders it was so 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. 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. A private. Don Jr. Has a private equity company. It'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 is invested that has contracts with the Pentagon. Just one you want to talk about. They talk about me doing foreign business. What foreign business are you talking about? I had a partner who was Chinese as part of private equity company and we were going to invest in natural gas in the United States in an industry that I knew of, 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. There'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 building a, they're, they're doing spas and golf courses and residential properties in Qatar. They're building on government property that they bought through Jared Kushner's private equity fund. A government owned island in Albania, I think it is. And they're doing one of the last public spaces in Serbia, a deal directly with the government. And that's just the tip of the 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 in 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 Dimitri 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 Naptagas and the Saudis and Don, as it relates to the pipeline, as 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 Service. I served on, like, I don't know, 19 different boards. I was the chairman of the board of the largest humanitarian, the.

The largest support group for the largest humanitarian organization in the world. I had traveled the world. I had been to every. 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. The Yale fucking educated lawyer. What experience does Don Jr have in anything other than being handed a check in an office by his dad? Name one. Jared Kushner had to biggest real estate failure in the history of real estate in New York. And when he bought the 666 building on Fifth Avenue, it had to be bailed out by the Qataris when Trump was president. And we're wondering, like, whether Hunter Biden. I 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 assessment of how much money that they've made in the first 10 months is like, what, three, $3.4 billion that they can identify in 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. Give myself 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 taking care of vets instead of taking care of illegal immigrants. Of all of the shit that you want me to give them the latitude to believe that that's why they voted for Donald Trump. Trump. Shouldn't this make you really pissed off, Hunter?

I've been pissed off for a long 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 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.

And says that he, his chief of staff said that he acts like an alcoholic and that of course he's in the Epstein files and that Pam Bondi completely screwed this thing up and totally screwed them all. That'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, the, the, the, the, the reverence that he's due for, for, for, for. 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 tweet or whatever you call it on Truth Social. I don't, I know, Don't. Yeah, whatever, whatever that. We'll throw it up on screen so everybody who can read it.

I think.

The response that I saw from that was horrendous. And, and I wanted to bring this up a little earlier, but, you know, when you're talking, because you see, you seemed surprised at what people believe. And, 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 or not 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 it. As fact now that are all complete. It makes it damn near impossible to find what's. If there is any real truth anymore. Yeah, but what, here's what, you know, what we see is we see. We just see corruption that's never corrected and there are never any consequences. We see Eric Swalwell, Chinese spies still sitting in there. We see, you know, we, we saw all the corruption with Trump, and whether you're, 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 won 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. Barissima stuff. Nothing happened. The stuff, you know, when your dad was president, and I can't think of any examples off the top of my head.

I know there's a thousand people who are going to get.

I got to stop you.

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. The Epstein files. We've been talking about this shit for I don't know how many fucking years now. 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 fucking presidency, we got the House, and we got the fucking Senate, and we still have zero Epstein files. You know, and we. And 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. Yeah, but he did 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 that's the buck. Pass the buck.

This guy's guilty. This guy's guilty. I never, never. I mean, we just never see any accountability. And so then. 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 it.

You see what I'm getting at? You see people. You see a population of people that are getting beat to shit with the.

Most offensive thing that you've ever said to me.

With. With.

With. Oh, God. Oh, my God. With.

With.

All right, I get it. I get it. I get what you're saying. Is it. Is it the perception 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 is how I started off when we talked. Started talking five hours ago. Who's benefiting them? Yeah. I sure as hell. Not that I see that. And, and, but I'll sit here and answer any question. Like, for instance, let me just like, stop you on like one thing. Like Eric Swalwell. That whole thing there is the truth. It's. It's a total story.

He didn't. A Chinese spy.

He 100 did not a Chinese spy 100 completely concocted. Have. Have Eric on. Have Eric on the show. And I promise you, it's absolute 100%. 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 true. Sean. But who's benefiting. Who's benefiting from. From turning us all, like, I mean, like, at each other's throats of concocting this. I'll tell you that to begin with, it's our adversaries. And then on the second, it's the people that really control these things. And it's oligarch, 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. About any of this? Do you think that in any way?

No.

I mean, let me point this out. I mean, there's a whistleblower you want.

To just watched every single tech billionaire, oligarch, whatever you want to call it, literally switched from the Biden administration right into the Trump administration. They're all there. They're all bitching about Trump before.

But here's the thing. They hated my dad. What do we do? We brought in the whistleblower. We tried to. We, not we. I don't have anything to do with the part of it. And I agree with you. Nobody's held them accountable. If you really wanted to be able to hold the social media companies accountable, make them liable like everybody else for killing little girls because driving them to suicide, I mean, they literally testified before Congress in a whistleblower and showed how they manipulated the algorithm to send our children into depression and suicidal states. And 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 in 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 problem that we have in this country is money. Is money in our politics and money in our media and, and, 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 pitchfork soon, man.

Maybe 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 at some point. I think what I was saying before is that there is this, 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 case against Donald Trump, as it related in, in New York was. I think it was a case. I think he's a crook. I think that he, I think that he stole documents. I think that was a real case. I think he tried to overthrow our government. I think that he tried for a coup. I think that was a real case. But the case in New York was if you're going to charge him, you should have charged about 14 other real estate magnets in New York for the same that he's doing.

But what we do is, is that we allow ourselves to be driven by our algorithms to believe things that just are not even remotely true and which then we all give up. Like you just said, nobody's held accountable. You know why, why the Biden Justice Department did not. This is, 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?

I don't know.

The same reason that Joe Biden didn't demand that they drop the prosecution of me, 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, it. He didn't direct the Department of Justice to do one thing or another. Why didn't Merrick Garland do it? 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, a attorney general and several other people that are in his cabinet, 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, and 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, do 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 loses the. The children. Not like it's a. It's 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. 14 year olds, kids, 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 know at this point, and I really mean it. It's like, I. I will tell you is that the only thing that is. 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 can go. He would go into the back of these, you know, Miss Teen USA pageants and, you know, walk up to the girls naked. They're 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.

Wow.

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, fault 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 they, 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 may get hurt. Do you, have you ever known the President to act out of anything but his own self interest 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, because, 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. And 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 in, in a, you know, a corrupt, senile, you know, criminal.

Well, I mean, I talked about this with Megan Kelly, too. She talks about her account on. I don't know if you remember that whole debacle back.

Yeah.

Handful of years ago, but pretty much says the exact same thing.

Yeah, man. And so I don't, you know, it's 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.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

I find you to be a very genuine person. And. And I believe you. The thing that makes you look very guilty is the pardon. The pardon from. Was it 202014 to.

Yeah.

What? 20.

2024. 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. That's what I was charged with. It's now 2025. Those were 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, so there's like, 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 is, was back to 2014, I believe. And so 2024, it goes back 10 years. And that's the blanket pardon is for those crimes. And when you give someone pardon, that's the pardon that you give them. And the reason to give me the pardon is this, in which I have make no apologies for anymore. Is this. Do you think that under Donald Trump, Department of Justice, that I would have gotten a fair shake as it 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 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. And 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 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 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 a, 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, 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 non violent 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 penalty's interest to $2.8 million that I would end up serving anytime. But do you think that I wouldn't have served time? That it wouldn't have been an enormous amount of pressure to do that?

Tell you what I think.

And that they wouldn't have been able to violate me on a parole but they decided that they wanted to take a P test and tell me that I was, you know, a junkie. Would anybody ever believe me?

I think that no they wouldn't believe you. No, I don't think you would get a received a fair trial. And with that being said, I don't think 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, 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 anyway associated with, 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, who got something nobody else could possibly ever get that simply by, by the fact of his, of his birth. No matter how much he 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 make ends meet to make it to the end of the week and that are getting, you know, just got pulled over by some state cop that's giving them a hard time and they come back and they turn on Fox News or they put on the Shawn Ryan show and here's, here's Hunter Biden like he got a pardon.

He got something I didn't. It would piss me the 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 either deciding that 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 know that I 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. And I know. And I'm not blowing 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. And. But. And to know that. That. That's the perception is that I. I got to get out of bed in the morning, just try to do the right thing. That's all I can do. Yeah. But I'm not going to apologize.

I'm not going to apologize for. 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, 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. But what I won't apologize for is for. For things that I did not do for. For conspiracy theories that. That the laptop. I won't apologize for. Burisma may not been, you know, the smartest thing to do in retrospect, in light of the. The. The. The fact that they try 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, and I walk in 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, you know, to Jeremy, like, they're. They're Button 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 an. The incredible advantage of incredibly low expectations because they not only think that I, you know, 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 give them a different impression.

What do you think they think now?

I don't know. I think that they think that I probably talk way too much and that they're thinking, when is he gonna shut up because we want to go home and eat dinner with our families. I think that that's what they're thinking at this point, is that I've just literally tired them out. Out a submission by. By verbal diarrhea. That's what I think they think. No, I. I don't know.

You know what I think they're thinking?

What?

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 really mean this, you know, people that remind me of my brother. Anyway.

What would you say to Bo?

I say to him all the time. I just talk to him all the time, Trying, you know. One thing that I never, ever single thing that I never doubted in my life. Was the love of my brother. Yeah. And he could beat the. Out of me, and I could. You know, I mean, we were brothers, you know, I mean, I don't know.

We.

Then we fought and. And. But never in my life, you know, would ever, ever doubt that, no matter what. Sorry. Is that. That he would jump off a bridge for. Yeah. Sorry. Jesus Christ. 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 to 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, what a gift, you know?

You talk to him often?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, all the time. There's not a day that goes by there's probably not, you know, and I Don't mean in a, you know, in a melodramatic, you know, macabre way. It's just that, you know, I went through a period of time where I, I did everything in my power to drown out his voice in my head. I mean, I literally, you know, I, I, I. In that period of time, I tried to smoke, Smoke them out. Couldn't. I couldn't do it. And, but there's never a moment and I don't. And I, and I really don't mean it in a melodrama, dramatic way. It's never a moment that I'm not having a conversation, you know, and usually, you know, telling me to shut up, Stop talking.

Have you ever got anything back from him?

Oh, yeah, Yeah. I really mean it. I mean, I, I, I, I. And I, I don't think this is like I was I, I 100, you know, and I. And I don't mean it in like some like, you know, 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, things. It's like, you know, I can hear him kind of. Whether it's the echo of it or, you know. And there's never a time that I don't feel. I feel the same thing about my mom. You know, I don't think that there's. That people leave us. I think that they. I think that whatever that energy is, is, is. Is becomes only discernible to us, to the degree with which we are. Try to tie ourselves in with the rest of the. Whatever sentient thing. I mean, everything. And I don't know, I'm. Now I'm getting.

Yeah, people can truly think that I'm talking to ghosts, but no, I, I really mean it. I talk to my brother all the time.

I talk to him, man. Yeah, I don't give a. What people think.

Yeah, no, I don't care. I truly don't. I'm giving you an out to be able to say, well, he wasn't little crazy at that point. But the, but yeah, I, I talk to him all the time. Talk to him all the time. Used to write to him in those moments and just to write it down. And, You know, 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 a brother is the only thing that'll save you is radical honesty with yourself, you know.

And he's right, isn't it?

I said to you guys out there, I said, you know, I just don't, like, I, 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. And the truth is, is that I up a lot of my life, my family, my. I, I created in, you know, you know, Jake Tapper went on some show and, and after 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, who dated his brother's wife and cheated on her, a brother's widow and cheated on his wife and abandoned his children and like, went through this whole list, list of things and is a, is a known crack addict who, you know, who's been a long term addict and you know, went through this whole, you know, list of things and, you know, Yeah, was 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, think all of it basically out of grief and trauma and loss and desperation, selfishness to try to fix that whatever hole was in my heart. But haven't we all, and I really mean this, haven't we all?

Lord knows I have.

And you know, I say to people like Jake, you know, you cat, what's it catch the first stone, you know, like, like, man, like, who the 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 just spend six hours because who the else cares, Sean? I mean, who am I? But it really means the world to me that like, you know, and you let everybody else, but more importantly to me, it was just meant to me be able to sit with you.

Thank you, man. I think that's what it's all about, man. Redemption and owning your greatest story in.

In the history of the world. The redemption story.

You got a hell of a story, man.

Yeah, I still got a long ways to go.

You want to end this with a prayer?

Yeah.

You want to lead it?

Well, the prayer that I always say is Hail Mary because I'm a. I'm a. I'm a Catholic boy, so. Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for sinners now at the hour of our death. Amen.

Amen.

Amen. Yeah. Honor. Thanks, man.

Thank you, man.

Appreciate it.

What a interview, dude. Thank you. No matter where you're watching Sean Ryan show from, if you get anything out of this, please like comment, subscribe, and most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, please leave us. Review on Apple and Spotify podcasts.