You may not remember a whole lot about it, but the second and final presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is actually a fascinating piece of history. And it's well worth rewatching. We actually did it today because we had time off.
Now, Trump showed up with a political killshot. He had proof that Joe Biden had been selling access to the US government to hostile foreign regimes. Trump knew that, and we know it from the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop.
But Joe Biden, as you may recall, did not even respond. That's "Russian disinformation," he said. And then he went on the offense. "Show us your tax returns," Biden demanded. "Show us your tax returns." And, of course, Trump refused. Biden, by contrast, already set up a website called Joe Biden.com to showcase his own recent tax returns because he had nothing to hide. Unlike Donald Trump, you can trust Joe Biden. That was the message.
Now, why are we telling you this tonight? Why are we dredging up history? Well, we're doing it because two years later, the roles have reversed in a bewildering and pretty remarkable and kind of hilarious way. So we now have Donald Trump's tax returns. House Democrats grabbed them. Law and precedent and privacy be damned. Privacy? And they release them to the public because Donald Trump is orange and bad and has no protections under the Bill of Rights.
So now that we have Trump's tax returns, what do they show? Well, they show that Donald Trump got a lot poorer once he got into politics. In fact, he may be the only person in Washington you can say that about. Whatever you think of Trump, it turns out he was not in it for the money. Hardly.
As for Joe Biden, well, you can't say that about Joe Biden. Joe Biden has never had a private sector job. For more than 50 years, he has worked at your expense for the US government. Yet somehow he's gotten rich in the process. How did that happen? How did Joe Biden do that? Well, Joe Biden does not want you to know. So now, this is the great part. Joe Biden is the one who is hiding his tax returns. Joe Biden.com no longer links to Joe Biden's tax returns for the years 2016 to 2018. As of tonight, those links have been deactivated. If you go there, you will find yourself taken by force to a Democratic party fundraising website. So in other words, stop asking questions and give us money.
But it does make you wonder what exactly was happening from 2016 to 2018 that Joe Biden might want to hide. Fair question, but no one in the media seems interested in finding the answer. We do know that during that same period, 2016 to 2018, there was a lot of weird accounting going on at Joe Biden's house in Delaware, the same house where yet another cache of classified documents was just found. Yet another.
In 2018, Hunter Biden was looking to rent property in California. Now, in a background check form as part of his rental application, Hunter Biden claimed that, in fact, he owned the Delaware house that Joe Biden, his dad, says that he owned. So they're both claiming to own the same house. Hunter Biden then also listed the address of that house as his primary residence on his driver's license, an official government document. Now, this is the very same home where Joe Biden has spent a third of his presidency in addition to his beach house in Rehoboth without maintaining any visitor logs.
Now this is worth knowing. And we don't know this because The New York Times or ABC News dispatched one of its crack reporters who found it. No. We know it because an anonymous Twitter account called @JJTalking found this background check form on Hunter Biden's laptop. Miranda Devine of the New York Post has also done extensive reporting on it. And the document raises quite a few questions, not all of which we can answer, by the way. But the obvious ones include: Did Hunter Biden actually buy his father's home in Delaware? Was he making rent payments to live there? Does that amount that he was paying refer to another property?
It was a big amount. On the form, Hunter Biden claims he's paying nearly $50,000 a month in housing costs. $50,000 a month. Where'd that money come from? You wouldn't think Hunter Biden would be able to earn that kind of money at the time, this is pre-laptop. But Hunter Biden had already been thrown out of the U.S. Navy for cocaine use. He'd already abandoned a rental car with a crack pipe inside along with his I.D. He had already left his wife for his sister-in-law.
Now, all of this was public information. So how did a disgraced drug addict with no job skills make enough money to make a $50,000 a month payment? Who is paying and how much are they paying him, and why were they paying him? And by the way, what classified documents keep appearing in homes that Hunter Biden lived in? Those seem like fair questions. We have a right to ask them. Joe Biden doesn't feel like answering them. Watch.
PETER DOOCY: Mr. President, are you sure there are no more classified documents?
Are you sure there are no more -- well, he's not sure. He's not sure of anything at this point, including what direction he's walking. But they're not even bothering his staff to answer questions any more on this topic, because every statement they've given so far, including statements carefully crafted by their attorneys, has proven to be completely false.
So, for example, on January 12, which wasn't that long ago, Karine Jean-Pierrre, the oracle, the spokeslady at the White House, assured us that all classified documents in Joe Biden's possession had already been found.
REPORTER: You said that the search isn't completed, but is the president confident that there are no additional documents with classified markings that remain in any other additional locations?
KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Well, I can just refer you to what his team said. The search is complete. He is confident in this process and I will leave it there.
What? She didn't say there were more documents. They're hiding everything, they're lying about everything. In fact, more documents were just found in Joe Biden's home. Clearly, an effort to undermine Joe Biden by his own party and make sure that he doesn't run again. But also an example of breaking the law because having classified documents in your home is, as we have learned, following the Mar a Lago raid in August, a felony and a threat to this nation's security.
But CNN isn't that concerned. On CNN, this weekend, its crack investigators assured us they've already looked into this and everything's fine.
JIM ACOSTA: You know, for many Republicans, the argument seems to be that President Biden is both not mentally fit to hold office, and yet he's supposed to be this, you know, in the minds of some Republicans, this criminal mastermind who is holding on to these documents for some nefarious reason. Does that make any sense?
So notice the framing here. CNN is not concerned about what the President of the United States has done or not done, whether he's broken the law or not, what the contents of these classified documents might be. What are these classified documents, by the way? Why don't we know? Can you generally categorize them for us? Are they nuclear secrets? Do they pertain to China, Ukraine? What is this?
CNN doesn't want to know. What they want to talk about is criticism from Republicans. It's about Republicans. They're saying Joe Biden's a mastermind and he's senile. But, you know, in saying that, at best, Joe Biden is living the life he's lived for quite some time, which is as the source of cash for his ne'er do well son and his ne'er do well brother who've made a fortune from hostile foreign governments. And again, we're not guessing at that. Hunter Biden already admitted it on TV.
TUCKER CARLSON: THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR BIDEN
AMY ROBACH: You didn't have any extensive knowledge about natural gas or Ukraine itself, though?
HUNTER BIDEN: No, but I think that I had as much knowledge as anybody else that was on the board, if not more.
AMY ROBACH: In the list that you gave me of the reasons why you're on that board, you did not list the fact that you were the son of the Vice President.
HUNTER BIDEN: Of course.
AMY ROBACH: What role do you think that played?
HUNTER BIDEN: I think that it is impossible for me to be on any of the boards that I just mentioned without saying that I'm the son of the Vice President of the United States.
That lady is no longer on TV, by the way, for some reason. Maybe the questions were too tough. But in any case, this all of a sudden is looking a lot more complicated and possibly bigger than just a story about classified documents being misplaced at Biden's homes or next to his Corvette. This might be a clue to the vexing question of how Joe Biden, who was a senator for several lifetimes, was able to have all these huge houses in Delaware over the years. His wife didn't work at Goldman Sachs. She sort of taught at a community college, kind of. Dr. Jill. Not actually a doctor, by the way.
So is it possible that Joe Biden's lifestyle was financed by his son and his son's dealings with foreign governments? Apparently, he shared a bank account with his son. Keep in mind that when Hunter Biden left his wife and three children, they were effectively broke. Could it be that the money was going to Joe Biden, whose home Hunter Biden, quote, "owned."
Hmm. We don't know. But these are interesting, interesting questions. At the very least, the media have basically conceded the smaller point that Joe Biden was illegally in possession of classified documents. They're admitting that.
STEPHANIE RUHLE: The Republicans are going to go nuts about this. How should the White House play it?
ROBERT GIBBS: Well, I think they should play it just very straight. I mean, these are documents that were found mistakenly in possession.
NORM EISEN: The reality is that accidents do happen all the time and and the key - so it's not a good reason, but it's a human reason.
MSNBC LEGAL ANALYST: It's a lot easier to accidentally take 12 documents as opposed to explaining how did I get 325 documents. That is more easily explained that, oh, this may have even been accidental.
PETER STRZOK: As sensitive as this information is, almost on a daily basis, somewhere in the US government, classified information is mishandled. There, unfortunately, very, very common. Now, that's entirely different from a scenario where you have somebody obviously, if they're trying to give that to a foreign power.
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The former deputy director of the FBI analyzing a news story. What's interesting, if you take three steps back, is that, say, three months ago, if you ask anybody who follows politics, who are the main contenders for the presidency in 2024? Well, of course they would be Joe Biden, the current president, and Donald Trump, the last president. And those are the same two people who now are under federal investigation for mishandling documents – one of the stupidest charges in our criminal code and one of the easiest to manipulate for political ends.
So who's the winner here? Well, the permanent bureaucracy, who has just decided who can and cannot run for president. Maybe you love Trump, maybe you hate Trump. Maybe you love Biden, maybe you hate Biden. But if you're an American voter, you have a right to decide because it's a democracy. You get to decide who the president is with your votes. Peter Strzok and the creeps at the FBI, the people who never leave D.C., who actually run the government, they don't get to decide because that's not democracy. That's something much darker.
And yet the two main candidates are now subject to independent counsel investigations. So voters are no longer in charge. The people who actually run the government are in charge. That's interesting.
