FNC’s Carlson: ‘How Has Joe Biden Lived in Extravagance All of These Years on a Government Salary?’

Thursday, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson took another look at the developing story about Hunter Biden, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son, and his questionable business dealings abroad.

They have once again become a story as The New York Post has unveiled emails allegedly tied to the Bidens.

However, Carlson said there were not just unanswered questions about Hunter Biden but also Joe Biden regarding his own livelihood.

Transcript as follows:

CARLSON: There’s an awful lot of noise in the news right now, as you would expect. There’s an election coming three weeks away. Everyone wants to get a blow in before it’s too late. But not everything you hear is untrue and not every story is complex.

At the heart of the growing Biden-Ukraine scandal, for example, is a very straightforward question: did Joe Biden subvert American foreign policy in order to enrich his own family?

In 2015, Joe Biden was the sitting Vice President of the United States. Included in his portfolio were U.S. relations with the nation of Ukraine. So at that moment, Vice President Joe Biden had more influence over the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian economy than any other person on the globe outside of Eastern Europe.

Biden’s younger son, Hunter knew that. He hoped to get rich from his father’s influence.

emails published yesterday by The New York Post documents apparently taken directly from Hunter Biden’s own laptop tell some of that story. Tonight, we’d like to bring you some more detail.

We have another batch of emails, some exclusive to the show. We believe they also came from Hunter Biden’s laptop. We can’t prove that they did. We haven’t examined that computer.

But every detail that we could check, including Hunter Biden’s personal email address at the time, suggests they are authentic.

As we told you last night, if these emails are fake, this is the most complex and sophisticated hoax in history. It almost seems beyond human capacity.

The Biden campaign clearly believes these emails are real, they have not said otherwise. We sent the body of them to Hunter Biden’s attorney and never heard back. So with that in mind, here’s what we have learned.

On November 2, 2015 at 4:30 in the afternoon, a Burisma executive called Vadym Pozharskyi emailed Hunter Biden and his business partner, Devon Archer. The purpose of the email, Pozharskyi explains is to quote, “be on the same page about our final goals, including but not limited to a concrete course of action.”

So what did Burisma want exactly? Well, good PR for starters. The executive wanted, quote, “high ranking U.S. officials” to express their quote, “positive opinion of Burisma.” And then he wanted the administration to act on Burisma’s behalf. Quote, “The scope of work should also include organization of a visit of a number of widely recognized and influential current and/or former U.S. policymakers to Ukraine in November, aiming to conduct meetings with and bring positive signals and message of support to Burisma.”

The goal the executive explained, was to quote, “close down any cases/pursuits against the head of Burisma in Ukraine.” So that couldn’t be clearer what they wanted. Burisma wanted Hunter Biden’s father to get their company out of legal trouble with the Ukrainian government. And that’s exactly what happened.

One month later to the day, on December 2nd, 2015, Hunter Biden received a notice from a Washington PR firm called Blue Star Strategies. Blue Star Strategies apparently have been hired to lobby the administration on Ukraine.

This show has exclusively obtained that email. “Hello all,” it began. “This morning, the White House hosted a conference call regarding the Vice President’s upcoming trip to Ukraine. Attached is a memo from the Blue Star Strategies team with the minutes of the call, which outline the trip’s agenda and addressed several questions regarding U.S. policy toward Ukraine.” End quote.

So here you have a PR firm involved in an official White House Foreign Policy call. How could that happen? Good question. But it worked.

Days later, Joe Biden flew to Ukraine and did exactly what his son wanted. The Vice President gave his speech slamming the very Ukrainian law enforcement official who was tormenting Burisma, the exact guy.

If Ukrainian government doesn’t fire its top prosecutor, a man called Viktor Shokin, Biden explained, the administration withhold a billion dollars in American aid. And Ukraine is a poor country, so they had no choice but to obey.

Biden’s bullying worked. He bragged about it later.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor and they didn’t.

So they said they had — they were walking out the press conference and I said, I’m not going to — we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the President. The President said. I said call him.

I said, I’m telling you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said you’re not getting the billion and I’m going to be leaving here. I think it was what — six hours? Look, I said, I’m leaving in six hours, if the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.

Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Now, Joe Biden gave that speech before the Council on Foreign Relations. So we pretend as if what he said was normal and officially authorized. This is how things are done.

That’s not true at all. This is bizarre.

And the amazing thing about the video you just saw is that no one in that audience of Harvard graduates and other assorted smart people, asked the glaringly obvious question: why was the Vice President of the United States threatening a tiny country like Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor? That doesn’t seem like the Vice President’s role?

Well, now we know why. Viktor Shokin has signed an affidavit affirming that he was in fact investigating Burisma at the moment Joe Biden had him removed. Shokin said that before he was fired, administration officials pressured him into dropping the case against Burisma. He would not do that, so Joe Biden canned him.

That’s how things really work in Washington. Your son has got a lucrative consulting deal with a Ukrainian energy company. You tailor American foreign policy to help make him rich. Our foreign policy.

Even at the State Department, possibly the most cynical agency in government, this seemed shockingly brazen.

During the impeachment proceedings last fall, a State Department official called George Kent, said it was widely known in Washington that the Bidens were up to something sleazy in Ukraine, quote, “I was on a call with somebody on the Vice President’s staff and I raised my concerns that I had heard that Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma.” This George Kent noted, could create a perception of a conflict of interest.

So how did the Vice President’s office respond to this concern? Well, according to George Kent, quote, “The message that I recall hearing back was that the Vice President’s son, Beau, was dying of cancer, and there was no further bandwidth to deal with family related issues at the time.” Family related issues. This was America’s foreign policy being tailored to Joe Biden’s son.

Five years later, Joe Biden still has not been forced to explain why he fired Ukraine’s top prosecutor at precisely the moment his son was being paid to get him to fire Ukraine’s top prosecutor nor has Joe Biden addressed whether or not he personally benefited from the Burisma contract.

But there are tantalizing hints. Last night, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani published what he said was yet another email from Hunter Biden’s laptop. It’s a note to one of his children. It’s sad, and it’s fraught and it’s personal, and we’re not going to quote it at length.

But at the end, there’s this quote, “Don’t worry, unlike your grandfather, I won’t make you give me half your salary.” What does that mean exactly? Well, we don’t know.

There may be more detail on the laptop, but unfortunately, we don’t have access to that. But the question remains: How has Joe Biden lived in extravagance all of these years on a government salary? No one has ever answered that question and the tech monopolies are working hard to make certain no one ever does.

This morning, The New York Post published another story based on the emails. This one describes a business venture Hunter Biden was working on in China. The email reads this way, quote, “At the moment, there’s a provisional agreement that the equity will be distributed as follows, 10 held by Hunter for the big guy.” The big guy. Is the big guy Joe Biden? If so, how much did Joe Biden get? And how much of that came from the Communist Chinese government? Those are real questions.

This man could be elected President in three weeks, but Twitter doesn’t want you to wonder it won’t allow you to ask those questions. Twitter restricted The New York Post story as quote, “unsafe,” like it was a lawn dart or a defective circular saw.

And that was enough for the Biden campaign. It was enormously useful. All day today, they deflected questions about Joe Biden’s subversion of our country’s foreign policy by invoking Twitter’s ban on The New York Post story.

So the tech monopolies censor information to help their candidate, that candidate uses that censorship to dismiss the story. One hand washes the other. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAMAL BROWN, NATIONAL PRESS SECRETARY, JOE BIDEN FOR PRESIDENT: Well, look, I think Twitter’s response to the actual article itself makes clear that these, you know, purported allegations are false and they’re not true. And glad to hear, you know, to see, you know, social media companies like Twitter taking responsibility to limit misinformation.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: You want to know what corruption looks like, that’s a term that we throw around a lot. You just saw what corruption looks like.

My campaign donors control the media. They’re shutting down the public’s access to the information that criticizes me. The fact they’re doing that gives me justification not to address your question about that information. That’s what corruption looks like.

When billionaires shut down legitimate questions about a candidate three weeks before Election Day. That’s corruption.

It’s also almost perfectly circular reasoning and to illustrate that, Twitter and Facebook censored The New York Post story before they had any reason whatsoever to suspect it was wasn’t true. Even now, they’re not really claiming it’s a hoax because it’s not a hoax.

In minutes, they simply shut down this country centuries’ long tradition of a free press and they did it for purely partisan reasons. They didn’t pretend otherwise.

Now, it doesn’t matter who you plan to vote for the first Tuesday in November, you should be terrified.

Democracies cannot exist and never will be able to exist without the free flow of information. That is a prerequisite. And without it, we’re done.

But companies like Facebook, and Google and Twitter do not care because they don’t believe in democracy. They worship power. And they don’t need to be consistent.

Melania Trump’s private phone conversations, the President’s stolen tax returns. They were happy to publish all of that. They didn’t have a problem with hacking.

But if you criticize the Democratic candidate, their candidate, you are banned. That’s the standard they have set. How do we come back from this?

Today you had elected Democrats, members of a party that in just the recent past claimed to revere free speech, cheering on censorship. Here’s the supposedly moderate Senator Chris Coons of Delaware doing just that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. CHRIS COONS, (D-DE): Facebook and Twitter have policies to not spread things that are utterly unreliable, that have been debunked, and where their origin is untrustworthy.

They are practicing their own internal controls, as I wish they had over the past four years. If they had been more selective about what they posted in 2016, don’t take my word for it, listen to the head of the FBI, an active Russian disinformation campaign in 2016 had an influence on that election. They are trying even harder in this election.

I’m glad that they are managing the content on their own websites.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: That man is a liar. Not one word of this story has been debunked. Not one word in those emails has been quote “debunked.” And if it is debunked, we’ll be the first to report it because we’re not liars.

But did you catch the phrase he wanted you to hear? Russian disinformation. That’s what they are claiming these emails are and it’s all over the internet. In fact, free conspiracy laden conjecture crazier than anything the Q people ever thought of. But none of their garbage, their lunatic lies about Russia is ever censored by the tech monopolies. It’s not unsafe, because it helps Joe Biden, therefore you can read it.

Where are the real journalists now? We need them more than ever. They’re gone. They’re cowering. They’re afraid. They don’t want to upset power.

Jake Sherman of POLITICO, who claims to be a news reporter, actually apologized on Twitter for asking the Biden campaign about Hunter Biden’s e- mails.

These people are craven. They have no standards. They have no self-respect. Like their masters in Silicon Valley, they worship power alone. Adam Schiff of California knows that feeling well. When he sees censorship, it excites him. And he calls for more.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA): The online ecosystem and unwitting audiences that the Kremlin so ably exploited, remain vulnerable to unscrupulous homegrown actors who seed and spread falsehoods of their own.

If left unchecked, there could be reversible damage, not only to our nation’s discourse, but to how we as a society discern fact from fiction.

The leading social media platforms have all made significant changes in their policies and capabilities since 2016, but they have not changed the foundational features of their platforms that expose users and even recommend to them often extreme, sensational or emotionally charged content.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: That guy is the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and there he is affirming the censorship of his own campaign donors in Silicon Valley, the most powerful people in the world. If this doesn’t rattle your cage, then nothing will.

Ten years ago, no Member of Congress would have said what Adam Schiff just said in public. Never. It would be considered an obvious threat to our Constitution, to the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. The ACLU would have screamed. Professional journalists associations would have joined them.

But today they are all silent. Some are applauding, and so it accelerates.

Watch this Member of Congress suggest that the government ought to decide what news organizations are allowed to publish, just like they do in China.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do we need a new agency that essentially would be on behalf of the public making the rules, subject to — obviously, with legislative authority, as opposed to have that delegated to the tech giants?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Oh, a new agency with legislative authority to decide what you’re allowed to read. Sound familiar? We’ve even got a name for it actually, ready to go. The Ministry of Truth, and it’s coming.

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor