The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America, by Miranda Devine, New York: Broadside Books, 2024, 400 pages, hardcover. ..

Dissecting the Biden Crime Family

By William P. Hoar

Shady businesses never produce sunny lives. When one is examining the Biden crime family, you’re talking about the very dark side of the street.

To be sure, it sounds appealing to maintain that crime doesn’t pay. However, corruption certainly does. And, while politics certainly plays a big part in this book, at its heart is how corruption pays. Yes, we have trouble right here in old D.C. — with a capital “B” that stands for the “Big Guy” Joe Biden, the other Bidens, and those who are beholden to them.

The author reminds us that places such as China, Russia, and Ukraine are known to be notoriously corrupt — and that is just where we see how “the Biden family traded cash for Joe’s good graces.” In such places, it is “implicitly understood that you don’t pay bribes to government officials; you pay their family members.” And, as we learn, sometimes 10 percent is to be held by Hunter Biden for the Big Guy. The Big Guy, as used in the book’s title, is the code the business partners used for Joe Biden.

As the evidence continued to mount, writes the author, it was clear that this was “precisely how the Biden family did business.” Yet, “Democrats and their many friends in the media continued to insist that Joe had done ‘nothing wrong.’” Then came the “Laptop from Hell,” as it came to be known.

Lead-up Hitter: Laptop from Hell

It was just four years ago, as we write, about three weeks before the 2020 election, that the New York Post published its first article on the shocking and sordid contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Details about that are included in The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America, by Miranda Devine. She also wrote an earlier book called Laptop from Hell on some of the dealings in Ukraine and China; this book under review, the bigger story in her view, turned out “to be the coverup, and that is what this book is about.” Devine is a New York Post columnist and a Fox News contributor. She also works for the Australian media as a Daily Telegraph columnist and a Sky News contributor.

If the reader did not believe in a “Deep State” before reading this volume, The Big Guy is likely to convince him of its nefarious existence. The story related by Devine does, as she convincingly lays it out, cover how “the FBI, the CIA, the State Department and Department of Justice conspired to protect Joe, his crack addict son Hunter and his scandal-prone brother Jim from the consequences of their reckless greed. The extent and nature of their crimes are coming to light as the United States and the world it leads face grave dangers from the very countries where the Bidens made millions of dollars.”

You probably will want to wash your hands after you finish with these pages.

Oh, yes, despite contentions made even today (albeit by liars), the laptop and its contents are real. And that has been admitted by the government. As Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) has recently pointed out, “The FBI even used the laptop to prosecute Hunter Biden’s gun charge conviction.”

“Pre-bunking” a True, but Embarrassing, Account

That particular conviction is still in the future during the time covered by The Big Guy. There are a lot of moving parts in play, and the topics and periods necessarily jump around a bit.

Making matters a bit more manageable, each chapter (in a quasi-journalistic fashion) has a dateline, with the places and the time period being listed. That is a help. On the negative side, the book does not have an index. On the plus side, there is a “cast of characters,” which definitely is a boost to those who might forget just who is being described. That’s certainly true if referring to, for example, Mykola Zlochevsky or Vadym Pozharskyi, respectively the owner and senior executive of Burisma — the corrupt Ukrainian energy company that has a key part in the story.

There are many substories over the years, as we bounce around the globe and the calendar. Overall, it reminds us that humankind once thought that the world was flat; it was later found to be round. Yet, it turns out to be different in the Biden world: It is crooked. We find that out, among other places, in a chapter called “The Dirty 51,” relating how when upcoming New York Post reporting was going to embarrass the Bidens, dozens of former intelligence officials (41 from the CIA) pretended that the laptop was a Russian disinformation operation. Other CIA operations offered protection from IRS investigators looking at Hunter Biden’s “Sugar Brother” (as Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris is dubbed). And the agency even tried to recruit Hunter’s business partners while Joe was vice president.

In our view, the strongest chapter in The Big Guy is the 10th, titled “FBI Coverup?” Why the question mark is included is a mystery: That is exactly what it was. As strong as the chapter is, it might have been better if it went even more into the procedure called “pre-bunking,” a version of debunking supposedly intended to prevent the effectiveness of what the government or left-wing media or social media consider to be “misinformation.” As it is, we do see a goodly amount about how the FBI and other government personnel were involved in that censorship.

We watch as pre-Musk Twitter (subsequently “X”) gets groomed “for weeks by the FBI and other shadowy operatives to recognize the [then-impending] Post’s story as something malign the minute it appeared. The warnings became more overtly political as the election drew closer.”

Who needs outright government-controlled media if all the feds have to do is tell the media how and when to do its reporting? Facebook also got its marching orders. Here’s a bit more:

During one of its weekly meetings with the FBI in the run up to the federal election, Twitter was told to look out for “hack-and-leak operations” involving Hunter Biden and “likely” in October, according to a sworn declaration by Roth [Twitter’s chief censor Yoel Roth].

That, of course, is just before the 2020 election.

The intricate censorship campaign included an initiative held at the Aspen Institute before the story appeared in the New York Post. (The FBI, as Devine reminds us, had the laptop in its possession for 10 months, so the bureau “knew it contained information that was damaging to Joe.”) The Aspen “exercise” was gamed as a mythical scenario with this bureaucratic mouthful: “Aspen Digital Hack-and-Dump Working Group — September 2020 EXERCISE: The Burisma Leak.” The targeted audience, according to The Big Guy, included social media executives, national security reporters, journalists and executives from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, NBC, the New Yorker, and the Daily Beast [who were effectively “pre-bunked” to ensure they would treat the New York Post’s] Hunter Biden laptop story the following month with suspicion, and easily succumb to the lie that it was a Russian disinformation operation.

Devine is not exaggerating when she notes that it took a “whole constellation of government and private organizations to pre-bunk and then crush the story of alleged Biden corruption on October 14, 2020.” That’s no joke, as Joe likes to say.

Meanwhile, the Biden “campaign boasted after the election that the pre-bunking of the [New York] Post’s story was no accident but the product of meticulous planning.”

How much of that was Joe Biden himself aware of? Probably very little. That’s what lackeys and ideological minions are for.

Ukrainian Prosecutor-general Gets Railroaded

One of the lesser-known characters in The Big Guy is a Ukrainian who was a target of Joe Biden, as some might remember from a rather famous, or infamous, video of a 2018 event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. The name of Chapter 22 of the book under review is direct, quoting the remark that Joe made publicly: “Son of a [B**ch], He Got Fired.” The episode involved is complicated and contested. However, Miranda Devine gives “special thanks” to Viktor Shokin, referring to him as the “honest Ukrainian former prosecutor-general,” citing him for the “hours he spent patiently explaining how Joe Biden railroaded him. In the middle of a war, after multiple assassinations, it took enormous courage not to be silenced.”

His story, probably unfamiliar to most, is a key one in the book — and, yes, he was fired at the behest of the Joe Biden. He was, as described in The Big Guy, investigating Burisma and its owner Mykola Zlochevsky (who paid Hunter Biden $83,000 a month to sit on the company’s board) before Shokin was ousted. Shokin had planned to interview Hunter and Devon Archer (Hunter’s friend and business partner). Archer, as you might recall from the news (and as is reported in the book), testified in July 2023 to the House Oversight Committee, implicating Joe Biden “in his family’s influence-peddling schemes.” Shokin is reportedly living outside Kyiv, still trying to clear his name.

We watch the maneuvering, and it isn’t pretty. Eventually, as we read, it became “official US government policy that Shokin should be removed, and also that Ukraine was to receive” $1 billion in U.S. aid regardless.” Yet, we are told, Joe then “called an audible,” the football term for an on-the-spot decision. And, at some point “before Air Force 2 landed in Kyiv on December 7, 2015, Joe decided to force Shokin’s removal by tying it to the $1 billion aid.”

Hunter’s Unremitting Shield

Anyone feeling sorry for Hunter Biden, for whatever reason, is unlikely to do so after reading this book, especially when one watches him doing his utmost to get out of an earlier child-support obligation for a born-out-of-wedlock child who is now living in Arkansas. “Hunter wanted nothing to do with her [the child’s mother and his former lover — whom he met at what we are told was his favorite strip joint in D.C.] or their blonde, blue-eyed little girl,” Navy, now age six.

A local lawyer found himself “facing off against Hunter’s four high-powered super lawyers” as Hunter tried to get out of his responsibilities. Hunter’s “Sugar Brother” (Kevin Morris) “orchestrated” Hunter’s legal defense, which, as we see throughout the book, sometimes consisted of as many as 20 lawyers. At the end, the monthly support was about a quarter of what the mother and Hunter had originally agreed to. There was also, as Devine somewhat charitably puts it, only a “grudging acknowledgment” from Joe and Jill Biden about their seventh grandchild. Then, the Bidens broke their tradition of having Christmas stockings, bearing the names of their grandchildren and even pets, hanging in the White House. In 2023, when the mother expected that Navy’s name finally would also be on display, “there was no display at all.”

Elsewhere, Devine reminds us about how the Department of Justice slow-walked and sabotaged the criminal probe of Hunter in Delaware. Meanwhile, the Bidens were holding parties for foreign dignitaries in the White House, which also served as a home for Hunter and his then-new wife and their young son. While the investigation was ongoing, we see how much justice and setting a good example truly means to the Bidens and their team. In actuality, they’re more like hypocrites who preach by the yard, but practice by the inch. Attending one of these state dinners, along with Hunter and Joe, is Attorney General Merrick Garland. Devine does acknowledge that Garland was careful not to be photographed anywhere near the First Son, but the optics were appalling, as numerous critics pointed out.

“Hunter and Merrick hanging out at Joe’s place?” Tennessee Republican congressman Andrew Ogles tweeted, “Classic Biden Crime Family.”

The book ends before all the charges against Hunter had been fully addressed (and publication also came after President Biden dropped out of — or, more accurately, was pushed from — his reelection effort). In the meantime (and this is covered by Devine), the delaying did help Hunter. As the author writes:

The successful obstruction of the IRS financial investigation of Hunter meant that the most serious charges from 2014 and 2015 were excluded and nobody would be held legally accountable for the Biden family’s global influence-peddling operation during Joe’s vice-presidency, or for the government-wide cover-up.

Then in September of this year, avoiding what could have been an embarrassing trial, Hunter pleaded guilty to the federal tax case against him; sentencing was set for December.

What about the whistleblowers, also stars of this account, whose careers were endangered? “For their efforts,” writes Devine in The Big Guy’s final chapter, they were “retaliated against by the IRS, abandoned by the DOJ watchdog and sued by Hunter’s well-funded legal attack dogs.”

How about the president’s pardon power? Joe Biden has repeatedly said, and the White House has echoed this promise, that he would not pardon his son. We’ll see. Politics is, after all, the most promising of careers.

Published with permission of thenewamerican.com