Live from Music Row, Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed conservative journalist Mark Hemingway to the newsmaker line to discuss the Biden crime family and the corruption at the FBI and DOJ.
Leahy: On the newsmaker line, the great conservative journalist, Mark Hemingway. Good morning, Mark. Thanks for joining us today.
Hemingway: Glad to be here.
Leahy: So Mark we’ve been seeing all these reports about the Biden crime family. How bad is it?
Hemingway: (Scoffs) If you’re going to ask the generic question, it’s pretty bad. Corruption in the Biden family goes back decades. In the 1990s James Biden, Joe Biden’s brother was running a lobby shop in D.C. and there were famous incidents written about in books involving his brother pushing Joe for votes that he appeared to deliver. For a long time, there have been a lot of questions about all these hangers-on in Joe’s family. First, it was his brother, and now it appears to be his children.
Leahy: So what struck me is the following. Back in 2013 or so, Hunter Biden was getting $83,000 a month from a company in Ukraine called Burisma. And got it for a couple of years. And the attorney general in Ukraine was investigating a Burisma.
Joe Biden’s over there in Ukraine and says, hey, you want your money from us? You got to fire that guy. And they fired the guy and then subsequently it seems to me we have had from Joe Biden a very pro-Ukraine foreign policy.
Is there more to the story about that connection that’s coming out now from the Comer investigation, the oversight committee chair of the House, that might put these pieces together a little further?
Hemingway: The truth is we don’t know for sure yet, but it does seem likely that there’s some connection there. Basically, what’s been going on for the last week or two is that Senator Chuck Grassley and Representative James Comer have come out with a letter basically saying that they received information from a whistleblower and that the FBI’s in possession of a detailed and specific document that contains allocation that Joe Biden was engaged in favor trading as a politician on behalf of his son while he was vice president involving a foreign nation.
Now, the situation you described that was briefly controversial when he was made head of Ukraine policy in the Obama administration seemed to very well describe that particular situation. But until those actual details come out, we just don’t know what to make of those allegations.
But yes, we know that when Joe Biden was vice president that he was meeting with Ukrainian and I think Kazakh business partners of Hunter at Cafe Milano, which is this fancy restaurant in D.C. in private rooms, while he was vice president.
It just looks horrendous. And the idea that we don’t know more about what was going on there is really just appalling when you consider how little evidence the FBI had involving Trump’s Russia collusion allegations, and they investigated that to the hilt long after they knew it wasn’t true.
Leahy: Mark, you’ve been reporting on the federal government issues and the Department of Justice and the FBI and politics for many years. Sitting here in Nashville, Tennessee in our studios on Music Row, I have a feeling that the weaponization of the Department of Justice and the FBI under the Biden administration has gone to another level and is politicizing our executive branch in a way that has never happened in history. Am I overreacting or am I moving in the right direction?
Hemingway: I think you are moving it in the right direction. It is pretty bad when you look at the things the FBI has done and, basically, since Trump, just the stuff that’s come out. First of all, in the Russian investigation where they had major FBI agents heading up huge parts of that investigation were trying to shut it down, and they were overruled at the highest levels.
You had FBI people that were caught lying to judges to get warrants to spy on the president. In the Joe Biden administration, you have these crazy things that have come out where the Justice Department has been investigating parents who are upset at their local school board for no good reason whatsoever, other than it was making Democratic politicians look bad supporting all these policies at the local level.
You have the FBI admitting that they were opening field offices to investigate traditional Catholics. You have the FBI ignoring federal statutes to let people protest and threaten Supreme Court justices at their homes because they don’t like that they overruled Roe v. Wade.
Essentially you had the Justice Department going after that guy for a scuffle on a sidewalk in front of an abortion clinic when there have been a million examples in the opposite direction where you have left-wing protestors harassing and vandalizing churches, and they haven’t done anything.
It just goes on and on. And it also appears that the corruption is just really stark. All of these people that were involved in the Justice Department, that, and in doing these decisions, we now see Peter Stryk, who was one of the major people in the Trump-Russia investigation going out to MSNBC all the time espousing incredibly politicize and liberal views that suggested he was not acting professionally the entire time.
We just found out a year or two ago that Louis Free, the former head of the FBI, was giving money to a trust fund for Joe Biden’s grandkid. An exchange for what appeared to some, I don’t know, some sort of business opportunities in the future. It just looks really terrible, and I really do think it is a situation that should be a five-alarm fire for Republicans in Congress. And American citizens are just concerned about equal treatment under the law.
Leahy: Here’s a big question. Where does this all go? Because it doesn’t look like it’s going to end up very well at all. It looks like the Biden administration, the Department of Justice, and the FBI are getting more and more aggressive in their selective prosecution of the law. Are we headed toward a catastrophe, and it can be averted?
Hemingway: I certainly hope that we’re not headed toward any catastrophe, but believe me, I do worry about some sort of scenario there, whether it’s a constitutional crisis or, some sort of worse situation where we see Americans targeted in mass by law enforcement unfairly.
But I do think that more and more Republicans are aware of the need for really big systemic reform at the Justice Department. I don’t know what exactly that means, but I suspect that should DeSantis or Trump become president soon, that will be a high priority to go in and do some sort of cleaning of the house at the Justice Department at a minimum.
At this point in time, I do wonder if we shouldn’t raise the Hoover Building and the salt of the earth where it stands. But it really has been a problem. And, bear in mind, the building the FBI occupies is named after J Edgar Hoover, who headed the FBI for 40 or 50 years and was known for dramatic abuse. The agency has been corrupt for a very long time. I really do think it’s a situation we need to take very seriously.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “President Biden, Joined by First Lady Dr. Jill Biden and Their Children Ashley Biden and Hunter Biden, Takes the Oath of Office as President of the United States” by The White House.
