Glenn Greenwald on Hunter Biden's Laptop, Lack of News Coverage

You don't hear a fucking peep about the revelations that are coming out of this laptop, where it ever came from. Jamie actually had a really good point. I want to bring it up to you to see if this is possible. So I've heard of people being able to hack into like an iCloud account from time to time. And if you had that ability to have the account hacked, you would need to clone it to a computer to then be able to decipher this material and then turn it into somewhere. Because you need to... You can't say you hacked the iCloud account. Is that possible that then they then put it on a MacBook, turn it in and say, oh look what's on this MacBook? But they do have emails and signed receipts from Hunter Biden. Supposedly. Supposedly. But they haven't denied that this is his laptop, which would be the first thing to do. That's this is the key point. So, you know, when we reported the Snowden archive, you know, like when we hit send that first time, like you asked me earlier, you know, there were millions of documents, right? There was we had a high degree of confidence in their authenticity because we had verified a lot of them. You use your intuition, you examine them from a kind of metadata perspective to see if there's indicia of forgery or alteration. But you can never prove the negative that none of the documents has been altered or forged by Snowden or by somebody else. Right. Like you just don't know for sure with 100 percent certainty until you hit publish. And the way that you ultimately find out for sure is if you publish that first report and the people that you're reporting about don't come back and say, what the fuck are you talking about? That's not a real document. We didn't ever do that. That's not our document. That's forged. And it was when the NSA didn't say that that we I mean, I don't think I've ever been so happy in my career in my life because that was proof that the archive was real because of course they would have said it. Same thing. You know, last year in Brazil, we reported this series of exposés where my source had hacked the telephones of the highest and most powerful officials in Brazil and the Bolsonaro government and gave me the text conversations that they were having that revealed a lot of corruption. Same thing. Of course, those people wouldn't verify or confirm to me that they were real before I published. They wanted me to be in doubt. And then once we published and they didn't say, those those aren't my conversations. Those are fabricated. We knew they were real. And we perceive. So the just the fact alone that Biden has never denied either that the conversations are real or that Hunter actually brought his laptop to that Delaware repair store. And, you know, we've submitted questions. I've submitted questions to the Biden campaign and to Hunter Biden asking that question specifically. And they won't answer because, of course, they're fucking real. But the it was the the journalists, the media outlets like CNN that took the lead first in saying that this was Russian disinformation. You know, like the standard way to get rid of information that they don't want the public to believe. They just lied about that. They just made that up. There was never any evidence that Russia had the slightest thing to do with it. You know, and as to your question, the provenance is a little unclear, like that is kind of a bizarre story, right? That like Hunter Biden brought in three laptops, never bothered to pick them up. The store owner out of curiosity looked in them once no one picked them up, saw that there was all this evidence of corruption and gave it to the FBI and Rudy Giuliani. I'm kind of skeptical, skeptical of that story myself. But why isn't the Biden campaign denying that and saying, no, Hunter never has been to that store in his life. That's called complete lions and cast. It's because it's probably true. But it's definitely true that these documents are authentic. It sounds like a crazy thing to do until you factor in smoke and crack. Once you factor, it is a factor. That's a factor. Once you factor in smoke and crack, you're like, hey, you probably leave shit all over the place. Like you're out of your mind. Like and I don't blame him for that. You know, I mean, he's obviously had a drug problem. And when you're smoking crack, you leave laptops at repair shops and you don't pay for them. That's it seems normal. Right. Right. I mean, that's the least of what you do. Right. Like if you're struggling with substance abuse, that does make it a lot more credible. But here's the thing. Like, this is why I don't think I've ever been disgusted with my colleagues in my profession, as I have been the last three weeks because of this story. And I'll tell you why. In general, journalists do not care about where material comes from if it's a authentic and be newsworthy. For example, in 2016, somebody mailed a copy of Donald Trump's tax, a copy of Donald Trump's tax returns to The New York Times, just dropped it in the mail and sent it to their newsroom. They got it. To this day, they have no idea who sent it to them, let alone what the motives of that person were or what they had to do to get them. Did they break in, commit crimes? Did they hack? Was it the Russians? Was it Iran? The New York Times has no idea. But they, of course, they've reported on the content as they should because that's what journalists do. And when asked when the lead reporter who's won two Pulitzer's was asked by NPR, how can you report on a document when you don't even know who gave it to you or what their motives were? He said what I would say and what all journalists should say, which is I don't give a shit about the sources motives. Sometimes you get great documents from sources who have terrible motives. You know, like they want to get vengeance on somebody. They feel, you know, like Deep Throat leaked about the Nixon administration to The Washington Post, not because he was a Snowden, not because he was noble, but because he was resentful that Nixon passed him over to be the director of the FBI. So that's so this idea that journalists are using, oh, my God, this might have come from Russia, therefore we shouldn't report it. There's a complete corruption of the journalistic function. But the reality, Joe, like, why are we even talking about this? Like, everyone knows the reality. I work in journalism. I have, you know, lots of colleagues that I work with. I have tons of friends in every news outlet up the east and up and down the east coast from New York to Washington and then on the west coast. The reason is, is because they're all desperate for Trump to lose. That's the reality. They all want Biden to win. So they don't want to report any information or any stories that might help Biden lose, in part because they want Biden to win, but also because in their social circles, everybody essentially is anti Trump and pro Biden. And they don't want to spend four years being accused of having helped Trump won like they were in 2016 when they reported on those emails that were leaked by the WikiLeaks. And it's just fear. They don't want to be yelled at. They don't want to be scorned in their social circles. And so they're willing to abdicate their journalistic function, which is reporting on one of the most powerful people in the world and Joe Biden, in part because they want to manipulate and tinker with the election using journalism, but in much bigger part because they're scared of being yelled at on Twitter. It's fucking pathetic. And it's going to ruin people's faith in journalism for a long time, even more so than it already is, for good reason. I now defend people who say fake news, as you were saying, even though in 2016 I didn't like it either, because it's just true. It's just true. They will lie. They will print things that they have no idea whether or not they're true at the CIA tells them to or if they think they can get attention from it about for it or a pause from their colleagues on Twitter. And I don't blame you know, if you have faith in mainstream news institutions, you're really irrational. Episodes of the Joe Rogan experience are now free on Spotify. That's right. They're free from September 1st to December 1st. They're going to be available everywhere. But after December 1st, they will only be available on Spotify, but they will be free. That includes the video. The video will also be there. It'll also be free. That's all we're asking. Just go download Spotify. Much love. Bye bye.