CLAY: We have got breaking news for you. During the commercial break, officially announced from the royal family’s Twitter account, the queen died peacefully at Balmoral this afternoon. The king and queen consort will remain at Balmoral this evening and will return to London tomorrow.
So, 96-year-old Queen Elizabeth — this just breaking in the last couple of minutes — died today at Balmoral, and there will certainly be much to follow associated with this story, the legacy of the queen, one of the all-time historic bastions for freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and an unbelievable opponent to Nazi Germany at a time when the rest of Europe was falling under Hitler’s dark cloud.
So, that is a truly historic moment to contextualize her service for England. I believe we now have Miranda Devine with us. And, Miranda, I know that you are Australian. But I would imagine you are quite familiar as well — we’ve got many things to talk about with you — but that news just coming down, what’s your reaction to Queen Elizabeth’s passing and what her legacy is?
DEVINE: Guys, look, I’m really sad about it, and I’m quite shocked that we turn silly since she’s 96 years old, but she really was the last of her kind, you know. The people who safeguarded the institutions, the church, she was… Her life was all about service and duty.
And she behaved so properly, always comported herself in, you know, a graceful and subdued and stoical way. And so, it’s just difficult to think in this time of turmoil and great change around the world, to have this woman who’s been such a stalwart through fifteen prime ministers in England, and not just in Britain but in the whole commonwealth.
In Australia this will be really quite a cataclysmic moment because there’s a strong republican move in Australia and has been for many years and the only thing that’s really stopped Australians from going it alone has been Queen Elizabeth. And there’s not quite as much respect for her son, Prince Charles.
BUCK: Yeah. So, what — Miranda, it’s Buck — what happens now in the royal line of succession and how does that affect obviously the U.K., the commonwealth, and just all over the world the relationship that the royal family will have?
DEVINE: Well, Prince Charles will take over as king. And just not so long ago, back within the last six months, the queen made a big concession, something that Prince Charles had been asking for, begging for, for a long time, and that is that Camilla would be his queen.
And that’s controversial because, of course, Camilla is his second wife, and he was having an affair with her during his marriage with greatly, publicly beloved Princess Diana. And famously Diana gave an interview in which she said there were three of us in the marriage. And, you know, it basically broke her heart.
She married Prince Charles which she was 19, and he was in his thirties, and I guess a lot of people around the commonwealth felt that she’d been badly treated. So, that was a very dark mark against both Prince Charles and Camilla whom he married after Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in 1997.
But Camilla has behaved properly in the intervening years and her popularity has certainly grown with the British public. So, I don’t know if it would be as much of a problem for Great Britain, but for countries like Australia where Princess Diana was really well loved and the queen was just adored, and Prince Charles is not thought of terribly highly, I think it will really precipitate a push for a republic.
And particularly because in Australia a new equivalent of the Democrats, Labor left-leaning government has been sworn in, elected, and they — the first thing that the new prime minister did was appoint a minister for the republic. So, they’re going to try it again, and they tried it 20 years ago; it was unsuccessful because the queen. I think it has more chance this time.
CLAY: Liz Truss obviously is the new prime minister, I believe the last public event of Queen Elizabeth’s long, illustrious life would have been a photo of her shaking the hand of the new prime minister on Tuesday, if I’m not mistaken. All right, Miranda.
We brought you on not because we knew certainly there was gonna be in the breaking news associated with this but because you wrote a phenomenal piece, as you have been doing for a long time, in the New York Post about what the FBI knew regarding Hunter Biden and his behavior and Joe Biden’s relationships with his business partners and laid it out in very compelling detail.
What did you write in the New York Post about Hunter Biden and his relationships, and why was it so significant?
DEVINE: Yes. Look. I think this is — the more we find out about what the FBI knew about the whole Hunter Biden story, not just the laptop which they had since December 2019 but all the voluminous evidence and very compelling testimony that Tony Bobulinski, who was a Biden family partner, business partner, he went into a Chinese deal with them and met with Joe Biden twice.
He came to the FBI voluntarily 11 days before the 2020 election and told them what he knew about Joe Biden’s involvement in this family business. And he had chapter and verse, he had — he handed over the contents of three of his phones, documents, WhatsApp messages, other encrypted messages that he had with Hunter and their other business partners.
He spent five and a half hours being interviewed by two FBI agents. He was ushered into the Washington field office, which is about a mile from headquarters in D.C. on October 23, 2020, and he was ushered in by two very senior FBI agents, special agent in charge in one case, and so there were four people there that knew that he was being interviewed for five and a half hours that day.
There was another agent called Tim Thibault who was then assigned as point man to take care of the Tony Bobulinski and spoke at length to Bobulinski’s lawyer the night after his interview or the night of his interview, told him, assured him that they would follow up, that there would be next steps and they would tell them what they were and also saying that Tony would probably have to come in for a follow-up interview.
But he never heard from any of them again. There was not a word. Not before the election, not after the election, he was never subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury in Delaware that supposedly is looking into Hunter Biden and his business dealings, which obviously involves his father because his father met with his business partners from overseas, even though Joe Biden swore blind during the campaign that he knew nothing about Hunter’s business dealings overseas.
So, Tony Bobulinski was star witness number one. And the FBI buried his material. And we know they buried it not just because Tony Bobulinski never got followed up but because there are whistleblowers from the FBI — we’re told as many as 14 — who have come forward to Republican Senators, and they have told Chuck Grassley that the FBI agent allegedly who interfered with an investigation into Hunter Biden in the FBI was none other than Tim Thibault.
BUCK: Speaking to Miranda Devine of the New York Post. Miranda, before I let you go, I just want to get your sense as to whether the what I call the Democrat apparatus is still dug in on nothing’s ever gonna happen to Hunter in terms of prosecution while Biden’s in office or you think there’s some shakiness in the Biden camp about that?
DEVINE: I don’t get the impression there’s any shakiness. I think there probably was earlier last year when the grand jury was hearing from his various business partners and ex-lovers. But the word is since then there’s been some negotiations about a plea deal and certainly the fact that Joe Biden took Hunter Biden very publicly on board Air Force One with him when they went on vacation together just a few weeks ago shows that he’s, you know, quite brazen, he’s not distancing himself from his son’s activities.
And it just looks as if this whole inquiry, which has been going on for four years in Delaware under the U.S. attorney David Weiss, is just being slow-walked. They’re not gonna do anything now with him, you know, several days of the midterms, 60 days of the midterms —
BUCK: Yeah, they’re gonna make this whole thing, I think, disappear. Miranda, thanks so much. Check out Miranda’s book, everybody, Laptop from Hell that tells you the truth about what went on here. Appreciate you joining us.
DEVINE: Great to talk to you. Thank you.