Cliff’s Note:
I have known Jake Tapper a long time. So has David. So, it turns out, has Hunter Biden—about thirty years, going back to when Jake was a kid in Washington and nobody had heard of him.
That is what makes the clip below different from every other cable-news complaint you have read this year. Hunter is not making an argument about media bias in the abstract. He is telling you where a specific book came from, who was originally writing it, and what it was originally about. And then he says the quietest, most alarming sentence in the whole interview, which is that he was there for all of it and he remembers.
The clip is free. Watch it.
The full ninety minutes is for paid subscribers. There is no advertiser paying for this show, no network standing behind it, and no corporate parent deciding what we are allowed to say about a man who works at one. There is a camera, a producer, an editor, and you.
—Cliff
In 2015, a reporter named Alex Thompson was writing a book about Beau Biden.
Beau had stage four glioblastoma. The prognosis is about two years and almost nobody beats it. He was also deciding whether to run for governor, which meant he was careful about what he said publicly about his own condition. Hunter explains why, and it is the part of this that stopped me:
“My brother wanted to believe, like me and his entire family and everyone that loved him, that he was going to beat all the odds—that he was going to be that 0.02 percent that makes it out. And that’s the only way that you can enter into the fight that is required of you, just by virtue of wanting to live.”
Out of that guardedness grew a storyline: the Bidens are secretive about their health. Nine years later that storyline had a much bigger subject. Same reporter. Much bigger name on the cover.
Hunter traces the whole thing there. He also does not spare his father: he says he panicked the moment Joe Biden walked out on that debate stage, that he had never seen him like that before and has not since. What he will not accept is who got graded on it—while Donald Trump talked for ninety minutes and nobody in the room stopped him once.
That clip is twelve minutes of an hour and a half. Behind that card: the distinction he draws about addiction that I have never heard anyone make in public. The paintings, the congressional subpoenas, and the billions in federal contracts going to the current president’s family. What he actually thinks about Kamala Harris distancing herself from his father. An argument about Pharaoh I am still turning over. He did not dodge a single question.
And this, near the end—about Jake Tapper, and about everyone else in Washington who spent 2024 talking to reporters on background:
“They forget that I was there for thirty years. And they forget that I know all of it.”
That is not a threat. It is worse than a threat. It is a man calmly noting that he has a memory.
If you are already a paid subscriber, you have the whole thing. Go watch it, and thank you—you are the reason it exists. Everyone else:
No network. No billionaire. No advertiser who gets to tell us what we may not say about a man who works at one.
—Cliff
