Live from Music Row Thursday 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 all-star panelist and The Epoch Times’  Editor-at-Large Roger Simon in-studio to comment upon The New York Times‘ admission of Hunter Biden’s laptop and Bill Barr’s recent memoir.
Leahy: Roger Simon, our all-star panelist, and a transmitter.
Simon: Don’t put me on a diamond. (Leahy laughs) It will go right through my legs.
Leahy: Lots of things going on in terms of the news media. I don’t know if you follow this, but The New York Times, I’d like to get your take on it, because we got a certain take earlier in the show.
But The New York Times has finally admitted that the Hunter Biden laptop, which was apparently given to the FBI in December 2019 – a story broke in October 2020 where the New York Post said, yeah, this is Hunter Biden’s laptop.
It’s got all of this compromising information there. New York Post reported it. All the major media outlets, including Steve Brill at NewsGuard, called it a hoax. Like on the 23rd paragraph of a story in The New York Times earlier this week, they said, oh, yeah, it was real.
Simon: It was real.
Leahy: What’s your take on all this?
Simon: I have a lot of take on that. One of the interesting things apropos of what we were just talking about before the break, Twitter … was the big place that banned talk of that New York Post article on Twitter, which is where most journalists go for their news, unfortunately.
Leahy: (Laughs) By the way, that one sentence encapsulates everything that’s wrong with American journalism today.
Simon: It sure does. I meant it by accident. I don’t brag about it, but that’s the sad truth. Another interesting thing about The New York Times suddenly admitting many, many months after that this was real is that they were ready to jump on the Trump Russia story within minutes.
Leahy: There you go. That is absolutely the point, isn’t it?
Simon: Yes. I mean, that they were being judicious is just so much BS is beyond BS. The New York Times we used to think of as the newspaper of record, I think we may have to change that definition. Maybe it’s the newspaper of government propaganda is really what it is.
Leahy: I think it is, yeah.
Simon: I speak as one who in my youth wrote for The New York Times. One of the interesting things is the difference between writing for The New York Times and The Epoch Times, which I currently do, is that I get edited at The Epoch Times. I never got edited at The New York Times.
Leahy: At The New York Times, really?
Simon: Not hardly anything at all. I wrote big essays for their book review section, full-page essays, and occasionally they would correct my errant spelling, but that’s it. And they never questioned me on anything factual I was saying.
And actually, in those articles, I was reporting on trips I took with the International Association of Crime Writers that was an original KGB front organization, which I signed up with to my shame, anyway.
Leahy: But you figured it out.
Simon: Yeah, I figured it out. But the problem is they never asked a question.
Leahy: It’s sort of interesting here, Roger, how all of these major news outlets are suddenly admitting this, 17 months after the election.
I have a question for you. It’s a little bit unrelated, but have you had an opportunity to read the memoir of Bill Barr, former attorney general?
Simon: You know, I haven’t read it, but I read a lot about it, obviously.
Leahy: Now he has something in common with you. He grew up in New York City.
Simon: Yes. Wasn’t his father connected with the Dalton School?
Leahy: His father was the headmaster of the Dalton School.
Simon: And my mother went to Dalton.
Leahy: Well, there you go. There you go. But his father was kind of controversial at the Dalton School, and he left and he went to another place.
But his father was on the faculty at Columbia. So he grew up in that Morningside Heights. Was that a little north of where you lived in Manhattan?
Simon: Yes. But not that far.
Leahy: Not that far. So I read with great interest, his life background was very interesting to me. He’s Irish on one side and Jewish on the other side of his family. And what I didn’t realize is the guy had a passion, a musical instrument he loved to play as a kid.
The bagpipes. The bagpipes. Now it’s hard not to like somebody who plays the bagpipes, as an Irishman, as an Irish American, said Michael Patrick Leahy the week after St. Patrick’s Day. But I read his book, and let’s talk about the Hunter Biden thing. So the timeline is, the laptop is given to the FBI in December of 2019, and the story doesn’t come out until October of 2020.
And what he said in his book and he left, remember, like December 23rd of 2020. He resigned as attorney general. He had a bit of a falling out with the former president, but he said, in essence, I’m very comfortable with the investigation the FBI was undertaking of that laptop. Roger, are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?
Simon: I think his dislike for Trump trumped it. To me, I read substantially the same thing. And I think that he didn’t like Trump’s style at all because his style was very much Beltway.
Leahy: Beltway. I mean, he was kind of a mentor of sorts to John Roberts, the current chief justice.
Simon: Right. That whom there is no more Beltway. They’re all afraid for their jobs in a very strong way.
Simon: Barr was safe that way.
Leahy: Barr, like his net worth, is like $50 million because he was like general counsel for GTE, a big telecoms company. And so he’s coming back. But I got to tell you … now, sometimes the former president goes a little bit over the top when he characterizes his opponents.
But he called Barr lazy. He said Bill Barr was lazy. And I have to tell you, although he has a strong track record and he’s a very interesting fellow to have conversations with.
Simon: And he’s intelligent.
Leahy: And he’s very intelligent. But if you look at the very narrow way he defined his job, and the very limited number of things he got engaged with and paid attention to – case in point: To me, if there’s a laptop that belongs to the son of a presidential candidate, that has emails that could show that the presidential candidate is compromised, I, as attorney general, would tell the FBI, “get on that, and give me a daily report.”
Listen to full 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.
