Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily podcast today is Friday, July 21st, 2023.

I'm John Pudhord. It's the editor of commentary magazine with me is always executive editor

A. Greenwald. Hi, A. John, media commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine. Hi, John.

And Washington commentary columnist Matthew continuity. Hi, Matt. Hi, John, Abe, you texted

us yesterday afternoon asking this question. Why would the head of barisma lie and tell

someone that he'd paid Joe Biden $5 million, I guess in 2015, in order to ensure that the

prosecutor in Ukraine, Victor Shokin, would be fired so that he would leave barisma the

oil company on whose board Hunter Biden served that he would leave barisma alone.

Why would he lie? It doesn't make sense. That the document that came out yesterday that

we had heard about for a couple of months, the Chuck Grassley released, is a confidential

informant unreport to the FBI. It is not classified or it wasn't classified, but it was

held by the FBI for a couple of reasons. One of which is that the thing about these

reports is that they are, this is what you do when you have an unconfirmed rumor that

somebody calls in. And apparently, what is called the confidential human source, told

the FBI that the head of barisma, whose name I can't remember off top of my head, told

him that he'd paid Biden and Hunter Biden $5 billion each and that Hunter Biden was

was dumber than his dog, but that he had to do this. And Abe, you asked, why would somebody

lie about this? I also said, I'm not saying he didn't. I was trying to sort of get a

fuller picture of the possible motives, but yes, okay. So I've two answers to that,

but they're just made up in my head. I mean, I don't know. One is that there is a certain

type of braggadociousness about people who claim to have bought influence. So he might

have been saying to somebody, you know, I'm so powerful. I paid off the vice president

...