A grand jury should be convened in Little Rock, Arkansas, to examine potential criminality related to the Clinton Foundation, said Peter Schweizer. Such a move, he said, would help restore public confidence in the Department of Justice (DOJ) and judicial system.
Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, joined SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight for a Monday interview with co-hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
Convening a grand jury to evaluate evidence of potential criminality on the side of Bill and Hillary Clinton with respect to political corruption would assuage public concerns of partisan political operations at the DOJ and FBI, said Schweizer.
“I think really what you really need to do, when it comes to the Clinton Foundation, is you need to convene a grand jury, and I think you ought to do it in Little Rock, Arkansas, where the Clinton Foundation is headquarters and based, and let the American public look at the evidence,” said Schweizer. “I think that’s really the only way that we’re going to get the kind of clarity that we need. Otherwise, there are going to be these lingering questions about how the FBI investigation was handled and whether it was politically tilted in one way or another.”
A grand jury’s use of “typical Americans” to contemplate possible criminality on the side of the Clintons would further restore public “faith in the judicial system,” said Schweizer.
“What you essentially are saying with a grand jury — which is commonly used by prosecutors — is, ‘Look, these are issues that we want to air before individuals that are sort of typical Americans.’ So that’s why I think a grand jury would be the best way to do it. Not just from the standpoint of justice as it relates to the Clintons, but also, I think, so people have faith in the judicial system because I think right now that is something weighing very very heavily in our country. People just think there are two sets of rules.”
Governmental focus on Robert Mueller’s ostensible investigation of alleged Russian state political interference is at least partially displacing investigations of corruption on the side of the Clintons, said Schweizer.
“The most recent that I’ve heard is that the FBI is looking into the Clinton Foundation,” said Schweizer:
They have been there for awhile. I know, and this has been reported, that they have talked to various witnesses that have information related to Uranium One. I know there has been discussion — I don’t know the actual details — of this whistleblower who is going to be at some point testifying in the Senate and the House, and that could be very soon indeed. I think that’s happened is so much of the oxygen now has been sucked up by this issue that there’s been less attention paid to the Uranium One-Clinton Foundation investigation, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not going on and the gears aren’t turning. The question will be, as the FBI is wrestling with these issues and the perception by some that they have been political partisans, is are they going to be capable of making the kind of recommendation that’s going to be taken seriously.
Pollak invited Schweizer to respond to a recent attempt by CNN’s Jake Tapper to draw an equivalence between the Christopher Steele “dossier” and Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash as prompters of FBI investigations into Donald Trump and the Clintons, respectively.
“I was reminded this weekend by Evan Perez, our Justice Department reporter, that the Clinton Foundation probe by the FBI, one of the bases for that was Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash, which obviously had partisan roots,” said Tapper on Sunday’s State of the Union. “The Mercer family, Steve Bannon were involved in that book, a lot of strong charges. And I don’t recall Republicans objecting to that book being used for the Clinton Foundation probe.”
“Any comparison between the Steel dossier and Clinton Cash is wide of the mark, and here’s why,” said Schweizer:
With Clinton Cash, you can have a debate as to whether the flow of money going to the Clintons is connected with policy decisions that they made. That’s a fair debate you can have, but nobody disputes the financial transactions, nobody disputes the policy decisions that were made, and nobody disputes the fact that these things were going on. Those are all things that have been independently verified by the New York Times and other news outlets. Here’s the heart of the problem with the Steele dossier — nobody can corroborate it. Nobody can confirm whether any of the stuff in it is true, and there’s reason to believe that it’s not. You cannot dismiss the Steele dossier just because of the source, but the problem is there’s absolutely no means by which it can be independently verified, and by the way, I think it was precisely designed for that purpose.
Tapper’s attempt to draw a parallel between the “Steele dossier” and Clinton Cash is flawed, said Schweizer.
“The thing that’s always been confusing to me is how everyone calls it a piece of opposition research, but you know as well as I do that opposition research is something you collect that’s shared with the media that’s designed to damage a candidate,” said Schweizer. “Opposition research only works if the journalist that you hand it to can verify it. … Nothing in the Steele dossier can be independently verified by anybody. There’s no paper trail. There’s no independent documentation. Even the sources that allegedly told him these things are anonymous. So I think the comparison between the two is not apt at all, and I think any journalist would tell you the same thing.”
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