Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss President-elect Donald Trump’s statement that he would not pursue a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton.
Marlow pointed out that in an interview Tuesday night, Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway seemed to confirm Clinton would escape further investigation because Trump “thinks that she and the Clintons have suffered enough,” and he wants to “unite the country and move forward, not backward.”
LISTEN:
“There’s a lot of imprecision in this conversation,” Schweizer noted. “We don’t know exactly what she was referring to – whether she was referring to the email investigation, the Clinton Foundation investigation, or both.”
He said it was possible Conway meant both, and added that in a conversation with the New York Times, Trump “indicated essentially the same thing, that he didn’t want to do any harm to the Clintons, which, to me, was a pretty general statement in saying that he didn’t want to see any legal action potentially taken against the Clintons.”
“My bottom line position, Alex, is, look, he should not even be commenting on this. It’s not appropriate for a President of the United States to be talking about a possible criminal investigation that’s taking place by the FBI at this point. It’s just simply not his place,” Schweizer said.
Marlow proposed that Trump might actually agree with that and was attempting to distance himself from whatever the Justice Department does after he takes office, making it clear that he would not be involved in pressing for further investigations of Clinton, but also that he would not prevent DOJ from taking action.
“The other possibility, of course, is he’s essentially saying this, staking out this position because there’s a concern that Barack Obama could pardon Hillary,” said Schweizer. “Basically, by staking out this position now, you wait until Donald Trump becomes president, and then the FBI does its investigation, and you see what happens. In other words, this is a way of kind of head-faking Barack Obama. I don’t think, personally, that’s what’s going on, but I could, of course, be wrong.”
He said he would be “frustrated and outraged” if the Clintons are let off the hook for political reasons.
“I completely understand and get the desire for national unity,” Schweizer said. “That’s really the reason, I think, that they are making this case: we need to move on; we’ve got other things we’ve gotta focus on. But the point is that the president and his administration can focus on jobs, trade, and other issues, and let the FBI simply do its job. The two are not incompatible.”
“This goes to the heart of why he was elected – because people are very frustrated with the sense that elites in this country aren’t held legally accountable the way that ordinary Americans were,” Schweizer mused. “If you think about this and play it out, Alex, if Hillary Clinton had won in November, it’s pretty clear she would not be under serious FBI investigation. That just was not going to happen. But if she loses, as she did in November, it also seems to be clear that she may also not be under FBI investigation. That, to me, is the definition of a rigged system. If you’re saying that an elite figure in the United States, under any scenario, is not going to face a serious investigation by the FBI, that to me is the definition of a rigged system.”
Marlow asked about the call by Hillary Clinton’s supporters to challenge the election results in some swing states. Schweizer dismissed it as “absurd.”
“It really redefines the meaning of ‘sore loser,’” he said. “Sore loser used to be somebody who would not shake the hand of the opponent and would sulk off. Now, if you lose, you try to consult left-wing lawyers and get things reversed. I think it just further shows the decline, frankly, of the Democratic Party and of the coalition, that they can’t seem to capture the fact that what they were presenting was not appealing to a broad part of the population, and so their response is to try to essentially litigate it or to change the results or change the rules. I just think it reflects badly on the Democratic Party, and it’s not gonna do them any good.”
Schweizer looked ahead to the future of the Clintons after the election: “First of all, we know the Clinton Foundation donations were way off last year, down by 37 percent, which is huge considering that she was gearing up for the presidential race. So the people that wanted to curry favor with the Clinton Foundation certainly would have been ponying money up then. I think the corrosive effects of all the reports about corruption already put a dent into the Clinton Foundation.”
“I think we’re going to see the cut in their budget increase dramatically in the years to come, for the same reasons,” he predicted. “Number one, that there’s been a lot of scandals, but number two, you know the Clinton Foundation and giving the speeches, it’s always been kind of about a transaction. You give a donation to the Foundation, Bill comes and gives a speech, and you’re getting access. You’re getting favorable treatment. Well, if you don’t have access, or you have access to somebody that doesn’t really matter politically any more, that’s not very appealing. So I think you’re going to see the Foundation and the speaking fees dry up. I certainly think Bill and Hillary don’t have political futures, in the sense of running for elective office again.”
“So then, of course, it falls to the next generation of Chelsea, where you have the progressive Democratic Party become the party, essentially, of royalty or of a dynasty. The rumor is, Chelsea’s going to run for Congress in Manhattan. You’ve got a congresswoman who is, I believe, 78, who’s getting ready to retire. Chelsea doesn’t live in the district, but, of course, simply by moving, she could make her candidacy possible,” Schweizer said.
With Michelle Obama also in the mix as a potential future candidate, Schweizer reflected on how moribund the Democrats have become, running the same few celebrity names over and over again, while the “new, vibrant candidate” from the past election cycle was “a 69-year-old guy from Queens.”
“He came out with a series of ideas and attitudes and approaches to America’s future, and that’s what people are interested in. I think the problem with the Democratic Party is, you get the same progressivism, just packaged differently. It might be Hillary Clinton. It might be Chelsea Clinton. It might be an African American candidate. It might be a blue-collar guy. But they’re all kind of peddling the same thing,” he observed.
“I think what’s happening among Republicans that’s interesting and dynamic is, you’ve got new and different ideas. It may come in the same package, it may come in a completely different package, but I think people are past the days where you come up with a candidate, you kind of create an image for that candidate, and then you just sort of pop them in, and people come to them based on their ideology. People are far more sophisticated than that,” Schweizer said.
Peter Schweizer is the president of the Government Accountability Institute and a senior editor-at-large for Breitbart News.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Listen to the audio of Schweizer’s full interview above.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.