Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer reviewed the corruption allegations made against President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily.
SiriusXM host Alex Marlow mentioned three stories in particular, beginning with a USA Today report that “they set up personal email accounts, three of them now, and they personally rerouted the accounts to Trump Organization computers after they learned Robert Mueller was looking to capture the emails, and perhaps subpoena them for the investigation into President Trump.”
“It’s very troubling, and also frankly it strikes me as kind of stupid,” said Schweizer.
“It’s troubling because it does occur at a time when they were apparently looking for a way to communicate, and to communicate in a way that Mueller and his team might not be privy to it. That’s what it seems like,” he elaborated.
“But it’s also stupid, in that this stuff is not that difficult to detect and find,” he continued. “You can find out where emails are routed. Look at what Hillary Clinton did. She set up this elaborate network designed specifically to avoid the Freedom of Information Act, so she could communicate and people wouldn’t have a public record of it. And it came out eventually, because of Guccifer the hacker and whatnot.”
“It strikes me as very troubling that it seems to involve an intent to be able to communicate without the ability of Mueller to detect those communications as it relates to what he’s investigating. It also strikes me as kind of amateurish and stupid, because this stuff would not be that hard for somebody like Mueller to find,” he stressed.
Secondly, Marlow noted the Justice Department has “dropped anti-nepotism memos that perhaps without them, Jared Kushner wouldn’t be allowed to be in the White House at all.”
Schweizer recalled the history of nepotism in U.S. government, leading to a structure of rules “erected in the 1960s after Bobby Kennedy was Attorney General under his brother John F. Kennedy.”
“There were moves to not eliminate nepotism, because the president should choose certainly at his discretion, but to set up certain rules,” he explained. “One of the reasons is precisely this: that if you hire a family member, anybody who has done business with or has been involved professionally with a sibling or with a child I think in particular – it’s just really hard to fire a family member, especially if you have a good relationship with them. You just don’t hold them to the same standard that you hold someone else.”
“Even more than that, the family member is certainly going to have interests that overlap with yours, again particularly when you’re talking about children,” he noted. “You want your children to do well commercially. You may have intertwining commercial relationships and commercial ties. There’s a lot of reasons to want to be very, very concerned about family members being hired, particularly in posts like this.”
“You go back to the Reagan era, Maureen Reagan, Ronald Reagan’s daughter, had some ceremonial diplomatic missions that she carried out for the Reagan administration just related to women’s issues and others. I think something like that is fine,” he reflected.
“But in the case of Jared Kushner, you have a close family member making very, very important decisions and determining who has access, in part, to the president. It’s very troubling, and this report out of the Department of Justice indicates that there clearly were roadblocks, or let’s say speed bumps, in the way that were creating problems, and they essentially just wanted to jettison and ignore those to make this sort of thing happen,” said Schweizer.
“Oftentimes, not always but oftentimes, rules like this are set up for good reasons. I think this is just a further indication of that,” he judged.
Finally, Marlow brought up ProPublica’s report that Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were “close to being charged with felony fraud” by prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in 2012 over the sale of units in the Trump SoHo condominium complex.
“You watch old mafia movies, and one of the things they often say is, ‘You want to get to a guy, you get to him through his family,’” Schweizer said. “The point being that by appointing and putting family members in political positions like this, you are creating a greater avenue for your enemies to come after you.”
“Now, I’m not familiar with the case you just cited, but I will say – and of course I don’t know the merits of it – I will say there were similar charges and lawsuits filed against the Trump children as it related to the Trump property in Panama,” he told Marlow.
“The charge there was that they had been promised in the pre-build that people were going to get condos of a certain square footage. The condos that were actually built were smaller than that. A lot of the buyers – I mean dozens of them – filed legal action as a result,” Schweizer recalled.
“These sorts of things have cropped up, and we know that in the business-commercial world, there is litigation, there are lawsuits that occur. I think that when you put it into the political context, Alex, which I think is what you’re really most interested in, that’s troubling. It’s another distraction. It’s another way to, in effect, try to undermine the president because you do that by going after his family members and exposing them,” he said.
“If you look at the history of issues related to nepotism and family members serving in senior government positions, especially sensitive ones, it’s not a great record,” he noted. “There are a lot of criticisms that Bobby Kennedy’s role when he was Attorney General was really essentially to protect his brother. A lot of the things he did in terms of wiretapping people like Martin Luther King Jr. and others were done more in the political context of helping his brother.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern
LISTEN:
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.