Revelations in the new book Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite show that Democrats lack credibility in accusing President Donald Trump of “abuse of power,” the book’s author Peter Schweizer said in an interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour.
Schweizer, the president of the Government Accountability Institute and a Breitbart News senior contributor, noted that one of the articles of impeachment in the current impeachment trial accuses President Trump of committing “abuse of power.”
“It’s funny, because the impeachment charges [include] abuse of power, which really is kind of a widely used term,” Schweizer stated. “That is also in the subtitle of the book, and we picked the subtitle eight months ago, before the trial even began, so it’s this happy strange coincidence. If you want to look for public officials who are making decisions and distorting the rules of government for the benefit of themselves — which is what they’re claiming Donald Trump did in this case — you are going to find multiple examples of the nine, I would argue, top progressives in the country doing exactly that.”
Schweizer began by sharing some findings related to former Vice President Joe Biden’s family’s business dealings.
“People are familiar with Biden stories as they relate to Hunter [Biden],” said Schweizer. “The deals in China, the deals in Ukraine, but there are actually five members [of the Biden family] that have engaged in corrupt behavior — that cashed in — while [Joe Biden] was vice president of the United States, and self-enriched.”
Schweizer continued, “I’ve exposed a lot of Republicans, a lot of Democrats, liberals, conservatives, and the most I’ve ever seen before is three family members involved in an enterprise, so the Bidens have busted through that ceiling.”
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“There is more material in the book about Hunter Biden, about deals that he and his business partner did with Russians and Kazakhs and other oligarchs. There are examples about how Hunter actually got taxpayer money for some of his business ventures.”
Schweizer added, “There is information on Ashley Biden — this is Joe Biden’s daughter, you don’t hear a lot about her — but basically about how Joe Biden set up her husband, his healthcare investment company with a launch in the Oval Office and with the support of the government apparatus. Imagine if the Trumps had done something like that.”
Schweizer went on, “The third one is James Biden, [Joe Biden’s] brother. James Biden gets involved in a construction company, even though he has no background in construction. They end up getting contracts to build homes in Iraq, to do other construction work at the State Department and elsewhere, even though he had no [relevant] background.”
Schweizer continued, “You’ve got [Joe Biden’s] sister Valerie, who in addition to running his presidential campaigns, took $2.5 million and spun that into her own private company while working on his campaigns, and then you’ve got his brother Frank who has been involved in a series of deals in Costa Rica, in Jamaica, and even in the United States that just reek of inside deals that trade on the power and influence of his brother.”
“All these individuals trade on Joe Biden’s name,” explained Schweizer. “He knows that [they do] it, but he also provides them access. It would be very simple for him to basically put out the word on the street, ‘I don’t want any of these kinds of deals to take place,’ but Joe Biden has never done that, and the family has cashed in in a major way at our expense.”
Mansour asked about Biden’s attempts to cultivate a blue-collar reputation.
“He’s identified as ‘Amtrak Joe,'” replied Schweizer. “He did ride the Amtrak train to Delaware when he was a senator, but we did some digging, and what we found were local news reports in Delaware that pointed out that, yes, Joe did ride the train, but if he was running late, he would call Amtrak and tell them to hold the train. All the commuters sitting on the train would have to sit and wait until Joe would show up. So there’s always this flip-side to the narrative, and, yes, he’s Amtrak Joe who rides Amtrak, but if Joe’s not ready to go yet, Amtrak is going to have to wait and passengers be damned.”
Schweizer noted that all of the Democrats profiled in his book involve cases of “real self-enrichment and real self-benefit.”
“All the examples that people are going to see of all these candidates are where they are bending the rules — they are bending power — for their own personal benefit. That can mean money for their family. It can mean political gain. It can mean political contributions,” Schweizer said.
Mansour asked about the investigation of Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) in Profiles in Corruption.
“[Amy Klobuchar] had a record that was highly selective on who she prosecuted,” said Schweizer of Klobuchar’s former role as a prosecutor in Minnesota. “I think the evidence is pretty clear. She based that in part on whether you were a campaign contributor to her or not.”
Klobuchar’s image of being a tough prosecutor is belied by the fact that she didn’t “go after the guy who created the second biggest Ponzi scheme in American history,” explained Schweizer. “That’s a guy named Tom Petters who lived in Minneapolis. We went through the court file, and what you find is, she went after people that worked with Petters, there was clear evidence at the time that this was a Ponzi scheme, there were all sorts of warning signs, but she never even investigated Petters, and you wonder [and] scratch your head, ‘Well, why is that the case?'”
Schweizer’s research uncovered the fact that Petters and his associates were the largest contributors to Klobuchar’s 2006 U.S. campaign.
Schweizer wrote in Profiles in Corruption:
When [Klobuchar] announced for the U.S. Senate in 2006, Petters Group Worldwide and its employees were some of her earliest and most enthusiastic donors. Just weeks after she announced her candidacy in February 2005, Petters and thirteen employees in his companies all gave her contributions in a single day (March 31, 2005). By the quarterly report released right before the 2006 election, they were her largest contributor by far—donating $71,600 or 32 percent more than her second-largest donor, her old law firm. By the end of 2006, Petters Group Worldwide had contributed more than $120,000 toward her successful bid.
Schweizer told Breitbart News Tonight that Klobuchar’s treatment of Petters is a clear example of “selective justice,” noting that the Minnesota senator has “continued with that selectivity in the U.S. Senate” where “she’s not prosecuting cases but she’s passing laws.”
“You see this pattern where, in one instance, dozens of corporate executives from a single company will send contributions to [Klobuchar’s] campaign, and in two weeks she introduces legislation to benefit that very corporation,” stated Schweizer. “So what you find with Amy Klobuchar is this very selective enforcement. If you’re with her and an insider, you’re going to be taken care of. If you’re not a donor and you’re an outsider, then you’re going to be in serious trouble.”
Mansour asked about Klobuchar’s call to Petters following the FBI’s raid of his company’s headquarters in 2008.
“Not only did [Klobuchar] call [Petters], she actually suggested a really good lawyer for him,” Schweizer said. “He’s entitled to representation, but is it really appropriate for a prosecutor that should have been investigating him that once he’s brought up on federal charges by the FBI, that’s she’s offering advice, ‘I’ll find a really good lawyer for you’?”.
Schweizer continued, “It just shows again that this image that is created — that [Klobuchar] is for the little guy [and] that she’s fighting big corporations — is just simply not true, and I would contend that is an abuse of power, because prosecutors have enormous discretion, and if they are making decisions based on who is giving campaign contributions to them, you’ve got terrible justice in the United States.”
Mansour reflected on Profiles in Corruption‘s revelations regarding Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). “She is as ambitious as Lucifer, and whatever she has to do — to lie, to get ahead, to paint a narrative of herself — she will. I was so disgusted. Your chapter on Warren changed my entire perception of her. She’s a fraud.”
Schweizer explained, “People don’t realize that in the mid-1990s, [Warren] was actually hired by the U.S. Congress and paid by taxpayers as a consultant to help rewrite portions of the U.S. bankruptcy laws, particularly bankruptcy laws [regarding] class action lawsuits [and] companies that were facing them related to breast implants or asbestos. So [Elizabeth Warren] gets paid to rewrite these laws. As she is still being paid — and then after she stops getting paid — she starts doing legal consulting work for the very corporations that she’s writing the laws for, that are going to apply to these companies.”
Schweizer continued, “It’s one of the games in Washington, D.C., that [Warren] has condemned other people doing, but she did it in spades. She started getting large consulting fees from companies like Dow Chemical and Anderson Worldwide who are paying her large sums of money — basically $1,000 an hour — to help them get around or deal with the law that she herself had actually written, and she made millions of dollars doing this. I think it’s quite stunning and runs contrary to the image that she tries to portray that she’s really fighting for the little guy.”
“[Warren] has tried to say, ‘Well, I was really doing it to help the little guy,’ but the problem is — and she’s knows this as a lawyer — she wasn’t being paid by the little guy,” added Schweizer. “She was being paid by the corporations, and the corporations were paying her to protect their interests … by limiting their liability and using a law she knew very well because we, as taxpayers, had paid her to write it.”
Mansour asked about Warren’s claims to Native American ancestry.
“[Warren] originally listed herself in the directory of the Association of Law Schools in 1986 as a minority,” noted Schweizer. “Her academic career had kind of stalled. She was the University of Texas. She lists herself in this guide of law schools as a minority. The next year, she’s hired by the University of Pennsylvania as a minority hire, and they make a big deal about it. She then gets hired by Harvard University in 1995. Again they make a deal about the hire — she’s a minority hire, she’s a Native American — [and] they give her tenure.”
Schweizer went on, “The following year in 1996, now that [Warren] has got her tenured position at Harvard, she stops listing herself in the directory as Native American. Very, very curious to me. If you really believe that you are [Native American], and if you really have had this family lore the whole time, why would you — after you received the prized tenure at Harvard University — purposefully stop listing yourself as Native American in that directory?”
Mansour noted that Harvard University’s spokesman described Warren as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color,” noting that at the time of Warren’s recruitment Harvard Law School was under intense pressure to hire a more diverse faculty.
Schweizer moved on to his findings related to Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA).
“This is probably the most shocking thing to me in the book,” remarked Schweizer. “[Kamala Harris] was the San Francisco district attorney for seven years. She was the California attorney general for six years, and during that time period, she never prosecuted a single case of sexual abuse involving priests in the Catholic Church. To show you how unusual that is …if you look at the top 50 municipalities in the United States, all 49 of the other ones at least prosecuted one case. Kamala Harris never did.”
Schweizer explained, “If you talk to victims’ rights’ groups in San Francisco, [Harris] not only didn’t prosecute a case, she actually hid evidence. What do I mean by that? The Catholic Church had turned over private records of abuse cases [and] given them to her predecessor. He was going to release them to the public. Kamala Harris beat him and she completely reversed course and said, ‘We’re not going to replace them. We’re not going to redact them, and let people know some of the facts. We are going to cover it up,’ and that’s exactly what Kamala Harris did.”
Schweizer went on, “So the question becomes, ‘Why?’ and what you find is, what helped get [Kamala Harris] elected San Francisco prosecutor was massive donations from entities — that means law firms and lawyers, primarily, but [also] others — connected to the hierarchy of the church in San Francisco at that time. It’s a horrific story. Victims’ rights groups — I quote them in the book — were outraged. They are still outraged. They believe that Kamala Harris engaged in a cover up, and she did it because it benefited her politically, even though it involved these horrific sex crimes.”
Schweizer concluded, “I think it’s very hard for the individuals we talked about to speak with moral authority when they present themselves as talking about what virtuous government should look like. I’ve always felt that the impeachment was ridiculous. It did not have merit. but I think the larger question has to come down to, who in Washington, D.C., can speak with moral authority these days? Certainly people like Kamala Harris or Cory Booker or Elizabeth Warren who are involved in the impeachment trial talk as if they can. They try to talk with authority, but when you look at their political careers, I would argue that you find enormous examples of abuse of power that I would argue are far more damning than what the President of the United States is being impeached for, right now.”
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.
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