Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and senior contributor at Breitbart News, explained how his latest book came to be titled, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite. He joined Sebastian Gorka on Thursday’s edition of the latter’s radio show, America First.
Gorka jokingly introduced Schweizer as a man who “hunts alligators for a living” joining him in “the swamp” of Washington, D.C.
Partial transcript below:
GORKA: [The title] is a little bit of a nudge, nudge, wink, wink. The title is Profiles in Corruption, if you know your history you know why he’s calling it Profiles in Corruption, we’ll get there in a second. … Where’s my producer? Mr. G? Are you on the mic?
MR. G: Yes, I am.
GORKA: You liked one of Peter’s earlier books, which was?
MR. G: Extortion.
GORKA: Why? What did it do for you?
MR. G: That is probably the biggest reason I supported Trump from day one, and it showed how much even the Republicans, a lot of them are all frauds and corrupt.
GORKA: This is how books change lives. For me, it was Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation. And the thing about Peter Schweizer is he calls the balls, he calls the strikes on left and right. Talk to us about you chose the title Profiles in Corruption.
SCHWEIZER: The title was suggested by my editor. It was very interesting, because my publisher is Harper Collins, they actually published Profiles in Courage.
GORKA: They did?
SCHWEIZER: Yes.
GORKA: That’s funny. They’re taking a jab at themselves. Remind those a little bit younger than we are what was Profiles in Courage?
SCHWEIZER: Profiles in Courage was John F. Kennedy’s book when he ran for president.
GORKA: Well, it wasn’t really.
SCHWEIZER: Exactly. I was going to get to that. It was his book.
GORKA: It had his name on it.
SCHWEIZER; It’s not to say he actually wrote it. It was written by Ted Sorenson, his longtime speechwriter, but it was a look at courageous people in American history and the wonderful things they had done. This, not sot so much. It’s a profile in looking at people that are very prominent on the political left, but we’re not talking about courage. We’re talking about profound corruption at multiple levels.
As an illustration of prominent left-wing political figures abusing power for self-enrichment, Schweizer shared some of his findings on Joe Biden:
Going back to November of 2010, Kevin Justice — a longtime Biden family friend from Delaware — visits Joe Biden’s office. We know that from White House visitor’s logs. We don’t know what they discussed, but we do know Kevin Justice had started a new construction company, HillStone. Three weeks after that meeting in the White House, he announces that the new executive vice president of HillStone International, a construction company, is James Biden, the vice president’s brother.
Now, dare I add, James Biden has no background in construction. … In fact, on the website — which they have since taken down — they say that James Biden is a good asset to the company because he knows his way around the corridors of power.
[After James Biden] joins the company, within six months, this new construction company lands a contract to build 100,000 homes in Iraq. It’s a $1.5 billion contract. … They [also] got contracts from the State Department [and] other government entities.
Schweizer also shared his findings on Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT):
Bernie Sanders has been in government since the 1980s, and it started when he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont. One of the first things he did was put his then girlfriend — later wife — Jane on the city payroll. The problem was, the city council had not approved it. It wasn’t a job that was open. It wasn’t even a job. He just gave her her job. City council objected. That’s really the beginning of him steering money to his family.
Schweizer explained how media buyers for political campaigns are compensated, noting that Sanders’ wife, Jane, was his media buyer during his congressional campaigns. Media buyers are paid commissions typically calculated as percentages of total costs spent on media purchases by campaigns.
Schweizer remarked:
The second layer happens when [Bernie Sanders] starts running for Congress, and they realize one of the deep, dark secrets of Washington, D.C. which is, you can make a lot of money being a media buyer for campaigns. The way it works is … if you spend a million dollars on television ads, if I’m your media buyer, I get to keep about 15 percent as a commission. You get a cut. Fifteen percent tends to be the industry standard.
Schweizer continued, “[Jane Sanders] became the media buyer for her husband’s campaigns, and made somewhere on the order of $150,000 doing that. But the big mystery comes in 2016. He runs for president. We’re not talking about small media buys, now. We’re talking about $83 million in media buys. That’s about $12 million [that] would be the fee for that. What we don’t know — because they don’t have to disclose it — is who got that fee. What we know is this, that $3 million went through a company called Old Town Media that didn’t have a website, didn’t have past history or description. It was registered to a suburban home in Virginia.”
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