Former GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff told SiriusXM host Matt Boyle on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily that he and others have been incarcerated for some of the things Hillary Clinton has done.
“One of the things that I pled to was what is called ‘honest services fraud,’” Abramoff explained. “Honest services fraud, when asked by the Congress, was actually far too broad, and was something that law enforcement was accused of taking advantage of, and including every area of life. So the Supreme Court narrowed it to include only, basically bribery, or things that were related to bribery of public servants and other areas.”
“That narrowing did not preclude a public servant from falling within the purview of that law,” he continued. “Now, I pled to that law because I provided, I was sort of the other side of the transaction that Hillary and her folks are on. I was one who provided gifts and contributions and all the rest to public servants, in order to get, in essence, outcomes for my clients.”
“What I see with her – I don’t know her, I mean I’ve met her a few times when I was a lobbyist, but I don’t know her, I don’t know her people, and I wasn’t involved in it. But from what I’ve read and what I’ve seen, it seems very clear to me that what they were doing is, in essence, selling the assets of the people, the federal government, for contributions to the Clinton Foundation,” he said.
“To me, this was classic honest services fraud, where you had – it’s not bribery, obviously. Bribery is very difficult to define in U.S. law, statutorily. It is a standard that is usually too high to meet – but what, in essence, was going on there is that the Foundation team was soliciting contributions at the same time as facilitating access to our public servants, to the secretary of state and her staff, and in some cases getting results, and in some cases not getting results, but that does not matter. In essence, what the result is, is the access,” Abramoff explained.
When Boyle mentioned the abnormally high percentage of meetings Secretary of State Clinton gave to Clinton Foundation donors, Abramoff interjected that “my point is, even if one of them is with a Clinton Foundation donor, if somebody gave money to the Clinton Foundation, and the quid pro quo was getting a meeting, or getting a phone call returned, that gets you into that area.”
“What puzzles me is that Director Comey of the FBI – I mean, this is the same FBI that investigated me, and properly referred charges to the Justice Department that filed charges against me for these things,” Abramoff said. “And I’m not alone, by the way. I’m not trying to say, therefore, why did they pick on me? They picked on me because they should have picked on me. I broke the law, unfortunately. I wish I didn’t, but I did, and I was properly punished. What I think irks people who have been through this process – and don’t forget, over two million Americans have been through the criminal process, or are in the criminal process right now, and many more have been through it – is watching somebody almost blatantly and flagrantly violating the law here, and that no one charges these people, and no one brings it to justice.”
“This is something that I think is wrong,” he declared. “I’m not necessarily saying, in these remarks, anything other than the fact that I think it’s unjust to our justice system to watch this happen. When people are out there thinking about committing a crime, they now can think, ‘Well, if Hillary gets away with it, and Bill gets away with it, maybe I can get away with it,’ and that undermines our society far worse than, God forbid, the election of Hillary to the presidency.”
Abramoff said that while he’s obviously not involved in the FBI’s deliberations, “I can’t for the life of me imagine the conversation at the FBI, in terms of referring criminal charges to the Justice Department, why Director Comey and others would conclude that no prosecutor would bring charges against her.”
“I think it’s astonishing,” he said. “On the services fraud, they certainly seem to have destruction of evidence, obstruction of justice, there seems to be count after count after count going on here, let alone that she, in fact, in an interview with the FBI – which somehow wasn’t recorded, or at least notes weren’t taken, very bizarrely – if she had lied in that encounter, then that’s perjury. Because the fact is, as soon as you lie to an investigator, you’ve sort of fallen into that area.”
“I can’t for the life of me understand it, other than to conclude that there was a political decision made here, and that is extremely dangerous,” Abramoff said. “Whether it’s Hillary, or it’s Trump, or it’s anybody – even if it had happened to Reagan! – people cannot be allowed, because they’re in high political office, to escape the consequences of their actions, any more than I wasn’t allowed to escape the consequences of my actions.”
On the question of whether a special prosecutor should be appointed for Clinton, as Donald Trump promised in the second presidential debate, Abramoff spoke highly of the FBI agents and lower-level Justice Department personnel with whom he worked, saying they were “to a person incredibly honest, incredibly professional, and I can’t for the life of me imagine any of these people going along with something like this, so it probably had to be made at a political level, at the top, which completely undermines it.”
“Now, should there be a special prosecutor?” he continued. “I think, absolutely. There should have been a special prosecutor from the beginning. We all knew – nobody thought, and I would go around in the interviews I was doing at the time, saying Hillary will either be nominated or prosecuted, and I don’t for the life of me believe she’ll be prosecuted because the Obama administration is extremely political. If they were a Republican administration acting like this, they would be considered worse than whatever Nixon was trying to pull off, in those days.”
“And so I never thought she would be prosecuted,” Abramoff confessed. “But it’s an outrage given what’s coming out since, that they can, with a straight face, say that there’s no need for a special prosecutor, there’s no need for any of this. So Donald Trump saying there should be a special prosecutor, I think is a completely normal statement.”
“In terms of his remark about ‘you’d be in jail,’ that’s probably political theater, probably not helpful in terms of if there ever were to be a real case pursued against these people,” he added. “But let’s not kid ourselves. If Hillary Clinton’s elected president in a couple of weeks, there will never be a prosecution of this, and these people will have gotten away with selling our government for hundreds of millions of dollars. That is a very disgusting and profound act. It will never, ever be dealt with.”
Abramoff noted sardonically that when he was prosecuted, all of his emails were “subpoenaed and then just sent over to the media by Senator McCain, and others who were kind of attacking me, so all of the things that I wrote also bore out, in many cases, things that – unfortunately for me – were embarrassing, and were things I regretted.”
He said Clinton was now getting “the same kind of treatment,” thanks to WikiLeaks, but “it seems clear, based on everything that we’ve seen, that there are some real issues here, and whether or not there’s a prosecution, whether or not there’s justice here, we’ll just have to see. The American people are going to have to make that decision themselves.”
Abramoff said he had “no particular insight as to what might come out” in future document dumps, but “it seems what’s clear is that every day, we’re getting more and more examples of Hillary, her people, and her Foundation and the rest were playing this kind of backroom game – with money, with power, with government, and with things that, again, if they were Republicans, they would have to leave the country, pull out of the race.”
“I think we’re probably likely to see more of that, and unfortunately, the more we see of it, and then if it’s ratified by an election that elects her, what kind of message have we sent to our kids? What kind of message have we sent to ourselves, that this is the kind of country that we’ve basically ratified?” he asked. “This is the kind of corrupt politician that we are okay with. It has never been the case in American history that we’re okay with it.”
“This election is a referendum on, do we elect someone to the presidency who’s openly been flaunting our laws and been corrupt within our government, selling our government,” Abramoff declared. “Are we okay with that? Now, if the American people say we are okay with it, okay. We just have a very different country, and it’s very disturbing.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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