Members of Congress and their staffs are on red alert tonight for a CBS 60 Minutes investigation by veteran CBS reporter Steve Kroft and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer exposing how lawmakers convert campaign donations into lavish lifestyle upgrades for themselves and their family members.
Sources say top CBS executives thought the report was so explosive that they made it the show’s lead story and delayed airing it for another week in order to capture tonight’s much larger NFL-viewing audience. The report features selected revelations from Schweizer’s forthcoming book, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets.
“I’m under a publisher embargo right now and can’t say much,” Schweizer told Breitbart News. “But suffice it to say, President Obama and some members of Washington’s Permanent Political Class are not going to like what we uncovered and the kinds of personal enrichment and self-dealing exposed in Extortion.”
To prevent early leaks of the book’s contents, publisher Houghton Mifflin made bookstore managers sign legal affidavits saying they would not shelve Extortion until the book’s official Tuesday, October 22 launch date. The book, which contains a staggering 35 pages of source materials totaling over 600 endnotes, is chock-full of revelations and never-before-released documents on top Washington figures, says Houghton Mifflin.
According to the publisher’s description, the new book “reveals vast new areas of corruption in our political system” and contains “eye-opening revelations on every page,” while opening “a whole new battlefield in the great war to fix what’s wrong with our government.”
In 2011, Kroft and Schweizer teamed up for a 60 Minutes investigation based on Schweizer’s New York Times bestseller, Throw Them All Out. The results rocked official Washington, as the exposé revealed that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was given insider access to the Visa credit card IPO, wherein she made a 50% profit on her investment in just two days. The report also alleged that Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) engaged in insider trading, prompting an ethics investigation and Bachus stepping down from his chairmanship of the Financial Services Committee. Schweizer’s book ultimately led to passage of the STOCK (Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge) Act banning congressional insider trading. Throw Them All Out was “the book that started the STOCK Act stampede,” reported Slate.
Schweizer, a noted conservative and fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has gained a national reputation for his bipartisan corruption investigations, attacking Democrats and Republicans alike. Earlier this year, progressive Comedy Central host Jon Stewart of the Daily Show featured Schweizer in a segment on the STOCK Act wherein Stewart criticized Congress for watering down the bill Schweizer’s book helped pass.
Schweizer and GAI worked with 60 Minutes for six months on tonight’s program. On Friday, CBS hosts Charlie Rose and Norah O’Donnell sat down with Kroft to discuss the soon-to-air report. O’Donnell called GAI’s Peter Schweizer one of “the top campaign finance watchdogs” in America.
The 60 Minutes joint investigation by Kroft and GAI President Peter Schweizer airs tonight on CBS.
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