Schweizer: No Comparison Between Hunter Biden and Trump Family Business

The sweetheart deals Hunter Biden’s private equity firm secured with foreign governments while his father was vice president are not comparable to the Trump family’s real estate empire, which predated President Trump’s election, the Government Accountability Institute’s Peter Schweizer told SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight.

In an interview last week, Schweizer, the bestselling author of Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, addressed the accusation that the Trump’s family business, currently managed by President Trump’s adult sons, is the same as the lucrative deals Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, received from foreign governments at a time when Vice President Biden served as the Obama administration’s point person negotiating U.S. policy with those countries.

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“I’m one of the people that has said, look, this issue of the Trump family and their investments, there needs to be continued accountability there and monitoring there. We don’t want any abuses to occur,” Schweizer said. “But I think people that come up to me and say, ‘Well what about the Trumps?’ – there’s a stark difference here. And that stark difference is that the Trump’s have a corporate empire with golf courses and hotels and with condos and with other things that has been in existence far before Donald Trump ever announced his campaign for presidency. It’s the family business. It’s like if Michael Bloomberg ran as a Democrat for president of the United States, and he became president. He would come with his business empire.”

Schweizer continued, “What we’re talking about with the Bidens in the case of China is completely totally different because Hunter Biden, before his father was vice president, was a lobbyist. He was a lobbyist for the online gambling industry and I’m sure that takes a certain skill set. But it has no skill set related to what he does soon after his father becomes vice president of the United States, which is he goes into a completely different profession and area, which is private equity, and he starts doing deals around the world. He does them in China. There is certainly the one in Ukraine.”

“So my point is the Trumps are in the business that they were in long before [Trump] ever announced he was going to be president,” he continued. “And they have agreed to say, ‘We’re not going to do any new major deals overseas.’ And we certainly need to hope that they honor that, and it needs to be watched. But in the case of the Bidens you’re talking about saying, ‘We’re going into a new line of business in which we have no background right after Dad becomes vice president, and we’re going to strike these deals with foreign governments in the case of China.’”

“This deal that they got with the Chinese government to establish this company Bohai Harvest RST is really really unusual,” Schweizer explained. “It was set up in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, which allows the money invested to flow in and out of the country. No other investment firm had this deal – not Goldman Sachs, not Deutsche Bank, not J.P. Morgan. It was unique. And so the question has to be asked: Why, oh why, of all the private equity firms in the world did the Chinese government select this small boutique firm that had only been around for a couple of years that was headed by a guy with no background? Why did they give him the deal and not give it to Deutsche Bank or Goldman or anyone else? I think we all know the answer to that.”

“So, to me, yes, there are certainly legitimate questions and issues that people can raise about conflicts of interest or deals involving the Trumps,” he said. “But really purely by looking at them for ten minutes, you realize the issues with the Biden case are far, far, far more troubling because of the nature of them, the scope of them, and who they are involved with.”

Schweizer also noted that the Biden family’s business deals with foreign governments have compromised them because their financial existence is contingent on these foreign governments. That is not the case with the Trump family real estate business, which was formed independently of Trump’s political rise.

“The fact is the Biden family’s financial fortunes are now really tied up with the good graces of the Chinese government,” Schweizer said. “If you look at the Trumps, you’ve got people staying in their hotel from around the world. If one foreign government gets mad and says we’re not going to stay in the Trump hotel again, it does not have the kind of financial economic effect that the Bidens upsetting or angering the Chinese government might have on the future economic fortunes of Hunter Biden.”

Breitbart News Tonight airs Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).