Breitbart News senior contributor and Government Accountability Institute’s Peter Schweizer said on this week’s broadcast of FNC’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that the mainstream media has a “stunning disconnect” into investigations into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s Chinese business deals.
Partial transcript as follows:
BARTIROMO: Miranda, let me kick it off with you, get your reaction to that statement from Ron Johnson. Cathay Bank was the only bank to provide any records. We spoke with Cathay Bank. This is Chinese Americans who founded this bank, and they serve the Chinese American community. They say they have nothing to do with the CCP, Miranda.
MIRANDA DEVINE: Yes, I think that the banks have been very difficult.
And to extract these bank records from them, even though fully lawfully and with a subpoena, I know that James Comer’s Oversight Committee did have some resistance, although that is now declining. And they seem to be getting full cooperation from most of the banks.
And they are just methodically going through forensically, finding the money trail that shows the huge, millions of dollars, huge sums coming from China, as well as other countries into Biden family coffers. And the wire that you just mentioned is particularly notable, because it’s — obviously, the payments have been made in a way to disguise them.
They were funneled, first of all, through a proxy, through Rob Walker, the Biden family intimate. And then they were parceled out over three months in small increments to five different accounts associated with four different Biden family members, immediate family members of Joe Biden.
And this money was paid just a few weeks after Joe Biden was no longer the vice president. And it was money paid to the Biden family for work they had done in the last two years of his vice presidency. So, it’s very fishy. And there’s plenty more where that came from.
BARTIROMO: Peter, you have new information in terms of this story, the cover-up of Biden family influence peddling
PETER SCHWEIZER: Yes. My colleague Seamus Bruner just came out with a story a couple of days ago looking at how the Biden family operates internally when it comes to these kinds of dealings. In this particular case, it involves the Biden Center set up at the University of Delaware.
And in the internal discussion among family members with the universities and with intermediaries, they talk about the fact that, how are the salaries going to be disbursed? They talk about the fact that they don’t want, actually, Joe Biden himself to sign on to the memorandum of understanding for the center that’s named after him. They want a family member to do it instead. And then there’s a discussion about disbursing the spoils.
Just to piggyback on what Miranda said, these financial transactions involving China are fishy in so many ways, not only the fact that it involves intermediaries, but when you look at the e-mails, you look at the sort of agreements around the transfer of these funds, they don’t entail, really, any sort of business work on behalf of the Bidens.
And when Hunter Biden responded to the release of these recent records by the committee, his lawyer saying that these are good-faith seed money from the Chinese businessmen, seed money is to invest in a business. It’s to start a business. It’s to rent an office. It’s to hire people. It’s not to parcel out to family members.
So I think we’re going to see this pattern repeated again and again and again. And just because their lawyers make up, I would argue, terminology as to what the nature of those funds were, we should not be dissuaded, and we need to keep moving forward.
BARTIROMO: Well, I mean, the point on this program, before you all joined me, was election interference, Miranda.
It doesn’t feel like Democrats get in any trouble with election interference. We saw it with the Biden laptop before the election a few years ago, where the FBI worked with Twitter to suppress truth.
DEVINE: Yes, this is their M.O. Whenever they’re in trouble, whenever there is corruption or some other scandal to cover up, they will just blow smoke on the other side, and particularly when it comes to Donald Trump.
I mean, election interference — what better election interference is there that we can see now than the leading candidate for the Republicans is being sort of legally persecuted with these weaponized, fake prosecutions, starting off with Alvin Bragg in Manhattan.
And, of course, the leaks, who knows where they came from about this upcoming indictment of Donald Trump came two weeks ago, just 24 hours after those bank records were revealed by James Comer, a bombshell story, if you ever saw one, in the Hunter Biden laptop saga. And yet it was just buried and disappeared under the avalanche of Trump news.
BARTIROMO: Yes. And I’m wondering if the influence peddling is happening as we speak in plain sight.
I mean, look at Hunter Biden’s artwork, displayed among the best out there in New York this week. We don’t know who’s buying this art, Peter, because they have made a decision to say, oh, well, in the face of all of these questions, we’re just not going to say who is the buyer of the art.
SCHWEIZER: Well, yes, that’s right.
I mean, let’s remember, in 2019, the Senate Banking Committee issued a report on how the art world was rife with money laundering and corruption. And so Hunter Biden has tapped into an industry where he can accept money in payment for — quote, unquote — “art” at whatever sum they want it to be. And there’s no disclosure requirements.
And here’s the problem. Look, I mean, you can look at the Trump case and you contrast it with the Hunter Biden case. Hunter Biden has already essentially admitted that he committed crimes. I mean, let’s remember, in 2018, this grand jury was convened. They were looking into tax evasion charges, among other things, involving Hunter Biden.
Hunter Biden gets a family friend to pay $2 million to the IRS, basically an admission that he didn’t pay taxes he was supposed to. That’s not a defense against tax evasion. And yet here we are three years later. The media is not interested in that story.
BARTIROMO: Yes.
SCHWEIZER: They’re not interested in the other things that the grand jury was looking that. So it’s a stunning disconnect with the mainstream media.
BARTIROMO: And the other things include that everybody in the country has seen Hunter Biden smoking illegal crack with a hooker, waving an illegal gun obtained illegally. And that came and went as well.
Miranda, final word from you. At this point, what should we be focused on this week as Trump gets ready to surrender?
DEVINE: Well, I don’t think that we should be losing sight of all the scandals and disasters of the Biden administration.
This is just, again, allowing Joe Biden to hide in the basement. He becomes more popular the less people see of him. And, obviously, this is the M.O. for the Democrats for the upcoming 2024 election. They just want to soften up, damage, distract Donald Trump. I mean, that of course, galvanizes the base for him and probably ensures that he wins the nomination.
But then they will just — the entire campaign will be filled up with negative legal stories about him, and allowing Joe Biden…
BARTIROMO: Yes.
DEVINE: … to hide away as — the sort of the perfect cleanskin.
BARTIROMO: Yes, it’s the same as when President Trump was in office, and he had to constantly be on defense, saying: I did not collude with Russia.
DEVINE: Yes.
BARTIROMO: He should have been focused on China, which he was. It was incredible how much he got done, even while constantly defending he didn’t collude with Russia.
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