Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, discussed the influence foreign donors wield in America through Bill and Hillary Clinton on Breitbart News Daily Wednesday morning.
SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon offered a backhanded salute to the Clintons for tapping into the new breed of wealthy foreign entrepreneurs early on.
“Bill Clinton’s a slick, smart guy,” said Bannon. “He looked out over the world and said, ‘Hey, you have all these billionaires, all these entrepreneurs, and they’re not clubbable… they really can’t get into the U.S. government, and they can’t get relationships, because they’re just not the kind of guys that went to Oxford or Cambridge. They’re not the Party of Davos types… there’s a whole system of international entrepreneurs that have gotten their wealth in various and sundry ways — some appropriate, and some a little less so — and that’s what Clinton set up the Global Initiative, and the Clinton Foundation, really to get access to that capital market.”
“If you think about it, the Clintons are like lots of other politicians. They love money,” Schweizer agreed. “They love taking peoples’ money, and I would say with the Clintons, you kind of have it on steroids.”
“But you have this pesky problem in the United States: you can’t take foreign money for a presidential campaign,” he continued. “It’s against the law. You can’t be a foreign corporation and set up a Super PAC for a campaign… You’ve got these rules in the United States that say foreign entities can’t give. So the Clintons say, ‘Hey, we’ve just got to figure out a way around that.’”
A key part of the Clinton system is the infamous speeches given by Bill and Hillary to foreign interests and corporations seeking favor with the U.S. government, raking in fantastically inflated speaking fees.
“It’s a way, effectively, to get around those campaign laws,” Schweizer explained. “Hillary Clinton running for President in 2008, if you’re a foreign oligarch, you can’t give to her campaign, but you can have Bill Clinton give a 20-minute speech for half a million dollars, or you can make a $5 million donation to the Clinton Foundation, and you’ve got access every bit as much as if you had raised money for their political campaign. That’s really what the Clintons have done.”
Schweizer warned that if the Clinton’s tactics for harvesting foreign cash were not dealt with, they will become commonplace. “You’re gonna have politicians in the future imitating them, setting up their own foundations,” he predicted.
Bannon noted the enormous success of Clinton Cash was due, in part, to Democrats embracing Schweizer’s book, driving up Clinton’s negatives on honesty, and reinforcing the disdain Bernie Sanders voters feel for her as part of a corrupt trans-national machine.
“Everything Democrats love — whether it’s global warming, whether it’s the rainforest, whether it’s environmental initiatives, it’s nuclear proliferation, it’s arms trading, it’s human trafficking — you can go across the board, and you see the punch list of the do-good Left… the Clintons literally monetized the bad guys,” said Bannon.
Schweizer noted there was a significant gulf between the reaction of Democrat voters to the Clinton scandals and the way Democrat politicians running against Clinton handle those issues very gingerly, including Sanders. He found a clear contrast between the delicate Democrat primary and the rambunctious Republican race, using the fate of the Bush dynasty in 2016 as an example.
“We saw what happened on the Republican side. There was not fear, there was not intimidation. For all the criticisms that people have leveled against the Bushes, the fact of the matter is, there has been a free-for-all open primary,” said Schweizer. “Flip that and look at the Democratic side. If you are Bernie Sanders, or you are a Bernie Sanders ally, if you aggressively go after Hillary Clinton, you are going to face retaliation in multiple ways. You’re gonna get retaliation when trying to get something done on Capitol Hill — it’s not gonna happen, because Clinton allies are going to shut you down. If you are an organization, they’re going to sap up your donors.”
“The Clintons function as kind of a political Mafia,” he said, recalling how reporters from major mainstream media outlets told him the consequences of writing a harsh story about the Bushes usually boiled down to “a terse email” complaining about unfair reporting, while reporters who write stories critical of the Clintons are liable to find teams of Clinton political operatives storming into the editor’s office and demanding they be fired.
Schweizer said one of the great lingering questions of the 2016 race was whether Republicans would raise these issues during the general election, unlike the way Clinton’s Democrat opponents have given her a pass. He worried there were already consultants whispering in Republican ears, telling them to ignore Clinton corruption and keep the race focused on issues like tax policy.
That would be a mistake, because as Schweizer observed, “When people elect a President, they are electing a person. The character and the trustworthiness of that person is key.”
“Over fifty percent of Democrats will say that Hillary Clinton does not tell the truth, and they don’t trust her,” he pointed out, adding that Hillary was involved in a deep partnership with someone else American voters have very good reason to distrust: former President Bill Clinton, whose speaking fees “tripled overnight” after his wife became Secretary of State… giving the American people a taste of what will happen if the Clintons are allowed to move back into the White House.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00AM to 9:00AM EST.
You can listen to the full interview with Peter Schweizer below: