Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) is “not nearly as moderate as she claims to be” and has a well-documented history of practicing her own brand of crony capitalism and selectively pursuing white-collar crimes while protecting her allies, Breitbart News senior contributor and author of the New York Times bestseller Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite Peter Schweizer explained during a Monday appearance on Breitbart News Daily.
Klobuchar, whose campaign has experienced a second wind after a strong third-place finish in New Hampshire’s Democrat primary, is hoping to build on that momentum and has been presenting herself as a more moderate choice on the campaign trail. However, that is far from the truth, as Schweizer explained on Monday.
As detailed in Profiles in Corruption, Klobuchar has voted with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — her ultra-progressive challenger — 88 percent of the time, and she happens to be one of the top recipients of corporate campaign donations in all of the U.S. Senate, Schweizer noted.
As Schweizer explained, Klobuchar “pulls that off” by practicing a “brand of crony capitalism.”
“There are numerous examples where, you know, a particular company or, you know, a smaller industry — the executives will get together and she’ll get a couple dozen donations from a company over a two or three day period,” he explained. “And then within a couple of weeks, she’ll introduce legislation that specifically benefits that corporation. That’s one of the reasons she’s been such a prolific fundraiser.”
Breitbart News reported on some of the examples laid out by Schweizer in Profiles in Corruption:
A prime example of this occurred in May 2011 when Klobuchar introduced legislation to deter internet piracy. Although Klobuchar was first-term senator mainly known her being “Minnesota nice,” the bill sparked widespread controversy
The legislation’s critics alleged it was draconian, pointing to a provision in the bill that made it a felony to illegally stream TV shows or films off the internet. One of the most prominent critics, the pop star Justin Bieber, even suggested that Klobuchar was the one who deserved to be “locked up” for proposing such a strict law.
The response from the entertainment industry, though, was exactly the opposite. Many industry executives not only lined up behind the bill, but it seems that many had already begun favoring Klobuchar even before its introduction.
“In the ninety days before she introduced the bill, something unusual started happening,” Schweizer writes. “Over a one-week period in February, seven executives from 20th Century Fox sent her donations. Three more wrote her checks in March.”
But Schweizer says Klobuchar’s problems go even deeper.
“For a Democrat party that’s become very progressive and let’s say ‘woke,’ she has spent a lot of her political career essentially turning a blind eye or doing the bidding of very large powerful financial interests,” Schweizer told Breitbart News Daily host and Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow.
Schweizer used the Minnesota lawmaker’s role as Hennepin County’s chief prosecutor, and her failure to pursue crimes that involved her own political allies, as another example.
“She highlights the fact that she prosecutes many white-collar criminal cases. A lot of those cases were pretty small fish, to be honest. But the whale that she encountered when she was prosecutor is a guy named Tom Petters, who ran the second-largest Ponzi scheme in American political history,” Schweizer said. “While she went after the small fish, she never went after Petters. And we went through a lot of the legal cases and documents involving this.”
“She went after some of his partners, she went after other people that were doing similar sorts of things but never went after Petters,” he continued, adding that Petters happened to be “her largest donor when she ran for the Senate.”
As Breitbart News detailed:
Klobuchar’s unwillingness to look into Petters coincided with a time their professional relationship was flourishing.
When Klobuchar first ran for county attorney in 1998, Petters and his associates only donated $8,500 to her campaign. By the time she was running for the United States Senate in 2006, Petters had emerged as one of Klobuchar’s most prolific financial backers. During that campaign alone, the Ponzi scheme operator donated more than $120,000, earning him the designation of being one of Klobuchar’s single largest campaign contributors.
The donations also seemed to signal a strong personal relationship. When the FBI finally caught up to the illegal operation and raided Petters’ office and home in 2008, he admitted on a wire-tap recording that Klobuchar had called him in the aftermath. Even though the confines of that conversation were never made public, the events that followed seemed to indicate Klobuchar was sympathetic to the plight of her longtime donor.
Further, Klobuchar’s mentor, former Vice President Walter Mondale, had “two sons that were actually working for Tom Petters,” which, as Schweizer noted, raises further questions.
“So you not only have the financial fact that Petters and his associates are donating to her campaign, you have the fact that her mentor Walter Mondale’s family is kind of fused at the hip with Tom Petters, which I think added to this sense that they had a certain level of protection or cover because Tom Petters knew the right people in her social circle,” he explained.
When Petters was finally arrested and charged, he called Klobuchar in D.C., who “gave him legal advice on how to try to counter the charges,” Schweizer noted.
“That certainly does not fit the image that she wants to portray, and it raises all kinds of questions about, you know, this selective enforcement or the selective prosecution of crimes,” he added.
The mounting questions surrounding Klobuchar’s prosecutorial and political past come as she seeks to build on the momentum from her success in New Hampshire ahead of the upcoming Nevada caucuses and South Carolina primary.