Exclusive—Peter Schweizer: Bill Clinton’s Memoir Is Riddled with Errors as the Great Truth Bender from Arkansas Attempts to Rewrite History…Again

Former President Bill Clinton is apparently obsessed with me.

In his new memoir, Citizen: My Life After the White House, Clinton spends at least 1,500 words spread across four chapters accusing me of engineering his wife’s 2016 defeat, an electoral humiliation from which the Democratic Party continues to reel.

Clinton’s tale stands as a masterpiece of prevarication, beginning with his foundational whopper: that my 2015 book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, was “political propaganda designed to help elect far-right wolves in populist clothing.” Patently false.

I began my Clinton Cash investigation in 2013 while Hillary Clinton was still secretary of state—long before she and Donald Trump announced their candidacies. What drew me to the subject was the Clintons’ own financial disclosures (thank you, Bill!) which revealed that torrents of cash ebbed and flowed with the Clintons’ political power.

Particularly jarring was the fact that foreign cash—linked to corrupt countries such as Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine—surged once Hillary was able to affect her benefactors’ diplomatic interests (the obvious purpose of the Clintons’ international money-raising operation was made clear when, after her loss in the 2016 presidential race, donations to their foundation dropped to nearly nil.).

Much of Clinton’s focus is on a key revelation in Clinton Cash regarding the Russian takeover of strategically vital American uranium assets, subsequently confirmed in exposes by the New York Times and the Washington Post. The sale of American uranium to adversarial Russia was alarming enough; what made it scandalous was the fact that several Clinton cronies and megadonors were enriched by the deal. Such a strategically risky transaction required approval by Hillary’s State Department – which was granted.

Clinton baldly claims that there was no scandal there, employing the same dodge that Clinton defenders used when the scandal was first exposed – that Hillary Clinton did not personally approve the uranium deal. That, as the former president knows, is a distinction with no difference. In fact, it is not even a distinction. The required approval was handled by a State staffer who’d later be shown to have close ties to John Podesta, Clinton operative and Hillary’s campaign chairman.

In one of his most preposterous claims, Clinton alleges, falsely, that my “book achieved its larger purpose when, amazingly, The New York Times and The Washington Post joined Fox in signing ‘exclusive’ agreements to use the book as a ‘resource’ for the campaigns, knowing full well whose payroll the author was on and his past work as a right-wing propagandist.”

Clinton somehow hopes you’ll believe that the New York Times, The Washington Post, HuffPost, Bloomberg News, and many other left-leaning or mainstream outlets were operating as part of some vast right-wing conspiracy. He libels these outlets and me by alleging that we somehow colluded to take down his wife’s campaign. I signed no financial “agreements” or “partnerships” with the Times or the Post. That is an absurd lie.

The truth is that those outlets reported on the enormous sum of cash that the Clintons received from foreign governments and businesses—hundreds of millions of dollars in total—because it was and remains a huge conflict-of-interest scandal.

The only notable leftwing news figure who pushed back on my claims was ABC’s George Stephanopoulos (Bill Clinton’s former communications director), who invited me on his Sunday talk show to attack the book, and me. Stephanopoulos did not refute the facts, nor did he reveal to his audience his own glaring conflict of interest: He was himself a major donor to the Clinton Foundation. (It is perhaps worth noting that Stephanopoulos was recently forced to apologize to Donald Trump and pay $15 million in a defamation settlement for statements he made about the President-elect on his show).

Clinton’s memoir is only the latest evidence of the Clinton obsession with Clinton Cash.  A 2023 exhaustive study by The Columbia Journalism Review revealed that in the weeks before my book was published, the Clinton campaign had identified my expose as “the single greatest threat” to Hillary’s candidacy. That conclusion led to a piece of political mischief that had profound historical consequences. To counter the narrative that the Clintons had compromised American security in the uranium deal, the campaign designed a dirty tricks effort that evolved into the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, which dogged Trump’s first presidential term.

Bill Clinton’s purpose in writing Citizen: My Life After the White House may have been to burnish the Clinton brand at a moment when Democrats could use the savvy and raw political instinct of the old Clinton. But Clintonism, for all of its political utility, cannot be separated from the persons of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and will forever be marred by a history of scandal, no matter how many rewrites the Clintons and their allies attempt.

Peter Schweizer is the president of the Government Accountability Institute, Breitbart Senior Contributor, and the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans and Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich