Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, joined Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM with host Stephen K. Bannon Friday morning to talk about the new documentary film based on his book.
Schweizer, who has written a series of similar books about the corruption of America’s political class, said the Clintons “are better at than anyone else, but everyone’s doing it.”
He charged that members of the political class are “systematically selling out the interests of the country for personal profit.”
“We’ve got all these laws that prevent politicians from taking campaign donations, PAC dollars from foreign companies and foreign governments,” Schweizer explained. “It’s against the law, and everybody agrees it should be against the law. Well, the Clintons set up this thing called the Clinton Foundation, and Bill hit the lecture circuit. So, if you were a foreign oligarch or a foreign government, and you want to put money in the pocket of the Clintons, and persuade them to take actions for your benefit, you could now do so.”
“This is unprecedented,” he declared. “We’ve never had a situation where the spouse of America’s chief diplomat, the spouse of the Secretary of State, was going around the world collecting $750,000 to give a 20-minute speech, from governments and from entities that literally had business sitting on the desk of the State Department at the same time – and who got favorable actions.”
“So when I say ‘selling out the country,’ what I mean is, it’s for profit. It’s a transaction. It’s all the concerns we have that are legitimate about Goldman Sachs, and Boeing, persuading our leaders to take actions for their benefit,” Schweizer continued. “Magnify that now, and include foreign governments and foreign entities, because the Clintons have perfected this mechanism for taking money from them.”
Bannon noted the Clintons’ corruption was well-understood by Barack Obama and his powerful “enforcer” Valerie Jarrett, with the latter particularly nervous about exposing Obama to the toxic exhaust from the Clinton money machine.
“That’s exactly right,” Schweizer agreed. “A condition for Hillary Clinton to become Secretary of State was that Team Clinton had to sign with Team Obama a memorandum of understanding that laid out that you were going to disclose all your donors, that you were going to have speech proposals for Bill Clinton screened by government officials. And as we point out in the book, that memorandum of understanding was basically ignored by the Clintons.”
“By the way, here’s what’s so interesting about this problem, and this challenge,” he said. “With the book Clinton Cash, and with the film, you’ve had everyone from Donald Trump to Larry Lessig – Larry Lessig, who I know has been on your show, he’s a progressive professor of law at Harvard law school. You’ve had everyone from him, to Donald Trump, and everyone in the middle, look at this and say, ‘This is rank corruption. This is terrible, awful stuff that needs to be dealt with.’”
“So the facts are the facts, and what the Clintons have tried to do, of course, is dismiss it, as they always do, as a right-wing smear or a right-wing attack. The problem is that we gave this material early on to the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and they ran stories. In the case of the New York Times, a 4,000-word front-page story, confirming exactly what we found. So the facts are not in dispute. The question is, what are the American people going to do about it? And, more broadly, what are we going to do in the future, to create laws and restrictions, so this sort of thing can’t keep happening?” Schweizer asked.
Bannon noted the extreme contradiction between Hillary Clinton’s infamous assertion that she and Bill were “dead broke” when leaving the White House in 2001, ostensibly due to the legal fees associated with Bill’s perjury and infidelity, and their net worth of over $150 million less than 15 years later – when neither of them were involved with any successful business ventures, and Hillary Clinton’s salary as Secretary of State was nowhere near the level required to accumulate such a vast fortune.
Schweizer said it was clear how that fortune was built: “They did it by selling influence, and selling access.”
“They didn’t start a business or company. They didn’t create jobs for people, where they’re producing, you know, goods and services that people are buying in the marketplace because they love,” he noted. “They made the bulk of their money by Bill Clinton giving, quote-unquote, ‘paid speeches’ where he’s paid these inflated fees.”
“Now those fees rise and fall, depending on what Hillary’s job was,” Schweizer continued. “He was getting about $175,000 for a speech, which is a lot of money, while she was a powerful senator. After he left the White House, she ran for the Senate in New York. Once she became Secretary of State, bar the door – his speaking fees go up threefold. And they go up because you’ve got foreign governments, and foreign companies, that now suddenly had never paid him for a speech before, now suddenly want to pay him $500,000, $700,000, $750,000 for a speech.”
“Now, the Clintons will say, ‘It’s just these people love us. That’s why they did it,’” he scoffed. “Everybody with an ounce of common sense knows there’s a reason his speaking fees went up when she became Secretary of State, and why foreign entities started paying them that had never paid them before.”
The really big score for the Clintons came with a massive uranium deal, a story that has become infamous since Clinton Cash exposed it, and Clinton-friendly major media outlets failed to refute a single word of it.
“It’s all about access, influence, and power,” Schweizer explained. “So they get the speaking fees, and then they get placed on the boards of companies that are, let’s just say, sketchy in the way that they do their business model. The uranium deal is a perfect example of that. You basically have a group of Canadian investors, who own 20% of our uranium assets in this country, and wanted to sell it to the Russian government. To get the Russian government to be able to buy that uranium, it had to be approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department.”
“So lo and behold, Steve, you had nine investors in this small Canadian company, you had an outbreak of philanthropy – all of a sudden, spontaneously – and they all decided at the same time, this would be a great time to give money to the Clinton Foundation. So they gave $145 million,” he said with an ironic chuckle.
Schweizer described the Clinton Foundation as a “black hole where money gets shifted around,” and the Foundation “never quite tells you exactly what they’re doing with the money,” beyond vague mission statements like “we’re facilitating poverty alleviation in Africa, or we’re facilitating children getting immunizations.” It’s never clear what “facilitating” actually means.
“You’ll see pictures of Chelsea and Bill with a sick child in Africa, and it’s a very touching picture, but the Clinton Foundation actually doesn’t do hands-on work with children in Africa, or Asia, or anywhere,” he pointed out.
Bannon made the devastating charge from Schweizer’s work that Clinton’s nominal primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, could never quite bring himself to utter: on every issue supposedly near and dear to the hearts of liberal activists and millennials, the Clintons “work with the worst people in the world on other side of the transaction, to make money and put it in their own pocket.”
Bannon called it a “national disgrace” that the media never conducted the kind of investigation Schweizer did, to expose the Clintons’ corruption, and that some Republicans have expressed a willingness to accept Hillary Clinton as President if the alternative is Donald Trump.
“People have to make individual choices when they vote,” said Schweizer. “But when you look at what the Clintons have done to the country, when they monetize everything to their benefit – when they are willing to do deals with people that are cutting deals with warlords in Africa, with oligarchs around the world, to sell uranium to the Russian government – I don’t know how you can compare that to anybody on the national stage in politics. It’s unprecedented.”
He added that Clinton corruption ties into the concerns many Americans have expressed about our “eroding sovereignty.”
“We have no sovereignty if the leadership is prepared to sell things in the United States for a price, and that’s what the Clintons unfortunately are prepared to do,” Schweizer warned.
He also warned voters not to accept the “everybody does it” dodge from Clinton apologists, because the Clintons are corrupt on a scale beyond anyone else in American politics.
“No national leader has ever done this – has taken money from foreign governments, foreign financiers, and foreign corporations while they are in public office, and making decisions for the benefit of those entities, and at the expense of the United States. It’s never been done,” he declared.”
Furthermore, Schweizer warned that this “extends beyond the Clintons,” because “if the Clintons were to go away from the national stage tomorrow, somebody else could replicate and do exactly what the Clintons have done, because the precedent has now been set.”
“We have to stop this precedent, or five years from now, you could have a Secretary of Defense, the SecDef, putting their spouse on the lecture circuit, taking money from foreign governments, set up a private foundation – and have all these foreign entities that the Secretary of Defense is supposed to make decisions about, getting large checks from those people. That’s where we’re headed, because of what the Clintons have done,” he predicted.
“This goes beyond ‘I don’t like Bill and Hillary.’ This goes to the future integrity of decision-making in this country,” Schweizer concluded.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00AM to 9:00AM EST.
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