Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and Breitbart News senior contributor-at-large, has described the Democrat-led congressional subpoenas of Deutsche Bank’s financial records related to Trump family business as a “fishing expedition.” He offered his analysis on Wednesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.
Schweizer said, “This really swirls around the fact that Deutsche Bank — which has had all sorts of problems with regulators in the United States and in Europe — has been really the lender of choice for the Trumps going back for quite some time. So the Trumps have relied on Deutsche Bank for funding a lot of their projects. Deutsche Bank, at the same time, has had all sorts of problems involving allegations of money-laundering and fraud, money coming out of Russia, et cetera. There’s no evidence that there’s a link between them, but I think the hope and the desire and the dream of a lot of Trump critics is that somehow they can join them together.”
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Schweizer noted how “high-end real estate” in America’s largest cities is used by foreign oligarchs — including those from Arab states, Russia, and China — to shelter ill-gotten funds as secure assets outside of their home countries. Opponents of President Donald Trump, he speculated, hope to link the president’s family business — particularly the Trump Organization’s luxury accommodations — to such foreign wealth transfers.
Schweizer stated, “”What’s unprecedented about this is, I don’t know of case where Congress or an independent counsel or whoever has ever gone back and looked at the private transactions of a public official before they became a public official. That’s unprecedented. Even if you look at the Whitewater case involving the Clintons, Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, and the concern was that they were leveraging their public office for their personal enrichment.”
“This is, to my mind, unprecedented,” continued Schweizer. “To go back and say, ‘We want to look at your private business transactions from ten years ago, well before you were even a candidate,’ is unprecedented. I don’t know of any other historical example of this.”
“This, to me, has all the hallmarks of a fishing expedition,” assessed Schweizer. “In other words, let’s get the information and then figure out what to do with this.”
The Democrat majority in Congress is using its investigative power to search for a crime, determined Schweizer. “I look at this now, and I don’t see an underlying allegation or serious allegation of misconduct that would reflect upon the president’s conduct, now. That’s why I think this is definitely a bridge too far, based on what we know now from Congress. If you don’t have an underlying serious chain of events that lead to allegations of criminal conduct, you can’t just say, ‘I don’t like this person. Let’s go through their records and find what we can.”
Schweizer concluded, “That’s the old saying that was said about dirty cops: ‘You find the man — I don’t like this guy — then you find the crime.'”
On Monday, Trump sued Deutsche Bank and Capital One to stop the banks from responding to subpoenas from Democrat-controlled congressional committees.
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