In her former role as a prosecutor in Hennepin County, MN, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) did not prosecute Ponzi scheme architect — who was her largest campaign donor — Tom Petters, explained Peter Schweizer, author of Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, president of the Government Accountability Institute, and senior contributor at Breitbart News.
Schweizer joined Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow for a special video edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily.
Transcript below:
MARLOW: Another of my favorite reads is the Amy Klobuchar chapter. We know she has a reputation for being the meanest senator, for being incredibly nasty to her staff. Those stories are legion, and you go into a few of them. But I did not know that she voted with Bernie Sanders 88 percent of the time.
SCHWEIZER: Yeah.
MARLOW: And she is responsible for, arguably, covering up the second-biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of the country — behind the Bernie Madoff scheme — because of this guy named [Tom] Petters, who is an ally of Walter Mondale, who was her ally and her mentor.
SCHWEIZER: Amy Klobuchar makes a big deal about the fact — in her memoirs and on the campaign trail — that she was the county prosecutor in Hennepin County, which is [in the] Minneapolis area [of] Minnesota, and she went after financial fraudsters. And she gives these examples, and it’s basically people like Northwest Airlines pilots who claim status as living in another state to avoid paying state income taxes in Minnesota — that’s who she threw the book at.
Who she did not go after was Petters, who ran this company called Petters Worldwide. It ended up being the second-largest — after Bernie Madoff — Ponzi scheme in U.S. history, and there was all kinds of evidence that this was going on. She actually prosecuted people that knew Petters, and she had evidence of what Petters was doing, but she didn’t go after him. And one of the reasons, I believe, is that Petters and his company were the largest campaign contributors to her Senate bid.
Schweizer added, “When [Tom Petters] finally got arrested by the FBI, one of the first calls he made was to Amy Klobuchar, who recommended the lawyer that he ended up hiring.”
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