by JOHN HAYWARD
http://www.breitbart.com/
June 10, 2016
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Clinton Cash author and Breitbart News senior editor Peter Schweizer addressed the criticism that his book plays a “guilt by association” game with the Clintons on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon.
“I didn’t have access to Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails,” he noted, looking back to a previous interview with Shepherd Smith of Fox News. “I don’t have a document that says, ‘We’ll give you money, and I’ll do this in return.’ What, clearly, the book shows is that the flow of money — particularly the flow of foreign funds — dramatically affected Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State.”
“It is about ‘follow the money.’ That’s the greatest route in American politics, right? If you want to find out why a politician is doing something, don’t look at what they say. Look at what they do,” he advised.
Bannon agreed that “follow the money” has been a reliable strategy for uncovering many previous political scandals, ranging from Watergate and Abscam to Iran-Contra. It’s a methodology the media seems eager to employ with everyone except powerful Democratic politicians, especially the Clintons.
Bannon observed that Schweizer has been less partisan than the mainstream media in his investigations, having worked crony-capitalism and corruption stories on both sides of the aisle before Clinton Cash became his most explosive production.
Schweizer said that a “key point,” which makes the Clintons “different than anybody else in American politics today,” is the size and scale of their operation, and the amount of foreign money they raked in.
“They’ve got a net worth now of around $200 million, when they had none in 2001,” he noted. “No American political figure or family has had that dramatic a climb. But even more importantly, the book is not about Goldman Sachs, it’s not about Boeing, it’s not about Big Oil. It’s about foreign companies. It’s about foreign governments and foreign financiers.”
Schweizer said that while Americans have strong disagreements about the role of money in politics, he doubted anyone would think “it’s a good idea to allow foreign entities, and foreign financiers, to give money to our politicians — but that’s precisely what the Clintons have established.”
“If you’re a foreign financier, and you’re trying to get something from the Secretary of State, you can’t give money to a political campaign. You can’t give money to a Super PAC. It’s against the law,” he said. “But you can hire the Secretary of State’s spouse to give an over-inflated speaking fee, and collect a lot of money. Or you can make a large donation to the Clinton Foundation, ten times the amount that you might donate to a Super PAC.”
Bannon cited the billion-dollar commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative by Gilbert Chagoury, who Schweizer described as a “doozy.”
“He doesn’t run an insurance company in London,” Schweizer said. “This is a guy who has climbed to the top in the most corrupt country in the world, which is Nigeria.”
Bannon added that the Nigerian section of the new Clinton Cash documentary film is “difficult to watch.”
“We start with the poverty in Nigeria,” he said of the film, for which he was a writer and producer. “You’ve got little kids eating out of garbage cans, every day. That’s how they exist. And you’ve got guys that run this country, and the warlords around this country, that have stolen so much money, and got it put away in places like Geneva, right, and Bill and Hillary Clinton are in business. They took a billion dollar commitment – one billion dollars. The mainstream media, don’t hear that on CNN. They never asked a question, in 35 hours of debates.”
There are many questions Clinton should be asked about this donation, given her benefactor Chagoury’s “horrific” track record, including an international court conviction for money laundering. “He’s been stealing with both hands from Nigeria,” Bannon declared. “Those little kids are eating out of that garbage can because of guys like this.”
“That’s exactly right, Steve,” Schweizer agreed. “Not only do they take money from guys like Gilbert Chagoury. As we point out, Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State took favorable actions on their behalf. So think about this for a second: Nigeria is the most corrupt country in the world, guys like Gilbert Chagoury are making all of this money. We send them $600 million in taxpayer money, in foreign assistance. Hillary Clinton signed a waiver so that they could continue to receive that aid, even though they were not transparent in how that money was being spent, and where it was going.”
“Absolutely, there was a flow of money, and Hillary Clinton took favorable actions,” he charged. “It did affect the decisions she made as Secretary of State.”
“Absolutely, there was a flow of money, and Hillary Clinton took favorable actions,” he charged. “It did affect the decisions she made as Secretary of State.”
Schweizer looped the Clinton Cash revelations into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. “Here’s the bottom line: Hillary Clinton sent and received 60,000 emails, about, when she was Secretary of State. She deleted more than half of those, and she turned the remainder over to the State Department, and said, ‘The 30,000 I deleted were all personal and private.’ She used examples like ‘this is about Chelsea’s wedding, and this is about yoga.’ Look, nobody sends 30,000 emails on yoga, or on wedding plans,” he said.
“The bottom line is, the deleted emails are precisely emails that relate to these kinds of transactions,” Schweizer asserted. “Meeting with donors, favors for donors, the flow of money, those sorts of issues. This is why the two events are connected. This is why, by the way, the FBI’s investigating both things. They’re investigating the email server. They’re also investigating this very real problem of pay-to-play with the Clinton Foundation, during her tenure as Secretary of State.”
Schweizer said he was preparing some additional analysis of Clinton’s email.
“What we’ve done is looked at the emails, and the ones that have been released, and what you find is that there are these gaps, where she takes a trip somewhere, and there’s several days where she does not send or receive an email, according to those that she’s released,” he revealed. “So the question becomes: really, honestly, she was not communicating with anybody for three days, while she’s Secretary of State, on a foreign trip, meeting with foreign individuals? Or is it more likely that these were deleted emails that were related to Clinton Foundation behavior, and she did not want the public to see those, so they were deleted.”
“It’s going to be a numeric analysis and a content analysis to see what’s really missing from the emails that they’ve released, and claim is the complete set,” he promised.
Schweizer looked forward to a round of media appearances in the days ahead. “Any time you work on fighting corruption, and corruption becomes the center point of a campaign, you’re glad that people are paying attention,” he said.
“This is a center point of the trouble we’re having in the United States. Why are our elected officials unresponsive? It’s because things are good for them. And things are good for them because a lot of them are on the take,” Schweizer declared. “They’re taking favors, they’re taking money. So corruption is a central component, I believe, of the problems we’re having in this country, where our leaders are just detached from us.”
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