Peter Schweizer’s Red Handed exposes how U.S. elites—from Bill Gates (investing in Chinese weapons-linked firms) to Joe Biden (Hunter’s $31M from China-linked donors)—enable Beijing’s rise, with bipartisan figures like Feinstein and McConnell’s in-laws profiting from state-backed deals. Silicon Valley giants Google and Microsoft fund AI for Chinese military labs while Musk praises authoritarian efficiency, revealing "elite capture" where corporate and political ties prioritize profit over national security. Schweizer demands divestment and bipartisan action, framing resistance as a patriotic duty against China’s strategic dominance. [Automatically generated summary]
So I am reading this book, Red Handed, How American Elites Get Rich, Helping China Win by Peter Schweizer.
Peter is the president of the Government Accountability Institute, and the book debuted at the top of the New York Times bestseller list.
And that is not that surprising.
This is a deeply researched, deeply wide scope book about the influence that China has on some of the top people in this country.
And it's really shocking.
Peter, thank you for coming on.
Great piece of journalism.
I mean, it really is riveting stuff.
And as I was saying before we came on, I wish I could say I enjoy it.
I don't quite enjoy it, but it is riveting.
So let me begin with this.
You know, I've known a lot of businessmen over the years, especially in the 2000s into the 2010, who would travel to China regularly with no qualms of conscience, conservative, patriotic guys who were sharing information and technology with them.
And kind of the government was saying this is a good thing to do.
What is the difference between that and what is in this book?
Well, I think a couple of things.
And Andrew, it's great to be on with you.
I'm a big fan of your written work over the years.
I think a couple of things have changed between what I'm talking about.
First is the time that we're talking about.
In my mind, things really changed in China substantially when President Xi came to power in 2011, 2012.
I think before that, you could sort of argue or make the case or hope that through more trade, more technology transfer, China would become more liberal.
When Xi rose to power, that changed everything.
It showed that that was a myth, that that was not true, because Xi has taken the country the opposite direction, more repressive, more aggressive, more focused on surpassing the United States than China was before.
So my argument would be it was maybe a little more defensible to think that things would turn out well in China 20 years ago.
You cannot make that case in the past 10 years.
China's Evolving Influence00:15:50
Anybody who's paying attention knows that.
The second, I think, important part of the puzzle, though, is what I'm really focused on in the book is individuals in the United States on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley that aren't just doing trade with China, they're actually engaged in activities that are very directly and specifically helping the Chinese military-industrial complex.
Now, people could say, well, in China, it's kind of blurred, and it is kind of blurred, but you're talking about people like Bill Gates who are actually investing in specific companies that are known, known publicly to be building military weapons-related systems for the Chinese military.
And that, to me, takes it to a higher level than somebody who is engaging in commerce with China because of labor costs or whatever.
China seems, you know, I talk a lot about the fact that there aren't that many real big, widespread conspiracies in the world, but there are a lot of conspiracies of interest where everybody has the same interests and it's not the interest they say.
China seems to be creating those.
It seems to be creating a system in which to disentangle yourself from China means to sacrifice your success and your wealth and so much.
Let's begin by talking about the Bidens.
Do we at this point know?
I mean, it's pretty obvious that Hunter Biden has been influence peddling his whole life.
I mean, that seems to be his profession.
Do we know now for a fact that Joe Biden is part of this?
Yeah, I mean, there's no question in my mind.
So in 2018, I first broke the story that Hunter Biden was doing deals in China and places like Russia.
And at that time, it wasn't clear.
All we had were corporate records, financial records from China and elsewhere.
And we sort of put together the pattern of behavior, showed what Hunter Biden was doing, what his dad was doing.
With the Hunter Biden laptop and with the email collection of one of Hunter Biden's business partners, a guy named Bevan Cooney, who gave us access to his GML account.
There's simply no question anymore.
We know for a fact that Joe Biden not only aided and helped Hunter Biden in his overseas business schemes.
We also know that Joe Biden is a direct beneficiary of those deals.
When Joe Biden stands up and says, I've never taken a foreign dollar in my life, could be technically true, but it's true because he's simply laundering it through his son, Hunter Biden.
The emails show without question that they have commingled finances.
They have intermingled, intertwined finances, whatever words you want to use, that Hunter Biden was taking the foreign money.
He was paying some of Joe Biden's monthly bills, but he was also paying some of his other bills like renovations on his home in Delaware.
So Joe Biden's a beneficiary financially, but we also know that Joe Biden was meeting with Hunter Biden's paymasters overseas.
He was also meeting with prospective business partners.
These were done in such a way when Joe Biden was vice president of the United States that they were off the books.
They didn't appear on the White House visitors logs.
But we know for a fact based on Chinese documents, for example, that those meetings took place.
So in my mind, all of the denials by Joe Biden, all the equivocations, all of the changing stories point to the simple fact that this is not a Hunter Biden story anymore.
It is a Biden family story with Joe Biden at the center of it.
And when Biden gets up and he's running for president and he says to people, you know, come on, folks, they're not going to steal our lunch.
These are good folks over there in China.
Is there any sign to you that this guy has, I don't want to use the word awakened because I'm not sure he's ever done that, but like that he is now aware that the people who are paying him are bad guys who actually have designs on our country?
Is there any sign to you that he has a lot of people?
Yeah, no, that's a great question, Andrew.
I mean, to my mind, there's no question he's always known to some extent that China is a rival to the United States.
Because look, when he was vice president under Barack Obama, Barack Obama's administration had a recalibration, a repositioning of U.S. military forces away from Europe and towards the Asia-Pacific region.
And there were people in the Obama administration that says China is the rising threat we need to be worried about.
So Joe Biden was getting those briefings.
He knew about those policies, but he never really embraced them.
So he knows that.
I think it's also very clear, too, the other interesting revelation that's come out with this new information, the Hunter Biden laptop and the Bevan Cooney emails, is who actually made the deals happen for Hunter Biden in China.
One could have the impression, Andrew, that this was just kind of a, you know, Hunter Biden sort of bumped around in Beijing and Shanghai and these deals just kind of happened because of who his dad was.
If you go back and look, there are basically four Chinese businessmen who made those deals happen for the Biden family, some $31 million.
Every single one of those businessmen, I talk about it in detail in the book, have links to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence.
So this is not some random event or some low-level grifting by the Bidens.
This was a concerted effort by Beijing to engage in what they call elite capture, which is to make foreign elites, particularly political elites, beholden to them, dependent upon them financially.
And that's exactly what was going on here.
And if they had spent 25 minutes on Google trying to figure out who these guys were in China that were giving them these deals, they would have known who these individuals are.
They chose not to do that or they chose to do it.
They knew who they were and they didn't care.
So to my mind, naivete on Joe Biden's part is just simply not something that you can even consider at this point, given the abundance of evidence.
We're talking to Peter Schweizer about his book, Red Handed, How American Elites Get Rich, Helping China Win.
And just to be clear, you talk about the book.
Some of these guys who are paying Hunter Biden money, which I guess goes to the Biden family, are discussing how they can win a naval battle with us in the China Sea because we have oil wells there that'll blow up and that fire will help them.
So this is serious business.
Talk a little bit about what's going on in Congress.
I mean, Dianne Feinstein knows that she had a Chinese spy.
I'm laughing, but it's not that funny.
I mean, she knows she has a Chinese spy in her employ and nothing, there doesn't seem to have been any consequences to that whatsoever.
Or am I wrong about that?
No, you're right.
I mean, this is part of the problem.
I mean, this strategy of elite capture that Beijing has, that's the term Chinese intelligence uses, works very effectively because what they basically do is they look at political figures in the United States or New Zealand and Australia and other parts of the world and say, if we can make these people serious money, they will be beholden to us.
They will have leverage.
Diane Feinstein's a classic example of it.
She was for a long period of time the chairman of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, which means she had access to the highest level secrets in the United States.
While she was doing that, her husband, Richard Blum, who sad to say recently passed away, was getting mega deals in Beijing from Chinese state-backed entities.
And that really grew out of the fact that Dianne Feinstein and her husband had a very close personal relationship with Zhang Zi Min, who was the premier of China for quite a bit of the time in the 1990s and early 2000s.
And he really opened the doors for them.
So if you look at some of the accounts of the deals that Feinstein's husbands got, many of them are first of a kind deals.
No other businessman has been given this deal in China.
And it helped make them very wealthy.
And to show the contrast, Andrew, of how bizarre the situation is, at the time she is the chairwoman of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, her husband, Richard Blum, has a major stake in a Chinese computer tech company called Legend that ends up selling laptops to the U.S. military.
God knows how that happened.
But it turns out the Marine Corps discovers, surprise, surprise, that these laptops are all bugged.
So the spouse of the chairman of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee is neck deep in a company selling bugged laptops to the U.S. military.
That shows the kind of paradox of what we're talking about here.
And Feinstein's not alone.
I talk about Nancy Pelosi.
I talk about on the Republican side, Senator Mitch McConnell and his in-laws, the Chow family.
Beijing is very opportunistic about this.
They don't care if you're Republican or Democrat.
If you're willing to play ball and if you're willing to help them on the big things, they don't mind if you critique them for human rights or for the Uyghurs.
As long as you help them with the really big things, they are very, very happy.
The translation from the Chinese to the English is what they're looking for is big help with a little bad mouth.
And that's what these politicians are essentially giving them.
They'll ding them for something like human rights, but they basically support giving Beijing unfettered access to our technology and to our capital markets and to our markets to sell their goods.
And if you give them those things, they are happy to give you deals to make you and your family very wealthy.
You know, to stick with the politics for just a minute, you mentioned Mitch McConnell.
That was going to be my next question.
This is not entirely a partisan thing.
I mean, this is something that goes, is there anybody besides Donald Trump who's willing to call this out?
Is there anyone in either party who you find, well, yeah, this is a voice that you can trust who's not in debt to these guys?
Yeah, it's a great question.
I mean, in the last chapter called Fighting Back, I do discuss the fact that there are some Republicans and some Democrats who have been actually really good on China so far.
You know, they can always disappoint.
On the Republican side, I talk about Ted Cruz, for example, who's very good.
Senator Rick Scott of Florida has been very good.
Rand Paul has been very good in the U.S. Senate.
If you look at the Democrat side, I got to say it, I don't agree with him on much of anything.
Chuck Schumer has been pretty good on China.
In fact, there are times when Trump was really going after Beijing and Chuck Schumer came to his defense.
So you got to give him credit for that.
Also, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Senator Warner from Virginia, a Democrat.
They've all been pretty good on China on these issues.
So there are people that are willing to do it.
The problem is, is it's the leadership.
Nancy Pelosi in the House, Mitch McConnell in the Senate.
You've got very senior political figures in both parties who have become very wealthy as a result of Beijing's largesse.
And it becomes very hard to overcome that when you're trying to push legislation that I would argue has a lot of bipartisan support on Capitol Hill.
Yeah, it's not a partisan issue.
I mean, it is a patriotism issue and it's a money issue, whether you're going to put country in front of your wallet.
Let's talk a little bit about Silicon Valley.
I mean, Google, I think it was Google, used to have the expression, don't be evil.
They actually got rid of that.
I guess in the interest of honesty, I guess.
I mean, how deep are these guys, the stuff we use every day?
How deep into China are these guys?
They're very deep.
And this is probably the most unsettling chapter of the entire book.
I mean, I'm not making excuses for politicians who basically sell out for commercial deals, but these are not people that are particularly wealthy.
And, you know, greed gets to them.
The question is, why do people like Bill Gates, the co-founders of Google, a guy like Elon Musk, who are worth more than $100 billion each, why are they willing to get into bed with Beijing?
That's the real question.
And in bed, they are.
If you look at Microsoft and Google, for example, they are both sponsoring heavily with money and with talent artificial intelligence research in China in the research laboratories that are known, known to be linked to the Chinese military.
We know in other cases that Google scholars who are connected to Google, who are paid by Google, have been involved in research projects that help enhance China's stealth fighter that is going to be going, God forbid, hope not, but maybe going toe-to-toe with America's stealth fighter in the skies over the Asia Pacific.
So that's known.
And the question is, is why are they doing it?
They're already fabulously wealthy.
And the scary part of it, Andrew, is that many of these Silicon Valley elites, it may be about money, but I think it's more about the fact that they are kind of enamored with what they regard as the efficiency of China's dictatorship.
Things get done quickly in China, they talk about.
It's so exciting what they can do in infrastructure because it's just, it gets done so quickly.
Well, of course, if you don't really believe in civil rights, you don't believe in property rights, you don't have an independent judiciary, you don't have an independent legislative branch, the list can go on and on.
Of course, you can be efficient as a dictatorship.
And this is the point that Elon Musk has made.
Elon Musk used to be very critical of Beijing in 2015, 2016.
More recently, he's become very pro-Beijing.
And he has said on podcasts that the Chinese government is more responsive to the needs of the Chinese people than America's government.
And he congratulates the Chinese Communist Party on the anniversary of their birth and the things that the CCP has done that's so positive.
I think it's helped that Beijing built him a Tesla factory, that they are doing many things to aid the expansion of his company.
But again, I don't know that Elon Musk needs the money.
I think he is just impressed with how efficient this dictatorship is.
And that to me, in a sense, is even scarier that these corporate elites in Silicon Valley, but also in Wall Street, are embracing the notion of the efficiencies of dictatorship.
That is not a good place, I think, for our corporate Titans to be.
Yeah, no, there's a long history of intellectuals romancing authoritarianism because they see people as numbers instead of as people and they forget that efficiency isn't everything.
So I'm running out of time, but I do want to ask you about the last chapter about fighting back.
What should we expect?
What can we expect from our politicians?
How do we get them to see that people who oppress their own people are not the people who should be running the world?
And in fact, we are.
How do we turn this tide around?
Well, there's a couple of things we can do personally.
Some things that I've had to do as I research this book that I didn't realize I was involved in.
First thing is look at the products you're buying.
I mean, if you're buying Chinese technology products made in China, chances are that company is probably linked to the Chinese military.
Call Out Leaders00:01:40
So you are subsidizing a company and a country that wants to challenge us militarily for supremacy.
Second thing is look at your investment portfolios.
I have a 401k.
I was shocked to discover that one of the mutual funds I was invested in, that's a global fund, 40% of their holdings are Chinese companies.
So I sold that mutual fund.
So there are very specific things we can do independent of Washington, D.C., that I would encourage people to do that I had to do.
Beyond that, I think we need to be willing to shame these corporate executives who say these wonderful things about China.
We should do the same thing to our politicians.
And it's really important, Andrew, I think, to have a zero tolerance policy.
You can't just call out the other side.
I mean, I'm a conservative.
So yeah, I want to call out Nancy Pelosi, but I've got to be prepared to call out Mitch McConnell as well, because otherwise this becomes a partisan issue and we're not going to get any traction anywhere.
I still believe there are issues like this that we can unite as Americans.
It's an 80-20 issue.
And I think we need to do this.
But that means both sides need to be prepared to call out people on their side that are engaging in this behavior.
Yeah, yeah.
The book is Red Handed, How American Elites Get Rich, Helping China Win by Peter Schweizer.
As we expect from Peter, it is a really remarkable piece of journalism.
Really One-stop shopping to find out about this issue.