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Oct. 20, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
10:16
Peter Schweizer Details Biden's Profile in Corruption
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And I'm going to go to my guest, Peter Schweizer, author of Profiles in Corruption, which I read, Abuses of Power by America's Progressive Elite.
They are even more corrupt than I thought after reading your book, Peter Schweizer.
Welcome to my show.
Dennis, always great to be with you.
Thanks for having me.
Always?
Always. Always.
Wow.
Oh, no.
It's nice to hear.
Yeah, that's great.
Hey, do you live in Tallahassee?
I do, yes.
I lived in Washington, D.C. for years.
And when I started writing about corruption in Washington, D.C., I figured I'd probably better leave town.
And my work is much more appreciated down here than it is inside the Beltway.
How do you like Tallahassee?
I love it.
I love it.
It's a college town of Florida State University.
It's the state capital.
You're not far from the beach.
It's Florida with a little bit of a mix of the American South.
So I enjoy it very much.
So who's moving to Florida now?
I think lots of people are.
The reports we hear is a lot of people from New York and New Jersey are heading to South Florida.
And I think that, you know, people from Illinois are moving to the western part of the Florida, you know, boot, as it were.
So, yes, there's a lot of influx, and generally they're very, very welcome.
People always ask them, you know, if you come down here, don't necessarily vote for the things you voted for in New York, New Jersey, and Illinois down here because we like the way the state is right now.
Thank you very much.
Why isn't that argument dispositive?
You fled a place run by the values you want now to reign in Florida.
How do they answer that?
It's a great question.
I think it seems strange because these are professionals oftentimes and smart.
They just don't seem to always draw the connection between the decisions that have been made in Sacramento or Albany.
With the state of New York or the state of California.
So it's almost as if they believe that the transformation in their state from becoming high tax, expensive, regulated, was somehow by osmosis, not by a series of decisions that people made.
And I think it's important to remind them of that.
So right now, how would you assess the politics of the refugee to Florida?
You know, it's hard to say.
I would say many of them are frustrated with how expensive their life is in New York and elsewhere, that the taxes are high.
I think also the role of the oppressive COVID lockdowns.
I think New York has been much more aggressive on this than most states.
So I think all of that generally leads them to be a little bit more libertarian in their thinking.
But we'll see.
I mean, I grew up in Seattle, Washington, and I went to California in the 1980s and visited.
It was generally a center-right state and changed quite dramatically.
So it can happen anywhere, Texas, Florida.
Just people need to make good choices and really think through the implications of who's leading them.
I didn't mean to ask you this, but I have great respect for your knowledge and wisdom.
It's a big deal for me because wisdom is rare.
You don't even have to make a prediction.
I don't make a prediction.
But do you have any sense of the election?
I will tell you, I would probably be the worst person to ask about that.
I believed Hillary Clinton was going to win in 2016. We're brothers with different mothers.
That's exactly what I believed.
And I thought Mitt Romney was going to win in 2012, so I've got a terrible record.
I've got a terrible record.
You're with me.
Okay, fine.
It's a perfectly legit answer.
So, I want you to know, your book prepared me for the revelations with regard to the Biden family.
I mean, I really learned a lot from your book.
Including about Kamala Harris, who's totally under the radar, which is a phenomenon.
But just talking about the Biden family, why is it not a normative, widespread question?
How does a man who spends his entire life in politics get so wealthy?
And his family?
It's a great question.
And people ask that all the time as it relates to the Bidens and other people.
And it's a completely, totally legitimate question.
And in the case of the Bidens, you know, I talk about this in the book.
They've really mastered what I call offshoring corruption.
So if you look at, you know, Joe Biden's financial disclosures when he was in office up through the vice presidency, generally it showed that he had no assets.
And that's because the deals that the Biden family did did not involve Joe because they'd have to be disclosed, they'd be visible, it might break the law.
So the deals are done with family members.
So by offshoring, I mean if people wanted favors from Joe Biden, they would do deals with his kids.
They would do deals with his brothers.
And that became the pattern.
And so what you see with the Bidens is...
This incredible system where you have five family members.
I mean, a lot of people, you know, focus on Hunter, and I think Hunter is the most egregious.
But this is not a Hunter problem.
This is a Biden problem because his two brothers, his sister, his daughter, and her husband all engaged in getting sweetheart deals and favors.
From Joe Biden.
And I think the other thing that makes this important to focus on with the Bidens is, you know, we're not talking about a congressman who's trying to get a road paving contract for his nephew from the Federal Highway Fund.
I mean, that stuff goes on and that stuff's bad.
We're talking about globalized graft and corruption involving actors around the world.
Who don't particularly have the interests of the United States at heart.
We're talking about the Chinese government.
We're talking about Russian oligarchs.
We're talking about corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs.
So the Biden corruption, while corruption is widespread in Washington, D.C., is unique because of how broad it is.
You've got five family members, but also the depth, the fact that their business partners are...
These people around the world that frankly don't have our best interests.
So the money is coming from foreign governments largely or foreign businesses?
Both, yes.
You have the Chinese government has done a series of deals with Hunter Biden.
We also now know that James Biden, his brother, was directly involved with a Chinese energy company called CEFC, which is very close to the People's Liberation Army, the Chinese military.
And then you have corrupt oligarchs.
You have Yelena Baturina, who is the ex-wife of the mayor of Moscow, who in WikiLeaks, if you go look her up in the WikiLeaks documents on the State Department cables, you'll find out that the State Department since 2010 has regarded her as joined at the hip with Russian organized crime.
This is an example of the sort of foreign businessman that Hunter Biden is doing deals with.
He's not doing deals in Frankfurt, Germany and Tokyo.
He's doing deals in Moscow, in Beijing, in Ukraine.
And that's what's really troubling about this.
Because it has implications for the foreign policy that Joe Biden carried out as vice president.
Okay, give an example of one of the implications.
Well, I'll give you a direct one, and that relates to China.
And I put out a 40-minute video called Riding the Dragon.
You can find it for free on YouTube about the Biden's relationship to China.
And what you find is that Hunter Biden...
While Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, secured a series of lucrative deals with the Chinese government that he had no qualifications getting.
The Chinese government, for example, gave him, involved him in a $1.5 billion private equity deal, despite the fact that Hunter Biden had no background in finance or in private equity and had no background in China.
And this is the Chinese government doing that.
Okay, so what I meant is you said it had implications for American foreign policy.
What foreign policy ensued from that deal?
If you look at Joe Biden's position on China, particularly beginning in 2013 when that deal was proposed, he has said repeatedly in interviews that China's not a threat.
They're not a rival.
They're friendly people.
Hold on there, Peter.
Hold on.
His book is very important.
I read it.
I mean, what else can I say?
Profiles in Corruption.
Abuses of Power by America's Progressive Elite.
I had always walked around thinking I knew there was corruption in America.
And nevertheless, I always thought that America had less of it.
In so many countries and this was a big reason for our success.
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