‘He’s not buying solar company stock or buying into an organic cattle farm. He is buying Fortune 500 companies…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Conservative investigative journalist Peter Schweizer has been most cited for his research into the Biden family‘s corrupt business deals.
But his new research has also brought intense scrutiny to current Democratic frontrunner Bernie Sanders and others in the still-crowded primary field.
As Biden, now trailing in fourth or fifth place, fades into the background, Schweizer recently appeared on “Fox and Friends” to discuss ways in which the socialist senator from Vermont has used his position to enrich himself.
It began as far back as the 1988s, when Sanders and his new bride, Jane Driscoll Sanders, returned from their Soviet honeymoon to his post as the mayor of Burlington, Vt.
There, he appointed her to several influential positions, as well as offering her a big pay raise—over the objections of the city council, Schweizer told Fox News’ Steve Doocy.
“Bernie ignored them, and that began this pattern of sort of steering money—taxpayer money and campaign money—to his family,” Schweizer said.
Jane Sanders continued to exploit legal loopholes while skirting ethical standards as Bernie’s stock began to rise. She took in an estimated $150,000 by setting up a media-buying business to support her husband’s campaigns.
“The dirty little secret here is, Steve, when you do a media buy, the buyer is entitled to a commission of between 10 and 15 percent,” Schweizer said. “So, it can be quite lucrative.”
He added that candidates who ran for governor and lieutenant governor in Vermont had only received Bernie Sanders’s endorsement after hiring his wife for her media services.
“He clearly seems to be leveraging his position for her business as well,” Schweizer said.
Schweizer also delved into the Sanders’ surprising financial portfolio. Despite his professed disdain for corporate America, it seems the senator has no problems profiting from it.
“He’s not buying solar company stock or buying into an organic cattle farm. He is buying Fortune 500 companies,” Schweizer said.
“So, he attacks Wall Street, he attacks big pharma, he attacks big oil,” but at the same time, Schweizer added, “he is invested in those companies; that’s where he is actually putting his assets.”
The result is a crisis of credibility between his words and actions that would surely call his expensive tax-and-spend proposals into question.
“It’s a major problem for Bernie,” Schweizer continued, “this gap between the image he portrays and the reality of how he actually conducts his own affairs.”
Following the success of his 2016 exposé on Bill and Hillary Clinton, titled Clinton Cash, Schweizer’s 2018 book Secret Empires is widely credited with bringing to national attention the shady business dealings in Ukraine and China that former lobbyist Hunter Biden engaged in through his company Rosemont Seneca.
That, in turn, caught the attention of President Donald Trump’s consigliere, former federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani, who began pressing for deeper investigations into Ukraine and the Burisma natural gas company.
Just over a year after the March 2018 publication of Schweizer’s book, Hunter Biden resigned his lucrative “consulting” post as a board member at Burisma.
Within months, partisan House Democrats lashed out by impeaching Trump for “abuse of power.”
Schweizer’s latest book, Profiles in Corruption, was released in January, picking up where Secret Empires left off with a recap of even more shady deals involving the Sanders and Biden families’ pay-to-play operations.
It also delves into scandals involving other past and present 2020 hopefuls—among them: Sens. Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown and Amy Klobuchar.