China Fueling U.S. Government Corruption | Peter Schweizer | EP 277

Full Episode Transcript:

Rebecca Weber: Hello, everyone. I’m Rebecca Weber. You’re watching Better for America presented by AMAC, the Association of Mature American Citizens. I want to thank each and every one of you for tuning in to Better for America, and I want to encourage you to follow me on social media. You can find me at Twitter, at the Rebecca Weber, that’s at the, T H E, Rebecca Weber.

Go ahead and do that. Be sure to tell more of your friends and family all about AMAC. The more members we have, the better work that we can do for you. Now we have a terrific episode coming up in just a moment. Don’t go anywhere. This is an episode you don’t want to miss. I am thrilled to be joined today by the most prolific expose writer in exposing government corruption.

He is the author of numerous New York Times number one bestsellers, including Blood Money, Why the Powerful Turn, A Blind Eye While China Kills Americans, another book Red Handed, How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, Profiles in Corruption, Secret Empires, Clinton Cash, and many more. He is also the host of the Drill Down podcast, Peter Schweizer.

Thank you so much for joining me today. Welcome to Better for America.

Peter Schweizer: Great to be with you. Thanks so much for having me.

Rebecca Weber: Peter, I’d like to start by asking you about your newest book, Blood Money, Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills American, Americans. It really talks about how China is killing Americans, sadly, and working aggressively to maximize carnage, really, while our leaders remain passive and in some cases even compliant.

Tell us how China is doing this and a little bit more about this great book. Thank you.

Peter Schweizer: Sure. Yeah it’s really a question of a lot of the chaos that’s occurring in America today. It’s fentanyl deaths. It’s violence on the streets. It’s what happened during COVID. In each of those instances, China has carried out policies that are designed to maximize The casualties that we suffer in America, if you look at fentanyl, for example people assume this is the Mexican drug cartels.

They’re basically the culprits here, and certainly they bear some of the blame, but they’re really the junior partners. The senior partners here is the Chinese CCP. The fentanyl precursors come from China. They arrive in Mexico at the port of Manzanillo. The international terminal there is controlled by a Chinese company that’s close to the Chinese state.

Those precursors go up to the border where 2, 000 Chinese nationals happen to be helping the drug cartels create the fentanyl. The pill presses and the pill molds that they need to produce these products that they are smuggling across the border. Those things come from China and China sells those at cost to the drug cartels.

They’re not trying to make money. The drug cartels communication networks are all run through China. They’re secure that way because they know China will not share those communications with U. S. Law enforcement and even the money laundering when they sell this poison, the money laundering is now done through Chinese state owned banks.

So this is a China operation and the Mexican drug cartels are the junior partners and Fentanyl poisonings are now the leading cause of death in America for people under the age of 45 more than car accidents. Fentanyl poisoning is an example. We have violence in America’s streets. There are these small devices that are called auto sear switches or glock switches.

They’re highly illegal in the United States. You insert one into a Glock handgun and it turns a Glock handgun into a fully automatic machine gun. The Chinese have been smuggling these into the United States since 2018. They’ve specifically targeted felons and criminal gangs with this technology. So we’ve seen this massive rise in machine gun fire by criminal gangs in the United States.

This is just a series of things that China’s doing. And the problem is that our leadership class, for a variety of reasons. is not confronting them or doing anything about it.

Rebecca Weber: Yeah, this is all too real. We know that China definitely poses a national security threat. We see how they’re going after Americans spying on Americans through tick tock and other social media apps.

We see how they’re buying up farmland. That’s a great concern really encircling the United States of America. Taking over infrastructure it is it is really a grave concern and I’m so glad that you’re writing all about this. Another issue that is recently been brought to my attention is China actually going into our schools to try to remove the way that we reference or the way children are taught about China, perhaps removing communism from from our textbooks.

How concerned should we be here at home for those listening, over two million AMAC members what should they know about how all of this could impact their lives?

Peter Schweizer: They should know that China is explicitly and I say explicitly because they say so they are targeting America’s young people 18 and younger.

So that’s people’s children and grandchildren, and they do that in a variety of ways Rebecca, you’re quite right. They are targeting our classrooms in the manner in which Chinese history is taught or inaccurately taught. People have heard of Confucius institutes. There are also what they call Confucius classrooms and partnerships that they have with certain school districts around the United States.

But the biggest challenge I think here is with TikTok which is the app that a lot of people know about. This is an app that. Is run Tiktok is directed by ByteDance. That’s the parent company and they marketed Tiktok to our children explicitly as a parent free zone. If kids are on Facebook, a parent can friend them.

They can see the sorts of things that they are posting. They can see the sorts of things that they’re exposed to. The same kind of thing happens on Twitter on X. The problem is on Tiktok. Everybody gets a totally different feed. The algorithm feeds every child a different feed. So the parent doesn’t really even know what they’re exposed to.

And as I quote extensively in the book, they view America’s children and tick tock as a way to get to those children. And they describe in detail how they are working to manipulate the values of young people in America. So It is a massive major concern in some classrooms, certainly on Tiktok, even when it comes to entertainment, a lot of the big Hollywood studios have struck joint finance deals with Chinese companies, which means that China now has essentially the ability to look at film scripts and modify and change them to conform more to CCP values.

This happened most dramatically with the Kung Fu Panda animated series. The first two films stressed individual values and self improvement. Kung Fu Panda 3 was financed in part by Chinese interests. They were able to influence the script. Kung Fu Panda 3 is an entirely different type of movie in the values and the viewpoints that it presents.

And that’s because China financed that film. And you can find that in a series of other blockbuster films as well. Entertainment, social media, and even in some cases, the classrooms. They are targeting children. They believe that this is a way in which they can defeat the United States without actually having to fire a shot.

Rebecca Weber: I really applaud you for writing so much on so many of these great issues that all Americans need to be more aware of. So many of your books have been Excuse me, hugely successful New York Times bestsellers. So you really do play this important role in exposing so much, including the evil deeds of those who are supposed to represent us and keep us safe.

Now that must be infuriating. I know that I’m sure fed up and none of these people, these elites are really held accountable in any meaningful way, it seems. And a lot of people chalk this up broadly as, the deep state is in control. But in your opinion, what is it that keeps these people shielded who are supposed to be doing their job?

And are our federal agencies and so on bought and paid for politicians to what exactly is allowing this to happen to our great country?

Peter Schweizer: No, it’s a great question. I think it’s really happening on a couple of levels. This seeming indifference by a lot of people in our government.

There are certainly people that have raised the alarm bell who are trying to deal with this threat. But I think we really have a couple of things at work. One is, a lot of our elected officials are generally go along to get along. They like the perks of the job. They like the influence.

But they don’t want a heavy lift. They don’t want to have to make difficult decisions. And when you look at what China’s doing and you acknowledge it that they are targeting and killing Americans that they are trying to access and are accessing our Children with propaganda. You can’t have a normal relationship with a country that’s doing that.

So now you’ve got to start to make hard choices. And so it reminds me of Winston Churchill, who talked before the Second World War about how many Leaders in the U. K. Were staring with vacant eyes, as he put it. And what he meant was they knew what was going on, but they didn’t want to deal with the reality of what was going on.

They just indifferently let it go on because they didn’t want to have to make hard choices. So that’s part of the problem. But there’s a smaller subset of people, and I would include in this. Certainly the Biden family who have financial commercial entanglements that make it very difficult for them To address these issues with not without risking serious blowback on themselves and a lot of unwanted attention.

I’ll just give you one very specific example. We know in 2017, the Biden family got a 5 million interest free forgivable loan that they never repaid from a Chinese businessman. This has been confirmed in financial records and wire transfers. This has been confirmed on the Hunter Biden laptop.

That Chinese businessman was business partners with a Chinese criminal gang leader called White Wolf. This is the gang leader and his gang who set up the Sinaloa cartel in the drug trade and made them the kings of fentanyl. So let’s really unpack what I’m saying here. You have one degree of separation between the Biden family and the fentanyl trade that is killing a hundred thousand Americans a year.

I’m not suggesting the Bidens are involved, but they are entangled because they have accepted large payments large loans, as it were, From businessmen who are linked to this trade and that is deeply embarrassing. So it’s a little surprise that Joe Biden will not confront China on this issue says that there will be no finger pointing towards China on this issue, because if he brings attention to it, it brings attention to himself and these financial entanglements.

Rebecca Weber: Yeah, and I really do blame mainstream media for being so complacent and not bringing truth to the American people. It does feel like a bit of a cover up. It also does appear to many AMAC members that the Biden family is compromised. And that this is only, another reason why we see wide open borders more and more of our young people dying people under.

I think it’s the number one cause of death. You mentioned for those people under the age of 45 is fentanyl death. These are shocking statistics. Do you expect that we’ll see anything come out of the Biden administration on this front?

Peter Schweizer: I think it’s highly unlikely. On the one hand, I’m encouraged this bill that has passed through the House with widespread bipartisan support that would force the sale of TikTok from ByteDance to an American owned company.

I support the bill. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s a good bill. I’m very encouraged that passed on a bipartisan basis. Joe Biden has hinted that he would sign that bill, although I would say the proof is in the pudding. I think a lot of efforts are being made to stop that bill from even being voted on in the Senate because Joe Biden doesn’t want to have to make a decision on that bill.

So there are things that are happening that are encouraging to me. We’re seeing some bipartisan effort. But it’s certainly not because of the efforts of the Biden administration. Joe Biden has essentially given China everything that they want. China calls this strategy of kind of forming these commercial financial ties with leaders in the West, they call it elite capture.

And what they’re expecting from these people, again, in their words, is big help, With a little bad mouth on what that really means. Rebecca is they understand that Joe Biden is going to have to talk about Taiwan. He’s going to have to talk about human rights in China. That’s the little bad mouth. What they worry and is important to them is the big help.

The big help, which is they want access to our technology access to our financial markets and access to the U. S economy to sell their goods. If they get those three things. They are very happy and under Joe Biden, they have absolutely gotten those things from this administration. So they’ve got to be very pleased with the posture the Biden administration has assumed towards China.

Rebecca Weber: I mentioned a bit ago, the farmland that they’re buying up across America. And we know that this presents a a threat, not only to our food but to local economies and so on. What should our listeners understand about the dangers in China buying up American farmland?

Peter Schweizer: No, great question, Rebecca.

Look, the first thing we have to understand is we don’t know. how big the problem really is. The U. S. Department of Agriculture says we know who the Chinese owners are of farmland because we can check the ownership status. The problem is just look at a state like the state of Maine. What they will tell you is that, the vast majority of the ownership of the farmland there is Canadian.

What they won’t tell you is that quote unquote Canadian ownership is Often is Chinese nationals who set up an LLC or a company in Canada and use that as a vehicle to buy farmland in the state of Maine. It shows up as Canadian ownership, but it’s not really Canadian ownership. It’s owned by China.

We don’t know the full magnitude of ownership in the United States, and we’ve got to get a grasp on that. I think the second thing we need to understand is that a lot of this that’s taking place involves Not just Chinese nationals and Chinese nationals that are close to the CCP. It includes Chinese criminal gangs.

There’s a massive problem in America with illegal marijuana growths. That are taking place from California to the state of Maine in the state of Maine alone according to federal authorities there are believed to be 300 illegal marijuana growths just in the state of Maine that are run by Chinese nationals And essentially this is Chinese organized crime that by the way cooperates with the CCP That provides the capital resources for the drug trade And then the people running these operations are oftentimes Chinese nationals who are illegally in the United States.

The people that we see crossing the southern border from China. Chances are very high that some of those people are going to be working for these criminal networks. So it’s a massive problem. We don’t know the magnitude of it. And it’s not just a question of them buying farmland to, grow wheat.

It’s a question of them actually engaging in criminal activity. And the final thing I would say is just look COVID. In terms of what the priorities of these companies are Smithfield, which is the largest pork producer in America, is owned by a Chinese company. When COVID hit there were concerns about the food supply and where, food availability, there were concerns about a shortages of pork and bacon, for example, part of that concern was Smithfield.

An American based company that’s owned by the Chinese during Cove. It actually cut their sales in the United States and increased them back to China. In other words, that’s where their priority is when push comes to shove. So control of the food supply can have very real consequences in terms of food prices and food about availability during a crisis situation.

Rebecca Weber: We need strong leadership who can address this and put America first and understand this great threat that China presents. And so many of our listeners, they understand that, government corruption sometimes boils down to money. They believe that our elected officials have sold out. And at some point you look at people like the Clintons or Nancy Pelosi or Dianne Feinstein, that they have accumulated more money than they can probably spend.

Based on your extensive research, to what extent are the people such as the Bidens motivated by power and money and aren’t doing the right thing by the American people?

Peter Schweizer: I think, Rebecca, the root of the problem is Democrat or Republican, it doesn’t matter as much to that extent which party.

The longer people are in Washington, D. C., the more likely they are to succumb to these self enrichment schemes. Joe Biden, of course, has been in Washington since the 1970s, so it’s no surprise that, Hunter Biden before he got involved in this quote unquote international business, which was really the family just collecting payments from people around the world.

He was a lobbyist. And what did he do? He lobbied his father’s office. His brother, James Biden was involved in sweetheart real estate deals involving Iraqi reconstruction. So the problem is there becomes a sense of entitlement, whatever one’s motive is at the beginning of going into public service.

And I do think it’s a noble cause. The problem is the longer they stay there they believe that they deserve to cut corners. They deserve to be wealthy because they have done so much to serve the country. It becomes this self fulfilling prophecy. So it’s one of the reasons I’m a big believer in term limits.

Nobody is irreplaceable. We can do without our entire congressional leadership. There are other people that could step up and do the same job and frankly do a better job. So it is the reason that I think we need to always advocate for a limited government. We need to advocate for term limits and recognize that our political leaders, as intended by our founding fathers, should be representative of us.

And when you get people that are in there 20, 30, 40 years, they are no longer representative of us. They’re representative of a political class that is all about power and self enrichment.

Rebecca Weber: Yeah. Now you’ve done a tremendous job as an author, sir, and you also serve as the president of the Government Accountability Institute.

Tell us a little bit about what is currently involved with that group and what does it aim to accomplish for conservatism in America?

Peter Schweizer: Rebecca, we believe that corruption is an enormous problem, and the reason we see the growth in the size and scope of government is not just because of liberal or left wing ideologies.

We also believe it is growing because it’s profitable for our political class. If you look at the 10 wealthiest counties in America today, seven of them are counties that border our nation’s capital. That to me is one of the reasons government keeps growing larger and larger. And so what we do at the Government Accountability Institute is we research that forensically.

We follow the money. The old line about corruption, we literally follow the money. So we broke the story 10 years ago about insider trading on the stock market by members of Congress. They, push certain healthcare legislation, but they’re buying and selling stocks at the same time and enriching themselves by doing so.

Our efforts led to the passage of the Stock Act, which certainly has not been perfect and has not been enforced effectively. But at least it has highlighted this attention and requires greater disclosure by our elected officials. And we look at the way that corruption has become globalized. It’s no longer a question of an elected official, Taking 100, 000 in a shoebox from a businessman back in his district or state, it’s now a question of international entities.

This could be foreign powers, especially hostile governments like China and Russia. It could be beleaguered, corrupt states like Ukraine. that see an opportunity to get an advantage by enriching an American political leader. So corruptions become globalized in America, and that certainly I think was jump started by the Clintons with the Clinton Foundation.

I wrote a book called Clinton Cash, which exposed that. And of course, the Bidens have taken that, I think, to an even another level. This is an area where we need watchdogs, we need attention, and we need to name names. We can’t simply talk about corruption in general. We need to name names, we need to expose people, and we need to shame people who are engaging in it.

And we, on top of exposing it do work quite extensively with congressional committees and with federal law enforcement agencies to share the information that we have to hopefully achieve some level of accountability.

Rebecca Weber: It’s good work that you’re doing, sir, and I just want to encourage everyone who’s listening to get your hands on this book, Blood Money, Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans.

We all need to be informed, and you’re doing just that, sir. Tell our great AMAC members how they can follow you on social media and get their hands on more of the great books that you’ve published.

Peter Schweizer: Thank you. You can go to my website, Peter Schweitzer. com. You can go to thedrilldown. com, which is the web page for my podcast.

And you can follow me on Twitter or on X. At Peter Schweitzer. And my book should be available everywhere. Amazon, Costco, Barnes and Noble, Walmart. I always appreciate feedback from people. So if you read the book and you have a comment or a thought or there’s something you think we should investigate, please do reach out on my website and we would love to hear from you.

Rebecca Weber: Excellent, sir. Thank you so much for joining me. I would love to have you back again. We see so much developing. I think that the American public will learn more and more. Thanks again for the great work that you’re doing and God bless you.

Peter Schweizer: Thank you, Rebecca. I appreciate it. I’m an AMAC member and I’m glad to be helpful.

Thank you.

Rebecca Weber: Thank you.