Peter Schweizer on Whistleblower: Media Trying to Turn a Biden Scandal into a Trump Scandal

“They’re trying to turn what was a Biden scandal into a Trump scandal,” Peter Schweizer said of the Washington Post‘s and other news media outlets’ framing of a “whistleblower” making headlines this week, offering his remarks on Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host Brandon Darby.

President Donald Trump reportedly urged Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to look into former vice president Joe Biden’s son — Hunter Biden — and his business dealings in the eastern European country, according to a Friday-published Wall Street Journal report. The allegation follows reports that a whistleblower filed a complaint in relation to the president’s communications with Ukraine.

Schweizer said, “Hunter Biden, in a sense, went around the world and cashed in on his father’s access. One of those places was in Ukraine, [with] an energy company named Burisma, which is headed by a very corrupt oligarch named Zlachevsky, [that] hired him as an advisor and a board member in April of 2014.”

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Schweizer continued, “What’s interesting about this is that Hunter Biden has no background in Ukraine. He has no background in energy or natural gas or anything like that, but of course his father, the vice president at the time, was the point person on U.S. policy towards Ukraine, and the money we’re talking about here is eye-popping. Hunter Biden was getting $83,000 a month from this Ukrainian energy company where he had no background.”

Schweizer went on, “So the immediate question becomes, he’s not selling his expertise — because he has none in this field — what is he getting paid for? That is the issue, and Ukrainian officials in the prosecutor’s office decided to investigate, and they started to investigate, at which point Joe Biden would later brag about getting the prosecutor fired, who has the head of that office, and Joe Biden said that he threatened to withdraw a billion dollars of our taxpayer money in aid to Ukraine unless they fired this prosecutor, so that’s what the issue revolves around.”

“The Bidens are not disputing that he got paid all this money,” noted Schweizer. “They’re not disputing that Hunter Biden had no background in this area. They just simply want the issue to go away, and what apparently President Trump did was have a conversation with the now-Ukrainian president, saying, ‘You need to investigate this. I think you need to investigate this,’ and that’s something we’ve been calling for for a long time.”

Schweizer repeated earlier calls for an investigation of Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings in countries with which his father executed U.S. foreign policy as vice president.

“I think Ukraine needs to investigate it, but also the U.S. Department of Justice, because let’s remember, Ukraine is a terribly corrupt country — it’s been plagued with that for a long time — and this is something that’s  too serious, we can’t just leave it to Ukrainian prosecutors to look into,” Schweizer stated.

News media outlets such as the Washington Post are framing the aforementioned “whistleblower” event as a “Trump scandal” while the “underlying issue” is Joe Biden’s possible monetization of political influence during his vice presidential tenure, assessed Schweizer.

“I think the larger issue here, I’m kind of astonished, the Washington Post is kind of covering the issue of this whistleblower, which of course they should, and we’ll have to see exactly when the dust settles, what exactly was said and what exactly happened, but there’s no reporting of the underlying issue,” remarked Schweizer. “There’s no reporting of the fact that the vice president’s son was going around the world — to Ukraine, to China, there are financial transactions involving Kazakh oligarchs, there’s money going from Swiss bank accounts to the vice president’s son — and ask me, [or] ask a lot of people — do we really want to have a country where it becomes acceptable and commonplace for this kind of behavior to take place? And I think the answer is, ‘No.’”

Schweizer maintained, “It needs to be investigated. They need to be held to account, and by the way, I think that if you change the name from Hunter Biden to Don Jr. or Eric Trump, I think you would have an entirely different tone by the media and by the Congress, and that’s a shame, [because] it should be consistent with whoever’s doing it. They’re trying to turn what was a Biden scandal into a Trump scandal, and I think what we need to do is focus on the larger issue here that the Biden family was getting millions of dollars from these overseas connected people going to Joe Biden’s son to allegedly do work that he had no qualifications to do.”

“Again the question is, what was [Hunter Biden] being paid for?” asked Schweizer. “These entities were not giving the money away. They were paying Hunter Biden for something. He’s not selling his expertise, so what exactly was he selling? And that’s what needs to be investigated.”

Joe Biden’s Democrat competitors in pursuit of the Democrats’ presidential nomination have neglected to highlight the former vice president’s potential conflicts of interest related to Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings. No news media figures hosting Democrat events marketed as “presidential debates” have, thus far, asked Joe Biden about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.

Schweizer is president of the Government Accountability Institute and senior editor-at-large at Breitbart News. His latest book is Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.

Breitbart News Tonight airs Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.