Schweizer: The New York Times Misrepresents Its Own Reporting

On the most recent episode of their podcast The Drill Down, Peter Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers slammed the New York Times for attempting to portray Schweizer’s bestselling book Clinton Cash: How Foreign Governments Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, and the FBI’s resultant investigations, as partisan efforts. Yet, as Schweizer and Eggers point out, the Times itself corroborated Schweizer’s reporting on the Clinton Foundation with its own 4,000-word front-page story in 2015.

“I’m just frustrated by the manner in which powerful forces try to misrepresent what we have done,” Schweizer says.

Indeed, in its own 2015 blockbuster story, the Times confirmed the basic facts of the Uranium One story GAI had reported, including the deep involvement of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her family’s charitable foundation, which took large amounts of cash from foreign businesses and governments for its charitable work while having pending business before the Department of State. The Times cited material Schweizer provided to them just prior to the book’s publication. The FBI agents who called Schweizer asked for and were given copies of the corporate records GAI had found in its research.

On the podcast, Peter remembered that first 2015 contact from the FBI. “So, the FBI calls… They said, ‘Look, we’re interested in the work that you’ve done. Would you be willing to provide information if necessary?’ I said, ‘Sure. This is the mission of GAI.’ We’re happy to share [the facts] because our mission is not only to tell the world what we found, but hopefully we want some justice on the tail end,” Schweizer said.

The FBI then launched investigations involving four of its field offices, before the 2016 election, Schweizer says.

“And then [Clinton’s] smart political people said, what if it’s actually Trump that has the Russia problem? Exactly. Classic move. You switch your chief vulnerability on your opponent.” This strategy, many observers have concluded, was the reason the Clinton campaign paid to produce the Steele Dossier and then fed its unsubstantiated rumors to the FBI, as the Durham report has now firmly documented.

Schweizer noted the double standard between how the FBI decided to investigate the allegations of Russia collusion by Trump and its actions regarding the operations of the Bill and Hillary Clinton Foundation. The FBI sprang into action on the Trump case on the strength of the discredited Steele Dossier. The bureau bypassed or ignored its own internal standards for reviewing and corroborating raw intelligence to justify the Trump investigation.

“Think about the Steele Dossier and the way in which the mainstream media outlets were used by the Clinton campaign by leveraging the credibility of the intelligence community to say, ‘here’s this story, here’s what we have.’ And they reported it breathlessly,” Schweizer says.