Peter Schweizer > Quotes

“Those who wonder why the American tax code is so complex, convoluted, and constantly changing fail to appreciate what a wonderful tool it is for extortion.”
― Peter Schweizer, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own ... The Bombshell Exposé on Congress Corruption

“Eliminating politicians’ ability to raise money while in session would force them to devote their time exclusively to their job: lawmaking.”
― Peter Schweizer, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own ... The Bombshell Exposé on Congress Corruption

“It is important to note that this deal was with the Chinese government—not with a Chinese company, which means that the Chinese government and the son of the vice president were now business partners.”
― Peter Schweizer, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America's Progressive Elite

“Novelist and essayist George Orwell wrote the masterpiece 1984 about a dystopian future. But he was also a shrewd observer of political life in democracies. He warned about the political choices people make regularly in an elective system of government. “A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims, but accomplices.”4 The progressive message continues to be “hand us more power.” What they are asking us to do is ignore history—including their history—in how such power is actually exercised. We must ask ourselves: Why trust someone with more power when you cannot even trust them with the little they already have?”
― Peter Schweizer, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America's Progressive Elite

“The reality is that most of what happens in American politics is transactional. People look for ways to influence those in power by throwing money in their direction.”
― Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich

“Even if nothing illegal occurred, one has to wonder about the political judgment involved. Surely the mere appearance of selling American power and influence to foreign interests should be enough to cause a former US president—and a possible future one—to steer well clear of such potentially”
― Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich

“The Clintons are perhaps the most politically sophisticated public figures of their generation. They know how things work in the corridors of power and around the world; they know that foreign governments are trying to”
― Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich

“But Mexican companies don’t run these ports; a Chinese company does. The international terminals at both ports are controlled and operated by Hutchison, which is largely owned by Li Ka-shing, whose ties to the Chinese triads were documented previously. The company also enjoys a close working relationship with the Chinese”
― Peter Schweizer, Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans

“A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims, but accomplices.”4”
― Peter Schweizer, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America's Progressive Elite

“FBI investigations alone will never take corruption out of politics. They take too much effort, and they attack the problem serially, one target at a time.”
― Peter Schweizer, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own ... The Bombshell Exposé on Congress Corruption

“Politics in modern America has become a lucrative business, an industry that has less to do with policy and a lot more to do with accessing money and favors. As we will see, bills and regulations are often introduced not to effect policy change, but as vehicles for shaking down people for those money and favors.”
― Peter Schweizer, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own ... The Bombshell Exposé on Congress Corruption

“Reagan’s activity in foreign affairs is not an improvisation, is not a chain of spontaneous initiatives, but a carefully planned and coordinated action, something of an integrated front of action under the slogans of world advocacy of the idea of freedom.”
― Peter Schweizer, Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism

“The law dictates how much politicians can collect in campaign contributions, limits their ability to make money on the side, and requires the disclosure of those contributors. Hopefully, politicians are also limited to some extent by their conscience. A sense of decency and good judgment ought to prevent politicians on both sides of the aisle from engaging in certain transactions—even if they think they can get away with it.”
― Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich

“Chinese companies have been smuggling pill presses illegally into the United States, mislabeling them as machine tools or other items or sending them disassembled to avoid detection.69 The destination is drug dealers and criminal gangs70 for the “mass production” of street drugs.71 Now Chinese companies send large quantities of pill presses to Mexico, too, including the metal cast dies to imprint pills with counterfeit numbers such as “M523” and “10/352,” which are the markings of real oxycodone pills. In other words, these Chinese companies are helping dealers produce counterfeit and illegal street drugs.72 In April 2020, the DOJ sent out an alert to law enforcement agencies with a blunt headline: “Chinese Pill Presses Are Key Components for Illegally Manufactured Fentanyl.” In the document, which was obtained by the author, the DOJ noted the “relatively moderate pricing” of $1,000 per pill press—essentially at cost. Why are Chinese companies not charging a huge markup to sell the pill presses to the drug cartels? The DOJ also noted that the “ambiguous export regulations in China allow traffickers to use vague manifest descriptions to describe pill press machines to avoid scrutiny from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel.”73 Chinese pill press manufacturers are required by US law to alert the DEA when they ship pill presses to the United States so federal authorities can track those who might be illegally producing drugs.”
― Peter Schweizer, Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans

“embarrassing entanglements. “Bribery interferes with trade, investment, and development,” Hillary Clinton said at the OECD’s fiftieth-anniversary forum in 2011. “It undermines good governance and encourages greater corruption. And of course, it is morally wrong—and far too common.” On that we can all agree.”
― Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich

“No one has even come close in recent years to enriching themselves on the scale of the Clintons”
― Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich – A Meticulously Researched Exposé

“Throw Them All Out,”
― Peter Schweizer, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends

“Machiavelli declared that it was better to be feared than loved as a leader, but you did not want to be hated. Hatred led to conspiracy. And conspiracy, he warned, could bring down governments.”
― Peter Schweizer, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends

“But the problem is not just with accumulated power, but also with those who seek it. As scientist and author David Brin pointedly noted, “It is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible.”
― Peter Schweizer, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America's Progressive Elite

“The assumption is that we need to protect politicians from outside influences. But how about protecting ourselves from the politicians?”
― Peter Schweizer, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own ... The Bombshell Exposé on Congress Corruption

“Nine out of ten times in the House of Representatives, and eight out of ten times in the Senate, the candidate who spends the most money wins.”
― Peter Schweizer, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own ... The Bombshell Exposé on Congress Corruption

“Both political parties were trying to grab the public high ground while in the background extracting what they could. Senator Harry Reid criticized Republican senators for holding “backroom negotiations” with Wall Street executives over the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. But when he made the charge, Reid had only recently himself held a fund-raiser in New York City organized by Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn.36 Republicans, on the other hand, criticized Democrats for extorting Wall Street, while playing a similar game themselves.”
― Peter Schweizer, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own ... The Bombshell Exposé on Congress Corruption

“Solving problems and settling issues is good lawmaking, but it’s not lucrative. It is gridlock, confusion, and rehashing fights that create streams of income—like an annuity—for the Permanent Political Class.”
― Peter Schweizer, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own ... The Bombshell Exposé on Congress Corruption

“Extorting money in the form of campaign contributions is not simply about getting reelected. Many politicians aggressively fund-raise even though they face little or no opposition for reelection. Politicians have discovered a creative way to transfer donations into subsidies designed to benefit their lifestyles”
― Peter Schweizer, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own ... The Bombshell Exposé on Congress Corruption

“Complexity is a useful and lucrative method of legal extortion for politicians”
― Peter Schweizer, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own ... The Bombshell Exposé on Congress Corruption

“According to Waggoner, the trouble is that complicated laws enrich those who make the laws while making the rest of society poorer.”
― Peter Schweizer, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own ... The Bombshell Exposé on Congress Corruption

“grilled me on my findings about the Clinton Foundation and failed the most basic test of integrity: come clean with conflicts of interest.”
― Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich – A Meticulously Researched Exposé

“the amount of schmoozing involved and crossing lines and one person putting money in a foundation, and then Clinton getting unbelievable amounts for his speeches, and then contracts going one way or another, it’s not good. Those blurry lines have been seen by many people over the years. This book describes them.”
― Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich – A Meticulously Researched Exposé

“What if politics is really largely about fund-raising and making money?”
― Peter Schweizer, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own ... The Bombshell Exposé on Congress Corruption

“major piece of financial regulation—the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act—moved toward passage. Wall Street money flowed to some of its fiercest critics in the 2010 election. That year, seven out of the ten top recipients of Goldman Sachs contributions, for example, were Democrats. Former Clinton secretary of labor Robert Reich declared that this was evidence that Wall Street was “bribing elected officials with their donations.”14 I would argue that Reich had the power equation wrong. It was the Permanent Political Class that threatened to cause severe damage to the financiers—not the other way around. As the late economics professor Peter H. Aranson puts it, “The real market for contributions is one of ‘extortion’ by those who hold a monopoly on the use of coercion—the officeholders.”15 The midterm election passed, and so did Dodd-Frank.”
― Peter Schweizer, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own ... The Bombshell Exposé on Congress Corruption