00:00:16.000Peter Schweiser goes into great detail how the Chinese Communist Party is purchasing the American elites, how they're getting rich, and they're helping China win.
00:00:39.000Stephen from Ohio, thank you for your support.
00:00:41.000Lisa from New York, thank you for your support.
00:00:43.000Alfredo from New Jersey, thank you for your support.
00:00:46.000Joshua from Massachusetts, Shannon from Indiana, Joseph from Pennsylvania, Barbara from Massachusetts, and David from North Carolina.
00:00:54.000Thank you guys on this weekend episode of the Charlie Kirk Show for supporting us.
00:00:58.000If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com, where we play offense with a sense of urgency to win the American culture war, where we focus on educating the next generation and future generations on American values.
00:01:44.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:56.000I am just so excited and honored to have the next guest we have on here, and he's someone that i've been wanting to talk to for quite some time, someone who I think is one of the last journalists in the country who has this unbelievable new book out called red handed, how American elites get rich helping China win, by Peter Schweitzer.
00:02:28.000You have probably, you're probably the most effective investigative journalist of this generation.
00:02:33.000You are willing to go after both sides and we're going to talk about that throughout this conversation, because it's not just about the Democrat Party, it's about the elites in general.
00:02:40.000Tell us about this book and then let's dive into some of the details.
00:02:44.000Yeah, this book is really looking at the question uh, that China has said, really for more than a decade, that the Chinese Communist Party uh, they are determined to surpass the United States and defeat us.
00:02:55.000And the question is, what is our leadership class doing about it?
00:02:58.000Uh, and what really the book concludes and demonstrates, I think with a lot of evidence, is, uh, what our leadership class is doing is selling us out.
00:03:06.000Uh, they're getting sweetheart deals from China.
00:03:56.000Not only are they not doing something to challenge what China is doing to us, they are actually actively helping them.
00:04:03.000I mean, you've got Titans in Silicon Valley, people like Bill Gates, companies like Google that literally are sponsoring research and providing resource for research in China into artificial intelligence with laboratories that are linked to the Chinese military.
00:04:20.000So they're aiding and abetting a military that is pointing its weapons at us.
00:04:24.000And you can find similar examples elsewhere.
00:05:01.000I've obviously done investigative work on the Clintons in my book, Clinton Cash.
00:05:06.000Again, that was focused on that one political family.
00:05:10.000But in this case, we're talking about something that's all pervasive.
00:05:13.000We're talking about the biggest names on Wall Street, the biggest financial institutions there, certainly the biggest names in Silicon Valley, and the most powerful people in Washington, D.C., certainly in the White House with the first family, but also with the Speaker of the House, leaders in the Senate.
00:05:31.000So it's all pervasive and the stakes are so high.
00:05:36.000The Chinese Communist Party is made clear.
00:05:38.000Their objective is to seize what they call the commanding heights so that they can dominate and supplant us as the world's most powerful country in the world.
00:05:48.000And that is something we ought to be concerned about.
00:06:00.000The Soviet Union, they were obviously very antagonistic towards the West.
00:06:04.000They tried many proxy experiments in Rhodesia and Cuba and other places.
00:06:08.000But the Soviet Union might have had some success that McCarthy was trying to uncover in infiltration, but nothing close to what the Chinese Communist Party has been able to do, where they said, hey, we're going to use the market system, the love of money of the West against them.
00:06:51.000The problem is they didn't, you know, nobody in the West wanted rubles, and they simply couldn't pay them.
00:06:57.000The problem is China does have the money, and you add to that elements of sort of the Maoist strategy that they've employed, and we have a real problem.
00:07:08.000Sometimes what people will say is they'll look at a politician like Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi and they will say, well, you know, look, they're being critical of Beijing.
00:07:17.000They're criticizing them for their treatment of the Uyghurs.
00:07:36.000The main thing is if you're giving us the main elements of what we want, which is access to Western capital, access to Western technology, if you don't interfere with the flow of those things, you can criticize us about the Uyghurs from time to time.
00:07:50.000We don't care because you're giving us, you know, big help with a little bad mouth.
00:07:55.000It's a genius strategy and it's working.
00:07:58.000Well, it's brilliant also because then it gives them cover to go back to their constituents and say, oh, no, no, I sent a tweet out actually two months ago.
00:09:06.000Look, there was a promise we were given by American elites, and this is Republican, Democrat presidents, people on both sides of the aisle.
00:09:13.000Wall Street certainly pushed this idea.
00:09:18.000If we open up our markets, if we provide capital to them, if we give them access to technology, if we let them buy our blue jeans, they're going to become more like us.
00:09:29.000The government's going to become less repressive.
00:09:31.000They're going to become basically a quasi-United States.
00:09:52.000They don't care because they might have been wrong, but they got rich doing it.
00:09:57.000The biggest banks on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, they actually went over to China in the 1990s and said, here's how to set up your system to allow the Communist Party to stay in control, but to have these elements of capitalism that will allow your economy to grow.
00:10:12.000So we now have an increasingly rich China, an increasingly aggressive China.
00:10:19.000And it is a China largely of our creation because we bought into this myth, this lie that they would become more like us.
00:10:36.000First couple of years I was doing this when I was 18 or 19 years old.
00:10:38.000I remember going to think tanks in DC and I asked questions about China and they would give me these papers that were obviously funded by McKinsey where they said, no, no, it's actually a really good thing.
00:10:47.000You get access to cheaper goods and it keeps inflation down and it's this wonderful thing and they're going to be like us.
00:10:52.000Like eventually it's not going to be Beijing.
00:10:54.000It'll be Brooklyn and we'll all live in this kind of harmony together.
00:10:58.000And it was, it was, I was young, obviously, but the elites should have known better, but they did probably know better.
00:11:05.000want to explore that is how much of this have they really kind of um admitted to themselves they're betraying the west and how much of this is kind of like i'm just going to make money and i don't you know really care about the consequences i want to ask you about the psychology of it because i'm really interested in it peter we could get into this you know as we go case by case because i do want to get into the specifics of the book it's just such an important contribution what you've done here and courageous by the way because people are so afraid to touch this topic how much of this kind of selling out of the America to China,
00:11:35.000how much of this is just kind of seeking profits?
00:11:38.000You know, what's the psychology behind here?
00:11:41.000How do these elites that you have on the front cover here, John Boehner, Elon Musk, Nancy Pelosi, LeBron James?
00:11:46.000I think that's Henry Kissinger, if I'm not mistaken.
00:11:49.000And then Bill Gates and then Joe Biden, how do they justify this?
00:11:55.000I think for some people, the motivation is profit and money, particularly those that don't have a lot of it.
00:12:01.000You know, if you're in public life and you're a guy like Joe Biden and you want to accumulate assets or your family wants to accumulate assets, it's going to be very tempting and you're going to be willing to play ball if you don't have moral problems with doing this.
00:12:18.000With other people like Bill Gates, who's worth $100 billion plus, it's harder to understand.
00:12:24.000And I think in a lot of cases, the motivation isn't simply just about money.
00:12:28.000I think if you look at Bill Gates, I think if you look at Elon Musk, I think if you look at the guys at Google, there's a, you might say, authoritarian impulse or an authoritarian lust that they have.
00:12:43.000That's a pretty strong statement to make, but they make these statements about China where they talk about the fact that decision-making in China is so much more efficient.
00:12:53.000Some of them even say that the Chinese dictatorship is more responsive to the needs of the people than America's democratic republic.
00:13:03.000It's a bizarre sort of position to have, but I think they actually believe it.
00:13:08.000And I quote in the book from a computer scientist from MIT in the 1970s, a guy named Wiesenbaum, who makes a really interesting observation, Charlie.
00:13:19.000He said, those that work in technology that are computer programmers, in a sense, they can develop a god-like complex.
00:13:27.000Because unlike any military commander, political leader, when they are doing their work as a programmer, they are God.
00:13:35.000They get to configure the program, the universe, the platform, the way that they want to do it.
00:13:41.000That's what Mark Zuckerberg got to do with Facebook.
00:13:43.000He got to, in a sense, reformulate the way in which people interact.
00:13:49.000And his concern was that this leads people in the tech space to think that they should start reorganizing the rest of the world.
00:13:59.000So I think it's money, certainly in the case of a lot of politicians.
00:14:03.000But I think when it comes to these very wealthy elites on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, there is this respect and admiration that they have for dictatorship that's very troubling.
00:14:16.000And I think is part of the reason they say such wonderful things about Beijing.
00:14:20.000It's not just getting access to the market.
00:14:22.000They actually really believe some of this stuff.
00:14:55.000It's beyond any sort of control that Alexander the Great ever would have possibly ever had.
00:14:59.000When you did this research, were you shocked at the extent of the connection between the American ruling class in every single industry to the Chinese Communist Party?
00:15:22.000I mean, if you look at the Titans of the tech world, you're talking about Bill Gates, you're talking about the founders of Google, you're talking about Mark Zuckerberg, you know, a few others that I mentioned in the book.
00:15:32.000Every single one of them has deep, troubling, and serious ties with Beijing.
00:15:37.000Same thing on Wall Street, BlackRock, Blackstone, Ray Dalio's, Bridgewater Associates, the biggest hedge fund in the world.
00:15:44.000All of them falling over themselves, saying wonderful things about President Xi, turning their gaze elsewhere when it comes to serious human rights violations or the national security threat that China poses.
00:15:58.000Every single one of them is doing this.
00:17:12.000I mean, you know, I first reported on the Biden family's commercial ties with China back in 2018 and believed it to be a story about cronyism and corruption and self-dealing and Chinese influence peddling.
00:17:26.000But Charlie, with new evidence that's come out from the laptop, from emails from some of Hunter Biden's business partners, we got access to their email accounts.
00:17:36.000The story has taken a significant and I think very troubling change.
00:17:40.000And that change is we are now talking about a story that enters the realm of the intelligence world and possibly espionage.
00:17:51.000Well, we decided to look back and trace who actually made those commercial deals happen in China for the Biden family.
00:17:59.000And what we found is that the Biden family and their companies, Hunter's companies, got some $31 million from Chinese businessmen in deals.
00:18:10.000And every single one of these deals was put together by a Chinese businessman who had ties to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence.
00:18:22.000Well, there's a $20 million deal where Hunter Biden gets an ownership stake in a financial management company that's financed by the Chinese government, of all things.
00:18:33.000He, of course, has no background in finance or anything like that, but he gets this deal.
00:18:46.000And Cha Feng, at the same time he is helping this deal happen for Hunter Biden, is business partners with the Vice Minister for State Security in China.
00:19:00.000And that person's job at the Ministry for State Security is recruiting foreign nationals to spy for China.
00:19:07.000He's also reportedly responsible for North American intelligence operations.
00:19:13.000There's another businessman that helps make that deal happen.
00:19:17.000And in another instance, transfers $5 million to one of Hunter Biden's companies.
00:19:23.000And that guy, Mr. Zhao, is business partners with the family of the former minister of state security, the guy who runs the entire spy apparatus in China.
00:19:34.000So what you see, Charlie, is this concentration of people connected to Chinese intelligence who are throwing deals at the Biden family.
00:19:43.000And the Biden family are taking those deals.
00:19:47.000And the question everybody has to ask themselves, I think we both know the answer to this, is is the Chinese intelligence service, is the Chinese state, are these businessmen just philanthropists?
00:20:35.000And what's important to point out here, Charlie, is that people that will, you know, on the political left say will acknowledge that Hunter Biden did these things.
00:20:44.000They try to sort of siphon it off and say, well, you know, that's Hunter Biden.
00:20:50.000The problem is the other thing we point out in the book, and there's numerous examples of this, Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, throughout the time he's vice president, probably still today, as far as I know, have intertwined finances.
00:21:04.000We know that during the vice presidency, Hunter Biden was paying Joe Biden's bills.
00:21:11.000Some of those are kind of rudimentary, that he'd pay a $300 phone bill.
00:21:14.000So Joe Biden could have this kind of strange back channel private telephone line.
00:21:20.000But he also paid for renovations on his home up in Delaware and there are other expenses.
00:21:25.000So when Hunter Biden is getting these foreign deals and collecting this money, one of the beneficiaries is Joe Biden himself.
00:21:35.000So on page 37 of your book, Red Handed, that everyone should go buy at least five copies of and give to your loved ones.
00:21:43.000And honestly, give to your elected official if you see them in hand and be like, what are you doing about this?
00:22:14.000We met in like the back of the Beverly Hilton Hotel or something, right?
00:22:18.000In this kind of weird, like clandestine meeting.
00:22:20.000And Joe Biden came and he was like, happy, go lucky.
00:22:23.000But it was very clear that he was being factored into the deal with the Chinese.
00:22:26.000Tell us about the curious case of Tony Bobulinsky.
00:22:30.000Yeah, you know, Tony, I think, is somebody who's a private person.
00:22:35.000I mean, he's not a political person at all.
00:22:38.000And he saw this happening and decided to alert the public to it, let the public know what was going on.
00:22:44.000And everything he said has been confirmed by the documents in the laptop and elsewhere.
00:22:51.000That deal, the 10% for the big guy phrase, involved a Chinese company called CEFC.
00:22:58.000CEFC was run by a Chinese businessman named Yi, who before taking this job had actually run an organization that was funded and directed by Chinese military intelligence.
00:23:12.000This company, CEFC, was located in a section of Beijing that is controlled by the Chinese military.
00:24:03.000And he saw red flags all over the place when he got involved.
00:24:07.000It's interesting to point out, by the way, Charlie, that the CEFC that has all these ties to Chinese intelligence, the plan was for Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and the representatives from CEFC to actually share office space in Washington, D.C. In the emails, Hunter talks about getting signage put up to that effect.
00:24:30.000The only reason that does not happen is one of the company executives from CEFC gets arrested by the FBI on espionage and bribery charges in New York, and that blows the whole thing up.
00:24:42.000So it just tells you this fundamental question of the Biden family being compromised has to be looked at.
00:24:49.000I believe they are, and I believe that there's substantial evidence that they are.
00:24:53.000So let me ask you a technical question that I'm just curious.
00:24:56.000And you don't have to, you know, divulge your trade secrets.
00:24:59.000So you say $31 million that you know of.
00:25:02.000Peter, how do you find this information?
00:25:04.000I mean, it's not like you could type it into Yahoo or Bing.
00:25:14.000Yeah, you know, the challenge a lot of times you face in research today is not too little information, but too much.
00:25:19.000So the 31 figure is very straightforward.
00:25:23.00020 million comes from the deal that he did with BHR, which is that private equity fund.
00:25:30.000And that information comes from a University of Chicago business school professor who looks at the size of the fund that Hunter was brought into, his 10% ownership stake, and says, this is what this is worth by sort of industry standards.
00:25:45.000It could be worth more, but that's what it's worth.
00:25:48.000So in some cases, it's getting expert analysis, serious expert analysis.
00:25:53.000In other instances, for example, the other $11 million, you have $5 million transfer to one of Hunter Biden's companies, another $6 million that's transferred to Hunter into some of his companies.
00:26:04.000That actually comes from so-called suspicious activity reports or SARS reports that are filed with the Treasury Department.
00:26:12.000Anytime a U.S. bank sees money flowing from a, let's say, sketchy source or a troubling source to what is regarded as a politically connected figure, and Hunter Biden would be one of those, obviously, it gets flagged and it goes to the Treasury Department.
00:26:29.000Those reports relating to Hunter Biden were released by the Senate last year.
00:26:34.000So we went and looked at those reports.
00:26:36.000We then went to Chinese corporate records and we looked at Chinese business publications and other sources to trace who were involved in these companies.
00:26:46.000And then we, of course, find out found out through the Hunter Biden laptop who were the people that made those deals happen.
00:26:53.000And then we did a detailed research analysis on Chinese sources on who those individuals are.
00:26:59.000Every bit of information that we use is footnoted in the back.
00:27:03.000Unlike some sources that were used in the steel dossier, we do not use any.
00:27:09.000Yeah, we don't use any anonymous sources.
00:27:12.000As far as I'm concerned, anonymous sources are basically worthless.
00:27:16.000You should be able to show them and share them, and people should be able to replicate them on their own.
00:28:34.000Because this stuff is so obviously either illegal and definitely immoral.
00:28:39.000Yeah, I mean, I guess I would say let's talk about LeBron James a little bit.
00:28:43.000Obviously, he's very outspoken on a lot of issues.
00:28:47.000I think says a lot of outrageous things about the country and whatnot.
00:28:52.000But he has a long history of kowtowing to China.
00:28:55.000People are obviously familiar with the case a couple of years ago in the NBA where the Houston Rockets general manager tweeted something out about Hong Kong and LeBron James said, oh, you know, he's speaking out of ignorance.
00:29:08.000The fact of the matter is LeBron James has been doing this for years.
00:29:12.000And he does it because in addition to his massive deal with Nike, he has deals in China.
00:29:18.000He has a line of shoes that are made only for the Chinese elite.
00:29:22.000These have ancient Chinese symbols on them.
00:29:26.000They're very coveted by the Chinese elite.
00:29:28.000Some of the Nike shoes that are released in the United States get released in China first.
00:29:35.000He has deals with Chinese state media companies for the distribution of his films and other video products in China.
00:29:42.000So these are very deep ties, and it's been that way for a long time.
00:29:47.000You might be too young to remember Darfur back in 2007 and 2008.
00:29:54.000But this was a terrible situation where the regime in South Sudan was slaughtering hundreds of thousands of black Christians in the South.
00:30:02.000That regime was backed by the Chinese government.
00:30:06.000And there was a petition drive launched in the NBA to condemn China for supporting this regime, this kind of Arabic regime that was slaughtering Black Christians in the South.
00:30:20.000LeBron James refused to sign the petition.
00:30:24.000The only other person on the Cleveland Cavaliers that didn't sign it was a guy in the back bench who had a shoe contract with a Chinese company.
00:30:31.000So to me, that speaks volumes and it indicates that, you know, in this particular case, certainly to LeBron James, these black lives did not matter.
00:30:40.000And I think it really damages his credibility because he's been this way for a long time.
00:30:47.000And I don't think it's going to change.
00:30:48.000The money is more important to him than the positions he claims to stands for.
00:31:07.000You know, look, I'm not going to give up on this until the American people give up on it.
00:31:11.000And I kind of have viewed my role and this organization that I run's role to be kind of a Paul Revere for America, certainly not comparing myself to Paul Revere.
00:31:21.000But our job is to sort of spread the word and to let people know that in effect, the British are coming.
00:31:27.000And now it's up to the American people to gather the Continental Army and fight for it.
00:31:32.000So one of the things you mentioned earlier, we have to alert our elected officials and tell them we care about this stuff.
00:31:41.000The second thing I would say is, you know, these companies, these big tech companies, they have shareholder meetings.
00:31:47.000Buy a couple of shares of stock of Google and go to the shareholder meetings and read some quotes from the book of what these executives say about China and ask them to explain it publicly.
00:31:59.000I think shame is still a very powerful tool that can be used.
00:32:03.000And then finally, in the last part of the book, I certainly have some things I recommend our policymakers in Washington should do.
00:32:40.000They've infiltrated every single part of American society.
00:32:44.000We talk about China quite often here on this program.
00:32:46.000But just to be able to have a piece of literature, research is what this really is, that goes through in an incredibly thorough manner, citing how every vertical of American culture and finance and business has been corrupted by the Chinese Communist Party.
00:33:04.000It's a military strategy, a lead capture, whatever you want to call it, of what I believe is an enemy of the United States, the Chinese Communist Party, that is one by one trying to pick off people that could potentially stop their rise to global power.
00:33:17.000And Peter, you've exposed that, and it's a great moral good and takes a lot of courage.