Congress must use subpoena power to investigate possible corruption via the monetization of political influence on the part of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden with respect to Ukrainian energy company Burisma, said Peter Schweizer in a Monday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host Haris Alic.

Schweizer said, “What you have is the Bidens exploiting the political power that Joe Biden had as vice president. When he was vice president of the United States, he had two countries of all the countries in the world where he was point-person on foreign policy. [He was] appointed to that position by the president, Barack Obama. One of those countries was Ukraine. The other was China.”

“Those are the two countries where Hunter Biden cashed in big time for the benefit of the Biden family,” continued Schweizer. “It was about the fact that his father was steering U.S. policy, and they exploited that situation to sign these lucrative deals with Burisma in Ukraine and Chinese companies in China.”

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“They’re not the victims at all,” said Schweizer of Joe and Hunter Biden. “They’re the recipients. They’re, in a sense, the extortionists … They’re not victims by any stretch of the imagination.”

Schweizer described the foundations of suspicion regarding the Bidens’ selling of political influence. “You find an overlay of all kinds of activities. We know that Devon Archer went and met with Joe Biden in the White House just days before both he and Hunter Biden started receiving these payments from Burisma. We know that when there were issues coming up related to natural gas and USAID money going into the energy sector, there was communication involving Burisma.”

“It’s the sort of fact pattern that is deeply troubling, and it’s the reason why I believe this needs to be investigated,” Schweizer determined. “What Democrats are basically saying is, ‘There’s no crime here that you’ve yet demonstrated, so there’s no reason to investigate.’ Of course, that’s not the same standard they apply to Donald Trump or others. Apparently, only when it comes to Joe Biden or the Clintons, you have to demonstrate the crime before the investigation, which I think is ridiculous. The reason you have investigations is to determine whether you look at a certain fact pattern that’s troubling, and you investigate to find whether a crime has been committed.”

Congressional use of subpoena power must be deployed to understand the nature of the Bidens’ financial dealings with foreign states and business interests, explained Schweizer.

“The only way we are going to know and get our hands on fully understanding what happened and what this relationship was all about is by investigating,” said Schweizer. “You need somebody with subpoena power. You need to look at the recorded communications, just like we’ve had the transcript of the president’s conversation with the Ukrainian president come out, those need to be looked at as they relate to Joe Biden and the Ukrainians.”

Schweizer went on, “We need to look at any email communications that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden might have had as it relates to Burisma. We need to ask Ukrainian prosecutors to look at the financial records of Burisma and their internal communications. That’s the only way we’re going to really understand and the position that people have taken that until you demonstrate the crime there needs to be o investigation is absolutely backwards and completely ridiculous.”

“There’s lots of evidence that an investigation was underfoot [in Ukraine] and that Hunter Biden was being investigated,” said Schweizer, recalling Joe Biden’s boast of leveraging U.S. foreign aid — as vice president — against Ukraine to coerce the termination of its then-prosecutor Viktor Shokin. “There were very specific alleged crimes that they were looking into. One of those was that [Hunter Biden] was functioning illegally as a lobbyist, and the other one was that there was a conflict between his compensation as a paid consultant [while also being] a board member, and according to Ukrainian law, you can’t mix those two.”

Schweizer advised, “We ultimately don’t exactly know everything that’s happened because nobody yet has subpoena power, and my point is that’s why this needs to be investigated. [Congress is] certainly trying to exert subpoena power to investigate the president. They’ve released sensitive communication involving phone conversations. We have none of that as it relates to the Bidens. We know of the flow of money. We know of the relationships. We know of Joe Biden’s bragging. It’s time for the Senate, in particular, to say, ‘We are going to investigate this and get to the bottom of it. This is corruption at the highest levels.'”

“There needs to be an investigation of any and all communication that took place,” Schweizer concluded.

Schweizer is president of the Government Accountability Institute and senior contributor-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.