On Friday’s Breitbart News Daily, SiriusXM host Alex Marlow asked Breitbart News senior editor and Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer about claims that Russian hackers interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Donald Trump.

“First of all, and we’ve said this from the beginning, Alex, the Russians historically – I’ve written several books on the Cold War – the Russians historically continue to do what a lot of foreign powers do. They try to curry favor with both sides,” Schweizer said. “There’s no question that they were going to try to do things in this election that they thought might make them look good and curry favor with Trump – and they were going to do the same thing with Hillary Clinton.”

“As we recounted at the Government Accountability Institute, there are deep financial ties and political ties that the Clinton camp has with Vladimir Putin, as well,” he continued. “Beginning with John Podesta, the campaign chairman, who was on the board of directors and owned 75,000 shares of stock in a privately held company called Joule Energy that received in 2011 $45 million in cold hard cash directly from Vladimir Putin. It was through a entity called Rusnano, directly controlled by Vladimir Putin, and they invested in this business by Podesta. And it’s frankly not clear what actually ever happened to that money. They were supposed to build a factory with it in Russia. There’s no evidence that they ever did.”

“So you’ve got that. You’ve got this project called Skolkovo that Hillary Clinton initiated as part of the Russian reset, which was an effort by our State Department to help the Russians develop their own version of Silicon Valley,” Schweizer went on. “Obviously, the Russian version is a little less free-wheeling than the American version, but the point being is that the Clinton Foundation was in the middle of that, and the Clinton Foundation got tens of millions of dollars from American companies participating in that – and, by the way, they also got money from the Russian officials that were involved in that.”

“What this whole initiative involved was the transfer of technology that ended up benefiting the Russian military. So, you know, this notion that Vladimir Putin is sitting in the Kremlin and saying, ‘Oh, the Clintons and these people are awful. I never want to have any dealings with them!’ is absolutely absurd and ludicrous,” he asserted.

“We know it’s been reported this morning the Russians tried to hack the Republican Party. They were unsuccessful in doing that. They obviously were successful in hacking Podesta and the Democrats because of lax security. But this notion that it is the Russians who somehow won this election is, again, patently absurd, and is another example of really insulting people and saying to people, ‘You may have voted this way, but you don’t really know why you voted that way. You voted that way because you were manipulated by somebody halfway around the world,’” he said.

“I’ve always said the hacking needs to be investigated. It’s a criminal law enforcement matter. We’ve had these problems throughout the Obama administration. There never seems to be any clear-cut effort by Obama to respond to them, to deal with them, which in and of itself to me is frankly a scandal – that now, suddenly, he’s all exercised about hacking and wants to do something about it. So it needs to be taken seriously, but to somehow morph what is a law-enforcement matter into a political matter is to me just another example of how they are trying to manipulate things, and drawing all the wrong conclusions about what happened on Election Night,” said Schweizer.

He said the Democrats were currently going through an emotional and psychological “process for themselves internally,” to convince themselves they didn’t really lose the 2016 election, but it’s being played out in public due to their enormous influence over the mainstream media.

“The Left needs to constantly reinforce to itself that they are virtuous, that they represent the wave of the future, as it were,” Schweizer explained. “It goes to the heart of what we’ve talked about before, Alex: the Left comes across very confident and very arrogantly, very demanding, but at their core there really is this sort of profound insecurity.”

“I think part of what you’re seeing is, they have to convince themselves that they got screwed,” he observed. “They weren’t rejected by the American people. It was not because their ideas were faulty and their candidate was awful. It was because they got screwed, and they have to convince themselves of that. They’re going to, I think, double-down on the sort of leadership that they have at the DNC. They’re going to double-down on their policy positions.”

“It is because the Left in America – this is not true forty, fifty years ago, but the Left in America – it’s really become an article of religious faith. It’s not a political belief system; it’s an article of religious faith. And it’s a religious faith that sort of demands their obedience to this set of ideas,” Schweizer posited.

“When you deal with somebody who is essentially a theocrat, whether that’s in the United States or a theocrat in some Third World country, this is how they respond. They respond with indignation, they respond with anger, and they respond by trying to control your life because they do not want to accept the fact that maybe their view of things is not accurate and a reflection of reality,” he said.

Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.

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