Now, I don’t know what Martin is talking about here. “Political operatives would secretly place damaging information with friendly outlets like The Drudge Report and Fox News,” and with me. Ever since I read this I have been — 27 years is a long time to be doing this — and I’ve been trying to think from whom have I taken phone calls from people planting information for me. This just doesn’t happen. I don’t talk to anybody. I really am a hermit. I do not have networking relationships with any of the people.

Look, I’ve gotta know a few of them over the years, but — I got a call from Greenspan once about a Mexican blackout. Newt urged him to call me thinking it would help if I knew what was going on. But I don’t get calls from people trying to plant information. I get calls from people wanting to appear to sell their books or what have you, but the left has always thought that this is what happens. That there’s this cabal of operatives out there, and that they would be consorting with people like me and Drudge and Fox News to plant news, we would hype the news and then somehow the Drive-Bys would pick it up and that’s how we got stuff in the mainstream. That is strange as it can be to me. I have no memory — Snerdley, help me out here. Well, okay, okay. That’s right. Okay, good. That’s right. The White House twice sent emissaries down to get my mind right on immigration. But that wasn’t to plant information. They were out saying what they were saying themselves. And I was disputing it. They wanted to get my mind right on it.

I can tell you this. I have never gotten a call from somebody at a website that I don’t know saying, “Hey, we got a story coming and it’s gonna be really right up your alley!” I have friends who post things– not very many, but I have friends who post things — at websites who tell me… (interruption) Oh, the phony soldiers thing? (interruption) Oh, yeah. There was… In fact, there was a guy in Las Vegas who got hold of John Hinderaker at Power Line, and he said, “I will only tell my story to you and Rush Limbaugh.” His story was that he knew who it was that beat up Harry Reid. He knew why Harry Reid was showing up with black eyes and all this over the holidays one year, a couple years ago. And this guy would not use his real name with us, but he would only talk to us, because he only trusted Hinderaker and me to get the truth out. It was a total setup. The guy tried to tell us it was Dingy Harry’s brother who had beat him up over something, and the guy later admitted he was just running a scam to see if he could get this done, if he could plant false information and we would run with it. And it didn’t happen. As I say, I’ve got friends that post things at websites who will send me what they’ve posted, but they never say, “Hey, would you run this? Would you hype this?” They just keep me informed. I don’t… I’m not part of any networking. I don’t call anybody and ask ’em what they’re doing, and they don’t call me. I am an acknowledged hermit on this stuff. My friends are not in this industry that I spend a lot of time talking about here. On purpose. By design. Over the years, I’ve gotten to know some people.

Anyway, this is one of these things that… It’s another one of these myths that the left has concocted because all of the stories that Jonathan Martin’s talking about here probably are stories that the Drive-Bys would not cover on their own for a reason. You know, not covering a story can be just as biased as how you cover a story. You know, selecting what people hear about and what they don’t hear about, that’s every bit as part of bias as flavoring the story. So the New Media, the alternative media came around. All we did was talk about things that we learned that they ignored. So they had to devise a theory to explain how this happened, and it could have been that we were actually working and digging and finding things. No! It had to be that there were political operatives — partisan political operatives — that were planting false information with us and we were then running with it, forcing it into the mainstream media. And, of course, I’m mentioned in this ’cause I am the Mister Big (and always have been the Mister Big) of the vast right wing conspiracy. Anyway, here’s the next paragraph: “Yet by personally broaching topics like Bill Clinton’s marital indiscretions and the conspiracy theories surrounding the suicide of Vincent W. Foster Jr. … Donald J. Trump is again defying the norms of presidential politics and fashioning his own outrageous style — one that has little use for a middleman, let alone usual ideas about dignity…” Whereas, of course, respectable newspapers like the New York Times don’t bother with middlemen. They dream up their own smears against Republicans and they put ’em on the front page. Politico does this.