RUSH: John, Salt Lake City. Welcome, sir, to the EIB Network. Great to have you here. How you doing?

CALLER: Hi. Thanks for bringing me aboard today, sir.

RUSH: You bet, sir.

CALLER: I just… I’m watching the TV and seeing all of these pundits and these wizards of smart pooh-pooh this wiretapping thing, saying that Obama would have had to go to FISA, he would have to get a warrant, and I’m dumbstruck. I’m asking myself, “When has the law ever provided an impediment to Obama or any of his toadies from Lois Lerner to Eric Holder to any of them?” And while I was on hold, I also came up with something. We know Comey and Clapper have been carrying Obama’s water for years. Why would they stop now?

RUSH: Well, wait a minute, now. Let’s go back to your first question. Can you give me a couple shreds of evidence of the wanton lawbreaking of Obama and Lois Lerner.

CALLER: Oh, just denying the tax-exempt status to political opponents.

RUSH: Yeah, that would be Lois Lerner.

CALLER: Yeah. How about the snooping on Sharyl Attkisson? The snooping on the Associated Press?

RUSH: Okay. All right. I have it next up in my Stack here. That’s why I was leading the witness, although I didn’t know that’s where he was going.

CALLER: (chuckling)

RUSH: John, I’ve got it right here. Here’s the deal. You remember this, folks? This goes back to October of 2014, so roughly 2-1/2 years ago. “A former CBS News reporter who quit the network over claims that it kills stories that put Obama in a bad light says that she was spied on by a government-related entity that planted classified documents on her computer. In her new memoir, Sharyl Attkisson says a source who arranged to have her laptop checked for spyware in 2013 was shocked and flabbergasted as what the analysts revealed.”

This is outrageous, it’s worse than anything Nixon ever did. “‘I wouldn’t have believed something like this could happen in the United States of America,’ Attkisson quotes the source saying, who looked at her computer. She speculates the motive was to lay the groundwork for possible charges against her or her sources. Now, she says that “the source, who’s connected to government three-letter agencies,” and there are any number of those: FBI, CIA, DOJ, “told her that her computer was hacked into by a sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware that is proprietary to a government agency.

“Either the CIA, the FBI, the DIA, or the National Security Agency.” You remember this? She went and she wrote a book about it. She went on a tour to promote the book. Now, we know that Obama weaponized the IRS. Folks, this is all predicated… I began the program today by asking: Is it unreasonable to believe that Barack Obama and his administration would wiretap or surveil Donald Trump while he was a candidate for the presidency? Is it unreasonable or reasonable to suspect this, based on what we know? And my point, it is not unreasonable at all to suspect this.

You cannot just reject this out of hand like the media is trying to do, because of things like this. (interruption) Well, I’m not linking Obama to it. I’m asking if it’s reasonable or unreasonable to think he could have been. I haven’t linked Obama to anything. Trump is. I’m simply asking, do you think it’s reasonable or unreasonable, Trump’s charge? And I think, if you’re answering honestly, you have to say it’s reasonable to think this. Trump has every reason in the world. It’s not just this.

Look at the efforts that have been ongoing since November to undermine his transition, undermine his presidency, undermine the election victory, to sabotage his administration. There’s no question that the deep state has been working leaking in felonious fashion all kinds of private data that they are intercepting from Trump’s phone calls. I mean, he calls the president of Mexico, he calls the president of Australia. A couple days later, there are news stories of what the call contained, what the presidents of Mexico and Japan and Australia said and what Trump said. And they lied.

In one of these stories they said that Trump hung up on one of these presidents. And it didn’t happen. When the president, I think it was Australia, when he read that, he called a news conference or put a story out: This was a pleasant conversation. Nobody hung up on anybody.

But somebody had the transcript of the call, and they leaked it. Somebody had to be able to get it. How’d they get the transcript of the call? How does that happen? President Trump has one of the most secure phone systems in the world in the White House. Even he marveled at it when he said he first saw it. Could not believe it.

Well, how does a phone call he makes, how does a transcript end up in the media? Somebody listened to it. Maybe somebody in the room listening on Trump’s side reported that. Maybe Trump’s got problems on his staff. I doubt that, but I mean, somebody leaked this, and somebody had access to both sides of these conversations.

And these are just three examples. There are many more. Well, if you have that, it’s like the old question from Pascal: Is it tougher to believe that something that’s never happened will happen or that something that has happened will happen again? Well, we’ve got something here that’s happened. We have leaks of private phone conversations of President Trump or President-Elect Trump. Okay, it’s happened.

The New York Times in January 20th, headline: “Wiretap Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides.” A timeline has been put together of all of these things that have happened, including the access of the request for FISA warrants. It’s clear the Obama Department of Justice wanted to investigate Trump and did. Found nothing on the criminal side, then asked for a FISA national security warrant for Trump’s aides. There’s no question this has been happening.

So is it unreasonable to think that people loyal to Barack Obama are in charge of this deep state effort to unseat or undermine? It’s not unreasonable at all. Now you add this Sharyl Attkisson story. You have Obama weaponizing the IRS and using it against every day Americans. That be Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote. Now, he didn’t wiretap James Rosen. It’s easily understood this error.

James Rosen’s the Fox News reporter. He was not wiretapped. His emails were surveilled and requested, his Gmail account. Not technically a phone tap. They got them, don’t know how. I don’t know if he was ordered to turn them over or what, I don’t remember that, but I just remember it wasn’t his phone calls they were tapping.

They lied about Obamacare. They lied about Fast and Furious. They have lied about knowing whether or not Hillary was using that illegal email server. They have lied about so many things, it’s just simply far more reasonable to accept that this happened than it is unreasonable, is all I’m saying.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The Gateway Pundit put together a list of more than a dozen proven victims of Obama Regime wiretaps. You want to hear some of ’em? Okay. “WikiLeaks released the following list on February 23rd of Obama administration wire taps: The U.S. National Security Agency bugged a private climate change strategy meeting between U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin…” Don’t forget, there have been wiretaps of Angela Merkel’s phone calls, and she was livid when she found out about it.

“Obama bugged Chief of Staff of U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for long-term interception targeting his Swiss phone. Obama singled out the Director of the Rules Division of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Johann Human, and targeted his Swiss phone for long term interception. Obama stole sensitive Italian diplomatic cables detailing how Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to help patch up his relationship with U.S. President Barack Obama, who was refusing to talk to Netanyahu.

“Obama intercepted top E.U. and Japanese trade ministers discussing their secret strategy and red lines to stop the U.S. ‘extort[ing]’ them at the WTO Doha arounds. [sic] Obama explicitly targeted five other top E.U. economic officials for long term interception, including their French, Austrian and Belgium phone numbers…” Now, you might ask, “Obama did all this?” Well, the administration did. But these are the kinds of things… Folks, it’s like Lois Lerner. I keep going back to this, but it’s such a great example.

When Lois Lerner was acting as a rogue IRS agent denying tax-exempt status to only conservative applicants, people on our side said, “We gotta find a smoking gun.” I said, “What do you mean?” “Well, we gotta find a memo! We gotta find direction. We gotta find Obama ordering her.” “You’re never gonna find that. It doesn’t exist.” “What do you mean, it huh?” I said, “Lois Lerner is there precisely because she knows what to do without being told. You don’t understand liberalism if you don’t understand that. These people are like-minded.

“They don’t have to be told to be liberal. They don’t have to be told what liberalism is and how it operates.” Eric Holder did not have to get a phone call from Barack Obama to understand that they weren’t gonna prosecute the New Black Panthers for vote fraud in the Philadelphia polling places. Barack Obama did not have to call Eric Holder to tell him to take over all those domestic police departments on charges they were racist. It’s just what liberals do. Liberals and big-government advocates do this. They surveil citizens. They surveil enemies of the state.

They surveil allies.

This kind of stuff happens.

This is my point about reasonable and unreasonable. I mean, this list goes on: “Obama explicitly targeted the phones of Italy’s ambassador to NATO and other top Italian officials for long term interception; and Obama intercepted details of a critical private meeting between then French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Merkel and Berluscon [sic], where the latter was told the Italian banking system was ready to ‘pop like a cork.'” These are just some examples; then they showed up on WikiLeaks.

“[I]n 2013 the … Washington Post expressed outrage after the revelation that the [Obama] Justice Department had investigated the newsgathering activities of a Fox News reporter as a potential crime in a probe of classified leaks. The reporter, Fox News’ James Rosen and his family, were part of an investigation into government officials anonymously leaking information to journalists. Rosen was not charged but his movements and actions were tracked,” and his email was hacked if you will. He was not phone-tapped, Rosen wasn’t. “Also in 2013…”

See if you remember this. “Also in 2013, members of the Associated Press were also a target of the surveillance.” They were okay with it since Obama was the one doing it. I’m not kidding. The AP was a target of surveillance. All of this was Obama trying to track down who was leaking things out of his Regime. The New Yorker, a liberal rag in Manhattan, “even noted that ‘In moderate and liberal circles, at least, the phone-records scandal, partly because it involves the dear old AP and partly because it raises anew the specter of Big Brother, may well present the most serious threat to Obama’s reputation.'”

Do you remember…? What was her name? Jill what’s-her-face of the New York Times, Jill… She used to be the editor over there until they moved her out. She charged sexism or whatever. What’s her name? She said — and she is as leftist as you can get, and I say that without exaggeration. She said the Obama administration was the most inaccessible, was the most un-transparent administration she had ever dealt with. (interruption) Jill Abramson! That’s right. Jill Abramson. You know, she wrote the book with Jane Mayer, trying to destroy Clarence Thomas. But, yeah, she was the editor at the New York Times.

They finally moved her out of there. I think it was… She charged sexism, ageism, some such thing. But she was been on record a couple or three times talking about how the administration had all the media fooled. The media think they loved them when Obama secretly despised them, spied on them and all these other things. Which is exactly what people like that do. You know, folks, it stands to reason. People that love Big Government, why do they love Big Government? And don’t give me ’cause they love doing things for people. That’s not it.

They love power, and they want to know who opposes them.

They want to know what their opponents are doing and saying. You know, you need to get a movie. You need to rent a movie sometime. I’ve recommended this once before. Lives of Others. Did you go out and get that? (interruption) Yes. It’s about life in East Germany in the 1970s. Not that far ago. East Germany was part of a Soviet Bloc, and it was all about how the East German government spies on citizens. It was truthful, historically accurate, and it was sobering. It’s the kind of thing that young people today cannot even imagine.

I mean, they have these holier-than-thou images of Obama, and if they ever actually learned, it would shock them to the point that they would not want to believe. This list of… Here’s the Sharyl Attkisson hack of her personal computer in 2014, her CBS laptop. Now you’ve got Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times today asking the IRS to leak Trump’s tax return to him. He says, “If you’re an IRS agent and have a certain president’s tax return that you’d like to leak, my address,” and he gives the New York Times address.

Now, this is a crime, and they’re happily — happily — pursuing what is felonious criminal behavior here, and they’re encouraging it in others. They want somebody at the IRS to commit a felony and leak Trump’s tax returns to ’em.