*CORRECTION TO THE TRANSCRIPT BELOW: After today’s show we learned that the New York Times did not alter its headline. They say there were two headlines all along, one in the online version, and one in the print edition. The print edition used the word “wiretapped” and the online edition never did. However, this does not change the premise that the story (Trump and Russians hacked the election) is waning in the MSM.
RUSH: Say, have you noticed, my friends, that the whole Russians-stole-the-election theme is gone? Have you noticed it’s not out there today? You can’t find a story on it? I’m gonna tell you why, ’cause we had a major role in this I am convinced right here on the EIB Network yesterday ’cause we nailed ’em.
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RUSH: Have you seen any stories about the Russians hacking the elections? It’s gone, and so is the New York Times headline from the January 20th story with “wiretaps.” They have gone back and they have changed it. “Wiretaps” is not in that headline anymore. I’ll have the details on this. There’s also two polls out there. Folks, this is big. This is exactly… I am convinced that we played a role in this. Not just yesterday, but in days in the past. Many people have, and Trump’s the actual reason why.
When he lobbed that tweet back that the Obama administration had him under surveillance, that’s when they had to let it go. And Matt Taibbi, who’s extreme liberal; Rolling Stone has a piece out today warning the Democrats saying you better be careful here, because you might get what you want, which is an investigation into what you’ve been doing. He’s warning them to walk this back and stop reporting on this with all these unnamed sources, that you’re setting yourselves up for a big fail.
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What has happened to the Democrats’ and media’s story on the Russians working with Trump to steal the election from Hillary? It’s gone. It’s not out there today. There aren’t any updates. We’ve got a revised New York Times headline — sneaky, sneaky, sneaky — as they postdate change the headline wiping out the word “wiretaps” and “wiretapped” from their headline on a story January 20th.
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RUSH: The “Russia hacked the election and Trump worked with them to make it happen” story is gone. Now, it may reappear, but it’s gonna reappear in a different form. It is gone, and the best evidence that I can give you that it is gone — remember the headline that we and a lot of other people showed you from the New York Times on January 20th, which was — in fact, I’ve got it here in the desktop. Find this thing and — oops. I moved it. I’ll have to get it later. It was a headline from January 20th, Trump’s Inauguration Day, and it actually said: “Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides.”
And all week long, you know, we put it at RushLimbaugh.com, a lot of other people did, people had been focusing on it because it used the word “wiretapped.” And the reason it became interesting is because Trump volleyed back. Trump tweeted that Obama had ordered wiretaps on Trump Tower. And that caused the media and the deep state and the Democrat Party, “Wuh, wuh, wuh, we’re not investigating you. You’re stupid! You’re silly! Show us the FISA warrant. We don’t have any –” And then they had to stop themselves. Because if there’s no investigation of Trump, then what have all these stories the past six months been?
If there’s no investigation of Trump, if Trump’s not under investigation, then what the hell have all these stories been about the last six months with unnamed sources, intelligence agency officials? And every story, as I have pointed out ’til I’m blue in the face, every story has made it plain as day that they do not have any evidence yet. But the trend is looking like it happened and we’re continuing to track this story down.
Well, if you look, if you go back, you will find that the New York Times has changed the headline. You might say, “What does it matter, Rush?” January 20th. Well, these things are kept as archives now. The stories are always on the website. The pictures of the New York Times front page are always cached. A bunch of people do it. They’ve actually gone in and changed the headline. And instead of saying, “Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides.” The headline now is: “Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry Into Trump Associates.”
Now, let me point out to you the difference. Up till now all of the reporting, every bit of it has implied that there are wiretaps, that there was a FISA warrant, two FISA warrants. One was sought to wiretap and surveil Trump that was turned down and rejected. A second one applied for that did not mention Trump was granted, but nobody’s seen these affidavits. Nobody has actually seen the warrants. They are not released, but the existence of these FISA warrants has been part of Drive-By Media reporting on this story.
So the assumption has been that the Obama administration asked and received a FISA warrant to surveil the Trump campaign and the Trump transition. And then the New York Times has that story on January 20th which says, “Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides” has been changed to, “Intercepted Russian Communication.” Why would they change the headline?
It’s very simple: there has not been an investigation of Trump, folks. They have been lying about this. “Lying” may be what’s happened, but it’s not the right way to — They have been hoping. There have been deep state sources telling the media enough things that the media has hoped and they’ve rolled the dice and believed that there is eventually going to be proof that Trump was being surveilled, and the reason that Trump was being surveilled is because there is evidence of Trump collusion.
Well, there isn’t any evidence, there never has been any evidence because there wasn’t any; and the Democrats were getting way ahead of themselves, the media getting way ahead of themselves. And Trump’s tweet back at them forced them to admit there wasn’t any. ‘Cause if they had admitted there was, can you — everybody talks about the scandal of Trump working with the Russians to affect the outcome of the election. That would be a huge scandal. But there’s no evidence, there never has been any evidence, there’s no indication of any evidence, there’s not even a scintilla of curiosity about evidence. It just isn’t there. This whole thing has been made up.
But now with Trump tweeting back — can you imagine the scandal if a sitting president actually was wiretapping a candidate for president from the opposing party? Can you imagine that scandal? Well, they’re not gonna let that happen, so they shut this down ex post facto, and they’re out there saying Trump’s insane, Trump’s crazy. We’re not investigating him. What makes him think we are? I guess the reason he thinks so is because it’s in the New York Times every damn day and it’s on CNN every damn hour, and it’s been in the New York Times and CNN every damn hour for six months that Trump worked with the Russians to hack the election.
As I said yesterday, what’s to hack? What was the hack? They can’t even produce the hack. Don’t tell me Podesta’s emails. They were not hacked. Podesta is responsible for his emails being in the public domain because he fell for a phishing attack. Podesta was not hacked. The Russians may have tried, but that’s not how we learned of Podesta’s emails. There was no hack. And as I pointed out yesterday, folks, this is all you need to know.
In October before the Election Day, there were a minimum of three stories of Hillary Clinton talking about how rotten it was for Donald Trump to suggest that our election had been rigged, how irresponsible. This meant that Trump was unsuited for the presidency, because it all stemmed from Trump’s lack of willingness in the last presidential debate, when he was asked a question, “Will you accept the outcome of the election?” And he said, “Tonight I’m not gonna tell you I will.” And they blew up. The media blew up, Hillary blew up, and they immediately targeted Trump as saying he was rigging the election and he was threatening the legitimacy of the election. I’ll give you the quotes here in just a second.
The point is that in October, prior to the election, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, the Democrat Party, were convinced the election was gonna be legitimate ’cause she was gonna win. In their mind, the polling data that they had, their common sense, Hillary was gonna win, it was gonna be a landslide, and here’s Trump saying he might not accept the outcome. And they were basing their outrage on the fact that our election is sacrosanct, our election is not hacked, our election will not be hacked, our election will not be unjust, it will not be fraudulent.
And then they lose, and guess what? All of a sudden the election was hacked. All of a sudden the election was fraudulent. All of a sudden Trump and the Russians did something. So Trump volleying back that he was being surveilled on an order by Obama caused panic in the deep state and in the Democrat Party and in the media, ’cause what if that’s true? What if they did get a FISA warrant? What if they were surveying Trump? You know what kind of scandal that would be? Particularly since nobody can find any evidence for it?
So they had to drop this like a hot potato. And last night when I got home, I ran into a story by an uber-leftist, I mean this is sick leftist. You know Mike Taibbi, his son, Matt, I think it’s his son. It may not be related. I’m just assuming that Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone. He was reporter for Channel 2 in New York when I was there. He’s got a piece in Rolling Stone — we will link to it at RushLimbaugh.com — warning the Democrats that they had better be real careful with this whole Trump-Russia thing, because if there’s nothing to it, they’re gonna be exposed as having made up all of this stuff, and when is there is a real scandal nobody’s gonna believe them because this has featured so many outrageous lies.
Here’s some excerpts from Taibbi’s piece. “But it could also be true that both the Democratic Party and many leading media outlets are making a dangerous gamble, betting their professional and political capital on the promise of future disclosures that may not come. … We can’t afford to bolster these accusations of establishment bias and overreach by using the techniques of conspiracy theorists to push this Russia story. Unfortunately, that is happening.”
In other words, he’s saying we in the media, we’re the ones relying on conspiracies now. We’re the ones that sound like and look like kooks advancing conspiracy theories. “Look at the techniques involved within the more ‘legitimate’ reports.” He means the New York Times. “Many are framed in terms of what they might mean, should other information surface. There are inevitably uses of phrases like ‘so far,’ ‘to date’ and ‘as yet.’ These make visible the outline of a future story that isn’t currently reportable, further heightening expectations.”
His real point here is — and this is a valid point — that all of this reporting by the Drive-Bys, and you can see it every time you turn on television and listen to anybody talk, how many Democrats, how many panelists on cable TV shows, how many guests, how many places you go and talk to people, how many people that you read already believe that Russia hacked the election, took it away from Hillary, and Trump helped?
They’ve done more than create the expectation. They have already convinced people it happened with no evidence. And Taibbi’s point is that they have built up expectations on this to the point that if there’s nothing here, they are going to have credibility and blowback problems the likes of which they can’t imagine.
“Take the Times story about Trump surrogates having ‘repeated contacts’ with Russian intelligence officials (an assertion that can mean anything, incidentally — as a reporter in Russia I had contact with Russian intelligence officials, as did most of my colleagues and friends in business.) … Democrats in congress have been littering their Russia speeches with caveats like, ‘We do not know all the facts,’ and, ‘More information may well surface.’ They repeatedly refer to what they don’t know as a way of talking about what they hope to find out.”
And they’re building up expectations to the point that if this doesn’t (audio glitch) there is going to be a rabidly insane, angry Democrat base out there, because the media already has them expecting that the news is coming, the ultimate proof from the deep state, the intel will finally arrive. And there isn’t any, folks! It did not happen. The whole thing is made up. It is something that they’re all hoping for.
The reason the Times changed the headline — well, I gotta take a break. But I’ll explain that when we come back, and I want to go back and revisit what Hillary and Obama were saying before the election on how the election was gonna be clean and it was gonna be unassailable and it was going to just be as fair as any election has been, and there’s never been one that isn’t, and Trump’s silly. And then they changed on a dime.
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RUSH: James Comey comes out and says, “We’re not wiretapping Trump. You people at the Department of Justice, would you get the story out, we’re not wiretapping Trump.” If you’re not wiretapping Trump, you’re not investigating Trump and the election. So the New York Times changes the headline. It’s no longer “Wiretap Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides.” Instead it’s, “Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry Into Trump Associates.” What happened here is exactly what happened to Mike Flynn.
The NSA was surveilling that fat Russian ambassador. His phone calls are being tapped as are all foreign ambassadors and a bunch of other people, Russians, being monitored, and as they talked to Americans, deep state operatives overheard. But they were not investigating Trump. There has not been an investigation of Trump! Or Trump collusion with the Russians. And Clapper even said so on Meet the Press. F. Chuck Todd begged him to say that there was an investigation of Trump. And Clapper said, “To my knowledge, no.” And he ran national security for Obama.
Exactly what Taibbi was talking about. You people making stuff up here, you’re writing thing that may be true, but if they’re not, you’re gonna have a lot of explaining because you’re building expectations out there — he didn’t say this — among this rabid Democrat base, and it’s all bogus. And Trump did this by tweeting that Obama was investigating him, tapping the phones at Trump Tower. And that sent them into a tizzy. They had to deny their own investigation, which was easy to do; there isn’t an investigation. And when you hear the quotes of Obama and Hillary before the election in October, you will realize nobody was thinking of the Russians hacking the election until Hillary lost. I’ll run through those again. We did this yesterday, but I wanted to put them in context now because I think that is the final nail in this coffin.
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RUSH: I want you to listen to how Taibbi in Rolling Stone concludes his story warning the media that they may have bitten off too much here. He admits the press has to cover the subject because the deep state’s leaking it to them. Intelligence officials, Obama embeds wanted the media to believe that there’s an investigation into Trump and the Russians hacking the election. The media loved hearing it. Anything to think that Hillary should have won and the only reason she didn’t is because of subterfuge.
But he warns the media they can’t do this with glibness and excitement, and they can’t accept Saturday Night Live as legitimate news updates on this. You can’t just laugh along with Saturday Night Live and think you’re advancing the story. “Reporters should be scared to their marrow by this story,” Taibbi writes. “This is a high-wire act and it is a very long way down. We might want to leave the jokes and the nicknames be, until we get to the other side — wherever that is.”
I don’t think there is one. There wasn’t an investigation. All of these deep state leaks and all these Obama embeds telling the media of all these contacts between Trump and Russian officials have come, now we know, from Russians being wiretapped, not Obama wiretapping Trump people. But here to me, folks, is the clincher. And this is how the Democrats work. I want to read to you Fox News October 18th, roughly three weeks away from the election last year. “Obama Accuses Trump of ‘Whining’ on Vote-Rigging Claims.”
And from the Fox article: “Obama said the rigging claim, ‘doesn’t really show the kind of leadership and toughness that you’d want out of a president — if you start whining before the game’s even over.’ Obama argued that elections are so ‘de-centralized’ that they couldn’t be rigged in the first place. Further, he said that if Trump wins, he’d expect rival Hillary Clinton to offer a ‘gracious’ concession speech and work with him — and he personally would welcome Trump for a ‘peaceful transfer of power. That’s what Americans do,’ Obama said.”
Okay. So that’s October 18th, a Fox News interview. Now, if you go back to October 18th, all of these people thought Hillary was gonna win in a landslide. Their polling data, the irreplaceable Nate Silver, every source authority they had, including their own instincts, told them that they were just gonna skunk Trump, it was gonna be a bloodbath, Hillary was gonna win, and of course Trump at that point in the debate had said, “No, I’m not gonna tell you tonight that I’ll accept the election outcome. I’m not gonna tell you that ’til it happens.”
They wanted to report that Trump had conceded the election that night. That’s why they asked the question, that’s the answer they were hoping for, so that they could report Trump, on the last debate, was conceding that Hillary was gonna win. And Trump, crafty enough to know that’s what was up and refused to give them that. So that’s why they were on this tear that Trump was challenging the authenticity of the election. And they were defending it. October 18th Obama’s saying it’s impossible to rig our elections. They’re too decentralized.
October 19th, next day, CNN headline: “Why Trump’s Talk of a Rigged Vote is So Dangerous.” The U.K. Daily Mail, October 23rd: “‘Some people are sore losers,’ Clinton mocks Trump for ‘rigged’ election claims and says his comments are more consistent with what dictators might say about their opponents.” This goes back to what was the hack.
At this point, now, the Podesta emails were out there, and the Democrats were running around like stuck pigs, and they were trying to claim the Russians had hacked their server and that the Russians had done this. When in fact it was the Democrats that had screwed Bernie Sanders! It was the Democrat National Committee that rigged an election! Not Trump. Not the Russians. The Democrat National Committee screwed Crazy Bernie. And that’s what one of the document releases on WikiLeaks indicated.
And then there were the Podesta emails. And again, those were not made public by way of a Russian hack. Podesta fell for a phishing attack in his own email. His mistake is why his emails were made public. Up until the election itself, no Democrat was talking about the Russians trying to rig the election. They didn’t think the election was going to be rigged. They thought they were going to win it. They were not doing anything to challenge the authenticity, the veracity of the election.
They were making a point to try to impugn and humiliate Trump for daring to suggest that our elections might be tampered with? This man is unfit for office! Well, now, we know what happened. Hillary didn’t win. Trump did. And it was Hillary who refused to concede that night. It was Hillary who refused to behave as an adult. It was Hillary and the Democrats who immediately did not accept it and began laying the groundwork for this silly “Russians worked with Trump to hack the election.”
Folks, we have been scammed by this ever since the election. The roots of it are the Democrats’ server hack resulting in our learning that they rigged the election against Crazy Bernie and the Podesta emails. Those two things the media has taken and made it look like the Russians made those hacks possible, that WikiLeaks was working with the Russians and with Trump in order to embarrass the Democrats.
And now we’ve got these Obama embeds in the deep state trying to sabotage Trump by leaking all this stuff that they are learning because of wiretaps they have on Russians, not on Trump or his people, trying to make the media think — and it didn’t take too much effort — that Trump was being investigated. But when Trump actually acknowledged their premise and said, “Yeah, I think they’re tapping Trump Tower,” they ran around like squealing stuck pigs saying, “What investigation? What are you talking about?”
So now, now what they’re all saying is, “There was no targeting of the Trump campaign. It’s silly to think we would do that. That’s outrageous. How dare Trump say that. Who does Trump think he is? There wasn’t any investigation. We need to move on.” No, we don’t need to move on. We need to find out the truth about these two FISA warrants. We need to find out, were they actually requested. We need to find out if there indeed was an attempt by the Obama administration to sabotage Trump. We do need to find out.
These people have been telling us that Trump was working with the Russians. We need to find out if what they’ve been reporting has any basis in truth or whether they made it all up. But now they seem to have to have dropped it, and they have now shifted almost full speed 100 percent into destroying the Republican Obamacare repeal and replace.
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RUSH: I just checked the email real quick, and I’m really glad I got this question. I just thought I made this perfectly clear, but if there’s any lack of clarity, the emailer said, “Rush, I don’t understand. Why does the Obama team want everybody to think there wasn’t an investigation?” Now, very simply, if there had been an official investigation via FISA warrants that the DOJ, the Justice Department, the Obama administration, that’s an abuse of power. You don’t do that. You don’t ask for wiretaps on the opposing presidential candidate.
If that really is what had happened, that is a huge scandal. That’s way beyond Watergate, gang. That’s an abuse of power. The Democrats don’t want anybody thinking that happened, even though they’ve been reporting it for five months that Trump was under investigation. That’s what they’ve been reporting.
And until Trump threw it back in their face, they were content to run with it. And then they had to, “Uh-oh, uh-oh! Whoa, whoa, whoa!” That’s the last thing they expected to have. They’re used to intimidating their targets. That’s why they had to dial it back. And Taibbi’s piece comes right before this all happens, warning them they’re on a high wire here with no net.
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RUSH: Here’s James, Simi Valley, California. James, I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush, for taking my call.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: I have a question, which is, do you think that Donald Trump will be able to root out the deep state within the administration and — because you had actually touched on this a year ago with a caller wondering why Obama never got caught with anything. And you had touched on the fact that people don’t need their marching orders; they already know what to do.
RUSH: Exactly. Well, this is the Trump desire to drain the swamp. That’s what he means by draining the swamp, by getting rid of the liberal — and by the way, it’s not just Obama. There’s a bunch of Clinton holdovers. The bureaucracy is big. And this is what the left does. They put activists in these positions. They put activists on the court and call ’em judges. They put activists in the media. They call ’em reporters. They’re everywhere.
They have been populating the deep state, as we humorously refer to it here, for 50 years. I’m starting to see stories now — there’s one in the Stack here — that there is no deep state, I don’t know what these people are talking about, there is no deep state, what is Trump talking about? Trump doesn’t even use the term deep state, but they’re out there saying there isn’t any deep state. It’s gonna be a massive undertaking to drain the swamp and I don’t think he’s even begun yet. He’s focusing on other things, ’cause I don’t think you’re gonna be able to identify every embed. I don’t think he’s gonna be able to completely drain it.