RUSH: The original tweet where Donald Trump stated that Trump Tower was being surveilled, wiretapped and so forth by President Obama — with this Susan Rice stuff it’s beginning to look more and more like there is something to that. And Trump is, as time passes, generally proved correct in these allegations, predictions, accusations that he makes.

The Susan Rice story continues, it builds and so forth, and a lot of people are trying to make her actions criminal when they may not be per se. Clearly you have abuses of power here. And I must point out that my friend Andy McCarthy just published a post at National Review making this point. Now, that doesn’t mean that if, for example, she is called to testify before a committee or two or if she has to do an FBI interview — and she’s been there before — what if they could get her on a process crime? What if she has lied?

Look, this woman lies repeatedly. She lied to Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, or she lied to whoever she spoke to prior to Andrea Mitchell or she lied about Benghazi. The woman lies. The odds are if she testifies, she might make herself vulnerable to one of these famous Martha Stewart process crimes in which it would become criminal.

So it is clear that there is something highly irregular here. It is very clear that the Obama administration was surveilling the Trump people. It is very clear that the purpose of the surveillance was to undermine the Trump campaign. And then it becomes very clear that the purpose of the surveillance was to undermine the presidency once Trump won it. When I say “very clear,” I’m saying to me. I don’t have any doubts about what went on here, and I think it’s splitting hairs to say, “Well, they weren’t really targeting Trump officials.” How do you know?

Look, Obama owes electoral victories to this exact kind of thing. Look at all these sealed divorce decrees that Obama succeeded in getting unsealed about his opponents running for state senate and then United States senator. We know that Obama wiretapped and spied on Angela Merkel. We already know that this is a pattern of behavior by Obama and his presidency and his White House.

So why is it difficult to assume — it seems to me it’s intelligence guided by experience, or experience guided by intelligence — that if Obama wanted to find out and get dirt on Trump people, he knows how to do it. He’s done it before. Angela Merkel, the prime minister of Germany, or president, whatever, chancellor, whatever her title is.

So none of this is something that hasn’t happened before. All of it has happened before. And in the famous linear thinking, philosophical thinking of Blaise Pascal, it’s much easier to believe that something that has happened could happen again or will happen again. In fact, it’s much harder to believe that something that hasn’t happened will happen. Did you follow that? It’s very straightforward. And in the case of Obama, it’s all happened before. Every bit of this has happened before.

The way this would happen, on purpose, you knowingly surveil foreign targets who you know are gonna be talking to members of the Trump transition people. You knowingly surveil people that are gonna be targeting, listening, talking to Trump campaign officials, transition officials, administration officials. And you can then say, “We weren’t targeting Trump people.” We were targeting, say, the Russian ambassador, or whoever else, the Turkish ambassador, whoever it might have been.

But the real purpose of it was to get the American side of the conversation. You’d never be able to go to a FISA court and get a warrant for that, but you will always be able to get permission and a warrant to surveil foreign actors, so you target the ones you know are gonna be talking to people you want to eavesdrop on or surveil. It wouldn’t be difficult to do at all. And it looks like that’s exactly what’s happened.

You throw Evelyn Farkas into this in terms of the leaking. You know, Rice has maintained she didn’t leak anything. Here’s a question. And it wasn’t political. She said it wasn’t political, what she did. Really? Was there any unmasking of Hillary Clinton campaign officials? Was there any surveillance of Hillary Clinton campaign officials? I mean, the Russians are talking to her too, the Turks and everybody else. Remember, they think Hillary’s gonna win the election, and so you don’t think that ground building was going on during the campaign, Hillary making contact or representatives of hers making contact with these foreign actors that she’s going to be dealing with.

Hell, she already knows ’em because they’ve been donating to her website, donating to her foundation, donating to her campaign, paying her $250,000 to do 20-minute meaningless speeches. Why wasn’t any of that unmasked? And if it was, why do we not know it? If Hillary Clinton campaign officials were surveilled in the same way Trump’s people were, then maybe they could say that this wasn’t political. Maybe they could say, “Nope, we were simply engaging in what we have to do to protect the national security the United States.”

But if they were making no effort to find out who Hillary’s people were talking to and what they were saying to foreign actors, and if there was no leakage, and if there was no unmasking of anything to do with Hillary, wouldn’t that kind of indicate that that same action against Trump was and had to be political? It seems to me to be the case.