RUSH: Okay. So right now President Trump is at the U.S. Capitol Building, and he is speaking at a ceremony that honors fallen police officers. You watch. If he doesn’t mention Comey, the media’s gonna get all over him because in their world Comey is fallen. He got canned and if Trump doesn’t mention Comey, it’s gonna mean he’s becoming Nixonian.
Greetings, my friends. Welcome. Great to have you here. Rush Limbaugh with a brand-new week of broadcast excellence. We come to you live from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Anti-Leftist Studies. The phone number, if you want to be with us, 800-282-2882. Oh, and you can send an email, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.
It is amazing to watch the Drive-By Media. They are actually trying to recreate Watergate here. The end result of Watergate was that the media is convinced they got rid of a president. So they’re trying to cause the same thing to happen here. They are taking anything and everything in the Comey firing, Russian collusion story and finding equivalence in the Nixon Watergate story.
There is none. It’s not even close. They’re not even in the same universe. And yet the media is so conditioned by this one event in American history — what is that event? That event is actually when the United States media got rid of a president. And ever since, they have been attempting to flex similar muscle and influence for two reasons: one, to get rid of Republican presidents; and, two, to prove that they still have the juice to do it. And we find ourselves mired in an ongoing narrative where the media is attempting to recreate almost in exactitude a timeline and narrative that is equal and identical to Watergate.
The latest iteration of this, every story out there is now about the cover-up! Remember, in Watergate the burglaries went into the DNC headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, and they idiotically left tapes on the locks, meaning left the doors unlocked so they could get back in. That was the famed plumbers unit. And there really wasn’t much to it until Nixon began to cover it up, in their view, and when the cover-up began we got a whole new phrase, the cover-up is worse than the crime, and the pursuit of Nixon trying to cover-up what had happened was given life.
And the same effort now is underway with Trump firing Comey. Ever since Comey’s firing, the media have changed the story from Russia-Trump collusion, because there isn’t any evidence of that and they know it, to now Trump doing a cover-up. You see, my friends, the Drive-Bys love to say that the cover-up’s always worse than the crime, and it’s an especially neat trick here since there’s no evidence of a crime. Firing Comey is not a crime. The timing of Comey’s firing is not a crime. Nobody can find a crime in the Russian collusion story, and, therefore, there’s no need for a special prosecutor, independent counsel, ’cause those people investigate crimes. And there are no crimes.
The crime is that Trump is president. The crime is that Hillary lost. And I’m not exaggerating. In their feeble minds, this is the equivalent of a criminal act. This active betrayal and defiance for people in the media and in the establishment, this is, in their minds, it’s a criminal thing that’s happened here. Now, there are a number of reasons for it. I have a piece here today by a man named — what is his name? Over here. Jeffrey Tucker. He’s not a Trump fan. It’s at a website called Foundation for Economic Education.
His theory is close to mine, that this is just the establishment circling the wagons. They cannot abide any of this. They cannot believe that an outsider came in and disrupted everything. I think there’s more to it and I think that’s very much a part of it, but as I thought about it, I also think there’s something else going on with a great sense of desperation, and that is to save the legacy of Barack Obama. I don’t think there’s any question that that is also a factor in the entire effort to delegitimize and get rid of Trump.
The Obama legacy is actually disastrous. It features lies, spying on Americans, spying on American reporters. Criminalizing, weaponizing the IRS against certain Americans. Lying to people about their health care plans and their doctors. Lying to people about the cost of health care. Lying to people about how great it was all gonna be. Lying to people about the stimulus, the impact. Lying about economy.
Just one lie after another that the Drive-Bys in charge legacy writing, in charge history writing, do not want exposed. They want to maintain control of the Obama legacy and have Obama go down in history as the greatest, smartest president ever, and all that is threatened here by Trump. And so there’s a number of things that are driving these people insane, hysterical, unhinged, off the tracks, whatever you want to say. And Trump does it to them just by waking up and being in the White House every day. He doesn’t have to say or do anything. It’s when he does say or do things that their animus is amplified.
But there’s no crime here, folks, and therefore there’s no cover-up. But I defy you, in your consumption of news today, to miss a reference to a cover-up. Well, the cover-up they claim is that Trump got rid of Comey because Comey was getting close in the Russia investigation. He was getting close to nailing maybe Trump, certainly some Trump associates. And so Trump moves in there and fires the guy. That is the cover-up. But there’s no crime! Nobody can tell you what crime has been committed, and thus there’s no need for an independent prosecutor.
We’ve got allegations of criminal activity. We got allegations of collusion, but collusion is not a crime. Did you know that if somebody colluded with the Russians it’s not a crime? Statutorily it is not a crime. It’s an ethics violation, but it’s not statutorily a crime.
So now the crime is the cover-up. And the Drive-Bys are pushing the cover-up angle by mentioning in every article about Comey that he was leading the investigation of the Russia-Trump collusion, which isn’t even true. He wasn’t. Agents were. Minor point, but these people hated Comey two weeks ago. These people despised Comey. They wanted Comey’s scalped two weeks ago. They wanted Comey gone. They wanted Comey to pay for this. They hated Comey.
Now, on a dime, Comey is their best buddy, somebody they must protect. We are supposed to believe that the Democrats are furious that Comey’s no longer leading the investigation into Trump, because only Comey could do it. If I worked at the FBI and I’m looking at this I’d be insulted and a little angry because the director is gone, the investigation is being led by a bunch of incompetent boobs. But this is what the Drive-Bys are trying to convince people.
By the way, they’re failing at convincing people. Wall Street Journal, NBC News polling data, ho, are they mad. Most people don’t even care about the Comey firing. Some don’t even know about it. The ones that know about it, a lot of them don’t care. Trump’s approval numbers, well, they’re not great, but they haven’t gone down since this happened.
This is the same James Comey that the Democrats accused of being Trump’s puppet. But that’s all forgotten now. Now Comey’s the only person on earth who could have gotten to the bottom of the Russia-Trump collusion. See, they know there isn’t anything there. Trump getting rid of Comey means that Trump’s gotten rid of the only guy who could have ever found the truth. And Trump, that rascal, knew it, and got rid of Comey in the nick of time, and that is what constitutes the cover-up.
The Wall Street Journal: “Opinion on Trump Stable Despite Tumult Over Comey Firing, Poll Finds.” Now, I want to issue the usual caveat. These polls… Who knows? I mean, you can’t… It doesn’t make sense to cherry-pick the ones you like and don’t like, and support and not support based on that. I’m just… I’m so worn out on polls because they’re all products of inside-the-Beltway mentality and institutions, but hell. I still report it to you.
“More Americans disapprove than approve of President Donald Trump’s decision last week to fire James Comey as director of the FBI, but the tempest in Washington over the dismissal has done little to reshape views of Mr. Trump among the public, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey finds. Thirty-eight percent of people in the survey disapproved of the president’s decision to fire Comey; 29% approved. One-third said they didn’t know enough” to care.
Stop and think of that. After 24/7, 365 nonstop, “Trump is an animal, Trump is a pig, Trump’s a criminal, Trump’s covering up,” they can only find 38% of the people disapprove of it. Now, if the Drive-Bys have tried to find evidence of their ability to move public opinion, this cannot warm their hearts. One thing I’m convinced of: I’m convinced these polls do not find very many Trump voters. I can give you evidence of this. There’s an AP story from over the weekend, and they say they went out to Trump rallies and so forth to interview people, but they didn’t.
They went and they found one Democrat in one place, another Democrat in another place, another in another. Supposedly, Trump supporters are now soured, and it’s so bogus. As I run through it with you later, you’ll see what I’m talking about. The headline to this story ought to be, “Despite Hourly, 24/7 Hammering by the Feckless Media and the Democrats and Hollywood, Trump Manages to Remain Stable.” And that is the headline. It’s not just his approval rating that remains steady. His overall personal rating went from 39-50 to 38-52 since last month. That’s statistically no change. That’s 39 approval, 50 personal rating, 39-50.
It’s 39 good, 50 negative, 38-50. Statically, no difference. The Comey thing and the wall-to-wall attention that it has gotten has not had one iota of an impact — especially compared to its intensity — on public thinking about this. And, as I say, I’m convinced if they would actually venture out and go to areas of the country voted for Trump, they would find a polling result that is much different from the one that they got and published.
Now, when dissecting Trump and those who support him, I have a question. Are we talking process or substance? ‘Cause this, I think, is a key to understanding and translating what’s going on. The James Comey firing, as you know, fired up both the left and the Never Trumpers something fierce. I mean, firing Comey, what would you say it replaced as the over-the-top outrage? The Trump-Russia collusion? The outrage over that has subsided long ago. All we get is the steady drip, drip, drip of that.
But, I mean, where these people literally have become unhinged, maybe be the Access Hollywood tape and Trump surviving that. But this? I mean, this has sent them into orbit. And like those feminazis in the Feminist Update Theme, they are in our face, the left and the Never Trumpers. And that’s fine. Presidents will be judged. But let’s provide a little context. This particular president has had a scope… He’s had a crosshairs on his back. He’s had the scope up a certain oral cavity ever since he was inaugurated.
He has been under the most intense media anal exam that I have ever seen. But this is now. And media heads explode on a daily basis, and we know why. President Obama’s legacy’s on life support. I really think that this is a central factor in what’s going on. The media reacting to Trump is such that you would think Trump had been caught giving Iran $150 billion and lying about it, which Obama did. He paid a ransom in cold cash, flown by mysterious airplanes over to Tehran to have Americans released.
He sat idly by and actually signed a piece of paper allowing the Iranians to ramp up a nuclear weapons program. You would think that we’d get this kind of outrage over something like that. You would think the media’s reaction day in and day out is that Trump has been caught lying about essential elements of his health care bill. When Obama lied, “If you like your doctor, if you like your plan, you can keep them — and your premiums are coming down $2500!” There was no outrage over those lies.
And those lies were repeated, and they were intentional, and they were intended to deceive. Dare we talk about Benghazi and how that was all made up? Some poor schlub who made some video nobody had ever seen blamed for the death of four Americans in Benghazi. There was no outrage. You talk about cover-up? The media participated in the cover-up of Benghazi. The media tried to cover up every Obama blunder and lie and weakness, which makes the media behavior here hollow and hypocritical and unsubstantive.
That’s why I’m asking: “Are we talking about substance here, or we talking about optics or process?” You would have thought Trump was trying to politicize the IRS and deny liberal groups tax-exempt status. But no, that didn’t happen except when Obama did it to the Tea Party. There’s substance and there’s the process. Trump, he’s rightfully been accused of mishandling the process of firing Comey. Make no mistake. Trump had both the authority to fire Comey and ample reason to do so. It was overdue. But the process is what they’re talking about.
And trying to find a crime, and without finding a crime now claiming there is a cover-up? You know, it smacks of two things. There is real desire here. These people, they can smell blood. They think they’ve got Trump close to resigning or being forced from office, but there’s also desperation, ’cause they know they’ve got nothing. They’ve got nothing at all. They’re not even close to having Watergate. All they can do is pretend and paint pictures and try to convince people. But from the polling data following the Comey firing and the ensuing chaos, it doesn’t seem that the picture painting they’re doing is that effective.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, we’re never gonna hear this, but I’m gonna say it: If anybody’s looking for real Watergate comparisons, I have them for you. The real Watergate comparison here would be Barack Obama ordering the FBI to spy on Republican campaigns, maybe not just Trump’s. We know back in June of 2016 that Obama ordered the FBI… Well, the FBI began an investigation of the Trump campaign. It doesn’t happen without Obama knowing about it.
We also know that Obama, according to a number of people — Susan Rice — ordered intelligence agencies to preserve all of the evidence they had collected on Trump-Russia collusion. Where is it? We also know that Obama had ordered that all intel gathered during this investigation be shared with 16 different intelligence agencies all over the world. During an election campaign, a sitting president spying on opposing party candidates — and the media? Nothing.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Dan in Irvine, California, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, thanks so much. Such an honor. I’ll be really brief here. I think a lot of people are missing, in regards to the hacking of the election that’s been, you know, talked about by the Democrats, obviously, President Obama actually addressed this directly to the public on his last presidential press conference on December 16th. Anybody can pull up the transcripts to that press conference.
I’ll paraphrase a couple things really briefly. He says, “At the beginning of the summer, we were alerted to the possibility the DNC had been hacked. I called in the investigators to find out everything about it, investigated thoroughly and then informed the potential victims on a bipartisan basis.”
He continues. “What I was concerned about in particular was making sure that the compounding of the potential hacking that could hamper vote counting affect the election process itself. So in early September, when I saw President Putin in China, I told him to cut it out or there was gonna be some serious consequences. And in fact we did not see further tampering of the election process.”
He continues. “As I said publicly before, they were not particularly sophisticated. This was not some elaborate, complicated espionage scheme. They hacked into some Democrat Party emails that contained some pretty routine stuff.” He continues. “I wanted to make sure the election went off without a hitch and that it was not tarnished and did not feed any sense in the public that somehow tampering had taken place with the actual process of voting, and we accomplished that.”
RUSH: Right, now I need to stop you only because of time, but he’s exactly right. Obama said all of that and more. In March of 2016 he pooh-poohed this. You see, from Obama’s standpoint it couldn’t be that on his watch the Russians had somehow snuck into our systems and were violating and were cheating our election.
No, no, no! Obama’s much better than that. There was nothing to see here. And he did say, in a show of toughness, that he went to Putin and he told him to cut it out. And when he told Putin to cut it out, there wasn’t any more evidence. This whole thing is a hoax! And it’s admitted to being hatched 24 hours after Hillary lost in that book about her defeat.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have. By the way, Bob Woodward is trying to talk the media down from the ledge by saying that firing Comey is not yet Watergate. This they don’t want to hear. So they’ll be ignoring Woodward and trying to find out what Bernstein thinks.