RUSH: There is also continuing testimony, which nobody is hearing about up on Capitol Hill, by the lawyers for the tech companies, Google and Facebook. In addition to what was learned yesterday that we passed on to you, the Facebook lawyer said that the Russian involvement, the buying of ads on Facebook, that happened after the election and it was oriented toward damaging Trump. The ads that ran on Facebook happened after the election, and their purpose was to do great damage to Trump after he won, the exact opposite of what people have been told that Trump colluded with Russia in order to screw Hillary.

What we’re learning in this Donna Brazile book, we are learning that it wouldn’t have mattered who did what. Hillary had guaranteed that she was going to lose this race because of the rotten campaign she ran, and Donna Brazile doesn’t hold back on that.

Tim Cook, the Apple CEO. Now, you might be saying, “Oh, no, not Apple.” No, no. Wait. This guy issues a tweet after every public event, a terror attack, Trump pulling out of Paris, whatever, this guy issues a tweet, an official statement on his opinion of it all. And it’s almost like the guy is proposing to run for president himself. And he did it again yesterday.

The iPhone X is going to be released tomorrow. So the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, was on NBC Nightly News being interviewed by Lester Holt, and Lester Holt threw him a softball. (paraphrased exchange) “Look, you’re a big tech company CEO. We got lawyers from Facebook and Google up there testifying. What about all this collusion? What about all these ads that were run on Facebook and Twitter designed to help Trump and hurt Hillary?”

Tim Cook said, “That’s irrelevant. Those ads… Those ads, they don’t affect anybody. Maybe 1%. Maybe one-tenth of 1%. Those ads are irrelevant, Lester. Those ads had nothing to do with it. The real problem,” he said, “is the fake news that is dividing our country, the fake news that is manipulating people and dividing our country.” Now, the second part of that we’ll deal with later. The first part: Here is yet another tech titan saying that the conventional wisdom that Russians were running ads on social media to hurt Hillary and push Trump were worthless.

Irrelevant, meaningless, and didn’t have any impact whatsoever. Then there’s additional… Remember all of the protests against Trump after the election. We have learned something else: A story that Twitter hid almost half the tweets about the DNC and the Podesta emails that WikiLeaks posted for the last two weeks of the campaign. We have news today that the supposedly Russian ads that were bought on social media…

Do you know what they actually did? They were promoting anti-Trump rallies such as the giant one right after the election at Union Square New York City. What we have learned today is that those ads that Russia was running were responsible for the turnout of all of the anti-Trump protests in New York City and elsewhere after the election. Now, I remember after the election the immediate aftermath… Remember all of those protests everywhere?

They were all over New York City, various neighborhoods of New York City, all over San Francisco, all over Chicago. Massive protests. Philadelphia. The Drive-Bys were all over it, and I remember telling you at the time, “Folks, this is bought and paid for. This is too coordinated.” I suspected George Soros. “But this is just… This does not seem spontaneous,” and then when the travel ban was announced, the first one, and we had massive protests after the travel ban, I suspected the same thing.

I said, “These are a bunch of bought-and-paid for protesters sitting around waiting for the ‘go’ phone call.” Well, it turns out that was right! All of these protests were organized on social media. News today that the Russians bought ads, even promoted anti-Trump rallies such as the giant one right after the election. But there’s more. The AP reported today — and I quote — “The hackers who upended the U.S. presidential election had ambitions well beyond Hillary Clinton’s campaign, targeting the emails of Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, U.S. defense contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin…”

The AP even supplied a list of those people that were hacked, including John Kerry, Colin Powell, Wesley Clark and even an emissary for the pope. These hacking and phishing attacks started years ago, and they hit all kinds of people, all of which undermines a carefully crafted narrative that the Russians have been doing all of this meddling just to help defeat Hillary. This has been going on for years, which people have said. The Russians have been trying to meddle.

Anyway, all of this news is being discovered while people are focused on Mueller, people are focused on the terrorists attack, people are focused on the tax proposal… Whatever it is, this stuff is not being reported, which is why I’m spending time here at the beginning of the program to lay it all out for you.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: When I say, “These supposedly Russian-bought ads,” it’s because we don’t know! These ads on social media that created, that organized, that promoted all of these anti-Trump protests after the election? There were ads on social media organizing these protests. We assume they were Russian bought, but we don’t know. So it could well be George Soros. It could well be any number of people.

The point is that we have learned today, via the AP, that none of this was genuine. I mean, some of the people that showed up to protest might have literally been angry. But they didn’t show up out of self-motivation. It was something that was organized, and it was made to appear generic. It was made to appear as though everybody who showed up was individually angry over the outcome of the election. The bottom line, folks, is that I think it’s safe to say that a majority of the anti-Trump news that we have all seen since the election and…

Well, even before, obviously. But I’m just speaking about the stuff afterwards. I shudder to think how much of it is genuinely fake, how many of it is all part of a campaign that the media is part of, that they are complicit in — and all of this is reported as though it’s real news. I keep using this example because it works: The Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Remember the media coverage of that, the universal outrage made to look like people all over this country were fed up and hated Indiana and hated Mike Pence and thought that was the absolute worst thing?

That was manufactured. All that hate supposedly and all that energy, anti-sentiment toward Indiana? It was all ginned up and made up, and a lot of this Trump stuff is the same thing. It’s all manufactured and made up. I don’t doubt that an element of it is true, but the size of the supposed group of people that are angry and the organization they have, it’s all concocted, just like the Trump rallies during the campaign. Those were bought and paid for. We know that.

A guy named Robert Creamer working for Hillary in the DNC organized those anti-Trump rallies and hired people, and he was caught on hidden video. It’s important to keep reminding people of this, because to this day we’re still affected by this. They get away with manufacturing narratives, manufacturing massive displays of public protest, massive displays of people supposedly who hate Trump, don’t want Trump, are angry with Trump. It’s way blown out of proportion to what’s real.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is last night on the Nightly News, the Apple CEO. Now, this is not about Apple; it’s not about the iPhone. This guy is showing up and tweeting every time there’s any kind of a public issue and laying down his opinion on it — and he is a classic civil rights, human rights, extreme radical leftist, okay? ‘Cause he thinks that’s what America is. So Lester Holt talks to him about social media companies being a little late to acknowledge how they were used by those trying to influence the election: The Russians.

It’s what this Capitol Hill hearing stuff is all about, and Lester is part of the Drive-By Media cabal that’s totally misinformed and uninformed. He doesn’t even know what they’re testifying to up there. Facebook and Twitter officials, Google lawyers are all saying the Russian involvement was scant, it was minuscule, and it happened after the election! But old Lester thinks that they’re up there providing evidence that Trump and Russia colluded!

And it’s only a matter of time before Mueller zeros in on it. Ken Starr, by the way, who the Clintons turned into a sex pervert selling cigarettes to your kids during the Monica Lewinsky investigation… Ken Starr says that Mueller is actually investigating the Clinton campaign now, that that’s where this investigation is taking him, which I found it interesting sidelight. Anyway, here’s Tim Cook talking to Lester Holt about Russian use of social media to elect Trump.

COOK: I don’t believe the big issue are ads from foreign government. I believe that’s like .1% of the issue. The bigger issue is that some of these tools are used to divide people, to manipulate people, to get fake news to people in broad numbers and so to influence their thinking. And this, to me, is the number one through 10 issue.

RUSH: So what does the Apple CEO care about that for? I mean, I think the guy’s got plans beyond the CEO position at Apple, is my point. But now let’s look at the substance of what he says here. “I don’t think the issue is these ads from foreign governments. That’s like one-tenth of 1%. The bigger issue some of these tools,” I guess he means Twitter and Facebook and so forth, “are used to divide people, to manipulate people, to get fake news to people. What’s the fake news that’s out there right now? Tim Cook doesn’t mean this, by the way.

The fake news out there is that Trump colluded with Russia. The fake news is that Trump hired prostitutes to urinate on the bed Obama and Michelle slept in while in Moscow. The fake news is that Trump somehow worked with the Russians or any number of other people and cheated Hillary Clinton out of the presidency. That’s the fake news. Now, Tim Cook doesn’t think that. He thinks the fake news is that that’s out there from the conservative side of things.

But he’s right in the sense that fake news is all over social media and it is being used to manipulate and it’s used to divide and a lot of it is robots, a lot of it is computer bots. So there is fake news out there. The fake news that’s dominating is 100% fake because it’s totally wrong. Now, let’s go back to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism hearing on Russian advertising on social media during the election. Facebook vice president and general counsel Colin Stretch testified again.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina, asked, “In terms of volume, Mr. Stretch, how many volume — meaning how many Russian ads, what kind of saturation here — are we talking about, sir?”

STRETCH: About approximately 90% of the volume we saw on the ad side appears to be issues based, primarily. A much smaller proportion were directed at particular candidates. In terms of the total volume of material on the site, it’s a very small percentage. We estimate that the Internet Research Agency content was approximately 0.004% of the content in newsfeed during the time in question.

RUSH: You couldn’t get a better definition of insignificance! You couldn’t better define irrelevant and nothing to see here than that admission. Approximately .004% — four one-hundredths of a percent — of the content in news feed was Russian ads. Which makes sense. They only spent a hundred grand or so buying the ads. You can’t win an election with a $100,000 no matter where you spend it. Hillary spent $143 million and still lost an election, and now they want us to hear and believe that the Russians spending a hundred grand on Twitter or Facebook sent the election in Trump’s favor?

So this Facebook guy is literally admitting “90% of the volume we saw on the ad side was issues based,” not Trump based, not Russia based, “primarily. A much smaller proportion directed at particular candidates…” But even so, all of it together, four one-hundredths of a percent of all the content that was out there. Fake news! What have they tried to make people believe the past three weeks? That the Russians were buying ads all over social media and that they were doing this to further the election of Donald Trump.

And what we’ve learned is that Russian involvement before and after the election was aimed at Trump. There was no helping Trump. There was no assisting Trump. There was every effort to damage Trump, as in organizing all those postelection protests. So here you have Tim Cook — who may be thinking of running for president; I don’t know. That’s just my wild guess. I don’t know. I’m not basing that on anything I think is subs. I’m wild guessing.

But even if he’s not running for president, he weighs in on every one of these issues, and he said, “Hey, ads are irrelevant, one-tenth of 1%!” The Facebook guy says even worse: Four one-hundredths of 1%. Now, just compare that to what you’ve been told. Compare that to what you’ve seen reported, and then it only makes common sense to extrapolate that throughout every media story that you see about Trump and people hating him, people not liking him, people opposing him, people objecting to him.

This is one of the biggest scams that many of us in our lifetime may have experienced, been privy to, witnessed, seen, been part of. It is relentless, and it is every day, and it has been relentless and every day since the election. And even before that it was relentless and every day during the campaign. And no matter what the media has done, they haven’t stopped Trump; they haven’t really damaged him. I don’t even believe these polls numbers, approval numbers have him in the high thirties.

It doesn’t makes sense with other polling data that is calculating the opinions of a majority of Americans on issue by issue by issue. If Trump’s approval numbers are in the thirties, then all these other upbeat opinions the American people are expressing don’t make any sense, unless Trump’s approval numbers are in the thirties simply ’cause people don’t like that he tweets or they don’t like his personality.

But we’ve been shown that that doesn’t matter because Trump won the election with the same personality then that he has now. So why, all of a sudden, would Trump’s personality start turning people off when it didn’t before the election? I really think that we’re being scammed to a degree none of us have even contemplated. We’ve thought that some stories are made up and bogus and biased or what have you. I think we don’t have an idea of the grand scope that this has been and continues to be.

BREAK TRANRSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Donna in Sayre, Pennsylvania, as we head back to the phones. How are you doing?

CALLER: I’m good, Rush. How are you?

RUSH: I’m fine and dandy. Thank you.

CALLER: I’m honored to be on your show. I truly view you as a voice of reason.

RUSH: Well, I appreciate that very much. It’s great to have you out there.

CALLER: I have a question; please forgive my ignorance. This Russian dossier. I don’t understand what prostitutes urinating on a bed has to do with Russian collusion. I don’t… I mean, we all know it’s fake, but even if it did happen, what —

RUSH: No, no, no. Hold — hold — hold it!

CALLER: I don’t understand how there’s more to this dossier —

RUSH: Hold it.

CALLER: — than just that.

RUSH: She can’t hear me. In 30 years, we haven’t been able to fix this. To a lot of people, Donna, it isn’t fake.

CALLER: Oh, okay.

RUSH: To a lot of people, it’s as real as the NBC Access Hollywood tape. To a lot of people, they think Trump really did it!

CALLER: (laughing)

RUSH: They think Trump really hired the prostitutes and had ’em come over and urinate on the pedestrian that poor Obama and Michelle had slept on. Now, it’s not collusion. What they’re trying to do with that is to show that Trump is a pig, that Trump is a reprobate, that Trump is pond scum and not fit to be president. That somebody who would hire prostitutes to come take a leak in unison on a bed in a five-star hotel should not be in the White House.

CALLER: (laughing) Okay and I have a little minor bone to pick with you, if I could.

RUSH: A minor bone?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: All right.

CALLER: On one of your shows… I had just bought a brand-new Android phone, and on your show you had mentioned having an Android phone was kind of like representative of Democrats whereas iPhone is representative of Republicans. So now I have to buy an iPhone because I cannot carry a phone —

RUSH: Wait a minute.

CALLER: — that is a Democrat.

RUSH: No, wait a minute. I don’t think I’ve ever said that Android is Democrat and iPhone is Republican. What it is, is Android is cheap. I don’t care. iPhone is premium, aspirational, state-of-the-art. Now, to the extent that that can be further segregated by Republican and Democrat, that’d be up to you. But I have never, ever described it that way. I’ve never said Android is a liberal Democrat phone.

CALLER: (chuckling) Well, now I have to carry an iPhone. (chuckling)

RUSH: You…? (laughs) Wait. You mean you have to go get an iPhone because of what I said about Android?

CALLER: Absolutely.

RUSH: You had an Android; now I have embarrassed and humiliated you so now you have to…? Well, I tell you what. You know, Apple is releasing a new phone tomorrow. It’s perfect timing for you. It’s the iPhone X. I don’t have any yet. Nobody does. (interruption) Yeah, they say they get there early for the line. Yeah, they’re gonna have some stores that are gonna have the phones. Well, your timing couldn’t be better. But I’m sorry.

Somebody had to tell you that, Donna, because I have never, never… I don’t even think that! I don’t even think that Android versus Apple is Republican versus Democrat. Look, there’s simply too many iPhones out there. People of all political persuasions, sexual orientation, sexual preferences, cisgender, transgender… It’s just the demographic’s too widespread to say that the iPhone has a political attachment to it.