RUSH: Now, when it comes to intelligence, on Saturday Trump said — this makes me laugh too — Trump said that Putin insisted during the meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit that Russia didn’t interfere in the election and that he believed Putin when he told him. “He said he didn’t meddle,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “I asked him again. You can only ask so many times. … He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did.”

Trump added that whenever they had met, Putin denied ordering Russia’s election meddling. Trump said, “I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it. … I think he’s very insulted by it, and that’s not a good thing for our country.”

Then Trump said he was surprised at the blowback his comments had received. “What I said there is that I believe he believes it, and that’s very important for somebody to believe. I believe that he feels that he and Russia didn’t meddle in the election.” Well, why would Putin, if Obama told him to stop it? Has everybody forgotten that?

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RUSH: You people have forgotten. Obama brought this up in the spring of 2016. Everybody’s worried about Putin meddling. Obama said (paraphrasing), “Don’t worry about it. I saw Putin, and I told him to cut it out. I told him to cut it out.” And the media said, “This is so great. Our guy is so tough, just told Putin to cut it out.” Right.

RUSH: On Saturday, Trump said that Vladimir Putin insisted during a meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit that Russia did not interfere in the election and that he believed that Putin meant it. Trump said (summarized), “He said he didn’t meddle; he said he didn’t meddle.” It was on Air Force One. “I asked him again. You can only ask so many times,” Trump said. “I just asked him again. He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did.”

And he went on to say that whenever they do meet that Putin always brings it up and that Putin always denies ordering Russia’s election meddling. Then there was media blowback to this, as you can imagine. And Trump’s reaction to the media blowback was to say he was surprised by it. “What I said there is that I believe Putin believes it, and that’s very important for someone to believe. I believe that he feels that he and Russia did not meddle in the election.”

Now, let’s go back and compare what Trump has just said about Putin to what Barack Hussein O said to the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev. This was shortly before the 2012 presidential election. Obama said to Medvedev — they were talking about the downsizing of the American nuclear arsenal — and Obama… It was an open mic that I don’t think Obama knew was open. It was caught. It has been broadcast. Obama said to Medvedev, “Look, this is my last election.

“After this election, I’ll have a lot more flexibility. Tell Vladimir to be patient.” There was no media blowback. There was no outrage. There was no anger. They didn’t barely even report on this. Had it not been for the open mic, nobody to this day would know that Barack Obama had sent a message to Vladimir Putin to relax, take it easy, that after Obama wins reelection in 2012 he’ll have a lot more flexibility to get serious about downsizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

You add to that that it appears that Hillary Clinton and the Democrat National Committee (which Hillary was running at the time) and Barack Obama’s FBI indirectly paid Russian operatives to dig up dirt on Trump. That’s some flexibility, and that’s some meddling. And speaking of meddling, Obama spied on the Trump campaign, and that dossier that they paid for… Folks, this is important to remember. The dossier served as the basis for this ongoing investigation of Trump. It is the basis! No less than John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, intimated as much — and Comey has said he took it seriously.

This whole thing was made up. It was bought and paid for by Hillary. It forms the basis of this absolutely obscene, absurdly wasteful and connected to no reality investigation of Trump and people in his orbit. What we don’t know is if FISA warrants were granted on the basis of this dossier, but, you know, Kimberley Strassel wrote about this last week in the Wall Street Journal.

This is, in terms of dirty tricks, maybe the biggest dirty trick of all time. I don’t even call this a dirty trick. I mean, I know the intent of using that term. This is scandalous. Dirty trick, I mean, this is criminal, is what this is! Using this cutout law firm to make the payment.

You know, more and more people are using law firms to be the middlemen in any kind of illicit transaction to secure attorney-client privilege so that nobody can legally describe what you’re doing. It’s a way to keep it secret. And now the Mueller investigation is just totally out of control with no limits on anything. And we know that the meddling has all happened on the part of the Democrats. Obama and Putin, what is this? “Tell Vladimir to be patient. I’ll have more flexibility after the election.” What is that, if that’s not meddling.

Now, the war between the intelligence agencies and Trump has not let up at all. “Former CIA Director John Brennan suggested ‘fear’ played into President Donald Trump’s behavior toward the Russians on Sunday in a blistering interview on CNN.” Brennan called Trump intimidated by Vladimir Putin. Trump called Brennan, Clapper, and James Comey political hacks. Trump added that he believed that Putin was insulted by these accusations. Then Trump backtracked later on Sunday during a news conference in Vietnam saying that he was quote “with our intelligence agencies.”

Now, this is not complicated. Trump did not backtrack. What Trump was pointedly saying was that he supports the intelligence agencies as they are currently led and constituted. He was not including the current CIA and NSA, his people running these agencies. He was not including them in his comments about Brennan and Clapper and Comey, all former Obamaites. He was pointedly suggesting that he didn’t believe what Clapper and Brennan and Comey were saying.

And who could blame him? These guys believed that Hillary and Russia created the Trump dossier. They believed it. Hillary goes out and has the thing manufactured, and they acted as though they believed it. Whether they did or not, if they knew it was made up, if these guys knew it was a pack of lies and still operated on it, that’s even worse, and I for one wouldn’t be surprised if we learn that they all knew this thing was trumped up. Because to believe that it wasn’t, who believes this kind of stuff? People that want to. I’m talking about the golden showers, the hiring of prostitutes and all this.

There’s not one thing, I don’t care what you’ve heard, there’s not one thing in this dossier that’s been verified. So these guys either believed it or they pretended to in order to begin their investigation and spying on the Trump campaign. And to me that is one of the worst examples of intelligence agencies going rogue that I know of. These two men, Clapper and Brennan and then Comey, are trying to overthrow an elected president via a silent coup based entirely upon lies created by the Hillary campaign.

And now Trump knows full well what’s going on and goes out and references it, and these guys are having a cow now claiming that Trump is intimidated by Putin, that Trump is afraid of Putin, that Trump is totally outclassed by Putin, that Trump is over his head. This is so fishy. These guys are Obamaites. They’re part of the swamp. There is no way they’re gonna give Trump the benefit of the doubt.

Now, here’s something else that’s happening out there. All of these people in the deep state in the intelligence agencies, the FBI and the intelligence community, they’re now acting hurt and shocked and surprised that people are questioning them. I don’t think they have any right to be surprised that people question ’em. You know, for eight years they go around telling people that Benghazi was caused by a video. For eight years they run around and they tell everybody Iran is cooperating and Iran does not want to establish nuclear weaponry.

They tell us for all of these years that the Muslim Brotherhood are secular moderates. They tell us that Al-Qaeda has been decimated. We have intelligence agencies publicly calling out their superiors for politicizing their analyses to fit the Obama political narratives. You have James Clapper who may have perjured himself in congressional testimony on metadata collection. The metadata of all of these warrantless wiretaps of every phone they could sweep up.

You have a record like this, when you have people running around claiming Benghazi was caused by a video, when everything has been politically tailored to favor whatever Obama and Hillary want it to be, it makes only sense to question these people. But they’re acting like we have no right, we have no right to question them and we don’t even have any right to be surprised as though they’re infallible. They are the IC, they are the intelligence community, and they cannot be questioned, they’re the biggest patriots, they’re only doing this or that for the best good of the country.

They’ve politicized everything according to what Obama wanted it to be. Come on, Brennan, John Brennan, who once voted for a Communist Party candidate? And I think even has a Muslim prayer rug, if I’m not mistaken. Clapper? National intelligence director? And we know the wishy-washiness of Comey on all of this. These guys just want to run around, they want to be able to get away with saying, “Trust us, just trust us.”

Well, I’m sorry. It’s tough. We know that Benghazi was not caused by a video. We know the Muslim Brotherhood’s not a bunch of moderates. We know that Al-Qaeda was never decimated or cut down to size. And we know that Iran is nuking up. And you tell us just the exact opposite.

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RUSH: No, I’m not saying that the intelligence community today is a bunch of politicized hacks. I’m saying they were. I’m saying that Brennan and Clapper and I don’t know, Comey — look, folks, do not forget, we had those whistleblowers. This didn’t get a lot of news, but there were whistleblowers who said that their intel — these were analysts — who said that their intel reports were rewritten.

After they analyzed whatever it was happening around the world, they would submit their analysis, and it was rewritten to advance the Obama agenda, especially during the campaign. My point is that the Obama Democrats, the Clinton Democrats, the Biden Democrats, you name, politicize everything. They corrupt everything.

The Clintons are one of the most corrupt families. They corrupt and they damage everything they get hold of, and they twist it and turn it and use every institution and tradition to their own political advantage. And that’s what Trump was saying. And if Trump wasn’t saying it, I have said it and would say it again. This Benghazi video, the people that got away with that think it isn’t any big deal.

I’m still outraged by that whole Benghazi thing, and I’m still insulted that they still try maintain. Obama went to the UN to tell the world that it was a video that caused that to happen and that we couldn’t do anything about it because of our laws. Yeah, the First Amendment gave this video maker the right to start a riot in Benghazi! I’m saying that the intelligence agencies and people working with Obama were corrupted by him for his purposes.

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RUSH: Let me just give you one example of what a hack John Brennan is. Now, he was the CIA director under Obama, and he’s the guy that we’ve got audio sound bites from who alludes… He first denies that the Trump dossier was used as a basis for his investigation of Trump, and then later on in the same interview kind of backtracks. He’s not so certain, and leaves it open with a little word trickery. So, look, it’s nothing I can prove, but I’m just gonna tell you: The things I’ve heard these people say, I don’t doubt for a minute…

Let me put it this way. If it were to ever be confirmed, I’d be the last guy surprised. I think these people have been so polluted and corrupted by the political desire to use all of these institutions to smash their political enemies. That’s exactly how they’ve been corrupted. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they knew that dossier was fake and still used it as the basis to investigate Trump, because the point of the investigation is not to find anything. These people are not setting themselves up so that they will fail if they don’t find anything.

The ongoing investigation, the never-ending leaks, the anonymous sources for over a year in the Drive-By Media, this endless thing that Mueller is doing with these indictments here or there? The impression is being created that Trump is unfit and therefore is certainly unfit a qualified-for-impeachment president. They don’t have to find anything. But as long as that dossier remains in the news, then what it says can be repeated over and over again. And it becomes its own justification.

So I don’t have personally any doubt whatsoever that Brennan and… They’re all in cahoots! Hillary takes over the DNC a year before the election, ends up rigging the election for herself against Crazy Bernie. The DNC servers are hacked. By the way, you know what else has been learned? Get this. (interruption) No, no. This almost to me is other bombshell material. We have now learned that all of those emails at WikiLeaks? Many of them were written after the DNC had been hacked. Now, folks, they knew they were hacked and they didn’t let the FBI investigate, no forensic investigation or analysis.

Instead, they used this outfit called CrowdStrike, which we now know has links to Fusion GPS, which is who Hillary hired through the cutout law firm to write the Trump dossier. So after they’re hacked, emails then show up at WikiLeaks, emails that were written and composed after they were hacked. Who does this? If you find out your computer has been hacked and that somebody has had access to it and may still — and if you know that you’ve denied everybody the right to come in and investigate and find out why — would you continue to use that network or those computers to write sensitive, confidential stuff?

So what in the world explains this? Well, we dial back, circle back to an often-heard claim that it was an inside job and not the Russians. An inside job now makes sense. If it’s an inside job to hack into the DNC network and their computers and servers — and then after that’s known, emails continue to be composed that end up at WikiLeaks — then somebody in there was trying to sabotage whatever was going on there. Now, the Democrats are running around, “The Russians did it! The Russians did it! The Russians were working with Trump and colluding here or there.”

But none of this holds up.

Now, Brennan, to give him an example of what a hack this guy is, when he was working for Bush… (chuckles) That shocks you, too, right? When he was working for Bush, he swore up and down that enhanced interrogations, including waterboarding, was legal, that it was necessary. But once he decided he wanted to work for Obama with his desire to become head of the CIA, he completely changed his tune and said that waterboarding was illegal and torture. Now, in case you’ve forgotten these whistleblowers, the intel reports that the whistleblowers were talking about flew in the face of Obama’s campaign claims that he had terrorism on the run.

Remember Obama talking about how ISIS was on the run and Al-Qaeda we decimated ’em after we had taken care of bin Laden? Obama was out pretty much claiming victory over all this, except ISIS was wreaking havoc everywhere. Now, the analysts were reporting that not only was terrorism not on the run, but it was on the rise, especially with ISIS out there. But the senior people at the CIA and at the DNI — Department of National Intelligence, which was what Clapper ran — they had these reports changed reportedly on Obama’s orders. This is what the whistleblowers said.

But given the loyalty of people like Clapper and Brennan, they didn’t need to be told what Obama wanted to hear just like Lois Lerner didn’t need to be told what to do at the IRS. But the whistleblowers were out saying this. Now, the point is that both Brennan and Clapper with presented by the media as apolitical and uninterested, that they are clean and pure as the wind-driven snow, that they are driven by the best of patriotic impulses and all they’re seeking to do is defend and protect our country and our Constitution.

Yeah, to the extent that Obama wants it defended and protected. Whatever Obama needed politicized, it was politicized, and this is what the whistleblowers pointed out. Folks, the deep corruption… When I talk about the traditions and institutions that have defined our country — and they’re many and varied — but what isn’t politicized these days? Marriage? The NFL? I mean, you name it. And now intelligence and the IRS. And this is what leftists do because this is what their purpose is, and this is, in their view, what government’s purpose is.

Government is to be used as a hammer. The whole point of having power is to use it to bludgeon people into agreement with you; to shape, bend, form, and flake a culture. It’s not about individual liberty and freedom. That’s not what the purpose of government is, to ensure that. “No, no, no, no, no. We can’t trust individual liberty and freedom because we can’t trust individuals to vote the right way, to spend their money the right way, to give to the right charity, whatever it is we want them to do.

“We have to force them to do it because they can’t and won’t do it on their own. Not bright enough, they don’t care enough, whatever.

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RUSH: Let me see if I understand this. Hillary Clinton pays for opposition research, which is called a dossier to give it credibility. The dossier is sourced by Russian operatives. It’s littered with lies. The FBI used it to justify spying on Trump with no evidence of criminal behavior by Trump. Trump is investigated by a special counsel who has lots of conflicts. It seems to me the crime here is the investigation, not Trump. We have this backwards.

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RUSH: I’ve gone back and got the audio sound bite. Grab number 23. ‘Cause remember, now, Trump talking to reporters on Air Force One, and he said (summarized), “Hey, look. You know what? Every time Putin sees me, he says he didn’t do it, and I believe him. Every time I see Putin, I ask him, ‘Did you meddle in our election? Did you help me win? Did you cheat and help me win?’ Putin says, ‘No. I didn’t do it, and I’m getting tired of the allegation. I didn’t do it and I wouldn’t do it.'” Everybody mocks Trump, makes fun of Trump, laughs at Trump for being such a tool when if comes to Putin.

Okay, December 16th, 2016. This is… Ah basically it’s 11 months before the election. It’s at the White House. Obama held a press conference and during the Q&A the AP correspondent, Josh Lederman, said, “Mr. President, there’s a perception that you are letting President Putin get away with interfering in the U.S. election.” Can we remind everybody of this? This was a question actually asked of Obama. This may have been one of the hardest hitting questions. “There’s a perception you are letting President Putin get away with interfering in the U.S. election.”

Now, remember, this had been floating around all of 2016, and Obama had refuted it a number of times and had pointed out that it was impossible to do. He had said it couldn’t be done because there are too many precincts, too many machines, too many people, and too many unknowns. You don’t know what states you need to cheat in. You can’t cheat in all of them. You don’t know what precincts to cheat in, and you don’t know what you need to do because you don’t know who’s gonna vote for who.

And he was exactly right about that. It would be veritably impossible to rig a U.S. election this way, the way they’re alleging — you know, Russian hacking. Voter machines are not even connected to the internet. But the media during this year, 2016, when Obama was out saying how hard it would be to do it, there was a perception that he was not hammering the Russians enough. Hence this question: “There’s a perception you’re letting Putin get away with interfering … and that a response that nobody knows about or a look-back review just won’t cut it. Are you prepared to call out President Putin by name for ordering this hacking?”

OBAMA: In early September when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that didn’t happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out and there were gonna be some serious consequences if he didn’t.

RUSH: I’m sorry, this is two months after the election. It’s a month after the election. I was getting my years mixed up. It’s 2015. This is even better. They’d already started the hacking campaign: The Russians colluded, the Russians stole the election, colluded against Hillary. It had been going on throughout the year, but now it had really ratcheted up because the Clinton campaign zeroed in on this after the loss. I was just… I got my dates confused here, folks. But this was after the election when he gets this question.

He says — and isn’t this typical of this erudite, elite sophisticate? The media just swoons over this. They swoon over an answer like this. “In early September when I saw President Putin in China, I felt the most effective way to ensure that it didn’t happen was to talk to him directly, tell him to cut it out…” So here’s a guy who used to rank high up in the KGB and you tell him to “cut it out,” and, what, he’s quaking in his boots? Putin goes back to the Politburo (impression), “We have big trouble. Big, big trouble, gentlemen. American president very, very angry.

“Told me to cut it out. Mwa-haha!” And they break down in hysterical laughter. “He told me to cut it out. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” Can you imagine the laughter if this really happened? “Yeah, I told him to cut it out.” Cut it out! “There were gonna be some serious consequences if he didn’t.” Okay, serious consequences. What are the serious consequences? ‘Cause they obviously didn’t cut it out, because the Democrats are basing the fact that they lost the election on the fact that Putin didn’t cut it out, that he kept cutting it in.

So what were the consequences? Where was this famous Obama red line? “I told Vlad! I told him: You better cut it out. You better cut it out, pal! There’s gonna be consequences.” Just like there were consequences on the red line in Syria that weren’t. What are the consequences? There weren’t any consequences. This is Obama blathering on and the media applauding (clapping) dutifully like they’re at the opera. Polite applause.