RUSH: Folks, I have a couple questions here. Actually, one question. What’s the big deal with this memo? If Trump is guilty, if Trump did all this, why are they worried about a memo detailing how they did it?
If Trump did it, if Trump colluded, if Trump did all this horrible stuff, if Carter Page did all this horrible stuff, if Stephen Miller did all this horrible stuff, if Melania Trump did all this horrible stuff, if Donald Trump Jr., if Eric Trump, if Barron Trump did all this horrible stuff, why in the world is the FBI so afraid of people finding out how they got him?
Folks, I swear. I’ve gotta button this up because I might say things that would come back to bite me. But this guy is not a good guy. It’s worse than just this guy is a loyal Democrat partisan. Once again, he has tried to discredit this memo by telling a bunch of lies about it. And the latest big lie is that Devin Nunes, the chairman of the committee secretly rewrote the committee memo while sitting next to Trump and substantially changed the memo after everybody had read it.
And of course the media dutifully picks up on this and they’ve got their narrative. “Nunes realizing memo was factually incorrect, Nunes realizing memo had no juice, Nunes, realizing it was about to be all over, went in rewrote the memo after everybody had seen it.” The media runs with this, and it just is not true! It is striking how much is simply not true in this entire story from the earliest days of it. It is really overwhelmingly striking how so little of this is true.
The only changes that were made in the memo were technical. They were cleaning up some typos, some punctuation. It was stuff like that because the thing’s gonna be released and you don’t want it to look like it was written by your average Twitter cellar dweller. So they had to clean it up. And Schiff, he knows full well that this thing was not substantially changed. He knows full well that there’s nothing in this that’s literally incorrect.
Why are they working so hard to prevent this from being seen? Why are they bending over backwards to prevent the American people from finding out how the FBI operated? Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a principle at stake here, and it’s not that complicated when you get right down to it. If the FBI, because of the politicized nature, which can corrupt, has been used to advance partisan political purposes of some of the leadership, this we need to know. And it needs to be cleaned out. Because everybody wants the FBI to be good.
Everybody wants the FBI to be trustworthy. Nobody wants the FBI to be corrupt. Everybody wants to defend and protect it. The FBI is a crucial law enforcement institution, and if there has been any malfeasance there, we are duty-bound to get to the bottom of it, not cover it up. But, boy, doesn’t it appear like that is what is going on here?
Well, there is a story — there’s a bunch of stories. There’s a narrative out there that Trump asked Rosenstein some time ago, “Are you my guy? Are you my guy?” Meaning, are you loyal to me? And everybody’s saying, does Trump not understand that the Department of Justice is not his? Does Trump still not get it that the Department of Justice is not there to carry his water or to run misdirection plays or cover up? Does he realize that the attorney general is not his lawyer?
I just want to say something. Given the way Eric Holder and Barack Obama operated, why would it be a surprise that any of us think that the DOJ exists to do the bidding of the president? Are you trying to tell me that Eric Holder was entirely independent of Barack Obama, or do you think Eric Holder was every day doing everything he could to implement the agenda of Barack Obama? And if you look at this objectively, you look at the Obama agenda as he stated it, and you look at Holder’s stewardship of the Department of Justice, you don’t have any difference.
He was clearly Obama’s guy. This is the point! And the Democrats didn’t have any trouble with that. The Democrats didn’t have any trouble with Holder being Obama’s guy. In fact, that’s the way it was supposed to be. Because the Democrats corrupt everything they touch by politicizing it. So the DOJ, the EPA, you name it, all of these agents, the IRS, all of these were in one way or another weaponized by Obama.
The media never had a problem with it. The media only had a problem with conservatives saying that it wasn’t fair, wasn’t just, wasn’t right. They said, “Grow up. Stop whining.” Remember all the conspiracies with Lois Lerner. But I don’t think Trump or anybody could be blamed for believing that the attorney general is there to advance the president’s agenda because that’s what we saw for eight years during the Obama administration. There’s nobody that would disagree with this.
In fact, I once had J. Christian Adams — now known as Chris. He was on this program after he resigned at the DOJ. He was in the Civil Rights Division, and he quit when Eric Holder told him that they were no longer gonna prosecute the New Black Panther Party that had engaged in voter fraud in Philadelphia by denying voters a chance to get to the polling place. This is a huge, huge deal. And Eric Holder essentially said, “We’re not gonna sit here and prosecute my people.” And everybody thought he meant race.
“Look, Lois Lerner didn’t need a memo to tell her what to do in not granting tax-exempt status to conservative fundraising groups. She didn’t need a note. There wasn’t a smoking gun memo because they didn’t need to write one. Everybody Obama hired already knew what was expected. They were just like Obama. They were leftist radical activists, and they were there to not only advance Obama’s agenda, but thwart any opposing agenda, and nobody had to send a how-to memo to Lois Lerner.”
That’s what we’re trying to root out. We just had eight years of it! Again, I defy anybody to try to convince me that Eric Holder and whoever was running the FBI at the time, were not doing the bidding of Barack Obama. And I defy anybody in the establishment, in the swamp who would claim to be surprised if they found out that Eric Holder and Barack Obama had the same objectives. I just don’t believe that Eric Holder would engage in Department of Justice activity that went against the Obama agenda. It just would not happen, and yet that’s exactly what they’re expecting to happen now.
The media and the Democrats are expecting Rod Rosenstein — and they’re expecting Christopher Wray and they’re expecting all these people — to stand up to Trump and to stop Trump and to stop the Trump agenda. And that’s what Mueller’s investigations all about. So we’re told that Trump’s sitting in the White House confused. He doesn’t understand why the DOJ is not his, why the deputy attorney general’s not his guy. And who could blame him, again, after witness witnessing eight years of Obama and Holder?
I just think all of this is 180 degrees out of phase, folks. It’s not the Trump administration acting like they got anything to hide. It’s the Democrats and the FBI. Well, a couple people at the FBI. I don’t think it’s the whole agency. That’s another thing too. The whole agency here is being tarred and feathered when basically you had a few agents or few executives, perhaps, who were no… (chuckles) There’s no doubt about it that they were politicized. Now, the latest, going back here to this shifty Adam Schiff, this story is in The Daily Beast.
“Transcript: The Daily Beast Peddled Fake News About Devin Nunes.”
And it’s fed to the fake news media, who swallow it without a single question. A pull quote from the Hemingway story: “Once again, reporters got burned by believing anonymous Democrats on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Betsy Woodruff and Spencer Ackerman of the Daily Beast credulously believed their ‘sources familiar with the exchange,’ who said Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, refused to deny he had coordinated with the White House when” writing the memo.
Have you heard that one? (interruption) You heard? (interruption) You haven’t heard? (interruption) Oh, well, that’s another big one. (interruption) Yeah. Nunes coordinated writing the memo with Trump, with the White House, probably Stephen Miller. Who knows who? They put this out. Nunes is accused of writing the memo after having collaborated and coordinated with the White House, and the story says that Nunes didn’t deny it. Nunes refused to deny it. (The fact is, he did.)
“In fact, Nunes explicitly denied the charge before shutting down the line of questioning in order to provide other members who were not trying to hijack the hearing time to get actual committee business done.” So much of what is news is the willingness now to knowingly create a lie that then begets a narrative, and there are two big ones here. One of them was started by Adam Schiff that Devin Nunes totally rewrote the memo after it had been read by members of Congress and the committee.
This stuff is starting to burn me as it always does every day. I normally have it contained. But this is…? What are they so afraid of? If Trump did it and the FBI’s proud of the way they found out that Trump did it — if Trump’s guilty, if there has been collusion, if there has been obstruction, and the FBI is very proud of what they’ve done — why is everybody so afraid of their methods being seen and exposed?
But, man, are they trying to cover something up.
Man, are they trying to keep it hidden.
Man, do they not want us to know, whatever it is.
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RUSH: Just ask yourself a question: If Devin Nunes was trying to be sneaky and rewrite the memo after everybody had read it, does anybody think that he believes he wouldn’t be caught? How absurd is this allegation? “Yeah, he rewrote it after everybody saw it and he collaborated with the White House!” That would be one of the dumbest things anybody could do because it would be discovered. The other claim that they’re making — the left, Adam Schiff, the Democrats — is that there were “material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”
Which is another way of saying, “Nunes is taking our investigation out of context! Without the context, you, the reader, can’t possibly understand all that really went on.” Well, okay, then what are the “material omissions”? What are they? What has been left out? Anybody could tell us after the memo’s released. What’s been left out? If something’s been left out that makes Nunes look bad, they should be happy to tell everybody. But they’re trying to get it stopped, quashed, sequestered, beaten into smithereens, what have you.
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RUSH: To Spring, Texas, and, Tom. I’m glad you called, sir. It’s great to have you with us here.
CALLER: Good morning, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: It’s an honor and privilege to speak with you today. I have a lot of contempt for Adam Schiff, and he really gets under my skin the way he visually attacked Mr. Nunes and other Republican members of the Intel Committee. Putting out this false narrative that this information they’re gonna release is all made up, trumped up, not true. You know, and the media’s gonna amplify it. But he keeps pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing. The next logical step would lead to a criminal investigation to verify what’s going on, and when the evidence is presented and the indictments go out and the charges go out, you know, he might be the person that we need to make all this come true.
RUSH: You’re talking about Trump investigating people like Schiff?
RUSH: Are you…? You sound convinced that when the memo comes out, that it is almost gonna require a criminal investigation of some of these people, McCabe and Comey, and some of the other people in the FBI. What makes you so certain that that’s gonna happen?
CALLER: I think the way the left is gonna push back to say that this information is false, talking points, made up, salacious, then there’s gonna have be an investigation. “Okay, who’s telling the truth? Is this information real or is it made up?” When the facts are presented, there’s gonna be indictments. There’s gonna be charges levied.
RUSH: Yeah, I… (Ahem)
CALLER: It can’t be anything else. I mean, Hillary Clinton alone, how many felonies did she break with the mishandling of classified information and then —
RUSH: Right. And how many indictments of her have there been?
CALLER: (silence)
RUSH: Zero! Look, my nickname is not Mr. Cold Water, and I don’t want to be that. I know what Tom here is saying. He’s saying the memo is gonna come out and the memo is going to offer strong evidence that there was deep corruption at the FBI, and then that’s going to cause a connection to anybody who might have participated in peddling that stuff, which would include guys like Adam Schiff. And his theory is this is going to require another investigation because the FBI’s gonna deny it. “It’s just Devin Nunes’s memo,” and then the FBI and these clowns are gonna deny it, say it isn’t true.
They’re not going to present any exculpatory evidence. They’re just gonna say, “This isn’t true, it’s politicized, and we can’t comment any further because of national security,” and all this, that, and the other. His theory is this is going to require further investigation which will then standpoint get to the bottom of it and he’s hoping there will be indictments of Comey and McCabe and Strzok and Page and Hillary and all of that. The process that he describes would take years. This right now, Tom, is a battle for the hearts and minds of the American people.
That’s what this is right now. But you raise a good point in that the Nunes memo will not be treated by a lot of people as factually true or as finally conclusive, especially if people in the FBI are denying it or claiming, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it’s way out of context. He’s left so much out of here. And we can’t fill in the blanks because of national security.”
Let me give you an example. I know that many of you are primed to believe that the Steele dossier was used to secure a warrant to spy on Trump by way of spying on Carter Page. Everything but confirmation of this has been reported in our media. By that I mean alternative so-called conservative media. It’s out there that this FISA warrant thus was granted under false premise because the Steele dossier isn’t true.
The Steele dossier was opposition research that was bought by Hillary Clinton, paid for by the Clinton campaign, and written by Russian agents hired by Christopher Steele, and that the FBI then took it and got a warrant to spy on Carter Page and other people with the dossier. This is what everybody thinks happens. But what if there are other things in the application for the FISA warrant besides just the dossier?
There are people who have been really curious why it requires all of this to learn the FISA application, because Donald Trump as president can declassify it any time he wants. And he could have any time he wanted to in the past any number of months. And he hasn’t.
But if there’s more besides the Steele dossier, and with as much hatred as these people have for Trump, I myself have been asking could there be other things in this application to spy on Trump and Carter Page beyond the Steele dossier. And on what basis do these people hate Trump? They think Trump’s the biggest immoral jackass that has ever, ever walked the streets of Washington, D.C. This guy is the reprobate of all reprobates.
So what if they have amassed all kinds of other evidence to throw in there that reflects very poorly on Trump’s character and morality? And if the application is ever made public because of this memo or whatever — some people are suggesting this may be why Trump himself has not declassified it because he knows there’s things in there that he doesn’t want people to see, above and beyond the Steele dossier.
So we just don’t know. What appears obvious is that the FBI and the Democrats do not want Devin Nunes’s memo to see the light of day, which means they don’t want anybody knowing what they’ve done here. And I don’t think there’s any doubt that these people were in the tank for Hillary and did everything they could to sabotage Trump’s campaign and to help hers. I don’t think there is any doubt about any of that.
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RUSH: You gotta hear Cory Booker. Cory Booker is one of these people that in the process of publicly losing his mind. It’s called passion. He’s clearly seeking the Democrat presidential nomination and thinks the way to get it is to appear unhinged. He was on the radio on Saturday. You would not have heard this, probably haven’t heard. This is why we’re playing it for you. Here’s what Cory Booker said about plans to release the House Intelligence Committee FISA memo.
RUSH: Yeah. They really don’t want this coming out. And I have to say, folks, if what is in this memo is so bad, if it is so incorrect and wrong, let it come out and let the Democrats be prepared to nuke the thing and ruin the career of Devin Nunes and ruin the career of anybody else who reportedly has seen it and is telling us we all need to see it. If it’s this treasonous, if it’s this outrageous, if it’s this wrong, if it’s this incomplete, then clearly you have the evidence to demonstrate this, and you can share that with us after the memo comes out and then you can destroy the people who have done this.
No, they don’t want to take that route. They don’t want us to see this. Except they know it’s coming out. So what’s happening now is the creation of the narrative that it’s all wrong, that it’s all partisan, that it’s out of context, that it’s incomplete, that it was written over again by Devin Nunes after everybody read it and that Trump and Nunes collaborated. So the effort to discredit it is happening now since they know it’s coming out, which must mean that they are really afraid of what this memo says.
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RUSH: Breaking news bulletin. CNN is reporting that the FBI director, Christopher Wray, might resign if the memo is released. (interruption) That’s your reaction, “Good-bye”? See, this is my point. You believe it. They could be making this up, or a source of theirs could be making this up. Okay. Don’t care one way or another, I want that memo out. We can always replace the FBI director. Is that it?
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RUSH: This is Fran Townsend, and she worked in the Bush administration. She has a great reputation. She was I think in foreign policy. I forget exactly what her position was, but it was fairly high, fairly ranking, and she was on CBS This Morning today with Norah O’Donnell. They’re talking about the FBI issuing a rebuttal to the Devin Nunes memo on the entire FBI investigation of the Trump-Russia collusion story. Now, there’s even more on the FBI director threatening to quit. It apparently is dire. The FBI director is said to resent having been chosen to be FBI director after Comey was fired.
He said it’s very disturbing for him to be chairman or the grand pooh-bah the FBI while the institution is under assault like this from this memo, and that the White House is very disturbed that Chris Wray wants to quit. And it is being portrayed as a very rocky circumstance at the White House right now. Fran Townsend… Now, she’s an establishmentarian, by the way. Fran Townsend is a qualified, ranking member of the swamp. You need to know this. When I say she’s highly reputed and respected, she is — in the swamp. She’s an establishmentarian. She ranks right up there with ’em. She’s got all the qualifications.
So here’s what she said about release of the memo…
RUSH: There’s the rub. That really is the rub here. But no matter what these people say, tearing down the institution by exposing inappropriate behavior? How is that tearing down the institution? How is that instead not helping to rebuild it? For God’s sake, if the institution has been corrupted and has been used for the political purposes of two things: Advancing a particular presidential candidate while trying to harm the opponent, doesn’t that need to be exposed and doesn’t that it need to be cleaned out? Why in the world would anybody want to protect that?
The reason they want to protect it is because Donald Trump is the guy carrying the wrecking ball. You know what? If Chris Wray wants to quit, fine! Let Trump put one of his boys in there. I mean, you can’t blame Trump for thinking that the FBI director for Obama had Obama’s back. We know that Eric Holder, the attorney general, claimed that he was Obama’s “wingman.” We know that these people acted for and on behalf of Obama when they were the department heads. Now we’re being told, “This is example of what Trump doesn’t know!”
“If the allegation of Chairman Nunes is that relied solely on the Steele dossier, that’s not possible.” It most certainly is possible! You cannot ignore the motive. The motive here clearly was to aid Hillary Clinton, to exonerate Hillary Clinton, which they did! One of these guys’ wives was taking money from Terry McAuliffe seeking political office on her own! McCabe’s wife. And then Strzok! People say, “Well, Strzok was sent packing when Mueller found out about it.” Yeah. All right. Fine and dandy. But it doesn’t deny what Strzok was doing! And he had plenty of time to do it before he was sent packing.
I don’t see a reason, like these people are panicked. What I see is a bunch of people who don’t want any of this to be known. And I fall back to the same old thing. How can a bunch of easily proven lies ruin the reputation of the FBI? If the Devin Nunes memo is incomplete, if it’s factually wrong, if it’s taken everything out of context, it’d be easy as hell to ruin Devin Nunes, if he is so dead wrong about this.
If they’re lying, if they’re making it up, if all of this is bogus, how can things like this end up harming the FBI when the FBI will be able to demonstrate for anybody and everybody how wrong Devin Nunes and his memo is. Right? But for some reason they don’t want to do that. Here’s Jeffrey Toobin last night on CNN talking about the same subject, the Nunes memo and what it represents and how horrible it is that it might be released.
RUSH: Oh, come on, Jeffrey! They’re just jealous that Trump watches Fox & Friends and Fox News. They hate Fox News going in. They can’t stand it Fox News would have any agenda influence whatsoever. The damage to national security. Hey, Jeffrey, you ever heard of a movie called The Post? The Post, Jeffrey. Oh, yeah, in fact, it was up for some epidemic nominations. The Post. Do you know what it was about, Jeffrey? You may have forgotten.
It was about Katharine Graham, Ben Bradlee, and the Washington Post who came across some secrets about how the United States had lied about everything in the Vietnam War. And the Washington Post thought that it was required to publish those things, those facts. The Washington Post thought that it was required that the lying, stinking government be pointed out.
There wasn’t any fear of releasing the Pentagon papers at the Washington Post. There wasn’t any fear of any damage to any institution. No, no, no, no. Quite the contrary. How do we damage the institution, was the question. And then, how can we somehow link Richard Nixon to it all, was the secondary question.
To call this unprecedented when journalism’s claim to fame in the modern era is the destruction of the presidency of Richard Nixon! You hold that up as a great moment in journalism’s past, a great moment in American history. And now a little four-page memo that details how the FBI may have tried to railroad Donald Trump somehow simply cannot be allowed to be seen by anyone because it is so dangerous and so damaging, and it’s never been done, it’s unprecedented in American history.
Really? It was called the Pentagon Papers, Jeffrey. Your mother might have worked on the story or been around when it was happening. Her name was Marlene Sanders. Jeffrey Toobin’s mother. You remember here? It was Toobin’s mom. NBC News, Washington.
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RUSH: One other thing here about Fran Townsend and her comment here. “So if the allegation from Chairman Nunes is that they relied solely on the Steele dossier, that’s not possible.” Oh, so now it’s not the Steele dossier, is that right? See, it was. It is the Steele dossier. That is undeniable. Now they’re trying to move the goalposts and say, “Oh, no, no, no. Steele dossier, no, there is other stuff in there, too.”
So now in the moments before the memo is released, they’re trying to deemphasize the importance of the dossier. This is an advance CYA operation, is what this is. ‘Cause when she says here, “If the allegation from Nunes is that they relied solely on the Steele dossier, that’s not possible.” Meaning there’s so much more. The dossier, that may not mean anything here, when the dossier is everything. You have to know how to hear the denizens of the swamp.
You have to know the techniques they use to move the goalposts, to use misdirection plays, flea flickers, reverses and double reverses. By the time they finish with it all you’re so confused you don’t remember what the thing was about to begin with. But none of that works on me.
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RUSH: Meet the Press has tweeted a statement from Paul Ryan on the GOP memo. “What this is not is an indictment of the FBI, of the Department of Justice. It does not impugn the Mueller investigation or the deputy attorney general.” That’s Meet the Press quoting Paul Ryan. It sounds like Christopher Wray got no reason to quit. Everything’s cool. We supposedly will find out soon.
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