RUSH: Sharyl Attkisson. She was on Chatsworth Osborne Jr. Tonight on the Fox News Channel, and he asked her if the government spying on Americans is uncommon. This FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page from the Steele memo, is that a one off, is it uncommon, or is it more common than we know?

ATTKISSON: I think not. You know, long before Trump announced running for president I had intel sources — contacts who I’m still in touch with — who have said that for a long time there has been presentation of bad evidence to the FISA court to justify warrants, that there has been sort of a reverse engineering. When political figures want to target people illegally, they find someone in their orbit that they can target, and then capture them incidentally, and then accidentally capture their data and unmask them, acting surprised that that’s who it was, when that’s the target that they intended to capture all along.

RUSH: Let me translate this. Here’s what she’s saying. What she’s saying is exactly what happened to Michael Flynn. She is saying that political people within law enforcement or political people at the request… Sorry. Law enforcement people — say at the FBI, DOJ — responding to a request, let’s say, by a Democrat, will go to the FISA court and get a warrant to spy on somebody who may be engaging in legitimate criminal activity, who it is known is talking to the real target that the political operative wants dirt on.

So they get the warrant to spy on the legitimate criminal actor but not to get data on him. Since they surveil him, they’re gonna overhear what he says to the real target they want data on. They get that, and then they unmask, which is exactly what the Obama administration was doing in droves. Susan Rice and Samantha Power were unmasking people in droves toward the end of 2016, and she’s saying that this is exactly how FISA warrants are being used. I saw a stat last night. I don’t have these numbers. I didn’t write them down; so I’m paraphrasing the numbers.

But I want to just give you the percentage. Something like 30,000 FISA warrant requests or applications and only 18 rejections. The point is that they’re pretty much always granted, and her point is that she’s got sources telling her that the FISA warrant application process is being used by political people to get a warrant to spy on somebody when the intent is to actually catch somebody else for political purposes. Somebody you know the target knows and talks to on the phone or wherever. And I have to tell you, I’m not surprised.

We’re talking about the swamp here.

We’re talking about the establishment.

If this is true, it doesn’t surprise me in the least.