RUSH: Toms River, New Jersey. Mike, I’m glad you called. I’m glad you waited and held on. What’s up?
CALLER: Hey, thanks for taking my call. What I’m wondering is, when does this reach critical mass? Because you said that we’re living in the biggest political scandal in our lifetime, and you’re good at predicting the political tea leaves or reading them. Would you make a prediction on when you believe this would turn critical mass and somebody’s head rolls?
RUSH: Well, what I’m gonna do in answering… Yes, I will. But your curiosity here transitions perfectly to a column today at National Review by Victor Davis Hanson. Now, he has decided to answer your question about where it’s going. Now, before I had seen Victor Davis Hanson’s piece today… You know, I am sorry to be a pessimist on this stuff. I never see the good guys get away with it. I see what happened to Scooter Libby, and this just looked like a rehash of what happened to Scooter Libby.
With Scooter Libby, it’s the most outrageous thing, they charged a guy for doing something he didn’t do while knowing full well the guy who did do it is laughing and joking and walking free. What we have here is the Washington establishment up against Donald Trump and Michael Flynn and any of these other ancillary figures that are being used to get to Trump, and the Washington establishment… Look at Mueller’s team. Sixteen… Well, some have been reassigned now. Strzok is gone. Lisa Page is gone. Bruce Ohr is gone.
It’s just gonna make it harder to get rid of him.
And I myself, okay, so we learn all of this, but still, is Flynn gonna go to jail? Even though we know we don’t know. But Victor Davis Hanson at National Review tackles it today. “Scandal, Corruption, Lawbreaking — And So What? — The FISA-gate, Clinton emails, and Uranium One scandals are sort of reaching a consensus. Many things quite wrong and illegal were done by both Hillary Clinton and her entourage and members of the Obama agencies and administration — both the acts themselves and the cover-ups and omissions that ensued,” are all on the Hillary-Obama side.
“Remember, in the FISA-gate scandal such likely widespread criminal behavior was predicated on two premises.” These guys at NRO write in a flowery way. What Victor Davis Hanson’s saying here is, in the FISA-gate scandal all of this Obama-Hillary behavior happened because they were certain Hillary was gonna win and nobody would ever find out about it.
So if Hillary wins, all these people that misbehaved are forgiven and maybe even rewarded. Number 2. Liberal “hubris in which our supposedly moral betters felt it their right, indeed their duty, to use unethical and even unlawful means for the ‘greater good.'” The greater good defined as keeping Trump out of Washington. Meaning, anything was permitted.
The wrongdoing engaged in by the Clinton-Obama apparatus “probably includes attempting to warp a U.S. election, Russian collusion, repeatedly misleading and lying before the FISA courts, improperly surveilling American citizens, unmasking the names of citizens swept up in unlawful surveillance and then illegally leaking them to the press, disseminating and authenticating opposition smears during a political campaign, lying under oath to Congress, obstructing ongoing investigations, using federal funds to purchase ad hominem gossip against a presidential candidate, blatant conflicts of interests, weaponizing federal investigations, trafficking in and leaking classified information. The list goes on and on.”
“The State Department is now involved. Apparently anyone who was a former Clinton smear artist can pass fantasies to a sympathetic or known political appointee at State. And if the ‘dossier’ fits the proper narrative and shared agenda, it gains credence enough to ensure that it is passed up to senior State officials and on to the FBI. Perhaps a private citizen with a grudge against a rival should try that as well.”
He’s talking about how easy it has been to get a fraudulent gossip-style magazine story as intelligence. How easy has that been. How easy was it to write a fraudulent, fake, phony opposition research paper and have it converted into supposed intelligence and have it used to grant warrants to spy on people by the highest courts in the land. How easy has that been, he’s asking.
“These scandals,” Mr. Hanson writes, “will grow even greater before various congressional investigations expire. But then what?” So he’s asking, like the caller, what’s gonna happen with all this?
“In some sense, we are in uncharted territory — given the misadventure of appointing Robert Mueller as special counsel. His team is now replaying the role of Patrick Fitzgerald in the Scooter Libby case: investigating a crime that did not exist and that even if it did was committed by someone else.”
There is no more concise way of explaining what happened here than that. It requires some background knowledge to get it, but let me again repeat this. Mueller is repeating the stratagem of the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation: investigating a crime that didn’t exist. Collusion with Russia didn’t exist, there’s no evidence. And when Mueller was charged, you know, the Justice Department regulations require that a crime have been committed that the special counsel investigates, there was no crime, and yet it’s an open-ended, boundariless investigation.
“The Mueller team’s likely parachute –” what that means, the way they’re gonna get out of this “– will have little if anything to do with the Russian collusion that it originally and chiefly was appointed to investigate. Instead, it’s likely to settle for perjury and obstruction charges against peripheral Trump officials (if the cases are not thrown out by possible reliance on tainted FISA transcripts).”
So Victor Davis Hanson’s alluding to the possibility that all these cases could eventually be thrown out because they lied to the FISA court in order to get the warrants that produced all this so-called evidence. And he thinks — cut to the chase — that this is gonna happen. But then we get to the meat of his opinion. This is what the caller wants to know.
“Still, Democrats at some point will see that what they thought was the formerly defensible is now becoming absolutely indefensible. Adam Schiff, after months of leaking, making grandiose false statements on cable TV, and getting punked by Russian comedians, is now a caricature.” He is not taken seriously. “He became the sad legislative bookend to the neurotic James Comey. Schiff will probably soon be forced to pivot back to his former incarnation as a loud critic of FISA-court abuse.”
Meaning, Victor Davis Hanson thinks that it is over for Schiff, that he’s become a joke, that he’s got nothing, never had anything, and isn’t gonna find anything, and now that comedians are punking him and making fun of him and everybody knows about it, he’s finished.
“If the economy keeps improving, if Trump’s popularity nears 50 percent, and if polls show the midterm elections still tightening, we should see the politics of Democratic equivocation sooner rather than later.”
Meaning, they will have to call this off. Now, he doesn’t mean they’re gonna call a preference and say, “Our investigation’s over and we didn’t find anything and we’re terribly sorry.” They won’t do it that way. They’ll announce they found something. It will be nothing, peripheral obstruction charges against Trump people you never heard of. But they’re gonna have to back out of it. Otherwise, they’re gonna get creamed in November.
He says, “I think the Democratic fallback position will be to point to the career carnage at the FBI and DOJ as punishment enough.” Meaning, you don’t need to prosecute these people. They’ve been punished enough through all this. We’re not near finished with this, so don’t go away, folks. Coming right back.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Mr. Victor Davis Hanson believes that what is ultimately going to drive the Democrats essentially declaring victory and closing this down is a polling result now that more than 50% of the public already believes that the Trump campaign was illegally spied on and smeared through the confluence of the Clinton campaign, the Obama administration, and the FBI.
And that’s true. I’ve seen that poll. Fifty percent of the public already believes that. If 50% of the public believes this, it means the Drive-Bys are failing. It means they’re not able to cover up what has really gone on here. It means that we in alternative media have gotten the message out. And they live and die by polls in the swamp. And if this number keeps increasing, they’re gonna have to cut their losses and go away. This is Mr. Hanson’s theory.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Again, very briefly now, reviewing what Victor Davis Hanson thinks is gonna happen. A lot of this is predicated on Trump’s approval numbers skyrocketing, not to mention public polling showing that 50% of the public already believes that Obama and Hillary were spying on the Trump campaign and have been engaged in smearing the Trump campaign and the FBI. That’s all part of this. It’s a phenomenal number, and it’s a breakthrough number.
When you hit 50% on any of this — presidential approval or a poll like this — it gives everybody pause, particularly on the Mueller investigation side. So Mr. Hanson’s theory is that they’re gonna have to sue for peace, that they’re gonna declare victory and go home with nothing major happening. But he thinks that Republicans accepting this outcome would be a grave error. If you let Mueller get a couple of scalps — peripheral scalps — for supposedly lying and you charge ’em…
Mr. Hanson believes that Jeff Sessions has gotta find his own lawyers — his own investigators — to investigate Obama, investigate Hillary, investigate the special counsel, investigate the FBI, and find out just how in heck any of this could have happened. A literal tabloid, trash newspaper story ends up being primary evidence for a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign as approved by the FISA court. He says investigate this and find out how in the name of Sam Hill something like this can happen.
He thinks it would be a mistake to let the Democrats and Mueller and Rosenstein or anybody involved in this to basically shut it down, claim a partial victory, and move on. “Despite a nonstop media assault on Trump’s administration, Representative Devin Nunes, and the congressional investigative committees, more than 50% of the public already believes that the Trump campaign was illegally surveilled …
“Voters would only grow more cynical if some Americans were allowed to abuse constitutionally protected civil liberties, and to lie to the Congress, the FBI, and the courts, while the less connected others go to jail for much less. Without a judicial accounting, it will be impossible to clean up [this mess in] the hierarchies of the FBI and the DOJ.” Meaning without a judicial accounting of the deep state, we’re never going to find out how, specifically who, all this happened.
“Indeed, absent accountability and punishment, the new modus operandi,” and this is a great point here. If after this — and remember, this is his prediction of what’s gonna happen, that the Democrats are eventually gonna have to sue for peace — the FBI, DOJ — ’cause there’s nothing there. They have nothing on Trump, and the public is starting to really sour on this. So they’re gonna have to get out of it somehow to save Democrat Party and its electoral chances. And if the people that did this get away with it, then guess what we have?
We have a whole new political modus operandi, and all it would require is for a similar situation to eventuate, a “lame-duck incumbent administration to use federal agencies to” spy on the campaign of one of the candidates vying to replace him. So let’s say it’s 2023 and Trump is finishing his second term, and there’s two candidates out there running for president. If we don’t stop this, then Mr. Hanson’s theory is that Trump could be the next Obama, and he could use the FBI and the DOJ to spy on whichever candidate he wanted to lose and use the power of the federal government to destroy that candidate and candidacy before it gets going.
Because if this is what happened here, and it’s not dealt with and the perps are not identified and punished — if this whole thing is not revealed to the American people — it’s just gonna happen again, particularly if everybody involved in this one gets away with it, and that is a good point. “It would be only logical to conclude that criminal acts used to help a successor would be forgotten or rewarded” if they worked. “What is needed?
That is the second time in this piece that very concise explanation of what’s happened here has been written: “[T]he effort to use the federal government to thwart the candidacy of an unpopular presidential candidate and then to smear and ruin his early tenure as president.” That’s the scandal that is maybe the gravest scandal in postwar American history, and it’s got to be rooted out. He believes that it will be.
Now, Mr. Hanson, I should say, has a history of thinking the good guys win. He’s a worldwide historian — Greek historian, primarily, but a student of world history. And he has written many columns over the years, as I recall (I can’t think anything specific right now), thinking that Obama was gonna get caught doing this, Obama wasn’t gonna get away with that, and Obama got away with all of it. But I can’t dispute his assertions here.
He’s absolutely right. I think if the Democrats give it up, this will be how, and then the pressure is gonna mount to not let the people that got away with this get away with it. And the danger I see there is the Republicans are gonna be breathing such a big sigh of relief if it ends, they’re just gonna want to drop it, and they’re not gonna want to steel back up and get loaded for bear all over again with another long-term investigation.
Here is Mike in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as we head back to the phones. Glad you waited, sir. How are you?
CALLER: I’m doing good, Rush. How about you?
RUSH: Fine and dandy, sir. Thank you.
I gotta believe that before the election they would discuss these things. I guess they couldn’t maybe let themselves to even think that it was gonna happen that Trump could beat her, but after it happened, they’re now, you know, in a corner where they didn’t want to be, obviously. And as far as Susan Rice’s comments on Obama wanting to do things by the book regarding Russian collusion — which obviously, again, is Strzok’s “insurance policy” — the Russian collusion angle. It makes you wonder: What weren’t they doing by the book? If he wants to do this by the book, it sort of alludes to the fact that maybe other things were happening not by the book.
RUSH: Exactly. That’s the exact point I made. If Obama has to go out and tell his people that this is gonna be done by the book, then what are they doing every other day? They’re not going by the book, obviously. Now, as for knowing what Hillary said to Obama on a phone call, I have no idea. All I know is she apologized. We can speculate why. I mean, it’s nice and sexy to think she was apologizing for the excrement show that was about to happen because she lost. That’d be fun to think that happened, but we’ll never know. Well, can’t say we won’t know, never. I mean, somebody may write about it someday on the way to jail. You never know.
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