RUSH: Devin Nunes was on the Fox News Channel last night.  Grab audio sound bite No. 10.  He made an interesting claim last night.

He said, “Democrats were trying to get information from Russians to use against Trump campaign.” We know exactly who was getting information from the Russians.  It was the Hillary Clinton campaign.  He implied that this is what his committee’s investigation has learned.  Democrats were trying to get information from Russia to use against Trump.  He said, “We know exactly who was getting information from the Russians. It was the Hillary Clinton campaign.

“They were getting information from the Russians, dirt on Trump to use in a campaign. That’s the very thing that for a year and a half we’ve been trying to investigate. Whether or not the Trump campaign was trying to get dirt against Hillary Clinton from the Russians? We have no evidence of that.” But we have evidence that the Hillary campaign was being fed “information from Russians to use against the Trump campaign,” and the clearest, the No. 1 exhibit is the Steele dossier!  The Steele dossier is Exhibit A in Clinton getting information from the Russians to damage Trump!

And they paid for it — $10 million — through the law firm.  You know the drill now.  Nunes just had a new way of expressing it last night.  It really isn’t a new revelation or new discovery.  We know that the Clinton campaign hired Steele — well, Fusion GPS hired Steele — under orders from the Clinton campaign with a law firm in there as a cutout to actually handle the transaction, given the Clinton campaign a couple layers of plausible deniability and invisibility.  But we’ve covered it all.

And we know that the Steele dossier is a political opposition research document.  It’s made up.  None of it’s true, either.  The Russians and the Clintons were colluding — and, by the way, one small, little correction here.  The guy who ran to the FBI with that Papadopoulos news is a former Australian foreign minister.  His name is Alexander Downer, and he used his government position in Australia to steer money from the Australian government to the Clinton Foundation.  It wasn’t his money per se.  It was Australian government money.

This guy was in the tank for the Clintons, and this is the guy who Papadopoulos just happened to accidentally start spilling his guts to while drunk, and this is what Adam Schiff says really got the investigation going as far as the FISA warrant.  Folks, we’re being lied to like you can’t believe and understand and even keep track of here.  There are real culprits who have committed real criminal acts, and they’re in plain sight, and they’re being ignored and protected and shielded at the same time.

Meanwhile, people who haven’t had a thing to do with the premise of Trump colluding with Russia — because there hasn’t been any — are having their lives ruined!

There is no Trump-Russia collusion.  There is Hillary and Democrat Russian collusion. And yet people are being pursued, they’re being bankrupted, they’re being wrung out on a false premise while the real culprits are sitting there in plain sight, getting away with it each and every day. And they’re trying to destroy Devin Nunes, by the way. That hasn’t stopped. That continues.

So here we have another example. The Democrats were trying to get information from Russians to use against the Trump campaign, and they did, with the Steele dossier. We have the Papadopoulos blurb about whatever he said. He’s another ancillary character over here who Trump didn’t know and never had any contact with, spilling his guts to an Australian diplomat who has now ties to the Clinton Foundation.

And this. “Congress Wasn’t Told of Clinton Foundation Ties to FBI’s Australian Informant.” Congressional investigators were not told by the FBI of the deep ties between Alexander Downer, the former Australian diplomat, and the Clinton Foundation. The FBI knows this! This is another thing. They know. They didn’t tell Congress. They’ve stonewalled it. They haven’t told anybody. This had to be ferreted out by Nunes and his team and others looking into this.

Jim Jordan was shocked when he heard this information. Everybody’s shocked. Everybody is shocked when they learn what Mueller is ignoring, what he’s not looking at, what the FBI knew and knows and is hiding and what the media knows and is hiding.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: How many Sam Nunbergs are there out there that the Drive-By Media relied on for a year and a half to present this cock-and-bull story about Trump colluding with Russia? Here’s Devin Nunes, by the way, last night on Fox. The question: “A report says that there’s a stream of illicit communications between the Trump team and Moscow that had been intercepted.” Oh, you know what this is?

Folks, does the name Jane Mayer ring a bell? Well, let me tell you who Jane Mayer is. Jane Mayer wrote a book with the former New York Times editor Jill Abramson on Clarence Thomas after the Anita Hill hearings. Jane Mayer is a — I want to be accurate here. I mean, she’s a communist. She is an uber-left-wing media hack who has taken it upon herself to destroy those people and things that irritate her.

So she and Jill Abramson write this book that takes out after Clarence Thomas. Prior to that, she did a series of stories in The New Yorker which essentially blamed the TV show 24 and its creators for all of the U.S. torture at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. She set out to destroy the TV show 24, claiming that it either was a leader in giving Americans ideas on how to torture or that it popularized torture and made it look cool or whatever. So she had that show in her sights.

Well, guess what now, 15,000-word piece in The New Yorker. Fifteen thousand words. That’s a novelette. Your average newspaper column is 750 words, 1,000 words tops. And you know what this is? She is beginning the rehabilitation of Christopher Steele. Her purpose in this story is to rehab Steele’s broken reputation and image and build him back up to heroic status.

And one of the assertions that she makes in this story is that Donald Trump wanted to name Mitt Romney secretary of state but that Vladimir Putin interceded and warned Trump not to do it. And that’s why Trump did not name Romney chief of staff. And so now there are people running lickety-split with the story that this proves there is compromising information that the Russians have on Trump and therefore this proves that the Russians got Trump elected and, furthermore, they wanted to get him elected because they got the ability to blackmail him.

Trump wanted to put Romney as secretary of state, Putin said, “You don’t do that or else,” and so Trump backed off. That’s what she asserts in the story. And you’ve got people who desperately want this to be true, even on our side, ladies and gentlemen. There are people on our side treating this as nearly gospel. “Man, this is fascinating. What could this possibly mean? Is Trump really a sleeper agent for Russia?”

And of course it has a baseline credibility because Romney, if you remember, during the 2012 presidential campaign, tried to tell everybody that the big threat we face is Russia. And remember how Obama pooh-poohed him and everybody in the press mocked him and made fun of him and laughed at him? And now look. As far as the media and the Democrat Party is concerned, Russia is back to being the great Satan.

And so of course the Russians wouldn’t want somebody who knows what they’re up to in their secretary of state. The Russians wouldn’t want Romney in there. So Putin told Trump that if you want to last, if you want your secrets kept, and if you want nobody knowing what we’ve got on you, you will not put Romney in as secretary of state. Give us Tillerson, give us somebody we can control. And that’s her story. Oh. That’s one little part of it.

You ever heard that assertion? You’ve heard it rumored. This is what the whole thing has been about. This is what they’re desperately searching. So here comes after a year and a half, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker miraculously finding this little tidbit in a 15,000-word story that has as its primary objective the rehabilitation of Christopher Steele, to make him a hero, to put back together his lost credibility and reputation, which they have to do. I mean, the guy has been exposed as a complete, total fraud.

And this get-Trump agenda, objective has to be saved. And since all the primary players are being exposed as liars and frauds and whatever, then it’s up to the left to rehab these people. And so that’s the primary objective of this piece in The New Yorker. And Nunes was being asked about that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The Nunes answer to the question about Jane Mayer claiming that Putin has the goods on Trump and that’s why Trump didn’t get to name the secretary of state he wanted to, this is when Nunes says, “Look, we know exactly who’s getting information from the Russians. It was the Clinton campaign. They’re the ones talking to the Russians. It was the Clinton campaign that was being aided and abetted by the Russians.” And this idea here that it’s the other way around. It’s gone beyond sane comprehension. It just absurd.