RUSH: Let me tell you the truth about something. Every one of these Drive-By Media hypocrites that are going on and on and on about conflict of interest regarding Sean Hannity would be the first people to accept an up-close and personal relationship with Barack Obama any day of the week, Hillary Clinton any day of the week, and they wouldn’t have any problem covering it up.
They would all brag about it. They all strive, they all wanted to impress Obama, they wanted to be in Obama’s inner circle. What the hell does it mean when you write that, “When I saw the crease in his slacks, I knew this guy was gonna be a great president”? What does that really mean? That was David Brooks, a so-called conservative.
Sean Hannity has not withheld anything from anybody about anything that he’s doing here. Sean Hannity is more honest, three times as honest as anybody you can pluck from the Drive-By Media doing their jobs each and every day. Each and every day they are engaging in deceit to try to hide from you the close ties that they all have with each other. Washington, D.C., is an incestuous revolving door. And Sean Hannity is not part of the Drive-By Media, Washington, D.C., establishment.
Sean Hannity is an advocate for Donald Trump. And in this day and age, advocates for Donald Trump are no different than Trump in that they have to be destroyed, they have to be targeted, they have to be held up for ridicule because it’s all about getting Trump. Every bit of this is about getting Donald Trump. The Washington establishment cannot allow for Donald Trump to succeed. He’s an outsider.
The establishment has established norms for the American people to believe and accept, and that is that Washington really doesn’t work, while making you think that they’re trying to fix this problem or that problem. But in the 30 years I’ve been doing this program, the number of things that actually get fixed, the number of things that actually improve because of the political process in Washington you can count on one hand. They can’t allow for some outsider to come in and in one year or two fix things that they have been obstructing, essentially, for 30 years or longer.
And that’s the great threat that Donald Trump poses. The threat to expose that the Washington establishment is not the best qualified to actually lead this country forward and fix things for the people who make this country work. It’s no more complicated than that. And so anybody that is openly on Trump’s team is going to be targeted, as we see here. I mean, pick your name of any avowed Trump supporter, and they will have been targeted for some kind of damage or embarrassment since the Trump campaign began.
Bruce Cutler. Before Cutler was finished, everybody thought he was in the mob too. They think Cohen’s in the mob. So, Hannity’s name gets thrown out in court yesterday as a client, quote, unquote, of Cohen’s. “Oh, my God, Hannity’s a thug, too!” is what connection they want you to conclude. Cohen’s a thug representing a thug, fixing things for the thug, and there’s his tight buddy, Hannity, whoa, whoa, what the hell?
They think they have a new discovery. Isn’t it interesting that every bombshell discovery they’ve had for the last year and a half designed to get rid of Donald Trump has fizzled out to absolutely nothing. They don’t have anything that they’ve been looking at. Even James Comey’s book doesn’t have anything new in it. And just as I predicted as an aside, Comey is already starting to suffer slings and arrows and criticism from people he thought would be his allies.
Now, stop and think of this. Here’s Comey writing a book, and he’s obviously aiming this at Hillary supporters. That’s who he wants to make him rich, which is what this book is about. The problem is half of Hillary supporters hate the guy’s guts still. And they’re not happy with any of this. So I don’t think this is gonna turn out for Comey the way he is dreaming or envisioning. But that is a bit of an aside that I want to circle back to later.
Every day, folks, for the last year and a half, what kind of things do we learn? We learn that Donald Trump, Trump Tower, his campaign, his transition illegally wiretapped, incidentally, by the way, to go get a FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page or they’re spying on the Russian ambassador, whoa, Nellie, look what we found here. Why, a guy talking to Mike Flynn. Whoa, Nellie, look what we find here, Carter Page is talking to X.
They have yet to be arrested. They have yet to be indicted, convicted, or jailed. They’re not even spoken about in critical terms in the mainstream media. Now all of a sudden Sean Hannity provides a criminal link to Donald Trump? Sean Hannity provides a criminal link to Michael Cohen? The Drive-Bys can’t get enough of this. And they’re harping all over Hannity and his conflicts. Well, let’s talk about Washington conflicts.
Let’s talk about all the conflict of interest that exist just in Washington, D.C., and all the conflicts of interest that you haven’t been told about. They say Hannity should have disclosed. Well, should F. Chuck Todd disclose? Should Ben Rhodes disclose? Should Bruce Ohr have disclosed? Should Peter Strzok have disclosed? Should McCabe have disclosed? Should Comey have disclosed? The conflicts throughout the Washington establishment and the Democrat Party in this project to get Trump are legion.
They are many. And we’re gonna review some of them, because many of them you probably don’t know. Well, we’re gonna go through the list, and I want to start it. We put together a montage of audio sound bites here of the Drive-Bys slamming Fox for conflict of interest while every one of these people that you’re going to hear has a conflict of their own or is in an incestuous relationship politically that they never disclose. So this is our first stab at this. Here’s the montage…
JACKIE KUCINICH: Why didn’t Hannity disclose this on his show?
JAKE TAPPER: (haltingly) Never did he disclose that Michael Cohen had… He had some sort of professional relationship with him.
MATTHEW MILLER: He’s going to have to answer questions about why he didn’t disclose that relationship.
GLORIA BORGER: He’s not really a journalist!
ARI MELBER: He was out there criticizing the DOJ, the FBI raid on Michael Cohen all the while hiding the fact that he hired Michael Cohen.
JOHN HARWOOD: Obvious conflict for a journalistic organization…
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Boldface lying to not disclose that he is a third client of Michael Cohen.
RON BROWNSTEIN: The idea that in any normal newsroom you could go on and do that having this kind of relationship with the person you’re talking about and not disclose to it your audience, you know, is just extraordinary.
RUSH: Give me a break! This is such rank hypocrisy. That last voice was Ron Brownstein. The other voice that you might have sat up and noted was Ari Melber. He said, “He was out there criticizing the DOJ, the FBI raid on Michael Cohen, all the while hiding the fact that he hired Michael Cohen.” Okay, let’s go through this. The first voice was Jackie Kucinich. Not gonna call this a conflict, but you should know that she’s the daughter of former Democrat congressman Dennis Kucinich. She’s in the Drive-By Media: The Daily Beast.
Jake Tapper was the next voice. Jake Tapper, 1992 served as campaign press secretary for Democrat congressional candidate Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, who is — wait for it — the more than likely of Chelsea Clinton. In 1997, Jake Tapper was a spokesman for Handgun Control, a gun-control advocacy group. CNN and Tapper failed to disclose Tapper’s anti-gun activism in advance of the town hall that he hosted with the Parkland students. Did any of you know any of this?
Why wasn’t Tapper forced to disclose that he holds an anti-gun bias while hosting a town hall made up of anti-gun bias? Jeffrey Toobin was the next voice you heard. Jeffrey Toobin is the son of former NBC News infobabe Marlene Sanders. Toobin worked for the Iran-Contra special counsel Lawrence Walsh. Toobin is a lifelong friend of Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan. And Toobin was a member of the infamous JournoList. JournoList was started by a wunderkind at the Washington Post at the time, Ezra Klein. It was a list.
It was a chat room in a secret enclave of the internet made up of Washington journalists who strategized each and every day and night on how to move forward the Democrat Party agenda in their jobs. That’s what JournoList was. A bunch of… We wonder how these montages we put together happen with 25 different people saying Dick Cheney brings “gravitas” to the campaign? Well, one of the ways is they all talk to each other. JournoList was shut down when it was discovered, but others have revised elements of it.
He’s also worked for Senator Robert Menendez and the 2004 John Kerry presidential campaign. How many people watching CNN that know Matt Miller was Holder’s spokesman, former communications director for the group that elects Democrats to the Senate and for Robert Menendez (recently on trial for corruption charges), and worked on the John Kerry presidential campaign? That’s a lot to disclose. I don’t think Matt Miller disclosed any of it.
Gloria Borger. She was next. This is not really anything other than curiously interesting. Her son Evan is married to Mary Anne Huntsman, daughter of politician Jon Huntsman Jr. Ari Melber. This is the guy saying, “He was out there criticizing the DOJ, the FBI raid on Michael Cohen all the while hiding the fact he hired Cohen.” Ari Melber has worked for Democrat senator Maria Cantwell for John Kerry’s presidential campaign. He is divorced from fellow reporter Drew Grant, reporter for the New York Observer.
Has he disclosed his ties to the Democrat Party, to the John Kerry presidential campaign? Anderson Cooper. He’s a Vanderbilt. His mother was Gloria Vanderbilt. His father was Wyatt Emory Cooper. Just that he has links to the elite, of course. Nothing scandalous there. John Harwood. John Harwood is a noted anti-Trumper and anti-conservative. He’s been at the New York Times, the Washington… I think the Wall Street Journal.
Harwood’s father was a reporter for the Washington Post at age 11. Harwood appeared in a 1968 RFK for President ad. When WikiLeaks dumped John Podesta’s emails, John Harwood was all over ’em sucking up to the Clinton campaign. Mika Brzezinski. She is the daughter of Zbig Brzezinski, the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, and former national security adviser for Jimma Carter. She was married to TV news reporter Patrick Hoffer and is now engaged to Scarborough.
I don’t know if they got married at all. But she didn’t disclose that she was dating Scarborough while everybody watching the show knew it. And Ron Brownstein. Ron Brownstein was the last voice you heard. “The idea that in any normal newsroom you could go on and do that having this kind of relationship with the person you’re talking about and not disclose to it your audience, you know, is just extraordinary.”
Brownstein worked for Ralph Nader. Uber-leftist Ralph Nader. His first wife was Nina Easton of Fortune magazine. Brownstein’s current wife is Eileen Nicole McMenamin, the former communications director for Senator John McCain. There’s a whole bunch, and that doesn’t even… We haven’t even gotten to the conflicts on the Mueller team and at the DOJ and on the Comey team, and wait ’til you hear those.
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RUSH: How often does ABC News divulge that George Stephanopoulos was a member of the Bill Clinton war room, among other things designed to destroy any woman who came forward alleging that Clinton had had an affair with her or some kind of sexual dalliance, working with James Carville? I mean, the guy never went to journalism school. He’s not a journalist. He’s a political activist and consultant disguised as a journalist. How often does ABC disclose it?
Via connections awarding stock options to Zucker’s 14-year-old kid! Claire Shipman, senior correspondent ABC News, is married to Jay Carney, Obama’s White House press secretary and Biden’s before that. Virginia Moseley, CNN vice president, Washington bureau chief, is married to Tom Nides, deputy secretary of state under Barack Hussein O. And then there is David Rhodes and his brother, Ben Rhodes, and that’s relevant as we get into the Mueller conflict.
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RUSH: More than 30 so-called journalists left their profession to go to work in the Obama administration or on one of his presidential campaigns, according to the Media Research Center. That’s Brent Bozell’s invaluable group. More than 30 journalists eagerly, because they’re all looking at Hannity and his relationship with Trump and they’re jealous in some ways. They would love to have been as close to Obama as Hannity apparently is to Trump. They would have craved it. They would have bragged about it while remaining journalists at the same time.
Let’s see. Who else. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Oh, we have lots. CBS News President David Rhodes. CBS News president David Rhodes is the brother of Ben Rhodes. Name is spelled R-h-o-d-e-s. Ben Rhodes was a top foreign policy adviser to Barack Hussein O while his brother is the president of CBS News.
Ben Rhodes, the brother of the president CBS News, was the man behind the Benghazi cover-up and the disastrous Iran nuke deal, and it was Ben Rhodes who often bragged about how easy it was to mislead people, including the media, into believing the Iran deal was something that it wasn’t! Well, how hard would it be to deceive the news media when your own brother runs CBS News?
Martha Raddatz is an infobabe at ABC News. She often serves as a moderator for presidential debates. She did moderate a Trump debate. I don’t recall if it was during the primaries or during the presidential campaign. But she went toe-to-toe with Trump. She fashions herself a foreign policy expert. She’s a journalist. But she’s tight with the State Department and foreign policy specialists, because it’s incestuous.
They all have the same agenda, the same goals where the United States and the world and global government is concerned. And I remember Martha Raddatz just giving Trump all kinds of hell based on the fact that in her mind he was stupid and naive and ignorant, didn’t know what he was talking about. Because he was criticizing the Obama administration for announcing days in advance military operations. And Martha Raddatz could not believe that Trump would dare criticize the great Obama.
And so Martha Raddatz is saying (paraphrasing), “Well, you don’t understand the way certain things work, Mr. Trump. Maybe they were psychological ops. Maybe Obama was trying to scare people.”
Trump came back (paraphrasing), “I don’t care. It’s stupid to announce an actual day you’re gonna do something or a day you’re gonna leave somewhere.” She was fit to be tied. She was flustered, frustrated, really, really angry. She couldn’t believe that Trump was actually in a debate that she was moderating. Well, anyway, Barack Obama attended her wedding. Yes indeed.
Now, let’s move on to some of the conflicts that we have been advised of, the things that we’ve learned about the campaign, or I should say the investigation, the Mueller investigation and the entire DOJ, FBI, intelligence community, deep state operation to run this silent coup on Trump based on this bogus allegation that he stole the election working with the Russians.
In this list of people we’ve got James Comey; we’ve got Andrew McCabe; we have James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence for Obama; we got John Brennan, CIA for Obama, who I think is the guy that ran this whole show, by the way, but that’s a little bit of an aside. We have Loretta Lynch and her meeting on the tarmac in Phoenix with Bill Clinton that we were told was just a coincidence.
Yes, ol’ Lorettie arrives, she gotta do something out there, and, lo and behold, Bill Clinton’s taxiing in. And air traffic control told Clinton’s crew that Lorettie was on the ground at the FBO. So Bill said (doing Clinton impression), “Hey, hey, whatever, we’re using that FBO. Head on over, I need to talk to Loretta, and Loretta got off the plane. We talked about golf and grandkids, it was a wonderful time.”
Right in the middle of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. None other than James Comey has said that Loretta Lynch doing this threw a monkey in the wrench and she should have recused herself and so forth. A little self-serving. We know of Andrew Weissmann, one of Mueller’s lead investigators. Bruce and Nellie Ohr, Bruce Ohr, FBI, Nellie Ohr, wife working at Fusion GPS. Samantha Power, U.N. ambassador for Obama in the closing days of his administration.
Let’s go through some of the conflict. Imagine this, folks. Ben Rhodes and David Rhodes, brothers, one of them runs CBS News and one of them is working to advance Obama’s Iran deal and other foreign policy things. As Victor Davis Hanson writes, imagine, “What if both ABC News and CBS News were now running mostly favorable news accounts about Donald Trump’s administration, rather than the media’s 90 percent (on average) negative coverage.
“And imagine that one of Donald Trump’s chief advisers and a deputy national-security adviser was the brother of the current CBS News president, while the sister of the ABC News president was another one of Trump’s top national- security and energy advisers.”
Imagine what the media would be doing with that. If the media’s splitting a cow, having a gasket over Hannity having some sort of attorney-client relationship with Cohen, can you imagine what they would think if somebody running CBS News favorably covering Trump had a brother working in Trump’s foreign policy — can you imagine the gasket they would blow? And yet that’s exactly what happened during the Obama administration.
“What would the media say of such apparent incestuousness that involved two-thirds of the networks’ nightly newscasts?” If ABC and CBS were both favorably disposed toward Trump and both had family members or spouses both working in the news network and the Trump administration, what would the Drive-Bys say about it? They’d be blowing A gasket! But it’s exactly what happened during the Obama administration, and nobody said a word.
“The public for much of 2016 was not told that the chief investigator of the Clinton email scandal, Andrew McCabe … was the spouse of a political candidate who had earlier received nearly $700,000 … from Clinton-related campaign-funding committees,” Terry McAuliffe.
McCabe’s wife running for Senate — yes, we find out, but we didn’t know for much of this time. And when we found out, the Drive-Bys, “It doesn’t matter. Are you kidding me? You’re telling me that McCabe’s wife can’t have an independent run for the Senate? You’re telling me that McCabe can’t do his job even though his wife is taking money from the Clinton machine?”
Why did it take the inspector general doing a report on these two to tell us months later what all they had been doing? Greasing the skids against Trump in the Russian collusion! Get this. You want to know how deep this stuff is? Paul Manafort, who was the first campaign chairman for Trump, Trump’s daughter “Ivanka, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had also been represented by attorneys from the legal firm WilmerHale…” So Manafort, Ivanka, and Jared Kushner have been represented by the legal firm WilmerHale.
That just happens to be “Mueller’s old firm, which supplied a number of counselors to the Mueller team. At least seven of Mueller’s team were known to have contributed money to the Democratic Party or Hillary Clinton or both. Andrew Weissmann,” you’ve heard the name by now, “yet another former partner at WilmerHale,” the law firm where Mueller worked, “had emailed applause to Obama DOJ holdover Sally Yates when she had tried to block [Trump’s first] immigration moratorium…”
Weissmann, on Mueller’s investigative team, sends her a congratulatory email.
“Like others on Mueller’s team, Weissmann was a donor to Democratic causes and an admitted Hillary Clinton partisan. And Sally Yates,” who received the congratulatory email from Weissmann after blocking Trump’s entirely constitutional immigration moratorium… “Sally Yates co-signed one of the FISA-court requests to surveille Trump campaign associates,” on the basis of this fake dossier, “and she also did not disclose to the court the full provenance of the Steele dossier” like Comey didn’t and like whoever else was involved in getting that FISA warrant.
Nobody told them that Hillary Clinton wrote the dossier — and yes, I mean Hillary Clinton wrote it. She paid for it. It was written for her. They hired Christopher Steele. She wrote it! It was her campaign document, it was opposition research, and these clowns all did not tell the FISA court — FISA court or judge — that it was not legitimate intel but rather it was political opposition research. “Another Obama holdover, Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce G. Ohr, met with the architects of the Fusion GPS dossier.”
You don’t even get to the definition of collusion once you find out what’s been going on the Mueller investigation. Here’s another one: “Another Washington couple, Shailagh Murray and Neil King Jr., were involved, respectively, in the Obama administration and the Fusion GPS opposition-research firm. Murray was an Obama-administration policy adviser who had once been deputy chief of staff and communications director for Vice President Joe Biden. She is married to Neil King Jr., who, like the wife of Bruce Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS.”
How in the hell could you have so many Obama appointees at the FBI and DOJ married to people working at Fusion GPS, which was involved in creating the phony Trump dossier? You want to talk collusion? You want to talk incestuous revolving doors Inside Washington, where these people look out for each other, protect each other, and then join each other in targeting enemies of the state who do nothing more than have political disagreements with them?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let’s just keep going here, folks. “In the small world of Washington legal and political circles, Mueller investigator Aaron Zebley was Mueller’s chief of staff while Mueller was FBI director, and he was yet another former partner at WilmerHale.” Again, that firm provides the lawyers that represent Manfort, and Jared, and Ivanka Trump. Now this guy, Aaron Zebley… Wait until you hear this! From Mueller’s old firm and Mueller’s chief of staff when he was FBI director, Aaron “Zebley had recently represented Justin Cooper.”
Does that name ring a bell?
Probably not, so let me tell you who it is.
Justin Cooper “testified that he had set up Hillary Clinton’s private server and then used a hammer to destroy some of her mobile devices, leaving the FBI unable to acquire them during its investigation. Clinton’s email server — the domain ClintonEmail.com — was registered to Cooper himself while Clinton was secretary of state.” As Mr. Hanson asks, “How much collusion was necessary to coordinate destroying 30,000 emails, smashing hard drives, and finding the proper Washington [lawyer] to ensure that the … FBI never charged perpetrators with a federal crime?”
Come on! This is just incredible.
Aaron Zebley, chief of staff to Mueller while he was FBI director and another former partner at WilmerHale, “recently represented Justin Cooper [who] set up Hillary Clinton’s private server…” The fix was in to protect her all the way up to and including people with right hand relationships with Robert Mueller, who is investigating not Hillary Clinton, and not her collusion, and not Fusion GPS. Nope! Mueller is investigating Trump — and not finding anything, apparently, so moving on to any nebulous area he can. All the while, none of these conflicts are even raised or mentioned or explained, much less called to our attention and criticized by the guardians of our liberty and freedom: The Drive-By Media.
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RUSH: There is one more name here — actually, many more. But the name Jeannie Rhee, an alumnus of the law firm for Robert Mueller, WilmerHale. “And she was another Mueller attorney who had represented someone deeply involved in a recent Clinton scandal.” She’s got ties to Ben Rhodes. Anyway, wait ’til you hear what she was into.
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RUSH: One more name here in the list of conflicts, just to show you how deep this is. Another member of Mueller’s investigation team is named Jeannie Rhee, R-h-e-e. She’s also from Mueller’s old law firm, WilmerHale. Nothing wrong with that. I mean, everybody has to work somewhere. But she is a huge donor to the Hillary Clinton campaign, and she’s on Mueller’s special counsel investigation team.
This woman investigating Trump, along with Mueller, represented the Clinton Foundation, which was selling Hillary’s presidency for years to foreign donors and washing the money through the Clinton Foundation. She represented Ben Rhodes, who is the brother of David Rhodes, who runs CBS News. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s foreign policy architect for Benghazi.
So was Jeannie Rhee representing the Clinton Foundation while some of her present associates at the DOJ and the FBI were supposedly investigating it? How is it that it’s nothing to see here when a person on Mueller’s investigative team’s worked in his law firm, donated to the Clinton campaign, represented a Clinton concern under investigation, meaning defended somebody under investigation? How does that person end up on an anti-Trump investigation?
Who else she gonna find? Because everybody in this town is aligned against Donald Trump. Anybody that Mueller is gonna find. And don’t doubt me. There are plenty of so-called conservative Republican Never Trumpers who, if asked, would also have eagerly accepted the job offer of appearing and working on Mueller’s special counsel investigation team.
Samantha Power. Samantha Power was Obama’s U.N. ambassador the lasts days of his regime. She’s married to the famous lawyer Cass Sunstein, who thinks the Constitution needs to be overhauled and rewritten. She was requesting surveillance on Trump campaign people. She was unmasking them. She was asking for their names for the purpose of unmasking, i.e., making their names public and then leaking them to the press. Is this something an ambassador to the United Nations does, an outgoing ambassador to the United Nations?
This group, this investigation is so thick with conflict and deceit that is not announced, that is not discovered, not reported on. And, meanwhile, a porn star and her lawyer seem to be leading the latest phase of the investigation into Donald Trump? I guess porn stars and the Democrats go together, after all, when you stop and think about it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Joe in Macomb County, Michigan, got to you. How you doing, sir?
CALLER: (garbled connection) Hi, Rush. How you doing?
RUSH: Fine.
CALLER: I wanted to bring up the subject of this Hannity, um, connection with Michael Cohen and (ahem) how you’ve been smearing all the elites for having business and family connections. But, Rush, that’s natural on both sides of the aisle when people live and work in the same culture. What you’re missing — the major difference — is what makes Hannity and Cohen so underhanded and suspicious. Both of them tried to conceal it while Hannity trashed people in Cohen’s defense on TV. Now everybody’s got something to worry about, and that includes Trump. The fact (sic) might have Cohen’s tape-recordings talking to Hannity, talking to Trump. This is sleazy, Rush, and it’s going to get sleazier, and you know it.
RUSH: Yeah, fine. All that may be true. But then let’s have the same kind of treatment with everybody. All I’m talking about is the one-way street this stuff is. Anyway, I literally have no more time to deal with this and swat it away. But the guy has a good point. By swat it away I meant that simply euphemistic way, not a personal abusive, harmful way. Don’t anybody misunderstand.
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