RUSH: You know it’s a slow news week when the Drive-By Media is still obsessed with John Brennan’s security clearance.

Greetings, my friends. Great to have you. Great to be back here at the one and only EIB Network. Rush Limbaugh at 800-282-2882. If you want to send an email, the address is ElRushbo@eibnet.us.

Do you know, the Washington Post, I believe it was, had a story back in 2014 suggesting that Barack Obama should get rid of John Brennan’s security clearance and there is also this story. “Flashback: Media Didn’t Care When Obama Scrubbed Security Clearances.”

And it was all about when people left the security services they lost their clearance, they lost their security clearance. And it was standard operating procedure and nobody cared about it. Everybody understood it. And now Brennan is threatening to sue Trump over this. And I’m not kidding, the Washington Post did have a story, and I think it’s four years ago, that Obama should withdraw or cancel Brennan’s security.

‘Cause what people have forgotten, the Drive-Bys were livid at Brennan many times during the Obama administration for basically acts of incompetence, not so much disloyalty, but acts of incompetence. But now everybody in the swamp has of course circled the wagons and all of that has been forgotten.

Now, it’s interesting that Brennan is threatening to sue over the loss of his security clearance! And when you threaten to sue over something it means that you have had something of value, usual financial value taken away from you and that you want to be compensated for it, or otherwise made whole. And, of course, Trump is tweeting that this would be fabulous. Let’s go ahead and file suit. I hope he does because that’s discovery. That means we get to go into all kinds of John Brennan areas.

He said “I hope John Brennan, the worst CIA Director in our country’s history, brings a lawsuit. It will then be very easy to get all of his records, texts, emails and documents to show, not only the poor job he did, but how he was involved with the Mueller Rigged Witch Hunt.” And then Trump goes on to predict that he will not sue.

Now, did you see, Mr. Snerdley, where Clapper said (imitating Clapper), “Wait a minute. You need to dial it back.” Clapper turned on Brennan. This is why! The minute Brennan started talking about suing that’s a gigantic red flag because that’s gonna open ’em all up.

These security clearances are resume enhancements. It is how people like Brennan get hired as consultants. It’s how they get hired on boards of directors. It’s how they get hired as TV analysts, experts and commentators. I have come to learn that a security clearance is resume gold inside the Beltway.

You know, the club is the club, but there are ways that members set themselves apart from each other. I mean, in every club there’s a top-tier, a middle tier, a lower tier, and then “I wish they weren’t in the club” tier. Even the D.C. swamp has all those tiers. And having a security clearance is one of the things that gets you in the top tier. And you can run around and brag about it. And you can drop the fact, “My security clearance was called into question.”

“Oh, you have a security clearance?”

“Of course I do. Don’t you?”

“Well, no. How do you get one?”

“Well, you know, they cost $20,000,” which they really do, “and you have to be able to pass all kinds of scrutiny.” And these guys do not want to lose these. These are like medals or gold stars. So Brennan is giving away the game here by running around threatening to sue Trump. There is no free speech being infringed upon here in any way, shape, manner, or form. Brennan’s been amplified in fact. Brennan’s out there saying more than he was ever able to say with more Drive-By Media outlets interested in what Brennan has to say.

But I think it’s interesting. Clapper turns on Brennan. (imitating Clapper) “You know, John shoots from the hip,” Clapper said. “Sometimes, you know, he just starts saying to things and it’s time to close the windows and run for cover. And it’s all because Clapper saw Brennan threatening to sue. Because when you do that, I mean, that opens everything up.

Here’s Trump with a tweet about — what was it? — just an hour or so. Two and a half hours later he said, “Everybody wants to keep their Security Clearance, it’s worth great prestige and big dollars, even board seats, and that is why certain people are coming forward to protect Brennan. It certainly isn’t because of the good job he did! He is a political ‘hack.'”

So it’s true that everybody in the Washington establishment wants one of these. And then when they leave whatever government position they have, they want to hold on to it. As I say, it’s how they set themselves apart from other members of the swamp club. But they’re $20,000 a pop. Somebody is making money on these things in addition to whoever passes them out. They take a long time to get if they’re done right. And, you know, nobody talks about them.

Security clearances have only become a big deal now when Trump has canceled Brennan’s. And he’s threatening to cancel the security clearances of others. And it can mean financial harm. It can mean a potential loss of money. I know many of you are thinking, “Rush, leftists don’t care about money. They’re into the cause.” Oh-ho-ho-ho, folks. Do not believe that. That’s been one of the biggest liberal tricks that they have succeeded in fooling everybody with for decades, that they don’t care about the money, that they’re doing it out of the goodness of their heart, they’re doing it for the cause.

They care about the money. They care about grant money. They care about nonprofit money. They care about finding ways to get money outside the traditional way most people do it, i.e., working. They want fundraising money. They want donor money. They want money you get from being on a board of directors here or there. But if you have one of these things, like I say, you get a TV gig, you can get contracting gigs, consulting gigs, and some jobs have gotten to the point now where they require you to have one.

For example, Henry Kissinger. I’m not lumping him in with Brennan; don’t anybody misunderstand. But when Kissinger left government, when he left the Nixon administration, he set up a firm called Kissinger & Associates. And basically when it began, if you wanted to hire Kissinger, whoever you were — a corporation, a wealthy individual — million-dollar minimum.

And Kissinger had a couple of associates on board that helped him with all this, Lawrence Eagleburger was one of them. And, as such, it was a pretty big firm. But the minimum buy-in, that was the fee. If you want the advice of Kissinger Associates, you had to give a million dollars. And this is way back when it was founded. And a lot of corporations signed on because Dr. Kissinger was thought to be among the top echelon, foreign policy experts. If you were a CEO of a multinational and you needed to know how long it was gonna be before South Africa started taking back the farms of white owned farmers, which is, by the way, is starting. You see about that?

South Africa has nationalized the first two white-owned farms, and it’s just the beginning. Just like happened in Zimbabwe, the former Rhodesia, under the dictatorial rule of Robert Mugabe. They think it’s just making amends for all these past transgressions, that the farms should never have been white owned. The Afrikaners were a minority, and they should have never had power. So now they’re gonna take these farms. These first two farms, the owners were offered 10% of the value, and the owners of the farms told the African National Congress where to put it.

The African National Congress said we’re gonna put it there and then we’re gonna take your farm and we’re gonna put your farm there, and they’ve done it. They’ve taken the first — anyway, if it’s six months and you wanted Henry Kissinger to tell you when that was gonna happen, it cost you a million bucks, and everybody working at Kissinger of course had a security clearance. What it means is you have access to inside foreign policy and intelligence information.

So if you’re John Brennan, you’re director of the CIA, you continue to get all that stuff even after you leave office and anybody who has one. As I say, folks, they are huge, huge status thing, status attachments. And it’s a real embarrassment to lose one. What Trump did in taking away Brennan’s security clearance, there may be nothing more effectively harmful to John Brennan than Trump doing that.

And now Brennan’s associates are worried that Brennan’s gonna blow it for everybody if he follows through on this suit, which I don’t think he will do, because it would open up discovery, emails, all kinds of things that Brennan doesn’t want anybody to know about.

Here’s a story. Clapper said yesterday he thinks that John Brennan’s rhetoric is becoming an issue in and of itself. Clapper was on State of the Union on CNN, which pays him. That’s why he was there. Clapper has the security clearance. CNN thought that was of value. By the way, Clapper’s the guy who engineered the leak of the news that James Comey had told Trump about the golden showers aspect of the Trump dossier. And he leaked it to CNN, which ran the story, they got a big journalism award, they hired Clapper. It’s an incestuous circle.

And Clapper said, “Yeah, John’s subtle like a freight train, and he’s gonna say what’s on his mind.” Translation: We all hate that Trump was elected despite our best efforts, and we all want to bring him down, but you have to disguise your hate and your agenda a little bit more subtly than Brennan is, for now.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Doug Brinkley is a noted presidential historian, and he’s worked at a lot of places, at a lot of different universities. The Doug Brinkley Presidential Library moves, kind of like the King Tut exhibit, they put it on the truck and they move it to a new museum. Well, the Doug Brinkley Presidential whatever it is changes universities. Where is he now? He’s at Rice University. Used to be at Tulane in New Orleans.

Anyway, he was on CNN on Friday night with Don Lemon. And Lemon said, “John Brennan says that Trump is drunk on power and that the country is in crisis. Now, what is your reaction to this, presidential historian, Doug Brinkley?”

BRINKLEY: Brennan is an American hero for speaking up. His tenure at CIA was impeccable. We owe him so much, and he’s now leading the crusade, really, to tell people that Donald Trump is unfit for command. The shock I think in history is gonna be how timid these Republican senators are. They’re so worried about the midterms, so worried about Donald Trump tweeting against them, so paranoid about being mocked by Rush Limbaugh that they’re cowering right now.

RUSH: So we’re back to this? Republican senators are not gonna do the right thing because they’re afraid of Trump’s tweets and they’re afraid of being mocked by me. It couldn’t possibly be that some of them agree with Trump. No, no, no. It’s that all of them, everybody knows that Trump is a blithering idiot. It’s just some of them are very much afraid to do anything about it. Brennan is an American hero for speaking up.

You know, some of the people that survived Benghazi wanted to speak out about it, Brennan made ’em sign NDAs three different times so that their truth — back to truth — the truth of what happened at Benghazi could not be broadcast by the people who survived it. John Brennan in 1976 — and he was in the American intelligence apparatus at that time — I don’t know if he was at the CIA then, but he was soon to be. He voted for the Communist Party candidate in 1976, guy named Gus Hall. What is anybody voting for the communist candidate doing in our CIA? Why does anybody like that get a security clearance? These are things that I, as your ordinary, average, everyday American citizen, wonder about.

In 1976, the Soviet Union was our flat-out number one enemy! Inarguably. What in the world is a guy at the CIA doing voting for their representative in the Communist Party USA eventually climbing the ladder at our CIA? John Brennan was right there missing all of the signs of 9/11. John Brennan was right there preparing all the reports about all the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It seems to me the guy doesn’t have much of a track record. But more importantly, he is a 1,000 percent pure partisan.

And we’ve always heard, we’ve always been told that this is not how intelligence operates, these various agencies serve regardless the party in power, that their client is the United States and national security. Well, of course, we now see all that’s out the window. We now see that the American intelligence — oh. You know what? I got a note. Jeff Lord sent me a note. I didn’t print it out. It doesn’t matter the names here, but there’s somebody running for I think governor or senator in Ohio.

And this guy was saying recently in a media appearance that he doesn’t understand all of this criticism of the FBI. He says 15 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, whenever you thought of the FBI, you thought of guys that got in their car and the first thing they did was turn on Rush Limbaugh. I think that’s still the case. But this the buy in Ohio ought to go talk to Jim Kallstrom and some of the very recent FBI leadership. Nobody’s indicting the whole FBI here.

This is very specific, the names of FBI, DOJ leadership that are tied to the Obama administration and the actions they took against a presidential campaign and candidate. And that’s why everybody’s outraged by it. This rank partisanship, this rank unfairness, rank lying, setting people up, planting spies in their campaign, none of this, none of this is, quote, unquote, American. None of this is, quote, unquote, the American way. And yet the people involved in it and behind it are called impeccable by people like Doug Brinkley.

John Brennan’s an American hero? John Brennan is routinely suborning the U.S. Constitution and all of his intelligence buddies. And then Brinkley says he’s shocked that George W. Bush hasn’t spoken out against any of this yet.

BRINKLEY: Everybody needs to speak up and defend Brennan right now. I’ve been surprised that former President George W. Bush is staying so quiet, eight years a president of the United States, his father had been head of the CIA, the CIA’s named after Bush. Speak up and denounce Donald Trump because some of these other people on the list aren’t household names, where Bush is.

RUSH: So they’re just shocked. I mean, Bush, he’s a swamper, and he has expressed his unhappiness with Trump. Why isn’t Bush speaking up? Well, Bush hasn’t spoken up about much at all. Bush was never political when he was president. Now they want him to be political.

Well, apparently something I said about this on Friday night lit up the producers at various cable networks, particularly Fox News, because a bunch of sound bites from this program were used on Friday to spark discussions. And up first, David Webb sitting in for Laura Ingraham on Friday night on The Ingraham Angle. And the guest is Security Studies Group president Jim Hanson. And to set things up, David Webb introduces and plays a sound bite of this program actually from last Thursday.

WEBB: Rush has been very up front about this. And here he talks about essentially trying to overthrow a duly constituted elected president. Let’s play it.

RUSH ARCHIVE: Where is it written that John Brennan, above all else, must be granted his security clearance, when this guy is actively engaged in overthrowing a duly constituted elected president? Well, you know the answer to the question. It’s because the left doesn’t care about the Constitution; it doesn’t care about the rule of law; it cares only about its power. And, folks, none of those are cliches. None of those are exaggerations.

WEBB: Jim Hanson, you heard it from the Rushster himself. What do you say to that?

RUSH: So here’s Hanson reacted to the Rushter.

HANSON: They’ve been trying to stop him, they’ve been trying to discredit his administration, and now they’re trying to get him removed. And there’s nothing to remove him on. There is no collusion with Russia. There is, however, a collection of former Obama officials and DNC folks who did conspire to create a controversy and who were leaking information, all of it potentially classified, to the media, that includes Brennan, who’s a prime suspect in that, along with Clapper and other people who signed these letters in support of Brennan saying he shouldn’t have lost his security clearance. I think the problem for ’em, it may flip to be looking at them, as opposed to Trump.

RUSH: Yeah, exactly. Now, Jeanine Pirro, Judge Jeanine Friday night sitting in for Hannity, introduced a discussion topic with yet another clip from yours truly. And, by the way, I sound hoarse in these clips because I was. I missed Monday through Wednesday last week as you may remember, and Thursday and Friday I came back with about 80%. That’s why it sounds a little gravelly out there. I could probably say that it’s Fox’s equipment and something is wrong there, but I gotta be up front and honest about it because truth is truth.

PIRRO: On his radio show today, Rush Limbaugh weighed in on President Trump revoking Brennan’s security clearance and the, quote, free speech hysteria that’s ensued. Watch.

RUSH ARCHIVE: These people have acted in corrupt ways to sabotage the United States presidential election and then a subsequent United States presidency! Why do they qualify for a security clearance in the first place? This is the swamp that Trump promised everybody that he was going to drain, and he’s doing a good job of it.

What press freedom is being infringed? Donald Trump is not doing one thing to stop them! All he’s doing is calling them out! All he’s doing is pushing back, and this is what it looks like! All Donald Trump is doing is what we have wanted any Republican to do for the last 20 years! He’s doing it! They say it’s a denial of their freedom!

They say the presidency is broken! They say we need to amend the Constitution and get rid of the presidency because Trump won! They are the ones that have the agenda that limits and denies freedom! They’re the ones with the agenda that is punitive to their opponents!

RUSH: Judge Jeanine loved it.

PIRRO: I’m always mesmerized by Rush Limbaugh. You know, he’s such a powerful speaker. And so when he talks about what freedom, Doug, you know, what makes ’em think they can sabotage or attempt to sabotage an election and then a presidency and keep their clearances? I mean, he’s got a good point.

SCHOEN: Here’s the way I saw it. When I heard Former Director Brennan call Trump treasonous, I thought that was way over the line. I disagreed with how Trump handled the press conference, how he’s handled relations with Russia. But I had a very bad feeling about Mr. Brennan, and I really would like to know more about what he knows, what he thinks, and why he’s saying what he’s saying.

PIRRO: ‘Cause he hates Donald Trump!

RUSH: Okay. For those of you hosting a Fox show tonight, let me give you another sound bite. And it is this. John Brennan is still running around — he first tried to walk back his claim that Trump had committed treason. But then as he tried to walk it back, he said, “You know what? I can’t walk this back. He did commit treason.” So he’s right back at it. But he doesn’t often specify what Trump has done that’s treasonous, but he has done it a couple of times. And you know what it is? It’s one thing, folks.

It is one thing and it so boggles my mind. John Brennan cites the press conference Trump had down at his golf club in Miami, the Doral club, when he asked the Russians to find Hillary’s missing 30,000 emails and give them to the U.S. media, who might be interested in them. I’m not making this up. That’s what Brennan says is Trump being treasonous. These people, aside from not having a sense of humor — when Trump said that originally, I was jealous. That’s the kind of thing I say.

I constantly taunt the media on this program, as you people well know. You know, I will wink and nod and I’ll whisper and I’ll say, “Look, folks. I’m gonna say something, but I don’t want you to tell anybody. I don’t want the media to hear about this. Can you keep this secret?” And then I’ll say it. Well, Trump asking the Russians, these people have no ability to put things in context. At that time there are 30,000 missing Hillary Clinton emails. And everybody claims to want them. But nobody knows where they are.

Everybody thinks they’re somewhere, but Hillary is not talking. She’s claiming that they only have to do with Hillary’s yoga and her daughter’s wedding registry and whatever else. And that there’s nothing to see in them. But they’re somewhere. And so Trump is making a joke out of what he thinks is a bunch of faux interest in finding them. “Hey, Russia, Russia.” What he’s basically saying, “Since our media has no interest and can’t find them, maybe you can, Russia.” The media was talking about Russia already colluding and tampering. Trump was simply goading them. Trump was razzing ’em, he was jabbing ’em, and they fall for it?

It’s an important characteristic to have a sense of humor. It is a very big and glaring weakness to not have one. And John Brennan obviously does not have a sense of humor. And John Brennan’s obviously not very smart. Because he’s trying to make people believe that that really was treasonous, that Trump — but at the same time, Barack Hussein O actually talking to Dmitry Medvedev, at the time the number two in command of Putin a couple of months before the 2012 election on an open mi and saying to Medvedev, “You tell Vlad I’ll have a lot more flexibility on our nuclear weapons withdrawal after I get reelected. You tell Vlad to be patient.”

That doesn’t constitute treason? Barack Obama telling the number two to Putin, “Hey, be careful. Be patient. We’re gonna do what we say about getting rid of our nukes soon as I get elected because then I’ll have a lot more flexibility and don’t have to run again.” Or how about Barack Hussein Obama engaging in a foreign policy guaranteeing that the state sponsor of terrorism gets to develop nuclear weapons and we pay them $150 billion in cash, delivered on pallets on the tarmac at Tehran International Airport?

And that’s not treasonous? That’s not undermining American interests? To fund the world state sponsor of terrorism and enable them to nuke up. But Donald Trump telling a joke, “Hey, Russia, if you can hear me, maybe you can find Hillary’s missing emails.” They really believe Donald Trump was encouraging the Russians to hack the DNC. That’s what John Brennan is running around saying. That is it. That’s all Brennan has in his claim that Trump has committed treason.