RUSH: In a White House gaggle with the reporters, the president of South Korea is in the Oval Office. And the president doubled down on the spying. He said spying is the correct term. It was illegal. It was unprecedented spying on his campaign. So he’s not letting up on the accelerator here at all.
And look. Everybody knows what happened here. This is one of the great sources of fear and frustration is that we all knew what was going on. They knew that we knew what was going on, but they were confident there was nothing we could do about it. They had Mueller. They had the FBI. They had Brennan. They had Clapper. They had the intelligence agencies. They had the establishment on their side.
And then Barr. They didn’t so much fumble as Barr stripped them of the ball. And Trump is continuing to pound it today. And I think that’s instructive in two ways. Trump would not keep pounding this if it wasn’t gonna go anywhere. And he wouldn’t keep pounding it if he didn’t think that it going somewhere was gonna produce a favorable outcome.
He also said things in the world are going well. American economy is doing great, South Korean economy is doing great. He even praised the Norks. Said they’ve got great potential. A lot of other presidents would have acted very differently than he did through this scam, he said. He said we’re very lucky that he was the president. And, by the way, he’s only echoing what we’ve said. Everybody, “Boy, listen to this guy’s ego.” It’s not his ego. Well, it may be.
How many times have I asked you to think what any other Republican in that town would have done under this kind of pressure? They would have folded inside the first week. They would have not only folded, they would have sued for peace. They would have admitted it.
There was not a single Republican in that town or anywhere else, probably, who would have the stomach or the rear end to endure this anal exam for as long as it’s been going, which you could literally say is since 2015.
He used to the term “treason” again to describe the scam and the spying on him. And he once again said he, quote, unquote, hopes that law enforcement takes it up. And you know what most of the press questions were about? The press is shouting questions in these things, and most of those questions were about negotiations with North Korea and South Korea.
The Drive-Bys in the room did not mock him. They did not try to egg him on. They did not try to make fun of him. They did not demand more about the spying. They don’t want to talk about the spying! They don’t want to talk about the investigation. They don’t want to talk about what Barr may or may not do. They didn’t want to give Trump any opportunity to expand on what he had said about that.
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RUSH: Now, does the name Michael Caputo ring a bell? He was one of the Trump campaign people who’s appeared on TV periodically in the last two years. He has been financially ruined via law firms (legal fees) that he’s had to hire dealing with appearances before the Mueller investigators. He’s one of many who have been taken to the brink, and every one of these people stayed loyal to Trump. There’s not a one of them that caved. There’s not a one of them that gave the investigators what they wanted.
Many of the people on Mueller’s team have, in previous cases, been known to demand witnesses make it up, to recite rather than testify. And by recite, it is meant, “You say what we want you to say, and we will suspend all investigations and we will give you immunity, but you say what we want you to say.” Many of Mueller’s investigators were caught doing this during the Ted Stevens trial in which his conviction was overturned and the case tossed out and the prosecutors on the case reprimanded by the judge for prosecutorial misconduct. Many of these people were on Mueller’s team.
Well, Caputo was one of the people (he’s from Buffalo) that were constantly harassed, and he was given options to escape all this with some kind of immunity if he would just recite, and he refused to. As such, he has had to make public appeals for support in paying down his legal fees. He’s one of many. Many of them have not gone public with this, but Caputo is one who did. Well, it turns out he was on Fox Business with Trish Regan, and he learned that an FBI informant investigating Russia had questioned him after speaking with Mueller’s team.
He said, “I was approached by a Russian national FBI informant in late May of 2016. He wanted to give me some dirt on Hillary, and I turned it down.” Caputo said this yesterday. So this is modified attempt at entrapment. This is a modified version of what they wanted to do with Stefan Halper who is the Cambridge professor who has connections with Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, which is the Brit CIA.
He’s got ties to the FBI. He has been used as a spy and an informant by the FBI and the CIA here. He has a farm in Virginia. He’s a well-traveled member of the international intelligence apparatus, if you will, and he attempted to get hired. He attempted to do a number of things. He is up to his neck in the attempt to corrupt George Papadopoulos. He attempted to get hired as a foreign policy strategist for the Trump campaign. Sam Clovis, I think, is who he interviewed with. He ended up not being hired.
Everybody knows what would have happened had he been hired. He would have started reaching out as a member of the Trump campaign team to contacts that he has in Russian intelligence. Now, he’s not a big Russia fan, but he knows Russian intelligence operatives. All it would have taken is for Halper or somebody like him to get hired, be officially a member of the Trump foreign policy team, then start conversing with Russians, and then Halper would find a convenient way for the FBI to learn of this, and they would then have had their collusion, folks.
This is how close we came.
This is how close they came to pulling this off.
They weren’t searching for collusion. There wasn’t any. They were trying to create it! And this is nature of the spying. And there are many more variables on this. Well, what happened to Caputo is much like what happened in the Trump Tower situation. A bunch of phony Russians call and say, “Hey, we got some dirt on Hillary,” and Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner supposedly take the meeting. And then when they learn that it’s a false premise, and the purpose of the meeting is to go easy on Russian adoption laws or some such thing, then they disband and leave.
But it was an attempt. It was an attempt — and they came close. It was an attempt to be able to publish a story that the Trump campaign met with Russian government operatives to receive dirt on Hillary. Bingo! We would have collusion. They tried the same thing with Caputo. “Caputo said that he was approached by a Russian national FBI informant,” in other words, a Russian national working for the FBI, “in late May of 2016,” and this guy wanted to give Caputo working for the Trump campaign some “dirt on Hillary.”
His instincts were to turn it down. “Caputo said he only learned that the individual was an FBI informant after he sat down with Mueller’s investigators.” He didn’t know at the time. His instincts were serving him well. “When they asked me about him, I told them what I knew. By their faces, I knew that it was someone they had sent to me. It was after my interrogation with the Mueller team that I went out, hired private investigators and found out the guy had used a fake name, Henry Greenberg, and that he had been working with the FBI for 17 years.”
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RUSH: We’re gonna start in Portland, Oregon. This is C.J., and I am glad to have you with us. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. What a great honor to be on the phone with you, sir. My question is, do you think that there will be attempts down the road to try and link Trump now to Julian Assange, you know, to discredit him further? It seems like they’ll go to any length now and the gloves are off, there’s no holds barred on what they’ll do. So I’m wondering if they’re gonna try and link Trump now to Julian Assange and try and tie him in with that whole thing now. Do you think that’s even a possibility?
RUSH: Well, now, here’s my instinctive reaction. And of course I have to say that — when you say, will there be attempts to link Trump to Assange. Well, do you mean — let me clarify something first — do you mean just as there were attempts to link Trump with Russia?
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: Okay. Well, let’s keep in mind that the apparatus for linking Trump with Russia is gone. All those people, Comey and McCabe and Clapper and Brennan, they’re all gone, and the access they now have is the media. The Department of Justice and the FBI is now run by Trump people. So any effort to try to replicate Trump-Russia collusion with Trump-WikiLeaks collusion probably will not happen within the realm of the American Department of Justice.
Now, the intelligence community is another thing. Those people operate independent of the president, if they wish to and by design. The CIA director, the National Security Agency director, these people can do what they want, but it’s gonna be tougher for them to find compatriots in the Department of Justice. They had one chance here in their Trump-Russia collusion business in terms of an official attempt.
Now, an ongoing attempt in the media to link Trump to Assange? Of course that’s gonna happen. We’ve seen evidence of it already. I played the montage that CNN is airing seemingly every 10 minutes of Trump praising Assange, praising WikiLeaks. But Trump at his little press gaggle in the Oval Office today distanced himself from WikiLeaks, didn’t know anything about WikiLeaks.
Of course everybody loved what WikiLeaks was doing when they were publishing the Podesta emails. But I think it’s gonna be tough — you get one shot at things like this. Well, it’s not really true to say you only get one shot, but this was a coordinated effort sponsored by a sitting president and his minions against a presidential candidate of the opposing party, who then defied all of their efforts and was elected.
So the effort continued. These Obama administration people, the leaders of the FBI and CIA continued the operation while Trump was president. But now to mount something just like it, linking Trump to Assange, they’re not gonna have — especially not with Barr saying that all of that is going to be investigated. It’s gonna be really tough to mount something like that again. But don’t let that sidetrack you. The media is gonna continue in its full-fledged efforts unabated to destroy Trump and get him out of office. I mean, before the election, if certainly not by virtue of the election. The media isn’t gonna stop.
So if the media wants to try to orchestrate a campaign with these now disgraced and out-of-power former Obama administration officials, they certainly can. If they want to bring Comey in and if they want to have Comey be interviewed about his knowledge of Trump’s ties to WikiLeaks from when Comey ran the FBI, they can do it. If they want to bring in Clapper, if they want to bring in Brennan to do the same thing, and they can make it up as much as they want.
CNN can bring these guys in and all of these gone people, all these resigned or fired people can go on TV and say, “We were very concerned during the campaign about the Trump campaign’s links to WikiLeaks. We didn’t have a chance to fully explore it because we were so concerned about Trump’s connections to Russia.” But they can do all of that they want.
They can make it up. They can continue to make it up like they were making it up for the last three years. They can do all of that they want. The thing that will be missing is that they will not have the investigative powers of the Department of Justice, i.e., the FBI propelling them, unless they can find some rogue agents help them, but it’s still gonna be rogue.
So I think the smear campaign on Trump will never stop. The attempt to link him to bad actors is never gonna stop. But there won’t be a new Mueller type investigation to look into Trump and WikiLeaks.
But again, they don’t need that, folks. The thing that you can’t forget — and I’m sure you won’t — now that they have suffered this deep humiliation and now that they’re a little scared to death — remember what this investigation, quote, unquote, was — do not ever forget this. It was not an investigation. There was never any collusion.
What this was — in fact, to state this, I’m gonna go back to what really was the origin of all this. The origin of all of this was to exonerate Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton had violated numerous federal laws with her server, her illegal private email server with which and on which she was trafficking in classified data.
In addition, there was the Clinton Foundation. She was selling influence to foreign buyers on the come under the assumption she was gonna be president. She was raking in money, she and her husband, were raking in money on the premise that they were gonna be back in the White House and could therefore repay that money in policy ways or who knows however which way.
Hillary Clinton had to be exonerated. She’s a Democrat nominee. They have to cleanse her. They had to exonerate her of all criminal activity. They had to not just insulate her, they had to exonerate her. And Comey did that on July 5, 2016, with that press conference. I submit to you that everything that followed had to also be covered up. What followed was then the attempt to sabotage the Trump campaign. That became an attempt to sabotage the Trump presidency, and that became a silent coup to reverse the election results. And the Mueller investigation was the culmination of all those efforts.
I am convinced that all of that was constituted as a cover-up for what had been done in two areas: to exonerate Hillary and to cover up the Hillary Clinton involvement in the dossier. The added bonus would have been if they could have gotten rid of Trump. So they had one shot at this, and it didn’t pan out for them all the way.
They were able to paralyze the Trump presidency. They were able to keep a cloud over Trump. They were able to keep his approval numbers below 50 in their polls. They were able to thwart Trump with judges. They succeeded in paralyzing Trump’s agenda.
But it all started with the necessity to exonerate Hillary Clinton, to make sure she got away with her own criminal activity and then to cover up her role and everybody else’s role in the effort to run the coup on Trump.
Well, that’s now blown up, and now there’s going to be an investigation of the coup attempt. And I don’t think these people are gonna have the wherewithal to mount a similar smear campaign on Trump with WikiLeaks, but it will occur with our friends in the Drive-By Media, however they can manage it.
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RUSH: Boise, Idaho. Mitch great to have you, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Oh, what a pleasure. Boy, I’ve been listening to you since the days you were on TV. All those times when I was listening to those chainsaws roar, that was amazingly great.
RUSH: Thank you very much. Yeah. The Timber Update.
CALLER: (chuckling)
RUSH: Yeah, that back in the Earth First days. I remember those days.
CALLER: And I’d also like to thank Mr. Snerdley for letting me through. Anyway, straight to my —
RUSH: Hang on here just a sec. Mr. Snerdley, he wanted me to thank you for letting him through. Okay.
CALLER: Very well.
RUSH: He said, “You’re welcome.”
CALLER: Oh, great. Great. So, Rush, what I wanted to talk about was after spending I don’t know how many millions of dollars on this proctological exam that Trump got, if the taxpayers would want to also pay for maybe some colonoscopies for people like Barack Obama, Loretta Lynch, Brennan, Strzok, Page? I’m wondering when these are going to happen and wondering if they’re going to be funded. I’m hoping that there’s some sort of GoFundMe page if it’s not funded. You know, how are we gonna make sure they happen?
RUSH: Listen to this! This is fascinating! Look, you are very shrewd out there, Mitch. Let me tell you what Mitch is worried about, which came up earlier today on our business broadcast. Mitch is worried that the Democrats are gonna shut down Barr and whatever investigation he plans into the coup into the spying on the Trump administration by defunding the DOJ. Well, they’ve been funded for the year. Those appropriations have been made.
In fact, Barr’s appearance before Congress this week was about funding for the department. So they could probably withhold some if they want. I wouldn’t put anything past these people. But again, folks, let’s remember something now. We live in a different media era. I know the perception is the Democrats get away with everything. They get away with fooling everybody. They get away, to this day, with fooling a majority of the American people.
This is what the popular perception is, and the media gets away with it, Democrats get away with it. If they try something like that, they’re pretty much going to be telegraphing they are scared to death of what’s gonna be found. Because they didn’t once want to defund Mueller. They didn’t once want to pull anything away from Mueller in terms of resources he had to go nail Trump. If they try this, remember, we’re in the 2020 election season.
People are already leery of this. Trump’s approval numbers are up. The Rasmussen number now is up to 53%. There has been an uptick because of the Mueller report. I think it’s far greater than any polling company is reporting. It has to be! Let’s just look at human nature. For 2-1/2 years, virtually everybody in this country was assured that Donald Trump colluded with Russia and that his presidency was illegitimate. That he might even be a Russian agent, he might even be a traitor. For two years, 2-1/2 years this went on.
The reporting much Trump-Russia collusion is so consistent and so constant that 42% of the American people, at one time, literally believed that that meant the Russians had tampered with votes, with voting machines. Nothing of the sort ever happened, and then one day — and we still don’t know. The Mueller report has not been released. All we’ve got is Barr’s summary. This is why I think (and why I’ve been saying) that Trump needs to call an Oval Office address when this is over.
When the redacted report has been presented and when it’s out there, he needs to call an Oval Office address and explain to the American people what happened here. Then, after that — or even if he doesn’t — if they try to defund any kind of investigation that Barr or the DOJ attempt, there’s gonna be a political price that they will pay on that, and it’ll be steep. Look, let me go back to something, a point that I made yesterday. I like to try to keep things as connected here as I can based on this. You know, I’ve got a question here from a caller who wants a serious answer.
I made the point — and it’s worth making again — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, any number of national Democrats have been able to get away with the American people for decades presenting themselves as centrists, as moderates. You know as well as I do, they have not been able to be honest about what they believe and who they are. They would never win national elections running as socialists, as uber-leftists — and they don’t.
They present themselves as pragmatists, triangulationists, moderates, or what have you. And they were able to get away with that until Twitter. Twitter now has become the home of the Democrat voting base. It’s a base that is largely insane; radical, radical left. Nothing moderate about the Democrat base, nothing pragmatist, nothing open mind. They are radical, uber-leftists, and they are demanding the same from their candidates. And guess what?
The Democrat presidential candidates, 99% of them, are providing it. They’re all saying all these radical things they think their base wants to hear. The problem for them is that the American people are in no way radical leftists! They are making the mistake of assuming that their party represents a majority of the American people. It might not even be the case that a majority of the Democrat Party is radical leftists. The story I had yesterday was about the survey data from a left-wing group, worried because most of the Democrat Party in this story are said to be centrists.
And they were worried the party is being dragged over to this radical left by its radical left base, and it’s being dragged further and further and further away from the mainstream, and that’s when we got the story that the Democrats need white male voters if they are to win. So my point to you is, if they withhold money from an investigation and start acting in ways to satisfy their radical voting base, they’re gonna be alienating a significant percentage of the American population at large, because their voting base is not the majority of this country.
The majority of this country — I don’t care what you think — is not radical leftist, pro-socialist.
The majority of the country is not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar.
But they are in the process of defining the Democrat Party. That’s not gonna work out well for them.
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RUSH: Here is Colleen, Springfield, Illinois. Hi.
CALLER: Hi. My question was about William Barr.
RUSH: Yes, ma’am?
CALLER: I think I speak for conservatives that are accustomed to investigations going nowhere. Can we trust William Barr? During his testimony yesterday, he kept referring to Mueller as “Bob.” And I thought, you know, you talked about D.C. being this incestuous bubble. Does he hang out with these guys? Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Mueller. I mean, is he going to, you know, send his buddies to jail?
RUSH: Look, it’s a great question. All I can do… In fact, I was talking about this very thing via email with a friend last night and we both agree, there just… I can’t assure you of anything. There’s just a sense that I get that this is for real. There’s a sense that I get that Barr is personally and professionally really concerned about everything that’s happened here and needs to see that it’s stopped. As to his relationship with Mueller? Yeah, they’re close. I mean, they’ve known each other long time. They’re both in the same profession. They’ve both got the same legal pedigree working in and out of government. Remember Mueller’s report came back clean in terms of the primary thing.
CALLER: Yeah, but I —
RUSH: Yeah, but I understand. I understand. I share your concern. I cannot assure you. All I can do is tell you that I have a good feeling about it, and that’s why I publicly stated so. I wouldn’t have done so if I had really great revelations, and I hope I’m not wrong. But, yeah, all of that stuff, all these comments, they’re made with some reservations. You have to. The swamp is the swamp.