RUSH: I got a lot here today.  I want to start with a montage of look-backs, the Drive-By Media, the Democrat Party — a bunch of deep-staters — saying Trump was lying when he said that the DOJ was spying on his campaign, and he was lying when he said that his wires were tapped at Trump Tower, that he was lying. He was crazy, he was insane to think that he was being spied on.

WOLF BLITZER: (5/22/18) (bouncy music) President Trump hammers away with his unproven claim that the FBI placed spies in his campaign.

KAITLAN COLLINS: (voice over) President Trump repeating his unproven claim…

DON LEMON: (5/22/18) The president doubles down on his unproven claims, repeating his suggestion of spies in his campaign.

FREDO CUOMO: (5/23/18) The president just tweeted again. “Spygate —

ALISYN CAMEROTA: Oh!

FREDO CUOMO: “– could be one of the biggest political scandals in history.”

ALISYN CAMEROTA: It has a name?

FREDO CUOMO: He has offered no proof that there was a spy.

LARRY O’DONNELL: (5/18/18) President Trump has a new favorite word — and every time he uses it, he is lying — and that is the word “spy.”

SHIMON PROKUPECZ: (5/18/18) The notion that somehow the FBI implanted, planted, uhhh, someone inside the campaign to spy on the campaign is just not true.

ADAM SCHIFF: (5/24/18) There is no evidence to support any allegation that the FBI or any intelligence agency placed a spy in the Trump campaign.

RUSH: Ahem!

JAMES COMEY: (5/24/18) Best I can tell, it’s made up. I don’t find it possible and I know it not to be true.

RUSH:  Except that the failing New York Times ran a story yesterday acknowledging the FBI planted a spy in the Trump campaign, and that’s the honeypot named Azra Turk (not a real name) who was there to seduce George Papadopoulos into somehow admitting that the Trump campaign knew the Russians had Hillary Clinton emails.  But she wasn’t the only spy.  Stefan Halper was a spy!  Stefan Halper tried to get hired into the Trump campaign. He talked to Sam Clovis, interviewed with Sam Clovis, presented himself as a Russia or Chinese expert, not sure which.  You had Joseph Mifsud, who was the first person the Maltese professor.

It was Mifsud who first told Papadopoulos that the Russians had Hillary Clinton emails.  Do you know what? In the Mueller report, the honeypot is not even mentioned! Azra Turk doesn’t even get mentioned in the footnotes of the Papadopoulos section of the report.  I wonder why?  Well, because Mueller is trying to protect the FBI! Mueller’s trying to protect the idea that they were spying on Trump.  The New York Times let the cat out of the bag yesterday.  Everybody now knows the FBI was spying on Trump.  They had to come clean with it, ’cause it’s gonna come out.

Shannon Bream last night used a clip of me from yesterday to interview and ask guests to comment.  Here’s the first bite…

BREAM:  Here is what Rush Limbaugh is theorizing today…

RUSH ARCHIVE: [T]he FBI, New York Times story today, there’s no question that it is trying to get ahead of the Horowitz report, which is looking into all of this. And the money quote from the piece: “It is unclear whether Mr. Horowitz will find fault with the FBI’s decision to have Ms. Turk, whose real name is not publicly known, meet with Mr. Papadopoulos.” … We’re now on offense, they’re on defense, and you can see them behaving in that way. Sending Clapper out today on CNN for no earthly reason. This New York Times story out of the blue, which is a CYA attempt if there ever was one.

RUSH:  So she had a former Clinton spokesman by the name of Josh Schwerin, and he’s supposed to rebut this idea that the New York Times and all these people were admitting that the FBI spied. Her question… You’ll hear he pretty much proves my point, inadvertently.  Question:  “How much does this have to do with the upcoming release of the Horowitz report,” Josh, old buddy, old pal?

SCHWERIN: I think the idea that it would be wrong for the FBI to conduct legal surveillance when they have one of our allied nations, in this case Australia, come to them and say a Trump aide says Russia offered to help.

RUSH: Oh, my God.

SCHWERIN: They had to investigate that.

RUSH: My God!

SCHWERIN: To not investigate that would be a dereliction of their duty. So I hope that the FBI looked into all of these claims and took them seriously. In this case Russia was interfering with the election. Whether Papadopoulos ended up being an integral part of that or not, they did intervene in the election, they did commit crimes against our country, and I’m glad the FBI investigated it.

RUSH: So the Clinton spokesman is admitting that the Obama administration was spying and trying to justify it. Well, what happened to all these outright denials like from Comey: Best I can tell it’s made up. I don’t find it possible. I know it’s not true. Adam Schiff: There’s no evidence to support any allegation. Josh Schwerin: Damn right we were spying, we had every reason to spy. This bunch was colluding with Russia. I’m glad they spied.

Wow. This is a 180. But he told a gigantic whopper. And again, I don’t know if these people are just flat-out ignorant and have believed every step of the narrative that’s been assembled or if they are knowingly lying. His outright lies is, “Hey, look. One of our allied nations, in this case Australia, came to the FBI. They say a Trump aide says Russia has offered to help. They’ve got to investigate that.” That’s Alexander Downer and Papadopoulos. And how many times have you heard me say — you don’t even need me to say it, you know what happened.

Stefan Halper and Mifsud tell Papadopoulos the Russians have Hillary Clinton emails. They arrange for Papadopoulos to meet Downer in a bar in London. Papadopoulos happens to mention this ’cause he’s been coached by Halper to tell Downer. Halper says, “Now, remember, George, remember the Russians have Hillary’s emails.” So he tells Downer, and then Downer, who’s in on the scam, calls the FBI, ”Hey, there’s a Trump guy here, Papadopoulos says that Trump knows the Russians have –” and here’s this guy from the Clinton campaign repeating that flat-out. This is all going to come out. This has been known for over a year.

Let’s see, time is short. I want to get to Glenn Greenwald, sound bites 8 and 9. This is last night on Tucker Carlson, Chatsworth Osborne Jr. on the Fox News Channel. He’s got Glenn Greenwald, a leftist. He founded the website The Intercept. Question: “Where is the part where we stop and assess what we have just seen for the past three years where we hold people accountable for it and learn something from it and move on?”

GREENWALD: The reason that you’re seeing so much intense rage towards Bill Barr is because they know what he is now going to do, which is what journalists should be doing and at least some of us are, which is asking the question, which is now for me the central question in American politics, how is it that our discourse has been drowned out for almost three years by a conspiracy theory, or really a set of conspiracy theories, as inflammatory and as dangerous as you can possibly get that turned out to be totally untrue? Who started this conspiracy theory? How are the vast, invasive powers of the FBI, NSA, and CIA used to spy and infiltrate a campaign and spy on American citizens in the name of a conspiracy?

RUSH: Let me tell you what rather bothers Greenwald. Greenwald is a journalist of old repute. He thinks journalists ought to be friends with nobody, and particularly powerful people in government. He thinks journalists need to be suspicious of the people in Washington who have power, and they ought to be doing everything to uncover every bit of corruption these powerful people are engaged in.

What he knows is that the Washington press corps became complicit in this conspiracy to unseat Trump, and he’s outraged by it. He thinks journalism has been dealt a tremendous blow to its reputation as an industry. I’ve heard him say this. He doesn’t understand how the entirety of the Washington press corps could end up as accomplices to the people who spread these lies for three years, this conspiracy that Trump colluded. We know it isn’t true.

And he cannot believe, he cannot believe there wasn’t a single journalist in all of Washington who was not interested in blowing this up instead of becoming friends and buddies and accomplices of the people who ran it. Here’s how he concluded his remarks.

GREENWALD: As a leftist, somebody who is steeped in the history of the Church commission, the abuses of the FBI under Hoover, these are the most serious things that can happen. You want to talk about threats to democracy? How about spying on and listening in on the calls of American citizens by convincing a FISA court that they’re Russian agents when then you unleash a prosecutor for 22 months who concludes that they aren’t Russian agents, that there’s no evidence to suggest that that was the case. That’s the real scandal. And that’s where the investigation is now going to turn. And that’s why there’s panicking about Bill Barr, because they know that he is going to unflinchingly pursue that.

RUSH: He’s not gonna just pursue it. He’s gonna find it. He’s gonna find out who did this, he’s gonna found out how all these media people ended up being complicit in it, they’re gonna get to the bottom of it, who started it, why they started it, when it started, and it’s gonna go very, very high in the Obama administration, folks. It’s gonna go all the way up to Brennan, CIA, it’s gonna involve the Brits and MI5 and MI6, you wait. And they all know it.

They never dreamed any of this would happen. Trump is supposed to be lone gone by now. Trump is supposed to be so humiliated and embarrassed he’s gonna resign long ago, and none of this has worked out the way they intended. They knew they were lying about this from the get-go and they ran the risk, and now it’s about to blow up in their faces. But Greenwald is right. How in the world do people who are supposed to uncover this kind of corruption end up enabling it and becoming complicit in it?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is interesting, Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s Situation Room last night.  The New York Times story shook ’em up.  I mean, out of the blue, here’s the New York Times admitting the FBI spied on Papadopoulos.  Now, Wolf Blitzer’s take on this is that it was an “intelligence failure,” because the honeypot failed to get anything out of Papadopoulos.  Listen to this!

BLITZER:  According to Papadopoulos, the woman almost immediately began asking him questions about, uhh, Russia connections, possible Russia connections. (sputtering) Uh, eh, according to, uh, Papadopoulos, he walked out of the second meeting, uhhh, with her because of her line of questioning about Russia. (sputtering) W-w-w-was this an intelligence failure on the part of the U.S.?

RUSH:  For crying out loud! What is his starting point? His starting point is even… This is after the Mueller report has come out, folks.  The Mueller report says there was no collusion, and there was no obstruction.  This has been out over a week. The New York Times story comes, and Wolf Blitzer hears that the FBI put a honeypot spy on Papadopoulos and that she got nothing.  He thinks it’s an intelligence failure!  He’s very, very worried. Did the FBI screw this up?

‘Cause in Wolf Blitzer’s world, Trump colluded with Russia. No matter what the Mueller report says, no matter what anybody says, in Wolf Blitzer’s world of CNN, Trump colluded.  Since the FBI had this honeypot who was deployed to entrap Papadopoulos and she didn’t get anything, he says… Intelligence failure?  You notice that Wolf Blitzer of CNN is not the slightest bit concerned that the FBI was, in fact, spying on the Trump campaign. In fact, in our montage that we played mere moments ago, audio sound bite number 4, Wolf Blitzer was the first one in it!

“President Trump hammers away with his unproven claim that the FBI placed spies in his campaign.”  So that’s back in 2018 (May of 2018, around then), and Wolf Blitzer is outraged that Trump says that the FBI’s spying on him.  Now a year later, he learns the FBI was spying, and that doesn’t seem to move him at all.  He didn’t feel the need to apologize to his audience.  “You know, one year ago I and the rest of us at CNN thought it was ridiculous the president was saying he was spied on. But the New York Times today has admitted that they were spying on them, so I guess the president was right.”

That doesn’t strike him.

No, what strikes him is the FBI blew it! This is… (chuckles) It’s hopeless with these people.  It’s literally hopeless.  I don’t know if they’re brain-dead, if they’re dumb, stupid, uninformed, or if they know exactly what’s going on and they’re just still involved in carrying forward the big lie.  At any rate, they went and got one of the writers of the New York Times story to come in and tell Wolf that it was not an “intelligence failure,” because there wasn’t any collusion. See, the news anchor ought to be sufficiently informed to know that and be able to conclude that.

Here’s Mark Mazzetti reacting…

MAZZETTI: In… I mean, right now it doesn’t seem that way because we now know that there wasn’t some big mother lode of information that George Papadopoulos could have offered.  I mean, they were clearly prodding to find out, “Was he a key link between the Trump campaign and Russians?”  We now know that he wasn’t so it would be card to characterize that as a failure, because it doesn’t seem like a key piece of information, in this case, was missed.

RUSH:  Translation: “Wolf, you idiot! It can’t possibly be an intelligence failure because he didn’t know anything because there wasn’t any collusion, Wolf!”  What hope does the CNN audience have if after the official conclusion is “no collusion” between Trump and Russia, CNN is still reporting as though there was and somebody’s still lying about that, and the FBI really goofed up by failing to get the goods from Papadopoulos?

Let’s go to the Papadopoulos himself — who, by the way, I’m gonna be interviewing next week for the next issue of The Limbaugh Letter.  He was on with Chatsworth Osborne Jr., last night, Tucker Carlson.  The first question: George, “Briefly describe your experience with [this honey trap that] you believe was sent to spy on the Trump campaign by the Obama administration?”

PAPADOPOULOS:  She was very suggestive, as you can understand. Younger — you know, very flirtatious — and I right away understand that this wasn’t a Cambridge assistant.  She barely spoke English.  She was very flirty and was trying to do two things.  One, two extract information about my professional connections in the Middle East. And, two, to see if I had any information that she could potentially extract from me about Trump and Russia — which, of course, is nonsense.

She is then introduced to me again the next day with Stefan Halper where she goes from this suggestive young lady to now pouring us coffee, and Stefan Halper is very belligerent.  He invited me to basically castigate me about my policy positions.  Azra Turk then took me to dinner and was just basically trying to extract information.  I was very suspicious.  Now, of course, the New York Times reported that she was some sort of agent, but I don’t think she was FBI.  I think she was CIA.

RUSH: Right. So how do you interpret this? Stefan Halper and Mifsud are the two FBI spies, implants, embeds, that worked on Papadopoulos. They both told him that the Russians had Hillary Clinton emails. They set him up with Downer. And they set him up with this honeypot.

And the honeypot was supposed to be able to get even more out of him as the seductress, you know, the honey trap, you know, very attractive, foreign intrigue, foreign language, accent. Here you are, George, you can look at it, maybe touch it, but you can’t have it, and if you dazzle this babe, George, who knows what worlds might open to you, ahem, ahem, ahem.

So the three of them, Halper and the honey trap and Papadopoulos get together, and they get together the next day, too, ’cause it apparently went well. And she’s introduced to him by Halper, and then she starts acting like his assistant, starts pouring his coffee and so forth, but then he starts getting very belligerent to her.

Halper is attempting to make Papadopoulos feel sorry for her, sympathetic. When they get together by themselves he’s supposed to feel bad for her that this evil guy mistreated her, and it’s all part of a trick designed to loosen lips by creating a bridge of connectivity via sympathy.

He was mistreating the honeypot, Halper was, so that Papadopoulos would feel sorry for her and open up. And it didn’t work. She took him to dinner, and then the pretense in it, she point-blank started trying to get information, which there wasn’t any. He didn’t have any. He got very suspicious, decided to end the whole thing.

There’s one more question from Tucker Carlson. “So she was dispatched by the Obama administration, Barack Obama was the president, lead the branch including the CIA and FBI, every other agency, spying on the Trump campaign. Am I missing something. Isn’t that what’s happened here, George?”

PAPADOPOULOS: That’s absolutely what happened. And I want to make something very clear. The day I met with Stefan Halper and Azra Turk in London, I was invited by the British ministry of foreign affairs to meet with them at their offices, including Tobias Ellwood, who was the number two at the time under Boris Johnson.

So, clearly, when the New York Times suggested in their reporting today that the British were told of this operation, I believe the British actually were actively spying on me as well, and I think part of what President Trump was tweeting last week about the British spying was about this involvement in this operation in London.

RUSH: There’s no question. Halper is British. Mifsud is Maltese. But there’s no question the Brits were in on this. This is why Trump hasn’t declassified all the documents because British intelligence, “Hey, look, we have such a great allied relationship, you don’t want to damage it by –” and Trump is sympathetic to that.

But he’s right about all this. He was targeted for a specific reason. They buttered him up. And they knew he didn’t know anything. They implanted it with him so that he would run around and talk about. He was the guy set up to be able to be the one they could point to and say, “This is the Trump official that’s telling everybody he talks to that the Russians have Hillary emails. So if the Trump campaign knows that, why, they have to be colluding.”

This was so close. These people came so close. If Papadopoulos were not as smart as he is, if he hadn’t walked away from this, we might be in a whole different stage of this by now.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here is America in Ogden, Utah. Great to have you. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. I’m so excited and nervous to be talking to you right now.

RUSH: Well, I’m glad you called. No need to be nervous. No need at all.

CALLER: Okay. My question is, you know, I’m a Rush Baby so I’ve been witnessing things for a while now, and, you know, you were talking about how everybody’s trying to CYA right now about collusion and about where it started from and the investigation is gonna figure these things out and you mentioned how you think it will go to the top, even to the Obama administration. But my question is do you really think anybody will be held accountable for any of it? I mean —

RUSH: I think this. I know where you’re coming from. I know that there are millions of you who have been hearing every day for the past two years, “Breaking news, it’s all gonna be explained tonight, tomorrow, next week,” and it never is explained tonight, tomorrow, next week.

I believe this. I believe that the right people are now pulling the levers to indeed make this happen and that they are going to try. Because they know what happened. We know what happened. It’s now known. The president declassifying things is gonna be huge. If I’m right, the executive branch, they’re gonna flood the zone with stuff that’s gonna be too voluminous to spin. I think the right people want this to happen, and I think it will. I actually do. I think Barr is serious.