RUSH: It gets even better than that, because (just as I told you yesterday) James Comey… (laughing) James Comey and Brennan are continuing their feud, or what is shaping up to be a feud, as they now disagree about what the other did and said. “James Comey says that in 2006 John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, insisted on including the dossier in their intelligence community assessment.”
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RUSH: Now, going back to Comey and Brennan, I’ll tell you what this is about. “Comey says that in 2016 Brennan insisted on including the dossier in their intelligence community assessment,” but Brennan says, “No, no, no, Comey wanted to use the dossier.”
So now they’re starting to point fingers at each other, and it’s gonna be a perfect time for leverage to be used for them to start ratting each other out. Now, Kim Strassel had a tweet yesterday. It was a four-part tweet, but the first of the four parts is what interests me. Her tweet reads like this: “Lost in this spat is that it ignores a bigger question. There were two outrageous aspects to that Jan. 2017 briefing.” Let me tell you what this briefing was. On January 6, 2017, James Comey and some others go visit Donald Trump in his office at Trump Tower.
He’s not president yet.
The inauguration hasn’t happened.
At this meeting is when Comey told Trump… Leading up to this, Trump had told the intelligence community that he didn’t need a daily briefing, that he was smart, that he had a good memory. He didn’t need to talk to these people every day. Trump did not want these people in the intelligence community… He knew what was happening. He knew what had happened to him during the campaign. He knew these people were behind this effort to get rid of him. He didn’t want to give them access every day.
He didn’t want to give them access first thing every day. Jimmy Carter met with these people the first thing every morning. A lot of presidents do. Some don’t meet with them. Some get the president’s daily brief. But the intelligence community loves the access. Trump didn’t want to give it to them. He didn’t want to give them in-room access to sabotage him, to influence him, to misadvise, ill advise him, what have you, and that ticked ’em off. It made ’em real mad. It really did.
So there were a number of reasons why Comey took the dossier with him into that meeting on January 6th. He wanted… He took one story from the dossier — took the golden showers story — the story where Trump supposedly had hired a bunch of prostitutes to urinate on a bed because Obama in Moscow had slept on it. The reason for this was twofold. They told Trump, “You gotta meet with the intelligence people. This is the kind of stuff that’s out there every day. You gotta know about it.”
The real reason they wanted to meet with him and get this in front of him so that it could become news. They were desperate to get the dossier in the daily news cycle, and they figured, finally, the way to do it was tell Trump about it. Once Trump knows, once the president has been advised, then it’s news, and then the media can report it. The dossier had been floating around Washington for six months, but everybody knew it was unverified and uncorroborated. Everybody knew that it was true. But they wanted to use it anyway.
So this was a trick.
This was a way to make it newsworthy, for Comey to go in and tell Trump about the golden showers aspect.
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RUSH: Okay. So Comey goes in the meeting and tells Trump about the golden showers on January 6th. Now, what is also known is that Comey, Clapper, and Brennan met with Obama the day before in the Oval Orifice. Now, Kim Strassel’s four-point tweet. Point number 1 — and I’ll read the whole thing to you. “Lost in this spat is that it ignores a bigger question. There were two outrageous aspects to that Jan. 2017 briefing. One is the subject of this dispute:
When Bret Baier of Fox News interviewed Comey, Baier asked Comey, “Why didn’t you tell Trump more? Why didn’t you tell Trump that Hillary had paid for the dossier? Why didn’t you tell Trump that the dossier was not verified and had not been corroborated?” and Comey said, “That wasn’t my mission. My mission was to only reveal that part of the dossier.” Who gave Comey this “mission”? That’s the question.
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RUSH: Now, before we get back to the phones, I want to get back to Kimberley Strassel’s tweet because this is a fundamental point. And it’s going to be one of the areas where the conspirators begin to unwind and fall apart from each other, as has already begun to happen. Brennan saying that Comey is wrong, and Comey saying that Brennan is wrong about various aspects of the dossier, whether it was legit or not, whether it was used, when it wasn’t used and all that.
So again, her first question: “Lost in this spat is that it ignores a bigger question. There were two outrageous aspects to that Jan. 2017 briefing. One is the subject of this dispute: Who pushed to include dossier in the briefing…?” And again, just to remind you, Comey tells Trump about the golden showers story in the dossier, ostensibly to warn Trump about the kind of smears that are out there and the reason you should be listening to the intelligence community.
The real reason that Comey did this was to be able to get the dossier out of the ashes and into the news. So Comey tells Trump, leaves the meeting, calls Clapper, says “mission accomplished.” Clapper calls CNN, they report on the dossier, and CNN ended up getting a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on this one, when all they did was answer a phone call from James Clapper, which had probably been set up in advance. Remember, Comey was interviewed by Bret Baier on the Fox News Channel, and Bret Baier asked a very good question:
Okay. Who gave him the mission? Now, I think that I know, and I think that you know. I think we all know who gave Comey the mission. Comey leaves the meeting and calls Clapper and says, “Mission accomplished.” Comey, by the way, in his interview with Baier and in his other appearances when he proudly says, “That wasn’t my mission. My mission…” He’s acting like a patriot here! He had been given a “mission,” and he had accomplished his “mission.” So he’s very proud of it. Okay. Who gave him the mission?
Now, tweet number 2 from Kim Strassel: “But the other outrage of that briefing was the deliberate decision not to tell Trump the whole truth — that dossier was being used as a basis to investigate members of his campaign. If FBI had any reason to suspect anyone in Trump’s orbit, incoming Prez needed to know.” In other words: Why didn’t you tell Trump that the Russians might be trying to use his campaign to interfere with the election? Why didn’t you tell him that?
Well, there’s a simple answer. The Russians weren’t! The Russians weren’t. Well, maybe the Russians were trying. Okay. They try everything all the time. It was the FBI that had attempted to infiltrate the Trump campaign. That’s what’s gonna come out. It was the FBI in coordination with Australia and the United Kingdom that were trying to get people on that campaign who would then interact with Russians so that they could then say the Trump campaign had been colluding. Her third question:
“Especially if FBI was actively looking at Flynn, who was about to become [the National Security Advisor]! There was no reason not to brief, since according to FBI, Trump was not a subject,” as Comey was telling him. But Comey wouldn’t publicly say this. “Who decided not to give Trump a FULL briefing about dossier?” Who decided to “deliberately hide this from new commander in chief?” Not just “Donald Trump,” but the commander-in-chief? Who decided not to tell him?
There’s a better way to put it: Who decided to deliberately keep from him everything known about the dossier? Did Comey make up his mind alone to do this? Was it Clapper? Was it Brennan? Was it Obama? Kim Strassel says that’s a question that is as big as any, because this meeting on January 6 is what got the dossier into the Drive-By Media. It was a strategic move, and it was under orders that Comey did it.
He was with Brennan and Clapper, by the way, but when Comey decided to brief Trump, he asked everybody to leave the room so it would just be him and Trump. The reason for that was to try to convey to Trump, “Hey, this is just for your eyes. This is not for other people. This is just between you and me, Mr. President. Just you and me.” It’s all a setup. Every bit of it was a setup. Now we’re learning that top FBI officials were quite worried that Comey would appear to be blackmailing Trump in this meeting.
They weren’t worried enough to stop him, are they? No. Now, after the fact, they are saying, “Yeah, we were worried that Comey might have gone in there and might have been seen as blackmailing Trump.” You can see how that would happen. “Mr. President, I have a dossier here and in it it says that you hired prostitutes. What are you gonna do about this? You had them urinate on a bed because Obama slept in it.” They’re worried? Now they tell us that this is a concern they had?
My guess is that that’s probably the least nefarious idea that anybody had. Blackmailing Trump was not what they were attempting to do. Although many people… I can see why people would think so. Now we go to the audio sound bites here, and I want to go back. Let’s see. Yeah, I got time here. We’re at sound bite number three, just to set this up. This is May 17th, 2017. So January, February… Three or four months after this fateful meeting between Trump and Comey, this is just a little comment that I made to people on the show.
RUSH ARCHIVE: I mean, if the FBI director has been keeping memos on meetings with everybody, he doesn’t run the Department of Justice. We’re not talking about J. Edgar Hoover here or are we?
RUSH: Now we’re being told that there was some concern by higher-ups in the FBI that Comey might have been blackmailing Trump or might have been — gone power mad, keeping all these notes for the purposes of blackmailing Trump on something besides the dossier. So here is Baker with Isikoff. Isikoff has a podcast called Skullduggery, and the question: (summarized) “Did you think through how Trump would receive the information about the golden showers story in the Steele dossier? You’re the FBI. The legacy J. Edgar Hoover. You send Comey in there, somebody does. Were you worried at all about how Trump would take this?”
BAKER: We were quite worried about the Hoover analogies and were determined not to have such a, uhhh, disaster happen on our watch, that, “Sir, we had this information. It came to us in a particular way. The press has it; it’s about to come out. You should be alerted to that fact.”
RUSH: Mr. Baker, come on. The press had it because you gave it to them! The press had it because John McCain made sure they had it. The press had it because everybody in the Washington establishment wanted this dossier to be publicly consumed. You knew that it was unverified. You knew that it had not been corroborated, but you wanted it out there. McCain helped a bunch of people get this dossier out there.
You say you’re worried about about the J. Edgar Hoover comparisons? The press had the dossier because it had been leaked! CNN was told that the dossier’s good to go by Clapper after Comey tells Trump about it, and now here’s Baker on this podcast yesterday acting like, “Ah, we’ve got this information. It came to us in a particular way. The press has it; it’s about to come out.” The press had it? Everybody had it! You made sure they had it.
He’s trying to act like, “Oh, my God. The press had it! We had to do something. We had to get in front of it. The press had it.” You gave it to the press! You leaked everything the press had. Every lie about this is a leak that comes from somewhere in the intelligence community or your newfangled investigation.
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RUSH: I just got a flash email here from Victor Davis Hanson. This is a great, great point. He says, “Rush, have you noticed this obvious but often-neglected point? All of the leveraged Trump subordinates never once incriminated Trump for collusion even when it was in their interests to do so to lighten their sentences.” What he means is all these people that Mueller was putting pressure on: Manafort. All these people. Flynn. All these people. Papadopoulos, Papadopoulos’s wife.
All these people that Mueller was essentially threatening to ruin refused to incriminate Trump on collusion. Not one of them, when it would have lightened their sentence. Even Cohen didn’t! Even Michael Cohen didn’t! And the reason is it didn’t happen. But even at that, none of them lied. None of them gave Mueller what he wanted. Now, let’s contrast this. Comey, Clapper, McCabe, Brennan, they’re already pointing fingers at each other.
Why aren’t they holding to their original positions that Trump was a traitor and that Trump was colluding or that Trump was hoping to collude or the Russians were hoping to collude? Why are they backing off of their original positions? Remember their original claim. They didn’t do anything wrong. They were only saving the republic. What they did was not only legal, but critical to the survival of the country. Trump was maybe partnering up with the Russians.
Why don’t they stick with that?
Instead, they’re the ones backing off!
They’re the ones changing their stories. They’re the ones starting to point fingers at each other. If no crime took place — meaning if these guys didn’t do anything wrong, if there was no coup, if everything Comey did was aboveboard, if everything Clapper and Brennan did was aboveboard — why not continue taking credit for it? In fact, why isn’t Comey trying to take credit for the whole thing and telling us Brennan and Clapper had nothing to do with it?
Why aren’t any of them fighting the others for total credit? If their original purpose was to save America from the dastardly Russians and to protect American elections, why have they given that up? Why are they now starting to point fingers? Why are they now starting to claim, “No, it was his idea to use dossier.” “No, no, no, no, no. No! The dossier wasn’t mine. No, no, no, no.” All of them are backing off of everything they spent two years assuring is us was true.
Meanwhile, not one Trump subordinate ever incriminated him, despite incredible pressure from Mueller and his band of investigators. Well, the answer to this is obvious. These people were lying from the get-go. Because if they were the patriots they claim to be, and if they were the saviors — if they were the people of impeccable character and moral strength to save America –they wouldn’t be giving this up.
They’d be hanging in. They’d be still insisting that what they did was crucial to save America. But, see, it was never that. What they did was never anything other than trying to ruin Donald Trump, overturn the election results, and get him thrown out of office. The fact that they’re now scurrying around and unable to maintain their original positions is really all you need to know about the falsity and the fallacious aspects of their original contentions.
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RUSH: So we’re gonna go to Bass Harbor in Maine, start up first here with Jay. Thank you for calling, thanks for waiting. It’s great to have you with us, sir. Hi.
CALLER: Good afternoon Maha Rushie. Tera dittos from an island off the coast of Maine. I’ve wondered for some time now whether or not President Obama was lied to about the contents of the dossier. I can’t imagine them putting that story out there with that type of salacious material without running it by him first. So I’m just wondering if he was in the dark at the start and got ramped up to launch an investigation.
RUSH: Wait, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Tell me something: How could this happen with Obama in the dark? Tell me what you mean by that.
CALLER: I mean at the start. If Comey or whatever went to him and say, hey, we have this, we think it’s legit, what do we do, and if —
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! You’re talking about the dossier?
CALLER: Correct, I’m talking about the specific salacious part in there —
RUSH: You’re talking about the golden shower. You’re talking about the story that Trump found out that he was sleeping on the same bed Obama did and said, “Oh, goody,” and hired some prostitutes to come urinate on it, you want to know if Obama was told that or not?
CALLER: I want to know if they… If he didn’t initiate it… I can’t imagine him coming up with that idea but whoever did pen this, I can’t believe that they wouldn’t have run it by him before putting a somewhat disgusting story out there.
CALLER: No. No. I’m saying that somebody went to him in the dark with that story and said, “Look, we have this story that the front-runner of the campaign that, you know” —
RUSH: Oh. Okay. I get it. So Hillary and her bunch hire Steele to put together the dossier —
CALLER: Yup.
RUSH: — and then the dossier comes back, and the FBI, Comey look at it and say, “Whoa.”
CALLER: Yup.
RUSH: So you’re asking if they went to Obama and told him that the guy Hillary hired to find dirt on Trump found out that he hired some prostitutes to urinate on the bed that you Michelle slept in. You want to know if Obama was told about this or not?
CALLER: If he knew at the very beginning before it got launched. In fact, that might have been the impetus for him to unleash the full might of our — I hate to use the word —
RUSH: Oh, I see. So you think Obama might have found out about this and it really made him mad.
CALLER: Wouldn’t you?
RUSH: I don’t know. (laughing) I’d kind of laugh myself silly. I don’t think… Maybe for the legal concept known as plausible deniability, but I can’t believe any of this happened without Obama knowing about it. Obama’s too hands on. We’ve had stories since. In fact, it was last week or the week before, this guy Peter Baker, the New York Times, is writing apparently an always being updated biography of Obama, and the latest update in it is how livid Obama was at Hillary for blowing his third term.
That he was just livid, that her campaign was soulless, that she didn’t work hard enough and he took this personally. He could not believe the American people would reject him and elect this guy Trump. So I’m just gonna tell you, if John Brennan at the CIA and the Brits are working this dossier that Hillary and the DNC hired… Remember, Obama is the DNC. The president of the party runs partied. I just can’t believe any of this happened without him knowing about it.
Although, as I say, they’ve probably built in plausible deniability so they can legally say, “No, Obama didn’t know about it.” But he’s too hands-on. But even if that happened, I don’t expect an investigation to go that high. I was talking about this with somebody the other night, and we were speculating, “Okay, if the investigation being done by the IG, Mr. Horowitz, and John Durham… If they discover that all of these people — Comey, Brennan, Clapper, all these people — were executing orders, had been given a mission, where did it come from?
If the investigation does indicate these higher-ups had a significant role, they should be named. But I think that’s why the scurrying and the finger-pointing is beginning to take place. People are now starting to say, “I didn’t do that, he did!” “We knew the dossier was fake but they told us to use it anyway.” “No, we didn’t know it was fake! We didn’t know.” “No he told us it was real!” All this stuff is starting now, and it’s gonna be fascinating to watch how it all shakes down — and we have just the threat of an investigation.
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