RUSH: Here’s Claire in Sarasota, Florida, as we zoom back to the phones. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you?
RUSH: Fine and dandy. Thank you. Great to have you on the phone with us here.
CALLER: Thank you for taking my call. Where I am sitting today, I think yesterday you were like, “Nobody stands up for Trump, where are the voices.” You know, I was telling Snerdley, I feel like we get the same script every day. We’re supposed to stay on the same chapter. “Don’t jump ahead! Don’t think ahead for yourself! Let’s play the Democrats’ game whenever they hand us a hand,” and you can go through every single one of these —
CALLER: Right!
RUSH: They get up and they accuse us of something and we accept the allegation and start defending it. Why? Why don’t we get up and set the agenda or the narrative and start accusing them of something? Why do we fall for it? I agree with you one hundred percent.
CALLER: Well, what I’m saying is, “This is a perfect example of draining the swamp.” Maybe we’re not hearing those voices because there’s so many other political participants that have also enriched their families like this, and maybe this is why nobody will speak out about Biden.
RUSH: Oh, I agree. Well, yeah —
CALLER: — the swamp —
RUSH: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Both parties do it. There are some Republicans whose kids have gotten rich using this kind of chicanery. Of course, they’re not gonna join any effort to blow that up. I think you got a point there.
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RUSH: The point that our last caller was making, is she wanted to know — and I’ve been asking the question all week — where are the Republicans? Where is the defense of President Trump? Where are the Republicans standing up and joining him in these efforts? And her theory is that everybody in the swamp is corrupt or has been touched by what happens there, and that anybody who has been touched by it is not going to speak up and call attention to it.
Her theory is that it’s more than just Democrats who’ve engaged in these practices that parlay the influence of a member of Congress or the Senate into wealth for the congressman, family, children, and so forth. Look, there are numerous ways that this works, and it isn’t anything new. I’ll give you one scenario as to how it can happen. I can’t give you a name I can assure you that this story I’m gonna tell you happened, but I know how it happens. I know the generics of the way these things are structured.
All you have to do is take a look at the number of people elected to Congress who don’t have any appreciable wealth. They may have a savings account or something, but they’re not millionaires. Let’s put this that way. They go to Washington and they get a government salary which, depending, is gonna be in the range of $125,000 to $175,000 a year, maybe 200 tops, and then they leave after certain number of years with millions of dollars or many millions, far more money than they have earned — particularly after you take taxes and everything out.
So how does it happen? ‘Cause it’s illegal. You can’t pay off a congressman. You can’t bribe a congressman. So how does it happen? Even though it does happen. Look at Harry Reid. Harry Reid owns so damn much real estate in California and Nevada and he never earned any more than his Senate salary. So how does it happen? Well, there’s any number of ways. But the way to do it and the “most-favored-nation status” way of doing it is to put an entity like a founding between yourself and a government contractor.
So you are Congressman Blowhard, and you’re working with a defense contractor that wants to manufacture parts for the next missile that’s gonna be used to upgrade the arsenal. And your vote is very much needed by the manufacturer of the missile part. So in order to get your vote, the manufacturer of the missile part is told what he’s got to pay by the Defense Department. “This is the bid, this is what we’re gonna accept. If you’ll charge this, we’ll give you the bid,” and then a consultancy payment will go to that foundation that the member of Congress set up where his family works.
This is what the Clintons did. So you set up a foundation. Call it whatever you want — it could be your name and your wife, family education foundation, doesn’t matter — and then you call it a consultancy, a foundation or consultancy firm or whatever. So then the consultancy firm, not as a member of Congress but one of your family members can provide advice to the defense contractor or anybody else. Doesn’t have to be defense. It could be any business that’s paying the government for some bias.
And your consultancy firm or your foundation offer advice to the firm on how to get the deal. And if they get the deal, then they give you a percentage of whatever the deal is, and they put the money in your foundation or in your consultancy firm that your kids happen to be running. This is exactly what Hunter Biden did. Now, in Hunter Biden’s case they put him on the board of this company, Burisma, which was an energy company in Ukraine. They put him on the board.
That was the price for getting the Obama administration to sign off on American money going to this business. American aid was going to Ukraine and some of it goes to the board members of Burisma, Hunter Biden. This is the way they did it with the ChiComs. But it’s by no means exclusive to the Bidens. The Clintons made millions of dollars doing this — and the thing about a attention if you want to use it this way, is you can solicit donations to your foundation for anything. It’s a 501(c)(3) so it’s a charitable foundation.
So you can go to golf tournaments. You can do anything to raise money for your foundation, and then you put your kids or your wife or whatever, your spouse in charge of the foundation, and guess what? The foundation can pay them $2 million a year, the foundation can pay all of their travel and entertainment, as an expense, because you’re doing foundation business wherever you go. As long as you do a fundraiser, ask somebody to give you some money for the foundation, bammo!
If you were to see the budget for the Clinton Family Foundation and all of the family members and related friends that were on there as employees and executives and traveling all around and their salaries, this is how it’s done. Now, it’s very difficult for it… Like if Bill and Hillary Clinton start a foundation, it’s very difficult for them personally, because they have to fund the foundation or arrange for the funding of it. They can’t… Well, they could put themselves as officers of the foundation and get some money this way, but that’s oftentimes not done because that’s too visible.
What the Clintons were also doing is Hillary Clinton was selling influence. She was seeking donations from foreign governments all during her time as secretary of state, and she was leveraging her influence as secretary of state to get donations to the Clinton Family Foundation — and it was (chuckles) not a well-kept secret. These people that were sending money to her foundation knew that they were buying favor not only with the current secretary of state. But if she became president, they were gonna be in a good position because they had paid her.
Pay-to-play is the way of the world.
So our caller is suggesting that the reason more and more people in Washington on the Republican side don’t stand up and defend Trump on this is that they may be doing similar kinds of things and they don’t want it to come to light. Given that this is how… Let me give you the mind-set of these people. I guarantee you that these members of Congress think what they’re paid is an insult. They have a sense of importance. They think they’re making laws for the country, that they’re experts.
They won elections, not something everybody can do. They think they’re woefully underpaid. So it’s almost like they’re all in it together. They found these ways to pad their income. In many cases, they don’t realize it ’til they leave Congress. They have to fill out financial reporting forms and all that. So they gotta keep it cool — until they leave, and it’s when they leave that we learn of the wealth they accrued during their time “in service” to America.
But pay-to-play has become one of the ways of the world in Washington, and if you would get some of these people to be honest about it — if you could assure them that they could tell you anonymously and that nothing would ever fall back on ’em — they would tell you, “Hey, we can’t afford to do this otherwise. I could earn far more than this as a lawyer back home or whatever. This… We don’t get paid diddly-squat! We have to do this.
“We want to send our kids to college too. We want to… Do you know how much it costs living in Washington?” This is what they’d say. They would say they’re justified on doing this on the basis that they’re way underpaid. Then they’d start saying, “Look at what athletes paid. For crying out loud, we’re more valuable than athletes. What do they know compared to what we know?” People do strange things, folks, in justifying the bending and the shaping and the flaking and the forming of the rules.
One of the easiest ways is to tell yourself that you’re only doing something to get you what you deserve anyway. And that’s why every now and again you’ll hear an argument. It doesn’t go anywhere, but you’ll hear an argument made that one of the ways to clean up Washington would be to pay these people more so they wouldn’t have to engage in these kind of schemes. As I say, that doesn’t go anywhere because it would never fly with the public.
General, you know, five to eight to 10% pay raises are tough to get past the public. I mean, they happen, but the public still not crazy about them. So I think the caller has point, and it’s one of the reasons why there’s not — and by the way, another thing. This is something that I think the Washington swamp really fears Trump exposing. You know, when he talks about draining the swamp, how would you do it? One of the ways you would do it would be to expose corruption.
What is he talking about now? Corruption. These people, folks, they’ve got their little fiefdoms here. They’ve got their system set up. You’re in the Washington club, you’re in the elites, your future’s made. For the most part, your kids’ future’s made to the extent they don’t screw it up. Their college admissions. Their health care. The access to powerful, influential people that might hair your kids down the road. All of that is what you get for being a Washington elitist, which means you gotta be a good Washington liberal.
I think this is also why so many so-called conservatives can so easily become Never Trumpers. These guys can’t live on what they make at their magazines. They’re barely afloat. So they’ve gotta go out and gotta be able to make speeches, they gotta be able to make speeches where somebody’s gonna pay ’em to come speak. Well, to get that gig, you gotta be on the approved speaker’s list at the speaker’s agency. It’s a big revolving door, and I think iit has ensnared a lot of people.
Now, again, other than the Clintons, I can’t give you a name how this works. I just know this is how it works. But I can’t… I’m not accusing anybody here ’cause I can’t tell you a specific name has done it in a specific way I laid out. There have been novels written about this. There was a novel written recently. I can’t remember the name of it. It was all about how the secretary of defense and her husband set up one of these consults.
The secretary of defense was becoming a multibillionaire by having the consultancy her husband ran in the way of all of these defense contractors. And that everybody in Washington knew it! They looked the other way because she was gonna be president someday. Can you say Hillary Clinton? Look, this is not a big secret, and the news people are as in on this as anybody else is.
They’re all part of the elite Washington club here and they’ve circled the wagons to protect this and themselves. They take Trump very seriously on this score. Despite the joking they make about him and what a buffoon he is and what an idiot, this scares them a lot. They can’t allow… They can’t permit this effort to get a serious toehold anywhere in this, ’cause once there’s a serious toehold, it can expand and grow and expose more and more people.
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You can see the outgo, the income, the expenses, who’s paid what, if you know where to and if you want to take the time. You’d be amazed at the number of congresspeople that have nonprofits. Now, the book that I mentioned, it’s unfair to you to mention this book and not give you the name. The book is called True Believer by Jack Carr, and it was the second book in a two-book series. The first book was The Terminal List.
And they’re both awesome. They’re great novels. True Believer is number two, Jack Carr, C-a-r-r, and The Terminal List. He’s got a lot of people listed in the credits and the acknowledgments, and apparently Katie Pavlich, Townhall, has been a big help to him ’cause he acknowledges her in both of them. But they’re really good.
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RUSH: I happen to have dug up from the archives a story back in May about how Elijah Cummings did this, talking about how Washington denizens enrich themselves beyond their congressional salaries. It’s a Washington Examiner story. It’s coming up. There’s a whole bunch of stuff I hope to get to this hour including your phone calls, so hang in and be tough.
Here first is John Kasich. Now, remember, Kasich was on CNN two weeks ago and I haven’t seen him since. I’m surprised he’s back. He told CNN that nobody in Ohio is talking about this impeachment business. It was with Alisyn Camerota, the infobabe. He said, “You can’t impeach somebody over a phone call,” meaning to Ukraine. She said (sputtering), “Well, what about the Mueller report?” Kasich says, “There’s nothing in the Mueller report to impeach anybody about. Not Trump.” She couldn’t believe it because Kasich, you know, is a McCain-Romney type Never Trumper.
Yeah, William Jefferson (Democrat-Louisiana) had stacks of cash in his freezer. He had to take a boat after Hurricane Katrina to get to his house because the cash of his in his freezer and fortunately the freezer had not ended up underwater. William Jefferson (Democrat-Louisiana). That’s exactly right. He had how many tens of thousands of dollars of cash in his freezer in his district home!
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RUSH: Here’s a story from the Washington Examiner from May 20th this year. “Top Democrat’s Wife May Have Gained ‘Illegal Private Benefit’ From His Committee Activities.” Now, let me summarize what this story is. Elijah Cummings of the Congressional Black Caucasians runs the House… What is the committee is he running? Government…? (interruption) Yeah, yeah, yeah, Government Oversight Committee, meaning oversight executive branch, oversight of everything going on in executive branch.
So here. I give you this story simply as an example of what I was talking about in the last half hour describing how this stuff is done. “A charity run by the wife of Rep. Elijah Cummings received millions from special interest groups and corporations that had business before her husband’s committee and could have been used illegally, according to an IRS complaint filed by an ethics watchdog group. Cummings, 68, a Maryland Democrat, is chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. His wife, Maya Rockeymoore… The couple married in 2008.”
That’d be 11 years.
“Cummings was once heavily in debt — in part due to hefty child support payments to his first wife and two other women he had [crumb crunchers] with — but his financial situation has improved considerably over the past decade. Cummings struggled with serious financial problems after joining Congress over 20 years ago. His house was placed in foreclosure, at one point; he owed $30,000 in unpaid taxes to the IRS; and he was taken to court multiple times for thousands in unpaid debts.”
Maya “Rockeymoore runs two entities, a nonprofit group called the Center for Global Policy Solutions and a for-profit consulting firm called Global Policy Solutions, LLC, whose operations appear to have overlapped, according to the IRS complaint filed by watchdog group the National Legal and Policy Center on Monday. The complaint states that the arrangement may have been used to derive ‘illegal private benefit.’ Global Policy Solutions received more than $6.2 million in grants between 2013 and 2016, according to tax records.
“Several of the nonprofit group’s financial backers — which included Google, JPMorgan, and Prudential — have business interests before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Cummings has served as Democratic chairman of the committee since January … The largest contributor to the nonprofit organization” run by Cummings’ wife “was the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a company that is regulated by Cummings’ committee.
“The foundation, which gave a total of $5.5 million to Rockeymoore’s consulting firm and $5.2 million to her nonprofit group,” so $10.7 million split between the nonprofit and for-profit run by Cummings’ wife “ceased supporting her groups in 2017.” Do you realize what was going on? Over $10 million divvied up, half to the for-profit, half to the nonprofit, run by Cummings’ wife. “In recent months, Cummings has been a vocal opponent of Johnson & Johnson, targeting the company as part of the House Oversight Committee’s probe of drug price inflation.”
Behind every successful man — or in this case, maybe “under” every successful man. But the point is, there’s not a thing anybody would ever be able to do about this because the minute anybody zeros in on this, guess what the reaction is? “You’re a racist. You’re a bigot. We’ve done nothing wrong,” and I’m sure they don’t think they have. This is the way of the world in Washington, D.C.
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RUSH: I’m sure that one of the ways that these nonprofits, 501(c)(3)’s for-profits will defend this is just call it reparations. Just call it reparations. That’d be one way of justifying… (interruption) Well, I’m you try go oppose it. You go call ’em out on it. You tell ’em! You watch what happened to you. Try it.
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