RUSH: Let’s start with Fiona Hill. Fiona Hill is a… She’s, I think, Harvard… It’s either Oxford or Cambridge. It’s one of the two elite academies in the U.K. she’s a graduate of. She is a national security/foreign policy specialist.
And she rocked the committee this morning, although they may not know it. Ah, I think they have to know it. Early on and after her opening statement in which she said there is no basis for believing Ukraine was interfering in the 2016 election, that there’s no basis for believing this at all. That that is a Russian trick, that the Russians are the people who meddled. Ukraine didn’t. There isn’t any basis for this. None whatsoever.
I kept watching it and I said, “No basis? How many times are we gonna have to drag this out?” Politico, January 11, 2017, Kenneth Vogel and David Stern: “Ukrainian Efforts to Sabotage Trump Backfire.” What is all this talk about Ukraine not being involved with election interference in 2016? How many times do I have to drag this story out? And it’s not just Politico. Other elements of the Drive-By Media also had the story. To say that Ukraine did not interfere in our elections to help Hillary Clinton is absurd.
And then she further rocked the hearings. She rebuked Pencil Neck in his very first question, because really what they tried to get back to today was Russian interference. They can’t let go of it. They can’t drop it. They are convinced and trying to convince people the Mueller report says things it doesn’t say, and so Schiff was attempting to get her to play off on the fact that Ukraine had nothing to do with election interference or meddling in 2016.
The Russians did it, and the fact that so many people think Ukraine had something to do with it is a Russian plan. This woman portrays the Russians as nearly invincible in being able to conceive and execute plans to disrupt all life in America. So Schiff wants to bear down. He wants to bore in. He thinks that this woman is going to unload on Trump. He thinks she’s gonna unload. She is so anti-Russian, she is so pro-Russian meddling, that Schiff believes that she is going to say that the Russians meddled to help Donald Trump.
And then the anvil fell on Wile E. Coyote again. Fiona Hill emphasized that Russia spreads its bet. It did not attempt to help or hurt any one candidate. Russia’s efforts were to destabilize the American citizens’ belief in the validity of their elections. She made it a point of saying the Russians were not trying to help Trump and harm Hillary, or not trying to help Hillary and harm Trump, that they didn’t care who won or lost.
All they wanted to do is destabilize, to discredit whoever was going to win the election, to divide the American people, that they were not engaged in trying to engineer a specific winner. All they wanted to do was have a cloud over whoever did win. You could hear the air come out of the tires when she said this. I fully expect the Republicans on the committee to pick this up, because she made a point, Fiona Hill (impression), “I am not a partisan.
“I don’t engage in partisanship. That is for others but not for me! I did not do it.” I’m sorry. “Did not do it.” Really? Have you ever heard of the Steele dossier, Ms. Hill? You ever heard of Fusion GPS, Ms. Hill? You ever heard of Hillary Clinton hiring the Russians via Steele to prepare a dossier against Trump? What do you mean the Russians were not trying to harm Trump? What do you mean the Democrats were not colluding with the Russians to help Hillary? That’s exactly what happened.
She’s doing damage control. She knows they can’t make the case that Trump is a Russian agent. She knows they can’t make the case that Trump is a traitor. So the best she can do is to say the Russians weren’t trying to help anyone. She’s running cover for the Democrats. She’s running cover for Hillary by claiming that the Russians didn’t care who won, that their only objective was to destabilize America on behalf of whoever won.
Of course, we’re all sitting here thinking that there’s nothing we can do to stop the Russians. This is what bothers me about all of this is the Russians are portrayed as invincible and unstoppable — and whatever they seek to do, they succeed. The Democrat Party has done more to destabilize American elections than Vladimir Putin could have ever dreamed of doing. And then this Fiona Hill woman comes out today here and says that the Russians are engaged now in doing the same thing in 2020.
They can’t let it go, and in the process, they are trying to convince as many Americans as possible that the upcoming election is already invalid. It’s already hopelessly tarnished and corrupt. It is outrageous what these people are doing. Ratings are plummeting. We’re losing a million viewers a day as the hearings go on, and the polling data is not good. Trump is gaining support, particularly among Republicans, even in states like Wisconsin. I’ll have the details for you as the program unfolds before your very eyes and ears.
One more thing about Fiona Hill. She made two points today that the Russians did not pick a particular winner. No, no. They were just going to destabilize America for whoever won. And then she said that there’s no basis for believing that meddled in the 2016 election, that that is itself Russian propaganda. And yet we’ve got these Drive-By Media stories detailing — with Ukraine sources — their attempts to destabilize the Trump campaign and how they were then having to backtrack because as it did work.
Their efforts to sabotage Trump backfired and so now they had to do a quick 180 to get on Trump’s good side since he won. But do you know something else that she did? I have here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers a column Fiona Hill wrote in the Washington Post in 2015. Now, all of these witnesses — every damned one of these witnesses — who have come forward has said how crucially important it is to provide “security assistance” to Ukraine.
“Security assistance” is military aid. That’s what it means. Security assistance according to the channels, usual channels. “Ukraine must get it. They must get it. They must,” and this woman hates Russia, and she was saying (impression), “Ukraine must get this aid! Ukraine must be able to defend itself against these attacks. Already Russia has annexed one-third of Crimea, 2015, whenever, 2014, whenever it was.” Yeah?
You know what she did? She wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post opposing aid to Ukraine. She opposed granting aid to Ukraine on the basis that if Ukraine got military assistance from the United States it would just encourage Putin to commit more atrocities, that if his object — Crimea and Ukraine — had military aid, that somehow that would mean Putin would launch even bigger attacks.
She was testifying before the impeachment committee today and said she was concerned about Ukraine security and stability as it tried to defend itself against Russia. And she was worried, she was very worried about this hold on the aid — very, very concerned that Trump was not forthcoming with the aid. But she had to admit that she wrote an op-ed in 2015 working at the left-wing Brookings Institution think tank in which she opposed sending weapons to Ukraine, and the Obama administration did not.
Ukraine sat there and was defenseless as Russia came in and annexed Crimea with people like Fiona Hill doing the advising, suggesting it would be a mistake to provide Ukraine defensive aid. It would be a terrible mistake. This would only encourage Putin. So Ukraine was defenseless. We did not come to their aid. (This is all part of my context I’m gonna get back into.) Now all of a sudden, when Trump has provided this assistance, these people come forward to complain that he put a delay of a couple of weeks on it.
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RUSH: (impression) “There’s no basis, no businesses whatsoever for believing Ukraine meddled in the 2016 elections.” Ah, the DNC computer may be in Ukraine, folks. The DNC computer that everybody’s telling us the Russians hacked? It may actually be in Ukraine. Here is The Politico story: “Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election” when Trump won.
“And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.” The subhead to the story: “Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton.” Donald Trump wasn’t the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country. Of course, now it’s been debunked that Russia helped Trump. Mueller did not conclude that. There was never any evidence of that.
“A top Ukrainian court has also ruled that the Ukraine government meddled in the U.S. elections,” but yet she’s up there talking today about there’s no basis for the fact. She wants everybody think Russia, Russia, Russia, and only Russia, Russia, Russia. “The logic of sending weapons to Ukraine seems straightforward and is the same as the logic for economic sanctions: to change Vladimir Putin’s ‘calculus.’
“Increasing the Ukrainian army’s fighting capacity … would allow it to kill more rebels and Russian soldiers… We strongly disagree.” Doing so would only spur Putin to even greater atrocities. I don’t see the need for harming Ukraine and providing further military assistance. Fiona Hill, Washington Post in 2015 — and indeed, Obama gave Ukraine nothing.
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RUSH: All of these witnesses — every one of these witnesses — who have come forward have had to admit (and they’ve done so begrudgingly) that Trump’s policy of sending weapons to Ukraine has worked and that it was more effective than Obama’s policy which denied defensive assistance to the Ukrainians and resulted in the Russians annexing one-third of that country, Crimea.
Fiona Hill writes her op-ed back in 2015 arguing against the aid. They’re all on the same page. Whatever Obama wanted is what all these sycophants signed on for. Whatever Obama wanted, they agreed with. Nobody was gonna buck Obama. Nobody was gonna go against whatever Obama wanted. Obama was in tight with Putin. Obama did not want to upset Putin. Obama did not want to upset the Iranians. This is all part of the context that Trump discovers when he’s elected president, which I’m gonna get back to in a minute.
I’m gonna beg the indulgence of those of you who heard it yesterday. We have people tuning in droves, new audience every day, and I need to go through this again because it is the easiest way to understand every bit of this in as common-sensical a fashion as possible. But I want to play one sound bite. I’m sorry, (impression) “sounds bitez” from Fiona Hill, and this is from her opening statement today. By the way, I was wrong. She didn’t go to Cambridge or Oxford. She went to Harvard and the Kennedy School. She’s a Brookings Institution person — you know, radical left-wing think tank in Washington. This just a portion of her opening statement.
HILL: I’m appearing today as a fact witness. I take great pride in the fact that I’m a nonpartisan foreign policy expert who has served under three Republican and Democratic presidents. Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country and that perhaps — somehow, for some reason — Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that is being perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves. I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary and that Ukraine, not Russia, attacked us in 2016. These fictions are harmful.
RUSH: “I’m appearing today as a facts witness, I take with prides…” Love the way these Brits speak. Their long T’s and D’s. “I’m a factsss witness. I takes greats pridesss.” At any rate, here we have to drag it out again. She claims that the Ukrainians had nothing to do with the 2016 election. Nothing whatsoever. She “refuses to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative, that Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary.”
They were a Donald Trump adversary, Ms. Hill, in the 2016 campaign. A court in Ukraine even acknowledged this in legal proceedings. The Politico has the story. “Ukrainian Efforts to Sabotage Trump Backfire — Kiev officials scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton.” In her world and in the world of every one of these people, there’s only one enemy out there, and it is Russia — and why do you think that is?
The one enemy is Russia because that’s how they’re gonna discredit Donald Trump. And to sit here and suggest that Ukraine might have had anything to do with discrediting Donald Trump, can’t let that settle in because that takes some of the pressure off of Russia. And her assertion here that the fictional narrative being perpetrated/propagated by Russian security service… refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative Ukraine government is a U.S. adversary and that Ukraine, not Russia, attacked the U.S.
Both can be true. Ukraine is an enemy of Russia. They also happened to be an enemy of Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign. So what are we to do with this? She refuses to be part of it, she refuses to acknowledge it, says there’s no basis for it. Yet in fact, the Ukrainians themselves admit that they were attempting to undermine Trump’s campaign and had to do a quick 180 after Trump won the election. So what is the context here?
The context in which Trump is elected, what does he find? What are the circumstances around the world? What are the circumstances in American foreign policy that Trump encounters? The left has tried to make the case from the beginning of these hearings that Donald Trump’s a mean guy and a Russian agent because he held up any military aid to Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine investigating the Bidens. And this is reprehensible. This is reprehensible.
Ukraine needs to be able to defend itself. Ukraine must be able to defend itself against evil Russia. And these are the very same people that denied Ukraine raid for eight years of Barack Obama. They refused any military aid while Russia came in and annexed Crimea. We had a pact with Ukraine. We promised to defend them militarily because we’re the ones that demanded that they disarm.
The deal was you get rid of your weapons and we’ll defend you if anybody attacks you. Russia attacked Crimea, one third of Ukraine, and we did not lift a finger to help. Putin was unopposed. People like Fiona Hill and every one of these witnesses, including Obama, were all in favor of Ukraine getting zilch, zero, nada military aid. Ukraine gets it under Trump, and these same people come along and say, he needs to be impeached because he delayed the aid in a quid pro quo.
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RUSH: So now it’s Republicans’ turn to go at Fiona Hill and this other witnesses, this Holmes guy. Devin Nunes is at the very moment talking to her and elucidating that she doesn’t know who Fusion GPS is.
She doesn’t know Bruce Ohr. She doesn’t know any of the people involved with the FBI to create the Steele dossier, even though she just admitted that she saw the Steele dossier the day before it was published by Buzzfeed and that it was given to her by the guy that ran the Brookings Institute, Strobe Talbott — who is also a very close Clinton confidant — and she said she thought the Steele dossier was a rabbit hole but that she didn’t know who paid for it.
The ignorance that these people have is striking, and I’m not insulting their intelligence. I don’t want anybody to misunderstand. They live in closed and closeted cocoons and they only read the New York Times and they literally do not know, folks, what you know about the Russian efforts to dismantle the Trump campaign and this ongoing coup to undermine Trump’s election, reverse the election results. At least, this is what they claim. They proudly, publicly claim that they don’t know. Like, she’s calling Fusion GPS “GPS Fusion.”
(impression) “I think wasn’t… (muttering) Didn’t they work…? Didn’t they pay for…? I’m — I’m not quite sure,” and Nunes is refreshing her memory. At any rate, it is a fascinating thing to watch this and to see some of the smartest, some of the most highly appointed and highly advanced career people being so blitheringly ignorant of so much that happened in their world. This stuff, this coup, this effort to overturn the election results in 2016 happened in the very world where Fiona Hill works.
Where Lieutenant Colonel Vindman works, where all these National Security Council and all these intelligence community people work. And it’s really hard to believe that they don’t know, but they’re under oath here. And so, anyway, it’s the pattern. Yesterday morning was the worst I’ve seen of it. Yesterday a lot of people said, “This is it for Trump,” after Gordon Sondland. After Gordon Sondland and his opening statement did not contain what he admitted during testimony that Trump had actually said to him, “I don’t want anything from Ukraine. I don’t want a quid pro quo. I don’t want anything.”
That was not in his opening statement. The Democrats thought that Sondland was going to be John Dean, and by the end of the day, Sondland is being laughed at and mocked. These witnesses today… This Holmes guy opened up by attacking what an oddball Sondland is. The star witness yesterday was summarily destroyed today by the witnesses today, because he bombed out. However and why ever, it doesn’t matter. He bombed out, and everybody’s admitting now they don’t have an impeachable offense.
There has not been an impeachable offense produced, elucidated. Light has not shined on one. There’s nothing here. And yet the articles of impeachment are written, and they will be presented to the Senate, and that will all happen. There’s nothing that’s gonna happen in these hearings that will stop that, that I can see. It doesn’t matter what the polling data shows. They’re now committed. I don’t know how Pelosi could pull back from this and save any face. Let me get started with some of the audio sound bites.
We’re rolling as things happen now, which has been the case all week long. The morning session happens, and the analysts predict doom and gloom for Trump. Then the afternoon session happens and everybody forgets what they said in the morning. And all of a sudden, Trump had a massive recovery in the afternoon. It’s just… If you know the formula when you watch the stuff, then you know when to be patient and when to stop drawing conclusions and when to start drawing conclusions. But I want to grab sound bite number 27.
I mentioned this in the previous hour. This is Fiona Hill letting the air out of Pencil Neck’s tires. Pencil Neck says, “Let me ask you, Dr. Hill, about your concern with the Russian narrative, that it wasn’t the Russians that engaged in interfering in our election in 2016. And, of course, that was given a boost when President Trump in Helsinki in the presence of Putin said that he questioned his own intelligence agencies. But why are the Russians pushing that narrative that it was Ukraine? How does that serve Russian interests?”
HILL: The Russian’s interests, uhh, frankly to delegitimize our entire presidency. The goal of the Russians was really to put whoever became the president — by trying to tip their hands on one side of the scale — under a cloud. So if secretary, former first lady, former senator Clinton had been elected as president — as indeed many expected, uhh, in the run-up, uhh, prior to the election in 2016 — she, too, would have had major questions about her legitimacy. They have everybody questioning the legitimacy of a presidential candidate, be it President Trump or potentially a President Clinton. But they would pit one side of our electorate against the other, that it would pit one party against the other.
RUSH: Boom! There it goes right out the window. Fiona Hill — who nobody can challenge! Nobody. She’s too smart, she’s too educated, she’s too deeply woven in the fabric of all of this wonderfulness. We can’t question her. No, what she says… She knows more than any of the rest of us. This has been the image that has preceded her appearance. And she just said the Russians didn’t pick anybody. The objective was to destabilize whoever won. Just cut the entire foundation out from underneath Adam Schiff.
Now, she is playing a very clever game here. She is a total advocate of the belief that Russia is the only entity meddling in our elections and that they’re practically unstoppable and that they’re gonna do it again, that they did it in 2016, that whatever happened in 2016’s not really legitimate ’cause the Russians had a hand in it and the Russians have a hand in 2020 and they’re working at it, and the trick that she is playing is like when people suggest that Ukraine was involved in trying to undermine Trump.
“Oh, no, no, no. No. That is the Russian disinformation, Russia disinformation.” So whatever idea somebody posits or whatever theory somebody posits, her answer to it is, “Oh, the Russians are responsible for that.” Whatever conspiracy theory anybody comes up with, “No, no, no! That, too, is Russian disinformation.” As far as Fiona Hill is concerned, the Russians published the New York Times, they publish and run Fox News, they are in charge and do virtually everything. They have taken over. They are practically unstoppable.
The deep penetration they have made is almost complete. It’s a pretty fatalistic picture, and I’ll tell you why, folks. I’ll tell you why. See, I’m still… I don’t believe any of these people, thoroughly, fully, completely. I think they are all wedded… Out of necessity, they are all attached and wedded to the idea that Trump’s election is illegitimate because the Russians engineered it. Now, they’ve failed to produce any evidence of it, because there isn’t any. There’s not a shred of evidence that the Russians tampered with a single vote.
In fact, the illustrious Department of Justice has even said not a single election result was affected, not a single vote was tampered with by any Russians indicted by the estimable Robert J. Mueller the 23rd or whoever he is, whatever number Mueller he is. They’ve gone to great pains to say it. But it is almost required that these witnesses working in conjunction with Schiff and the Democrats continue to validate the idea that Trump is illegitimate, because the Russians meddled in the election, and it otherwise would have been different.
Now, since there isn’t any evidence that Trump colluded, there’s not a shred of evidence — ’cause it didn’t happen! The only evidence they ever had for any of it was the stuff they made up, the Steele dossier, which Fiona Hill is acting like, “Oh, that’s a rabbit hole! I know nothing of dossier. (muttering) I’m not familiar with the Steele dossier.” Of course she wants to distance herself from it. It’s a piece of garbage! It was political opposition research, and it failed.
It was even used to get FISA warrants to spy on Trump and his campaign, and it failed. These people failed in every effort they made to derail Trump’s election. They have failed so far in getting him thrown out of office. They have failed in their efforts to get Trump’s voters to abandon him. They have failed at everything — and as they have gone public with their efforts, it has been one disaster after another.
The only thing they can cling to is, “The Russians did it, the Russians did it, the Russians are doing it, the Russians are gonna keep doing it, the Russians haven’t stopped doing it.” That’s all they can do, because the only thing left to them is to continue to try to persuade as many Americans as possible that Trump is not legitimate — and therefore, everything in his presidency, policy-wise, ideas, whatever, should all be disqualified. Judicial nominations, you name it. It’s all they’ve got.
They can’t run against the economy. They can’t run against any Trump domestic policy. It’s going great.
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RUSH: Okay. Very quickly sound bite 29, sound bite 30. I want to you to hear this. This is Devin Nunes talking to Fiona Hill about the Steele dossier.
NUNES: You stated in your deposition that a colleague had showed you the Steele dossier before it was published. Who was that colleague?
HILL: That was one of my colleagues at the Brookings Institution.
NUNES: And who was that?
HILL: That was, umm, the Brookings Institution president, Strobe Talbott, who had been sent a copy of this.
NUNES: And he shared it with you?
HILL: That was the day before it was published in BuzzFeed.
NUNES: You mentioned in your deposition also that you thought that it was a — let me get the exact quote — that the dossier was “a rabbit hole”? Is that still your testimony?
HILL: That’s correct.
RUSH: Let me explain to you who Strobe Talbott is. Strobe Talbott, when I first heard of him, he worked at TIME magazine and he was cited by Walter F. Mondull. In 1984, he was cited by Mondull as some expert in something or other during a debate with Reagan. 1984. Strobe Talbott. What a name. Strobe Talbott. That’s gotta be… That’s gotta be Ivy League. That’s just gotta be pinstripe, white shoes. It’s gotta be the whole ball of wax. Strobe Talbott. So I said, “Okay, who is this?”
And I found out that Strobe Talbott was a good friend and best buddy of Bill Clinton, that they had gone to Oxford, were Rhodes Scholars together. Then I find out Clinton gets elected 1992, there’s Strobe Talbott in the inner circle of advisers. Now the guy… (interruption) No, no. All that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with any of this. It’s just that he’s in the Clinton network, folks, and he’s got the dossier. He is a Clinton apparatchik. He goes way back.
Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar when? He went to U.K., that’s Oxford. So that would be, I don’t know, sometime in the late seventies. I could be way wrong on that. The year doesn’t matter. But they were thick as thieves. Anyway, Fiona Hill (impression), “My colleague at the Brookings Institute… BuzzFeed… Strobe Talbott gave it to me.” She did not want to mention that because she knows. I mean, it’s all the partisan links in the world.
So then Nunes said, “Do you know who paid Christopher Steele to generate the Steele dossiers? There were several of them, you know.” As I’ve told you, the Lee Smith book actually documents that Fusion GPS wrote the dossier, folks. And there were several little miniature dossiers that got compiled by Steele to become the final product known as the Steele dossier. But Fusion GPS actually assembled it. So Nunes knows this, and so he’s asking Fiona Hill, “Do you know who paid Christopher Steele to generate Steele dossiers? There were several of them, you know.”
HILL: At the time I did not know. I understand from the media that it was, uh, through GPS Fusion. (sic) If that’s not correct, um… Yah.
NUNES: Do you know who was — and there was a law firm involved, but do you know who the source of the money was?
HILL: I didn’t at this time. No, I did not.
NUNES: But do you know?
HILL: Now I’ve read in reports and, uh, thanks to your colleagues as well that it was the — the DNC, as I am led to believe.
NUNES: And the Clinton campaign?
HILL: I don’t know that for sure.
RUSH: (impression) “I don’t know that for sure! (sputtering) I know everything there is to know about foreign policy and Russia, but I don’t know any of this. I know everything! I know more than you will ever know. I know more than Vindman knows. But I never heard of any of this. As you say, the DNC. Well, I don’t know that. (muttering) I read in reports. I’ve ready in media reports, of course, but — and your colleagues, your colleagues. Your colleagues. Your conspiracy brats. I’ve heard… I’ve heard… I’ve heard it said you said you believe it was the DNC, as I’m led to believe, and the Clinton campaign.
“I — I don’t know that for sure, but I know everything else.” So, once again, how hard is it to believe these people really don’t know? They know everything, they’re experts on everything, never heard of “GPS Fusion” until Devin Nunes told ’em about it? They never heard of Glenn Simpson. He asked them, “Do you know Bruce Ohr? Do you know Nellie Ohr? Do you know Peter Strzok? Do you know Lisa Page?” (impression) “I don’t… (muttering) I’m not so familiar.” No, I don’t believe so.” “Do you know Anastas Mikoyan III, undersecretary for pork bellies in russia?” “Oh, yes! Yes, Anastas Mikoyan is a very, very close associate of mine.” “You never heard of Bruce Ohr?” “No, I can’t say as I have.”
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RUSH: Here’s Fiona Hill being interviewed/questioned by the Republican counsel Steve Castor, and this was gonna be one of the themes today, so I guess this fits. It’s how everybody is dumping on Sondland today, and I wanted to point out 24, 28 hours ago Sondland was the guy who brought Trump down.
I mean, even on Fox News, Sondland’s opening statement — even before we got to questions, his opening statement — meant the end of Trump. Do you remember, all these clowns making this perception based on his testimony, his opening statement and Schiff’s questions? Then the afternoon session came and Sondland wilted and found out that he admitted something from his opening statement that might have been rather important such as, “I asked the president what he wanted from Ukraine.
“The president said, ‘Nothing. I don’t want a quid pro quo. I don’t want anything. Just tell Zelensky to do the right thing.'” Wait. What? Why wasn’t that in the opening statement? “I ran out of space.” So 28 hours ago Sondland was the man. We also learned that the reason Sondland’s testimony has changed to frequently is that the left is threatening him and his family and they are running a boycott that was started by a Democrat member of Congress of his wife’s properties, real estate and hotel properties in Oregon.
You want to talk about witness intimidation? It has been the left that has been doing it. Anyway, Sondland has now crumpled. Sondland is gone, and there are audio sound bites of how the press abandoned him at the end of yesterday, and this witness today, what this guy’s name, Holmes? Is that his name? He dumped all over Sondland and his opening statement. And now Fiona Hill — who knows everything there is about foreign policy and world politics.
Except anything to do with Steele dossier and “GPS Fusion,” as she says. She doesn’t know anybody at the FBI, she doesn’t know anybody at the CIA, she doesn’t know anybody had anything to do with any of that, but she knows everything else. The Republican lawyer says, “Ambassador Sondland indicated you were upset with Ambassador Bolton and upset with the way things are going. Your counsel said it was an outright fabrication. What is going on with this?”
HILL: I was actually, to be honest, angry with him. And, um, I hate to say it. But often when women show anger, it’s not fully appreciated. It’s often, y’know, pushed on to emotional issues perhaps, uh, or deflected on to, um, other people. And what I was angry about was he wasn’t coordinating with us. Now I actually realize having listened to his deposition that he was absolutely right, that he wasn’t coordinating with us because we weren’t doing the same thing that he was doing. And I realized in fact that I was really being fair to Ambassador Sondland, because he was carrying out what he thought he had been instructed to carry out, and we were doing something that we thought was just as — um, or perhaps even more — important. But it wasn’t in the same channel.
RUSH: It wasn’t the same channel! We’re back to the same old thing. Sondland was carrying out Trump’s orders, and she was offended, and she even says, “I had to apologize because he was carrying out what he thought he’d been instructed to carry out,” i.e., the president’s instruction, “and we were doing something we thought was even more important,” meaning: The president’s an idiot, and we were doing things the president didn’t want to do because we know more than the president does.
But it wasn’t in the same channel. Outside channels! This is, again, go back to the context. This is exactly what Trump was elected to do, was to go outside the usual channels. The usual channels is what he ran against. The usual channels, which he thought had created stupid and inexplicable American foreign policy with wasteful dollars being spent left and right and getting nothing for it. Look, I’ve been through the context three times now in two days.
I don’t get to go through it all again, but we’re down to whatever it is. You know, Bureaucrat A upset over what he or she overhears or thinks and tells Bureaucrat B who thirdhand then gets upset and so forth. And they’re all ticked off… When you strip it away, they’re all ticked off because Trump was using Rudy Giuliani and not them, which makes perfect sense. He didn’t trust them. They were part of the cabal that was attempting to run this coup against him.
Every one of these witnesses has been part of that coup to one extent or another led by… I don’t know about led by, but worked extremely hard by.
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RUSH: This is Diane, Salt Lake City. Great to have you with us. Hello.
CALLER: Oh, hi, Rush. Hey, I think that with this inquisition that Schiff has unwittingly proven what the Democrats keep denying: He’s proven that there really is a deep state of career bureaucrats who feel that they, and not our elected president, run the country.
RUSH: Amen.
CALLER: We’ve watched this string of arrogant, left-wing bureaucrats parade before Congress for the past two weeks, and they’re simply ticked off because Trump — who they think is a uncouth buffoon — didn’t heed their so-called expert advice. So instead of doing the proper thing — voicing their opposition by going through the chain of command or just outright quitting — they ran to the biggest Trump hater in Congress and colluded with him to destroy their boss.
RUSH: Let me have a sound bite right here that’s gonna make your point. It’s Devin Nunes talking to Fiona Hill, and he says, “Look, I understand the people NSC, State Department had issues with Trump policy. But at the end of the day, Trump’s commander-in-chief. He makes those decisions, right? Number 32, sound bite 32, three, two, one, go.
HILL: We at the National Security Council were not told — either by the president directly or through Ambassador Bolton — that we were to be focused on these issues as a matter of U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine. I never personally heard the president, uh, say anything specific about 2016 and Ukraine. I’ve seen him say plenty of things publicly, but I was not given a directive. In fact, I was given a directive on July 10th by Ambassador Bolton very clearly to stay out of domestic politics.
RUSH: Okay. So what’s so hard then? You were given a directive to stay out of it. (impression) “I was not given a directive! No directive. I’ve heard the president say things specifically, but not to me. Only in the media, TV.” Maybe — just maybe — Ms. Hill, the president didn’t want you involved in what he was doing for contextual reasons. “But I was not given a directive. In fact, the only directive I got was to stay out of it.” I wonder why. But Nunes is right, Trump’s commander chief at the end of the day. They just can’t accept that, folks. They just can’t.