RUSH: To the phones we go somewhere in Virginia. This is John. It’s great to have you with us, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How you doing?
RUSH: Fine and dandy.
CALLER: You know, I gotta completely agree with you. Sad day because, you know, I spent my entire career in the FBI, and I know some of these players personally.
RUSH: Oh, wow, you did?
CALLER: Yes, I did. Yes.
RUSH: You’re retired now?
CALLER: I’m retired, yeah. But what you’re saying is right. I mean, 17 missteps, this just doesn’t happen in the bureau. And, you know, it’s one of those deals when it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. And I don’t know what else to say other than that —
RUSH: Well, tell me a little bit about your experience in the FBI. Were you a field agent? Were you —
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Okay.
CALLER: Yes. And a supervisor.
RUSH: All right.
CALLER: And, you know —
RUSH: Did you go to the Quantico school and all that —
CALLER: Oh, yeah, I did it all, yeah.
RUSH: All right.
CALLER: But what your audience needs to know is these Woods Procedures, which he’s talking about frequently in the — I went through the summary last night. They’re very meticulous and they happen everywhere. And their entire purpose is to ensure the accuracy of the FISA application. Because you don’t want to invade somebody’s privacy without due process, essentially. And it is rare to even have a single mistake in those things. And he’s outlining 17 mistakes as you just said and as Mike Lee just said.
RUSH: Right. Well, it’s not just that. How many people have to sign off on a FISA warrant application? It’s not just —
CALLER: Tons. And he lays out in his report, you know, that the director signed off on these things. This went all the way up the chain. But the mistakes, too, are what’s really egregious. As he lays them out there, what we call material, which means they went to the heart of whether the FISA application would have been approved by the court if the information, full information, had been in the application. And they left things out like, you know, Page apparently was working for another agency and was considered reliable. They left things out like Page —
RUSH: That would be the CIA. He was working for the CIA against Russia.
CALLER: They left things out like Page stating that he didn’t even know these people, he had never spoken with Manafort. You know, you can’t leave material things like that out of an application. It’s just not done.
RUSH: Well, they did.
CALLER: I know. That’s what I’m telling you. That’s why it’s a very sad day for the bureau and it’s even a sadder day for the country.
RUSH: Let me ask you this. We got the Steele dossier. We know today that it’s literally manufactured and made up. Not a single thing in the Steele dossier. And folks, it’s a lot of pages. It’s not some little five or six page document. It’s a very big piece of work. Not a single thing in it is true. It doesn’t even get there to say it’s not verified or corroborated. It couldn’t be because it’s made up and literally it’s made up. Some of it comes from a guy making statements gossiping in a bar that one of Steele’s agents overheard and just decided to put it in there, and he couldn’t believe, he now says, that Steele used it.
But I’m getting off the path. Specific question, you’ve got this dossier that the FBI knows is bogus, that the people involved in using it to apply for a warrant to the FISA court know is bogus. And yet they lie. They convince the court that it’s substantive, that it’s dangerous, that it’s potentially threatening to America. And the court buys it.
What would have happened if they would have taken the dossier and told the court the truth about it? “Judge, the Clinton campaign paid for this. We haven’t been able to verify any of it, there’s none of it that’s true, and the guy that’s responsible for this hasn’t been to Russia since 1989 or something,” what do you think the outcome would have been?
CALLER: I don’t think the court would have signed it.
RUSH: They would have even taken it if they were gonna tell the truth about it.
CALLER: You know, the thing about that Steele dossier, anybody that has experience — and some of these people are not friendly towards the president. I’m talking about Mike Morell, the former head of the CIA, he said, but anybody that has any experience, you look at that dossier, and you immediately say this is junk. This is trash. Because it’s not just one source.
It’s like six sub-sources of one source, and that’s just not considered credible in law enforcement or intelligence purposes in those agencies. So to even look at that dossier and put any credence — you can take the information, you can stick it in the file for reference, but to then use that to brief the president of the United States and then to use that in the FISA application? You know, just my opinion, but —
RUSH: What is your opinion of the story of the origins, that George Papadopoulos, a peripheral player in the Trump foreign policy team who never even met Trump, is over in London telling people that just happened to be connected to the FBI that he knows and the Trump campaign knows the Russians have some dirt on Hillary?
See, my problem with that is that Strzok and his texts with Lisa Page go all the way back to 2015. They were arrayed and aligned against Trump from the moment he got in the race, which was June of 2015. Their texts happened months before this so-called official beginning in July of 2016.
CALLER: Hmm. Well, I mean, it sounds very strange to me and very fishy to me. I can’t put it my finger exactly on what was there, but, you know, the thing that Horowitz points out in his report is that Papadopoulos later said that nobody in the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia. And they didn’t include it in the application. You must include things that are exonerating of the subject —
RUSH: Oh, yeah, that’s another point. They purposely left out exculpatory information in the application.
CALLER: The court must have the full scope of information to make a judgment because FISA and any wiretap is considered the most extreme invasion of a citizen’s privacy.
RUSH: Well, no damage done. No damage. There wasn’t any bias here, so no damage.
CALLER: It’s very sad.
RUSH: Another day at the FBI. No bias.
CALLER: Well, that’s the part that bothers me, you know, you serve, there’s so many people, the rank-and-file are so good, they follow the rules meticulously. And then you have senior people come through and do this, and I don’t blame anybody in your audience for believing that we’re corrupt. But we’re not. That’s the point. This is so outrageous and egregious in the bureau that it’s just unbelievable to those of us that have served.
RUSH: Well, I’ve gotten to know some FBI agents over the course of my life, and the one thing I’ve noticed about them, they really do believe — and this is not derived from my perception of their ego. They really do think they are elite agents of law enforcement. They are the best of the best, that the things they go through at Quantico, the training that they undergo, the qualifications they have to have to even get to Quantico, they really do think they are the elite of the elite when it comes to law enforcement.
So it’s gotta be something that I would think bothers you as you say it does because of the — the worst thing that can happen to any agency that takes itself seriously and has a lot of devoted people to it in it, is to have something like this come along, “Ah, they’re just as corrupt as everything else in government.” It’s the last thing in the world you want to hear.
CALLER: Well, and I would say even, sure, maybe we think that we’re elite, things like that, but I say on top of everything else — and this is no different than you or many of your listeners — those that have served in the military, we consider ourselves patriots. And, you know, the president is a democratically elected president. And these things you just do not — they’re just very dangerous for the country, in my opinion.
RUSH: Well, I’m glad you called. I’m glad you waited. I appreciate your patience. That’s John somewhere in Virginia, a retired FBI agent. Folks, it was beyond lying to the FISA court. The FBI, quote, unquote, told the court that the primary sub-source who created the dossier appeared highly credible, but they didn’t tell the court that he said all the info was gossip and hearsay and jokes heard in a bar.
It goes beyond lying. As John pointed out, they covered up damning information about the dossier, and they covered up exculpatory — for example, they did not tell the FISA judge that Papadopoulos is denying anything, is denying everything, he’s denying that they knew anything about the Russians, that there was any Russian involvement in the foreign policy apparatus of the Trump campaign.
And Papadopoulos, by the way, for all of this, I mean, if Papadopoulos is the origin of this investigation, he goes to jail for 14 days for lying to the FBI. What’s up with that? Here again it’s time for some accountability. We’ve had some people lying to the FISA court, FBI, management people in Washington lying to the FISA court. We’ve had FBI employees lying under oath to Congress. You lie to them and six months in the slammer for you. Ask Martha Stewart or anybody else.
Now, we’ve had so much lying on the part of government officials about this. And this report makes some of that lying clear. Even though there wasn’t any bias at all, evidentiary, testimonial, documentary evidence. It just means that nobody confessed it. I wish somebody would ask this guy this point-blank: “What do you mean when you say that there’s no testimonial or documentary evidence? You just mean nobody admitted it to youm, right? You’re not saying there wasn’t any. You just didn’t get anybody to admit that’s what drove them, right?” That’s all he’s saying here. And he’s hanging his hat on it because that’s all they’ve got.
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