RUSH: Well, if you’re watching this fiasco, I know that it’s frustrating to watch, and I gotta tell you, folks, it’s frustrating to have to come here and do this each and every day because every day we’re faced with bold-faced lies, misrepresentations, lawyerly, passionless explanations of things. But that’s what it is, that’s what we get to deal with, that’s what we will deal with.

So Lindsey Graham was great in his opening statement exposing all of this. Then it got to questioning of Horowitz (doing imitation), “I think, well, there’s no bias, no documentary evidence, poor Carter Page, well, we didn’t find, no, ruh, ruh.”

Dianne Feinstein asked one question 10 times. “You didn’t find any political bias in any aspect of the –” “Well, we didn’t find any documentary testimonial evidence.” And then Pat Leahy, Senator “Leaky” Leahy, gets to his turn. It’s obvious that they’re trying to create a series of sound bites for the Drive-By Media that say there was no bias whatsoever in the beginning or the decision to begin the investigation into Trump-Russia collusion.

They’re going overboard on it. They’re making it obvious that there was political and other kinds of bias. There was political bias, there was personal hatred bias, and they’re making it obvious here by harping on it. I mean, Feinstein must have asked Horowitz four or five different times the same question, and he delivers the same dry, dull, boring answer. (imitating Horowitz) “Yes, we found no evidence of any documentary or testimonial bias.” And all that means is that nobody admitted to it.

But let me tell you why there was political bias. Aside from common sense, political bias was delivered to the FISA court in the form of the Clinton campaign’s hit job known as the Steele dossier. The FBI knew what the Steele dossier was. The FBI knew that it was bogus. The FBI knew that it was totally made up, and they used it repeatedly to get warrants and warrants renewed to spy on this poor guy, Carter Page.

The FBI knew where it came from. The FBI knew it was garbage, as Lindsey Graham has specified and has made clear. And there’s no reason to knowingly use something that’s garbage unless you’ve got bias driving you. It is paramountly obvious that bias is what drove this. They know it, the Democrats know it, and the Drive-By Media know it. That’s why this constant harping on the fact that there was no bias.

I’m not kidding. Feinstein must have asked this guy five times as though she had never asked it before. “And your conclusion is that there was no bias at the beginning?” “That’s right, Senator, we have found no bias.” And then Leahy, who can barely speak anymore, (mumbling) “No, Senator, we found no bias whatsoever, no testimonial, no documentary, couldn’t find any evidence.” (mumbling)

They know they’ve been caught, folks. They know they’ve been damned because outside of that, everything in this report is an indictment. And even Horowitz said today that there’s not a single person vindicated in this operation. He was asked this question about Comey specifically. Let me find the bite. It’s one of the last bites that I have here. Yeah. Grab sound bite number 17. This is Lindsey Graham talking to Horowitz. And here is the quick question and answer.

GRAHAM: Former FBI Director James Comey said this week that your report vindicates him. Is that a fair assessment of your report?

HOROWITZ: I think the activities we found here don’t vindicate anybody who touched this.

RUSH: Don’t vindicate anybody who touched this. But there wasn’t any bias. Oh, no, we didn’t find any bias. “You didn’t find any bias in the beginning of the investigation?” “No, sir, no, Senator, we found no evidence of any bias whatsoever.”

Bias is why they did this. Bias is why they used a bunch of garbage, the Steele dossier. Do you realize it has been made abundantly clear here that when the FBI suspected the Russians may have had something to do with hacking or whatever Hillary’s campaign or server, that they went in and briefed her, and it was elicited even from Horowitz himself that the FBI did no such thing when they thought the Russians might be involved with Trump.

They didn’t inform Trump, they didn’t tell Trump, they didn’t warn Trump. Instead, you know what they did? They sent an agent to conduct a 302. That means an investigation. When the FBI was briefing Trump, they sent an agent in to conduct an investigation that nobody knew was going on.

In other words, the agent was just there as part of the contingency and Trump was getting a briefing about something, who knows what it was. There was an agent in there that was ready to copy down anything Trump said that they might be able to use and convert in their non, unbiased effort to destroy him.

But they’re overplaying their hand in this. They’re harping on it so much because it’s all they’ve got, that anybody watching this after a while says, “What is the point? Okay, you got it. You say there’s no bias.” It’s like anybody else who says something over and over again, you begin to get suspicious of it when they don’t let it just sit there and settle after saying it one or two times.

They had a garbage dossier. The dossier is all they ever had. They used it and used it and used it. They withheld exculpatory information from the court. That’s bias. You’ve got evidence that goes against your premise. You found evidence that Carter Page is not a Russian agent. You found evidence that the Steele dossier is garbage. You don’t tell the court that? That’s bias.

There’s nothing but bias in this entire investigation, a bias that derives from personal, raw hatred for Donald Trump. This guy Horowitz is even asked about Page and Strzok and their texts. Lindsey Graham read them. CNN did not cover it, by the way. CNN did not cover Lindsey Graham’s opening statement. They had a panel discussing what they thought Lindsey Graham might be saying but they didn’t cover it.

They didn’t start covering until Horowitz gave his statement, and Horowitz opened (doing impression), “We didn’t find any bias. We found no bias.” The first 10 minutes, “We didn’t find any bias. There wasn’t any bias in our investigation, we looked long and hard and we couldn’t find any bias.” The first 10 minutes then Feinstein’s question, CNN’s right there, “Did you find any bias in the course of the –” “No, we didn’t find any bias. There wasn’t any bias anywhere. Couldn’t find any bias, didn’t find any bias, looked hard, looked hard, we thought we might find some bias. Couldn’t find any bias whatsoever.”

So that is what the Drive-By Media is gonna run with all day long. In fact, let me show you what I think is going to be the bite that you’ll hear on the Drive-By Media all day. This is Feinstein asking questions. Sound bite number 18. “Your report states –” This is like the seventh time she asked the question, by the way. “Your report states that he didn’t find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation played a role?”

HOROWITZ: That’s correct.

FEINSTEIN: Thank you. And you didn’t find a deep state conspiracy against candidate or President Trump?

HOROWITZ: As to the opening we found no — no bias, no testimonial or documentary evidence on that.

FEINSTEIN: And no rationale for a deep state —

HOROWITZ: We looked at — Mr. Priestap, as I noted, was the decision maker and we did not find any evidence in his emails or texts of having engaged in any bias or having any bias.

RUSH: Now, ladies and gentlemen, let’s be very honest here. Stupidity doesn’t run in one direction. We’ve seen and we’ve heard testimony about Horowitz’s report. If you look at both sides, some people are saying either that the FBI agents were stupid and incompetent, they made some mistakes, 17 errors all in one direction, by the way, anti-Trump, 17, but no bias.

Seventeen errors that this clown Horowitz identifies. I’ll tell you why I’m calling him a clown in a minute. Seventeen errors. They’re all in one direction. They’re all anti-Trump. “We didn’t find any evidence.” So, what? The FBI agents were stupid? They were incompetent? It’s either that or they were biased for Hillary and prejudiced against Trump. And we know what it was. We know what it is. We know what it all remains. They were biased for Hillary. They were biased for the Democrat Party. They were prejudiced against Trump.

Now, stupidity and incompetence are scattershot. You find it here, you find it there, you find it over there. Bias and prejudice are precise, targeted things, and they are fired by snipers. We know what happened. We know why it happened. The only thing remaining here is accountability. Accountability for McCabe, accountability for Comey, accountability for Strzok and Page.

Did you hear what Trump said last night? We got sound bites of Trump at the rally. He was on fire. And even Katy Tur on NBC News was caught on a hot mic she didn’t know was on saying she had never, ever been to a rally like this, and it was hot, and Trump was on fire, and he was hilarious. And he’s out there, he told people (paraphrasing), “I don’t know if this is true, folks, but I’ve heard, I’ve heard that this Lisa Page babe, that Strzok had to get a restraining order against her. I don’t know if it’s true or not.” And the audience just starts howling. And then he reenacted her having an orgasm.

Have you heard, by the way, she is filing a suit, and one of the reasons she’s suing is she wants financial recovery because she had to go to therapy. And you know why she had to go to therapy? She had to go to therapy ’cause Trump was making fun of her. Trump was making fun of Lisa Page so she had to go to therapy, and she wants somebody to pay her back for the cost.

She had to go to therapy. Trump was mocking her. How has Trump mocked her? He faked her organisms in the texts with Strzok. “Oh, Peter I love you. Oh, Peter.” “Oh, Lisa, I love you.” “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Please, I love you, Peter. I love you. Oh, we gotta stop Trump, oh, my God.” “We’ll stop him. Don’t worry about it. We’ve got a backup plan. We’ve got an insurance policy.” “Peter, I love you. Oh, my God.”

She’d been made fun of. She went to therapy, and she wants somebody to pay for it. Therapy? She’s an FBI lawyer and agent. She was mocked. What the hell did she and Strzok try to do to Trump? They tried to sabotage his campaign. They tried to destroy his life. They tried to destroy his businesses. They did the same thing with Carter Page. They’re trying the same thing today with George Papadopoulos all over again.

They don’t care. They’re sitting there acting totally void of any emotion. Horowitz discusses and explains the personal destruction that the FBI people in this story enacted against people in the Trump campaign that had not done anything because all of this was made up, and it was made up, and it was started because of fear, because of hatred and precisely because of bias.

You can’t miss the bias when you look at this. To assert that there wasn’t any bias is so ridiculous and absurd that it is obvious to anybody watching that they are lying about it. And you’ll notice Horowitz always covers it, “We didn’t find any testimonial or documentary evidence.” Again, what does that mean? It means that nobody he asked confirmed that they were biased.

He was looking right at bias and claims it wasn’t there because the people he talked to, like Strzok, “No, no, I have no Trump bias.” “Okay. See, no bias.” He talked to Lisa Page, “Oh, no, no, no, I have no bias.” “Okay, no bias. I talked to Bill Priestap, I talked to Comey. No, no, no. At no point did anybody say they were doing anything because of bias. Therefore, we found no bias.”

He’s looking right at it. It was staring him in the face. Every aspect, every other detail in his report derives from bias. But because nobody admitted to it he reports there wasn’t anybody. Feinstein asks him about it 10 times, then “Leaky” Leahy asks him about it eight more times. That’s the primary thrust of the Democrat Senators’ questions over and over and over again. There wasn’t any incompetence here, depending on how you want to define it. There wasn’t any incompetence. There weren’t any mistakes made. Well, again, depending on how you want to define it.

This was essentially a bunch of snipers. These FBI agents and these lawyers and this team running Crossfire Hurricane were a bunch of snipers. They were targeting Donald Trump. They were targeting him with garbage. They were targeting him with lies. They were targeting him with character assassination and innuendo that was driven, propelled by bias.

I read this report and I hear people talk about it. Remember Trump saying years ago that Obama had tapped his wires at Trump Tower? Everybody laughed. Everybody smirked. Everybody said, “Oh, what an idiot, what a paranoia, what a dangerous guy, what a buffoon, what an ogre.” And Donald Trump has been proven correct over and over and over again.

And even the Never Trumpers on our side refused to acknowledge this. The same people, including the Drive-By Media, the snipers in the FBI Crossfire Hurricane operation, the same people who continue to think it’s okay for Obama and Biden to spy on and collect evidence of wrongdoing on a political rival, i.e., Trump, are now trying to impeach Trump for appearing to do that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: “We found no bias.” This is Horowitz. “We found no bias at the beginnings of the investigation. It got a little bit more, uh, uh, unsatisfactory as it got to the FISA court stage.” Feinstein kept repeating that Horowitz found no bias. But all Horowitz says is that he found no bias by virtue of admission. I’m telling you, that’s all “testimonial or documentary” means. He’s admitting that he is not using his own common sense.

You can’t look at this operation and not see the bias. With the phony dossier used three times to renew a FISA warrant knowing that it was garbage and knowing that it was bogus. But even if it’s true, the decision-makers don’t make the decisions in a vacuum. They have to decide things on the information presented to them by their biased underlings.

He’s saying, “Well, Priestap, I talked to Bill Priestap. Bill Priestap didn’t have any indication there was any bias.” Really? We’ve got a lawyer here named Clinesmith who altered emails, lied on emails to get FISA spy warrants renewed. You can’t find any bias? We’ve got the Page and Strzok text thread where it’s obvious they hate Trump. They’re scared to death of Trump. And Horowitz knows this, but he can’t find any bias. “Well, people we spoke to, we didn’t find any testimonial or documentary evidence.” Really?

Well, you’ve got a bunch of underlings like Strzok and Page and some of these others who are delivering information they have learned that then is taken and put in the FISA warrant application. There is bias all over it and just because nobody would admit to it that is the sum total of the defense. That is all they’ve got. They’ve got nothing other than to keep pounding there was no bias, that there was no personal or political animus toward Donald Trump that’s responsible for any of this. And that doesn’t pass a common sense test. It doesn’t pass a smell test. And these people look absolutely pathetic.

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RUSH: Let me give you another example of how absurd this is, folks. It has been learned — and, by the way, there are gonna be some fireworks this afternoon because wait ’til Ted Cruz gets going and wound up and Mike Lee, some Republican senators. A lot of this is gonna be attacked and I think unpacked even further.

But one of the best indications of the bias here, it was elucidated today, Lindsey Graham drew out from Horowitz that the FBI gave Hillary Clinton a defensive briefing about foreign influence involving maybe in her campaign.

Now, also it was made clear that this has always been a counterintelligence investigation, not criminal. ‘Cause they never had a crime. There has yet to be a crime alleged to have been committed by Donald Trump in any of these stories — Russia, Ukraine — no crime has yet been elicited, and in neither of those articles of impeachment is a crime specified.

So this is a counterintelligence investigation. Lindsey Graham asked a great question. “Well, now, counterintelligence investigation, who were you investigating here?” “Uh, what do you mean?” Well, it’s very simple. You didn’t tell Trump. You tell Hillary. You tell Hillary, you warn Hillary, you give her a defensive briefing about possible foreign influences in her campaign. Okay, good for you. But you did not give a similar defensive briefing to Trump. Meaning, you didn’t warn Trump that the Russians are out there trying to meddle. You did warn Hillary. So in your counterintel investigation, or in theirs, who was the target?

“Well, I’m not sure I understand what you mean.” “It’s real simple. Was Trump the target or was Russia the target?” “Well, I, I, I, counterintelligence, ruh, ruh.” It was Trump who was the target, and that’s why they didn’t share any information, despite having no evidence. Yet they’ve got the dossier that they know came from the Hillary Clinton financial coffers, they know it was paid for by Hillary, they know it was put together and assembled by an absolute scourge named Christopher Steele, they know that it was bogus, they know that it was garbage.

They know, therefore, that this agent of Hillary’s is talking to people in Russia to put together this bogus agreement and yet they give her a defensive briefing warning her the Russians might be involved. The Russians were involved because Hillary bought it. Hillary paid for the Russians to be involved in the manufacture and the creation, the writing of the dossier.

Not only did they not tell Trump, they did something even worse. Lindsey Graham pointed out that when the FBI did generically brief Trump about the possibility, by generic, something they would tell any candidate any time, “Here’s some things to be concerned about. A foreign government might try to influence your campaign. A foreign government might try to get some of their agents hired in your campaign.” They were not specific. They didn’t warn Trump that they had knowledge of anything because they were surveilling him via the warrants on Carter Page.

So when they’re doing one of their generic briefings for Trump, they sent an FBI agent in to spy on Trump during the briefing. The FBI agent in that meeting filed a 302 report on what Trump said. A 302 is an agent’s summary of an interview or any aspect of an investigation. So in what Trump was led to believe was a generic briefing that any candidate would get on the pitfalls and the perils that face any candidate for president of the United States, they actually sent an agent in to spy. And even Horowitz admitted that that generic briefing was a pretext meeting, that the FBI wanted it so they could investigate Trump.

And yet in the next breath we’re told there was no bias at all involving any of this. And I want to stress, this needs to be said as often as Horowitz claims it or as often as Feinstein and Leahy ask about it. Horowitz is covering his rear end when he says we found no documentary or testimonial evidence of bias. All that means is that nobody they talked to admitted it. That’s all it means. It doesn’t mean there wasn’t any.

That’s why Horowitz, every time he answers this bias question, he makes sure to say, “We found no testimonial or documentary evidence of bias, correct, Senator. That’s right. We found no testimonial or documentary evidence.” That’s not saying there wasn’t any bias. What that is saying is that nobody that he interviewed in his investigation admitted to it.

Well, who would? “Mr. Strzok, are you engaged in this operation because of any personal bias against the president?” “Oh, no, no, no, Mr. IG, no way. I have no dog in this hunt. I have no investment in any outcome.” So Horowitz writes, “Okay. No bias, Strzok.” Then he goes and talks to whoever else. “Did anti-Trump hatred or bias have anything to do with the way you conducted your investigation?” “No, Mr. IG. There was no bias at all on my part. I couldn’t care less who wins this election,” or, “I just wanted to do the right thing for America,” blah, blah. Horowitz writes down, “No bias.”

That’s it, folks. In any court, that gets nuked. If that’s somebody’s defense in court that gets nuked because a lawyer is gonna know that a jury is gonna see right through it. What about common sense? Here’s the evidence. Here’s what they did. Here’s how they helped Hillary. Here’s how they hurt Trump. Here’s how they were on Hillary’s side. Here’s how they were on the side against Trump.

Bias? They had a vested interest in the outcome. They wanted Trump to lose. They were doing everything they were doing here to try to make sure Trump lost. Or that Trump would not survive if he was elected. And it was driven solely by bias.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Horowitz is very circumspect, very lawyerly, no emotion whatsoever. He can’t even express obvious things, when he’s asked to answer obvious things. I tell you, this Horowitz case is another reason we have Trump, because strip it all away and Horowitz is there to protect the FBI, folks, which makes common sense. He’s a stater, deep stater, swamp rat, whatever, he’s there to protect the FBI. He’s not there to expose it.

And he had a very, very narrow line to walk here and he’s covering up for everything but harping on this, “We couldn’t find any bias” garbage. The FBI abused an American citizen, Carter Page. They didn’t just abuse the FISA process. There was a human being who was abused. There was a human being who was lied about. There was a human being who was spied on by the American government in the attempt to get Donald Trump.

Carter Page is that human being, damn it. He is not part of some esoteric lawyerly, scholarly process. This is the United States of America with all of its power, all of its investigative power, secret courts investigating and abusing one guy who is being smeared as a Russian agent, when he wasn’t. And all of this gets stated with this lawyerly distance circumspection, no emotion to it whatsoever. It makes me livid.

Let’s see. Got 24, 40. Damn it. Damn it. I just engaged here in bad clock management. I’m like Andy Reid of the Kansas City Chiefs. I have three bites here. Well, he’s notoriously bad for misusing time-outs and stuff. I got three sound bites here from Pat “Leaky” Leahy making my point. (impersonation) “No evidence of bias, the report says so.” “That’s right, Senator, we found no documentary or testimonial evidence of any bias.” “And the report says that found no evidence of any bias leading –” “That’s right, Senator, we found no documentary or testimonial evidence.” “Just to be clear, your report early on says that you found no bias. I like sitting on that apple tree, apple fell on my head last time. You found no evidence of bias.” “That’s right, Senator, we found –” I got bites here illustrating this. So they’re coming up. I have to take a break. Don’t go anywhere, folks.

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RUSH: And remember Horowitz was asked, “James Comey’s out saying your report vindicates him. Is that true?” “This report vindicates nobody that was involved in this.” That’s what Horowitz said. “This report vindicates nobody.” How the hell can there be no bias, then?

Andy McCarthy just said on Fox — I’m told, I didn’t see it — and this a good way to put it. He said that all Horowitz is saying is that nobody admitted it. Nobody admitted they were biased. And so he didn’t find any. What an absolute crock. But it’s what it is.

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RUSH: This is sound bites 19, number 20, and number 21. Leahy is the second-in-command Democrat. Dianne Feinstein is the ranking Democrat, the minority leader on the Judiciary Committee in the Senate. And she had just spent 10 minutes asking over and over and over again if Horowitz had found any political bias in the investigation. I mean, over and over.

And then she asked, “And did you find any evidence of a deep state?” You know, what’s Horowitz gonna say? “Yeah, all of you, all of me.” Of course there’s a deep state. What’s he gonna say? (mumbling) I want you to hear what Leahy did and how it happened when it was his turn, so here’s the first bite.

LEAHY: Is it correct that you found no evidence that the investigation was motivated by anti-Trump or political bias, is that correct?

HOROWITZ: We found no evidence that the initiation of the investigation was motivated by political bias. It gets murkier, the question gets more challenging, Senator, when you get to the FISA and when you get to the attorney’s actions, for example, in connection with that FISA.

RUSH: We’ll unpack this in a minute. But again, you hear the phrase, “We found no evidence of testimonial or documentary evidence.” Then Leahy finally found some bias. Somebody in the FBI leaked — well, here just listen to bite.

LEAHY: There was one occasion where I think bias did impact one or more Russian works. The FBI appropriately kept quiet about the Trump/Russia investigation during the 2016 election. The same can’t be said about the Clinton administration. Rudy Giuliani and others appeared to receive highly sensitive leaks from the New York FBI field office. What can you tell us about the New York field office’s leaks to Rudolph Giuliani and others?

HOROWITZ: We were very concerned about that. We put in the appendix charts showing all the different contacts. And subsequent to that report, and this continues to this day, we are investigating.

RUSH: Now, let me tell you what this is all about. This is the New York FBI, that’s the office Jim Kallstrom ran. And I don’t want to put words in Jim Kallstrom’s – I don’t want to say words that — well, he said them, but he was one of the founders of the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation, and I’ve known Jim Kallstrom since the early 1990s.

In all of this — he’s retired FBI — I can tell you without quoting him that all of this just really, really bothered him. He loved the FBI. The FBI was it. It was his life. Vietnam veteran comes home, ends up rising in the ranks to the director of the New York office. And I’m sure what this is, there are a lot of people in the FBI who were livid over what was going on here with this Crossfire Hurricane operation.

There were a lot of people beside themselves in the FBI that could not believe what the people in Washington were doing. And so I’m sure that there was some conversations. Rudy knew these people. He was mayor of New York. But now here comes Leahy. “There was bias, FBI office New York region. We’re very concerned about that, Senator, very, very concerned.” And then later Leahy went back to it.

LEAHY: One of your central findings is that the FBI’s investigation into Russian ties to the Trump campaign was not influenced by political bias, is that correct?

HOROWITZ: The opening of the investigation, we found was not connected to any of the bias texts that we identified.

RUSH: Right. So it just kept going and going. Leahy must have asked seven times. Now, let’s go back to Horowitz’s answer here in the first bite. “We found no evidence that the initiation of the investigation was motivated by political bias, but it gets murkier, Senator, the question gets more challenging, Senator, when you get to the FISA court and when you get to the attorneys’ actions, for example.”

This is Clinesmith who altered emails and documents and lied to the FISA court to get the FISA warrant to spy on Page renewed, including using the dossier. The dossier is all they ever had. So Horowitz, “Well, we didn’t detect any bias in the beginning.” Again, that’s only because nobody admitted to it. Nobody confessed to bias. That’s the only reason. The idea that there wasn’t bias is absurd.

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RUSH: Somebody just sent me a note, so I’ll go ahead and repeat it. I mentioned in the first hour CNN covered none of Lindsey Graham’s opening statement and they cut away for every Republican senator’s question. They only join for Horowitz’s opening statement, and only the portion where he said: “there was no bias.” And they only come back when a Democrat senator is asking questions.

And that’s why the Democrat senators are constantly asking, “You found no bias in your report?” “That’s right. No bias. (mumbling) No bias, none to be seen here.” The CNN audience, that’s all they’re seeing. Now, the CNN audience you can put in a thimble now. So in a way this is kind of important.

One of the reasons why the left is so mad, not all and not by any means the only, their media lies to them constantly. Like their media’s promised ’em Trump was gone how many times in the past three years? And at some point — nah. I was gonna say they have to start doubting. But they just want to be fed the hate, and that’s what their networks and newspapers do.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Well, this is somewhat gratifying. I’m just watching some of the hearings during the break. Mike Lee made one of the points I made in the opening hour of today’s stellar broadcast. He’s really ripping Horowitz to shreds on this claim that there wasn’t any bias. And he’s doing it very well. And he’s doing it in the form of statements and self-answering questions. He’s not elucidating any answers here from Horowitz. Horowitz is staring blankly ahead, half asleep, I think.

But he says (paraphrasing), “We’ve got a real dilemma here. You chronicle 17 missteps by handpicked agents, the best of the best. You chronicle 17 — you can’t find any bias. So what are we left with? We’re either left with the fact that we have got gross incompetence and lack of qualifications or we have a purposeful effort here to undermine a presidential candidate. It’s gotta be one of the two.”

Exactly. And when all 17 mistakes, 17 mistakes in judgment, 17 mistakes in execution, when they all go one way — anti-Trump — they aren’t mistakes. It’s like I said. Stupid is a scattershot thing. Incompetence and stupidity happen here, they happen there, it’s kind of like a shotgun effect. They don’t run in one direction.

We’ve seen and heard testimony about the Horowitz report. If you’re looking at both sides, some are saying that the FBI agents were stupid and incompetent or they were biased for Hillary, prejudiced against Trump. You had 17 missteps all anti-Trump. Well, stupidity and incompetence are random. They happen here, they happen there. But not 17 times in a row.

Bias and prejudice are fired by snipers. And what we’ve had here, what this investigation literally is is a bunch of FBI snipers taking shots at Donald Trump and people in his campaign and people in his family. This has not been an exercise in incompetence. This has not been a series of random acts and incidents and misjudgments. These were handpicked. And every damn one of them is a Hillary Clinton donor and or supporter. And yet there’s no bias.

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RUSH: Folks, if I appear to be, well, shouting, I don’t know if it’s coming off that way, I’m just really passionate. I want to be on. It’s really frustrating. I’m not saying it’s hard, and I’m not complaining. I’m just telling you, it is really frustrating to come here every day and to be greeted every day by a pack of provable, demonstrable lies.

And I feel exactly like you do. I’ve got a microphone here, and I know that there’s 27, 30 million people of you. I still feel like it’s up to me to nuke all of this stuff. Even though I am by no means alone in any of this. There’s all kinds of effort being made in destroying it. But still it’s a compunction. And that explains the animated emotion here that I bring.

It’s mind-boggling. The bald-faced, open-faced lying coupled with the most dishonest, corrupt media that we have faced in our lifetime.

Dennis, Virginia Beach. You’re next. It’s great to have you, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Yes, Rush. I’d like to wish you all a Merry Christmas. And before I get going, the question I’m really upset about is the judges, the role of the judges in the approval process. A spotlight needs to be put on them. Are they lazy? Are they incompetent? Or just complicit? I’d like to know what type of questions they asked to determine the approval process.

RUSH: Well, I don’t know what kind of questions they asked, but I can explain this. ‘Cause it’s no different at the FISA court than it is at the district court. It’s no different at the district court than it is at the municipal court. And it’s no different at the municipal court than it is at night court.

The prosecution and the judge — doesn’t matter the names — are familiar with each other, they know each other, they see each other every day, they’re on the same team. The objective is guilty. There’s more to it, but I’m out of time. I’ll expand on this in the monologue segment of the next hour.

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RUSH: I got a couple sound bites here from Mike Lee that I want you to hear, Mike Lee, senator from Utah questioning Horowitz. And we might have some stuff from Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz was on fire.

Amy Klobuchar, who is a Democrat presidential candidate, just had her turn and she’s talking about Ukraine and the civil rights movement back in the sixties and let’s all remember why we’re here and some legislation she’s trying to — she’s doing a campaign-for-president speech before she asks Horowitz if there was any bias in the Crossfire Hurricane operation. Two bites with Mike Lee questioning Horowitz. Here is the first one.

LEE: Either, one, these FBI agents purposely used the power of the federal government to wage a political war against a presidential candidate they despised. Or, two, these agents were so incompetent that they allowed a paid foreign political operative to weaponize the FISA program into a spying operation on a rival presidential political campaign.

I’m not sure about you, but I’m not sure which one is worse. I am sure that neither conclusion is acceptable. The fact is, these were agents who made their bias clear, and they went after someone in part because they did not like his candidacy, and that’s inexcusable.

RUSH: That’s exactly right. And the point he’s making here is — and Cruz referenced it, too — there were 17 gross errors of misconduct and behavior, and we’re being asked to believe that those were all just mistakes. These God-fearing, devoted, patriotic agents, they just screwed up. Yeah, it just happened they screwed up 17 times, and every one of those 17 screw ups was anti-Trump. Ah, it was just an accident. And it wasn’t. It was purposeful. Now, this next bite, Mike Lee gets Horowitz to admit that they’re not ruling out bias, they’re not ruling it out just yet.

LEE: As to the opening, which is in a different place than the FISA issues that you’ve identified and I talked about earlier, I think it’s two very different situations. On the FISA side, we found, as you noted, a lack of documentary, testimonial evidence about intentionality, but we also noted the lack of satisfactory explanations, and, in fact, leave open the possibility that, for the reasons you indicated, it’s unclear what the motivations were.

On the one hand, gross incompetence, negligence. On the other hand, intentionality. And where in between? We weren’t in a position, with the evidence we had, to make that conclusion. Point is –

HOROWITZ: (crosstalk) But we’re not ruling it out.

RUSH: You see how he’s skating here? Well, yeah, we saw this, but we weren’t in a position to — meaning we’re not gonna judge anybody. If we ask ’em if they’re biased and they say that they weren’t, then we’re gonna report we found no bias. And even if we see bias, we are not going to be in a position to draw that conclusion. Because all we can do is report to you what people tell us.

Well, it’s irrelevant now. You can’t have any of this happen. None of this investigation could have happened without bias. And it goes beyond bias. This is pure, as I say, raw hatred. Now, the caller’s question about what’d the FISA judge do when he’s presented all this lying evidence, what did he do with it? I have no idea. I don’t know who the FISA judge was. In either of these applications for the original warrant, then the three renewals, I don’t know who the judge was.

But I know how this works. Sidney Powell has written about it in her book about the Exxon trials and about how the same people in that travesty of injustice ended up on the Mueller investigative team. And there is a bias in courts, folks, and it’s from the judge to the prosecutors. I don’t care, you defendant, you walk in there, you’re automatically guilty, despite the fact that you are innocent until proved guilty, the bias is, you wouldn’t be there, you wouldn’t have been charged if you weren’t guilty.

The judges and prosecutors, particularly in the federal system, know each other. They see each other every day. The prosecutors are trying cases left and right. The defendants differ and the defense lawyers differ, although when you get into the big names defense lawyers, the judges know them, too, but there is a bias. There is a bias that exists between judges and prosecutors that the perp did it.

There’s a bias in favor, that because the perp did it, we’re gonna give the prosecution a little leeway in proving it. It’s just there. And it manifests itself, I believe, in — here’s the FBI. Let’s pretend that we’re actually in this FISA court, wherever the hell it is. And the FBI has done all of their work, they’ve got all their documentation, and all they’ve got is this dossier.

They’ve got a fake, altered email that Clinesmith has changed the meaning of by 180 agrees. We have nothing but a pack of lies, and they’re presenting it to the FISA court as a hundred percent true.

“The dossier is true. The dossier has evidence that we’ve got to track down, Judge. The dossier says that Trump hired some prostitutes to pee on a bed. We got check this out, Judge, we gotta see if there’s anything to this. If this is true, Judge, we’re –”

The judge, “Yeah, yeah, you’ve gotta look at this. Warrant granted.” The judge is not gonna assume they’re being lied to by the prosecutors. And even if they assume they are being lied to by the prosecutors, it’s all in the pursuit of justice, which is guilt. It is just the way it is.

Any of you who have ever been defendants at a trial know what I’m talking about. You know what you’re up against the minute you walk in there. I mean, it’s not universal. There are some instances where this symbiotic relationship between judge and prosecutors isn’t as battened down as I’m indicating it to be. But for the most part, it is.

And you know what? Folks, bias in this case, it’s not a political bias. It is just a belief on the part of the judges that these prosecutors wouldn’t be wasting their time with people that didn’t do it. And so I’m sure in the FISA warrant application — do you realize the first application — this is something that people forget — the first application failed. It was in the spring of I believe ’17, ’16, spring.

Whenever the first application was made, it failed, the court said that they didn’t have enough. So it was after that that the dossier was thrown into the mix. So in that circumstance the judge or the FISA court is going to think, “Okay. They were denied the first time around. They’re gonna come back the next time. They’re gonna have more evidence,” and it was accepted. You know, the important thing’s the remedy.

The FISA court was obviously lied to. The FISA judge was obviously lied to. And, by the way, the FISA judge has known this for years now. Whoever the FISA judge was or the series of judges that were authorizing A, the warrant, and B, the renewals of which again there were three; so four times they went to the FISA court — five if you count the first failure. The judges who granted the warrant and the renewals have to have known for months now that they were lied to.

So we’re back to this word “accountability.” There just doesn’t seem to be any accountability for people in government who misbehave. Like I say, you lie to the FBI, you can say bye-bye to your family for six months. These people, a long list of them have lied to the FISA court. Some of them have lied under oath before various congressional committees. Some of them have lied on TV in interviews. Now, those are not matters of legality when you lie to a journalist or so forth. But when you lie to the government, boy, you are in deep doo-doo.

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RUSH: Here’s Jerry. Jerry in Pinetop, Arizona. Some of the best city names in this country are in Arizona. And this is another one. Pinetop, Arizona. Great to have you Jerry. How are you?

CALLER: Good. FairTax dittos, Rush. On Monday in the House committee hearing, one Democrat lawyer asked another Democrat lawyer something like, “Do perpetrators usually admit that they are committing a crime to victims with whom they are speaking?” The answer was “of course not.” Well, Horowitz should be asked the same thing. Do perpetrators who are biased admit in interviews that they are biased? The answer would be “of course they don’t.” “And do you usually find things in their writings where they admit bias?” “Of course they don’t.”

So, you know, all this stuff that he is saying about there being no bias is really provable as prosecutors do with other evidence. You know, you prove bias or crime or motive with other evidence. For example, you ask the victim for information, or you ask who the perpetrator has spoken to, what they said, or you look to see what happened actually. And if you look at Trump and the Ukraine allegations, what you see is the Ukrainian president, the alleged victim here, said, you know, there was no problem.

RUSH: “Trump didn’t do anything wrong. He didn’t bribe me, he didn’t demand anything from me.” And they’re saying, “Well, you wouldn’t know, you’re an idiot. You’re the Ukraine president.”

CALLER: Right. And then if you look to see who Trump talked to, like that ambassador, he said, “No, you know, Trump said I don’t want anything out of this,” et cetera. And if you look to see actually what happened, the aid flowed, and the Ukrainian investigation didn’t occur. So if you apply those same standards to Trump and to Horowitz, I think we’re in really good shape as far as that’s concerned.

RUSH: Well, I don’t think we’re in bad shape. Look. This “no political bias,” they did get out of the starting gun with that claim, there was no political bias, and they’re gonna live with that, they’re gonna die with it, whatever. That is all they’ve got. But as you dig into it, you find out that not only is the claim not true, it’s not even the story.

Now, what he’s referring to here, folks, what Jerry is referring to is on Monday in the Round Mound of the Gavel’s hearing where he had a lawyer as a witness and then that same lawyer became a lawyer asking questions of witnesses. Nobody’s ever seen this before. One of Nadler’s first witnesses ended up being the lawyer asking the Republican lawyer questions, interrogating ’em.

And then he was asking questions of the Democrat lawyer, the MSNBC, Goldman. What the caller here is talking about, what Jerry’s talking about is the lawyer said to the other lawyer, “In your experience, do perpetrators and people who are guilty of crimes acknowledge that they are committing a crime while they’re in the act of it?”

“Well, no. My experience of years and years and years of prosecuting bad people is that those people seldom admit what they’re doing while they’re in the process.” “So” — and he gives the example — “So it’s not like Trump would be on the phone with the president of Ukraine and saying, ‘Okay. I’m gonna bribe you now. I’m gonna demand that you do something and if you don’t do it, I’m not gonna give you what you think I’m gonna give you.’ We have found that perpetrators don’t act that way, and because they don’t, that’s how we can assume their guilt.”

And I’m sitting here saying, “What? Because Trump didn’t say something, it means that he’s guilty of it?” And that was the answer. So what Jerry here is saying, well, just because these people said that they weren’t engaging in any bias doesn’t mean they weren’t because perps never admit what they’re doing. He’s trying to take this Democrat lawyer’s own philosophy and turn it right back on Horowitz. Well done. I think it’s an excellent illustration of the absurdity of all this.

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RUSH: Okay. More on this tomorrow. The one thing about all of this that really irritates me is that Hillary Clinton is truly guilty of all of this stuff, and she continues to be uninvestigated. And that has to change.