RUSH: I have a major dilemma today, folks. By the way, greetings. Rush Limbaugh and three hours of play-by-play of the news is upcoming. Happy to have you here with us. It’s great that you’re here, and it’s great that I’m here. We look forward to it each day. It’s 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.

My dilemma is that what I think is the biggest and most important thing, story, whatever, that explains everything else, has become old news. And my dilemma is, do I continue to inform, educate, comment about it, or do I leave it aside in the past and deal with the hot topics of the day which are the result of agenda writing and soap opera scripting by the Washington and New York media.

And of course my instinct is to not let go of what we have learned about what started all of this. Because it’s simply outrageous. And I’m talking about the entire so-called investigation by the FBI and the intelligence agencies and, for want of a better term, deep state to try to unseat candidate Trump and then unseat President Trump.

All of that is what makes after today possible. And if that could be properly nuked and destroyed and explained to everybody, then it would disqualify everything that’s followed it. It would disqualify the Ukraine phone call. It would disqualify all of this sudden stuff. And I’m talking about in terms of public opinion, which is what we concern ourselves with here.

The more I have read – I really took time to go through the IG report. It’s 400 pages, took hours and hours to read this. Folks, it’s simply outrageous, and these interviews with Comey and others on TV over the weekend, they don’t even scratch the surface of how outrageous this was. Now, much of it we know. Much of it I’ve already had imparted to you.

I have here a 17 page, just to illustrate, I have here a 17-page review and commentary on all that happened. And I can pick from any page, I can pick randomly any paragraph and read it to you, and it’s outrageous. There’s not one bit of extraneous material in this 17-page summary. It is all devastating. It is all nearly criminal.

And I still don’t believe the full impact of what happened has been appreciated by a lot of people. Even some of you. I think you’re very much aware of what happened, the operation Crossfire Hurricane, the Steele dossier, how it was used. The full scope and breadth of this and what it has meant and what it has launched and what it has rendered to me is simply unacceptable.

And as I say, if people were to understand how egregious and outrageous and criminal it all was — and maybe many of you already do — then it would render everything happening now as nothing more than a flailing attempt to still make hay out of nothing.

So that’s my dilemma. And I’m gonna try to mix the two today because, you know, being on the cutting edge of societal evolution. Plus going back in time, it’s always risky because you don’t want to cause reactions in the audience where people, “Come on, Rush, that’s old news. That’s old news. Been there, done that.” This should never be old news, what this was.

We were lied to every day by everybody on the anti-Trump side of this. We were lied to by elected officials. We were lied to by security officials, by intelligence people, by FBI people. We were lied to by the media, who were complicit in this. I mean, every day. And not just once or twice a day.

We were lied to about everything. And of course the transformation of the media in this story is especially curious. They got everything wrong, and they knew it, and they did it on purpose, and there has yet to be a mea culpa, there has yet to be an apology, there has yet to be a correction, there has yet to be, “Oops. We’re sorry.” There’s not even any embarrassment over what these people did.

I’ll give you an example of something that is relevant to the present and the future, and that is if you’re going to watch mainstream media, there are a number of tricks that are being employed. They’re not new, but I just want to properly characterize it. If you take a look at CNN or MSNBC you will find that there are fewer and fewer actual journalists who are by virtue of their knowledge and their training and their experience who are, quote, unquote, experts in whatever it is they cover.

Like if they’re assigned to cover the FBI or CIA, if they’re assigned to cover the intelligence community at large, if they’re assigned to cover the Pentagon, whatever, you’ll note that most of the people on TV are former generals, former admirals, former lieutenants, former officials in the security agency. CNN’s stable of reporters consist of people like Brennan who has lied through his teeth from the beginning of this and has yet to be held accountable for it and continues to lie.

The same thing with James Clapper and everything else that they have brought forth from the FBI, the CIA, the DIA. They get all of these retired former Obama people on and then they position them as independent experts. As one reporter said, it would be no different than if the media went out and got former retired automobile company executives as official commentators and reporters on the state of the auto industry. Or imagine if CNN used former energy company CEOs as experts on climate change, which is what they’re doing here.

Clapper and Brennan have no business, other than this is a free country, they have no business being presented as independent experts in the intelligence community when in fact they remain advocates of the Obama administration and enemies of Trump. And yet they are presented as impartial. That’s the authority that is given to them by virtue of being hired. And they are treated with great — and every one of these people lied.

For example, I could show you tweet after tweet after tweet or audio clip after audio clip of every one of these people saying that the Steele dossier, “Oh, no, that wasn’t part of our FISA application.” It was all that they ever had. The Steele dossier was it in toto. There never was anything else. They had to lie and fake emails and make things up, and they lied to the FISA court.

It is genuinely outrageous what has been done here. Carter Page was lied about repeatedly to the FISA court, portrayed as a Russian spy when in fact he was a CIA agent working for America, interacting. And even after the FBI learned that Carter Page was a CIA asset working for America, they continued to portray him as somebody that they needed to spy on to the FISA court in the Trump campaign.

The way that this is IG report’s been presented — no bias, no intentional bias — that is such a blanket cover that doesn’t even get close to describing what went on. It is the greatest political scandal in our history. It is the most outrageous. It’s not just the greatest political scandal of our lifetimes, it’s of American history. And there really should be people in jail for this.

All you have to do if you’re a journalist, if you’re a serious journalist, read the IG report, you should be so embarrassed, you ought not be able to show your face on TV. But there is no embarrassment, there’s no apology.

Now, the reason I’m harping on this… “Come on, Rush. We know all this.” I know you know all this, folks, but the point is: Without this, there is no controversy over the Ukraine phone call. Without this, there is no 658-page impeachment report today.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I gather a lot of people are gonna want to talk about Comey, which we’ll get to. But none of this — and this is easy for me to say — none of this about Comey is shocking or surprising. I have thought Comey was slimy since that July 5th press conference exonerating Hillary Clinton. I remember a lot of people thought that Comey was on our side that day. He couldn’t prosecute her, but instead listed all of her crimes and then said no reasonable prosecutor would prosecute because she didn’t intend to break the law, blah, blah, blah.

That’s awfully fishy, especially when all of this got going, all this Russia stuff, it was obvious that Comey had developed megalomania and considered himself Captain America and was part of this crowd that thought that Trump was a reprobate, didn’t deserve to live in Washington, D.C., much less be president, was single-handedly gonna take him out.

Then the more I learned about the January 5th, 2017, meeting with Obama, then the next day meeting with Trump in Trump Tower, folks, it is horrible. Do you remember — oh, I think barely a couple of days before the Nadler economy vote, Nancy Pelosi has a press conference in which she says, “This isn’t even about Ukraine. This is about Russia. This is about the president’s attempt to set Ukraine up for Vladimir Putin.” Remember she said, “All roads lead to Putin.”

Then all of a sudden, when it comes time to vote out the articles and have the witnesses, there’s nothing about Russia, literally nothing. It’s all about this bogus nothing-to-it phone call. What happened to Russia? I’ll tell you what happened to Russia. What happened to Russia was the IG report.

The IG report following shortly after the Mueller report documents and proves that not only was there never anything to the allegation, that everybody involved was lying and altering things and creating things and planting spies and informants in an effort to undermine first the campaign, then the transition, then the presidency.

The IG report was coming, and that’s why Pelosi eliminated anything about Russia from their impeachment articles because the IG found that all of the criminality occurred on the other side of the aisle. The criminality occurred with Brennan and — I can’t start listing names or you don’t know where to stop. The criminality occurred from Comey on down in the FBI, from Brennan on down in the intelligence community and in the media.

Just as was true when the Mueller investigation shut down without a single American being charged with criminally conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election. I can’t tell you how devastating that was. It’s just that they were able to move it, compartmentalize it, to, “Okay. That’s yesterday’s news. Now we move on and here comes Kavanaugh and then here will come Ukraine or whatever else we can manufacture.”

The Mueller report was the cull misogyny of two years of lying to the American people multiple times a day by everybody on television. On CNN, MSNBC, by everybody at the New York Times, by everybody at the Washington Post, lying that the dossier had nothing to do with the FISA applications. And these networks and newspapers hired as their sources the culprits, the people who were engaged in the actual conspiracy or hoax or coup.

Those people were hired to go on television or to be quoted in the newspaper as saying, “Nah, there’s nothing to this. Trump did it. No, of course, the FBI’s aboveboard. We’ve never done anything like we’re being accused of doing. No, no, no. This is perfectly legal and everything we’re doing. Trump is a danger to the world. Trump poses a great risk.” The very people running the scam became the experts denying everything on cable news and in the newspapers.

So the Mueller investigation drops, not a single American charged with criminally conspiring with Russia. Then the IG report is next. And what did it say? That years of all of these false, big time claims, that all of these news narratives from the U.S. media were utter frauds, that there wasn’t a shred of truth in anything. And the only reason this has escaped the genuine scrutiny that it deserves is because the IG himself is a swamp rat, and the first thing he said was, “We didn’t find any bias.” And you know the qualifications. All it meant was nobody admitted to any.

If you read the IG report he concludes there’s only two ways to explain what all happened here. It’s either incompetence or intentionality. What is intentionality? Bias. He admits it later in the report. It’s just this stupid summary that the media was able to first report — we talked about this — that exonerates everybody simply because there wasn’t any bias in it? The report doesn’t even say that.

You’ve heard about the 17 errors that were made. There are not just 17 errors. These are major criminal undertakings. They weren’t 17 errors. They were criminal, knowingly criminal undertakings to violate the law, to violate the tenets of the FISA court, to deceive the FISA court and judges, to deceive the American people, to deceive the Trump campaign and its people, to set people up to commit crimes, to lie about their culpability in things that did not even happen.

And the IG concludes that it was either incompetence, which is highly unlikely ’cause it was four years. You don’t have a steady stream of this kind of incompetence from the premier law enforcement agency in the world, the FBI. He said it’s either incompetence or intentionality. And intentionality, for those of you in Rio Linda, it means they meant to do it, which means bias. The body of the report and the analysis clearly offers bias as one of the only two explanations for how all of this happened.

The FBI engaged in gross abuse of its power, engaged in deceit after deceit after deceit. The IG report documents countless instances in which the FBI, in order to convince the FISA court to allow it to spy on Carter Page, manipulated documents, concealed exculpatory evidence, meaning denied the court evidence that would show Carter Page wasn’t doing what they alleged, and they knowingly lied to the court. They presented outright lies to the FISA court.

Now, Carter Page is not just some cartoon character here. Carter Page is a human being, an American citizen. The entire library of his civil liberties were abused and exploited. He actually was, for all intents and purposes, an agent of the CIA. He had contacts in Russia. He was meeting with them and reporting regularly back to the CIA.

The FBI was going to the FISA court and claiming that he was a Russian agent, that he was spying for Trump, that he was an agent — he was a go-between — between Putin and Donald Trump.  The CIA got hold of the FBI and said, “No, no, no. You’ve got this wrong. Carter Page is one of ours.”  Even after they learned that, they went back three more times to renew the warrant to spy on Carter Page! Even after having been told that, essentially, he was engaged in patriotic acts for the United States as an agent or operative for the CIA against Russia.

This guy has had his life turned upside down.  He’s had all these allegations that he’s a traitor, that he’s a spook.  He’s not just some faceless name being bandied about in news stories.  He’s an actual human being that was nearly destroyed.  Michael Flynn and his family were destroyed.  Flynn was set up by Comey, and Comey has bragged about how he destroyed Flynn.  He’s bragged about how the new Trump administration didn’t know how things operated yet, so it was easy to deceive Flynn.

It was easy to just send a couple of agents in to actually investigate Flynn while Flynn thought that it was a conversation between equals talking about his new job as national security adviser.  They never told him he was being interviewed.  They never formally went to the White House counsel’s office to seek an interview.  They just said, “Hey, can we come by and talk? We have a couple people in the neighborhood. Can we come by and have a chat with you?”  Flynn says, “Sure.  I’d love to talk to you.”

They sent a couple of agents that prepared 302s, which is what you write up after a criminal investigation — and this barely scratches the surface of what they did.  The Steele dossier was known to be a fake, it was known to be hearsay, and the FBI used it and used it and used it. All these reporters are on television every day saying, “No, the Steele dossier has very little to do with the FISA application.”  These reporters on TV are quoting Democrat sources on the House Intelligence Committee. “No, we assure you,” they told their audiences.

“We assure you the Steele dossier is very, very limited role in the application for the FISA warrant.”  No, it was all there was.  I want you to try to imagine, if you can, the most outrageous, bald-faced, egregious lie or deceit that has ever been perpetrated on you in your life, and I want you to remember when you discovered it the range of emotions that you felt.  And then I want you to try to imagine that happening multiple times a day for three years to Donald Trump, members of his campaign team and administration.

But mostly to you and me by virtue of it all being peddled to us via the media, who were willing participants and accomplices in this.  James Comey’s trying to say, “Well, you know, there were a lot of investigations. There were seven investigations.  This was way down the list in my office.  I… I…”  What a crock.  Way down the list? Now he’s trying to pass off all these abuses on underlings that he wasn’t properly supervising.

I think these people all need rehab.  I think Nunes is right. I think they all need therapy.  I think they are deluded, deranged, sick — made so by whatever it is that Donald Trump does to these people just by virtue of his existence.  And I know what it is.  It’s just increasingly hard to actually explain it ’cause you need to get into psychological terminology, and that can get kind of boring.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Denise in New Haven, Connecticut.  Denise, great to have you.  Hello.

CALLER:  Thank you, Rush.  While you’re talking about Comey and all of his foibles and how he’s being exposed, there’s one little detail that I think is important, and that is while the surveillance of Carter Page was occurring and the false narratives that he wasn’t a CIA asset — not operative but asset or whatever. The CIA, namely John Brennan — who, I believe, is elbows deep in all this, as you well know. He didn’t speak out.  He didn’t correct the record.  The CIA had every opportunity to do so. But they kept their mouths shut, because John Brennan is elbows deep in this, and I think that’s being overlooked by everyone.  They’re focusing on Jim Comey, but this is direct evidence to the coordination that took place.

RUSH:  Well, no, you’re right. You’re right about that in a lot of ways.  For example, the Brits were doing all of this work to undermine Trump.  What was their conduit to the FBI?  It was Brennan.  Brennan is who received whatever so-called intelligence the Brits — like Stefan Halper and Mifsud and Dearlove and all these people — were over creating with Papadopoulos.  The woman Azra Turk — who was introduced to Papadopoulos in an attempt to try to seduce him with Mifsud — was presented to him as a research assistant for Stefan Halper.

She’s a CIA agent, and Papadopoulos figured it out.  Brennan was the conduit.  It was Brennan who would accept the information from the similar agency (MI6 in the U.K.) and then filter that to the FBI.  In this chain of command, you’d have Obama at the top, Brennan, then Comey — and they might be coequals on the organizational chart.  But Brennan has got so much explaining to do. This is just one example.  The entire time that Carter Page is reported on by the Drive-By Media as a potential spy for the Trump campaign working with Russia, John Brennan and others at the CIA knew that Carter Page was nothing of the sort.

They didn’t say a word, of course, because the objective here was to get rid of Trump.  That’s the scope of this.  That is the point of this.  John Brennan lied to and misled the American people while slandering and libeling Donald Trump steadily and daily for three years — knowingly — all because they supposedly don’t like his character, didn’t like his personality, that that somehow threatens their own version of decency and so forth, as though these people have a monopoly on character and decency? It’s a good point.

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RUSH:  Let me give you the example of a headline.  NBC, July 2018, quote, “The so-called dossier formed only a small part of the evidence used to meet the legal burden of establishing probable cause that Page was an agent of Russia.”  An outright lie.