RUSH: Upper West Side in Manhattan. This is Bill. Great to have you, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. I gotta get in everything fast. I got three points. I forgot to tell Snerdley the third. I want to help you make the complex simple and understandable for the people in Rio Linda. The chances of 17 things, like in the IG report, all going in one direction pointing to intentionality instead of honest screw ups is like taking a fair coin and tossing it 17 times and coming up 17 heads in a row, and that is roughly one in 131,000 times, and that’s very, very slim.

RUSH: Let me ask you a quick question, just quick. Do you know what the 17 items are?

CALLER: I don’t ’cause I —

RUSH: Stand by. I’m gonna tell you what they are in the next segment. What’s your next point?

CALLER: The next point is about Carter Page. During the interview with Chris Wallace Comey yesterday said this was way down on the list, all these lapses. There were other things more concerning. And I think that Lindsey Graham should invite him behind closed doors, let’s find that out.

And the third thing is I know FISA judges are top secret, their identities are concealed. When you were talking about imagining the most deceitful thing that could happen to you, isn’t at least one of those judges incensed and white hot over this and can he not or she not come out of the shadows, say, “I’m done with the FISA court”? I want an explanation for this.

RUSH: It is curious why — and that may have happened. You know, this is the thing about the FISA court. It’s secret and it’s very private. In fact, these people, do you know we’ve had — we’re tracking down Saudi people on military bases, and there are people, “You can’t do that, that’s bias, that’s prejudice,” and so forth.

The FISA court may have already had that kind of reaction, we wouldn’t know. Some judge on the FISA court may have blown his gasket over this internally and we wouldn’t know. And if the media found out they would suppress it, cover it up, and not report. I understand, though, if I were one of the FISA judges and I find out all this stuff after the fact I, too, would be livid and I’d want some scalps beyond that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, these 17 incidents that the inspector general found, these incidents of curious behavior — and as our caller from the Upper West Side pointed out, all 17 went against Trump! All 17 of these — what were “mistakes” — just happened to be mistakes committed at Donald Trump’s expense.  As the caller pointed out, that’s like having a coin and tossing it seven times and getting heads every time, or tails.  What are these 17 incidents?

James Comey says, “Well, you know, they’re kind of minor in the big scheme of things.  There were lots of more important things we were dealing with than this investigation.”  Folks, I really can’t emphasize the expansive, constant, never-ending, bald-faced lies that were this investigation, this coup, and they are what propels impeachment to this day, which is why I’m focusing on this.  I got a piece by Julie Kelly at American Greatness just savaging Comey that I want to share with you before the program ends today.

Chris Wallace, I think, undressed Comey yesterday.  Comey doesn’t know it.  Comey, in his arrogance and conceit, thinks he gets away with saying, “Well, these things, I guess I was wrong. There was some sloppiness in the FISA applications.”  Sloppiness?  There wasn’t any sloppiness.  That’s the point.  It wasn’t sloppy.  It wasn’t incompetent.  It was intentional, and it was false, and it was done for one purpose: To railroad an American citizen.

Actually two — Carter Page and Trump — and everybody they could touch with Trump, like Flynn and Manafort.  Look, I don’t want to offend anybody here. I really don’t, and please don’t misunderstand.  Folks, you know when I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt — and I knew it practically from the get-go. But you have… At every stage of one of these bogus things, there are new discoveries, new things you see that convince you even more than you were that something is bogus or whatever you think it is.

When I saw the 6 a.m. raid on Roger Stone’s house, that’s what told me they’ve got nothing.  And then when I saw them go after somebody named Jerome Corsi, I said, “They’ve got nothing.  They are just trying to destroy anybody they can to make it look like Trump’s done something, that Trump is guilty, and that they’re getting close by nailing all of these ancillary figures.”  Don’t make me say any more.  I’m just telling you that going after those two guys and some others…

There was Assange, and there were some other ancillary figures that the left might think are very powerful conspiracy movers on the right, and they’re privately just a bunch of jokes.  What are these 17 incidents?  Well, there were two groups that made up 17.  The first is a group of seven things; then there are 10 more.  The specifics cited by Horowitz in his report, specifically, quote, “Based upon the information known to the FBI in October 2016…”

This is a month before the election. “The first application for a FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page contained seven significant inaccuracies and omissions, among them,” among these significant inaccuracies and omissions, “the FBI concealed that Carter Page had been working with the CIA in his dealings with Russia, and that Page had notified CIA case managers of at least some of those contacts after he was approved as an operational contact with Russia.”

In other words, they’re getting a warrant to spy on somebody in the Trump campaign they claim is working for Trump and colluding with Russia who was actually a CIA operative working for the United States.  They knew that!  They knew Carter Page was not a Russian agent, they knew he was a CIA agent, and they asked for the warrant to spy on him anyway because all they could do was make up a case.  They didn’t have a case.  That’s incident number one.

Comey wants to say: Well, these are minor things. Uh, they really had no great impact on anything.  “The FBI application lied about the timing and the substance of Page’s relationship with the CIA.  The FBI overstated the value and corroboration of Steele’s prior work for the U.S. government to make him appear more credible than he was, and they held from the court every reason they had to doubt the reliability of the key source that Carter Page used.”

Those are the first seven incidents.  Let’s go through them again.  They knew Carter Page was not a Russian spy.  They knew he was not colluding with Russia on behalf of Trump.  They knew that he was helping the CIA in operations against Russia — and they named him as a spy for Trump, nevertheless, in the FISA application.  In addition to knowing all that, they lied about how long page had been working with the CIA.  Then when they get to the Steele dossier, they said that it had been corroborated.

They said that it had been verified.  None of it ever has been!  To this day, it’s all made up.  They lied to the court and said some of it was corroborated, some of it had value, because Steele had been a previous informant for the FBI who they trusted and so they trusted him here. When in fact, they did no longer trust Steele, and they withheld those reasons from the FISA judge as well.  The FBI relied solely, folks… It’s not a small part.  It was the primary ingredient in the application for the warrant to spy.

And the FBI’s reliance on it, which every reporter knew it was bogus, all of the national security reporters, all the CIA analysts, all these people on TV knew it was bogus and went on TV and lied about the Steele dossier because they were all working hard to get it in to the mainstream news cycle.

From the IG report, quote, “We found the FBI did not have information corroborating the allegations against Carter Page when it relied upon his reports, the Steele reports in the first FISA application or subsequent renewal applications.”

They lied in making the case to spy on an American citizen in the middle of an election. They relied on an embarrassing gossip piece that nobody had any reason to believe, that everybody had every reason not to believe. And they hid all of this from the FISA court. Because they knew the court needed to believe the Steele dossier was reliable. They knew the court needed to think the Steele dossier was the gold standard, that it held the dynamite.

They had to convince the FISA court that Trump was in fact colluding with Russia and they used the Steele dossier to do it and lied about Carter Page in the process. This is not incidental. This is not accidental. This is not incompetence. This is intentional, and that means it was with bias.

From the report. “In addition to repeating these seven significant errors contained in the first FISA application, we identified 10 additional significant errors in the three renewal applications based upon information known to the FBI after the first application and before one or more of the renewals.” That is from the report. They found these first seven incidents and then as they examined the renewal applications, they found 10 more.

Among the most significant of the 10 additional acts of deceit, the FBI omitted the fact that Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source, who the FBI said was credible, had made statements in January 2017 raising significant questions about the reliability of things in the FISA application and in the dossier.

Let me read from the report. It’s kind of convoluted, but I want to do it anyway. “Omitted the fact that Steele’s primary sub-source, who the FBI found credible, had made statements in January 2017 –” this before Trump’s inaugurated “– raising significant questions about the reliability of allegations included in the FISA applications, including, for example, that he or she –” this sub-source “– did not recall any discussion concerning WikiLeaks that there was nothing bad about the communications between the Kremlin and the Trump team and that he or she did not report to Steele in July 2016 that Page had met with the Russians.”

In other words, the FBI had all of that exculpatory information about Page, about Trump, and about the dossier, and they omitted all of it. They did not include all the evidence that said, “By the way, Court, we’re lying to you.” So not only did they knowingly lie over and over and over, which is not incidental, they compounded the lie by withholding evidence that they were lying, which of course makes sense they would do, but they’ve been found out.

Steele’s own primary source told the FBI that Steele was lying about what the source said. And the FBI ignored him and did not tell the FISA court that Steele’s number one source was saying that Steele’s dossier is bunk. The FBI withheld, concealed from the FISA court all of this because they knew it would mean the end to their ability to spy on Carter Page.

Why did they want to spy on Page? They knew there wasn’t any collusion. They knew that Page was working for America, for the CIA. So why did they want to continue to spy on him? Because they were trying to create collusion, folks. They were trying, with all of their informants — Stefan Halper, Alexander Downer, Joseph Mifsud — they were trying to create collusion between the Trump campaign with anybody in Russia.

They wanted the ability to continue to spy — loose term — so that they could then manufacture more falsehoods that Trump in fact was colluding with Russia. If the FISA court had denied them their warrant to spy on Page, they would have lost the opportunity to manufacture credible, quote, unquote, evidence that Trump was spying. But none of this ever happened. Every damned bit of this was manufactured, conceived, strategized, made up. Judges were lied to, courts were lied to, the American people were lied to, the media perpetuated these lies knowing that they were lying to everybody.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Look, folks, the bottom line is that the premier law enforcement agency the country, the FBI, at its leadership level, the intelligence community, the State Department, have been so thoroughly corrupted and remain corrupt. And those people who are the instruments of corruption are now official commentators and analysts on cable news, further corrupting the media, further corrupting ability of the American people to actually learn what’s going on and what’s happening.

I’m telling you every bit, every aspect, every element of this phony baloney, plastic banana, good-time rock ‘n’ roller impeachment garbage derives from the full corruption that was inherent in trying to reverse the election results of 2016. There is none of this that is legitimate. None of it is warranted. None of it’s real because all of it has been birthed from some of the most open and egregious corruption of agencies and the American people think are inherently honest and decent and good.

Except impeachment is real. Articles of impeachment have been voted out by the committee, they’ll be voted on on Wednesday, and there will be a trial in the Senate. And it is all bogus. There has yet to be a crime committed. There has yet to be an impeachable offense, and that doesn’t even get close to describing what actually has happened here.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here is Stacy in Athens, Georgia. Hi.

CALLER: Yeah. I was listening to the Comey interview on Sunday, and his claim was that – (dog barking) Oh, stop! His claim was that he had to depend on his underlings. Well, back in April we were told that Barr couldn’t depend on that. He had to know exactly what was going on with every part of the investigation. Why wasn’t Comey involved in that? He claims ignorance when it’s in his favor.

RUSH: Oh, I see what you’re saying. You mean Comey gets away with saying, “Well, my underlings might have been doing some things I wasn’t aware of,” but Barr was not granted the same latitude?

CALLER: Well, exactly. He was supposed to know everything that was going on, have his hands in everything, but Comey, who supposedly knew nothing about what was going on, except what he heard in the news.

RUSH: You gotta be judicious here. James Comey has not been honest since this all began. The guy wrote a book on how he’s the only guy with honor, he’s saving America, he’s Mr. Super Patriot. He alone is saving America from this dastardly Trump. And I think he actually believes it.

You know, his image before all this began was that he was the most honest, the same integrity and impeccable honor as Mueller had. All these individual citations of Comey’s lying and his prevarications, his weaknesses, I mean, the whole package here is fraudulent. The guy is just not at all what he thinks he is or what his image says he is.