RUSH: Well, look at that. “CBS Blasts Trump for Unprecedented Breach of 60 Minutes Agreement.” Unprecedented breach of 60 Minutes agreement? Unprecedented breach. Who do these people think they are? They think they can do anything they want. They can videotape you and then they have total control over it. If you have your own version of the video and you release it, you’ve breached an agreement? What if they’re lying about you, they’re lying about you, which, what are the odds?
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RUSH: “CBS Blasts Trump for Unprecedented Breach of 60 Minutes Agreement.” I wonder what the breach was. Well, he walked out of the interview for one. Lesley Stahl was — you know, I mentioned this yesterday. Let me double down on the — well, not double down. Just reiterate. The other day — it was earlier this week — I got a note from Cookie who said that a very famous and top-tier elitist Washington journalist wanted to talk to me for five minutes just, you know, off camera. And she’d mentioned the name of who it was. It was Lesley Stahl, although I didn’t mention this when I first told you about it. I didn’t say it was Lesley Stahl, and I didn’t know they were doing a piece on Trump.
So yesterday I mentioned that it was Lesley Stahl that wanted to ask that. Obviously it was for this Trump report. You want to talk about some bias? You want to talk about prejudice? This is prejudice. The fact of the matter is, who is it that’s burning down American cities right now? Not after the election, but before the election. Who is and how long have they been doing it? Why, my take is it’s Democrats. It’s Black Lives Matter. It’s Antifa. It’s Democrats in blue cities, in blue states. They are rioting, they are looting, they are destroying property that isn’t their own. It’s happening. Lesley Stahl can watch it happen if she wants to.
And yet she had the audacity to want to talk to me to find out if you was gonna urge you to remain calm after Trump loses the election or was I going to urge you to raise hell out there. And, of course, it’s insulting on a number of levels. Number one is, I never urge audience activism. I don’t have to. You people make up your minds what you’re gonna do. I do not look at you as not knowing how to behave, not knowing what to do. It never crossed my mind to tell you to do something or not. It does cross the minds of leftists because that’s what they want.
They want control over people’s lives. They want to be able to punish you if you don’t do what they say. It would no more occur to me to tell you to remain calm — now, I know on occasion I have asked you to, you know, don’t tell anybody what I’m gonna tell you, don’t want the wrong people to hear this. I mean, I’ve done that. But in terms of advocating mass behavior that would be bad behavior? I would never urge people to engage in criminal behavior to boot.
Yet look at what these people believe? The audacity of this is just — and I’ve been around 32 years. It’s as though they’ve learned nothing about me or about this program, how it happens, why it is the size it is, why it’s so large. None of it has mattered. There’s no curiosity among any of them to find out. It’s just something they wish weren’t the case, and they do their best to defame it whenever they can.
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RUSH: So here’s what’s got ’em all ticked off at CBS. Trump has released the full 60 Minutes interview. Ha! Trump posted the full 60 Minutes interview on Facebook. We are feverishly attempting to get it. We’re gonna pull it. We’re gonna try to pull some bites from it, but it’s gonna take us a while. We’re a man short today on the editing staff.
Some guy doesn’t know what time of year it is, and so we’re limited in the number of people that can help put this stuff together. (interruption) What? (interruption) What else am I supposed to say? Guy takes a day off when we’re 10 days away from the election. Anyway, we’re doing what we can, as fast as we can.
But I see CNN is replaying, it looks like, the Biden 60 Minutes interview or a portion of it, but this is what’s got CBS so ticked off. Trump’s just released the whole thing on Facebook, and I think he did it… If my memory serves correctly, he did it because he thinks they did their usual tricks, misrepresented what their purpose was or how they were going to be or whatever it was. I love it. I absolutely love it.
RUSH: We have two sound bites here that we have from the Trump 60 Minutes interview.
Now, here’s what happened. Apparently, this is iPhone video. So a White House staffer apparently videotaped this while it was happening, and 60 Minutes may not have known this. Because Lesley Stahl’s audio, she appears to be off mic, which would be the case if the recording device is some distance from her. Now, the whole interview was 37 minutes, and Cookie has watched the whole thing.
She said that Trump is very smooth, that he’s very relaxed, and that it seems like the recording is off an iPhone, like maybe a White House staffer did it. Now, CBS obviously would claim property rights over this. It’s their camera. It’s their media. It’s their show. And they probably would not grant anybody the right to videotape it at the same time.
I’m sure people have asked, tried to negotiate it. I don’t know. I’m just… Now, I’m really flying blind here. My guess is (chuckles) that White House did this without CBS knowing about it, and because Trump thinks he was treated unfairly in this interview, they’ve posted it on Facebook! This has never happened to 60 Minutes.
The whole interview is on Facebook. You don’t have to watch 60 Minutes Sunday night to see this. So here are a couple of bites that we have culled from it in the time that we had. This Trump is trying to bring up the Hunter Biden story to Lesley Stahl here.
STAHL: (silence)
THE PRESIDENT: His family is corrupt, okay? He’s corrupt. He’s a corrupt politician, and he’s in the midst of a scandal —
STAHL: He’s noooot!
THE PRESIDENT: — and he’s taking —
STAHL: (snickers) He’s not.
THE PRESIDENT: Of course he is, Lesley.
STAHL: Noooo. C’mon.
THE PRESIDENT: Of course he is, and you don’t cover it.
STAHL: Well, because it can’t be verified. I — I’m telling you —
THE PRESIDENT: You want to talk about insignificant things.
STAHL: I’m telling you that —
THE PRESIDENT: Of course it can be verified.
STAHL: We —
THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me.
STAHL: We cannot verify it.
THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me. They found the laptop. Lesley? Lesley?
STAHL: Can’t be verified.
“It can’t be verified.” “It can be verified! They found the laptop.” She says, “It can’t be verified.” No wonder he gets ticked off. It is verified! It has been verified that Biden was the architect of this scheme in both China and Ukraine. The next bite is on the spying on his campaign.
THE PRESIDENT: The biggest scandal was when they spied on my campaign. They spied on my campaign.
STAHL: But there’s no ev… There’s no real evidence of that.
THE PRESIDENT: Of course there is. It’s all over the place.
STAHL: Noooo.
THE PRESIDENT: Lesley —
STAHL: Sir?
THE PRESIDENT: — they spied on my campaign —
STAHL: Can I —
THE PRESIDENT: — and they got caught.
STAHL: Can I say something? You know, this is 60 Minutes, and we can’t put on things we can’t verify.
THE PRESIDENT: You won’t put it on because it’s bad for Biden.
STAHL: We can’t put on things we can’t verify, and —
THE PRESIDENT: Lesley, they spied on my campaign.
STAHL: Well, we can’t verify that.
THE PRESIDENT: It’s been totally verified.
STAHL: No.
THE PRESIDENT: It’s been… Just go down and get the papers. They spied on my campaign; they got caught —
STAHL: No!
THE PRESIDENT: — and then they went much further than that and they got caught. And you will see that, Lesley, and you know that, but you just don’t want to put it on the air.
STAHL: No. (sputtering) As a matter of fact, I don’t know that —
THE PRESIDENT: Okay.
STAHL: — and you’re out there —
THE PRESIDENT: Why don’t you get back to your interview?
RUSH: All right. Now, this points up something interesting to me. But before I get to what, this is… If I were Trump, I’d a been going nuts too. “It can’t be verified. There’s no real evidence.” What do you mean, there’s no evidence! But the problem is the terminology he’s using. This coup was not about spying on him.
I mean, it was, but that’s one of the most insignificant aspects of it, if you ask me. To me, this is a classic example of President Trump believing everybody knows what he knows, and so all he’s gotta do is bring up a term or a phrase and it’s gonna trigger everybody’s memory. “They spied on my campaign. The biggest scandal…” No, the biggest scandal was not when they spied on the campaign, sir.
The biggest scandal was the coup they ran trying to get rid of you! That included spying on you, but “spying on your campaign” is such a large, vague and opaque proposition that of course it allows her to say, “There’s no real evidence of that,” but there is evidence. Now, I know why he says it, because Barr says it. Barr said under oath, “Yes, I think they spied on the campaign.”
It was a horrible thing. It was, and I’m not trying to diminish it. But this coup involved much more than spying on his campaign. There was actual lawbreaking that went on here. There was no evidence that warranted anything they did, Lesley. The only thing they had was the Steele Dossier. I never hear Trump talk about the dossier. I never hear him talk about it.
He’s always talking about the fact that “they spied on my campaign.” The Steele dossier, they lied to the FISA court, Lesley! They had no evidence. They spied on Carter Page. They set him up. There was never any evidence that warranted any of the investigation they did. When the file was handed to Robert Mueller, it was empty!
But spying on the campaign is the least of the things that happened. I mean, to one extent or another every campaign is spied on. Now, not in the sense that Trump is talking about. What he means here is that the FBI attempted to embed people like Stefan Halper and others in his campaign. But you’ve gotta finish the sentence.
“They were spying on my campaign, Lesley, because they wanted to implant people — embed people — who were then going to try and make contact with the Russians so that they could then say that I was colluding. But they failed. There was no collusion with the Russians, Lesley. That’s the lie. There was no meddling with the Russians. I’m the cleanest guy in Washington.
“I’m the last guy they could pin anything on. I’m the most investigated guy in this city, and they haven’t found diddly-squat on me, as compared to Joe Biden.” But, “The biggest scandal was when they spied on my campaign,” that doesn’t even scratch the surface of what they did, Mr. President. That doesn’t even get close to scratching the surface of the attempt that was run on you.
They were attempting to overturn the results of the 2016 election. They were trying to get you thrown in jail, sir. They were trying to get you thrown out of town. They were trying to get your family indicted. They were doing far more than spying on your campaign.
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