RUSH: Let’s go to the phones, sneak a call in. We’ll start with Michael, Charlotte, North Carolina. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, sir. How you doing?
RUSH: Very well. Great to have you with us.
CALLER: So I’m 27 years old. I need a little wisdom from you. How does the current situation going on right now, how does that compare to Watergate? ‘Cause I wasn’t around during the seventies.
RUSH: Well, if Trump is right, and if Obama or an agent has actively been surveilling and wiretapping the Republican presidential candidate, that makes Watergate look like Romper Room. It would be the culmination times five of what Nixon was anticipating or hoping to do in Watergate.
You know, Nixon was penalized for what they thought he wanted to do. It’s not for what actually had happened. Watergate was all about the cover-up of it and what that presented as a problem for Nixon. If this actually happened, it dwarfs Watergate. I’m not just saying that for, you know, partisan political purposes or what have you. That’s just a genuine assessment. This is really, really big stuff. You know, presidents cannot do this. You don’t get to surveil your political opponents like this under the guise that they’re committing crimes and so forth. If there’s ever evidence that would support this, then Watergate leaves the lexicon and Obamagate replaces it, if it’s ever established and proven.
By the way, Thomas Friedman was on Meet the Press yesterday. Did you hear what he said? He said, “Well, there’s no evidence for this Russian hack. None. That’s why we need an independent counsel.” So the seriousness of the charge is far more important than the nature of the evidence. They don’t have any. It’s much more reasonable to think Trump’s right than these people are.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay. Now, he asked a question about Watergate, and he wasn’t alive living through it, and I just had a couple minutes. Let me expand on the answer to our previous caller. What Nixon and Watergate was originally trying to do was find out where all the leaks were coming from. Sound familiar? The Plumbers were supposed to find out where the leaks were coming from. But it was their idea to try to find out by tapping the DNC phones. Which they failed to do, by the way. Nixon didn’t know. Nixon was just accused of trying to tap the DNC and Watergate, but it turned out reality he did not know anything about it, ever.
It was the cover-up that did him in. It was the Plumbers that were doing it. They thought they were doing it to please the president, and they thought they were doing it… They snuck into the DNC headquarters, which were in the Watergate office complex and residential towers. They even left evidence of their first visit. They left masking tape or electrical tape on the locks so that the doors would not lock when they shut so that they could get back in. It was a bumbling bunch of Keystone Cops — and it’s curious, because these guys were not Keystone Cops in reality.
So Nixon was just trying to find out where the leaks were coming from, but he didn’t know about it. When the cover-up began, you know, that’s when Watergate began to unravel because then that produced tapes and a bunch of other evidence of Nixon’s basic personality toward Democrats, his suspicions and what others had been doing on his behalf. But I’ll share something with you. My dad, who just Watergate infuriated him. Until his last, dying day, my if anybody ever brought up Watergate, my dad would say, “What did he do? What did Nixon do? You tell me.” Some 18-year-old friend of mine would come up and Dad would say, “You tell me. What did Nixon do?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Limbaugh, really.”
“That’s right because Nixon didn’t do anything.”
My dad believed it was a hatchet job from the get-go. Now, it wasn’t just that. There were some questionable things, but Nixon didn’t know of it. The question was, how does this rate against Watergate. If Trump is right and if Obama ordered this and there was surveillance of Trump during the campaign, Nixon never did anything like that. May have wanted to; he was trying to plug leaks. Nixon at the time, by the way, was running away in the polls. He had a double-digit lead. He was gonna go on to win the election in a landslide.
Nobody could understand the paranoia.