RUSH: “Donald Trump was the third person in the room in August 2015 when his lawyer Michael Cohen and … Pecker discussed ways Pecker could help counter negative stories about Trump\u2019s relationships with women…” Trump\u2019s relationships with women? “It\u2019s impeachable, Mr. Limbaugh! It\u2019s criminal. We\u2019re on the verge…” It is?<\/p>\n
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“According to documents supplied by the SDNY, Trump and Cohen had a meeting one year before,” not 2015. It was August of 2014 they met “to discuss this arrangement.” Again, the memorandum from the Southern District of New York says, \u201cIn August 2014, Chairman [Pecker] had met with Cohen and [Trump] and had offered to help deal with negative stories about [Trump]\u2019s relationships with women by identifying such stories so that they could be purchased and \u2018killed.\u2019”<\/p>\n
So this arrangement was made long before Trump became a candidate and probably even before he thought of running for the White House. So where\u2019s the campaign finance violation? There isn\u2019t one, and there isn\u2019t a crime. And, by the way, this practice… I\u2019ve told this story once just to show you how common this is. When this program was first starting, we started with 56 radio stations in small markets. They were great radio stations, but it wasn\u2019t enough to make this a success.<\/p>\n
You need to be… I\u2019ll give you a little inside baseball stat. If you can get a radio program on the air in the top-ten markets, then you can tell advertisers that you reach 80% of the nation\u2019s population. If you can get your program on the top 20 markets, you can say to advertisers that you are reaching — not that they\u2019re all listening to you, but you are reaching — 95% of the population. So we needed top-ten markets. We weren\u2019t on the air in New York, but our commercials were airing there.<\/p>\n
That was an arrangement that we had to make. The New York stations said, “We\u2019re not gonna carry some bumpkin national show! This is New York. People in New York don\u2019t care what\u2019s happening anywhere else.” Okay, fine. You wait. Up next was Los Angeles, and the guy that ran the station we were trying to get on in Los Angeles agreed to buy the show and bury it! It\u2019s called “shelving.” He agreed to buy it and pay us for it but never air it, keeping it out of the market entirely.<\/p>\n
Now, this is not the same reason that the National Enquirer was trying to bury stories about McDougal, but the point is these things are not uncommon. The guy in LA didn\u2019t want to carry the show but he didn\u2019t want to take a chance it was gonna succeed on some other station; so he was offering to pay for it and shelve it. Now, I\u2019m thankful my syndication partner Ed McLaughlin said no. By then, we needed some money. We were just starting out. There was no funding or any of that. It was purely an entrepreneurial exercise.<\/p>\n
We resisted the temptation and found a different station in Los Angeles. The rest is history. But these kind of things, these kinds of — and none of that was criminal. Not a thing of this was criminal, trying to bury it. (chuckles) I thought it had criminal intent, in a way. But it was not, according to law, criminal. Other stations tried to say, “Yeah, we\u2019ll take it, but we\u2019re gonna run it between midnight and 5 on Saturday night.” No, we\u2019re not gonna let you have it.<\/p>\n
All these big market stations were afraid of it but didn\u2019t want it, initially. They wanted to bury it or shelve it. And we just stuck with it. Pecker was a friend of Trump\u2019s and this is a deal that they entered into. But it was 2014, not 2015. Trump was not even a candidate at that time. But look at the juxtaposition of things here. Where did this all start? It all started with Russian collusion, and I just saw a Fox News poll.<\/p>\n
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This is the poll that has Trump\u2019s approval number at 46%. This poll has, again, 46 or 47% of the American people believe the Russians tampered with votes! Forty-six or 47% believe that the Russians did indeed collude! They believe it — in a Fox News poll — when it didn\u2019t happen! (chuckles) The people who are pushing the conspiracy have not even alleged it. They have created the impression. That\u2019s how collusion has come to be defined, the way it\u2019s been discussed by the media and all of the paid-for guests on the media.<\/p>\n
The “collusion” has come to mean Russians somehow find a way to screw with our votes and screw with the outcome of elections. Even Rosenstein has made a point of saying nobody that\u2019s been indicted has had anything to do with votes. Not a single vote has been tampered with. Not a single election outcome has been affected. The media studiously ignores it, and the same kind of thing is happening here. There isn\u2019t any crime. We started out with Trump colluding with Russia.<\/p>\n
And now we\u2019re being told that there are dire criminal activities that have been unearthed are Donald Trump paying off women with whom he reportedly has had affairs. Such a dastardly scheme! Such a dastardly scheme! I mean, the idea that these things are gonna send Donald Trump to jail is absurd, unless the entire legal system ends up being rigged and all kinds of violations there take place. But under the current code, under current law, there is no way that what Trump has done here is criminal or in violation of campaign finance violations, and that\u2019s not from me.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s from Bradley Smith, the former chairman of the Federal Election Commission.<\/p>\n
BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n
RUSH: Another thing that came to mind, two things. Every witness that the great Robert Mueller has drug out of the sewer is a known liar. Every witness that Mueller has has been demonstrated to be a liar to one degree or another, and many of these witnesses have claimed that Mueller is even asking them to lie now and say what Mueller wants them to say instead of what happened.<\/p>\n
Second point, just to remind you, when it comes to federal election law, remember who wrote these laws. People that run for office. They write federal election law, but it is largely — well, I\u2019ll give you an example. If, in the case of a questionable campaign expense, if it can be shown that the expense in any way, any way whatsoever is personal, then it is automatically exempted as a campaign or election expense. That\u2019s in the law. The people that run for office wrote the law, and they gave themselves a lot of outs.<\/p>\n
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Well, in 2014, if Donald Trump\u2019s having a meeting with the rat and with Pecker from the National Enquirer at which time Pecker is offering to buy stories about these babes and then not run them, 2014, it could easily be claimed that Trump entered into this deal or okayed it in order to keep his family from finding out, i.e., personal!<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t take much evidence. If there is even the slightest even opportunity that the payment could be said to be for personal reasons, then it is automatically exempt as a campaign expense and therefore exempt from campaign finance law.
\nProving intent is, unlike Comey\u2019s claim about Hillary, proving intent in campaign finance law violations is mandatory. And it\u2019s a really hard thing to prove because of this out that they\u2019ve built into the system.<\/p>\n
BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n
RUSH: You know, it seems like only yesterday that Cohen… Look at people we\u2019re talking about here. It seems like only yesterday Cohen\u2019s lawyers said that he was gonna wait until Mueller\u2019s investigation was completed and report was issued before he would speak publicly, which was a laugh. Cohen can\u2019t wait to tell the world what a victim he is and what a reprobate Trump is, and it\u2019s all because he\u2019s made a decision that his future financial opportunities are far greater as a friend of the media and a friend of Hollywood and a friend of movie and TV producers than as a Donald Trump loyalist.<\/p>\n
No question that that\u2019s his decision — and they probably put the fear of God into him at the special counsel\u2019s office, and he has committed tax fraud and other serious crimes that have nothing to do with Trump that he\u2019s still hoping to get reduced time on. But why is Mueller and the SDNY…? Why are they allowing Cohen to go all over TV now and talk to Stephanopoulos? Isn\u2019t Cohen interfering in their investigation by blabbing to the press like this? Isn\u2019t this what we\u2019ve always heard?<\/p>\n
Why are they allowing him to do it? The DOJ, for example, they say they can\u2019t release any documents to Congress because it might interfere with the Mueller and Trump witch hunts! They can\u2019t reveal… Congress still wants some documents on this whole thing that happened with Flynn that have not been released, and they\u2019re saying, “We can\u2019t release them. It would interfere with the investigation!” Well, what is Cohen doing? That\u2019s why I don\u2019t think… I don\u2019t think he\u2019s a free agent on this.<\/p>\n