STEPHANOPOULOS: I was just able to confirm with sources that have direct knowledge of the conversation between Senator Clinton and Governor Bill Richardson that she made the most stark argument you can make. She said flatly, ‘Barack Obama cannot win, Bill.’ Barack Obama cannot win. The Clinton campaign is starting to make very, very dire arguments in these conversations with superdelegates.
RUSH: ‘Barack Obama can’t win.’ That’s their pitch to the superdelegates. It’s getting even better than that, but all things in due course. Now, Richardson. If you think back to the first Clinton term, Bill Richardson really did get screwed with the Clintons. They made him get Monica Lewinsky a job at the United Nations when he was ambassador up there. Bill Richardson got called in for testimony with Ken Starr, and… I find this amazing, the number of Clinton people who will not write a tell-all book but, boy, when they have a chance to turn the screws to these people, they are doing it! You people, many of you hate the Clintons and you want to see them roasted and out of American politics in terms of presidential politics. You’ve got a delight here in what is happening and what you’re seeing with all these defections. Jon Corzine, who had endorsed Hillary, said that if she doesn’t win the popular vote (he’s the governor of New Jersey), he’s going with Obama. General Dean is in retreat.
Now, he’s trying to get all the superdelegates to agree to commit publicly long before they get to their convention in late August. But Mrs. Clinton says he’s a loser. Obama ‘can’t win.’ That’s what they’re telling all the superdelegates. Now, how many votes has Obama got? It’s 13,355,000 or so, my latest count. So when she tells Bill Richardson, ‘He can’t win, Bill. He can’t win,’ and now, of course, Richardson’s leaked that out. She’s saying that 13 and a half million Democrats have voted for Obama, voted for a loser. Whether a do you bet…? Well, what do you think the possibility is that Bill Richardson taped that phone call with her, when he called her and said, ‘Sorry, but I’m splitting the scene, and I’m endorsing Obama’? These people know who they’re dealing with when they’re dealing with the Clintons. Here’s Bill Richardson yesterday on CNN, The Situation Room. John King filling in for Wolf Blitzer. King said, ‘According to this account, Clinton gets red-faced, he turns to this woman, he says this: ‘Five times to my face, Richardson said he would never do that.’ Is that true?’
RICHARDSON: No. And the Clintons should get over this. I mean, I did this endorsement ten days ago. I try to stay above it. I feel that my loyalty is to the country.
RUSH: ‘But he said ‘five times to my face.’ Did you promise Bill Clinton anything that he could have missed?’
RICHARDSON: No, I never did. And I never saw him five times. I saw him once when he came to New Mexico to watch the Super Bowl with me. We made it very clear to him that he shouldn’t expect an endorsement, uh, after that, uh, meeting, and at one point I was very close to endorsing Senator Clinton, but I held back. I waited. I felt the campaign got nasty. I heard, uh, Senator Obama. He would talk to me continuously.
RUSH: All right. Now, we have a dilemma. We have ourselves a first-rate Democrat Party dilemma here. Bill Clinton says in San Francisco on Sunday — he lost his temper — Bill Richardson promised him five times to his face. (doing Clinton impression) ‘That’s right, Limbaugh. You heard it right: five times to my face. He would never, ever, endorse Obama. He would not do this.’ Now, you just heard Richardson say he never said that. Now, who do we believe? Who do we believe? Well, I know he said he didn’t sleep with the woman, but that’s the point. Which one of these two guys have been under oath and lied? William Jefferson Blythe Clinton! Now, but we could think like a moderate at this. If you’re a Democrat, you want to mitigate the damage here. You think like a moderate. ‘I know who lied. It was Bill. But we don’t want to offend anybody here. We don’t want to take any… Everybody lies. We can’t hold this against him.’ With Clinton, everybody knows he does lie. But here’s a clue to the truth. Bill Clinton did not say, ‘Bill Richardson promised me,’ or ‘Bill Richardson promised me several times.’
He tossed in the number five. You gotta learn how to parse the Clintons. ‘Bill Richardson promised me five times to my face. He said five times to my face,’ and James Carville said that Bill Richardson promised Clinton ‘five times.’ That’s a focus group talking point! That was not accidental. That was not improv. He was going to use it if he got the question; he got the question Sunday in San Francisco. Now, you think it’s automatic here to believe Bill Richardson because of Bill Clinton and his serial lying. However, how many of you remember that Bill Richardson phonied up a resume? Remember this? Do you remember what it was, Mr. Snerdley? What did he phony up? What did he put on his resume — and it was there for years — and it never happened? That he was drafted by a Major League Baseball team, but he never was, and he got called on it, and he said, ‘Well, you know, somebody told me I was once. I — I — I didn’t really know. So I just put it on my resume. You’re right. I’ve checked and it didn’t happen.’ So who the hell do we believe here?