RUSH:  Oh, wow.  Look at this.  The FBI is reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email use!  Holy smokes.  Wait ’til they hear about that on CNN.  Holy smokes!  Whoa.  Now my mind’s going crazy here wondering what could be behind this.  I don’t have any more information than that. (interruption) They did, huh?  They found some additional emails pertinent to the investigation.

The FBI is reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email use.  They found some additional emails pertinent to the investigation.  CNN still doesn’t know yet. (laughing) Either that or they are going to suppress the news.  They can’t suppress that.  What a time to announce that.  You know, this is gonna change, this is going to change a lot of people’s analysis of the original investigation.  It’s gonna change a lot of people’s analysis of Comey’s press conference.

We don’t know enough to really make any assessments here.  And of course, folks, it’s entirely possible what could happen here.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, Jason Chaffetz has announced that the FBI has discovered new email messages and is reopening the case on Hillary Clinton.  Jason Chaffetz tweeted a couple of minutes ago, “FBI director just informed me the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.  Case reopened.”

Hot damn.  This investigation will not conclude by the time of the election, folks.  (interruption) What, you think it will?  No, it can’t.  This investigation cannot possibly conclude by a week from Tuesday.  So it’s been reopened.  There are brand-new emails that have been discovered, pertinent.  Do they come from WikiLeaks?  Has the WikiLeaks dump shown emails that Comey didn’t have?  Are there emails the FBI didn’t get, didn’t see, didn’t find?  Where did these emails come from?  We will know this in due course.

The Clinton campaign is going to be livid over this.  They thought they had this slam dunked and put away.  I have all kinds of questions going through my mind about this now, about Comey, his stellar reputation before this happened.  Look at all that has happened to end this investigation, to suppress it, to basically conclude it with everybody thinking, “Good grief.  There was all kinds of intent here.  There were all kinds of criminal activities.”

The WikiLeaks dump, all of these emails that have been procured via WikiLeaks indicate that there was a lot there to be found that the FBI didn’t find or looked the other way when they saw it.  It must be profound for them to reopen the investigation.  Whatever they have must be pretty stunning.  But you can imagine, the Hillary campaign, Obama DOJ, Loretta Lynch meeting with Bill Clinton on the tarmac in Phoenix, and that gets the investigation shut down. Hillary Clinton gets a three-hour interview two days before Comey announces everything on this. They granted immunity to Hillary’s number one aide, Cheryl Mills, and then allowed her to be called a lawyer.

She’s not a lawyer.  She’s not Hillary Clinton’s lawyer.  But for the purposes of Hillary’s interview, they okayed the idea that she was a lawyer, and then that invoked attorney-client privilege, which meant that Cheryl Mills could not be forced to tell anybody what she knew Clinton was doing regarding this FBI stuff.  This was as corrupt as it could be right in front of our eyes.

The corruption was there.  We could see it.  It didn’t have to be reported to us.  Cheryl Mills is not a lawyer — well, she may be a lawyer.  That’s not her function with Hillary.  She’s never been Hillary’s lawyer.  She’s an aide.  She’s a PR person.  She’s an assistant like Huma Abedin Danger is.  Then she gets to sit in on Hillary’s interview with the FBI as Hillary’s lawyer, which invokes attorney-client privilege, which means Mills can’t be asked anything.

They granted her immunity. She turned over her laptop and they destroyed the laptop!  Which means they destroyed evidence.  All of this happened in clear view of people who know what’s going on.  It was highly irregular, a lot of people’s reputations took a big hit when Comey’s press conference made it clear they were not gonna pursue Hillary despite the evidence he laid out.

He laid out indictment after indictment after indictment and then said no reasonable prosecutor would bring charges here because we just couldn’t find intent.  Well, they must have found intent now, because that was the one thing that was protecting Mrs. Clinton.  No reasonable prosecutor would carry this forward.  They couldn’t find any intention on her part to break the law.  Now they found some pertinent emails, emails pertinent to the investigation, which could mean that they shine a light on intent.

Look, I’m vamping here.  I’ll have a little bit more time to put some things together.

And something else, folks.  I want to prepare you.  Look.  They could announce the reopening today and then Tuesday announce the end of the investigation, nothing there.  Gotta be prepared for anything here.  This could be a reopening for a couple of days to satisfy other political concerns covering somebody else’s rear end.  There could be a number of things we don’t know going on here.

But they’re not gonna be able to conclude this investigation before the election.  I mean, things don’t move that fast.  And the Clinton team is not gonna be participating in this fast enough for that kind of resolution to take place.  (interruption) Where will Bill meet Loretta Lynch this time?  Probably Fort Marcy Park.

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RUSH: CNN’s playing down this new investigation by the FBI.  They’re trying to play it down saying the FBI just looking at some other emails.  There’s nothing really to see here.

The banner headline on CNN: “FBI: New Emails Found Related to Clinton Investigation.”  The subhead: “FBI director: Will be examined to see if they have classified information.”  So.  So that’s where this is going to lead. The WikiLeaks email dump has clearly demonstrated classified information was being passed back and forth.  The reason this didn’t go anywhere… Let’s remember here, the reason this investigation really didn’t go anywhere is because Barack Obama would have been ensnared.

Barack Obama was emailing Hillary Clinton on her private server and therefore everything he emails is, by definition, classified.  Everything he sends is categorized as classified and he’s emailing back and forth with Mrs. Clinton using a fake name, and he lied about that.  He told everybody — the American people — that he didn’t know Hillary was using a private server until he saw it on the news.  He learned about it when all the rest of us learned about it.  It wasn’t true.

Well, how did Comey deal with that?  The way they dealt with that was very simple:  “We’re not gonna do an investigation here that’s gonna indict the Democrat nominee for president or the president of the United States.  We just we’re not. In an election year, we’re not going there.  The FBI will wash its hands of this. This is above our pay scale.”  It was something along those lines.  But something’s happened to force this to be reopened, and we’ll keep following it and pass on whatever we learn that we think’s important as we learn it.

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RUSH:  You know, everybody’s dealing with this on the fly.  CNN is say it’s just a shame that the Republicans have so politicized Comey that we don’t know that we’re gonna be able to believe anything forthcoming here.  Comey’s letter, by the way, is addressed to numerous House committee chairmen, not just Jason Chaffetz.  My thinking on this is — and I’m a layman, and I don’t want to jump the gun here and assume things that are not known.  But I can’t imagine that they would reopen this investigation if this were just an inquiry.  There has to be something here.

They have to know that there is proof of guilt now, or they have to be fairly certain of that.  They wouldn’t embarrass themselves by reopening this, especially at this stage of the campaign with this kind of heat that they have to know this is gonna cause.  I mean, they’re not living in a vacuum there.  Comey knows full well what this is gonna cause just to do an inquiry here. I think that they found guilt.  I think there was guilt the first time around that they overlooked for political reasons.  You know, Obama doesn’t want somebody to be indicted or prosecuted, they’re not gonna be.

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RUSH: Okay, would you like to hear how a cynic — a genuine cynic — reacts to this FBI story?  You want to hear the real cynical view?  There’s always a spoilsport in every group, right?  There’s always somebody who just can’t wait to throw cold water on everything.  There’s always somebody who claims to know what’s really going on, and it blows you out of the water and just ruins your day.  Here is that person.  Here is what that… Whoever… I mean, you all know one of these people.  Every one of us knows the chief cynic in our group of friends.

The cynical view of the FBI reopening the case in the Hillary Clinton emails goes this way: “Comey is just doing this to take everybody’s attention off of the WikiLeaks email dump.  He’s gonna make everybody think for the next three or four days that there’s really something to be forthcoming here. I mean, opening the investigation, reopening it is a big deal.  He knows that everybody’s gonna say, ‘Wow!  There must be something brand-new that’s dynamite.  There must be something that’s gonna just end it for her.'”

And then everybody focuses on what it is, and they drop reporting the WikiLeaks scandal, which is starting to have negative impact on the Clintons.  The WikiLeaks scandal right now is starting to hurt because it’s exposing the fraud and the hustling and the collusion and the corruption that’s going on at the Clinton Foundation.  You start messing around with things that are supposed to be charitable to serve humanity, you end up profiting personally from it, that’s easy to understand.  Everybody knows that’s not nice.

Everybody understands that you are not supposed to get rich off of a charity, and the news here is that the Clintons have done that and are doing that.  That’s easy to understand.  So, as Hillary starts plummeting in the polls — eight points down in the Washington Post — riding to the rescue is the Lone Ranger, James Comey, announcing that they’re reopening the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.  Everybody stops talking about what is easily portrayed and is easily understandable in the WikiLeaks story and starts speculating on what Comey and the FBI are doing.

All the while, nobody knows.

That’s the cynical view.  The cynical view is that Comey is still carrying water for Clinton and is trying to get everybody to stop paying attention to the WikiLeaks dump because it’s starting to have an impact.  So you announce you’re opening the inquiry, get everybody all hot and bothered and focused on it, and then after three or four or five days, announce that it was a false alarm, nothing to see here. The investigation is now officially over — and, meanwhile, in that five-day period everybody’s forgotten about be WikiLeaks.

That is the cynical view of this.

That is… If you know a cynic, that would be the way the cynic would interpret this. (interruption) I’m looking at Snerdley’s face, and he thinks, “You know what? There could be something to it.  Could be something to it.” Here’s a quote from Comey in the letter to the chairman of the various committees.  “I’m writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.”

Now, what I don’t get about this is that Comey already said her emails have classified information.  He just couldn’t find any “intent” that she did it on purpose.  So it’s not news that she was trafficking classified information.  What’s news is that Obama lied about it.  That’s what’s news. What’s news is that Obama knew and he was doing it, too, under a fake name.  So if he’s already acknowledged that she was trafficking in classified information, do they have something to show bad intent now?

Is that what they’ve come across, that there’s something that now definitely shows intent to do this?  The WikiLeaks dump shows it?  Hell, everybody in her staff talking about this knows it was the wrong thing to do.  They’re all talking about how to shield it, how to stop it, how to protect it.  “Why did she do it?”  You got emails, two or three of them. I forget the actual people.  Cheryl Mills might be one of them.  Huma Abedin might be one.  They’re asking, “What is she doing?  Why is she doing this?”  Everybody knew it was wrong. (interruption)

Yeah, Neera Tanden. That’s the woman that… A whole bunch of people.  So what could it be?  So I… (interruption) What is your theorem, Mr. Snerdley?  You’re saying you had another take. (interruption) Mmm-hmm. Mmm. (laughing) Oh, my gosh.  Okay, here’s… Snerdley’s theory is the FBI does their own internal polling, and the FBI is looking at things here and they realize there might be a new sheriff in town here in a couple of weeks and they might want to get on the right side of things with the new sheriff.

You’re talking about Sheriff Trump, right? (interruption) Yeah.  That’s not what the FBI’s supposed to do.  See, this is… The FBI is one of these institutions that we used to be able to count on, depend on, and what they told you was true.  If there was DNA evidence on something, it was there.  If there wasn’t, it wasn’t.  If there was gun residue here or wasn’t, yeah. Whatever they told you, you believed — and that’s out the window.

That’s gone now with this Clinton investigation.  They really have blown that.  I mean, people now think the FBI can be politicized like anything else that Obama touches or that the Democrats touch.

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RUSH:  So everybody’s trying to figure out what happened, what is new here?  I would like to offer a possibility.  One of the most eye opening revelations in the WikiLeaks email dump has been Clinton staffers, when learning that Obama lied, saying he didn’t know about this server ’til he saw it on the news like everybody else, they knew that was a lie, they knew Obama was emailing with Hillary, and Cheryl Mills, in an email to somebody, said, “We have got to clean this up.”  You think Comey didn’t notice that?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Can you imagine who it is on the Hillary team that drew the short straw and has to tell her the FBI investigation has been reopened?  Do you think they ran around and got the ashtrays and the flower vases out of the room first?  The shot glasses, get those gone.  Those are easy to pick up, shot glasses, pick one of those things up, even Hillary in her weakened condition could pick up a shot glass and throw that.

JOHNNY DONOVAN:  And now, from sunny south Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!

RUSH:  You know, Hillary is in Iowa, and the camera is showing the front door of her airplane open and the stairs — ah, there she comes.  We’ve had that picture for 20 minutes.  She’s been on that airplane 20 minutes.  Now she’s waddling down the stairs and got into the SUV with ease.  Did not need any assistance getting into the SUV.  See how fair we can be here?  She sat on that airplane a long time before getting down those stairs.

Anyway, greetings, and welcome back.  It’s Open Line Friday, Rush Limbaugh here behind the Golden EIB Microphone.  Our telephone number, if you want to be on the program is 800-282-2882.  The email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.

If you are just getting up or if you are just turning on the radio, the breaking news that happened about an hour ago, James Comey, the director of the FBI, sent a letter to various chairmen, chairwomen of congressional committees announcing that they had come across additional emails that have caused them to reopen the Hillary Clinton email investigation.  Apparently they were discovered as the FBI was investigating an unrelated case.

This is as much as is known.  Everything beyond that now is learned analysis and speculation, such as, “Well, they surely wouldn’t open this just as an inquiry.  There has to be something serious here.”  And with just a little over a week before the election, to do this, I mean, they have to know the impact this will have on the media and on the campaigns. So there must be something serious to it, otherwise they could easily have waited ’til after the election to do this.  Remember, Nixon didn’t get nailed on Watergate ’til after he was inaugurated.  Watergate was learned that summer.

The cynical view of this, I just want to share this with you again. We all know somebody in our circle of friends that’s a cynic.  I’m not the cynic, by the way.  And the cynic’s in my group irritate the hell out of me, ’cause they’re usually negative know-it-alls.  But nevertheless, in the interests of covering every base here, I must share with you the cynical reaction to this, which is the WikiLeaks email dump is beginning to have negative impact on the Hillary campaign.

The WikiLeaks story has now made the front page of the New York Times, CBS, NBC, Washington Post, ABC.  It’s now a lead story and specifically the WikiLeaks information about the Clinton Foundation and how they’re getting rich off of a charity, even quotes from Chelsea Clinton to Doug Band saying, “You gotta stop this, it looks like you’re hustling everybody,” and he was.  What he was doing, he was soliciting donations to the foundation.  Let’s just pick the ABC Widget Company.  He asked the ABC Widget Company for a $4 million donation and then asked them to hire Bill Clinton as a consultant for $3 million.

Another company was solicited for a two-and-a-half-million-dollar donation and then asked to pay Hillary Clinton $500,000 for two speeches.  This happened.  Chelsea Clinton found out about it, she goes to Doug Band, who was the guy doing it.  There’s an email from him saying (paraphrasing), “Look, I’m not the only guy doing this here. Bill Clinton was doing it. If you’re gonna focus on me, don’t just look at me, Clinton himself was doing it.”

Chelsea sees also this, there’s an email from Chelsea in which her reaction is recorded, and her reaction is (paraphrasing), “You gotta stop this.  It looks like you’re out there hustling,” which is exactly what he was doing.  The Clintons have gotten rich off of their charity.  That’s easy to understand, because charities are about giving money away, not taking it.  But here comes this FBI investigation.  Yes, they’re reopening it.  And what’s gonna happen, the WikiLeaks story is gonna take second, third, our fourth place.  This is the cynical view.

So the reopening of the email investigation sweeps the WikiLeaks leaks off of all news coverage.  And then next week Comey sends another letter out saying our investigation is complete and there’s nothing to see here.  We found nothing new. We followed the lead that we had, and our investigation’s now closed.  And WikiLeaks will have been off and out of the news for five days.  That is the cynical view of this.  There are just as many other valid views of this, that it’s serious.

You want another view of this?  I predict we’re gonna see this written by somebody somewhere.  Mr. Snerdley, you alluded to it a moment ago when you said the FBI does its own polling.  James Comey enjoyed a flawless reputation before this.  James Comey was heralded by everybody who had ever worked with him, from Patrick Fitzgerald to Andy McCarthy to John Ashcroft.  I mean, the list of people who’ve worked with Comey is long, and to a man, to a woman, they all attested to his virtue and his integrity and his being a straight shooter, that he’s untouched by political concerns.

Then his press conferences where he lists all of the violations of law that Hillary engaged in but exonerated her on the basis that he couldn’t find any intent.  And his reputation took a huge hit.  And people who had known him and worked with him for years began to ask what the hell happened to Jim Comey.  That began to breed speculation, maybe Obama’s got something on him. All of this stuff was out there, folks.

It was being written about at the highest levels of intellectual dispatch.  Respected journals, magazines, think tank newsletters, all kinds of learned people were speculating that James Comey had finally been corrupted by the Obama administration. That James Comey might have been pressured to recommend, which the FBI never does, the FBI never calls a press conference to say they’re recommending nothing happened.

That happens behind the scenes.  We never see that.  And the FBI never calls a press conferences to say they’re gonna recommend the DOJ pursue charges.  They do all of that behind closed doors, and it’s the DOJ, the attorney general who does all the press conferences announcing what they’re gonna do.  It was highly irregular for Comey to go lay out his evidence, and then say, “No reasonable prosecutor would proceed, and so we are not recommending.”

Everybody was saying, “This is so unusual.  This never happens this way.” That somebody must have gotten to Comey.  And the presumption is that Obama has politicized virtually every cabinet department, every agency of government. He’s politicized it for the purposes of advancing his and the Democrat Party’s agenda, and now that came to include Comey.  Well, Comey heard all that, Comey saw all that, and as somebody who enjoyed a flawless reputation for the greatest integrity, this could not have sat well.

So I suspect there will be those who theorize that Comey has been wallowing in guilt all of this time and finally, as he perceives the WikiLeaks data, he realizes that he can no longer continue to act like nothing happened here when the WikiLeaks data is conclusive that there was so much going on and that there was intent to hide it and there was knowledge of trafficking in classified data and that the president was engaging in it after lying and saying he wasn’t. He was using a fake name. That the WikiLeaks document dump produced so much new evidence that Comey could not ignore it.  I predict you’ll see somebody write something along these lines over the course of the next couple of days to explain what’s going on.

On the Drive-By Media side, CNN, the New York Times, ABC will attempt to downplay this, saying it’s obviously perfunctory, that there’s nothing to see here, or they will savage Comey as a partisan rat.  They will say that Comey has been lying in wait all of this time, that they’ve known from the get-go that Comey was a Republican, that he’s always been a Republican, he was waiting for the most opportune time to strike to do great damage to the great Mrs. Clinton.

Paul Krugman of the New York Times has tweeted that Comey now is required to tell us everything right now, and if he doesn’t, that the automatic conclusion is that this is nothing more than a partisan, and therefore corrupt — you see, when the left uses government to go after its enemies or advance its agenda, it’s perfectly fine.  It’s said that it happens under Republican auspices that it poses a great threat to the very way of life.

So that’s basically where we are with this.  There’s no way this investigation can conclude before Election Day.  It could.  I mean, there’s no way it’s gonna conclude with she’s guilty, she did it.  It could conclude, according to the cynic, the cynic’s take on this, next week Comey could say, “Nothing to see here.  We’ve looked at it.  Sorry, but it’s not what we thought it was.”  That could happen before the election.  But a further investigation with more interviews and a collection of evidence designed to get a conviction, something like that’s not gonna happen before Election Day.  But it doesn’t have to if it’s legit.  So that off the top of my head is what we have on this.

Oh, there’s one other thing I mentioned that might be the smoking gun here, if you will.  Cheryl Mills, in one of these emails produced by the WikiLeaks dump, makes a reference to Obama having lied about not knowing Hillary was using a private server, not knowing she was trafficking in classified data.  He said he didn’t know anything about any of that ’til he saw it on the news.  Well, they knew that he was lying, because he was communicating with Hillary on her server, under a fake name, and the email from Cheryl Mills is something along the lines, “How are we gonna clean this up?”

So it could be that Comey saw that.  There’s “intent.” (chuckles)  I mean, there is intent to suborn perjury.  There’s an attempt to break the law.  There’s an attempt to suborn lying if not perjury.  Obama wasn’t sworn.  But still, that could be enough to be what this is.  The WikiLeaks stuff is important, too, because it’s now starting to sink in and take hold, and Hillary is trending downward in the polls.  She’s going up in some others, too, by the way.  In the Investor’s Business Daily poll, she’s up three today after Trump has been up all week.

So it’s volatile out there, and we’re still at that stage where nobody really knows what’s gonna happen.  But there is no shining star on Hillary Clinton right now.  She’s got trouble.  She’s always had trouble because she’s not independently charismatic.  She’s not engaging.  She’s not. I mean, we learned in these WikiLeaks emails that they focus grouped people for two years, folks, in order to find out what kind of person Hillary should be.  They focus grouped it!  Now, Bill Clinton did that too during his presidency.

Some of you who were too young to know this, do not doubt me.

The Clintons actually tested and focus grouped where they should go on vacation.

No, no! I’m not making it up.  Presidential vacations — with Obama you never know.  They’re all the time.  Traditionally, they’re August.  The Clintons routinely had their pollsters assemble focus groups and test where they would get the greatest public reaction in terms of vacation location.  They actually poll tested — they focus grouped — everything.  We now know that Hillary focus grouped just what kind of person she should be.  What that means is, there’s no way they can let Hillary go out there being who she is ’cause it doesn’t work.  So they had to focus group and poll test thousands of people to create a persona for Hillary to then act and try to pull off.