RUSH: Mr. Snerdley, what did I tell you yesterday? Can you turn on his microphone in there so that he can address the audience? Is that possible without going — okay. I want to get something out of — and, by the way, on health insurance, it seems like everybody’s forgotten that we’re talking about insurance here and not full-fledged coverage of everybody’s health care. I’ll get on to that in a minute here, folks.
But first, we’re living in really, really, really dangerous times, and I made this point back last November. People were getting worried that Trump seemed to be very close to Obama, seemed to be very accommodating of Obama, seemed to be very complimentary of Obama. Now we’ve got the WikiLeaks dump here on the CIA, Vault 7.
Folks, we are in the midst of dangerous times like you cannot believe, and Donald J. Trump is the target. Now, I had something I wanted to point out yesterday, and I didn’t. I was so absorbed yesterday in the minutia of detail that a couple things I refrained from saying — didn’t refrain; just didn’t get to them — were hard, fast opinions about what Trump was really trying to do with this allegation that Obama had wiretapped him, ’cause the way this is playing out is beautiful.
This is absolutely beautiful the way this is playing out. It’s a brilliant maneuver on Trump’s part, whether he intended it to be or not. Now, Mr. Snerdley came in here before the program, about an hour before the program yesterday, asked me what I make of all this, and that’s when I first ran by him the question of is it reasonable or unreasonable to think that this could happen. But then what did I tell you? What did I say to you?
SNERDLEY: You said that you believe that Donald Trump was fed up with the lies coming at him from the Obama people, this was a shot right back at Obama. You want to dish this stuff over here, take this.
RUSH: Okay, that’s exactly right. And I wanted Mr. Snerdley to tell you so that you don’t think I’m making up something I said yesterday for post-facto brilliance. I want you to know that the brilliance was here yesterday; I just didn’t say it. And the theory that I articulated to Mr. Snerdley was, when everybody was saying, “What the hell is Trump doing? Oh, my God, Obama tapped?” I said, “Look, what I think Trump’s actually doing is saying, ‘You guys want to lie about me in your Russia stuff, here’s a taste of your own medicine. I’m just gonna fire something right back at you.'” So he fires back that Obama is bugging him, that Obama bugged Trump Tower, and look what that has wrought. It’s fascinating.
Greetings, my friends. Welcome. Rush Limbaugh here at 800-282-2882. The email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.
So I think now that so many things have unfolded here, and I am gonna try to unpack this in some chronological, sensible manner today. You know, this foundation for this narrative that the election was stolen, that the election was hacked, that the Russians worked with Trump to affect the outcome of the election. Isn’t it fascinating now that after Trump accuses Obama of wiretapping him, that now all these people are saying, “Well, well, well, what do you mean? There’s no evidence of that! You can’t say that. Where are you getting that? There isn’t any investigation like that.”
So what Trump has forced these people to do is essentially withdraw their narrative. They’re out there now claiming that Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about, that there isn’t any kind of investigation like this, essentially. Not using those exact words. In order to defend Obama, they’re saying Trump’s crazy. “What investigation are you talking about? There was no wiretapping of Trump.” Oh, there wasn’t? There wasn’t any wiretap? Well, then how do we know what Trump said on the phone calls he made to these presidents? How do we know all this stuff the media has treated us to about collusion?
What about all these leaks from the deep state that contain detail, everything you want to know except the source identity? If there’s no investigation, if there wasn’t any way Obama could have tapped Trump Tower because no such thing was going on, then how does any of this other stuff happen? It’s entirely possible and I must confess that I have thought this.
I haven’t articulated this, either, because I didn’t have anything to back it up other than my own thinking. But it is entirely possible that the Democrats made up this entire thing about the Russians and Trump working together to affect the outcome of the election in order to create the investigation that they are now denying is happening.
I think that they expected to win. They thought that Hillary was gonna win this in a landslide. And when Hillary lost, I think they had a Plan B but nobody really took it seriously because Plan B was predicated on Trump winning, so didn’t give it a lot of credence. But the moment, the moment the election was over, this meme that Trump had been working with the Russians had been filtering throughout the campaign, there had been allegations here, allegations there because of the WikiLeaks dump of the Podesta emails, and they were trying to tie Trump to that. But when Trump won the election here came the full-fledged narrative that Trump’s election was fraudulent and unjust because he’d worked with the Russians to hack the election.
By the way, in the WikiLeaks dump today of thousands and thousands of documents from the CIA, do you know what is included? A little program called UMBRAGE. What this program is, apparently the CIA has the ability to mimic Russian hackers. In other words, the CIA has the ability to hack anybody they want and make it look like the Russians are doing it or make it look like the ChiComs are doing it or make it look like the Israelis are doing it.
They have the ability to do this. They have the ability to mask and mock various other state actors and make it look like — so I think because of everything that we’re learning here, the danger that Donald Trump has faced ever since he won the election is greater than we’ve ever known. And it is obvious to me that this whole business — well, I say obvious, I’m leaning toward being near certain that this entire pretext of Trump working with the Russians to affect the outcome of the election, folks, it is so ridiculous.
The Democrats have to know and they have to have known all along it didn’t really happen. There isn’t any evidence for it, and nobody has come forth in all these media reports, they’ve found not a single source that can confirm this, because it didn’t happen. But that’s only the pretext. The allegation is what permitted this ongoing investigation of Trump and, say, of Michael Flynn and whatever else was going on.
But once you establish in the minds of the media and in the minds of some in the public that the election was fraudulent, that somebody tampered with our sacred electoral process and that it might have been Donald Trump himself working with the Russians, why, then the door’s open wide and everybody wants you to get to the bottom of it. Which is exactly what the media and the Democrats, the American left, the establishment, exactly what they wanted, a pretext to have a never-ending investigation of Trump.
All the while, I think they probably knew there was nothing to the actual substance of the allegation. And in fact, the longer it went with no proof, the better, as evidenced by people like Thomas Friedman. (paraphrased) “Yep, there’s no evidence; that’s why we must investigate. It’s a serious charge! If it really happened, we’ve gotta find out. We’ve gotta get to the bottom of it.” And that opened the floodgates. That opened the doors of possibility for the establishment, the CIA, the deep state, the Democrats, the media to have never-ending investigations.
For the FBI to have a never-ending investigation of Trump and of his campaign and of his presidency, of his administration, of the people in it, and it’s exactly what we’re watching now: A never-ending investigation of every Trump appointee or nominee, an attempt to stop as many Trump executive orders as possible. Now, it’s gonna take weeks or longer to understand all the implications of the data in the WikiLeaks CIA dump. But one matter is abundantly clear to me. Someone who really supports Trump is trying to counter what’s happening to him.
There’s a whistleblower somewhere. I don’t know if it’s another Edward Snowden, but somebody in there has leaked these documents to WikiLeaks. Folks, 8,000. It’s called Vault 7, and it’s gonna take a long time to go through all of these. But it looks to me like somebody who supports Trump somewhere in the deep state is trying to impede and impugn the integrity of all of these investigations. And at the same time I think whoever did this, if it’s one person or many — whoever he, she, or they are — there’s no doubt in my mind that the Obama administration’s reputation is also under attack here.
Because most of what the WikiLeaks CIA release contains is what the CIA has been doing during the Obama years, specifically 2013 to 2016. And you throw Trump’s weekend tweet into this that Obama was hacking him. I want to go back to something I said yesterday about the FISA court and these warrants. When it comes to national security warrants, it’s entirely possible that Trump has seen them. His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, could go get the applications. It is entirely… Now, no FISA warrant to my knowledge has ever been made public, since the FISA court was first begun in the Carter years in 1978.
I don’t think any of these requests, these warrants, applications for warrants have ever been released. But somebody in any administration can go look at them. They’re precisely in the executive branch, and the president and his attorney general would have unquestionable, unquestioned access to them. I find it fascinating that Trump’s allegation is timed in such a way that maybe somebody’s actually seen evidence that such a request was made to wiretap Trump Tower or Trump personally.
But you look at Trump’s weekend tweets, this CIA leak to WikiLeaks or the dump to WikiLeaks about the CIA is even more and more curious. The timing is exquisite. Now, given the pace of technology, pretty much 100% of the tools — i.e., hacking efforts, hacking programs — that are in this document dump have been developed and deployed during the Obama administration. That’s what’s fascinating about this leak. Now, not all of them, but the focus is 2013 to 2016. That’s the Obama years.
These are tools created by the United States government to surveil your iPhone. One of the programs turns on the microphone of your Samsung smart TV and turns it into a bugging device. You never know. You turn your TV off, but the microphone stays on. Not that you’re being bugged, don’t misunderstand, but the program makes your TV a bug. Same thing with your iPhone. The CIA, according to this dump, has developed a little hacker program that turns on your microphone and keeps it on when you think the phone’s asleep.
Same thing with Android phones. Same thing with Windows Microsoft products. These are extensive tools to spy on people, and they were created and perfected during the Obama years. Some of them were started prior to that as well. But the point is none of this was shut down during the Obama years. It was all expanded. It was all improved. The infrastructure must have had approval from somewhere high up the executive branch chain.
Now, the CIA is also extremely independent, and they’ve got people in there that could be doing this with knowledge only of the director or the deputy director. These are things that we don’t know. But common sense — intelligence guided by experience — can point us in some really intriguing directions. And the section on UMBRAGE, as I say, at first glance… I haven’t had a chance to pore through nearly even 5% of this. But this UMBRAGE section of the leak defines a method for the CIA to make attacks look like they originated from the Russians.
They have found a way to essentially emulate Russian hacks either from the KGB, the RBG, the Russian government, various other Russian hackers. It’s a wide variety of people. The CIA has found a way to make it look like it’s the Russians doing the hacking. Isn’t that interesting, given everything we’ve been told about the election? “The Russians hacked the election, that the Russians did this, the Russians did that.” So far we don’t have any evidence the Russians did anything! But we have all kinds of supposition that the American deep state is deeply involved in whatever sabotage is being conducted on the Trump administration.
The evidence the Russians were involved? Nobody’s got it. Everybody runs around and talks about it as though it’s a fait accompli, but there isn’t any evidence. If there were, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, you name it, would you have published it all. But there isn’t any. In fact, the stories they run make it clear there still isn’t any evidence. But that just means we need to keep investigating. The implications of the CIA being able to make their hacks look like the Russians? (chuckling) You throw that in the mix at everything else that’s happening now.
We’re living in very interesting times, very dangerous times, folks. The establishment of this country — whatever you want to call it, the ruling class — is desperate. We’re living in times they never thought possible or didn’t consider likely, and that is somebody from outside their group being president, being vice president, being secretary of state, being secretary of commerce, being attorney general. This kind of thing, this is such an assault, and it’s got them in a state of panic.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: No, no, no, folks. What I’m saying is this: For the last how many months we’ve been reading and hearing about “the investigation.” You know it as well as I do. The investigation into what? Into Trump and the Russians colluding to hack the election to screw the highly deserving Hillary Clinton. Then Obama is the recipient of a Trump bomb. Trump lobs in an allegation that Obama bugged him, hacked him, wiretapped Trump Tower.
The immediate reaction from James Comey and every, “Wuh wuh wuh wuh what do you mean? That’s silly. There’s no investigation. What did Trump say? Obama wouldn’t be…” What do you mean, “There’s no investigation”? There’s no investigation? None of this has been going on? There’s no substance to it, and that’s why Trump’s tweet is wrong, because there’s no investigation? They’re backtracking; they may not even know it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Hi. Welcome back. It’s great to have you. Rush Limbaugh, behind the Golden EIB Microphone.
Donald Trump is doubling down, as he always does, on the allegation that Obama wiretapped him. He’s doubling down on it, and these are… Here’s the thing about Trump. Whether it’s what he says about things going on in Sweden, after time passes, it always turns out that Trump is on to something. With something he says, alleges, accuses, reports, it always ends up that he’s far more right than he’s wrong. So he’s doubling down on this now as he always does.
And the media is having kittens again. They just can’t believe that a president would say things like this. And I go back to yesterday and ask the question: Is it reasonable to suspect that it could happen, given all of the wiretaps we know — we shared the data with you yesterday — that the Obama administration has conducted? All of the surveillance on the AP, on James Rosen at Fox News, of Angela Merkel. The evidence is clear that the Obama administration was surveilling people in this country and all over the world.
So is it more reasonable or unreasonable to believe that Trump would be a subject of this, especially given all the reporting since election about the, quote/unquote, “investigation into Trump”? If there’s an investigation into Trump, wouldn’t you think that an investigation into Trump might consist of some surveillance? Is it reasonable or unreasonable to think that that would be part of it? This is where I think these people have taken it too far and it’s now about to boomerang on them.
I mean, I’m talking about the intelligence/deep state sources of the media, the media itself. And it’s actually — if you separate all this from the genuine danger that this portends — fascinating to watch. And because now the… I’ll give you an example. The media and the rest of the Democrat Party can’t handle Trump’s allegation that Obama tapped his phones. Now, this is the same media and the same Democrats who’ve been saying for months that the Trump campaign was being investigated. Proudly saying it, happily reporting it, sharing with us statements by unnamed sources, “American intelligence sources,” “American intelligence operatives.”
We don’t know who they were. They were never named. But they apparently were all over the place. And they were feeding the media transcripts of telephone calls that Donald Trump had made. How’d they get ’em? Somebody had to find them. Somebody had to be surveilling those calls. Yeah, it could have been a Trump employee who’s a rogue. I don’t know. But it doesn’t deny and it doesn’t refute the allegation that somebody’s spying on Trump. They’ve been proudly bragging about their investigation!
They have been saying for months that the Trump campaign was being investigated by the FBI for ties to Russia-based on intercepts. The New York Times, as we pointed out yesterday, on January 20th actually referred to “wiretaps” in their headline of the story that day documenting the latest intercepts. And in that story, they had to include, as they do in every one… It was a paragraph way down deep in the story, but the paragraph said there’s no evidence that Trump’s done anything or that anybody’s been investigating Trump. There’s no evidence for anything because all of this has been manufactured.
All of this is a stratagem, folks, ’cause when you get down to it (and I firmly believe this) every Democrat — Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, you name it — have known from the get-go that the Russians didn’t hack the election outcome. They know they lost the election. Now, some of your militant base — the average, ordinary, American lunatics that vote for ’em — I’m sure they believe it, but the people spreading this know full well it didn’t happen, that it’s a distraction, that it’s a diversion. It’s a technique to continue this investigation.
What investigation? Comey has now came out and said there wasn’t an investigation. Once Trump lobs his allegation that Obama was wiretapping him, Comey — who testified before Congress he would never make public the facts of any FBI investigation, including what they were doing with Hillary or the Clinton Foundation. All of a sudden Comey, who says, “Never, ever would I ever go public with the details of anything we’re investigating,” comes forward and asks the DOJ to tamp down what Trump is alleging ’cause it didn’t happen!
Wait a minute. If it didn’t happen, how do you know? Could somebody produce the FISA warrants? Could somebody produce the evidence? Could somebody in any of this produce a scintilla of evidence to back up everything or anything they’re saying? Nobody does that. It’s one of the most amazing periods of time we’ve been through. There isn’t a scintilla of evidence to back up anything that’s been reported, and yet Trump all of a sudden decides to get in on the game, and so he lobs his own allegation and throws it right back in Obama’s lap.
The media and the Democrats are outraged. “How dare he? This is the president of the United States,” and Comey comes up, “There isn’t any investigation.” Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. There isn’t an investigation? “Yeah! There’s no reason for Obama to be wiretapping anybody. There’s no investigation.” Oh, really? Where was this bit of news back in November? Where was this bit of news last week? Where was this bit of news on Inauguration Day? It’s just delicious. (sigh) You remember last month’s Michael Flynn scandal?
My good buddy, old pal Andy McCarthy at National Review come up with the simplest way to get to the bottom of whether Flynn… In that wiretapped phone call with that fat Russian ambassador, the NSA was wiretapping the fat Russian ambassador, and so Flynn’s on the phone with the guy. So Flynn’s overheard in the supposed wiretap of the Russian, and McCarthy says, “Look, release the transcript of the call. Don’t cherry-pick it. Release the transcript. Let us hear if Flynn actually promised to lift sanctions.”
Well, they haven’t done that. Flynn’s denied they even talked about lifting the sanctions. The Russian guy might have brought it up. Flynn didn’t say one way or another. Flynn should not have been forced out of there. He was because he didn’t tell the truth to Pence, but he didn’t do anything structurally wrong, just like Sessions has no business recusing himself from anything. McCarthy said, “Publish the transcript,” but nobody wants to. Nobody wants to reveal it. If they’ve got slam-dunk evidence, why don’t they show it?
If they’ve got slam-dunk evidence, why is that part of the New York Times story? If they’ve got slam-dunk evidence of all these allegations…? Well, they don’t. That’s the whole point. They never have had any and there never gonna get any because there isn’t any. This whole thing is a pretext to conduct an investigation that never ends to keep the Trump administration under the suspicion of a huge cloud with nothing as a foundation for it. Now we’re in the same exact position. James Comey wants to prove the FBI is innocent.
James Comey wants the DOJ to come out there and say that there’s no investigation; there’s no wiretap of Trump. Well, let’s see the FBI’s two requests for FISA warrants. Let’s see why the first one was turned down. That’s the reporting. All of this that we know has been reported in the Drive-By Media. Nobody’s making this stuff up. Every bit of what we know has appeared in the New York Times or on CNN or in the Washington Post. All that’s been missing is any evidence. So let’s see these FISA warrants.
Let’s see the first one in June that was rejected because supposedly it involves Trump and there wasn’t any evidence to back it up so the judge denied it, and let’s see the one that was granted in October. I know FISA stuff is classified, never been released before. What harm can it do here? Remember, Jeff Sessions and Obama can see it. They can go get. If Trump is doubling down on this, you have to wonder if they know based on the FISA warrants that were requested during the Obama administration.
Now, Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit — he’s also a law professor at the University of Tennessee — has a hypothesis. It is this. “The spying-on-Trump thing is worse than we even imagine, and once it was clear Hillary had lost and it would inevitably come out, the Trump/Russia collusion talking point was created as a distraction.” They created the Trump-Russia collusion as a distraction to get everybody — this is his theory — looking at that so that they wouldn’t find out what they’ve actually been doing is investigating Trump!
Mr. Reynolds says, “Now it’s being rowed back, because the talk of ‘transcripts’ supports the spying-on-Trump storyline.” Transcripts of phone calls, transcripts of X, transcripts of Y. The media’s reporting on transcripts. What transcripts if there’s no investigation? What transcripts if there’s no wiretaps? What transcripts if there are no email bugs out there? And he points out that “the rumors being floated about Trump are being retracted, and once everyone from Comey to Clapper has denied that he was ever under investigation, future ‘leaks’ will come pre-discredited.”
That’s another thing. Clapper. He’s on Meet the Press on Sunday. “I can deny that!” He was asked by F. Chuck Todd, “Did Obama get a wiretap for Trump?” “I can deny that!” Comey: “That isn’t true. DOJ, you go out there and tamp it down. That isn’t true.” Why? “Well, because Trump was never under investigation.” That’s what they’re saying. If Trump was never under investigation, what the hell have the past five months been about? And it’s in this little mixture today that we receive the news of somebody leaking a bunch of CIA data to WikiLeaks.
Dangerous times in the United States of America.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want to grab a quick phone call here. This Steve in Tallahassee, Florida. Great to have you on the program, sir. How are you doing?
CALLER: Great Rush. A real honor.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I’ll get right to it. No one asked the question, why would Putin want or not want Trump as president versus want or not want Hillary? And I kind of know the answers, but I’m thinking Putin was celebrating at nine o’clock Eastern time thinking Hillary had one.
RUSH: Yeah, I saw is that. Let me answer this. It’s a great question. That’s why I took your call first. Brilliant question, opportunity to make the host look good, and you did a great job and I really appreciate it, Steve in Tallahassee. Can I ask you a question before I answer this? Why does it matter what Putin wants? Why in the hell should we be tailoring the outcome of our elections on the basis of what Vladimir Putin wants? What, we want Hillary to win because Putin doesn’t like her? We want Trump to win because Putin — what does it matter what Putin wants?
Let’s find out who Castro wants to win and try to engineer that. That’s another one of these crazy narratives that the media and the whole Democrat-media complex has come up with here that has as its purpose impugning Trump. Now, the Democrat Party has loved the Russians all my life. The Democrat Party has envied the Soviets. The Democrat Party backed ’em up, protected ’em, defended ’em. Ted Kennedy worked with the Russians back in ’84 to help defeat Ronald Reagan.
Now all of a sudden we’re to believe the Democrats don’t like the Russians. It’s absurd. Obama loved Putin. Obama was de-arming our nuclear arsenal, was reducing it, for Putin. But yet a narrative was birthed, and that narrative is that Trump is such an idiot, that Trump is such a bumbling fool, that Vladimir Putin can’t wait to have him in the Oval Office because that will make Putin the effective president of this country.
Why? Well, because we know that Trump has done business with the Russians, and that’s why he won’t release his tax returns. That’s what he’s trying to hide. And so what it means is that if Trump’s elected, it means Putin is running the country. That’s been the Democrat fearmongering line, one of many, during the campaign.
But let’s unpack this. When you get right down to brass tacks, the Russians and our old buddy shirtless Vladimir had every reason to want Hillary to win, because Hillary Clinton would continue Obama’s feckless, damaging, dangerous policies which have benefited the Russians hugely, like the Iran deal.
Do you know how beneficiary the Iran deal was for the Russians just in terms of economics and commerce alone? Trump is not going to let the Iran deal stand, and he said he wasn’t going to. But the CIA, now, that’s a different story. Some in the CIA might think Hillary Clinton would cut them along with the military. Some in the CIA might really be ticked off at Hillary Clinton over Benghazi. You ever stop and think of that?
Some CIA people were killed in Benghazi, and then Hillary and Obama were running around lying about it. There are people in the CIA that cut both ways here. We’re being told the CIA is unified in its hatred and opposition to Trump. Don’t believe it. There are many great people at CIA, FBI, who think of Hillary the same way you and I do, and they just might not want her having anything to do with the Oval Office. But we know that she let CIA officers die in Benghazi and then blamed some video that had nothing to do with it.
We also know that Julian Assange at WikiLeaks has said over and over again the Russians were not the source for all of the stuff he had of Podesta’s emails. I don’t know what you think of Assange or care, but he’s not on record as being a proven liar. People may think he’s a reprobate. They may not like him ’cause he sounds and looks of effeminate, that’s somebody else’s problem. The Russian evidence in all this is laughable.
You know, one of the hackers used the name of the KGB’s most famous hacker spy and they typed stuff in Cyrillic. They left fingerprints in the hack of the DNC and Podesta’s emails. They left fingerprints that said, “Hey, we are the Russkies, and we were here.” Exactly. The Russians are gonna leave evidence they were there? No professional would do that.
So the idea that Putin wanted Trump doesn’t pass the common-sense test. He would much prefer somebody that is gonna continue the policies of Obama, which did nothing but strengthen Iran and strengthen Russia and weaken the United States. Why would he want somebody that’s gonna bring all that to a screeching halt, who would be Trump.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want to also go back to November 14th. Grab sound bite number one. I recognized back then — and we’ve got the WikiLeaks dump today with thousands and thousands of CIA documents — if you haven’t heard about this yesterday, folks, this is big, and it’s gonna take a long time for people to go through this and make sense of it, but one thing that has stood out to those of us who have done a cursory examination of the data, there’s a CIA — well, it’s under the UMBRAGE headline. That’s a name of a program.
It turns out that the CIA has created computer hacking tools that enable the CIA to hack somebody and make those people think the Russians are doing the hacking. In other words, the CIA has created hacker programs that emulate and identify themselves as Russian or Chinese or Japanese. Now, you throw that into the mix that the Russians are collaborating with Trump to affect the outcome of the election, what if it was the CIA doing it? Of course, now everybody is saying, “No, there was there wasn’t an investigation. What are you talking about? Trump wasn’t being surveilled. What do you mean?”
There’s no investigation? Trump wasn’t being surveilled? You mean there’s no investigation into whether Trump colluded with the Russians? “No, no, where are you coming up with this?” They’re being forced to walk this back. This was a distraction they created. Here’s what I said to people back on November 14th. Trump had just won, of course, the week prior and he’s saying great things about Obama and he’s visiting the White House, talking about how nice Obama’s been, how much help Obama has offered.
RUSH ARCHIVE: I think we are in a precarious situation. We have a very, very defeated and maybe wounded President Obama who nevertheless maintains control on all the levers of power until January 20th. We have a president who was on the cusp of an historical event never before conceived in this country, has just been snatched away. But he’s still there, he controls the levers of power for another month and a half, two months. And, as such, we don’t know what all is threatened.
And Trump is a guy that operates a hundred percent from leverage. And if you watch his behavior right now, I think Trump knows full well how precarious and dangerous the next two months could be, and it’s therefore necessary to be soothing and certainly non-confrontational and non-provocative of Obama, like, yeah, I’m gonna keep some things about Obamacare, yeah, he’s a great guy, really enjoyed meeting him, yeah, I’m gonna seek his counsel, yeah, he and the Clintons are good people, I don’t want to hurt ’em, I have respect, I found talking to Obama fascinating. I think the flattering is done as an insurance policy. We’ll see. I think come January 20th, all bets are off. But we won’t know for sure until then.
RUSH: Well, it turns out we did know not long after this, because they doubled down on trying to impugn Trump’s election victory, and then the transition, and now they’re still trying to destroy Trump, sabotage him. And now with this CIA dump to WikiLeaks, Donald J. Trump is in a lot of danger and thus so are we. I mean, there are powerful forces arrayed against him that he’s aware of.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay. Here’s Dave in Lorain, Ohio. Dave, I’m really glad you waited, and welcome to the program. How are you?
CALLER: I’m doing fine. How are you, Rush?
RUSH: Good. Good. Good. Thank you.
CALLER: On the subject of intelligence, last night on Fox News it was reported that when President Obama had 17 days left in office he changed the way intelligence is handled. Where it used to go to the NSA and the FBI and be held there and disseminated to whoever was necessary, now he made this change where it goes to over a dozen other agencies immediately. And I was just wondering if you had heard that and if you were gonna make any comment on it. It certainly lends to the idea of leaks or informing shadow government people. I mean, it sounds to me like something that is really serious and hopefully President Trump can change.
RUSH: Here’s what I knew. When I saw the subject line on your call, I had a vague recollection — I didn’t see Fox News last night. But I knew it was familiar. It turns out that this was originally reported in the New York Times back on my birthday, January 12th. And it is 16 foreign governments —
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: — and intel agencies that Obama is sharing National Security Agency intercepts and intelligence with. The stated purpose, Dave, is so that these other countries can help the NSA catch things they might miss or that these other countries can tell the NSA, “No, you’re wrong. That’s not what’s happening in our country.” But I think all of that’s bogus. I think this is all part of sharing the Trump investigation data with these foreign intelligence agencies of other countries as a means of further poisoning other countries against Trump.
CALLER: Yes, and anything that goes on in the future, I mean subjects coming up that we’re not even currently thinking about —
RUSH: It’s unprecedented. To share intelligence data with 16 other intel agencies like this?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s John in Indianapolis. John, glad you waited. It’s great to have you with us on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Talk about sharing something cool, how about your new website? Whoever put that together needs a raise or, you know, a pat on the back, an attaboy, or a beer. Congratulations. I really dig it.
RUSH: Well, thank you. Thank you very much. I’m really flattered to get the feedback there. I sincerely appreciate it. I’ll pass that on to the designer.
CALLER: Awesome. Hey, the first segment of the first hour, the WikiLeaks drop, the CIA masking themselves, alleged ability to turn on mics and maybe cameras. Over the course of the half decade of my last life I’ve heard blips, burps, and hiccups about them having the ability to do that, so that kind of perked up my ears when you dropped the bomb on the first hour, first segment.
Then a few weeks ago I saw the movie Snowden, and, you know, I’m not an Oliver Stone conspiracy theory guy, but, you know, looking back on it, I’m kind of believing all that. And then you add in and pepper it with the fact that Obama commuted the sentence of one Chelsea Manning and left Eric Snowden out to dry in Russia. And then, you know, you being the big, popular media figure that you are, are you concerned about you being watched or listened in on?
RUSH: All the time.
CALLER: And real quick, real quick before I stop, what happens with all the IRS agents that Obama hired to basically confiscate our money? I haven’t heard anything like that. And go.
RUSH: Of course I, like anybody else, I’m not paranoid about it. You know, I have a built-in advantage. Because of my hearing I maybe make 10 phone calls a year. And I don’t talk about anything. It’s nothing that’s gleanable. When I’m at home, I don’t talk to anybody. I’m not talking. When I’m in a room, I don’t talk. I do not talk. Eighty percent of my talking in the day is done in these three hours. And then I get away from it, I’m talked out.
Now, I do email, yeah. But point is, we’d be foolish not to be concerned about it and to take steps, try to have the latest encryption and so forth. I’m not paranoid about it, I’m just realistic. But I haven’t seen the movie Snowden, either. So I’m a little bit of a disadvantage there. But the CIA WikiLeaks dump, we learned the CIA can emulate Russia, for example, in hacks, that’s big to me. That’s just tip of the iceberg.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, folks, I want to remind you something very important on the John Podesta emails. They were not hacked. John Podesta got sucked into a phishing attack. He openly gave away his email password. Nobody hacked his account, like the Russians.