RUSH: Well, if this were a sane world and if this were a normal day, do you know what the big news of the day would be? That Donald Trump nailed it, that Donald Trump was exactly right, that the Obama administration was in fact spying on them — and indeed, requested and got a FISA warrant. Do you realize how many people have been trying to deny that? “There weren’t any FISA warrants. The administration wasn’t snooping on anybody! That’s just made up! That’s paranoia. Obama, our savior, wouldn’t do that.”

Yet now we know that there was a FISA warrant. The Obama administration was surveilling some guy named Carter Page. They found nothing, but they were looking to. They wanted to. Carter Page had done some business in Russia some time ago, and they were desperate. Obama and his team were desperate to prove that there was some kind of collusion between Russia and Trump. Now that’s kind of out the window with what’s happened in Syria. But you won’t find that news today. Well, in the Washington Post. But normally you would hear other people pick it up. CNN? Noooo. You know what they’re talking about in an effort to not cover any of this?

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RUSH: I cannot tell you how big this is. This validates what Trump was saying about his campaign being surveilled. And it’s also the first time anything like this has ever happened. The Washington Post has the story and they’ve got so much detail I wonder if they’ve actually been leaked the actual warrant application. You know, FISA warrants are secret as grand jury testimony, but somebody’s leaked this stuff to the Washington Post.

Brief review of this FISA business. There were reports there was a FISA warrant requested in June, 2016 that was denied. So they went back in October, requested it again, that was granted. Then there have been total, utter denials, no FISA warrants. Then we got the news yesterday that, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, there was one.

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RUSH: On this FISA story — FISA warrant story — in the Washington Post, the Washington Post says that the FISA, the warrant being approved, shows that there must have been some collusion between the Russians and Trump. And I’m here to tell you, ladies and gentlemen — do not doubt me — that is BS. What happened was the Obama administration wanted to find collusion between Trump and Russia all last summer. They were hoping to find some collusion. There were rumblings about it.

You know, the media was talking about and other Democrats. They used the power of the federal government to get a FISA warrant. Do you know that FISA warrants are almost always granted? I mean, I think the percentage of FISA requests turned down is like .03%. I mean, it’s almost automatic. You ask for a warrant from the FISA court, and it’s granted all the time. I think contrary to the warrant indicating there must have been some collusion, what the warrant being sought means is that Obama wanted to search for some.

That the administration… Somebody in the administration. Obama, you… I’m not gonna name names. He is at the top of the executive branch, so we’ll throw him in there. They wanted to find some. There wasn’t any evidence of Russia collusion! All they had was these three guys: Roger Stone bragging about this and that; then they had Carter Page (who had done business in Russia long ago); and Paul Manafort, who had business in Ukraine. They were hoping! All of this was on the come. They were hoping that after they got a FISA warrant, they could find some collusion.

There isn’t any evidence in all of these months and even with the issuance of this warrant. There has yet to be a shred of evidence produced that there was any collusion whatsoever. So the granting of this warrant, in my humble opinion, was expressly so they could look for some, not because they thought they had some. A FISA warrant is much different than a traditional search warrant. You know, you’ve paid enough attention and you know that, if the police want a search warrant for your house, they have to go to a judge and present at least a semblance of a reason that there is evidence to be found of your guilt.

A FISA warrant is nowhere near that standard, because it’s foreign intelligence, surveillance, and national security and all that. It’s a much wider berth. That’s why they’re almost never turned down. Now, all of this time… All of this time, folks… I want to remind you, how many times just in the last six weeks have we focused on the FISA warrant aspect of this story? And every time that that entered front and center in the news, there were a number of media outlets and Democrats pooh-poohed it.

“No, there wasn’t any FISA warrant! Comey alluded to the fact there weren’t any FISA warrants here.” Whenever it came up, it was always just pooh-poohed. It was always bumped out of the way. “No, no! You’re being paranoid. We didn’t do any of that. There wasn’t any investigation like that. You’re being silly.” When Trump accused Obama of “tapping the wires” at Trump Tower? “Oh, there’s no spying! Don’t be silly. You’re being paranoid!” It was Louise Mensch at some rag called Heat Street (or I forget the place she works). She’s a-five-star Never Trumper. She’s Brit.

She ran the story last October that there were two FISA warrants. Everybody said, “There’s no evidence of that! There’s no proof of that. You don’t know that. That didn’t happen,” blah, blah, blah. And all of this time — all of this time that they’ve been denying it — it’s out there. There’s a FISA warrant! It was issued to surveil Carter Page, who wasn’t with the Trump campaign very long anyway. He was with it in the early stages.

They were fishing. The guy had done business. He had invested in Gazprom, a Russian energy company. So they were hoping. They wanted — they were desperately hoping — that with the warrant they could find something. It’s not that the warrant was granted ’cause they knew — ’cause if they know, we would know. If they had evidence of collusion, they would be plastering it all over everywhere. So the principals in this — for weeks now and months — have been denying that anybody in the regime sought a FISA warrant.

Now the Washington Post runs this story: “FBI…” That’s the executive branch. Somebody asked the FBI to go get the warrant. As I’ve pointed out countless times, the White House does not do investigations. The White House does not investigate national security things or crimes. The White House is a consumer of the intelligence that’s produced and gathered by the FBI, the NSA, and the CIA. So if the FBI requested a FISA warrant, the odds are somebody asked them to. We don’t know for sure. Somebody does, though. Somebody knows.

So the Washington Post is attempting to say that the existence of the warrant means that they had evidence of collusion. They don’t, or we would know it. Whoever colluded would have been outed by now. We would already be proceeding to impeachment. They’ve got nothing. They never have had anything. “The FBI obtained a secret court order last summer…” And remember, all during the recent discussion of this, all of the denials — and not only just denials. There were people trying to ridicule and make fun of the people who said there were FISA warrants that were granted.

If they were in the media — if they were, like, here in talk radio — they were lambasted and criticized for being irresponsible. “No evidence of FISA warrants,” and all this time there was one. Why were we told for so many months that all of these reporters about FISA warrants were untrue? I’ve been trying to remember last night and this morning. Didn’t the FBI director, Comey, testify that there was no surveillance on the Trump campaign, or was he talking about Trump Tower? I don’t remember if he said there were no warrants obtained or not.

This was congressional testimony. We saw it on TV. I just can’t… I don’t remember the specifics, but we are going to find out. The Washington Post says, “The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant targeting Carter Page’s communications after convincing a [FISA] judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia…” Well, let’s see the evidence. I’m telling you, there wasn’t any evidence. They got this warrant to snoop. They were hoping that they would find evidence.

All last summer, folks. I mean Trump gets the nomination in July, and all this time, they are still — every one of these people — convinced Hillary’s gonna win in a landslide. We’ve got this new book on the Clinton campaign, and you talk about a dog-and-pony show and the Keystone Cops? This book, the excerpts that I’ve seen of it and read this morning make it crystal clear. This campaign was one of the most inept and incompetent in recent memory, filled with infighting and lack of trust. Bill Clinton trying to take over various aspects of it. Hillary having no energy. Hillary having no impetus, providing no leadership.

‘Cause they all thought it was a cakewalk!

So even while they thought it was gonna be a cakewalk/landslide win, they still are out there trying to find some kind of dirt, collusion, Trump campaign. So let’s see the evidence. What increase would possibly be being protected now? You know, the headline of this story? “Obama Administration Spied on Trump Campaign.” That’s the news. The media wants you to think the news is that the Trump campaign is really looking now like there was collusion because we got a FISA warrant to investigate it. That’s not the news. The news is the Obama administration — counter to everything the Democrats and the media were saying — was in fact spying on the Trump campaign.

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RUSH: Okay. So I’ve been doing what I do. I watch the media here during the break. And it doesn’t matter, they got Republicans, they got Democrats talking about this FISA warrant. There is an automatic assumption that law enforcement never lies and that law enforcement’s always on the up and up. And so Ed Rollins, Doug Schoen, “This is a serious problem. A FISA warrant granted against a member of your campaign, that’s a very, very serious problem. When I ran the Reagan campaign, I would have never had anybody around –” And Doug Schoen says (mumbling).

I’m telling you, this FISA warrant, they’re looking at this the wrong way.

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RUSH: I’m gonna tell you what I honestly think about this. Not that I’ve withheld anything. I’m not gonna make a specific prediction, but I’m gonna wager here that we don’t know the half of it yet. I’m gonna wager that we’re gonna learn some things in time that are gonna cause everybody to rethink what they think they know happened on that airplane and in that terminal.

I say this because it always happens. I say this because I know how the media works. I say this because I know how stories are created, how they are amplified, how they are updated and so forth. There are certain things about this guy that are known that are not being factored in. Like this guy has a history of exploiting situations in which he finds himself. I’m not gonna make any specific predictions, but I want you to remember that on this day, April 12th, I make the prediction that what we think we know about this, what everybody is slam dunk certain of, is not going to be what really happened when we find out everything. You just wait.

This is so typical of the way things get reported in our media today. You have all the ingredients. You have Big Corporation automatically a suspect in the eyes of the left and the media. You have an innocent passenger who happens to be of minority persuasion. The ingredients are all there. And I’m not, as I say, going to hazard specificity, but I’m just gonna tell you that when this — and I don’t know how long it’s gonna take, but the day is going to come where there’s gonna be a bunch of revelations that you’ll go, “No kidding! I would have never guessed that.”

You just wait. What you think you know about this right now is not going to hold up. There’s a bunch of stuff that is yet to be learned or maybe it has been learned but it isn’t being reported. And it’s the same thing in this FISA warrant.

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RUSH: This is an interesting story from the New York Times. The headline: “Trump’s Shift on Russia Brings Geopolitical Whiplash.” Now, see, what is wrong with that? The presumption here is that Trump’s launching 59 Tomahawks into Syria and knowing that Syria’s a Soviet or Russian client state, this represents Trump turning on a dime from his friend and buddy and ally, Putin, into now somebody taunting and pressuring Putin.

So the New York Times categorizes this as geopolitical whiplash because Trump is shifting in his sympathies toward Russia. You know what the headline really ought to be? “Media Shift on Trump-Russian Collusion Brings Reader Whiplash.” We’re the ones with whiplash. ‘Cause we’ve been told all these months that Trump and Putin are practically blood brothers and they have some kind of friendship, BFFs, for long-standing, and they’re working together to undermine the Democrats and whatever it is.

Then all of a sudden, after months and months of that, Trump does something totally out of character with that assessment, and the New York Times says, “Wow, wow, geopolitical whiplash as Trump has turned on Putin.” Trump didn’t turn on Putin. He’s never been part of Putin. He’s never been a Putin BFF. It’s the reader that has whiplash trying to keep up with all this.

I’m gonna tell you what we’re looking at here. We’re witnessing the normalization of a cover-up of a massive political scandal. The massive political scandal is the illegal domestic spying of a political opponent and the dissemination of private and classified information. That is the massive political scandal. And we now have evidence that there has been a massive political scandal, even further evidence by learning that there was indeed a FISA warrant sought by the Obama FBI to surveil Carter Page.

Let me tell you about Carter Page, so you just know, you can have this at your disposal. Carter Page worked in Moscow for Merrill Lynch more than ten years ago. His crime seems to be that he invested in a company called Gazprom. It’s a Russian energy company, natural gas and oil. Podesta of the Hillary campaign, John Podesta, has invested in another Kremlin-run energy firm, but nobody cares about him. He’s invested with a Russian energy company, too, as Carter Page did.

Do you know that Carter Page never had any official association with the Trump campaign? He was a volunteer. And he never met Trump. Did you know that? Never met Trump, barely talked Trump, and yet they’re going after this guy as part of the Trump campaign, who was colluding with the Russians, they got a FISA warrant to survival this guy. And I’m telling you, folks, it’s not because they had any evidence. They were looking for evidence. They were desperately looking.

They were searching everywhere for evidence to support this wild-ass claim of theirs that Putin and Trump had colluded to take the election away from Hillary. They are looking for evidence. They didn’t have any. That’s why they had to go get a FISA warrant. You don’t need any evidence for one of those. But if you go to a standard, everyday judge, you have to some indication of guilt or complicity before you can get the search warrant.

They didn’t do that. They went to the FISA court, keeping it away and hidden from everybody, where warrants are automatically granted, practically. That’s the scandal. The scandal here is that the surveiling of the campaign of a presidential candidate on behalf of that candidate’s opponent — in this case, Hillary — and then the leaking of classified information and national security information to the media in an effort to destroy the transition and then the presidency. That’s the scandal here. And the news that a FISA warrant was granted, to me, advances that cause, not that Trump must have done something wrong, there’s a warrant. Which is how the media and everybody wants you to look at this.

Folks, thanks to the Washington Post report, here’s what we know. The Washington Post report that the Obama FBI sought this FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page, a volunteer, who had been in Russia 10 years prior. We now know that the Obama Regime has known since July of last year that there was no evidence of any Russian collusion. That’s what this tells us.

Since last July, they got a FISA warrant looking for evidence. Why didn’t they come forward and put an end to that disinformation campaign by our media, the DNC? Why didn’t that happen? ‘Cause that’s not the agenda.

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RUSH: No, no, no. Let me be perfectly clear. I got a couple of emails. I haven’t made myself clear on this FISA warrant business. Here’s what’s going on, folks. The Obama administration asked the FBI to go to the FISA court and get a warrant to surveil Carter Page, the only guy they can find that had any connection with Russia. He had worked there for Merrill Lynch. He was a volunteer. He barely even knew Trump, but he had been to Russia. They were desperate to find something.

The purpose of this — and this is the nub of it — they were looking for somebody that they could pretend was acting as a foreign agent in order to get the surveillance warrant so that they could then turn around and spy on the whole campaign! And once they had that FISA warrant, then they could go out and surveil all these foreign actors like the Russian ambassador and incidentally pick up other people in the Trump campaign on purpose!

You couldn’t get a warrant to surveil Flynn, but you could get a warrant to surveil the NSA would do it as a matter of practice the Russian ambassador, anybody he talks to. So if he talks to Flynn or anybody else in the campaign, since you’ve got the warrant already looking into evidence of collusion, now you’re just looking for more.

But the real purpose was to get that warrant issued on Carter Page, which opened every door there was. They could then spy on the entire campaign, not just Page. There’s no doubt this is what was going on. Trump nailed it. He was exactly right in his claim that he was being surveilled. That’s what today’s news the Washington Post cements.

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RUSH: Chris in Dallas. It’s great to have you with us, sir, on the EIB Network. How you doing?

CALLER: Doing great, Rush. Mega Kansas City Royals dittos to you.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: Thank you for taking the call.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: Just one thought I had was can you imagine the uproar if the tables were turned and it was 2008 and George Bush had used the FBI to have surveillance on Barack Obama pre-election? Can you imagine the uproar from the media?

RUSH: Oh ho.

CALLER: We would still be talking about it.

RUSH: There wouldn’t be anything else edging it off the front page for day after day after day. Even for that matter, what would have happened, do you think, if the Obama administration was doing all this but against Hillary instead of Trump?

CALLER: That’s a good question.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: I don’t know.

RUSH: Man, that would present the media with a definite dilemma, ’cause they love Hillary. They love Obama more. But if it came to protecting anybody, they would always choose to protect Obama. The Obama historical election and legacy is paramount. Mrs. Clinton would become chump change to sum it up.

CALLER: (chuckling)

RUSH: And then imagine if someday… Let’s say it’s 2020 and the Democrats, amazingly, nominate Elizabeth Warren and they find Trump gets a FISA warrant to surveil Elizabeth Warren. Can you imagine what would happen then?

CALLER: (chuckling)

RUSH: So your analogy as good. I appreciate the call.