RUSH: The New York Times had to apologize for a major error. Not apologize. They don’t apologize. Retract.

Remember when they claimed that 17 various intelligence agencies had agreed that Trump and Russia had colluded to affect the election, to harm Hillary Clinton? They had to “walk that back” while we were away, and it turns out it’s only three intelligence agencies, all run by Clapper. The New York Times published the story on Sunday. I don’t have the dates here, but this is in the last two weeks. The date of this story is… It might have been three days ago that this happened. The Times published… When I’m away, the days run together. I follow the news every day, and some days I can figure out it happened when I wasn’t here, and some days I was.

But I think this happened over the Fourth of July break. The New York Times published a story titled, “‘Trump’s Deflections and Denials on Russia Frustrate Even His Allies.’ They overstated the number of U.S. intelligence agencies involved in a January 6 assessment concluding the Russians interfered in the election to benefit Trump. The Times story originally included this line: ‘The latest presidential tweets were proof to dismayed members of Mr. Trump’s party that he still refuses to acknowledge a basic fact agreed upon by 17 American intelligence agencies that he now oversees:

“‘Russia orchestrated the attacks, and did it to help get him elected.” The story on January 6 is how Trump was so obstinate and stupid and he won’t even admit that that’s what happened. That was entirely bogus! The whole thing. There’s not a word of truth in that story. Trump did not oversee the election or collude with Putin. There is no evidence Putin wanted Hillary to lose or Trump to win. There’s no evidence of any of that. The smart thinking on Putin says that he doesn’t care who wins; here gonna deal with us as an enemy entity anyway. But regardless, there isn’t any evidence of any of that, and there never has been.

And the Times, in order to buttress the lie, throws in”17 American intelligence agencies” agreed with the premise that Russia orchestrated the attacks and did it to help Trump. “The figure is not accurate,” the Times said Sunday. “The January 6th hacking assessment was a conclusion drawn by analysts representing three intelligence agencies acting under the aegis of the office of Director of National Intelligence,” that is James Clapper,” and he testified to this on May 8th.” So CNN had to retracted it, and AP had to do the same thing ’cause they’d reported the same thing. So there were not 17 intelligence agencies.

But from January until just a few days ago, the news was that 17 different American intelligence agencies all agreed that Russia orchestrated the attacks on the election, did it to help Trump get elected, and he knew about it. It is a lie that has been repeated in hundreds of media articles and television broadcasts about the so-called Russian collusion. In reality, James Clapper had three analysts who agreed with him — not even three agencies, three analysts who agreed — and it got reported as 17 separate intel agencies. You know, Al Franken was questioning Clapper. Franken the didn’t like what was he hearing.

“There were only three agencies that were directly involved in this assessment?” “Plus my office, “Clapper said. Franken said, “But all 17 signed on to that, right?” Clapper said, “Well, with the sensitivity of the information we decided it was a conscious judgment to restrict it just to those three. No, they weren’t 17.” January to May 8th everybody in the Drive-By Media had reported 17. It’s all falling apart now, folks. It’s what I meant by last Thursday and Friday about the momentum shifting, the worm was turning. And what happened to CNN with this video is evidence of two more turning. It’s evidence of the momentum shifting.

There’s another piece of fake news that was out. Do you remember the story…? It was over the weekend again, maybe. I don’t know how much attention you paid. There was a story that the Pence team, the Mike Pence, vice president’s team in the West Wing was feeling a lot of friction with the president’s team and they wanted out. They wanted no part of it and they were creating distance and they were embarrassed. The vice president’s team did everything they could to avoid interaction with the president’s team because it was just unseemly, it was chaos, it was out of control over there.

That has been debunked.

“In exclusive comments to Breitbart News on Saturday, the Press Secretary for the Vice President, Marc Lotter, pushed back against claims from six Republican ‘sources’ that there is division between the Trump and Pence teams.” He says there is none, that the whole thing is fake news. You want another example of fake news? I’m telling you, folks, CNN is literally disintegrating. I don’t even think they’re aware of it. I think they live in such a befuddled surreality that they’ve created for themselves that I don’t think they have the ability to be embarrassed and humiliated to the degree that they should be.

Do you remember there was a report? CNN reported a meeting. It was a meeting between the EPA administrator Scott Pruitt and the CEO of Dow chemicals, Andrew Liveris, and the story alleged that some kind of impropriety happened as a result of the meeting (the EPA administrator meeting with a Dow Chemical CEO), and obviously it was something about climate change and polluting the planet and how the Trump administration was secretly meeting with Dow to allow them to continue to pollute, lifting regulations. That was what was implied.

“A Breitbart News investigation uncovered that no such ‘meetings’ ever took place, the Senate Intelligence Committee was not investigating the matter…” The story said the Senate Intelligence Committee was investigating the meeting. They’re not, “and the Treasury Department had already — at the urging of Sen. [Fauxcahontas] — determined the matter to be entirely ‘without merit.’ … Under the headline ‘EPA Chief Met with Dow CEO Before Deciding on Pesticide Ban,’ the AP’s Michael Biesecker alleged that some super-secret covert meeting occurred between Pruitt and Liveris — and that awful things came as a result of that meeting.”

In fact, no meeting ever happened. Some source just made it up and lied about it to the AP, and the AP ran with it. This is CNN level. This is the kind of scandal CNN has become accustomed to. This stuff now is bleeding. CNN’s bleeding over into the AP, and what’s happening at CNN has started to happen at other places. Here’s another story: “The Associated Press Walks Back Several Trump-Russia Stories —

“In stories published April 6, June 2, June 26 and June 29, the Associated Press reported that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies have agreed that Russia tried to influence the 2016 election to benefit Donald Trump. That assessment was based on information collected by three agencies … and published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which represents all U.S. intelligence agencies. Not all 17 intelligence agencies were involved in reaching the assessment.”

Now, AP and CNN both reported that error for many months and then had to walk it back, and it’s just the beginning of what’s gonna have to be a lot of other corrections or deletions or whatever they’re called. Now, folks, I don’t know if Trump does this consciously or if he has a sixth sense, but one of the goals of tweeting out that wrestling video that he found that the kid had created where he’s body slamming CNN, again, I don’t know how much of this is strategic with Trump or how much of it is instinctive.

But what he ends up doing is humiliating and embarrassing these people just by using his sense of humor and just by going after them and laughing at them and poking fun at them and cracking wise about their lack of integrity. And what he does, he ends up illustrating the sheer hypocrisy of the media. And whether he intended to do it or whether it was just his instinct, whether it was strategy, it works.

And then CNN falls for the trap, if that’s what it is, by using all of their resources to track down this poor kid, a private citizen, and threaten him because he made a joke that they didn’t like because it was about them. This is happening amidst all of these media people retracting all of these Russia-Trump stories all over the past weekend.

So Trump is exposing them. And this is what fighting back against them looks like, folks. I keep saying it. I’m gonna probably need to keep saying it ’cause, yeah, to some people the tweets and the focusing of attention on the media does appear to some to be unpresidential. Some people say, “I wish he’d stay above it. Why not just ignore it?”

Trump has long had a philosophy that if you attack him he’s gonna hit back, and it hasn’t changed just because he’s president. In fact, he said it is presidential. This is the modern American presidency. If you’re the president and you’re gonna have the entire media apparatus of Washington, D.C., come after you, you’re going to have to do something about it. You can’t sit there, as George W. Bush did, and his father before him, you can’t just sit there and ignore it anymore. You just can’t.

If they’re gonna lie about you — it would be one thing if the coverage was, for the most part, rooted in at least a foundation of fact, but once that goes out the window, once they start manufacturing it, making it up, and once they’ve got all these Obama and Clinton embeds remaining in various levels of government who can call anybody in the media and lie about anything, the old days of ignoring it and staying above it are out the window. You have to fight back against it, because they are trying to destroy Trump.

People say, “Yeah, he should ignore it, just focus on the agenda.” Folks, he’s doing both. I have a story here from the Wall Street Journal: ” Could Trump Really Be Draining the Swamp? The water appears to be receding at key Beltway bureaucracies.”

Apparently Rex Tillerson is vacuuming people out of the State Department. Not being reported. And that is a swamp, let me tell, the State Department is a swamp, and it does need to be Hoovered, and apparently Rex Tillerson is doing it. And it’s happening at EPA as well. So while Trump has got these media people focused on themselves and him, what if this — I’m gonna hold that thought.