RUSH: The Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham memo. This is a memo, it’s a criminal referral asking for a criminal investigation in the State Department. What was the State Department doing in all of this? Not just the FBI. The State Department where Hillary Clinton once prowled the corridors. Because in testimony before his committee, Senator Grassley has been able to confirm that Christopher Steele lied to the FBI. And that’s what he wants.
He wants a trial, a criminal investigation of Steele, the author of the dossier, for lying to the FBI. They’re putting everybody in jail for that. They put Martha Stewart in jail for it, they put Scooter Libby in jail for it, and Charles Grassley is asking why are we not trying to put Christopher Steele in jail? He lied to the FBI. What about? He lied to the FBI about his contact with Michael Isikoff at Yahoo News.
The Grassley memo confirms the Nunes memo, that the FBI misled the FISA court to obtain a surveillance warrant on a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, who has never met Trump. Did you know that? Carter Page told George Stephanopoulos on ABC News (paraphrasing), “I’ve never even met Trump. I wasn’t a close adviser! All I ever did was go to Moscow once. But I am not a Trump adviser. I’ve not told him a thing. I don’t know him. I’ve never met him.”
So Christopher Steele, he lied to the FBI about his contact with Yahoo News. The circular route of this is this. In its FISA warrant application, the FBI includes the Steele dossier, but they do not say that Steele was paid to write this dossier by Hillary. They do not include in their application the political nature of this dossier. They pass it off as legitimate intel, not as opposition research.
Now, we all knew that. But in addition to the FISA application containing the Steele dossier, they backed it up with a Yahoo News story! The Yahoo News story was written by Isikoff after talking to the author of the dossier! So we have a circular route here. Steele writes the dossier and then calls Isikoff, Yahoo News, and reports to him what’s in the dossier. Then Yahoo prints its story, the FBI gets that story and acts as though it’s independent confirmation of the dossier, when in fact it’s nothing more than Isikoff reprinting what Steele told him.
But Steele had lied to the FBI about his contact with Yahoo News. He did not tell them that he had advised or informed Isikoff at Yahoo News, and that’s why the FBI included the Isikoff story. They tried to pass it off as independent confirmation of the dossier. And this is all in the Grassley memo. It’s now been greatly redacted.
Now, why is this important? Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal is on a tear about this. She’s asking, why isn’t this Grassley memo front-page news? And the answer is because it confirms the Nunes memo and it blows up the Schiff talking points, which the media ran with. And Schiff is being further humiliated and embarrassed today, which we’ll get to in the next hour.
Now, this is a big deal because all day yesterday the Drive-By Media, the great power source of the Democrat Party, the Drive-By Media was trying to say that the FBI did explain to the court that the dossier had political origins. And if you read what they published about it, you’re gonna get confused like a pretzel because it doesn’t say that.
What you get is a headline that says, “FBI did indeed include partisan nature of dossier.” Then you read the story, and you don’t find that anywhere. They did not. The FBI did not inform the FISA court that the Steele dossier was a political opposition research document. I don’t care what you heard yesterday in the news, it didn’t happen.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So just to review, the Grassley memo confirms the Nunes memo and adds even more to it. This is a criminal referral at the State Department asking for there to be a criminal investigation of the author of the Steele dossier, Christopher Steele, for lying to the FBI, among many other things. People are in jail for lying to the FBI. Martha Stewart went to jail, Scooter Libby was gonna go to jail ’til Bush commuted the sentence, all for lying to the FBI. Christopher Steele lied to the FBI when he did not represent that he had talked to the media about the dossier and informed the media of the dossier.
This led to the FBI including a Yahoo News story about the dossier in the FISA warrant application. That was made to look like the news story was backing up the claims made by the dossier, when in fact Isikoff knew what was in the dossier ’cause Steele had called him and Steele lied to the FBI and said he had not talked to the media! So Grassley and Graham want a criminal referral into Steele lying. But that’s not even the half of it. This whole dossier thing… I cannot escape this. I think about this every time it comes up.
When I first learned what was in this, which is shortly before BuzzFeed published the damn thing, whenever that was. Sometime last summer. I had heard the scuttlebutt about a dossier, but nobody in the media would run with it because it was so odd, it was so salacious. And then I had heard, “Well, nothing in it’s been verified. They can’t prove it.” And then I heard, “Man, they can’t wait! They want to run it. They want to run it so bad.” Well, they needed two things, the media. They needed two things for this dossier to become a news item.
And they presented it to Trump as a bunch of BS but as an example the kind of stuff that’s out there that he needs to be aware of because even though it’s lying sack of you-know-what, it can still have impact on events around the world. And it was used as… Well, all that took was for Comey to present it and it became news. (impression) “Today, President Trump was informed of a dossier that accuses him of hiring prostitutes to urinate on a bed slept on by Barack Obama and the lovely and gracious Michelle (My Belle),” and that’s all it took.
After that happened, “What’s in it? What’s in it? Oh, my God!” BuzzFeed to the rescue publishes the whole damn thing on in their website full of disclaimers. “We can’t corroborate it! We can’t confirm it, we don’t know that one word of this is true, but you have a right to see it,” and we’re off to the races. When I first saw this, when I saw the golden showers story about hiring prostitutes to urinate on the bed, that’s all it took. I’m not bragging here, folks. I’m recounting history for you. I’m sharing with you the way my mind works.
The thing became totally bogus in my mind right then and there, and then I began asking, “How can anybody believe this? How can anybody…?” And then when I learned John Brennan, Obama’s CIA guy, said it was the foundation of their investigation, I was genuinely dumbfounded. Until I, you know, realized the CIA is a political weapon used by Obama. I said, “Okay, now it makes sense.” But this is bogus. There couldn’t be anything in this that is true. And then individuals named in the dossier came forward and blew to smithereens the allegations about them.
To this day, my friends, — to this day — not a single element of this has been verified, and yet look at its seminal, central relevance and importance in virtually everything happening here to try to get Trump. And it is a thousand percent bogus. We didn’t know any of this a year ago. We had to dig this stuff up ourselves. None of what we know about this has come from the mainstream media, and that is very important. None of this has come from the New York Times; they’ve tried to hush it up. None of it has come from CNN; they’ve tried to discredit it.
“Here’s why: Because it confirms the Nunes memo and blows up the Schiff talking points (which the media ran with). 2) It is confirmation that the FBI’s FISA application relied on the dossier and [the Yahoo N]ews article, and worse, on the credibility of a source in the employ of the Clinton campaign.” That’s Sidney Blumenthal. “The Clinton campaign.” Hillary Clinton herself is behind this dossier. She is behind the origination of the dossier. But Barack Obama can’t be far behind, because all of this is done to shield and protect Obama.
Hillary Clinton was to be elected to make sure we didn’t know any of what we know today, and to make sure that we don’t know what we are going to learn tomorrow and next week and next month. Hillary Clinton’s primary purpose — in Barack’s vision, anyway — was to protect all of this. We would never hear of the Strzok text messages. We would never know that this dossier was anything other than what they were lying to us about, that it was a legitimate bastion of intelligence. We wouldn’t know anything, if Hillary Clinton had been elected.
If Hillary Clinton had been elected, there would not be a single word of concern about Russian intervention unless the media wanted to use that to continue to discredit Trump so as to persuade future Trumps to never try this. But there would have never been any concern of Russian intervention if Hillary had won. We wouldn’t be anywhere near this. There wouldn’t be a special counsel looking into Russian interference, because they wouldn’t want to be doing anything to taint her glorious victory.
If there was any reference to Russia if the Clinton camp had won, there might be stories about how close we came. “The Russians almost elected Trump!” I could see them doing things like that, but we would not have claims that the Russians succeeded in tampering with our elections. None of this. There would not be a special counsel, unless, in victory, they wanted to pummel Trump into a grave by impaneling one to investigate his corruption/collusion with the Russians. Anything’s possible.
The Grassley memo “is proof that the FBI did not tell the [FISA] court the extraordinarily partisan provenance of the dossier,” their No. 1 exhibit. We’ve learned that “a source in the employ of the Clinton campaign” was informing Christopher Steele of events to put in the dossier. We now are very certain that that’s Sidney Blumenthal. The Charles Grassley memo, the request for an investigation of Steele memo, “provides evidence that the FBI presented the FISA court with materially false evidence.”
But then they had to go get the renewal, a 90-day renewal of the application to keep surveilling — and after they learned that Steele had lied under oath, the FBI still does not tell the FISA court that he had lied, that they had a dubious/bad source. And finally, the unredacted Grassley memo “provides evidence,” not speculation, evidence, “that Steele was getting information from the Clinton team itself! Via the State Department!”
That’s why Grassley’s criminal referral involves the State Department. Devin Nunes gave us a heads-up on this when he was with us on Monday that this was coming down the pike, and it has hit. So now we not just have a dossier based on unnamed, shady Russians, but Sidney Blumenthal’s fingerprints are now on it. And people are beginning to ask, just how much of this whole thing was engineered by the Clinton campaign from the start?
Well, if you read that book written about the Hillary campaign, pretty much all of it. I don’t have any doubt the Clinton campaign, the Obama administration are in this up to their armpits. The various, salacious, lying, false — stop and think about this. Nothing in this dossier can be verified, and yet it is and remains and has been for a year the primary vehicle to investigate Trump. How in the hell does that happen?
Can you think of any other case where the primary piece of evidence could not be substantiated for a year and yet the investigation would continue to ramp up. Not a shred of evidence, and everybody using this dossier now knows, and probably knew from the get-go, that it was bogus, and yet they keep using it. What does that tell us? Go to the audio sound bites. Some backup for this. Sharyl Attkisson, Fox & Friends this morning, had this to say.
RUSH: Interesting take. Backs up one of my concerns. The real reason Hillary had to win was to make sure nobody learned any of what we’re learning! And particularly the involvement of Obama. But she’s making the point that this is by no means the first time that law enforcement has lied or used shady practices to get a warrant to spy on people, that it may in fact be routine for 10 years or so, and that everybody’s in on it and we can’t afford to have it exposed. Ergo what we’re literally seeing here is some panic that doesn’t look like panic on the part of FBI, DOJ, Clinton, and Obama.
Let’s jump forward to audio sound bite number 7. Last night on the Fox News Channel, question to Trey Gowdy: “Weeks before the election, somebody –” and this is from the Grassley memo. This is just backup of what I just told you. “Weeks before the election, somebody in the Obama State Department was feeding information from a foreign source to Christopher Steele. Is that right?”
GOWDY: When you hear who the source, one of the sources of that information is, you’re going to think, “Oh my gosh I’ve heard that name somewhere before. Where could it possibly have been?”
MACCALLUM: A foreign source?
GOWDY: The domestic source. And I’m trying to think how Secretary Clinton defined him. I think she said he was an old friend who emailed her from time to time.
MACCALLUM: Sidney Blumenthal?
GOWDY: That’d be really warm.
RUSH: “Sidney Blumenthal?” “That would be really warm.” So we had Sidney Blumenthal from the Obama State Department — remember, Obama wouldn’t even let her hire him. So she had to finagle him to get on a different payroll, but he’s been her side by side left-wing advisor and confidante going back to vice president days. Well, I’m sorry. First lady days. I mean, the guy would be right at home in the Politburo in the Soviet Union. Ditto his kid, Max over at Media Matters for America.
Anyway, we have a State Department source, a State Department associate of Hillary Clinton feeding information to the author of the Trump dossier.
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