RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, yesterday on the program I came across a bit of news that to me was a miniature bombshell, and I didn’t have a whole lot of time to get into it. I’m going to in the last half hour of the program today, and I’m gonna tie it in to what is happening in the Trump collusion investigation. Because I’m telling you, folks: Every road on this entire fiasco, this whole scam, this hoax, this Trump-Russia collusion?
Every road leads back to the Obama White House and to Barack Obama. We think it goes back to Hillary, but it doesn’t. It predates Hillary. It leads back to Barack Obama and his community organizing websites and operations in the White House, and I’m gonna show you. I’m gonna show you that they did a dry run for the Trump-Russia collusion to see if they could actually manipulate the media into doing their bidding. And they found out they could, and so they sprung it again on Trump-Russia collusion after Hillary lost.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Yesterday a news story I came across wasn’t brand-new, but I had not heard it prominently in a while. It was in The Daily Caller. The headline: “Obama [Hired] Fusion GPS to Investigate Romney.” That, to me, is a bombshell-type revelation. I mentioned at the end of the program yesterday. “Obama [Hired] Fusion GPS to Investigate Romney.” This is during the 2012 campaign. “The Barack Obama presidential campaign hired Fusion GPS in 2012 to dig up dirt on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, according to a book released” this week.
“The Obama campaign hid its payments to Fusion GPS through its law firm,” that we’ve also heard of, “Perkins Coie. The arrangement is similar to the one that the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee used to pay Fusion for its investigation of then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016.” Now, this is amazing in several ways. First, how is it possible that no one in the news media ever investigated this? We had Harry Reid telling lies about Romney not paying his taxes.
We had the Democrats and the media telling lies about Romney’s employees dying of cancer and Romney not caring, and then the old story about Romney being anti-animals ’cause he put his dog on the roof of the station wagon one family vacation. It was known that Fusion GPS was digging up dirt on Romney. It was previously known. Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal reported on it. She dug up dirt… Remember the name Frank VanderSloot? He was from Oregon. He was a Romney donor, but he was opposed to gay marriage.
And he was investigated and destroyed for that very policy position by these people, by the Obama administration. And it was reported that the Obama campaign was paying this law firm, Perkins Coie, large sums of money. The Federalist discovered the Obama payments to Perkins Coie last October when the Washington Post first revealed that Hillary was paying the same law firm. So how come throughout the 2012 campaign nobody in the media ever thought of investigating whether Obama had used Perkins Coie as a cutout for their payments to Fusion GPS like Hillary did?
Now, the source for this is David Corn and Michael Isikoff. Their book is Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and Donald Trump’s Election. Now, these are committed leftists, these two guys, so Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS must have thought it was safe to let his hair down and tell these people what all was going on, and they’ve written about it. I don’t know what they’re thinking here because they have just blown up this entire Russian investigation, and they have made it possible to trace it back to Barack Obama and his White House as a technique!
It is this arrangement: Hillary, Obama, Fusion GPS investigating Romney. Now they create the Trump dossier, hiring Michael Steele and all this while we are lied to and told that it’s a legitimate collection of intelligence? When it’s nothing more than a Barack Obama campaign special, a campaign policy! And here’s more: “Obama’s Campaign Paid $972,000 to Law Firm [Perkins Coie] that Secretly Paid Fusion GPS in 2016 — Former president Barack Obama’s official campaign organization has directed nearly a million dollars to the same law firm that funneled money to Fusion GPS, the firm behind the infamous Steele dossier.
“Since April of 2016, Obama for America…” It’s not just the Hillary campaign and the DNC. Obama’s Obama for America, the stepchild of the Organizing for America PAC “has paid over $972,000 to Perkins Coie,” nearly a million dollars, that they also paid in 2012. We know this because of “records filed with the Federal Election Commission. … The Washington Post reported last week that Perkins Coie, an international law firm, was directed by both the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to retain Fusion GPS in April of 2016 to dig up dirt on then-candidate Donald Trump…”
Now, they’re trying to tell us that it was Trump cheating and messing around with Russia that caused Fusion GPS to get interested and pay a guy to dig some dirt up. When in fact, this is an Obama campaign tactic. It is an Obama campaign policy that began with Romney. And since it worked, it was continued with Hillary Clinton. And I’ve got the Kimberley Strassel story here: “Trolling for Dirt on the President’s List.” It’s May 10th of 2012, and this is about VanderSloot, Frank VanderSloot being targeted because he was a Romney donor who was anti-gay marriage.
He was “one of the eight, smeared particularly as being ‘litigious, combative and a bitter foe of the gay rights movement.’ About a week after that post” by the Obama super PAC, “a man named Michael Wolf contacted the Bonneville County Courthouse in Idaho Falls in search of court records regarding Mr. VanderSloot. Specifically, Mr. Wolf wanted all the documents dealing with Mr. VanderSloot’s divorces, as well as a case involving a dispute with a former … employee. … Some digging revealed that” this guy…
There’s not any relation to the Michael Wolff of the current book. Michael Wolf was “a law clerk on the Democratic side of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.” This is nothing more than a Democrat Party opposition-research technique using Fusion GPS and the law firm Perkins Coie to hide payments, to dig up dirt on candidates and their supporters — and, in the case of Trump, to make it look like actual, real intelligence. Washington Times: “Obama Aide Started Christopher Steele-FBI Alliance —
“A senior Barack Obama State Department official gave the green light to an FBI agent in 2016 to meet with … Christopher Steele, a meeting that touched off a relationship that would fuel the ongoing investigation into possible Donald Trump-Russia election collusion.” This is also from this book, Russian Roulette, by Isikoff and David Corn. So what is all of this? What is the tactic? What’s the technique? How did they perfect it? We now have a pretty good idea thanks to a great piece that ran on a website last week written by Lee Smith, Tablet.com.
I’m gonna take a break. I’m gonna come back. But basically it’s this: This entire campaign of using intelligence sources from the deep state, coordinating with members of the media to leak news that does not exist and have it reported as fact even though there’s no evidence… In the Trump campaign, it was not the first time it was done. Obama did it during the negotiations in the Iran deal using a report from both the Washington Post and The Atlantic by the name of Entous. Adam Entous. E-n-t-o-u-s.
Essentially, they did a dry run to see if people from the intel community could manipulate the media to do their bidding. Obama was spying on domestic opponents of the Iran nuke deal. The same way they spied on Mike Flynn: Get a warrant for actual foreign agents and then use those surveillance tapes to overhear Americans that these targets were talking to and then unmasking them. I’ll have the details when we get back.
But, folks, the bottom line is that this entire Trump-Russia collusion story is a creation of the Obama Organizing for Action, Organizing for America community-organizing technique, policy, what have you. It is an entire opposition research area. It is not intelligence. There was no Trump collusion with Russia. The whole thing’s been made up, and the key to having it work was succeeding and creating an “alliance” between deep state intelligence officials (spies) and getting media to unquestioningly report everything they were fed.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Lee Smith at Tablet magazine. I gotta go through this quick. I’m gonna post the link at RushLimbaugh.com. You can see it on the app and you can see it on the website. “[H]ow and when American journalists got in bed with [our] country’s spies … started several years before Trump or Russiagate. It was while reporting on the Obama administration that the press came to rely on the White House’s political operatives, including intelligence officials, for sources and stories about American foreign policy.
“It got worse when the Obama administration started spying on its domestic opponents during the Iran deal, when the Obama administration learned how far it could go in manipulating the foreign-intelligence surveillance apparatus for domestic political advantage. As Adam Entous, then of the Wall Street Journal, wrote in a December 2015 article, ‘the National Security Agency’s targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.’
“Obama administration officials leaked the story to Entous in order to shape its reception. After all, the real news was pretty bad — Obama had spied on Americans and the Americans he spied on, Congress and Jewish community leaders, knew it. But in [Adam] Entous’ account, it was only by accident that the National Security Agency had listened in,” because they weren’t the targets, like Flynn wasn’t the target. (But he really was.) “While Entous’ evident lack of skepticism about that account was hardly good reporting, it was perfectly in keeping with the maxim of not biting the hand that feeds you.”
In other words, Entous loved being on the Obama team, and he didn’t question anything they told him. He just printed it like a stenographer. “[T]he purpose of the spying campaign was to help the White House fight U.S. legislators and other Americans critical of the” Iran deal. And Adam Entous was used two or three other times. They even used him to report that Russia had successfully blown up the electrical grid in Vermont and shut down a dam. It never happened. Entous never questioned it; he was exposed.
But the Obama people found out that he could be used, and any other reporter they could use to say whatever deep state intelligence people wanted said about the Iran deal. So since it worked like a charm there, they redid it on the Trump-Russia thing. They had done a dry run, spying on Americans during the Iran nuclear negotiations, and they simply ran the plan again on Trump-Russia collusion — and this column by Mr. Smith detailed how they did it, who the reporters were in some cases, how they got Sessions to recuse himself.
And the key to it is for the first time in the Iran nuclear deal, they succeeded in having the media not question the spies. Up to that time, the media was usually very distrustful of the CIA, the intelligence community. But here because of Obama — the media so wanted Obama to succeed — that they simply lapped up everything any deep state spy told them and they printed it. Since it worked so well in the Iran nuclear deal, they did it again. This whole thing, folks — Trump-Russia collusion — is a gigantic political operation that was hatched in the Obama White House with the clear knowledge of Hillary Clinton. There isn’t any real actionable intel here at all. It is entirely made up, and that’s why there isn’t any evidence for it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Obama hires Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Romney. And then they dig up dirt on opponents, the Iran nuclear deal and Fusion GPS gets hired by Hillary to go after Trump. And they try to tell us this is a real intelligence scandal? What a hoax.