RUSH: I have spent considerable time detailing and explaining how the Obama administration spied on domestic opponents of the Iran deal and that that was the forerunner of the attempt to spy on Trump transition and campaign people, and how the Obama administration used a new alliance between intelligence community people and media to advance the mythology and lies about the Iran deal.
And when they saw how easy it was to compromise the media in pushing the phony Iran deal narrative of the Obama administration, that essentially became the trial run for what we are going through now with the intelligence community having an alliance with the media to leak a bunch of absolute drivel about Trump for a year and a half and two years to try to shape public opinion. I’m gonna go back and I’m gonna review all of that.
When it comes to the Iran deal, I’m gonna go back and review a whole bunch of things from the past that we touched on when they came out that everybody has forgotten, that detail just how rotten this deal was to begin with. They also detail how the Obama administration virtually lied to the American people about it, and did so with the assistance of the media and the new alliance between the media and the Obama intelligence apparatus.
It’s a fascinating story, and it’s gonna just nuke to smithereens all of these people that are in a conniption fit over this. And if you look at these people, it does raise a question. I don’t care where you go. John Kerry, Hillary Clinton — who I think needs to be given a breathalyzer test after 9 o’clock every night if she’s gonna start tweeting things. But wherever you go, Obama, John Kerry, Hillary — everybody in the Obama administration — is reacting to this Iran deal like they have lost something huge.
It gives the impression that there’s more involved here than just an Obama policy being reversed. It’s almost like there’s something that was personal at stake here that has been taken away from them. And, I mean, it’s more so than usual. They’re more upset… You know, they were mad at the attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare, for example, and they had their little things to say about that. But this is engendering a completely different reaction from them.
But I can’t wait to get to the history of this with all of the stories we had about how bad this is and how bad the Obama administration was lying to people about the Iran deal. It is one of these things that I’m thinking about starting with, when I guess I essentially have. The thing to remember… I want to read you a statement Ben Sasse, U.S. Senator Ben Sasse. He’s from Nebraska. He issued a statement following the president’s announcement yesterday getting out of the Iran deal.
“The Iran deal has always been terrible. Today is a reminder that if you live by the presidency, you die by the presidency. We ought to be clear about this: Donald Trump isn’t ripping up a treaty; he’s walking away from Barack Obama’s personal pledge. Two-and-a-half years ago, President Obama made a bad deal with Iran without support from Congress, and today President Trump is pulling out of President Obama’s personal commitment, and he doesn’t need Congress’s support to do” it because Congress had nothing to do with authorizing this.
Obama did this personally. Obama never had the votes in the U.S. Congress to get this ratified as a treaty. So Obama did it by virtue, by way of executive action. And that’s the only reason Trump is able to rip it up the way he has. If this had been sanctioned and authorized as a treaty by the United States Senate, Trump could not have done what he did yesterday. The key to remember is that Obama never had the support even of prominent people in his own party.
And because he did it that way, Trump — like so many other Obama things, which were enacted over the heads of the elected representatives of the people. Trump can simply erase them with a subsequent executive action or executive order. I’m telling you, if this had been a treaty and the Senate had ratified it, Trump could not have done what he did yesterday. He would have had to go back to the Senate, had to reverse the process all over. It would have been practically impossible to do because of the number of votes required even to ratify a treaty.
But as such, he didn’t need the support of Congress; he didn’t need the support of the Senate. Ben Sasse says, “American foreign policy makes lasting progress when it is led by the President, approved by Congress, and presented honestly to the American people.” This was not presented honestly to the American people. The Obama administration lied about the details of this deal, and one of the architects of the deal, Ben Rhodes, ran around and bragged about how easy it was to lie both to the American people and American journalists.
Ben Rhodes from Obama’s national security apparatus made the comment that your average journalist today is 27. They don’t know anything; they believe everything we tell ’em. It was a snap. It was right out of the page of Jonathan Gruber, who was the architect of Obamacare, who after it was signed into law, ran around the country bragging about how easy it was to lie to the American people about it because the American people are essentially ignoramuses. So Obamacare, the Iran deal…
You look at the tricks that they had to play in order to get Obamacare passed into law. Not one Republican vote for that. They had to use budget reconciliation for it to avoid the requirement for 60 votes. They had to play all kinds of games and employ all kinds of schemes to get Obamacare passed, which is one of the reasons it’s been easy — relatively easy — to get rid of the individual mandate. Now, Congress did vote it, so Congress has to participate in the repeal and various elements delayed that for six months, nine months of Trump’s term.
The Republicans weren’t sure he was gonna survive, so they didn’t want to support him on anything. When they finally figured out he was gonna survive, they became a little bit more supportive. But really, Ben Rhodes running around bragging? I mean, this was even in the New York Post. John Podhoretz of the New York Post documented this extensively. We’re gonna go back and revisit this. For all of you who think this was some kind of great deal and there’s been a big trick played, this country has been saved.
This was a disastrous deal. One of the… The $150 billion that Obama pledged to Iran upon signing of the deal? Trump has made a big deal out of that $150 billion, and of course there was another amount of money — in cash — that was delivered (chuckles) on an unmarked airplane to the Tehran airport, pallets of cash that were from Obama to the government of Iran, ostensibly for the release of American hostages. But one of the things that’s not being commented on in all of this — and it’s understandable when you hear it.
You know who one of Iran’s most important allies is? Take a guess. (singing Jeopardy! theme) Beep! Right. Russia. Russia is one of Iran’s biggest allies. Do you know what one of Russia’s primary foreign policy objectives has been for years and years and years? (singing Jeopardy! theme) Beep! Right. An outpost in the Middle East. Guess what? They had it with Iran. Who has been supplying Iran, largely…? They’re not the only ones, but who has been one of the majority players in supplying Iran with nuclear technology for weaponized nukes and nuclear power? (singing Jeopardy! theme) Beep!
Right. Russia.
John Kerry, secretary of state, admitted that some of the money we gave Iran would be used to fund terrorism. And they’re trying to tell us that this was a great deal and that pulling out of this deal is gonna put the United States at great risk. We were at great risk in this deal! Do you know, do you remember, this Iran deal that Obama made had a clause requiring us to defend Iran if Iran were attacked — including if they were attacked by Israel?
Trump has been talking about that since 2015 and this been one of the primary reasons Trump has wanted to pull out of this. Iran took that $150 billion and repaid the Russians for some of the nuclear infrastructure they had been building. Now with the deal over, Iran has no more source of money. And with sanctions being reenacted, reemployed on Iran, it’s gonna be even tougher for the Iranians to continue to do business with the Russians.
So Trump has just — in addition to everything else — flipped a gigantic middle-finger bird at the Russians. But wait! The Russians and Trump colluded steal the election from Hillary, which would mean that Trump would be in the debt of the Russians. All of this is in the beginning stages of imploding. The Mueller investigation, all of this stuff, is in the beginning stages of imploding.
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RUSH: By the way, folks, that $150 billion from Obama to Iran, it just didn’t go to Russia. John Kerry admitted that some of it would be diverted to jihad. You know what that means. Terrorism. So some of that Obama $150 billion — well, American $150 billion — went to Syria, went to the Taliban. It flowed to Hamas and Hezbollah for the war on Israel. It went to Yemen, where there’s a proxy war going on against Saudi Arabia — which, by the way, is now part of the new Trump alliance with Israel.
Here’s Obama, greatest president ever, first African-American president, believes America needs to be cut down in size. America is the problem in the world in many ways. It’s not the solution. America has been unfair to smaller countries. So here comes Obama to kind of level the playing field and promote globalism.
And this one is just yanked right out from under ’em, and these people in the Obama camp that had something to do with this are really taking this hard. They’re taking it so hard, it’s making me curious what they’ve lost here. What did Kerry lose personally in this? This is… He’s reacting to this more than just lost his credibility, reputation, or resume point. Ditto, Hillary. Ditto, Obama himself.
What did they lose personally in this? And I don’t have the answer, but I tell you what: I am deeply, deeply curious.
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RUSH: This Iran deal, folks, was even less than they were lying to us about it being. Let me explain. I have here a printed page from a website called Human Rights Voices, but it actually reprints something that was sent to then-congressional Representative Mike Pompeo. And it was seen by our buddies at National Review. Now, the date of this is November 24th of 2015. Donald Trump just came down the escalator, you know, six months prior.
I mean, the presidential campaign is barely, barely underway. November 24th, 2015, headline: “State Department: Iran Deal Is Not Legally Binding and Iran Didn’t Sign It.” When I saw this, I remembered this too! Quote: “President Obama didn’t require Iranian leaders to sign the nuclear deal that his team negotiated with the regime, and the deal is not ‘legally binding,’ his administration acknowledged in a letter to Representative Mike Pompeo,” Republican from Kansas.
Now, “Frifield wrote the letter in response to a letter Pompeo sent Secretary of State John Kerry, in which he observed that the deal the president had submitted to Congress was unsigned and wondered if the administration had given lawmakers the final agreement. Frifield’s response [to Pompeo] emphasizes that Congress did receive the final version of the deal. But by characterizing the JCPOA as a set of ‘political commitments’ rather than a more formal agreement, it is sure to heighten congressional concerns that Iran might violate the deal’s terms.”
There isn’t a deal.
Iran can’t violate because they never signed it! Therefore, technically they’re incapable of violating. This is just a set of political documents put forth by Obama, never ratified by the Senate, not signed by the Iranians. Again, I want to read to you from Julia Frifield at the State Department. She’s the assistant secretary for legislative affairs — November 19th, 2015 — in the Obama State Department, “The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA),” the Iran deal, “is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document…” It was the final document.
She “wrote the letter in response to a letter Pompeo sent Secretary of State John Kerry, in which he observed that the deal the president had submitted to Congress was unsigned…” So Pompeo’s sitting there in Congress; they get this deal. It’s the Iran deal. They’re supposed to look at it. Obama wants ’em to sign on to it. Some people go, “Wait a minute. The thing’s not even signed.” State Department: “Yes, that’s true. It’s not a treaty. It’s not an executive agreement.”
It was nothing more than a set of political commitments. This is community organizing in action is basically what this is. Obama spells out some things that he wants to do with Iran, some things he wants to do for Iran. He calls it a “deal” to limit Iran’s… If Iran didn’t sign this, how the hell can they be held accountable in the pursuit of nuclear weapons, nuclear electric grid, nuclear anything? How can they be held accountable when they didn’t even sign it? It’s a nothing!
And right there playing along with this is the Drive-By Media, which is going to be the next aspect of my little trip down memory lane in reminding you how we got here. There’s even more information from this story. “President Hassan Rouhani discouraged his nation’s parliament from voting on the nuclear deal in order to avoid placing legal burdens on the [Iranian] regime. ‘If the [deal] is sent to (and passed by) parliament, it will create an obligation for the government.
“‘It will mean the president, who has not signed it so far, will have to sign it,’ Rouhani said in August. ‘Why should we place an unnecessary legal restriction on the Iranian people?'” He was gonna sign it. They didn’t. It’s an Iranian deal that is a list of political achievements, objectives by Obama that doesn’t even have an Iranian signature. It’s not even a deal. To even call this a deal? So all Trump has done is withdraw whatever commitments Barack Obama personally made to the nation of Iran.
That’s all that has happened here.
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RUSH: I want to continue with this Iranian business and get this rapped up because there’s lots of other stuff I want to get to, and people want to weigh in on this themselves on the phones. So we have established that there wasn’t even a deal; the Iranians never did sign this. It was Barack Obama’s personal policy preferences toward Iran. Folks, the meat and potatoes of this is coming up next. ‘Cause I guarantee you, I would bet over 80% are shocked to learn that the Iranians never signed it, that it was a treaty, that it isn’t even really a deal.
If you’ve got a document, statutes that say, “This is what you can’t do,” and somebody keeps violating them, if nobody’s gonna stop you, you keep doing it. And nobody was gonna stop Obama because he was the first African-American president; he was the chosen one for the American left, the Democrat Party, and there was not a soul that was gonna stand up to him.
There was not a soul that was gonna stop him. They knew that the full wrath of the Drive-By Media would rain down upon them. So Obama had a free rein. That’s the only way this was allowed to happen is nobody had the guts to stop it. Even the Republicans — remember the Corker deal? — tried to make this look legit. The media made it look legit, and that’s the real story of this! How did this even happen?
How does something that is nothing more than one man’s personal policy preferences toward Iran get presented to the American people as a treaty-like, official U.S. policy that has as its No. 1 objective keeping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon — when, in fact, it does just the opposite? It permits the Iranians getting a nuclear weapon! It commits the United States to defending Iran if they’re ever attacked, even by the Israelis.
And they got $150 billion in cash from Obama and the State Department — well, the Treasury — and this whole thing was presented to the American people as a serious, constitutional treaty that represented an official United States agreement with the government of Iran with several allied nations as signatories (i.e., our European allies). This was nothing but another scam, folks!
And the scam was pulled off by way of an alliance between the Obama intelligence people — that would be the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, all the people that ran these agencies that were Obama acolytes — and the media as willing accomplices in furthering the misconception about this. So first, as a reminder, John Podhoretz, May 5th, 2016, headline: “White House Admits it Played us for Fools to Sell Iran Deal.” It begins this way:
“Congratulations, liberals of the Washington press corps and elite organizations: You’re a bunch of suckers. We all know this because the Obama White House just told us so. In an astounding New York Times piece by David Samuels, senior White House officials gleefully confess they use friendly reporters and nonprofits as public relations tools in the selling of President Obama’s foreign policy — and can do it almost at will because these tools are ignorant, will believe what they’re told, will essentially take dictation and are happy to be used just to get the information necessary for a tweet or two.”
Now, Podhoretz, he knows it, but he at this point of the time of this writing is not yet aware of how deep this web of deceit sinks between Obama and the media and all of these nonprofits. He gets a heads-up on it from the piece in the New York Times by David Samuels, and in this piece, White House official — they can’t contain themselves — confess how they used reporters and nonprofits as PR tools, and they committed how they can do it any time they want because the reporters are a bunch of sycophants.
As you’ll hear, Ben Rhodes — who is Obama’s foreign policy kid at the time — was talking about how easy it was to fool the media. They’re just basically a bunch of ignorant 27-year-olds who will do anything to be close to us. “Their greatest triumph, according to Samuels [in the New York Times], was selling a misleading narrative about the nuclear deal with Iran — the parameters of which were set a year before the administration claimed and which had nothing to do with the fact that a supposedly more accommodating government had risen to power.”
In other words — I’m sure you remember this — one of the things they used to sell us to the deal was the Iranians had a new government made up of a bunch of moderates — and the new leader, this Rouhani guy? He was a moderate. “We can do a deal with this guy!” John Kerry’s all over the place saying so, Obama is. But they weren’t moderates. There aren’t any moderates that are alive in the Iranian regime.
Rhodes thinks everybody out there in the media, the nonprofits, anywhere that don’t agree with him and Obama foreign policy, they are “‘The Blob’ … He thinks as little of them as he does of the journalists he and his team must spoon-feed. ‘The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,’ Rhodes says. ‘They literally know nothing.’
“Then there are others his assistant Ned Price refers to as ‘force multipliers,’ more senior reporters and pundits who parrot what they’re told. ‘I’ll give them some color,’ Price says, using the journalistic term for juicy bits of inside-baseball detail, ‘and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own,'” as though they thought it up, but all they’re doing is repeating what “we” told them.
“A foreign-policy reporter named Laura Rozen, the most credulous conveyor of pro-Iran-deal news last year, is given a specific shout-out by White House digital guru Tanya Somanader. ‘Laura Rozen was my RSS feed,’ Somanader tells Samuels. ‘She would just find everything and retweet it.’ … It could only work if water-carriers did the White House’s job for it, and nonprofit water-carriers did their faithful duty.
“‘We created an echo chamber,’ Rhodes tells [the New York Times] about the journalists and think-tankers who were discussing the Iran deal based almost entirely on information given to them by the White House. ‘They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.'” This is exactly what Lee Smith dug up at The Tablet. It is this operation that Podhoretz is writing about that I’m sharing with you here.
It is this operation that ended up being the trial run for Obama using the intelligence community to basically write whatever they wanted written about Trump and Russia and collusion. When they found out how easy it was to plant total BS with the media and have them write it without even trying to verify it about the Iranian deal, they figured they had these people in the palm of their hands.
This was the proving ground: 2015, 2016. This was what was in place when it was time to enact the Trump-Russia collusion operation featuring endless leaks from intelligence people to the media — unverified, uncorroborated. The media didn’t check anything, just printed it, and they continue to do those things to this day. And when the Obama administration found out how easy this was, because these reporters on average are 27 years old and “don’t know anything”?
And that’s how you ended up thinking that it was a big deal, that it was gonna stop the Iranians from getting nuclear weapons, that the European allies had signed on to it, that the Iranians had signed on to it. It is nothing but a gigantic scam! It worked so well that Ben Rhodes and people in the Obama administration could not stop bragging about how easily it was to execute to the New York Times.
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RUSH: Folks, we’re not only gonna have the Podhoretz piece at RushLimbaugh.com, we’re gonna find the New York piece that he actually wrote his column on, it’s the peace by David Samuels New York Times somewhere between April 29th and May 3rd of 2016. We’re gonna find that original link because it’s in the New York Times, the Obama administration are bragging about how easy it was to use the media and a bunch of nonprofits to lie to the American people.
That the media people were so young, so ignorant, so desirous of being close to the administration, they’d print anything. It’s an amazing piece of hubris. This is the kind of thing you would normally never, never admit. But they were so proud of themselves, they could not stop bragging about it — and the New York Times thought they were brilliant too. The New York Times was part of the group that was fooled, but they didn’t care because anything for Obama. You know, anything for Obama!
Whatever. Whatever he wanted! Anything for Obama. Where’d Obama get the $150 billion, by the way? Where’d he get that money if Congress didn’t authorize it? The $150 billion he puts on the tarmac in Tehran, where’d he get it? Where did he get the cash in addition to the $150 billion? Where did he get this? Congress didn’t authorize it. Where did it come from? Well, wherever he wanted it to come from, ’cause nobody was gonna stop it.
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RUSH: I have here yet another New York Post story, Ruth Brown and Danika Fears. This is December 18th, 2017. “Obama Protected Hezbollah Drug Ring to Save Iran Nukes Deal.” Do you remember this? This whole deal was shockingly irresponsible, dangerous, a masterwork of deception. “The Obama administration…” I’m now reading from the story. Oh, by the way, we have put Podhoretz and the original New York Times story there on the ticker at RushLimbaugh.com on the website and the RushLimbaugh.com app.
We are now able to post things instantaneously. Transcripts of things I say takes a little bit longer, but they get up very quickly now rather than having to wait until 5 or 6 o’clock every day. Back to the New York Post story. “The Obama administration stymied a sprawling investigation into the terror group Hezbollah — and its highly lucrative drug-trafficking networks — to protect the Iran nuclear deal, according to a bombshell report. A team…” Remember, this is last December. “A team at the Drug Enforcement Administration had been working for almost a decade to bring down [Hezbollah]’s sophisticated $1 billion-a-year drug ring, which laundered money and smuggled cocaine into the United States, Politico reported.
Now we need to find out what made Iran so important to Barack Obama that all of this deceit would be entered into in order to construct a, quote-unquote, “deal” the American people were told would prevent the Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon? Who was really the purpose of this? Why was this so important to Obama? We know now why he didn’t submit this for ratification. We know why this was not treated as a treaty.
It would have never passed the smell test. And what do you think these allies like the U.K. and France and Germany knew? Do you think they knew from the get-go that this was as phony baloney as it is? Or did they think that this is a legitimate deal that the Iranians were gonna sign and abide by? Could they have been that stupid? Could they have been that fooled, as the American people were and as the American Media was? (interruption) I don’t know, Mr. Snerdley, but it’s… (interruption)
I think they knew about it all along because they’re in on whatever this deal is promising to people who want something out of it. And this is why they can’t pull out of it. They’ve gotta act like it’s still important, it’s still relevant. They can’t pull out! They would look like fools to pull out of this now. ‘Cause they would have to admit everything that I’ve just shared with you about what this is. And they’re not doing that. Everybody’s on the same page. “This is imperiling the world!
“This has made the world more dangerous. This has made the United States less trustworthy. This has made the United States unreliable.” What an ever-loving crock! What’s really happened here is that all these people in Iran and the Middle East have once again learned that we’re not a patsy and we’re not led by a bunch of fools and idiots. It’s mind-boggling. You know, people say that, use that phrase to the point of it having become a cliche, but this genuinely boggles the mind.
Let me go back to the phones. This is Dustin in Hopewell, New Jersey. Great to have you, Justin. How you doing?
CALLER: Hey, Rush, how you doing. Great to finally talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: (gargled cell) So just to get to it, I recently started engaging friends of mine, liberals, about this Iran deal. I’m finding that the ones who have a lot of information refer — and they believe that it really was a good deal, and that they’re not developing their arsenal. When I pressed them on
RUSH: And you won’t, and they’re not gonna change, and they are… Those people are emotionally attached and wedded to this deep respect for Obama, because there’s a lot that these people gain. By having a deep investment in Obama, they’re automatically not, what? They’re not racists! They are forward thinkers, they’re good people, they’re fair and all this. To back away from Obama is to run the risk of being called a racist, a sexist or any number of these other terms.
But generally you’re dealing here with people who when you get down to brass tacks, they’re ignorant. They don’t know what they are talking about because they have been lied to. They have been lied to by people they trust in the Drive-By Media. They think this is a good deal. They think the Iranians are gonna be prevented from getting a nuclear weapon. They believe everything they’ve been told — and you have the unenviable task of telling them that people and institutions they trust are lying to them.
You’ve got your work cut out for you.
CALLER: Absolutely. In a state like I’m in, in New Jersey, and as an educator and working in public schools, I can’t… I have to hide my views; otherwise I’d be ostracized.
RUSH: Yeah. Or worse.
CALLER: (chuckles) That’s true.
Every chance there is to defeat them, they have to be defeated. The candidates they support have to be defeated. Don’t waste your time reaching out to them. If you want to have… If it’s fun for you to try, go ahead. I’m not suggest that go you ostracize yourself from your friends, but keep your expectations reasonable. You’re dealing with people where thought, wisdom, analysis is not going to permeate. They don’t think what they think now because of what they think. They haven’t thought at all.
They’re simply accepting a bunch of indoctrination and PR. That’s what you’re up against. Now, I know some people say, “Well, then why are you doing what you’re do?” Well, because I have special skills, ladies and gentlemen, that enable me to get further in persuading people. If you want to try it, I mean, go for it. I’m not… I just want you to maintain your expectations. These people that he’s talking about here, his friends that think this is a great deal? It is an even a deal!
You know what, Dustin? Try an experiment. Tell them the Iranians never even signed it! Better yet, Dustin, go to RushLimbaugh.com in a minute and print out the last half hour’s worth of transcripts and the piece from the New York Times where Obama people admit that the whole thing was a scam, and give that to them — and they won’t even believe that. They’ll think you’re running a trick on ’em, or that you’re missing the point, or that Obama was so smart, so far ahead of people, that he could even lie to people like this just to get conservatives all in a blather.
They won’t believe it.
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