RUSH:  The New York Times admits (as though it’s no big deal) that the FBI ran at least one government informant against the Trump campaign — it’s a spy — and they report this as though it’s standard procedure.  Certainly understandable.  Even justifiable!  After all, it was to get rid of Trump, and that’s what everybody should want.  (That’s the tone of this story.)  Oh, yeah.  That the FBI, the Obama administration ran spies.

There may be more than one on the Trump campaign.  And the New York Times reports this as though it is as normal as anything could be.  No outrage about it.  And the New York Times also admits they didn’t have a crime.  All of this has happened absent a crime.  There was no crime.  They admit that.  They admit there isn’t any evidence that Russia was working with Trump even to this day!  Like they have admitted in every story they’ve run — and, yet, here we are.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, let’s not forget, because it’s been over a year now that this attempt to get rid of Donald Trump has been underway. And let’s not forget the original premise. The original premise of all of this also serves as — if you call the narrative of this entire 4100-word New York Times piece.

The narrative is that Hillary Clinton was gonna win. It was a slam dunk, and everybody knew it. But then the Russians decided they didn’t want her to win. And so the Russians decided to interfere in our elections to make sure Hillary Clinton didn’t win. And in the process, they worked with Donald Trump or members of his team.

There was Russian collusion to deny Hillary Clinton the presidency because everybody knew she was gonna win. The polls all said so, the experts all said so, she was gonna win an historic landslide, and she didn’t. Something had to go wrong. The narrative is that Russia made it happen.

Now, when the FBI begins to break this down for everybody, they can’t avoid the fact that the Clinton campaign did engage in criminal activity! Hillary was using an illegal server. She was sending and receiving classified documents across an unsecure personal server, including people from the State Department and even the president of the United States. All of that is a crime. It is a very serious crime. It’s a series of felonies.

Hillary Clinton, when all this was discovered, deleted 30,000 emails from her server and turned over 30,000 emails to the State Department, to the government, to examine, so that everybody could see that they were nothing. They were nothing but emails about yoga lessons and Chelsea Clinton’s wedding reception and the registry and all that. The 30,000 emails that she decided nobody needed to see have gone missing.

Nobody knows where they are. Guess what? The Russians have them. The Russians have them. The Russians hacked Hillary and got the emails, and how do we know it? Because some obscure peripheral foreign policy adviser of the Trump campaign happened to get drunk one night and tell that to the Australian ambassador.

Well, how did the young Trump campaign aide know this? Because the FBI’s informant and a friend of his planted that information in the ear of the Trump peripheral campaign aide. The peripheral Trump campaign aid had no idea of this, he didn’t know any of this. He had to be told. He was told by agents of the FBI, spies and informants the FBI had hired.

And then the Australian ambassador takes the guy out, gets him liquored up at a bar in London, and he repeats what he’s been told. “Hey, the Russians have 30,000 emails.” The guy wants to sound like an insider. He wants to sound like he’s more involved in the campaign than he is. He wants to sound like he’s a big guy. The Australian ambassador, on cue, Clinton donor, goes back to the FBI and says, “Hey, I got a Trump guy I had dinner with last night, couple of drinks, this guy tells me the Trump campaign knows that the Russians have thousands of Hillary emails.” Bam! And the New York Times has admitted that.

But the narrative is the Clinton campaign’s where the crimes happened! So they had to exonerate Hillary ’cause they knew those crimes took place before the election. So they exonerate Hillary. Comey goes through his dog-and-pony show. They even make a big show out of reopening the investigation on October 28th to make it look like they’re not trying to aid Hillary Clinton, to make it look like, oh, my God, they are acting independent. This could end up hurting Hillary really bad.

They all figured Hillary was going to win anyway. All the smart people thought that. This was a way to advance the narrative that the FBI was on the up and up and was not involved, exuding any preference for who won, to make it look like everything that followed that was legit and aboveboard. And what followed the exoneration of Hillary Clinton was the investigation of Donald Trump, but there was no crime. The crime all took place in the Clinton side of this equation, for which she was exonerated.

So now we get this counterintelligence investigation, which is what permits all of these stories, never-ending stories from unnamed sources saying that agents from the Trump campaign were seen talking with agents from Russia. They built this whole myth of things that never happened. The ultimate aim was to drive Trump’s numbers down, preelection numbers, postelection numbers, presidential approval numbers down, hoping to force and to shame Trump into resigning. That was the overall objective.

But they had no crime. They couldn’t find a crime. To this day the New York Times points out there is not a crime. And there has not been any collusion. They can’t find any evidence of what they have been looking for for over a year. So this New York Times story, let’s briefly unpack some things here that — you know, and they admit to this, folks, as though it’s no big deal. They admit to this as though these are newsworthy revelations that are designed to impress us, how thorough our FBI is looking out for us.

Low-information people and leftist activists are supposed to read this and say, “Thank God for the FBI for looking out for us.” And that is the attempted narrative here, to provide them cover, because what they did is grossly illegal, improper, unethical, and should result in every one of these people being fired, loss of pension at bare minimum.

The FBI admitted in the New York Times piece they spied on the Trump campaign. Exactly as the Washington Post wrote last week, as Kim Strassel has been tracking down, and as I tried to piece together last Saturday afternoon and tell you about on Monday.

Quote: “The FBI investigated four unidentified Trump campaign aides.” Only one name is unredacted in the report on this to the House Intelligence Committee. It’s Carter Page. The other three, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and George Papadopoulos. The FBI investigated four up to now unidentified Trump campaign aides in the early months.

“The FBI obtained phone records and other documents using national security letters. … And at least one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos, current and former officials said.” Bingo. It’s not every day the New York Times inadvertently confirms something that I’ve said, but they’ve done it today.

Now, you might be wondering, what is a national security letter? This will blow your mind. Up to now, everybody thinks that if the FBI wants to look at you and you’re a terrorist or you have some threat, you pose some threat to the United States, they gotta go to the FISA court and get a warrant from the FISA judge permitting the FBI to spy on the accused, the alleged terrorist.

A national security letter means they don’t have to do any of that. It really is quite stunning. National security letters can simply be created pretty much out of whole cloth by the FBI to grant themselves permission to investigate people without having to get a warrant.

Let me take a break and I’ll explain more about this when we get back, ’cause if I keep going on this I’ll go long and I don’t want to do that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: National security letters.  You may never have heard of these, but let me quote again from the New York Times: “The FBI. obtained phone records and other documents” on Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Manafort, Michael Flynn “using national security letters — a secret type of subpoena…” Well, that doesn’t tell you much.  So I checked into this.  “National security letters are secret orders the FBI uses regularly to obtain sensitive electronic data and phone records.”

Now, the first place that I found that had written about this was The Intercept, which is a left-wing website run by this Glenn… Well, I don’t know if he runs it, but he’s prominent there. It’s Glenn Greenwald, who’s Snowden’s buddy on the internet.  He wrote about national security letters back in January of 2017, and here’s what The Intercept says they are. National security letters “are controversial in part because they carry the force of law but are created entirely outside the judicial system: To issue one, an FBI official just needs to attest that the information sought is relevant to a national security investigation.”

(chuckles) That’s it, apparently! They can issue these things to themselves.  Now, they’ve “also been criticized because they’re shrouded in secrecy.  Companies that receive them for the most part are forbidden from notifying their customers or the public.”  If you get one of these national security letters and if you’re any kind of a company, you cannot tell people that you are the recipient of one, that you’re being investigated.  “The government has fought to keep even basic rules governing [these things] secret.”

You know, for all of you, you worried that federal law enforcement is spying, you may not know the half of it.  This goes so far beyond FISA.  Now, the interesting thing is, “The FBI’s internal guidelines suggest that the FBI use [these national security letters] to demand sensitive information on email transactions even though the Justice Department has specifically told the FBI that it does not have the authority to use the letters this way.” They’re still using them despite what the DOJ has told them!

“The documents indicate the FBI can use national security letters to surveil a community of interest by obtaining information from a business about a customer and every person that customer has contacted.  Documents reveal that a secretive unit that mines phone records can still initiate such requests.”  But they do not have the full force of law. They’re clearly an intimidating ingredient, if you receive one.

And this is how they didn’t have to go to a judge, didn’t have to get a warrant to spy on these four people, and this is how the FBI was able to gather information on the Trump campaign with no judge needed.  National security letter.  Now, they did use a FISA warrant and include the dossier.  They did do that, but they were using national security letters elsewhere.  You know, one of the most amazing aspects of this, folks, is this story writes about reports on the Obama campaign spying on the opposition presidential candidate as though it’s nothing — as though it’s common and ordinary everyday practice!

There’s no sense of outrage in this story.  The New York Times does not evince any reaction to this at all other than to report on it in such a way that it’s perfectly understandable. It’s perfectly understandable that a sitting president would spy on the campaign of a presidential candidate of his opposing party.  They report this like it happened and it was understandable why it happened, and it made sense that it had happened, and that they had to do it! Because they were up against such odds, they knew this stuff has happened, but they couldn’t prove it.

They knew Russia wanted to help Trump, but they couldn’t prove it — and they still can’t.  Now, Mike Rogers at the NSA (who was one of the few dissenting intelligence officials from this whole agenda) said that he believed the Russians were indeed trying to damage Hillary, but only because the Russians always try to damage who they think is gonna win.  They don’t pick sides.  They just try to smear whoever they think is gonna win.  In this case, everybody thought Hillary was gonna win.

When Trump wins, one week after, the Russians sponsor an anti-Trump protest — that CNN ends up informing about and promoting.  I mean, this all boggles the mind.  In fact, way too many people are blase about this.  Way too many people are acting like there’s nothing really to see here, when this is the biggest scandal of our lifetimes — and nothing that I can think of even comes close!  Let me grab a quick call.  Get one in here in the first hour.  Mark in Houston. I’m glad you called, sir.  What’s up?  What do you think?

CALLER:  What I think is it occurred to me about maybe a week ago or so that we are experiencing and witnessing not a coup d’etat, but a failed coup attempt.  And I’m wondering, at what pivotal point…? What do we need to verify that this is a failure?  I mean, look at all of the information and the evidence and all of the FBI people that have gone by the wayside now. If it didn’t happen already, a coup has to take place like that — or else the guy getting d’etat’d or his head cut off is the guy who can build his army against. I don’t know if it was Giuliani or something, but it occurred to me that he now can fight back, and that’s dangerous for the people that are creating that coup d’etat.  That’s kind of what it looks like.  We’re looking at history happening right before our eyes, Rush.

RUSH:  Well, the old adage is, “If you’re gonna take on the king, you’d better kill him, because if you don’t…” I’ll tell you what’s happening right now.  The Mueller investigation is ongoing. It is a cover-up of basically what the New York Times has admitted to today.  The Mueller investigation is designed to cover that up, to deflect everybody and to go through the motions of making people think there’s still something out there to find that Trump indeed stole the election.  But things are falling apart for Mueller more rapidly than people admit — and how they end this, I don’t have any idea.