RUSH: Well, now Donald Trump’s really done it. Now he has really done it. Now he’s referring to them as the “criminal deep state.” The Drive-By Media has the vapors. They can’t believe this. And James Comey is tweeting. And James Comey is admitting that the FBI used spies on Donald Trump. He calls them confidential human sources. Ha-ha. Plural.

Great to have you, folks. Rush Limbaugh, as always, behind the Golden EIB Microphone. Telephone number, if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882. The email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.

President Trump’s Spygate could be one of the biggest political scandals in history. And, with that, Trump has given the scandal a name: Spygate. And then listen to this next tweet. This could be the poster and the slug line for the movie: “They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam, and end up getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before!”

Would that not get you into the theater, if that were the slug line for a movie? Referring to the deep state as the criminal deep state. Yeah. It is amazing to watch this play out. James Clapper, you know, I’m beginning to wonder about something. It is obvious to me that Clapper and Comey and Brennan and a few others are sticking their necks way out to protect… who? Why, none other than Barack Hussein O.

Meanwhile, where is Barack Hussein O? Well, he’s out there making gazillions of dollars. Barack Hussein O just signed a multi-eight-figure deal with Netflix with Michelle (My Belle) Obama. So while Obama’s out there raking in the dough, building a presidential library in the state of Illinois which is on the way to being abandoned — wait ’til you hear the news on that. I mean, we called this one last week. These guys are making absolute fools of themselves.

This guy Clapper is now lying all over the place. He’s on with Maude Behar yesterday on The View. And she says (imitating Behar and Clapper), “Okay. Okay. So you’re spying on the Trump campaign.” Clapper said, “Well, well, yeah, spying, yeah, I really don’t like that word. But we were not spying on Trump. We were looking for Russians.” And Maude Behar said, “Well, he ought to be happy, he ought to love you, you’re trying to help him out.” And Clapper says, “Yep, that’s right.”

Do you realize how easy this is to refute? Forget timelines here. Of course the timeline is relevant and fascinating, but not for my point here. Oh, you know what? This is an excellent opportunity for me to let you in on how I think these people are now gonna set this all up. Meaning the deep state people, the FBI, DOJ people, Clapper, Comey, Brennan, Mueller, all of these people.

Because now there is a legitimate curiosity about when this whole investigation began. And they’ve lied to us about that through the Drive-By Media. They first tried to tell us the official investigation began when they decided Carter Page might be a problem. They got a FISA warrant based on the Steele dossier. Then they said, “No, it wasn’t based on the Steele dossier. It was ’cause Carter Page had connections in Moscow.”

And then that didn’t fly because it was then revealed that the dossier’s a bunch of crap! The dossier’s political opposition research bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton. So they tried something else: George Papadopoulos. Well, the investigation began July 31st, 2016, when it was learned that Papadopoulos was bragging while drunk to the Australian ambassador that he knew, the Trump campaign knew that the Russians had a bunch of missing Clinton emails.

And, by the way, let’s be straight about the emails they’re talking about here. This is not the DNC hacked emails that ended up at WikiLeaks. There’s two different sets of Democrat emails here. The ones we’re talking about are the ones that they leaked to Papadopoulos that the Russians had the Hillary emails, the missing 30 or 33,000 Hillary e-mails.

Don’t be confused by this. The deep state is trying to make you think that the emails here are the DNC hacked emails that ended up at WikiLeaks and therefore are being published by media during the summer and fall of the campaign 2016. That’s not the emails that Papadopoulos was fed information about, was bragging. Those are the Hillary emails. When Trump stood up and said, “Hey, Russia, hey, Russia, nobody can find these emails. The media’s crazy. Maybe you can find ’em, Russia.” The fact that they didn’t see that that was a joke is quite telling in and of itself.

But, anyway, then the Papadopoulos story bombs out. Now the thing is that, “No, no, the investigation actually began earlier than that.” “Oh, really? When?” “Well, it began in late spring.” “What triggered it in late spring?” “Well” — and this is what I want you to be on the lookout for. People in this deep state want you to think that everybody was minding their own business and watching the presidential campaign and letting it play out. There was no attempt to influence it at all until the Trump campaign named Carter Page and Paul Manafort, Carter Page to the foreign policy team, Papadopoulos to the foreign policy team, and Manafort as campaign manager.

What they’re trying to say is the FBI already had files on these guys as people who had done business in Russia and in Ukraine, in the case of Manafort. And they’re going to try to tell you that this was an automatic trigger and that it was a just trigger because these guys that ended up on the Trump campaign were legitimate security risks. This is why they’re moving the beginning of the investigation back to late spring 2016, because that’s when the foreign policy team was put together.

If you recall — maybe you won’t, but let me refresh your memoir. You know, Trump’s an outsider. He doesn’t have a whole lot of outsiders, never has had, doesn’t listen to very many. But in a presidential campaign there’s some must-dos. And so when you’re on the verge of winning the nomination, when you’re trending like you’re gonna win it, the media in the political process begin to demand some things from you.

And among those things, who is going to be on your foreign policy team? Who are your foreign policy advisers? And the reason this question is asked is because, as I have postulated, it simply isn’t possible that everybody running for president throughout their life has met people in every walk of life that would perhaps qualify for a powerful position in a presidential administration.

And so Trump was assumed to not know any of these people. “So, hey, who’s gonna be on your national security team?”  It’s a setup question in the case of Trump.  But the Trump administration decided they had to have some answers.  So they went out and they picked some people to fill some jobs.  One of them was Papadopoulos, one of them was Carter Page, and the other was Manafort, and that is when — that’s what you’re being told now — the FBI panicked because there was a legitimate reason to panic.

They’re gonna tell you, “Those guys had ties to Russia,” and it was at that point they’re gonna try to tell you late spring 2016 that they had no choice than to start running an investigation of the Trump campaign to protect it.  Maybe Trump didn’t know these guys had ties to Russia.  Now, you want to be able to nuke that?  Let me tell you one way you can nuke that.  If indeed the FBI and the DOJ thought that Carter Page and Paul Manafort… Let’s throw Papadopoulos in for good measure.

If they really, really thought that those hires meant the Russians were going to be involved in the very high-power structure of the Trump campaign, then why not go to the Trump campaign and warn them?  Why not go to Trump and whoever else and say, “Look, you might want to rethink this.  We’ve got some info on these guys, and it doesn’t look good.”  Why wouldn’t they warn Trump?  If they really…? Now Clapper is out saying that’s what they were doing by running their informants in the Trump campaign, they were looking out for Russian activity.  No, no, no, no.  By their own admission, they already had that when Page and Manafort were named.

They already had that.

They started running the spies in the campaign ’cause they already suspected Manafort and Page and to an extent Papadopoulos.  This is what they’re saying now, I’m not, and it’s gonna appeal to some people.  I want to warn you, it’s gonna appeal.  And the reason for this, they’re trying now at this late stage to come up with anything that will justify their investigation.  And if they can say that it was perfectly reasonable to be concerned about Manafort and Page because they had ties to Ukraine and Russia, then they were doing the nation’s business.

But they weren’t.  They weren’t looking to help Trump.  They weren’t looking to protect Trump.  They didn’t warn anybody in the Trump administration about these guys.  They stood aside.  They put spies in there, informants, and they hoped and prayed that Trump would collude with the Russians.  They weren’t trying to stop it.  And by the same token, here’s the way to nuke it number two.  If the FBI, the DOJ, Page, Strzok, Comey, Clapper, Brennan — if they knew that the Russians were colluding, if they…?

Forget that.  If they knew and if they could prove — which they still haven’t been able to do, by the way. If they could prove that the Russians were using the Trump campaign to screw the Hillary Clinton campaign and if Trump was involved, then why not stop it and arrest somebody who was responsible for it in the Trump campaign?  Why sit back and watch it?  Why put spies in that are not identifying themselves?  If they are there to protect Trump, the way to protect Trump was to go to him and say, “Hey, you need to know about Manafort and Page.

“You need to know what we know about ’em.  You maybe need to rethink this.”  They act really altruistic, but they weren’t.  They didn’t say a word about this.  The spies were there for entrapment, not protection.  Yet Clapper is all over television trying to redefine the narrative that it was all for the protection of Donald Trump, that they weren’t spying on Trump, that they were looking out for the Russians.  The way to nuke that No. 3 is, “Okay, then, Mr. Clapper, if you’re worried about the Russians tampering, why didn’t you have a spy in the Hillary campaign?

“Why were you not concerned about the Russians trying to harm Hillary?  Because, after all, you have said throughout all of this that that was the objective.  The Russians were trying to hurt Hillary.  Well, then why didn’t you have some spies in her campaign to see if they were succeeding?”  And the answer is — dadelut dadelut dadelut dadelut dadelut — all of this is BS.  They all expected Hillary Clinton to win.  They didn’t think Donald Trump had a chance.  They wanted to destroy Donald Trump as soon as he won the nomination.

They planted spies and so forth in late spring 2016.  The Obama administration is where this whole thing originated.  None of this is possible without the players and the actors in the Obama administration.  And they are still out there — the Clappers, the Brennans, the Comeys — and they’re doing everything they can.  They’re admitting to spying.  They’re trying to rearrange the narrative that it was helpful and not punitive.

Meanwhile, Obama is out there not having to weigh in, not being asked about it, not being asked to defend the actions of his underlings while he’s raking in big, beaucoup bucks from Netflix and whoever the publisher is. Is it Random House? I don’t know who the publisher is for the joint memoir.  But it’s coming to a head now with Trump referring to this now as “Spygate,” “criminal deep state.”  They go after phony collusion with Russia, a made-up scam.

They end up getting caught in a major spy scandal the likes of which we may never have seen before.  I think that is true.  Trump tweeted last night that a spy was put in his campaign to help Crooked Hillary win.  The tweet was, “If the person placed very early into my campaign wasn’t a SPY put there by the previous Administration for political purposes, how come such a seemingly massive amount of money was paid for services rendered — many times higher than normal…[?]

“…Follow the money! The spy was there early in the campaign and yet never reported Collusion with Russia, because there was no Collusion. He was only there to spy for political reasons and to help Crooked Hillary win — just like they did to Bernie Sanders, who got duped!” This is a reference to Stefan Halper, who, in August of 2016, sought out Sam Clovis and wanted to be hired in the Trump campaign foreign policy apparatus.  This is after! This is after late spring where the FBI seems to be set off by Trump hiring Manafort and Page.

So while they want to tell us that they’re all upset, “Oh, my God.  The Russians may have a way into the Trump campaign” and not tell Trump, not warn him, but now say they’re trying to protect him, in August they try to get a spy hired by the Trump campaign, the foreign policy operation.  So Trump is right about this.  It is what it is, and more and more people are beginning to see this.  And now, there’s another thing that’s happened here that happens to be right up my wheelhouse in terms of a question I have always had about something.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Folks, when I say “deep state,” I want to specify who I mean.  FBI, DOJ people — not all of them, but the people whose names we know — Clapper, Brennan, Comey, McCabe, Rosenstein, Strzok, Page, Sally Yates.  I mean, there’s more than that, but that’s what we’re basically talking about.  I don’t believe for a moment the FBI’s story that they were trying to help Trump/protect Trump by looking for Prussian collusion.

They were there trying to implement collusion, if you ask me!  I think they wanted to get that ball rolling!  Now, the media… This is very important here, folks. The Drive-Bys are reporting that both John Brennan and Obama told the Russians that we knew what they were doing; they’d better stop it.  Remember Obama was asked specifically about this? When everybody was talking about Russian collusion in the spring of 2016 and even into 2015, Obama told everybody very proudly…

You know, he put on the Clark Kent uniform and he said, “I called Putin, and I told him to cut it out!”  Remember?  And everybody swooned.  “Oh, wow!  Obama told Putin to cut it out!”  And everybody believed Putin would cut it out.  But what does that mean?  It means Obama told the Russians that we knew what they were doing because Obama told Putin, “You’d better cut it out.”  Well, if we knew what they were doing, then why not help Trump in his campaign — tip him off, warn him — as they claim they were doing?

You see, it cannot be fear of tipping off the Russians.  They say the reason they didn’t tell Trump is because they didn’t want the Russians to know they were in on it and that they knew what they were doing, but they’d already told the Russians they knew what he were this doing when Obama told Putin to cut it out!  So if the Obama administration warned Russia directly and did it in the media, then why not tell Trump what’s going on?  Why use spies at all if you already knew what Russia was doing, hmm?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Folks, a major, major point here. Barack Obama and Brennan have both said that the Russians were warned to stop doing what they were doing. Obama did it publicly, and Obama did this twice, by the way, in explaining how difficult it would be to actually hack and determine the outcome of a presidential election.

But, I mean, even before Trump won the nomination, Obama’s out there on TV and he’s acknowledging this Russian attempt at collusion, and he said — I’ll never forget it. We’ve even played the audio where he’s relaying to people that he had met with Putin and he had told him to cut it out. And he did it in this typical Obama faux professorial, pseudointellectual (imitating Obama), “And I was meeting with President Putin and I was very serious with him and I just told him to cut it out. Just that simple. I told him to cut it out.” As though the Word of God had just been handed down from Mt. Sinai.

But the point is, Obama’s acknowledging that they know that the Russians are trying something, or at least — you know, folks, I have to tell you something. I know it is conventional wisdom if you know what’s good for you, you acknowledge, “Oh, yeah. The Russians, no doubt they were trying to hamper our election. No doubt they were.”

I have to tell you, I don’t even buy into that, the way it’s being portrayed. The Russians, and before them the Soviets, had as a matter of their existence the infiltration of various areas of their enemies. The Soviets long ago invaded American education. The Soviets long ago invaded American religion. It’s just what communism does. It doesn’t sit there and just idly observe enemies. It tries to destroy them.

And during the Cold War and other areas the Soviets were all over this country attempting to influence. They’ve always been trying to get spies placed in the State Department. Whitaker Chambers was one of the early Soviet spies who defected. Whitaker Chambers, the life and case highlighted by William F. Buckley Jr. at National Review. He was a long Soviet spy, came out, went public, details, many books written about it. Alger Hiss. It isn’t new. And the way this is being portrayed is that it is new.

This particular instance of Russian collusion is being presented to the American public as though there’s something unique about it, never before done, because this collusion was aimed at Hillary Clinton, this collusion tried to steal a presidential election. And my point is that it isn’t anything new. They have been trying to discredit American presidents and presidential candidates since the days of the Soviet Union, since the Malta conference they have been trying to do this.

But this is all being presented as though it’s unique, it is more successful than it’s ever been. And I would even argue that. I would argue the old Soviet Union had much greater success infiltrating American institutions than this current crop of Putin former KGB people in stealing the U.S. election. It’s flat-out not possible. And yet the narrative is that it happened and that they couldn’t stop it and we tried, and it’s just not true, folks, I say plaintively.

So when I hear the Russians interfered, I don’t join the conventional wisdom parade on this. I’m not denying it; please don’t misunderstand. I’m just not joining the parade that treats this as something new and incredible and unprecedented and, boy, are we at great risk. We have been at great risk as a great nation since our founding. And we will remain a great nation at risk because the world is very dangerous and we’re always gonna have enemies.

The American people are being misled and lied to in unprecedented ways here. What the Russians are doing is not new, and it isn’t unprecedented. And this particular effort of the Russians is not nearly as successful as previous efforts. I would contend to you that the Russians have had a bang-up success infiltrating the American college campus. Look at the professoriate, look at the faculty, look at the absolutely drivel, Marxism garbage that is common for you to pay 40 to 60 grand a year to send your kids there to get indoctrinated to it. It’s common!

In California, Marxists essentially run the state, and have for a while. You could say the Soviets have succeeded in infiltrating California. You could accuse them of having great success in Seattle. You could say they’ve had amazing success in Chicago. But they did not succeed in turning the election against Hillary Clinton. She lost that election on her own. Donald Trump won it on his own. And try as hard as they might, the Russians had nothing to do with it! Because they couldn’t have, because as Obama has said it simply isn’t possible to hack or to steal or to whatever adjective you want to use to describe rigging an election. It just isn’t possible.

But aside from all that — that was an aside — Obama admits that they knew what the Russians were doing, because Obama told Putin to cut it out. Long before Trump is the nominee. So then Trump hires Manafort, Carter Page, Papadopoulos. And what happened there? What happened there? When the FBI heard that Trump had hired Carter Page, Comey ran to Loretta Lynch, and she arranged a briefing where all the top intel people in the Obama Regime, National Security Council were gathered to hear about the stunning development that Carter Page had been hired.

The upshot of the meeting was that Loretta Lynch said she would set up a meeting to warn Trump about Carter Page and his ties to the Russians. But that meeting never happened. They never tipped Trump off, which raises the question, why not? If the FBI was so concerned about Carter Page, so concerned the Russians were gonna tamper with the election, why not go in there and warn Trump instead of putting spies in there? Because, ladies and gentlemen, they were attempting to start or permit the collusion.

They weren’t try to stop it.  If they were genuinely serious, tell Trump! Warn him about it.  If their concern is really for the integrity of the American electoral process, then by all means go tell Trump.  Warn him he may have just hired somebody with ties to Russia.  They didn’t do any of that.  So if Obama warned Russia directly because Obama knew what they were doing, why not share it with Trump instead of using spies?

They didn’t need spies.  They knew what they were doing!  So what are the spies really there for?  The spies are there hoping for collusion and catching Trump at it.  They wanted Carter Page to be an agent.  They wanted Carter Page to engage the Russians as a member of the Trump campaign team.  That’s what they wanted to see. They wanted it! And when it didn’t happen, they set it up with Page and Papadopoulos.  They tried to set it up.

These tried to make fake these events where Papadopoulos is drunkenly bragging about knowing Hillary’s emails are in the possessions of the Russians.  When collusion didn’t happen, these people tried to make it look like it was happening by staging events!  This is outrageous what they have done here.  They leave Page there.  They don’t warn Trump.  They desperately hope collusion happens so that their spy can see it and report on it and kick Trump out of the race.

That doesn’t happen.  So after some time goes by, they set up Papadopoulos. They run him with Stefan Halper into the Australian ambassador’s lap at a bar one night where gets drunk and starts bragging about the Hillary emails.  I mean, this is so beyond the pale.  And the reason I’m spending time on this is I’m driving in to work today and I’m listening to… I don’t even know what. It was satellite radio in the car, and it might have been Fox & Friends.

I don’t know.  This is not to indict anybody, but there was a guest on explaining or trying to explain what I’ve just explained to you, and the host said, “Well, okay.  But let me play devil’s advocate with you.  What if all this is real?  What if Carter Page really was a spy, and what if Manafort really was a spy? Was not the FBI justified in what they did?”  And I said, uh-oh.  Uh-oh.  This is a friendly buying this latest narrative that the FBI had no choice.  Now, admittedly, the friendly posed this as a devil’s advocate.

The point is the FBI’s effort to make this look legit could work if you’re not careful.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: To the phones we go.  David, El Paso, Texas.  Welcome.  Sir.  Great to have you.

CALLER:  Hi, Rush.  I’ve been waiting to call you since I was in eighth grade.  I’m gonna get straight to it.  Do you think anybody in this little cabal, I guess you say…? Do you think any of them are gonna finally face criminal charges?

RUSH:  You know, I don’t know.  There are so many things written about this.  Victor Davis Hanson has one today at National Review, which is a very thorough documentation of all of the questionable and perhaps criminal activity that these people in the deep state have engaged in.  And when you read it — and I don’t have time to read the whole thing on the air here. But if you read it, you can’t not ask yourself, “Why are these people not charged?  Why are these people not in jail?”

(sigh) The only thing that I could tell you about this is I think the best place to look to find an answer to this is Donald Trump. I think Donald Trump does not let people get away with screwing him.  He may not deal with it instantaneously when it happens, but he doesn’t let people get away with it.  And there probably are some people at the FBI and the DOJ…  In fact, there are some FBI agents who are asking to be subpoenaed so they can come up and basically spill the beans on what’s been going on in there.  They want to whistle blow.