RUSH: Christopher Wray, the FBI director, was out at the Aspen Institute for ideas, as opposed to the Aspen Institute for skiing. And they were talking about ideas at the Aspen Institute. And you know what Christopher Wray said? Are you ready for this? He said, “Look, the Russians do not tamper in our infrastructure, in election infrastructure.”

I said, “Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what?” Say that again. Happily. “The Russians do not tamper in our election infrastructure.”

So what does that mean? For those of you in Rio Linda what it means, point-blank, is the Russians don’t deal with tampering with the votes. Election infrastructure is the polling place, the voting machines, the people that count the votes and do all that. That’s the voting infrastructure. And here’s the director of the FBI, the descendant of James Comey. James Comey, Clapper, Brennan, all these people that have been trying to tell us the Russians screwed with the votes. That’s what they’ve been trying to say. That’s what they’ve been referring to. They want you to imply, they have come out and said so directly, but stealing the election, that’s what that means.

But then we had the Rosenstein-announced Mueller indictment last Friday in which he made it clear that not a single vote was changed and not a single election outcome was affected by any of this. So Christopher Wray, the FBI director, owns up and says, “No, no, no. They do not tamper in our infrastructure. They try to destabilize the integrity of our system by usually backing losers and getting the losers all upset claiming something went awry, and that promotes disharmony and distrust of the election system.”

Why couldn’t somebody say this two years ago instead of going through all of this crap — pardon me — that we’ve been through? Why couldn’t this have just been said two years ago, “The Russians do not tamper with our infrastructure. What they generally do is try to promote discord and distrust within our system. And the way they do it is by stoking the losers with the idea they’ve been cheated!”

Well, is that not exactly what’s happened, except the losers in this case, they’re the ones that did the tampering, they’re the ones that tried to affect the outcome of the election with the phony dossier. The Democrats weren’t fooled by anything the Russians did. If anything, the Democrats and the Russians were working together in terms of having the same objective, and that’s undermining Donald Trump.

But, I mean, that’s a heck of an admission. And as I say it was the Aspen Institute for ideas. And it has made the news, but it’s not big news on any of the cable networks. It’s not big news anywhere unless you happen to know where to go to digest news every day as I do as a highly trained broadcast specialist. I have my routine down here, found it easily. Do you realize what a big admission that is? Really what a profound — the current director of the FBI.

So what is this charade, then? Why are we continuing to look for Russian tampering in the election when the director of the FBI says, “No, no, no. They never do that. They try to sow discord within American public opinion.” Have they not succeeded? By the way, they and the Democrats working together have created the most distrust for the American electoral system I’ve seen in my lifetime.

And the Democrats are just as guilty as the Russians. And the media. The media is right in there because they want everybody to believe that the election infrastructure was tampered with and Hillary should have really won it and did really win it except Trump cheated because he likes Putin or what have you.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, the New York Times today had what I am sure they intended to be the bombshell story of the day. Headline: “From the Start, Trump Has Muddied a Clear Message: Putin Interfered.” It’s written by David Sanger and Matthew Rosenberg.

And here is the lead. “Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.”

That’s supposed to be the bombshell report for today, that Trump knew, that Trump was told two weeks before he was inaugurated that Putin personally ordered all of the cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.

Where is that Wray sound bite? I’m tired of repeating this. This is Wray at the Aspen Institute for skiing. I’m sick and tired of hearing myself say this. Here it is in his own words.

WRAY: My view has not changed, which is that Russia attempted to interfere with the last election and that it continues to engage in malign influence operations to this day.

HOLT: Aimed at our political system?

WRAY: Aimed at sowing discord and divisiveness in this country. We haven’t yet seen an effort to target specific election infrastructure. What they do is they will identify a divisive issue and through a variety of means, some overt, some covert, some through fake news, some through propaganda, will essentially sow divisiveness, spin people up on both sides of the issue, and then kind of watch us go at each other.

RUSH: Okay. Did you hear that? When he says that we have not identified, we do not believe they tamper with election infrastructure, meaning they don’t get into who wins and loses elections! And yet the New York Times’ opening paragraph: President Trump “was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.”

The Russians do not and did not sway any election. The indictments that Mueller handed down Friday, explained by Rosenstein. No election was affected. No vote was changed. The Russians do not meddle in elections. And this is not a fine point. It’s a very precise point. Our own FBI director says what the Russians do is get involved in the sowing discord, the disinformation — you heard it — fake news after an election, during a campaign, designed to affect attitudes. And they generally focus on losers and try to make losers feel like they were cheated.

The purpose is to create discord and challenge the integrity and honesty of elections. But they do not take action to sway the presidential election. But we do! Barack Obama campaigned in Israel against Benjamin Netanyahu. In a number of other places Obama also campaigned. That’s why I’m having a real tough time here falling into the conventional wisdom, “The Russians meddled and the Russians swayed the election.” The Russians didn’t, and our own FBI director says so.

Anyway, this was supposed to be the bombshell of the day. The New York Times dropped it last night on their website. The Drive-Bys were breathless, even Fox News, even Fox News last night went belly up on this. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Trump was told two weeks before he was inaugurated that Putin personally ordered cyberattacks?”

This highly classified intelligence is undoubtedly the January 2017 assessment by Clapper’s office of national intelligence, that report claimed that Putin personally ordered an influence campaign to harm Hillary’s chances and to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process. That is the same assessment that the Drive-Bys have claimed for more than two years was the product of 17 intelligence agencies when in reality it wasn’t. It was the product of a handful of people who were handpicked by Clapper to agree with him.

We still have not seen the evidence. Nobody has shown us any evidence. So this contributes to the conventional wisdom. Now, the New York Times says: “The evidence includes texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin who has described to the CIA how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.” How about we see the evidence, then? How come the evidence hasn’t been leaked to the New York Times?

Here we just go. We have another anonymous source close to Putin. This is the Clapper intelligence report that his office put out in January. Top secret source close to Putin. For all we know, this evidence is the Trump dossier. We don’t know diddly-squat and yet here it is yet again.

So this drops last night. And the reason I doubt this is because I’ve doubted everything else these people have put forth the last two years. It’s all been of the same nature. It’s all been anonymously sourced. There’s never been any evidence suggesting what they’re reporting is factual or true. The reason why this supposed to be a bombshell is because — well, here we go — Donald Trump was told two weeks before his election that Putin personally ordered all of his mayhem against Hillary.

So you’re supposed to say, “Well, Trump has known this for two weeks before he was inaugurated, and he’s still running around denying the Russians did it? Why, Trump’s lying! Why, Trump must really be in tight with Putin.” This is what they want you to think. But it’s the New York Times, and it’s James Clapper and nameless other sources close to Putin.

But again, folks, I have to fall back on this — you know, Putin orders what? Cyberattacks to sway the 2016 presidential election? Let me explain again the Russian techniques as explained to me by people I trust. That the Russian disinformation campaign, be it this or when they seek to infiltrate the American education system, the purpose here is to promote destabilization. And the Russians always target people they think are going to win, by definition.

Why waste time on the people they think are gonna lose? The Russians cannot determine who wins and loses the American presidency. No other country can, either. No country can determine with hacking or anything else who wins the presidential election. And Russia cannot either. And there’s not a single person that will tell you point-blank that Russia did do this or can. They want you to believe it after they imply it, but they can’t tell you because they can’t.

Christopher Wray has admitted it. Rod Rosenstein has documented it. It didn’t happen. It can’t happen. But you’re supposed to think that the Russians did it. The Russians always focus on who they think is going to win. In this case, everybody thought Hillary Clinton was gonna win. The purpose is to destabilize the winner, to create and raise doubt about the winner and the authenticity of the victory for the purposes of weakening and destabilizing the next president, by creating doubt in the minds of the American public of the legitimacy.

This is the Russian gambit. It is not to determine who wins! They can’t. It is to target who they think is going to win and try to weaken them. In this case, Hillary. Well, guess what’s been done with that? Since the Russians were targeting Hillary, our media and the Democrat Party are telling us that the Russians really wanted Trump to win. That’s not the case. That’s not what this means. And it wouldn’t matter who the Russians want to win because the Russians cannot make that happen. Just like you can’t.

There’s no individual and there’s no country that can determine who’s gonna win the presidency. Not without having direct access to the infrastructure itself and really cheating. And the Russians can’t do it, and Vladimir Putin can’t do it. So they don’t even try. That’s not the objective. Therefore there is no collusion! And collusion isn’t crime anyway.

But the point is that by targeting Hillary, if this happened, the Russians were targeting who they ought was going to win. They already thought Hillary’s a joke anyway, don’t forget. She’s the secretary of state with that new plastic red reset button. They think she’s an abject joke. They probably wanted her win because she’s such an idiot, they’d have their way with her. But nobody thought Trump was gonna win.

So they try to destabilize Hillary. That then becomes Trump was who Putin wanted to win. Not the case at all. Putin was as shocked and surprised as everybody else. And the first week after Trump’s win is when there were Trump protests sponsored by the Russians and encouraged by CNN. Once Trump had won, the Russians turned their fire on him, and they were among the bunch the organizing first protests. You know, the women wearing the vagina hats. Supposedly. And we’ll be back after this, my friends.

Hang on, you know, folks, let me apologize. I’m sorry to run through this again. I know that if you’re a regular listener you’ve heard this. But we haven’t been through all of this in a while because we have to deal with the crisis of the day, but I wanted to put this in perspective because there’s a new conventional wisdom out there that you and I must accept now: The Russians meddled, that Mueller is legit and everything he’s doing is necessary, we must find out what happened. We know what the hell happened and we know it’s that it’s being ignored.