RUSH: I have here a story from Paul Sperry, who is a recognized, great investigative reporter. He’s not part of the Drive-By Media culture, thankfully for us.  He has written for a number of different publications, including the New York Post and a number of different websites.  This piece appears at RealClearInvestigations.com.  The headline here:  “Trump-Russia 2.0: Dossier-Tied Firm Pitching Journalists Daily on ‘Collusion.’”

Now, I’m not gonna be able to share the whole thing with you because it prints out to 11 pages, and I just had the break here at the top of the hour to dig into this and absorb and mark up enough of it here to be able to share some of it in a way that makes sense.  It’s very complex, and we’ll link to it so you can read it at RushLimbaugh.com.  But I think this story, actually, among other things is going to inform us where all of the same talking points in the Drive-By Media come from.

For example, remember our famous montage — the montage that started all the montages — our montage on hundreds of media people using the word “gravitas” to describe George W. Bush’s choice of Dick Cheney as his vice-presidential running mate?  Since that montage, news organizations and websites and other programs have been doing montages on everything.  But that was the montage that started it all — and I’m exaggerating hundreds.

We had at least 50 different journalists in that montage, and they’re all using it. Every damn one of them talks about how the choice shows “gravitas” or that it was “for gravitas,” because Bush didn’t have any. Bush didn’t have any seriousness. He didn’t have any weight about him, and so his choice of Cheney showed gravitas.  It was uncanny how many journalists — who you would think are competitors and would want to be different — were instead identically uniform.  Well, this piece may actually uncover how this happens.

Let me begin at the beginning.  Again, the headline:  “Trump-Russia 2.0: Dossier-Tied Firm Pitching Journalists Daily on ‘Collusion’ — Key Democratic operatives and private investigators who tried to derail Donald Trump’s campaign by claiming he was a tool of the Kremlin have rebooted their operation since his election with a multimillion-dollar stealth campaign to persuade major media outlets and lawmakers that the president should be impeached.

“The effort has successfully placed a series of questionable stories alleging secret back channels and meetings between Trump associates and Russian spies, while [at the same time] influencing related investigations and reports from Congress. The operation’s nerve center is a Washington-based nonprofit called The Democracy Integrity Project, or TDIP. Among other activities, it pumps out daily ‘research’ briefings to prominent Washington journalists, as well as congressional staffers, to keep the Russia ‘collusion’ narrative alive.”

Let me stop here and summarize and explain.  The original Trump-Russia collusion theory or story came from a totally made-up piece of crap called the Steele dossier. It then became known as “the Trump dossier,” then just simply “the dossier.”  And it was all of these unverifiable, uncorroborated articles of supposed intelligence linking Trump to Russia.  And of course, the big one was the golden showers story in which Trump found — when he was in Moscow at a hotel — that Obama had slept on that same bed in that same room and so Trump promptly hired some prostitutes to come over and urinate on the bed.

That was called the golden showered story, and it was the prominent story in the dossier.  It was the story that Comey explained to Trump when explaining the dossier to him.  Remember, Trump had said’that he didn’t need a daily intelligence brief, that he was smart, and he could remember things.  He didn’t need to talk to these people every day.  Well, that didn’t go over well, ’cause the intel people want daily access to the president, whoever it is, to be able to influence him — and Trump was basically telling them to go pound sand.

So Comey and his buddies had to find a way to get in dossier in the public, and the way to do that was to make it news.  The way to make it news was to present it to Trump.  So Comey takes the dossier in coordination with James Clapper, who is the Director of National Intelligence. He goes to the White House, and he shows Trump that one aspect of the dossier, and then says to Trump, “This is the kind of stuff that’s out there every day that you need to know about, Mr. President.  You need to know the kind of things our foreign adversaries are saying about you.”

Trump said, “Well, this is crazy.  Why should I have to be told about this stuff? This is absolute insanity.”  Comey didn’t care about that.  He called Clapper on the way out of the White House and said, “Mission accomplished.”  Clapper then called CNN and says, “Trump has now seen the dossier!”  So CNN begins an “investigation” of the dossier, BuzzFeed since publishes it, and then CNN ended up getting a Pulitzer Prize for their story on how Trump became aware of the dossier.  It was a total put-up job.  That dossier was Hillary Clinton opposition research.

It was circulating throughout Washington all during the summer of 2016, but it never made it in the media ’cause everybody knew it was lies.  Everybody knew it was unverified, uncorroborated.  But they desperately wanted it in the public domain!  Comey and Clapper figured out how to do that.  This all happens after Trump is elected and after he is in office.  So the dossier was designed to set up plunging Trump approval numbers so they could eventually impeach him.  But that didn’t happen.

The Mueller investigation was then called ’cause the Democrats were unsatisfied with a bunch of things. So Rosenstein names Mueller, and Mueller begins an investigation of Trump-Russia collusion, and we now know — we now know with incontrovertible evidence — that this dossier was the only thing they had that in any way (including chock-full of lies) gave them an excuse to say that Trump might have been colluding with Russia.

Everybody involved in it, including Mueller, at some point learned that it was totally bogus, and they still used it to get FISA warrants.  I’m convinced that number of liberal Democrats and journalists actually did believe this at first, and they desperately searched for evidence prove it.  There wasn’t any because it was all lies.  So that effort kind of fizzled.  It gave us the Mueller investigation, but there hasn’t been any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion whatsoever.

So the people behind that original effort have now started Version 2.0, and the name of this group doing this is the Democracy Integrity Project or TDIP, and they have been, for the past year and a half, “pump[ing] out daily ‘research’ briefings to prominent Washington journalists,” like Jim Acosta, “as well as congressional staffers, to keep the Russia ‘collusion’ narrative alive.”  In other words, they are producing lies.  They are producing total BS to keep the “‘collusion’ narrative alive,” even though the dossier has bombed out and even though the Mueller investigating hasn’t found any collusion.

Now, this organization, TDIP (the Democracy Integrity Project), is led by somebody called Daniel Jones.  “He is a former FBI investigator, a Clinton administration volunteer, and a top staffer to California senator Dianne Feinstein.” Daniel Jones.  You may have heard his name related to other scandals such as the Christine Blasey Ford scandal.  This guy, as an operative for Dianne Feinstein, has been all over. His fingerprints have been all over these multiple efforts to impugn and destroy Donald Trump.

Now, this group, TDIP, The Democracy Integrity Project — it’s a nonprofit — “employs the key opposition-research figures behind the [Steele] dossier: Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and” who worked with Steele to write the dossier. They’ve also hired Steele, even though he’s been totally discredited. “Its financial backers include the actor/director Rob Reiner and billionaire activist George Soros. The project’s work has been largely shrouded in mystery.

“But a months-long examination by” Paul Sperry at RealClearInvestigations.com “found that the organization is running an elaborate media-influence operation that includes driving and shaping daily coverage of the Russia collusion theory, as well as pushing stories about Trump in the national media that attempt to tie the president or his associates to the Kremlin,” even to this day.  “The group also feeds information to FBI and congressional investigators, and then tells reporters that authorities are investigating those leads.”

So these dummkopf, sponge reporters take it for gospel what these people say they’ve got and then they run with it, and this ends up being source material for “the investigation into Trump-Russia collusion. ” One nonprofit has force-fed all of the Drive-By Media a complete crock of excrement on Trump-Russia collusion, and that’s how it continues to be reported even though there isn’t any.  But feeding information to the FBI and feeding information to congressional investigators as a “tactic[,] adds credibility” to the pitches made by this organization.

And because of this credibility, when they say that there’s collusion between Trump and the Kremlin or Trump associates, well, they are said to have “credibility,” and this is why the media totally relies on it, because of who it is that works at this nonprofit.  Sperry says that all of this “mirrors the strategy federal authorities themselves deployed to secure FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign: citing published news reports of investigative details their informants had leaked to the media…”

In other words, do you know…? In the quest to get a FISA warrant, do you know what the FBI did?  The FBI, McCabe, Strzok Smirk would leak portions of the dossier to the media.  They would leak elements of their investigation to the media.  The media would then report on what the FBI had leaked.  The FBI would then take those news stories and attach them to their FISA warrant application and say, “See, Judge?  This is so true, the media’s even reporting it!  It isn’t just us here in the FBI.”  Well, the only reason the media had it is because the FBI leaked it for this express purpose.

So the FISA judge (if they’re not in on it) is sitting there saying, “Wow, Trump-Russia collusion! You’ve got this dossier and now you got the media reporting it?  There must be something to it.  Here’s your warrant.  We sign off on it.”  They’re doing the exact same thing here.  They are leaking garbage. They are leaking made-up things about ongoing Trump contact with the Kremlin.  The media then reports this stuff, and that feeds on itself as a continual loop.

“Five days a week, TDIP emails a newsletter to influential Democrats and prominent Beltway journalists under the heading ‘TDIP Research’ — which summarizes the latest ‘collusion’ news, and offers ‘points of interest’ to inspire fresh stories regarding President Trump’s alleged ties to Moscow.” So we have Version 2.0. Paul Sperry has uncovered all this, and this organization TDIP may well be the source for all of this uniform reporting in the media on whatever.  Gravitas, Russian collusion with Trump.

The key takeaway here is that despite the utter falsity of the original Steele dossier, despite the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever of Trump-Russia collusion, a former staffer for Dianne Feinstein and Bill Clinton is now running an organization that’s feeding journalists with a new set of lies and distortions that are perpetuating the Trump-Russia collusion myth.  This is said to be one of the reasons why people like Pencil Neck Adam Schiff are saying, “Well, maybe Mueller didn’t do as good a job as we can do.”

Members of Congress and the media are being told that there are things Mueller hasn’t found.  This is how they are covering the fact that Mueller hasn’t found anything because there isn’t anything.  This group is informing journalists that they know of things that Mueller may have missed.  “We don’t know yet. We haven’t seen his report.”  That’s how they’re keeping this whole thing alive.  This is a hoax from day one.  It continues as a hoax, and now it’s — according to Paul Sperry — into “Version 2.0.”

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I had a chance to do a little bit more digging during the break into this 11 page story that we will link at RushLimbaugh.com. Here’s another pull quote from the story.

“Longtime observers of the Washington political scene are curious how Jones,” the Feinstein staffer, “has for years been able to escape serious scrutiny while running a political influence operation that works closely with national media, federal law enforcement and congressional investigators. With access to a multimillion-dollar war chest, they say he could continue to push the anti-Trump Russia collusion narrative long past the Mueller report or even the 2020 presidential election.”

And something else from the story, another pull quote. “By filing under that tax-exempt status, the organization,” TDIP, “does not have to publicly disclose its donors. Its latest IRS filing shows reported income of more than $9 million and assets of more than $1.6 million. In addition to Soros, who has donated at least $1 million, liberal Hollywood activist Reiner also backs the project, according to the former Simpson colleague with direct knowledge of discussions with Reiner. In 2017, Reiner started the Committee to Investigate Russia with James Clapper.”

A Hollywood actor colluding with James Clapper and several other former Obama officials. “Reiner’s office declined a request to discuss the extent of his financial contributions to the project.” His assistant said, “Sorry, Rob is not available.”

“A New York-based nonprofit linked to the family of billionaire Democratic activist Tom Steyer has donated $2.1 million,” to this organization. “Social media titans including the founders of Facebook, Twitter and Google are indirectly funding the project through donations funneled through a Silicon Valley foundation.”

So this is a major, major operation that has been going on under the radar that no journalist who is being fed information from has dared release. Journalists are using all of the crap that this organization feeds, and they never once cite them. It’s sources close to the story, it is anonymous former intelligence officials, it’s whatever. It’s the same way they’ve been doing it since this all began.

And it is an insurance policy in case Mueller doesn’t find anything. The express purpose here is to keep stories in the media that Russian collusion occurred and that the investigation to find it is ongoing and worthwhile. So when Jerry Nadler or when Pencil Neck Schiff or any of these people impanel a committee to go after this, the media’s right there with support, saying, “Yeah, it’s absolutely worthwhile because we continue to hear from our sources about Trump-Russia collusion.”

Now, you would think at some point these people would say, you know, it hasn’t worked yet. Well, that’s arguable. It has accomplished something. It hasn’t gotten rid of Trump, which is their objective, but it has done damage.