*After my show today, I discovered this story at The Federalist by Mollie Hemingway. This is why I spent so much time on this today. This is key to understanding this whole sordid affair, folks. Talk about being on The Cutting Edge!
RUSH: Well, you might call it Vindication Day. Virtually everything about the Russia investigation that you in this audience have been told by me, and pretty much everybody else informed in so-called conservative media, has been right on the money for three years, right on the money. It’s Friday, so let’s go.
JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny South Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!
RUSH: For three years, heck, maybe even four now, if you want to count parts of 2016 in the campaign. We’ll stick with three. For three years I told you there was no collusion between Trump and Russia and that there was no evidence, that it was entirely made up. And going all the way back to 2016 during the transition between Trump’s election and his inauguration in January of 2016. December, 2016, started questioning, you know, what did Obama know, and when did he know it?
Because that was always the question. It wasn’t what did Trump know. And it’s been fascinating for me to watch left-wing media. It started yesterday on the program as the Flynn news was breaking, as the DOJ announced that they were dropping the charges, dropping the case.
Like I told you at the end of the program, this is monumental. This kind of thing doesn’t happen, folks, whether it be the Department of Justice or whether it be a state attorney or district attorney, they just don’t drop charges on people. They maybe will let a judge take care of a mess for ’em by dismissing a case, but they don’t do what happened yesterday, particularly when the defendant has pled guilty, as Flynn did. Flynn pled guilty. And that’s what the Drive-By Media couldn’t get past yesterday.
I was watching CNN. CNN has had a meltdown over this. CNN’s meltdown yesterday and last night was total. And they’re not even covering it today. The entire foundation, the entire reason that the American media has been getting up and going to work for the past three years just blew up in their faces yesterday. There has never been anything they assured us there was. There was no collusion. There was no Trump as a Russian agent. There was no Russian interference in the election or the outcome. The Russians had nothing to do with who won and who lost the election. There was never any evidence suggesting that they did play any role.
Folks, this is the biggest political scandal certainly in my lifetime. It was the complete array of the Washington establishment against one man, Donald Trump. And it was purposed to destroy him, his family, his career, his businesses and to get him out of office and to reverse the election results of 2016. And they never had a shred of evidence for any of it. It did not happen. The Russians had nothing to do with our election, they had nothing to do with the outcome, above and beyond what they normally tried to do, like the Chinese are always trying to sabotage. We’ve got enemies.
But the election was legitimate. It was fair. And there was no collusion between Trump or anybody else in his campaign and the Russians. The collusion that did happen took place between the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democrat National Committee and Russia in the paying for and the creation of the Steele dossier, which serves as the bogus basis for everything.
So yesterday when the DOJ announces that they’re dropping the charges and dismissing the case, CNN was melting down before my eyes. And one of the reporters just couldn’t get past the idea, “Well obviously this is partisanship, this is a travesty. Why, Flynn had pled guilty. This is Trump turning the Department of Justice into his personal law firm.”
We talk on this program often. Are these people in the media really this stupid, are they really this uninformed, uneducated, uncurious? Or are they just so poisoned with partisan hatred that they’ve lost all rationale? “Why would Flynn plead guilty if he didn’t do it,” they were asking. “Why would Flynn plead guilty if he didn’t do it?” And that’s all they had to ask and that’s all they had to tell themselves to prove to them that the miscarriage of justice was not what happened to Flynn, but the dropping of the case.
How can they not know what happened to Flynn? How can they not know what was done to him? How can they not know that Flynn was set up? You can read about it. I can read about it. You can go any number of places and find out what happened to Michael Flynn. He was set up. He was not told that he was being interviewed when he was being interviewed. He was set up to commit perjury. He was set up to lie. But the reason he pled guilty was to stop the bleeding.
He pled guilty… Do you know that Mueller didn’t even file charges for 10 months after taking the case on Flynn? They didn’t have anything. They had to manufacture a bunch of things — and they promised after bankrupting him, that they would bankrupt his son. This is not hard to learn. It’s not hard to find. It’s out there. It’s in the public domain.
Robert Mueller and all of these Democrat prosecutors that were in on this bogus investigation were threatening Flynn with total ruin — and then they were gonna go after his son! They were gonna go after his son as having falsely registered as an agent of Israel or some such thing. And Flynn had some really bad lawyers.
Flynn had some establishment lawyers who were telling him to go along with it. The only case that he had, the only chance he had to save his son was to go ahead and accept the plea. “Do a little time and everything will be fine.” Now, all of this is… As I say, it’s not kept in some secret vault where you need a password and key to find out what happened. It’s out there everywhere — and it has been for months.
How is it the people at CNN don’t know? How is it the people at New York Times and MSNBC, whatever, don’t know? It wasn’t until Flynn got a decent lawyer, Sidney Powell — who knew what these people had done in previous cases, who knew how to battle them, who knew how to go after and win on prosecutorial misconduct.
She went in and she burned the place down and she left no bodies. They had no choice but than to dismiss charges after Sidney Powell had exposed the Mueller investigation and the Department of Justice for all of the illegal activities in which they had engaged to get a conviction on Flynn. They needed Flynn out of the way. They needed Flynn not as national security adviser.
They needed him out of the way so that their investigation of Trump could go on without Trump knowing about it. And there are many other reasons they wanted to get rid of Flynn too. Obama hated his guts. But, man, look at what else we’ve learned in addition to all that. James Clapper. We now know, because of the release of transcripts, James Clapper — testifying under oath before various congressional committees.
Quote: “I never saw any direct, empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or somebody in it was plotting or conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.” Clapper testified to that in 2017! He testified! John Brennan did the same. These people were all testifying under oath that they hadn’t seen a shred of evidence that Trump or anybody in his campaign was plotting or conspiring or colluding with the Russians to meddle with the election.
Now, there’s a lot of people that knew Clapper had testified to this, and not a single one of them leaked that he was lying through his teeth every day on CNN. We have put together a montage of Clapper and John Brennan starting in 2017 all the way through 2020, appearing on CNN and a couple of other places.
I want you to keep in mind as you listen to this, Clapper was revealed to have testified, quote, “I never saw any direct, empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or anybody in it was plotting or conspiring with the regulations to meddle with the election.” Now our montage…
CLAPPER: (7/19/2019) I really do wonder whether the Russians have something on him.
BRENNAN: (3/21/2018) The Russians may have something on him personally.
CLAPPER: (12/18/2017) What a great case officer Vladimir Putin is. He knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he is doing with the president.
BRENNAN: (10/2/19) He knows that Russia interfered on his behalf. He really is hoping that his pal Vladimir is going to come through once again.
CLAPPER: (10/7/2019) The Russian interference, the Russian meddling…
BRENNAN: (8/19/2018) He called publicly on the Russians to find Hillary’s emails! Collusion means cooperating!
CLAPPER: (7/26/19) The Russians meddled — and successfully so — in the election of 2016. That cast doubt on the legitimacy of that election.
BRENNAN: (7/17/2018) I equate it to the betrayal of one’s nation — aiding and abetting, giving comfort to an enemy.
CLAPPER: (4/18/19) What we have here is a case of collusion.
BRENNAN: (10/16/19) The champagne corks were going to be popping in Moscow.
LEMON: (2/19/2019) Do you agree, the president the United States, is a Russian asset?
CLAPPER: (2/19/2019) I completely agree!
RUSH: Uh… (chuckles) Yeah, I’m doing my best to control what is a natural tendency to real rage and anger here. This is so beyond the pale, and there needs to be some serious accountability here. Now, you can’t go get somebody for lying on television. It’s not a crime. But these people ought to be finished. There ought to be nobody left in media who would hire them.
They have probably discredited themselves in their so-called area of expertise, intelligence and intelligence gathering. This is just… Again, the man testified: “I never saw any direct, imperial evidence the Trump campaign or somebody in it was plotting, conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”
James Clapper, July 19th: “I really do wonder whether the Russians have something on him.” John Brennan, March 2018: “The Russians may have something on him personally.” James Clapper, December 2017: “What a great case officer Vladimir Putin is. He knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he’s doing with the president.”
“The president’s a Russian agent,” says James Clapper on two occasions, lying through his teeth!
John Brennan, October 2019: “He knows that Russia interfered on his behalf. He really is hoping that his pal Vladimir is gonna come through once again.” Clapper, October 2019: “The Russian interference, the Russian meddling.” Remember, he testified he never saw any evidence, any empirical evidence of any of this happening, because it didn’t. It didn’t happen.
There never was. Folks, we lost the House of Representatives because of this. We lost two years, 2-1/2 years of an agenda being implemented. Who knows what other damage resulted to this country because of this, and half of the country — statistically half of the country — was believing every word of this. We had news organizations winning Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting on this.
Let me remind you of one of the stories, because the question of Obama’s involvement in this has been solved. He was involved. He was well aware that Flynn was being wiretapped. He was ordering people how to behave and what to do in regards to it. Barack Obama was fully aware, involved, and giving orders on how this whole fake Russia collusion thing was to be implemented.
There was a meeting in the Oval Office, Obama’s Oval Office January 5, 2017. Trump would be inaugurated in two weeks, 2-1/2 weeks. In the meeting are Comey and Clapper and Brennan and Sally Yates and some other people. Pardon me. The meeting breaks up… I’ll give you some details on the meeting in just a second. The next day, January 6th, there’s a meeting with Trump at Trump Tower.
It’s Comey and Brennan and Clapper, and it is ostensibly — Trump, at this point, has told people he doesn’t need an intelligence briefing every day ’cause he’s a smart guy and has a good memory. And the intelligence community was doubly insulted ’cause they want first dibs on access to the president to implement their agenda, which may not have anything to do with his — and this is true of any president.
Trump has just said, he doesn’t need them. He doesn’t need to see ’em every day. Oh-ho-ho-ho! Well, that wasn’t gonna stand. They also had the Steele dossier. It was rummaging around Washington, everybody knew about it. They were desperate! Obama, Comey, Clapper, they’re desperate to get the Steele dossier into public media. So the meeting at Trump Tower with Comey, Clapper, Brennan on January 6 was designed to do just that.
I’ll tell you how — and, by the way, for those of you have heard me tell the story, I beg your indulgence. Remember: Our models are estimating the audience here is expanding at geometric proportions. It’s 43.5 million, according to the latest model run, meaning there are people listening here each day who have never heard the program before. So hang on. I’ll tell these stories as quickly as I can. And it doesn’t hurt you to hear them again to cement them in your memory.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Man, oh, man, 20.5 million jobs lost last month. That’s a record, 20.5 million. Folks, I’m gonna tell you, make the case as the program unfolds, the same people, the same group, the same cabal — different individuals, but the same mind-set — the people with the same objective who ran this totally made-up, not a shred of evidence ever on this whole Russian collusion business are the same kind of people who want 20.5 million people to lose their jobs.
They want this economy shut down, who want the shutdown to remain in place for as long as they can make it remain in place. It’s the same people. It may not be Comey and McCabe and Clapper and Brennan, but they come from the same organization, the same group of people. Call it the establishment, deep state, whatever.
They’re the same people who have a singular objective destroying and replacing Donald Trump, and the secondary objective, reversing the election results of 2016. That’s what all of this is about. It’s not about your health. It’s not about keeping you healthy. It’s not about making sure you don’t get the coronavirus. It’s about the latest attempt to get Donald Trump.
Now, if that sounds simplistic, I’m sorry. It is exactly why all of this is happening. Now, you might be shouting a question. “Well, Rush, after 3-1/2 years, couldn’t Trump have figured this out? Why does he keep letting these people succeed?” That is a great question, proving that some of the best questions I get are the ones that I ask myself, and I am prepared to answer that question for you. But looky here. Another obscene profit time-out has eventuated, so I’ve gotta take a break. I’ll finish the Oval Office story. Don’t worry. Haven’t forgot that.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, so again, in the Oval Office on January 5th of 2017, Obama, Clapper, Comey, Brennan, Sally Yates, Biden was in the meeting as well, and they are discussing how to get the Steele dossier in the public domain, how to get the media to cover it. It’s been out there for months circulating in Washington. None of it’s verified. They know it’s bogus. They paid for it. It’s totally made up. There’s not a single thing in it that’s ever been verified.
Folks, I really don’t know how else to characterize all of this. But they wanted it out there because of the particular story, the golden showers story where Trump had supposedly, on a trip to Moscow, hired a bunch of prostitutes to come to his hotel suite to urinate on the bed when he found out that Obama had slept in it. That was the golden showers story in the dossier. They wanted that out there. They wanted to portray that Trump is a pervert, that he’s a sick puppy, that he’s a sleazebag, a sleazeball. They’re frustrated the Access Hollywood video didn’t take care of him in the campaign.
So they want this thing out there. They strategize how to do it ’cause there’s a meeting on January 6th, the next day, at Trump Tower. That meeting happens. In addition to wanting the dossier mentioned, one of the purposes for the meeting is Comey is telling Trump that he’s wrong about not wanting a daily brief from the intelligence community. Comey wants to tell him you need to get these. ‘Cause they wanted the intelligence community to have access to Trump. They happened to be able to plant lies and rumors about things happening around the world to make Trump make decisions that would kill him, that would destroy his presidency. They were doing everything they could to undermine the man. And this is even before he’s taken office.
So January 6th meeting, Trump Tower. Comey says to the president (paraphrasing), “You really need to talk to the intelligence people. You need to have them give you a brief every day. You need to know what’s going on around the world, these various hot spots.” At that point he asks Clapper and Brennan to leave so that it’s just Comey and Trump in Trump’s office. Comey then brings out the dossier says, “Sir, I don’t know if you’ve seen, but this is exactly why you need to accept an intelligence brief every day. Look at this story. Look at this about you. They’re saying that you hired a bunch of prostitutes to urinate on a bed in Moscow because Obama had slept on it.”
And Trump — we know now Trump — the first thought that he had was he was being blackmailed. He didn’t trust these people. He didn’t quite know them, but he wanted them to be on his side. He wanted his election as president to be embraced by people. And at this point he was still extending the benefit of the doubt. He was a little dubious of Comey because he had been advised by people, but at this point he was nowhere near wanting to fire Comey. He was getting close, but he hadn’t made that decision.
But when Comey tells him about the golden showers story, Trump immediate thinks he’s being blackmailed. And then says (paraphrasing), “You know that’s not true. What are you telling me? You’ve gotta dispel that.”
“Mr. President, that’s not why I’m telling you. I’m telling you this is the kind of stuff that’s gonna be said about you all the time. That’s why you need to take meetings with the intelligence community so you can find out what’s going on about you, what’s being said about you. You’ve got to know what our enemies have percolating to try to damage you.” All that was BS. Trump said, “If my wife finds out about this, this is crazy. This is absolutely nuts. This didn’t happen. It’s absurd.” He thought he was being blackmailed again, not necessarily by Comey, but by whoever was behind this story.
So Comey leaves. The meeting is over. What does Comey do? By virtue of his own testimony to congressional committees we know what Comey did. He called Clapper and said, “Mission accomplished.” “Mission accomplished” means “I told Trump about the dossier. I told Trump about the golden showers. Clapper, after getting the phone call from Comey with the message mission accomplished, Clapper calls CNN and says, “I got breaking news for you. The president of the United States was just briefed about the Steele dossier and the golden showers story.”
That made the dossier suitable for reporting on because the president had been told about it. That made it news. That was the objective. The afternoon and evening of January 6th the news media is filled with stories about the golden showers and the Steele dossier within the confines, the rubric of Trump colluded with Russia. They didn’t have any of Trump’s denials. They reported this as though, “Hey, it’s under investigation. Trump may have done this.” CNN ended up getting a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on this when all they did was accept a phone call from Clapper, who they then later hired.
Now, Clapper, just a few months later testified before a congressional committee, “I never saw any direct empirical evidence the Trump campaign or anybody in it was plotting or conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.” Get me audio sound bite number 1 again. That’s his testimony. After he’s been hired by CNN, this is the same guy who has just testified he never saw any evidence, there wasn’t any evidence, there was no collusion. Listen to him again on CNN.
CLAPPER: (7/19/2019) I really do wonder whether the Russians have something on him.
BRENNAN: (3/21/2018) The Russians may have something on him personally.
CLAPPER: (12/18/2017) What a great case officer Vladimir Putin is. He knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he is doing with the president.
BRENNAN: (10/2/19) He knows that Russia interfered on his behalf. He really is hoping that his pal Vladimir is going to come through once again.
CLAPPER: (10/7/2019) The Russian interference, the Russian meddling…
BRENNAN: (8/19/2018) He called publicly on the Russians to find Hillary’s emails! Collusion means cooperating!
CLAPPER: (7/26/19) The Russians meddled — and successfully so — in the election of 2016. That cast doubt on the legitimacy of that election.
RUSH: All right. That’s enough to illustrate the point. So here you have James Clapper, who under oath has to tell the truth. Directly contradicts himself, lies. He is engaging here in character assassination. He’s attempting to ruin Donald Trump, the human being, Donald Trump the president, Donald Trump the man. He is attempting to destroy his reputation with an audience compromising statistically half of the people in the United States of America.
And up to today these people have all gotten away with this, folks. They have prevailed. They won the House for the Democrats in 2018. They created a whole lot of doubt about Donald Trump that short-changed the implementation of his agenda. They succeeded in creating in the minds of how many Americans that Trump did all this horrible stuff, that Trump was a traitor.
Remember, they spent years reporting this four and five times a day every day, seven days a week for two years. New York Times, Washington Post, Times, CNN, MSNBC. And the whole time they knew it was all a lie. They knew there was nothing to it. It was entirely made up, and the plot hatched in the Obama Oval Office. It wasn’t by the way just Clapper who testified that he didn’t see any evidence. Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power was asked about same thing. She said (paraphrasing), “I’m not in possession, I didn’t read or absorb information that came out of the intelligence. So no, I don’t know anything about collusion.”
Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice was asked the same question, same committee testimony that Clapper testified. She said, “To the best of my recollection there wasn’t anything smoking. There were some things that gave me pause. “I don’t recall intelligence that I would consider evidence to that effect that I saw…conspiracy prior to my departure.” She asked whether she had any evidence coordination between Trump and Russia. Susan Rice said, “I don’t recall any intelligence or evidence to that effect.”
They then asked her, “Well, what about collusion between Trump and the Trump campaign and Russia?” No, same answer, didn’t see any. Form Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes was asked the same question during his House intelligence interview. (paraphrasing) “I don’t know. I wouldn’t have received any information on any criminal or counterintelligence investigations into what the Trump campaign was — so, no, I’ve not seen anything.”
Every one of these people on television lying through their teeth saying that Trump colluded, the Trump campaign colluded, there may have been a conspiracy between Vladimir Putin and Trump to sabotage the Clinton campaign. None of it. What do we do to get these two years back? What do we do to hold the people behind this accountable? I don’t have the vocabulary, I don’t have emotional range to describe for you how atrocious, how criminal, how unacceptable, how outrageous all of this not just was, because it is continuing.
The Kavanaugh hearings were just an extension of this. Trump and the phone call with the president of Ukraine was just an extension of this. Everything that has happened in the American media and the Democrat Party since election night November 2016 has been about getting rid of Donald Trump, including their reaction and policies regarding COVID-19 and keeping the economy shut down for as long as they can in as many states as they can. Nobody’s paid a price for this yet. They’ve been called out. They have had the boom lowered on ’em in that standpoint.
But even now McCabe and Comey are running around like, “Why, this is the biggest travesty of injustice. Flynn needs to go to jail. Why, why, this is horrible what’s happened. This is just proof that Donald Trump has turned the DOJ into his personal law firm.”
Even Adam Schiff, after all of the testimony from every one of these Obama people — Clapper, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes — Adam Schiff in a statement accompanying the release of these transcripts said, “The transcripts released today richly detail evidence of the Trump campaign’s efforts to invite, make use of, and cover up Russia’s help in the 2016 presidential election.”
That is purely pathological. The transcripts say the exact opposite. The transcripts that were released have no evidence of any campaign effort to involve Russia. It didn’t happen. The Russians had nothing to do with the 2016 election. Nothing the Russians did had one iota’s factor, effect on the outcome of the election.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: That’s right, I did. All the way back… I remember this specifically. In February of 2017, Trump has been in office only couple of weeks, I pointed everybody back to Obama.
I said, “This could not have happened… This whole Russia investigation garbage, Comey doing a number on him, this would not have happened without Obama knowing about it, certainly and maybe even approving of it. Couldn’t have happened.
JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny South Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!
RUSH: I mean, that was my instinct. There’s no way this entire Russia operation happens, because all these clowns, Comey, McCabe… These people love Obama, are a bunch of sycophants for Obama. They wouldn’t be do this without his knowledge. They wouldn’t be subjecting him to any risk whatsoever.
He had to know! That was just my instinct telling me this. Well, guess what? The documents that have been released — the unredacted testimony before the House Intelligence Committee — show that Obama was in on it, and he was well aware of the attempt to take down Michael Flynn. What happened is this.
These documents — the unredacted testimony of various people before the House Intelligence Committee — show that… Remember the name Sally Yates? She was a… (interruption) Yeah, well, she was the deputy attorney general under Obama, and Trump held her over. She was the person who failed to implement his first travel ban on the basis that she thought it was unconstitutional.
And she became a left-wing heroine because of this. She was one of the very first people to undermine — officially — a Trump directive. She was made a big hero. She was an Obama holdover. She was the former deputy attorney general, and she was in that meeting between Obama and Clapper and Brennan and Comey on January 5th, 2017.
And these documents show that Sally Yates on that date, knew about a phone call between Flynn and Kislyak. This is one of the ways they got Flynn. They wiretapped a phone call that he had had with the Russian ambassador, whose name is Kislyak. This is the guy that went to lunch with every all the time. He’d go to lunch three to four times a day.
This is the guy that they ended up having to recuse Sessions for having a meeting with. The point is they wiretapped the phone call. Why is that important? Because they knew Flynn didn’t do anything wrong! (Sorry for yelling.) They knew Flynn had not violated any official law. He had not undermined America. He had not discussed…
Something else Obama did — and this is key. Maybe you’ll remember this. In December of 2016, Obama announced that he was sending home 35 Russian spies — 35 personnel from the Russian embassy. He was sending ’em home. He was sending ’em back to Moscow. That’s how Russia was gonna be pushed for interfering in the 2016 election.
So don’t tell me Obama wasn’t in on it. That was solely unnecessary. Russia had not interfered. They didn’t interfere. There isn’t any evidence they interfered. There’s no evidence that anything they did made any difference about the 2016 election. So Obama sends those people home. They’re wiretapping Flynn.
Well, they’re wiretapping Kislyak, which they can do. He’s a foreign agent. So since they’re wiretapping Kislyak, they capture the phone call, and Flynn is the national security adviser. He’s talking to all kinds of people from other countries now. It’s part of his job. It’s not illegal for him to talk to the Russian ambassador.
It isn’t illegal for him to talk to the ambassador from the moon! They, because of the wiretap, knew that hadn’t broken any law talking to Kislyak. They knew that Flynn had not discussed the lifting of sanctions that Obama had placed on Russia. They knew Flynn didn’t do anything — and yet, they pursued him. They set up a perjury trap.
They set up this phony interview with him in which they did not tell him what they were doing and they did not tell him that they had the transcript of the call between him and Kislyak, and they tried to get him to say something different to them than he said in the phone call to Kislyak. It was one of about a zillion phone calls he’d made.
So if he got confused over what he had said to Kislyak and he couldn’t remember this or that, they wanted to nail this guy. He was set up, and Obama knew it. And this is what Sally Yates learned on this January 5th meeting. “Yates, Comey, Brennan and Clapper, were at the White House to brief members of the Obama administration on the classified intelligence community assessment on Russian activities in the election of 2016.”
(chuckling) It was so phony. I mean, folks, I really wish I had 10 times the talent I’ve got, ’cause I haven’t gotten close to telling you how this has really affected me. I haven’t gotten close to telling you the emotional roller coaster this has put me on. I haven’t gotten close to telling you how frustrated and angry I am over this whole thing.
I don’t have the ability to. I’ve tried. I’ve slaved over it. It’s just… It’s the kind of thing… Maybe I’m just too naive. It’s just the kind of thing that you just hope and pray that, in your country, doesn’t happen. You love America. It’s the greatest place on earth. You have all of these ideals, and you hope — you just hope, you think, you believe.
You accept the premise that at these positions — director of the FBI, assistant attorney general, all these positions — you’ve got the best people you can get in there. I know partisanship exists. It’s why I say I’m naive. But these people were nowhere near the best of anything with any value or ideals. These are people that couldn’t have cared less about the reputation the FBI.
They couldn’t have cared less about the system of justice. They just swept all of this aside, for this objective of getting rid of a guy who beat them and they just couldn’t come to grips with it. So, anyway, after the briefing — that January 5th briefing, all those people in it — Obama dismissed the group but he asked Sally Yates and Comey to stay behind.
And he started out by saying he had learned of the information about Flynn and his conversation with Soviet ambassador, Kislyak, about sanctions. Now, Obama said he didn’t want any additional information. He wasn’t asking them anything. But he was seeking information on whether the White House should be treating Flynn any differently, given the information.
And then Yates recalled Comey saying, “You know, maybe we can get him on the Logan Act!” The Logan Act has never been prosecuted. It goes back… It’s centuries old and it’s never been used, because it’s probably unconstitutional. That phone call became part of the FBI’s justification to interview Flynn on January 24, 2017.
That’s a couple days ago after Trump has been inaugurated. Ahead of the meeting that they had, these two agents had with Flynn, “notes show that they planned to get Flynn to lie in order to pursue criminal prosecution or to get him fired.” They wanted to get him fired. Remember, these are the notes that we got last week from Bill Priestap.
(paraphrased) “Oh, my goodness. Look at this! What are we trying to do? Are we trying to get the guy fired or are we getting him to lie for a perjury trap?” So Obama was well aware of all of this. And I’m telling you that these underlings would not have taken this as far as they did without him knowing about it. I don’t know if any of this is ever gonna get up to him, but do not doubt me.