“And he intends to portray Hillary Clinton as fundamentally corrupt, invoking everything from her cattle futures trades in the late 1970s to the federal investigation into her email practices as secretary of state. … Another goal is to win over skeptical Republicans, since nothing unites the party quite like castigating the Clintons. … For Hillary Clinton, the coming battle is something of a paradox. She has decades of experience and qualifications, but it may not be merit that wins her the presidency — it may be how she handles the humiliations inflicted by Trump.

The story goes on to warn Trump that if he goes anywhere near any of these things, that it’ll backfire on him and it will probably irreparably harm his campaign.  That was yesterday morning in the New York Times.  So let’s go to the audio sound bites.  Last night on the Fox News Channel, Sean Hannity show, this exchange took place.

HANNITY:  What about what Clinton’s done?  How big an issue should that be in the campaign?  For example, I looked at the New York Times.  Are they gonna interview Juanita Broaddrick?  Are they gonna interview Paula Jones?  Are they gonna interview Kathleen Willey?  In one case it’s about exposure.  In another case it’s about groping and fondling and touching against a woman’s will.

TRUMP:  And rape.

HANNITY:  And rape.

TRUMP:  Big settlements, massive settlements.

HANNITY:  $850,000 to Paula Jones.

TRUMP:  And lots of other things.  And impeachment for lying.

HANNITY:  Smearing, besmirchment of women.

TRUMP:  He losing your law license.  He lost his law license, okay?  Couldn’t practice law.  And you don’t read about this on Clinton.

RUSH:  No, no.  So he went there, he mentioned the rape word, everybody knew it was gonna happen ’cause they leaked the details of the interview that Hannity had with Trump. But on the same day the New York Times warns Trump don’t go there, don’t do it, don’t go anywhere near the Clinton scandals.  Trump might be the first, I don’t know, the first Republican politician to ever bring up the charge by Juanita Broaddrick that Bill Clinton raped her.

So he clearly didn’t listen to the New York Times.  Do you think the New York Times is trying to help Trump?  Do you think the New York Times was warning Trump to stay away from any of these scandals just to make sure that he didn’t shoot himself in the foot and damage his campaign?  You think the New York Times wanted Trump to avoid this so that he could maybe win the election against Mrs. Clinton?  We don’t think that, do we?

So why would the New York Times advise Trump to stay away from these scandals on the basis it could backfire if they don’t want him to win?  If they want Trump to lose, then why are they trying to help him?  Well, they’re not, is the bottom line, not trying to help him.  This is the protective shield around the Clintons that the Drive-By Media has erected, defended, protected, since 1993, 1994.  And they are trying to intimidate Trump, maybe some of his supporters.  I don’t think they can intimidate Trump.  Maybe trying to intimidate some of his supporters to maybe talk to him and caution wiser counsel.  “Don’t go there, Mr. Trump.  It’s potential quicksand.  You don’t want to get stuck in there.” And Trump obviously has other plans.

Trump put out his list of potential Supreme Court nominees, 11 names.  Snerdley, did you know one of the names on the list, what’s her name, Gloria Sykes?  I’m not sure of the first name.  She’s the wife of Charlie Sykes, the talk radio host in Milwaukee who led the conservative talk radio assault on Trump in Wisconsin.  So Trump has put his ex-wife on his list of 11 potential Supreme Court nominees.

I’ve read a bunch of different conservative blogs on this.  In some of the conservative think tanks, you find some people upset that he didn’t pick from prominent judges and jurists that they would have picked.  From Ivy League schools, yeah.  But aside from a few people in think tanks, apparently across the conservative sphere out there, there was universal applause for this list that Trump put together, and it’s epitomized here by Dr. Krauthammer last night on Special Report with Bret Baier.

KRAUTHAMMER:  I think it’ll have a dramatic effect in doing that.  The one thing holding back people who’ve resisted supporting Trump, or at least the major thing, is the fear of what a Clinton presidency would do to the Supreme Court and how it would change it for a generation.  Now you get a list of 11 who are quite sterling, three of them clerked for Justice Thomas, two of them for Justice Scalia, the six federal judges all appointed by George W., which means they are conservative and they are relatively young.  So this is a future-looking list.

RUSH:  Dr. Krauthammer excited about the list.  Other conservatives, some at National Review, were as well.  As I say, some of the think tanks, I can’t think off the top of my head, but some think tanks were upset that some of the older jurists that they think are really good — Patrick Kavanagh is one.  But some of the jurists that they like actually have voted to sustain parts of Obamacare.  And so others in the conservative movement said it’s a good thing Trump did not — we don’t need anybody else on the court that thinks Obamacare is okay, no matter what else they are, we don’t need anybody else that thinks that.

And they pointed out, as Dr. Krauthammer did here, that all these names on Trump’s list, they are young.  If they got on the court, they’d be there for decades, which is a factor given their lifetime appointment.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I got a Stack here of stuff on Trump and the R-word with Hannity last night on Clinton and so forth.  There’s actually a lot of people that have reacted to this in a number of ways.  In addition, you know, it might be worthwhile to remind people what Hillary has said about this, because Trump’s gonna be the only guy that will bring this up, too.  Nobody in the Drive-Bys gonna bring it up, and I don’t think anybody else in the Republican Party would lead with it.  They might add to it or affirm it after somebody like Trump does.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Roger Kimball, who is one of the founders of PJ Media, very, very highly approved of website here at the EIB Network, published a piece, I guess was yesterday on Clinton Cash, or it’s always worse than you think.  You know, Peter Schweizer has this book, wrote the book about Clinton Cash.  And it is meticulously researched and footnoted. And it’s why we all know who has donated to the Clinton Foundation, what foreign governments, what foreign entities, what foreign international corporations, what individuals, you know, the people who donated a sum total of over $100 million to Bill and Hillary and their foundation.

And it’s Schweizer and his book that has researched and documented this and is able to conclude that these donations are occurring for one reason.  Many of them happened while Hillary was secretary of state and have continued since and have obviously been made, as I call it, on the come.  These are investments in a future Hillary presidency in which Bill would be involved.  These are people already purchasing policy preferences from the Clintons in advance.  That’s what Schweizer’s book documents and they made a movie out of this now.  I guess it’s a 60 minute documentary about it that’s gonna be airing sometime during the summer.

And what Roger Kimball has done is taken this book and has taken it seriously and has written a piece that says it’s even worse than what Schweizer has come up with.  With the Clintons, it’s always worse than you think.  He writes this.

“In his column for PJ Media, my friend Ron Radosh, the distinguished historian, outlines the case for believing that Hillary Clinton is the ‘lesser of two evils’ compared to Donald Trump. Ron says that he is ‘fully aware’ of Hillary’s liabilities, yet concludes: On foreign policy, there is more hope that [she] will take a course that asserts American leadership abroad.”

And this is where we distance ourselves because that’s absurd.  She’s bought and sold to every foreign power there is.  Hillary Clinton is going to be led around the nose by whoever it is that’s donated to her foundation.

“Clinton Cash, the documentary film which I watched in previews yesterday –” this is Roger Kimball, “– is based on Schweizer’s book,” and it “provides a relentless and devastating portrait of brazen financial venality in exchange for political favors.

“I read through Clinton Cash quickly when it came out last May. This was no right-wing hit job … but rather a methodical and exhaustively sourced chronicle of how the Clintons parlayed Bill’s celebrity, Hillary’s position as secretary of State, and her possible future tenure as president of the United States into a veritable Niagara of cash.

“Eye-popping speaking fees for Bill — $250,000, $500,000, even $750,000 a pop — and millions upon millions directed to the Clinton Foundation and its offshoots. Where was the money coming from? Did they actually find his ‘wisdom’ that valuable? No. The money came from multinational corporations that needed a favor. Shady foreign financiers. Dubious state entities in Africa, Saudi Arabia, Russia, South America, and elsewhere.

“Are you worried about ‘money in politics’? Stop the car, get an extended-stay room, and take a long hard look at the Clintons’ operation for the last sixteen years.

The Associated Press estimated that their net worth when they left the White House in 2000 was zero. Now they are worth about $200 million.

“How did they do it? … The Clintons have perfected pay-to-play political influence peddling on a breathtaking scale. Reading Clinton Cash is a nauseating experience.

At the center of the book is not just a tale of private greed and venality. That is just business as usual in Washington (and elsewhere). No, what is downright scary is way the Clintons have been willing to trade away legitimate environmental concerns and even our national security for the sake,” of personal income.

And there’s the details of the Canadian mining industry, major donors to the charitable endeavors of the Clintons, uranium being sold to our enemies with the Clintons acting as intermediaries to make it possible, collecting their commissions.  I mean, the details just go on and I’m not gonna bother you with all the details that many of you have already heard and know.  Not the point.

The thing about the Clintons is that people never understood what Whitewater was about.  This is something that I bet befalls a lot of people.  Bill and Hillary Clinton combined were dirt poor compared to the people in their orbit, compared to the people they hung around. Clinton is from Arkansas. He didn’t have much, his mother didn’t have much, stepfather didn’t have much. Hillary Chicago, middle class, nothing special, but they go away to the Ivy League and they become educated, and they’re hanging around trust fund kids.

Everybody they know is filthy rich with old money, old blue-blood, inherited wealth.  And they’re gonna inherit it themselves, and that’s why so many of them are able to go to work at TIME Magazine for $80,000 a year, ’cause it doesn’t matter what they earn because their inheritances are multi, multimillions, sometimes billions.  Bill and Hillary are hanging around all this, and it’s something that defines membership in this group, wealth is.  They don’t have any.

And I’m convinced in the 1980s, people have forgotten this aspect of the eighties, but there were all kinds of people that were getting wealthy on real estate, any number of things.  Legitimate.  The economy was booming.  As liberal Democrats the Clintons were part of the group that believed all of that was shady, that nobody earned that kind of money legitimately.  Liberals never believe that merit earns that kind of money.  There’s gotta be some cheating, there has to be some chicanery, there has to be under-the-table deals, nothing is legitimate.

They never applaud and appreciate hard work as being a payoff because they don’t believe that’s how it happened with people.  They’re suspicious of it, as all liberals are.  That’s why the rich are always targets, particularly wealthy people who earn their money as opposed to inherit it, are targets, new money people.  And it’s thought to be luck, cheating, something ill-gotten, that kind of wealth.

That’s what Whitewater was.  Whitewater was a scam. It was a get rich quick scam.  It had nothing to do with political power. It had to do with getting rich.  The Clintons have been obsessed.  That’s what the cattle futures deal was.  They have been lifelong ticked off at not having any money.  When Hillary says they left the White House broke, in her mind, they were.  They couldn’t hang around with their rich friends if their rich friends weren’t gonna pay for it.  That was humiliating, it was embarrassing.

So Whitewater — and it didn’t pan out, but it was supposed to be a get-rich-quick scheme like the Clintons thought everybody else was doing in the eighties.  So that’s what they’ve set up here, and they have sought and they are obsessed with it.  Bill and Hillary Clinton, they’re classic phonies.  They sit up there as liberal Democrats and they decry wealth and they impugn it.  Remember they’ve got their daughter, Chelsea, out talking (imitating Chelsea), “You know, I tried to get interested in money, but, you know, I just couldn’t.  You know, I just.”  That’s all planned.

Liberal Democrats, like the Kennedys, super wealthy people have to lie about it, don’t care about it, they’re not interested in it. “Raise taxes, go right ahead, I don’t think I’m paying enough.”  That’s all part of the scam to make their voters think that they don’t care about being wealthy, when that’s all they care about.  And the Clintons are proving that this is exactly what all of this has been about for them in addition to whatever political damage they can wreak havoc on the country in the process.  So they’re willing to sell anything to get this money.  And now they’ve got it, and they still won’t spend their own money.

They’re still living off other people’s donations, other people’s money for everything.  And Chelsea is just as focused on it as either of them are. It’s a giant scam. And that’s what makes them, in Schweizer’s book, dangerous, what Roger Kimball’s writing about.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Look, if you want to know what Whitewater was, in the simplest of terms, the Clintons and Jim McDougal sold retirement lots to the elderly and some middle-class families (they advertised in small, little newspapers), and then foreclosed on them if they missed a payment.  They could only miss one payment.  The fine print in the contract stated that the buyers didn’t own anything until they had made the final payment. That was after 30 years, in some cases. You know, it was a 30-year mortgage, and you don’t own it until you make the final payment.

If you miss one payment, the property reverts back to the Whitewater Development Corporation, essentially. So it was a foreclosure scam.  Of course, it didn’t work, in the sense of generating untold wealth for the Clintons, but that’s what it was designed to do.  When you bring Trump into this, I don’t see how anybody… You could read Schweizer’s book. He’s written two books on these people.  There’s no way you vote for Hillary Clinton.  I don’t care! You don’t want these two back in the White House under any circumstances.  When I see all these moderate Republicans and some of these libertarian financiers suggesting that they don’t want anybody, they want third party, that they just can’t vote for Trump, they’re looking this the wrong way.

With Hillary, we don’t want the Clintons anywhere near this country’s leadership again!  We don’t want to even flirt with it. We don’t want any more of Obamaism, which they would bring.  I think if these people were using their heads, what they would do is start getting behind Trump now, like Nixon did Goldwater back in 1964. They would do whatever they could to ingratiate themselves to Trump.  And that way, they’d have influence with him.  You know, you show the boss how valuable you are.  Just work with the guy.  If you find him repugnant and repulsive, but he’s all you’ve got and you don’t like it, find a way to get close to him and maybe find some influence over him with full-throated support.

But that’s got to be preferable to the Clintons.