RUSH: I have to share this with you. Two different sources… Well, actually it’s one source, Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. It’s two stories here, CNN and The Politico. First, the Politico. Ready? Headline: “Trump Transition Members Were Under Surveillance During Obama Administration.” Now, look, this is gonna be treated as big news. But if you go back to the first hour of this program, go back to yesterday, folks, there’s no way this could not have been happening for all that news that was made!
From September, October, November, December — particularly November, December — and January during the Trump transition with all this leaking coming from sources deep inside the intelligence community and all this, this leaked data that was being reported. There had to be some surveillance going on for any of this to be known, including Mike Flynn talking to the Russian ambassador. So Devin Nunes had a press conference this afternoon. “House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) told reporters this afternoon that members of the Donald Trump transition team, possibly including Trump himself, were under surveillance during the Obama administration following November’s election. …
“According to Nunes the surveillance appears to have been legal, incidental collection and that it does not appear to have been related to concerns over collusion with Russia. … According to Nunes he will be going to the White House later Wednesday to brief the Trump administration on what he has learned, which he said came from ‘sources.'” From the CNN version of the story: “House Intel Chairman: Trump’s Personal Communications May Have Been Collected — House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes said Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s personal communications may have been picked up by investigators through ‘incidental collection.'”
Folks, let me tell you what this means. They had to be doing this! This is exactly… I wish I could find it, remember the exact day and the transcript, ’cause I remember… I almost word-for-word said something along the lines of, “Let me tell you what I think happened here. I think security agencies were surveilling all kinds of foreign actors, and they end up talking to Americans, and therefore these people were also under surveillance even though they weren’t targeted, and there are procedures to keep those people and what they say quiet, private, undisclosed, what have you.”
It’s called “masking,” and this was admitted to by Comey on Monday, that indeed this is the procedure, and they were discussing the unmasking of an individual… His name never came up, but it was Mike Flynn they were talking about. “Nunes said at a news conference he discovered the potential surveillance of Trump himself while reviewing intelligence reports, but said it was not related to Russia. ‘This is a normal, incidental collection, based on what I could collect,’ Nunes said. ‘This appears to be all legally collected foreign intelligence under’ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.”
Really? Does that mean there was a warrant associated with it? The foreign inteli…? (interruption) No. Nunes is saying Trump was not wiretapped. What Nunes is saying is that there was surveillance that picked up conversations of Trump and his people during the transition. It is not disclosed who was being surveilled. Again: “Nunes said at a news conference he discovered the potential surveillance of Trump himself while reviewing intelligence reports, but said it was not related to Russia. ‘This is a normal, incidental collection, based on what I could collect,’ Nunes said.
“‘This appears to be all legally collected foreign intelligence under’ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.” Well, there’s a court that is attached to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It’s called the FISA court, and you have to go there if you want a warrant to surveil. They are never refused. Very rarely are these requests for warrants refused by the FISA court. It’s a secret court. You don’t know… Only the Regime knows. Only the administration knows. They’re never been made public.
“Nunes said he alerted House Speaker Paul Ryan about the collection and is traveling to the White House Wednesday afternoon. ‘I’m actually alarmed by it,’ Nunes said. … Nunes did not know whether the ‘incidental collection’ happened at Trump Tower, and could not say for certain whether Trump’s communications were directly collected. Nunes said the collection included Trump transition officials and that it happened after the election. He said he could not say whether it meant that Trump was ‘spied on.’ I’m not going to get into legal definitions, but clearly I have a concern,’ he said.”
Now, look, folks, I take you back to this Wall Street Journal editorial today comparing Trump to a drunk trying to suck from an empty gin bottle, that Trump is dangerously unfit, dangerously unbalanced. He won’t apologize for claiming that he was spied on! He won’t apologize to Obama. He will not withdraw it; he’s doubling down on it. Turns out — and I think it’s safe to say that Trump’s record remains 100%. The things he says generally have happened or do happen. Nunes said he found this on his own going through reports.
He called a press conference about this, admits to being concerned by it, that Trump and his people were surveilled during the transition. That is what Trump meant. I have no question that’s what he meant, when Trump says in his tweet something about how outrageous it is that Obama would “tap the wires” at Trump Tower. In Trumpspeak, if the government is wiretapping people, then the president knows about it, and therefore the president’s doing it. That’s what Trump means. The president runs the executive branch.
The executive branch houses the Department of Justice, which houses the FBI, and therefore all these agencies report to the president, and therefore the president would know if this kind of thing is going on and could theoretically even ask that it go on. Despite these people in the media saying, “No president would ever do that!” Don’t give me that. You impeached Richard Nixon because you thought he wanted to do that. What do you mean, “no president would ever do it”? Anything to protect Obama.
But, folks, this has been the point of all this we’ve been talking about this since after the election, with news story after news story after news story. And the New York Times headline on January 20th using the word “wiretapped” to talk about electronic communications that have been heard and reported on data leaked to the media. Remember all those stories that purported to say that there was collusion between Trump and his campaign and Russia to affect the outcome of the election, and in every one of those stories, they had to put in a little paragraph deep down:
“Sorry, investigators have yet to find any clear evidence, but the indications are that they should keep looking” or some such BS. How in the world could any of that stuff have been leaked if there weren’t surveillance — unless somebody was just making it up, which in fact did happen with the Trump dossier! Now, Comey is on record — the FBI director is on record — as saying that the investigation began in July when they looked at that Trump dossier that was written and made up by the Brit. I forget his name. It’s the dossier that contained false premise after false premise, lie after lie after lie.
It was explained to us by intelligence people as an example. They created a fake document with fake intel in order to show it to Trump, to show him the kind of things that he should get used to seeing when he is inaugurated. Trump at the time was saying he didn’t think he needed an intelligence briefing every day, and the intel people (like everybody else) want access to power. So they were trying to make the case that he should get that daily briefing, and somebody created this dossier that is lie after lie after lie. It was circulating around Washington for nine months last year, and everybody knew it was bogus.
They wanted to run it, but they couldn’t ’cause nothing in it was true. So BuzzFeed finally did run it. They published it, and they published it with a caveat: “We can’t confirm any of this. None of this has been able to be proven, tracked down, confirmed in any way. But it’s so serious we think you should see it and make up your own mind.” It was one of the most bogus journalistic decisions in the world. You don’t need to be journalists to do what they did, and they have the guts to start talking about so-called conservative conspiracy sites and so forth?
These people on the left are the problem, folks. The people on the left are where the insane lunatics reside today. The people that are out of their minds because of what’s happened here. It is not Trump that’s unfit. It’s these people who are unfit. It’s these people jumping to conclusions, these people refusing to even consider that Trump might have a point about something. Now here comes news from Nunes that Trump and his team were being surveilled. We just don’t know if it was directly or indirectly, but they were caught while surveillance was going on. Nunes is going up to Trump at the White House this afternoon to show him the data.
This is after all these denials at this hearing on Monday! But everybody knew what Trump meant. This is the thing. This is where things lose any sense of common sense or reality. People that voted for Trump knew exactly what he meant when talking about Obama “tapping the wires” at Trump Tower. They don’t think that Obama put on his intelligence uniform and found some deep, dark room in the basement of Trump Tower and started putting various cables in holes and jacks in the phone bank.
The United States government was surveilling him, and Barack Obama ran the United States government! And the way to get people to listen to you if you’re serious about it is to mention the president by name. And, by the way, it worked because everybody then started running around like chickens with their heads cut off claiming, “There wasn’t any investigation! Trump’s insane.” What do you mean “there wasn’t any investigation”? You people have been reporting on the investigation for three months.
What do you mean “no investigation”? But this is why I think it’s not Trump by any stretch that poses a threat or danger to this country. It’s all these reactionaries that have lost their minds, who think that they represent the modicum of decorum, that they are refined, that they are sophisticated, that they have proper musicians, and they have the proper breeding. (impression) “Trump? He’s just from Queens! He’s a pig from Queens! What the hell’s happened to our country? He’s a pig; he’s a bigot.” These people, on the other hand, have been rendered One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Yep, and Hillary’s still Nurse Ratched presiding over the whole gang of them.
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RUSH: Christopher Steele is the British citizen that created that fake Trump dossier. He created it while he was being paid by an anti-Never Trumper and Hillary supporters. And Comey said that that’s what they used to start the investigation of Trump in collusion with the Russians.
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RUSH: About chairman Nunes, House Intelligence Committee, if the intelligence that nabbed Trump and his campaign team was not about Russia, what was it about? And how does it fit together? I mean, if it was just normal collection, how do four Americans end up being unmasked and the subject of leaks in the Drive-By Media in November and December?
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RUSH: You gotta hear this. The White House press briefing. The media is beside itself over Devin Nunes’s discovery of intelligence that shows that Trump was survived, Trump officials. Legal surveillance, but remember, Trump was insane, Trump is a lunatic, Trump’s making it up, Trump’s dangerous, and now they found some.
White House correspondent for Real Clear Politics’ Alexis Simendinger said to Sean Spicer, “Okay, related to Congressman Nunes, can you explain why the White House has agreed to meet with him about this? The reason I ask is, because the minute that Director Comey said that there was an official investigation it might appear the White House is interfering with it, and Congressman Nunes should present his information not to the White House, but to the FBI. So why is anybody here at the White House agreeing to meet with the Intelligence Committee chairman about his findings?”
SPICER: Let me get this straight. Number one, we asked, as you know, two weeks ago, we said this was the appropriate venue. Number two, you guys have asked us over again, why aren’t we meeting with certain individuals. The chairman of one of the two committees that we asked to look into this wants to share his findings or what he knows. I think that is exactly how we’ve talked about this working.
But I would leave it to Congressman Nunes to come up and to brief and share his thoughts. I don’t know what his plan is, obviously. He briefed the media before he briefed us. He went down and talked about what he had found. So, you know, it’s interesting; I didn’t see any complaints from the media when he shares what he’s found with you guys, but when he wants to come up here and tell us ‘this is where the investigation stands and here’s what I’ve learned,’ there seems to be a little bit of an interesting double standard on that.
RUSH: It is. I mean, the media is all concerned that Trump’s gonna tamper with it. That’s what they’re afraid of. “This Trump, he’s unstable, he’s unfit, he cheats, Trump cheats, Trump, Trump, Trump, was put in there by the Russians. Everybody knows that. We in the media know that. And now he’s gonna have intelligence that shows he was — He’s gonna cheat, he’s gonna cheat and tamper with it.” Trump’s gonna tamper with the Nunes evidence before it goes to whoever. These people.
Folks, Trump is not the guy we need to worry about being, you know, an order of fries short of a Happy Meal. That’s the media and the left. They’re the people with the elevator not going to the top floor. It is not Donald Trump.
These people are seething with rage in there over this news. Part of it I guess exposes them. I mean, there’s intel. They denied there was intel, denied there was an investigation, and now Nunes has found some of it, and some of it he found is what has been reported on by the media.
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RUSH: The media ought to be thrilled with this latest news from Devin Nunes, the House Intelligence Committee, because this documents the FBI stories on wiretaps was true! The media should feel vindicated. By the way, there’s a little added twist to this. I knew this was gonna happen. The ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, the Democrat leader in that committee is Adam Schiff, the pencil neck guy from California. (laughing) And he’s saying (paraphrasing), “What? I don’t know anything about this. Haven’t told me anything about it.”
Some congressman by the name of Jim Himes — not to be confused with Teresa Heinz Kerry. This is Jim Himes, with an M — spoke with pencil neck, and neither of them are familiar with the evidence that Nunes is citing. So the next guy that’s gonna be accused of making it up is gonna be Nunes. (laughing) Why don’t you go sit next to Judge Gorsuch so we can grill you at the same time, Nunes. See how this all plays out.