RUSH: Hillary Clinton’s lead over Bernie Sanders has nearly vanished. George Stephanopoulos — here it is — audio sound bite number 16. Sunday morning on This Week, this is Stephanopoulos talking about the presidential primary.
STEPHANOPOULOS: The Clinton campaign seems to be bracing for losses in Iowa and New Hampshire. They still hope they can pull out Iowa, but you hear a lot of talk about how this is a delicate fight; it’s gonna take a long time.
RUSH: Really? It’s gonna take a long time? She might lose Iowa and New Hampshire? None of this was supposed to happen. Again, this was supposed to be a coronation, folks. Believe me, there is panic. This is not… He makes this sound like this is just, as far as he’s concerned, run-of-the-mill, day-to-day Democrat politics. This is not. Bernie Sanders was supposed to have been long gone by now. I mean, even more so than Trump was supposed to have been long gone. Bernie Sanders was never supposed to even arrive.
Bernie Sanders was always gonna be nothing more than an asterisk. He was just out there as a placeholder. He was just there because the Clintons’ good graces allowed him to make a pretense of running. And in the process, the Democrat Party has become so extreme and so radical leftist that Bernie Sanders is now perceived by more Democrats as a genuine real, real Democrat than Hillary Clinton is. There’s a huge story out here about the number of self-identified Democrats is at an all-time low. It’s at TheHill.com.
“The percentages of everyday Americans describing themselves as “Democrat” or “Republican” are near historic lows for both political parties,” which I believe, by the way. “Roughly 29% of respondents in a Gallup survey released Monday identify as Democrats, marking the lowest point in 27 years.” That’s huge, folks. You know, everybody thinks the problems exist on the Republican side because that’s where the Drive-By Media focuses. They focus on the dysfunction that exists in the Republican Party, and they’re ignoring that and more going on in the Democrat Party. Twenty-nine percent.
Now, the people that used to call themselves Democrats and Republicans and no longer do are now calling themselves “independents.” It’s a companion story: “Twenty percent…” I’ve been telling you about this: 20% of Trump’s support base identifies Democrats. It’s close to being his largest group. It’s not quite, but his largest support group is almost blue-collar Democrats, the old Reagan Democrats. But Bernie Sanders is now to the… It’s not just the election polling. It’s the fundraising numbers. He is outraising Hillary in the last month or so.
He’s raising as much as Hillary, and she’s not a piker in the fundraising department. On top of this is the FBI probe that we’ve been hearing all about last week (remember Joe diGenova), and then a second person came forth and said the evidence is so huge, and it continues to mount, that if there is not an indictment of Hillary Clinton, that there will be a walkout in the Justice Department and the FBI. It’ll be like Watergate. People will just refuse to continue go to work, because the evidence of her criminality here in trafficking in classified documents is just overwhelming.
And in fact, the latest in that, folks, is an e-mail that was revealed recently in a typical Friday-afternoon document dump. There’s an e-mail in which Hillary is advising a ranking subordinate to purposefully remove the classified labels, remove the classified markings so that she can send an e-mail without going through the hassles of encrypting it and without having to not use her own server. So she’s telling someone to take classified document and take the classified markings off of it and send it, through unsecured lines. There’s no question if that really happened, what that is. That’s knowingly…
Up to now she was saying, “Well, I didn’t see any markings. I didn’t know any markings,” and everybody’s response to that is, “You assume it’s all classified, Mrs. Clinton. Come on! Nobody’s being fooled by your feigned ignorance here.” But this dispels the feigned ignorance. This blows that sky-high. She had knowingly classified documents. She told a subordinate, a ranking subordinate to remove the markings so that she could send it, and that’s been discovered. Now, there’s another element to this that’s been added on to it.
“FBI’s Clinton Probe Expands to the Public Corruption Track.” Now, this is long overdue, and I think it’s actually been going on longer than the story indicates. But it’s Catherine Herridge at Fox News. “The FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private email as secretary of state has expanded to look at whether the possible ‘intersection’ of Clinton Foundation work and State Department business may have violated public corruption laws, three intelligence sources not authorized to speak on the record…” What this is about, is the Clintons are out there raising money. Everybody knows they’re doing this.
They’re raising money via the Clinton Crime Family Foundation. It’s ostensibly for “charitable” purposes. But what’s really happening is they’re soliciting donations from powerful people in powerful positions in foreign governments — and not chump-change amounts. We’re talking about multiple hundreds of thousands, multiple millions of dollars. There can be no question what this is for. These people in foreign countries that do have business with the United States are not giving hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars to the Clintons because they want an invitation to Clinton Global Initiative.
They’re not doing it because they want an invitation to whatever party Bill throws with his next stable of babes. They’re not doing it because they like the Clintons. They’re doing this because they are buying influence in advance. They are buying favorable influence from what they hope and presume will be President Hillary Clinton. And the FBI’s looking into this. Now, the story makes it look like they just started a probe into that. The fact of the matter is, it’s been going on for quite a while.
“The development follows press reports over the past year about the potential overlap of State Department and Clinton Foundation work, and [preguntas] over whether donors benefited from their contacts inside the administration.” Some of them think that the influence purchasing was taking place while she was secretary of state, which is probably true. There’s no question. But there was also selling it on the come, meaning: “Donate now; when I’m president it’ll pay off for you.” And they’ve been looking into this for a while. The evidence here has to be overwhelming. And James Comey runs the FBI. Don’t forget he was Ashcroft’s deputy, John Ashcroft.
You’ve forgotten that, haven’t you? James Comey… That’s assistant attorney general or whatever the title would be. But he was a deputy, high-ranking deputy to John Ashcroft, who was attorney general for W., and he’s now running the FBI. He is a no-nonsense guy. He’s not particularly partisan one way or the other, at least in the way he’s done business. He’s just strict a law-and-order guy. And I’ve always found it strange Obama kept him. But that’s neither here nor there. So this stuff is just continuing to mount here, and Stephanopoulos talking about this Democrat primary now devolving to a delegate count? That’s huge!
This was supposed to be a coronation, and Stephanopoulos is admitting now that this is gonna take a long time. We may… Folks, before this is all said and done, we may have to reactivate Operation Chaos, this time for Bernie, depending on how the Democrat hierarchy seeks to treat him. Eh, I got a question about this last week. “Do you think you can possibly reinstitute Operation Chaos?” and was it asked as though I might implement it on the Republicans. I said, “Nah. I can’t see that.” But I can see, depending on how things pan out here, doing it for Bern. Bernie Sanders not supposed to win these two states and he’s not supposed to outraising Hillary.
None of this is supposed to happen. And the effort in the Drive-Bys to make it look like casual, ordinary, everyday business in the Democrat Party? Believe me, it’s not that. And the same thing with this bimbo eruption business. You know, Hillary and her team’s trying to say, “Eh, it’s no big deal what Trump’s doing, focusing on Bill’s past,” and they’re really not focusing on Bill so much. The smart play here is that they’re going after Hillary’s role in impugning the women that came forward, because Bill’s not a candidate, but Hillary is.