RUSH: I want you to hear a couple of sound bites. You know, yesterday we had the news, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend announced that she had been at the home of George H. W. Bush 41, and she claimed that he told her that he was voting for Hillary.
Now, he has stated that he’s not gonna announce who he’s gonna vote for, and so people have assumed that means he’s not voting for the Republican nominee. But not necessarily. It could well be he’s gonna vote for the Republican nominee but doesn’t want anybody to know.
Now, the thing is here that nobody heard him say this to her. It’s at his home. They’re in Maine. It’s a Thousand Points of Light charity cocktail party, reception or something. And it’s classic that a Kennedy would take a private conversation and run out to Facebook with it and blast it all over the place. But that’s what happened. Now, the Bush family is not gonna deny or confirm anything because they’ve said from get-go that this is something they’re not gonna announce, just not gonna react to it.
So Kellyanne Conway was on Erin Burnett OutFront last night on CNN. I think this is how you deal with it. I think she gave a great way, Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign spokesman and campaign manager. So the question was, “Former President George H. W. Bush says he will vote for Hillary Clinton. Now, that’s not voting for Donald Trump. That’s voting for Hillary Clinton. What is your response to that, Kellyanne?”
CONWAY: Well, I respect the 92-year-old former president very much and his decision, and I think that Americans are very grateful to the Bush family for their public service. That’s his right. Look, this was a bruising primary, and Jeb Bush really failed all expectations that he would be the, quote, electable, the predominant person on the stage. I mean, he lasted through South Carolina, got out of the race before March 1st, so I know there are a lot of hurt feelings there.
Erin Burnett followed up and she said, “The Washington Post is reporting that Mr. Trump may have violated the laws against self-dealing through his foundation. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read it, but they lay out several donations that he made to charities in order to settle lawsuits. One of them involved Mar-a-Lago. It was a $100,000 donation to a veterans charity and to settle fines that Mar-a-Lago owed Palm Beach over some sort of dispute about a flagpole.”
It wasn’t a dispute about a flagpole. This was actually comical. I happen to know about this. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago is right on the ocean, South Ocean Boulevard, it’s right there at the turn by the bath and tennis club. Yes. Right there on the ocean, build by Marjorie Merriweather Post when she was married to E. F. Hutton and her daughter, Dina Merrill, grew up in the place. And it’s monstrous. Trump bought it for 10 million when he was married to Ivana back in the whenever days. Ten million and refurbished it and renovated it and got permission to turn it into a private club with a portion of it reserved for his personal accommodations, residential area of it.
So he put up this giant American flag. He put up a flag that’s bigger than the flags at automobile dealerships. And the town of Palm Beach got the vapors. Well, there was a concern that the turtles, if they were attracted by lights, would see the American flag and be offended or realize they were supposed to be in Argentina and here they are in south Florida and panic. I mean, the town can come up, believe me, with any justification for whatever it is that they want to limit citizens’ freedom being.
So all hell broke loose over the size of Trump’s flag. And it was big. (laughing) I mean, if the wind was blowing and the thing was fully extended and flapping around up there, it was huge. But some in the hierarchy of the town leadership thought it was so big that it was an eyesore. And they associated it, since it was Trump doing it, they concluded that it was really a gauche way to market and advertise the club. They weren’t opposed to the American flag flying, don’t misunderstand, this was just huge. So there were countless lawsuits back and forth. It was big news down here for quite a while.
Now, I don’t remember how it was settled, but the flag’s still flying. It’s still waving and flapping in the breeze up there. So there must have been some controversy with it, because that’s the nature of Erin Burnett’s question. “One of these donations that he made to charities to settle lawsuits, one of them involved Mar-a-Lago, hundred thousand dollars to a veterans charity to settle fines that Mar-a-Lago owed Palm Beach over the size of the flag.” She said flagpole. It wasn’t about a flagpole. It wasn’t about the height.
“Now, of course,” she said, “it’s illegal to use a charity’s money to benefit yourself or your business.” Can you believe she’s asking this question with the Clintons? This is incredible. She’s asking this of Trump’s spokesman, campaign manager knowing full well — do you know how much — what did I read the other day? The Clinton Foundation — oh. I’m gonna get this wrong. Something like $7 million was spent on travel alone, or maybe it was 70% was spent on travel. I’ll get it straightened out here before too long. But whatever the number is, it’s astounding. It’s how much money was not going to charity.
There’s even a story here today that the Democrats — I got it right here. “The Clinton Foundation has been a negative,” according to a Democrat leader. The Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative are meeting in New York this week, coincides with the UN bringing all these ne’er-do-wells from all over the world into town because a lot of them are women. So the Clinton Global Initiative is timed to happen at the same time.
It was $7.8 million in travel in 2014, $5.2 million on charitable grants. That’s what it was. The Clinton Foundation, $7.8 million on travel for whatever works at the foundation, and the same year they donated $5.2 million to charity. So, anyway. You thought I’d lost my place. You were probably were very frustrated, why didn’t I get to the sound bite. So here we are. So she says to Kellyanne Conway, “Are you concerned at all that Mr. Trump may have broken the law with the way he was using his own charity to pay for things?”
CONWAY: This is a classic Donald Trump. He wanted to raise the American flag as high as he possibly could over Mar-a-Lago. I think a lot of Americans at this point would applaud that. And, of course, the county said he couldn’t do it, it had to be smaller, so they started assessing a $1,250-a-day fine. So the way that they, quote, settled it was for Mr. Trump to donate $100,000 to a veterans group. I don’t want that to be lost here. I want to point out to you that the Trump Foundation has no permanent staff, no paid staff, no overhead, no one from the Trump family takes a penny as a salary or as benefits. Contrast that to, as we know, the slush fund otherwise known as the Clinton Foundation.
RUSH: Slush fund! Exactly. That’s exactly what I called it. Slush fund. Nobody at the Trump family takes a dime out of it, so there you have it. So Kellyanne Conway in two different sound bites dealt with all of this exactly as it should be dealt with.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Yeah. There was… On the Trump flag and the flagpole, there was a controversy over how high the flagpole was because of the size of the flag. The flag was huge! I should say, “Yuge!” The flag was. So there was a height component to this.