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Establishment Attempts to Smear Trump with Fake News

by Rush Limbaugh - Jan 11,2017

RUSH: The media is out of control. The entire Washington establishment doesn’t know what to do, folks. They are clueless. They are witless now, and they are totally discombobulated. The normal techniques that they use to destroy their enemies just bounce off of Trump. It’s really nothing different.

They have not known how to deal with Trump since he entered this race. They try to plug Trump into their formula, their system, the establishment, the business of politics, the way they do things — which is a world they run, by the way. And in their own minds, the media run the establishment. They can take people out, they can build people up, and they have become accustomed to being able to do one or both whenever they want. They are totally ineffective with Trump, and they don’t know how to deal with it.

And this is a very crucial point. What is behind all of this… By the way, this story that BuzzFeed ran with last night? I don’t know how many of you heard all during the summer that… I heard from a number of you in emails, “Rush, I’m really worried. There’s some story on Trump out there that they’re just waiting to unload and it’s just gonna destroy him. I don’t know what the details are, but everybody’s got it.” Well, this is what it was.

For months, the Drive-By Media tried as hard as they’ve ever tried anything to verify what was in this 35-page intelligence report, and none of it could be verified. Month after month after month after month. They were desperate to release this during the campaign, during the debates. They were desperate to release this before the election. But nobody could verify it. So in their frustration at their inability to take Trump out and their inability to damage Trump — their inability to destroy people’s love and support for Trump — they have proceeded down the path of self-destruction.

They’re really destroying themselves now, and the intelligence community’s involved in this. But this is also a media operation as well. So they just decided… BuzzFeed last night releases this big story that everybody’s had all summer long, this 35-page detailed report on all kinds of perversion — behavioral perversion — that Trump and his associates engaged in on trips to Moscow and so forth. And one of the allegations — are you ready? — is that Trump bought a bunch of prostitutes and brought them into the presidential suite at a hotel in Moscow where Barack and Michelle Obama had stayed and then Trump had the prostitutes urinate on the bed in front of him.

That’s one of the fundamental ingredients of this story, and they’ve been trying to verify this, and the name Michael Cohen, one of Trump’s lawyers, is said to have been in the group witnessing and watching the urination by prostitutes on the bed. It was a way — it was a childish way — of supposedly getting even with Obama. It’s just absolutely ridiculous. It turns out that the Michael Cohen that this report claims was not Trump’s Michael Cohen. The whole thing is made up! The whole thing is just an absolute disaster.

So BuzzFeed last night decides, after CNN… There’s a coordinated effort. CNN reports on the existence of the report but they don’t detail it. Jake Tapper, who wants to be known as one of the most highly respected journalists in the world, decides to start vomiting this stuff. But he doesn’t get into details. That’s a signal for BuzzFeed to go ahead and release and publish all 35 pages. And BuzzFeed does so while telling everybody that none of it has been verified. (summarized) “We can’t confirm anything that’s in this report.

“Not a single shred of this can be verified as true. But we think you should see it so that you can make up your own minds,” and then this began a whole media — I don’t know what you call it — meltdown last night. And it was fascinating to watch, folks, ’cause you could go to one blogger after another and you could read the bloggers who really hoped it would be true. And if I wanted to, I could name the names for you. I spent a lot of time last night tracking this story, and I found the bloggers who wanted it to be true by hoping it was true.

They were holding out hope that there may be some backup for this, and others said, “It’s a disgrace. It’s a shame that any of this ever saw the light of day because none of it’s been verified.” It was a very eye-hoping moment. But what’s really happening here is that the Drive-By Media and everybody in the establishment (which includes the intelligence agencies) are used to being able to take out people, to destroy people, to ruin people with innuendo and allegation. That’s all they’ve ever needed. I give you Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. I give you Robert Bork. I could give you example after example where, if they’ve wanted to target somebody and damage them or ruin them, all they’ve gotta do is broadcast innuendo and allegation. They don’t have to have evidence for it. It’s never been needed.

But they’re outclassed by Donald Trump.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  What we have here, folks, is a variation on, “Yeah, we have no evidence, but the seriousness of the charge demands an investigation.”  We first heard that or I first became familiar with it during the Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill hearings. Actually, no!  I first heard about it when they alleged that George H. W. Bush flew on an SR-71 in the summer of 1980 to meet with the Iranians in Paris to arrange for the hostages to remain captive until after the election to facilitate the election of Reagan.

Gary Sick, a University of Columbia professor, wrote an entire book on this.  It was a total lie.  It was total fake.  It was total made up.  And Tom Foley, the Speaker of the House — Democrat — at time, said, “Well, the seriousness of this charge, even though there’s no evidence, mandates that we conduct an investigation.”  And it’s the same thing here.  This is a variation of that.  Here’s what is going on — and this is, I think, key to understanding this.  Members of the establishment — and they run the gamut from members of the intelligence committee to elected officials to key positions in various bureaucracies, in the media.

The establishment’s made up of a lot of people, and there’s a pecking order, and there is a rulebook, and there is a style sheet, and there is a modus operandi for everybody in it.  And systems have evolved and been built up over years and years and years and years and years as to how this establishment operates and how you avoid the pitfalls in it and so forth.  And it has evolved and been tailored to be effective specifically against fellow members of the establishment.  And it’s proved pretty effective.

The media, working with whoever they can find or whatever source they wish to associate with are used to being able to take people down or taking people out with simple innuendo, with simple allegation.  The Gary Sick example is a glaring example of the effort.  It didn’t work.  It was designed to reelect Jimmy Carter.  It didn’t work. But it created a cloud over George H. W. Bush that remained forever. Because the media, once it’s out there, it becomes part of the lifetime narrative of the individual, in this case George H. W. Bush.

So it was always remained an unanswered question: “Did Bush…?” ‘Cause there wasn’t any evidence, you see, and since there wasn’t any evidence, they couldn’t refute it.  Wait ’til you hear what the Daily Beast has done with this story today.  Hang on for that.  The Daily Beast, another left-wing website.  In this case, though, they’re dealing with somebody — and they still haven’t figured this out, and this is staring them right in the face.  Trump is not of their world.  Trump is not of their establishment.

Trump is not one of them and has not lived his life as one of them, has not tailored the way he’s lived his life — the private aspects, the personal and public aspects, he’s not tailored any of that — for the success or failure routes within the establishment.  But the establishment people, the media, they have their ways.  And they’ve been as effective as anything against fellow members of the establishment, usually Republicans.  They still haven’t figured out who and what they’re up against.  They continue to try to plug Trump into their systems.

And what they are missing is that Trump is of a totally different world.  He doesn’t enter their world with any fear. He didn’t enter their world with very much respect for them. He doesn’t enter their world with any desire to impress them. He doesn’t become president with any desire to be accepted among the establishment.  He’s running for president and won for totally different reasons.  And his reasons are specific and rooted to saving and improving the country and not climbing the ladder of success within the establishment and not being accepted as one of those people.

And since he’s choosing not to play by those rules, those rules do not affect him. As long as he remains honest and forthright with the people who elected him — as long as he maintains connection with his base — there’s not a thing these people are gonna be able to do to him.  And every attempt they make is only going to strengthen the ties Trump’s supporters have for and with him.  Like this episode.  It’s not gonna lose him any support; it’s gonna gain him support.  And I’ll tell you what else it’s gonna do.

It’s gonna inoculate him from the next charge they try to come up with, ’cause you can’t get much more outrageous than this.  If you’re gonna hit the king, you better take the king out.  In this case, if you’re gonna hit Trump, you better get rid of him, because if you don’t — and they failed here — then the next time they come at him it’s just gonna bounce off like a peashooter up against a battleship.  They haven’t the slightest idea how to deal with Donald Trump, and you know why?  Because they haven’t any experience dealing with real people.

And by “real,” I mean people that are not of a phony, narcissistic, cliquish type of existence, where success is defined by something that has very little to do with how good you are at something and how much you accomplish.  Trump comes from an entirely different world.  He comes from a merit-based world.  He doesn’t come from a PR or buzz world.  Well, there’s some of that with him, but he’s entirely merit based.  His success stories are genuine success stories.  They’re not lies and spin and PR where people are convinced he’s big and successful.

He actually is, and has to prove it. It has to be demonstrable.  And they don’t know how to deal with this.  They don’t know how to deal with somebody not part of the political establishment world.  Stop and think about the examples that I gave you, how they’ve succeeded with lines and innuendos.  Look at what they tried to do with Romney. Here comes Harry Reid saying, “Hey, a friend of mine says Romney hasn’t paid his taxes in ten years!” To this day, people still think Romney might not have paid his taxes.

Romney lost the election, and Harry Reid says, “Hey, he lost, didn’t he?  I don’t care if it was true or not. It worked, and I have no regrets about it whatsoever.” “Romney was a bully at prep school and Romney doesn’t like animals. He puts them on the roof of the station wagon for the family vacation!” All of this stuff is the same kind of stuff they’re trying with Trump, this is bouncing off because that’s not why he’s there.  He’s not there because he’s mastered the ladder of success within the political establishment.

He is there because he’s precisely not that, and the people in the establishment haven’t the slightest idea how to behave in any other way.  They are arrogant and condescending, and the establishment is all there is, and anything outside of that they look upon with contempt and derision, including Trump, including you, including me.  And their arrogance prevents them from actually learning anything about the people like Trump, in this case, covering him and who he really is. They are totally obsessed with one thing, and that’s destroying Trump.  They’re totally obsessed with taking Trump out.

They’re obsessed with damaging Trump’s reputation, his administration. That’s all they care about.  That’s all that matters.  That’s how they prove their self-worth.  It is how their success is decided and defined, as to who they can destroy and what they can build up.  But in the past, they haven’t needed evidence to accomplish their smears.  They were able to smear Clarence Thomas with no evidence whatsoever of sexual harassment against Anita Hill.  Look at what they did to Robert Bork.  There was not one shred of evidence that Robert Bork was anything other than a fine, upstanding man and a great judge and a great jurist, and they destroyed him with allegation and innuendo.

And this is their world and their experience.  They’re able to do that.  They don’t need to have evidence, they don’t need to have the truth.  That is irrelevant.  All they need is the seriousness of the charge.  And then their brethren elsewhere in the establishment coincide, get in gear, and help conduct the smear by going out and asking, “Well, where is the evidence that you weren’t in Moscow?”  And they just never give up.

But Trump’s a different animal.  They don’t know how to deal with it, and he’s making ’em look like children.  In this press conference today there was a man in the front row from CNN, a reporter in the front row, and he kept shouting at Trump like a little child. He demanded that Trump take his question. He started shouting at Trump while Trump was answering other questions, and Trump refused to take the question and looked at the him and said, “No, you’re fake news.”  And that’s when I started laughing and applauding here when we were covering this live.

So CNN’s been called out as fake news ’cause that’s what CNN is!  CNN is fake news!  BuzzFeed is fake news!  The thing that is different about this is the intelligence communities.  That’s what we haven’t seen before.  We’ve seen the media behave as they have, but we have not seen the intelligence communities behave — and I tell you I warned Trump when he first started commenting on the intel community and attacking them, I warned him right here on this program, “These are people that can cause you a lot of trouble because they deal in innuendo.”

They are the only ones who know what they know and they can tell anybody anything, and they can leak anything they want.  They’re kind of like law enforcement; nobody ever doubts ’em, even though there’s clear reason to doubt them, weapons of mass destruction, you name it.

The Daily Beast thing.  Let me find this.  ‘Cause, folks, this is classic.  You know, I’ve got two different stacks of this stuff here.  I can’t find this real quick — yeah, let me take a break.  I’ll come back and find it.  I’ll tell you what this ultimately is.  The Daily Beast runs a story claiming that elements have denied that there’s anything to this.  And the Daily Beast story says (paraphrasing), “Well, the denial doesn’t have much evidence.  The denial is rather thin.  We’re not sure we should believe the denial.”  It’s from the people who are responsible from the story.  It’s Orwellian, is what it is.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’m trying to take this complexity and make it as simple as I can so people can get their arms around it.  There are two websites involved in this, aside from the intelligence community.  One is called 4chan, the numeral 4, c-h-a-n, the other is Reddit.  They are completely separate entities, completely different websites.  They have common users, but they are two different websites.

There is a politically incorrect forum on the 4chan website where this kind of stuff starts.  These are pranksters and storytellers and they try to one-up each other with fake news and funny stories and satire and parody.  And it is said that this report originated at 4chan.  Somebody wrote it up and summarized it and sent it to Rick Wilson, who is a noted anti-Trumper. I forget who he worked for during the campaign. Wilson then wrote up his own summary of it and gave it to the CIA.

The CIA accepted it and began looking into it and another summary of it was written, and at some point both Obama and Trump were briefed on it.

Now, because of this, because there was an intelligence briefing where both Obama and Trump were told of this story, news media outlets said, “Well, it’s news then. If Trump’s been briefed on it, for crying out loud, we’re gonna run it.” BuzzFeed and CNN figured, “Hell, we’ll run with it.”  It turns out no less than NBC is reporting that Trump was not briefed on this salacious series of details, that he was shown this memo, which alleged links between his campaign and Russia, among the urinating on the bed story. There were other examples of Trump pervert type behavior that would make him subject to blackmail by Putin.

They show this to Trump.  They show this to Obama.  The news media reads that the CIA briefed Trump and Obama, they figure it’s serious news then.  But it turns out that Trump was not briefed on it as something that actually happened.  It turns out that the CIA gave this to Trump as an example of the kind of disinformation that is out there.  They gave it to him as somewhat of an educational thing, as an example of disinformation.  They did have a briefing with him and they showed him this, but they told him it’s an example of disinformation.

They did not tell him that it was real.  If he had been told it was real and if Obama had been told it was real, believe me, we would have heard about this long before last night.  If anything in this had ever been real.  And you must understand that journalists from around the world have been chasing down the elements of this intel report for almost a year.  And they haven’t been able to confirm one thing in it.  And that’s why it was never used.

Now, the Daily Beast example.  Headline:  “4chan Claims It Invented the Trump Golden Showers Story.” The golden shower story is the prostitutes being hired to urinate on the bed in a hotel that Barack and Michelle Obama had slept in the previous visit.  “As news broke of an unverified document detailing supposed Russian dirt on President-elect Donald Trump — including sordid allegations involving urine and prostitutes in Russia — users on the subreddit The_Donald and 4chan’s forum took a victory lap. Not because they found the story funny, but because they claim they planted it as a fake.”

So people at both Reddit and 4chan are doing happy dances out there ’cause they totally made this up and made the CIA accept it as real and start conducting investigations.  Now, the way to translate this is the anti-Trumpsters at The Daily Beast want to believe that these unsourced and unverified stories are actually true.  But the 4chan people and Reddit people say that they’re not true, we made this all up, we can’t believe how gullible you people are.

I can.  I can believe it’s all made up, and I can believe they fell for it.  This is the establishment, this is how they operate.  They hate Trump. They despise Trump. You can’t overestimate how much he is hated by official Washington.  Folks, you cannot, and they will not stop trying to destroy him.  They will not stop in their efforts to make sure he does not succeed in anything.

So the Daily Beast reports here that the 4chan website bragged that they planted this story, they don’t like it, and they added “the evidence supporting the denial is very thin.”  So mind you here, the evidence of the underlying story is nonexistent.  There is no evidence to support one shred of this.

So in the insane world of the left, the evidence disproving an unproven allegation is subjected to a higher standard of proof than the bogus allegation itself.  This is mind-numbingly insane that we find ourselves in the middle of here.  Thank God you people have me to explain this and sort it out for you.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  We’re gonna find out this dossier was generated as part of opposition research by anti-Trump Republicans, a guy named Rick Wilson, keep that name in mind.  I’ll tell you what this is, folks.  This is the next version of Bill Burkett and phony documents to Dan Rather at the Texas National Guard to get George W. Bush.  It’s exactly what this is.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Folks, I still have quite a lot to see here.  This is big, what they tried to do here today. They tried to take Donald Trump out last night. A combination of the intelligence agencies and the media tried to take Donald Trump out, and he just flattened them.  They are all now in meltdown.  CNN’s in meltdown.  I’ll tell you, there’s another name involved in this that I failed to mention, and I want to do that now.  A central figure in this is Senator John McCain.  Senator John McCain was deeply involved in passing these documents off to the FBI along with a Republican campaign operative by the name of Rick Wilson.

McCain passed them off to the FBI. Wilson passed them off to the CIA.  McCain actually called Comey on this and said, “Hey, there’s something you want to know, something Trump did! It’s horrible. It’s despicable. They’re stand…”  It’s just pathetic.  Now McCain is issuing statements trying to distance himself, saying he had no idea if any of this is true or not.  Well, that’s what CNN is saying.  “Well, we didn’t know if it was true.”  For crying out loud, you people in media, this start tick me off.  They have known for months there was nothing to this story.

You wanted to run this story all last summer, all during the fall.  They wanted to run this story. They desperately looked for evidence to find that this story was true, and there isn’t any, because if there had been they would have found it; we’d have heard about it before last night.  So what happened, CNN decides to run the story anyway as a, “You wouldn’t believe what’s out there” kind of story. “You wouldn’t believe what’s out there, folks. We’ve been trying to run this down.  But we’re not gonna tell you what’s in it ’cause we can’t verify any of it.”

That signaled BuzzFeed.  BuzzFeed was next in the news chain. After CNN, led by Jake Tapper, alludes to the story yesterday afternoon, BuzzFeed then says (summarized), “Oh, we’ll publish the whole memo! We’ll publish all 35 pages,” and they did, and they issued caveat after caveat. They said there’s nothing to it. There’s no verification. We can’t find any evidence whatsoever, but, man, is it serious! You make up your own mind. So they published the whole thing, and then that begot reactions to it and the reactions were multifaceted.

You could tell blog by blog who hoped it to be true, who wanted it to be true, who held out possibilities it was true.  Others, like John Podhoretz, slammed it for what it is:  The most pathetic descent into unprofessionalism in his experience for the Drive-By Media.  And that’s exactly what this is.  They are so desperate, they are so ineffective with Trump, they are so at their wits’ end.  Every bit of technique and ammunition that they have been able to use any time they want to destroy anybody (usually Republicans), doesn’t work on Donald Trump and so they don’t know what to do.

So they keep ratcheting it up. They keep trying what they think are even more powerful examples of the same type of thing.  Now, I mentioned before the break at the top of the hour that there is something out there that happened that’s very, very close to this, and that is, remember this guy Bill Burkett that Dan Rather and Mary Mapes at CBS found? This guy was lurking around Texas, hanging around in obscure, dark corners. He claimed to have official documents from a commander at the Texas Air National Guard that George W. Bush got the guard position because he was a coward.

And his daddy got him the point to the National Guard and Bush never showed up. And so Dan Rather gets these documents from Bill Burkett and they run a story on it, and it turns out it’s totally false. It’s made up. It isn’t true.  Dan Rather gets fired.  Mary Mapes gets fired.  The media has an awards dinner for Dan Rather, because the media realized that if they allow this to stick, it would damage all of them.  I’ll never forget this.  They actually created some new award, they had a dinner, and they awarded some lifetime journalism thing for Dan Rather after this episode.

Mary Mapes got blown out. Burkett’s nowhere to be found.  Here’s the difference:  All during that episode, George W. Bush said not a word.  Karl Rove said not a word.  Nobody in the Republican Party said a word.  Donald Trump comes out first having some people react to it last night; then Trump does a press conference today (previously scheduled) and nukes it, destroys it. Story over. Drive-By Media embarrassed. Media now melting down, running away from the story claiming, “Hey, hey! It was legit! We didn’t say anything specific. We just told people that it was the seriousness of the charges. Some very, very bad stuff potentially out there.

“We didn’t do anything! We didn’t do anything. You can’t prove anything. We didn’t do it. We didn’t do it.”  They’re melting down, they’re running away from it, all because Trump had the evidence to blow this through the moon, through sky-high, and it’s a beautiful thing to watch.  But it’s going to continue.  As I say, what is new here is the involvement of the intelligence communities.  That’s something that we haven’t seen. The media do this and their sources have been many and varied, but we actually appear to have active participation by politicized elements of the intelligence community joining with the media trying to destroy Donald Trump and his presidency.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here is Andy in Boca Raton.  Many people mispronounce this, think it’s Boca Raton.  It isn’t.  It’s Boca Raton.  Anyway, great to have you, Andy.  How you doing?

CALLER:  Thanks for taking my call, Rush.  Many mega dittos to you.  Thanks for recapping last night’s speech.  I wasn’t gonna waste 51 minutes of my time.

RUSH: (chuckling) Yes.

CALLER: You summed it up in about two-and-a-half minutes.  So thank you very much.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER:  I want to wish you a happy birthday.  I know it’s coming up in a couple of days. My present to you, sir, is coming on the 20th when they remove the “elect” from President-Elect Donald Trump.

RUSH: (chuckling) I’m glad you —

CALLER: I just wanted to ask you a couple quick questions. One: If it ever did come out that the Russians never hacked the election, will the Drive-By Media ever stop pursuing that?

RUSH:  No, they won’t.

CALLER:  They won’t?

RUSH:  No.

CALLER:  Number two: Can Donald Trump say anything to prevent them from ever asking that question again?

RUSH:  I think at some point it’s gonna be replaced by something else, but the premise behind it will never go away.  The attempt to discredit or destroy Trump’s victory and then presidency is something that they are going to be a long time letting go of.  Not only is it a stratagem and not only is it a technique, they really believe it, Andy.  This is the thing about leftists.  They really believe — some of them — that climate change is destroying the planet.  They really believe that the Russians hacked the election.  Now, let me break this down a bit.

I do believe that at the upper echelon of liberalism where they strategize this stuff, I think these people know that it’s all BS.  But their rank-and-file eats it up as verbatim. The people on the protest March — the average, ordinary leftist Democrat showing up to vote, 90% of the media — they believe it. They literally believe that Trump benefited from Putin hacking the election and they believe that happened because they think so Putin would rather see Trump because now they think Putin has stuff on Trump they can blackmail him with.

Because they can’t intellectually understand the country rejecting Hillary Clinton.  They are that out of touch.  They cannot… They can’t come… They think these last eight years have been the road to nirvana, and they can’t understand the American people rejecting this. So it has to be some trickery, and they’re not gonna let go of it until they have something else to replace it.  Four years from now, eight years from now.

They are going to continue to say and try to persuade as many people in the public as possible that Trump’s illegitimate.  That’s all they’ve got.  All they’ve got is whatever technique they can come up with to delegitimize the Trump win.  Same thing with George W. Bush after the Florida recount in 2000.  They just… They don’t accept reality.  Remember, to understand ’em, to them there is no reality.  Reality is just what we build and construct to exclude them.  I’m glad you called.  I appreciate those questions.  I really do.


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