RUSH: While we’re on the audio sound bites, I’ve got a couple here and I can’t follow this. The second sound bite here doesn’t make sense to me. It was last night, Shannon Bream’s show on the Fox News Channel. She’s got the former deputy assistant attorney general Harry Litman on talking about impeachment.
Now, I don’t know who this guy is. I mean, I’ve heard the name Harry Litman, but I can’t place it. Anyway, she plays a sound bite of me for this guy to react to. So she introduces and plays a clip of me talking about Trump and the deep state, and here’s the first of two sound bites.
BREAM: Let me play something from probably one of Harry’s most favorite radio shows, Rush Limbaugh. As he laughs. He’s shaking his head “no.” Okay, but this is what Rush has to say about how this whole thing is playing out and what the end result has been.
RUSH ARCHIVE: Recent CNN poll shows the enthusiasm for the incumbent Donald Trump is almost unprecedented. And, in his own party, his approval numbers are well now past 90%. Everything they have tried has blown up in their faces, and, in the midst of all of it, guess what’s happened? The existence of this so-called deep state has now been shown to be true. The existence of this little cabal of elitists that think they run things is no longer now just somebody’s suspicion.
RUSH: Oh, yeah, I remember that. It was a good point yesterday. It’s one of the things Trump has done. Everybody’s always speculated that there’s some power behind the throne, some secret group that actually runs things in Washington, and they’re there despite who the president is. And these generally have always been things touted by conspiracy theorists, people that have been labeled kooks in the past.
Donald Trump’s exposed it. Whatever you want to call it, the deep state, the elites, the Washington establishment, there’s no question that it exists. And there’s no question that they are ticked off. And there’s no question that maybe the center of it is the national security apparatus, the National Security Council, because within that group is every other group we’re talking about. Director of national intelligence, CIA, military has people in there, State Department, diplomacy. It’s all in the National Security Council or apparatus.
The whistleblower was on the National Security Council. McMaster, who we now know had ties to the whistleblower, he was the national security adviser for Trump. And that seems to be the nexus. One of the things that we have learned that has upset these people — and, folks, I’m not making this up. It is simple as this. Oh. By the way. Something else that we have learned. It may well be Eric “Charcoal” Ciaramella who released the transcript of two phone calls Trump made, president of Mexico, and was it Australia?
Remember early on in the Trump administration he makes these two phone calls, and the transcript of these calls leaks. And it is now thought that the whistleblower, the spy, is the leaker of those two calls. And nothing would surprise me. But what upsets these people is that Trump makes phone calls — like the president of Ukraine — he makes phone calls without the National Security Council bigwigs listening in. And they feel left out. This is not the way it works in Washington. Presidents do not exclude the national security apparatus. Presidents let those people listen in because they’re the ones that really do foreign policy. All presidents understand this.
Well, Trump began to exclude these people shortly after he was inaugurated because everything he was doing was leaking. You know, another rip on Trump, the transcript of the call he made to the Ukrainian president was put on a super-secret server. And the media and the deep state people are trying to say, “See, see Trump’s trying to hide it, Trump’s trying to get away with stuff. He’s trying to break the law, and that’s why he’s putting that stuff away.”
And it was not the reason at all. The transcript of these calls that Trump was making were being kept away from people in his own administration who were leaking. It makes perfect sense, especially after those first two phone calls leaked. And the reason that I know this, we have a story here. And this story is a guy, he’s a financier, he’s a Wall Street guy, his name is Jay Latimer, international businessman, writer, investor.
He has worked in investment banking for several multinational banks — New York, Hong Kong, and Beijing. And he describes a briefly encounter he had with a member of this cabal. He says, “I recently spoke with an old acquaintance, just out of government, who had worked in the Intelligence Community in Washington. The venue was a neighborhood party in a deep-blue area of the U.S., in one of the highest of high-income ZIP codes.”
So elite, wealthy liberal Democrats were the people at this party. “As the lone conservative,” writes Mr. Latimer, “I tend to tread carefully in these discussions. However, I thought she might have a conservative bent,” this woman he was talking to, “as she seemed to share my mistrust of government. When she first started working for the I.C., she told me she was waiting to meet ‘the adult in the room,’ as everyone she interacted with seemed clueless,” the intelligence community.
“After a few years, she eventually realized ‘there was no adult in the room!’ So I was interested in her take on the Trump impeachment process, then just getting under way. When I brought it up, she immediately got excited. ‘It’s worse than you think; it’s worse than anyone knows!’ I wondered what might be worse than what I’ve read. I also wondered which side she felt was acting worse — Trump or the swamp?
“I soon learned she was upset with Trump for supposedly talking to Ukraine about Joe Biden. I asked, quite innocently, wouldn’t you expect him to look into it? After all, Trump is the head of the law enforcement community, and Biden’s son was getting over $50,000 a month from a Ukrainian energy company for a position that he was clearly unqualified to hold. Wasn’t that suspicious? She airily waived off my concerns. ‘Oh, everyone in Washington does that kind of thing.’”
And, by the way, she’s right. Have you seen Hunter Biden’s interviews about this? He doesn’t think he did anything wrong at all. This is the way Washington works. The children of high Washington officials are set up in the way Joe Biden set up Hunter Biden. The way the Clintons have set up Chelsea. It’s just the way of the world, like all parents try to set their kids up or do as much for them as they can.
In Washington the problem is that they don’t use their own money to do it. They use defense contractor money, they use foreign donations, they do all kinds of things, like in Ukraine, Burisma, ChiCom, it was other countries’ money that Biden used to set his kid up. But this woman that Latimer’s talking to, “That doesn’t bother me. Everybody does that in Washington.”
No. What really made her mad “was that Trump had changed the procedures, placing his calls to other heads of state under high classification status, so they could not be seen by others in government. She considered this an outrageous breach of protocol. How could Trump do such a thing?”
So it’s exactly what I suspected. Trump, after his phone calls were leaked, and they were not the only things that were leaked. Trump started making these phone calls and doing other operations essentially behind closed doors without letting these people in. And they are normally part of the process. They are the foreign policy establishment. When a president calls a foreign leader, they have to be on the call. They have to know what’s going on. They have to provide input. They are involved.
And Trump has been acing them out because he doesn’t trust them. And they are livid! And this is what literally is behind the whistleblower and all these other things getting this impeachment process going. These are just people who think they run that town, and Trump has run an end run around them and is leaving them out, and they are livid. They are ticked off.
They have been rendered irrelevant by Donald Trump. And that’s the biggest insult you could do to these people. Because in their minds they are Washington, they are government, they are foreign policy. And Trump is excluding them. It’s like Trump has taken away their reason to live. He’s taken away their access to power and bragging rights and whatever else they get their jollies doing by being involved in these things.
“So I pointed out” — this Mr. Latimer continuing — “I pointed out that he had a good reason; Trump was the victim of two major leaks in his first month, where the full texts of his calls were given to the press. Wasn’t that also outrageous and unprecedented? And given the strong possibility of further leaks, wouldn’t classifying his calls be the prudent thing to do? At this point, her eyes flashed in anger. ‘He can’t just change things like that! He’s not a king!'”
Meaning he can’t just arbitrarily decide to exclude us. Now, who are these people? Well, the first thing to know about ’em is that none of them are elected. There’s not a single one of them in this cabal that ever answers to or is accountable to the American people. And in a representative republic, that is a nonstarter. But it’s been this way probably for decades. I will bet you it’s been this way since the post-World War II era.
This order, this Washington, this world order that John McCain talked about, this is what he was talking about. And letting Trump have access to this, these people think it’s the biggest insult that ever could happen. Some Nimrod like Trump given access to this order that the United States — now he’s excluding these people, and he doesn’t have the right. Who does he think he is, a king?
When, of course, he has the total right to exclude anybody he wants on these phone calls. He has the total right to send Rudy Giuliani as an ambassador or as an agent of some kind to Ukraine if he wants to because he is in charge of American foreign policy. These people do not think that’s the case. They literally believe – and I’m not exaggerating — that they are.
So there are many reasons these people hate Trump. But I’m telling you that while some of it may be policy, a lot of it isn’t. A lot of it is just the fact that he’s taken away their reason to live. He’s taken away their identity. He’s taken away their bragging rights. He’s taken away that which gives them self-esteem.
They’re not factors. They are not relevant when it comes to American foreign policy. And they think they run it. And so Trump’s gotta go. Trump’s gotta go, and he’s gotta be replaced by somebody who knows the way things are done. An average Republican or Democrat who is gonna let these people run the show because presidents come and go and these people are constant.
Well, folks, this is exactly what we elected Donald Trump to do. So the bottom line is, they’re trying to kick Donald Trump out of office for doing exactly what you elected him to do. It’s no more complicated than that. All the rest of this is just blather. All the rest of it is just a bunch of garbage thrown up against the wall hoping a lot of it sticks so that you’ll be confused. It’s no more complicated than Donald Trump is actually doing what you elected him to do, and official Washington is intolerant of it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You know what? I forgot to air his Harry Litman response to my point. So grab sound bite number 5. So I said in the sound bite that one of the great things that’s happened here is that Trump has now exposed the existence of this private, secret cabal that thinks they run Washington and the government.
Whereas before, people thought, “Nah, only conspiracy theory kooks believe that.” So here is this former deputy assistant attorney general, Harry Litman, responding. Shannon Bream says, “So here Rush says Democrats are helping the president by going after him and they ended up exposing deep state in the process. Your response?”
LITMAN: (snickering) I don’t know where to start, especially with Rush on the deep state. It’s a hundred percent clear (snickering) there are no due process protections at this point. The ultimate call rests with Schiff and what he said — and, given the track record, I think it’s very justified. If they’re trying to use this to relitigate Steele dossier or Burisma — something that doesn’t have anything to do with Trump’s actual behavior — then they will say, “We won’t do it.”
RUSH: Pfft! I’ve read the transcript, I don’t know what he’s talking about. I literally don’t. He makes a joke about my observation Trump’s exposed the deep state then goes off talking about the dossier and Schiff and due-process rights and so forth. So I have no clue what he’s saying.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay. Let’s go to the phones here. We’ll get to the Savannah Guthrie, Nikki Haley sound bites in mere moments. We’re gonna go to Northern Virginia, the north Washington suburbs in Virginia. This is Chris. Great to have you, sir. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. Great to be on with you. Yeah, this definitely is a D.C. suburb up here. Listen, I had to call. I’ve just been so frustrated with the dismissal of the deep state conversation. I worked 12 the years in the intelligence community. I eventually had to get out because I couldn’t take the corruption anymore. It’s exactly what people say it is. It’s exactly what the so-called conspiracy theorists are saying, and I get so tired of this dismissal of saying that it’s not there.
People feel like it’s their duty — regardless of what politicians, regardless of what the elected officials want — that they have this solemn duty to maintain something, and it supersedes everything. It supersedes any sort of conversation or desire by the American people. They feel that they have the right to do whatever they need to do to maintain their control, and it infuriates me that the media and everyone are so dismissive of the concept.
RUSH: Well, they’re dismissive because they want to try to keep it under wraps. They’ve gotten away with portraying people who talk about it as conspiracy kooks for so long, that’s been a very successful way to keep it under wraps. This is why I think it’s monumental what Trump has done. There’s all kinds of ways to look at this. You can look at this as, “Oh, my God, these people are trying to destroy Trump.
“Oh, my God, this is horrible! Oh, my God! Trump… No.” The other way to look at it? Look at what Trump is exposing. He’s doing exactly what he was elected to do. He’s exposed these people, and he’s bringing into clear view for anybody who wants to pay attention exactly who they are and how they operate. And, by the way, making end runs around them. Not including them, for example, in the phone call to Ukraine. Not including them after leaks of phone calls.
That’s exactly what he was elected to do. It’s exactly what “drain the swamp” means. He can’t get rid of them, but he can certainly render them irrelevant. He can deny them access. And it is driving them nuts. And that’s why they’re coming back and talking about him being so unqualified and so unsophisticated and so strange to the ways of Washington. These are people… You say that these are people, that they have a right. I think it’s worse than that.
I know what you mean. I think what you really mean is they have a sense of entitlement. They are not elected, and yet they think that they have a duty to protect the American people from themselves because the view of the American people is one of ignoramuses, dunces, people that don’t know what’s going on. And these people have this added attitude of superiority about them. And when you boil it all down, nobody elected ’em.
They’re not accountable to anybody, and it’s about time that the American people found out that there’s a large group of people — unaccountable, unelected — who think that they are entitled to make foreign policy despite who wins elections. It’s no more complicated than that. And so here we now have an eyewitness, a guy who actually had to leave it — and basically, they’re a bunch of incompetents to boot.