RUSH: The IG report is out. Nobody’s read it in detail yet, but they’ve presented a summary, and the Drive-By Media’s all over it. And let me tell you what it is. The FBI’s application for a FISA warrant to spy on a Trump campaign volunteer was perfectly fine. There was no political bias whatsoever on the part of McCabe or Comey or Strzok. Neither Comey nor McCabe nor Strzok showed any bias in their investigation. Oh, and a PS: Climate change is real and we all only have 12 years to live.

I told you this is what the IG report was gonna say. This guy’s a swamp rat. Now, here’s what it means. And, by the way, in a previous IG report James Comey — people have forgotten this. In a previous inspector general report on something — it was about, I think, the press conference he did with the Hillary Clinton emails. He was referred for criminal prosecution, and the DOJ refused to do it. Horowitz cannot charge anybody with anything. The IG cannot prosecute, cannot charge. All he can do is refer, suggest.

And he suggested in a previous report that Comey be charged. And the DOJ said, “Nah, not gonna do it.” Now, what this means — here’s a statement from Barr. “The inspector general’s report now makes clear the FBI launched an intrusive investigation and found 17 areas of misconduct in the FISA warrant application, that it launched an intrusive investigation into a presidential campaign on the thinnest of — this is Barr’s statement on the IG report. So what’s the conflict?

If Barr is saying that the IG report proves that the FBI launched an intrusive campaign into a presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions, then how can there be no political bias shown by Comey or McCabe or Strzok? Let me explain this to you. As I understand it, all that means is that Horowitz did not encounter a witness who said so. It doesn’t mean that there wasn’t. It just means he didn’t find any because nobody copped to it.

These IG reports are not what everybody thinks they are. It’s more like a watchdog, but there’s a protective — this is not BIA. This is not the Bureau of Internal Affairs. Do not be confused. Everybody associates the inspector general with the equivalent of internal affairs at a police department. It’s not the same at all. When the IG comes to do an investigation, nobody quakes in their boots. If internal affairs is after you, and you’re a cop, you’re not happy. And all it means is is that nobody admitted and no witnesses provided any evidence that there was any political bias.

So if the IG says to McCabe, “Were you motivated by political bias?” “Oh, no, not at all, Mr. Horowitz.” “Okay. Fine.” You can’t find any evidence for it because there wasn’t any testimony. As far as I’m concerned, just because he couldn’t find a witness — of course they’re all circling the wagons in there. You think they’re gonna spill the beans on each other? That’s for later. That is for the Durham investigation. And Barr’s statement here that the DOJ IG report makes clear the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a campaign on the thinnest of suspicions, that ought to reassure everybody. That’s the attorney general’s assessment of the report now.

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RUSH:  Okay.  A couple things happened during the break. So we’ll get to the phones here in just a second.  Mark Meadows has just spent two hours being shown and having reviewed for him the IG report.  He has two tweets.  First tweet: “I just got out of a nearly 2 hour briefing on the IG report. It is deeply disturbing. Some former FBI and DOJ officials are about to have some serious explaining to do.”  The second tweet: “And after reading this, it’s no wonder we’ve been seeing defensive leaks in the New York Times and CNN.

“And that the Democrats rushed to hold an impeachment hearing the same day,” to cover this up. “It’s every bit as bad as advertised. And certainly worse than the media has been suggesting.”  So it looks like the best they’ve got is to say that the IG couldn’t find any political bias to explain what happened.  But one of the things that the IG report details is that the FBI relied totally on the Steele dossier for the FISA warrant, and that they never cared who paid for it or whether it was verified.

That is damning.  That confirms so much of what many of us have known, that the dossier was all they ever had, that it was never verified. It was Hillary Clinton opposition research, and apparently the report mentions that that’s all they had to get the FISA warrant, and that the FBI knew that’s all they had. They knew that it was unverified and that they were not interested in who paid for it.  Now, how you get that without then concluding there was political bias, I don’t know.

Unless Horowitz can’t presume anything, and if nobody alleged it and if nobody admitted to bias, then he can’t report that there was any.  But that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t some.  There have been. There have been defensive leaks now for the past three or four days suggesting the IG report, “Ah, nothing to see here.  This thing is gonna pretty much confirm that the investigation was legitimate and everything about it was okay,” and apparently that’s not the thrust of this report.

So it’s gonna be trickling out, and — exactly, by the way, as I predicted — Fox has dumped out of the hearings now to cover this.  CNN has not dumped out of the hearings to cover this, which is another indication that it’s not good.  If the IG report… If the IG report were a total exoneration, CNN would cut away from these impeachment hearings and go and report it, but they are not.

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RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, an even bigger piece of news, if it’s possible.  The special counsel appointed by Attorney General Barr to look into the coup, John Durham, has issued a statement: “I have the utmost respect for the mission of the Office of Inspector General and the comprehensive work that went into the report prepared by Mr. Horowitz and his staff.  However, our investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department.”

What that means is exactly what I told you: The reason there’s no political bias found is that nobody that Horowitz talked to admitted any, and Horowitz can only talk to DOJ people.  He can only talk to people in the midst of this operation, Crossfire Hurricane, and of course none of them were gonna admit that they were politically biased.  So Horowitz reports that he found none.  But Durham says, “Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities…

“Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the inspector general that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.”  This is a slap in the face.  This is John Durham telling Horowitz (translated), “Your whole take on this is not true.  It’s not right.  We have more evidence than you’ve found.  We don’t agree at all with your conclusion that the beginnings of this were warranted and justified.”

That is why Barr’s statement today is as, shall we say, biting of the inspector general’s report as it is.  So again, John Durham — and let me say something about this, by the way.  Let me point something out.  Do you realize how unusual this is?  For example, during the Mueller investigation with all the wild-ass, crazy crap being reported, did he ever pop up and say, “No, no. That’s not right! No, no, that’s not right”?

Only one time.   It was almost near the end when BuzzFeed or some Millennial newsgroup reported something outrageous, and Mueller said, “That just isn’t true. We haven’t found that. We didn’t say that.”  For this guy, for John Durham — a fellow DOJ investigator — to issue a statement expressing abject disagreement with the conclusion in the IG report? That, my friends, is big.  That kind of thing doesn’t happen, but Durham felt compelled.

After reading the IG’s report and then measuring and balancing it against what he found, he felt compelled to issue a statement stating not that he just disagrees, but that he has way beyond what Horowitz has, and that’s why he disagrees.  There’s another reason this is happening.  I gotta be very careful pointing this out, however.  You don’t want to tell anybody I said this.  But that’s the political component of this.  Barr knows exactly what’s going on here. The whole thing, folks — every damn bit of this — is a political operation, is a silent coup political operation to get rid of Donald Trump.

Durham knows that his report’s not ready yet.  He’s got some time yet remaining, a lot of witnesses to go.  He’s got a grand jury, which means there are gonna be criminal indictments here, and he doesn’t want this… He and Barr both do not want this misleading conclusion from the inspector general to go unanswered in the public domain, for both legal and political reasons.  This is big.  This is a very, very good thing that Durham did this.

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RUSH:  Another tweet here from Mark Meadows, who has spent two hours seeing the inspector general report.  He says, “Wow… page 341. IG says FBI used an Aug. 2016 ‘defensive briefing’ with the Trump campaign as an ‘opportunity to gather potentially relevant investigative information’ about Michael Flynn.”  In other words, what the IG report says — and it really… By the way, from everything I’ve been able to tell so far (while digesting it all while also doing the award-winning program here), this IG report slams the FBI on all kinds of things.

The original report was they could find no political bias.  That’s the best they’ve got, and all that means is that the inspector general didn’t encounter anybody who admitted it, not that he didn’t find it.  And we know that Durham has issued a statement disagreeing almost categorically with the IG report that says the beginning of this investigation was warranted and valid.  So fireworks are coming.

But this page 341: “FBI used an Aug. 2016 ‘defensive briefing’ with the Trump campaign as an ‘opportunity to gather potentially relevant investigative information’… on Michael Flynn.” What that means is you got presidential campaigns.  Both of them get briefings — foreign policy, defense, you name it — because one of the two’s gonna be elected president and you want them inaugurated hitting the ground running.

You don’t want ’em to know nothing.  You want ’em to be up to speed. It’s common practice. It’s been that way for many, many, many years that both campaigns — well, the out-of-power campaign — gets briefings.  What this report says is the FBI was using these briefings to conduct investigations on people who did not know they were being investigated, like Flynn.

Flynn thinks he was literally being briefed.  He’s the incoming national security adviser for Trump.  He thinks he’s being briefed.  They’re running an investigation on him, and the IG report says the FBI was doing this frequently — which aligns perfectly with so much of what we know about the way the FBI operated here.

Let me grab Line 1 quick because this goes with it.  I’ve got Mark here in Upstate New York who wants to make a point.  Mark, I’m glad you waited, and welcome to the program, sir.  Hi.

CALLER:  Hello, Rush.  Thank you for taking my call.

RUSH:  Yes, sir.

CALLER:  I’ve been a loyal student of yours in the Limbaugh Institute since 1996.

RUSH:  Thank you, sir.  I appreciate that.

CALLER:  Oh, thank you.  I find it very ironic and funny that in July of 2016, super patriot James Comey was able to say that Hillary did commit all these crimes but could find no intention, therefore “no reasonable prosecutor” would take the case and prosecute it.

RUSH:  That’s exactly right.  That’s a very good memory of yours there, sir, yes.

CALLER:  But then the whole impeachment inquiry and case is being predicated on Trump’s intent to do something.

RUSH:  That’s a great point, and they don’t even know his intent! They’re making that up.  Just like they’re making up that he was bribing Zelensky, but didn’t tell him that’s what was going on because the guilty never admit it.  No, that’s a great, great, great point.  Comey exonerates Hillary because even though she broke the law, she didn’t intend to.  “No reasonable prosecutor would ever prosecute the case.”  Give me a break.

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RUSH: Macon, Georgia. This is Bill. Great to have you. Hello, sir.

CALLER: Sell our nukes. Sell Alaska back. Pallets full of cash in the middle of the night. How come the FBI or no source in the media have ever said what the quid pro quo was supposed to be between Trump and Putin? We heard all about it with the Ukraine. We haven’t heard anything out of anybody in the Secret Service who you would think, being 24/7 with Trump and his family —

RUSH: Well, wait a minute now, the quid pro quo was Hillary Clinton losing because Putin was scared to death of Hillary Clinton. They didn’t want any part of Hillary Clinton and so the quid pro quo was “We’ll help you get elected, if you win,” I guess.

RUSH: So they wanted to elect the pro military guy, Trump, the pro law enforcement pro-military guy —

RUSH: It’s a great question. Why did the Russians want Trump to win? What were they gonna get out of it? The answer is that Trump was a traitor. He was a treasonous agent of Russia and was going to undermine America. This is the point they’re trying to make subtly.

CALLER: Well, you would have thought something would have come out in the KGB files that were released in the nineties. Never heard a whiff. In fact, I’ve never heard a negative thing about Donald Trump from June 14th, 2015, to the day he graduated college, not a bad thing about him. Now all of a sudden on June 15th he comes down the escalator and he’s this traitor?

I mean, you know, look Rush, I ask rhetorical questions and I’ve been asking them for three years. Social media, family, no one’s been able to answer either one of those questions, especially the one about the Secret Service. Until I hear someone from the Secret Service say, yeah, I was watching Trump’s son or I was watching him and wow there’s all kinds of shenanigans going on, until I hear that —

RUSH: Well, your questions are questions you’re not supposed to ask. You’re just supposed to accept it on faith that the Russians meddled in the election so that Hillary would not win. That was it. That alone is supposed to be so outrageous that we gotta get rid of Trump. How dare he help the Russians in any way corrupt our elections.

Your question about quid pro quo is really cool. What did the Russians get out of it? I mean, they loved Obama. Obama let them take Crimea from Ukraine. Didn’t lift a finger to stop them. Hillary Clinton with the plastic reset button. Hillary Clinton didn’t stop ’em in Syria, didn’t stop ’em in Libya, didn’t stop the Russians anywhere they were. Why in the world would they not want her to win? The fact is I think they did. She was the one in bed with ’em.

The dossier. Speaking of that — thank you, Bill. I’m only moving on here because I’m short on time. Because I have a little bit more to reveal here from the IG report. Are you ready? The headline to this: “Bruce Ohr funneled info to the FBI 17 times while hiding the connections of Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS from his superiors. Between the date of Steele’s closing as an FBI spy in November 2016 and May 15, 2017, Bruce Ohr met with the FBI 13 different times.

In his meetings, Ohr provided the FBI with information that Steele had provided to him. The Steele election reports that Ohr had received from Glenn Simpson, Fusion GPS, as well as a thumb drive containing information Ohr had received from his wife, Nellie Ohr, that contained open source research that she had compiled.” All of this is on Trump while working for Fusion GPS.

“Department leaders including Ohr’s supervisors were unaware that Bruce Ohr was meeting with Christopher Steele, Glenn Simpson, the FBI, or the State Department, or of Ohr’s wife’s connections to Fusion GPS.”

In other words, the IG report says that everybody that Bruce Ohr reported to had no idea what he was doing, that he was collaborating with Steele on the dossier and with Fusion GPS, which also wrote part of the dossier. “The Carter Page FISA application noted the person who hired Steele looking to discredit the Trump campaign. Two of the six Steele reports received by the Crossfire Hurricane team on September 19th referenced Carter Page by name. On September 21, 2016, a couple days after the team received these reports, the FBI advised that the FBI believed it was ready to submit a request for FISA authority on Carter Page,” even though they knew that the dossier was unverified and had links to Christopher Steele, who was no longer trustworthy.

It’s pretty devastating in parts. And so remember, the original leak was, “Hey, there’s nothing here that proves political bias in the beginnings of the investigation.” That was it. That was the best they had. Apparently a number of things FBI did have now been documented in this report. Don’t forget, Durham has come out, issued a statement disagreeing almost categorically with the IG conclusion that there was nothing to see here on how this whole thing began.