On his radio program Tuesday, conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh kicked off one lengthy segment by offering up what he said was only a “half-joke”: “Let me tell you the next thing to keep a sharp eye out for, folks, and that is people fleeing the country. If you see James Comey in Argentina, or if you see James Clapper somewhere where they can’t be extradited, then you will know that we are getting close,” said the host.
Attorney General William Barr’s decision to appoint prosecutor John Durham — a U.S. attorney from Connecticut with a history of exposing government corruption — to look into the highly suspect origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, suggested Limbaugh, has the Deep State “very nervous,” and it should.
For some background on Durham’s “long history” of taking on government agencies, Limbaugh read a quote from the Times report on Barr’s appointment of Durham: “Mr. Durham has a long history of serving as a special prosecutor investigating potential wrongdoing among law enforcement and national security officials. He was appointed to the federal bench in 2017 by President Trump. Mr. Durham has even investigated the use or misuse of FBI informants.”
“In fact, one of his best-known investigations was an investigation of the FBI’s handling of the mass murderer and Boston mobster Whitey Bulger,” Rush pointed out (transcript via RushLimbaugh.com). “This is very significant. It was Robert Mueller III … Mr. Integrity, Mr. Honorable, who kept four innocent people in prison for decades in order to keep Whitey Bulger from being exposed as an FBI informant. Four people. Four people who were innocent were kept in jail for years in order to protect the status of Whitey Bulger as an FBI informant.”
Durham was named special prosecutor in 1999 to look into the case and in December 2000, “‘Durham revealed secret FBI documents that convinced a judge to vacate the 1968 murder convictions of four other FBI informants because they’d been framed by Robert Mueller’s FBI,” Limbaugh said, partly quoting the Times.
“So if you ask me, Barr could not have picked a man with better experience,” said Limbaugh. “Not only has Durham gone up against the FBI and won before and even Mueller, he has investigated the FBI’s use of informants, which played a larger role in the inception of the FBI’s case against the Trump campaign. This seems like an inspired choice. And as I say, Fox News is reporting that their sources are telling them that John Durham has been on the job for weeks.”
“So this has a lot of people very, very nervous,” he said after reading a quote from the Fox report. “In addition to this, the just recently retired deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, is out making speeches, and he is unloading on James Comey. Just unloading on him.”
Rosenstein’s condemnation of Comey, said Rush, highlights just how clearly the forrmer FBI director was in “violation” of FBI decorum in his “now-famous press conference on July 5th where he went out there and listed everything they had discovered in their investigation of Hillary Clinton, her server and her emails, and then announced they weren’t gonna charge her and that no prosecutor would because they couldn’t find any intent.”
“If you’re not gonna charge somebody, you do not detail what you think they did. You don’t destroy them!” Limbaugh exclaimed.
“This has been a political operation from day one,” Limbaugh said later of the Trump-Russia investigation. “The Steele dossier is all they had. It’s a political opposition product, and there’s never been anything… This has never been a criminal investigation, and even they admit that. They called it a counterintelligence investigation. It’s always been nothing but political. The Justice Department has been weaponized, or was weaponized, by agents opposed to Donald Trump. The criminal justice system was used as a political operation, and it was hidden under the disguise of a legitimate intelligence investigation.”