On his talk radio program Tuesday, conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh discussed the newly revealed messages from former FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was removed from the Trump-Russia investigation after his overt anti-Trump bias came to light. Strzok’s newly released texts and emails from December 2016 and April 2017 triggered a request by two high-ranking Republican senators on Monday for further investigation. The reason they’re so “significant,” said Limbaugh, is they provide a possible clue about the role of John Brennan’s CIA in spreading false “collusion” claims to the press.
On Monday, Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent a letter to Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson highlighting a text and an email from Strzok that raised serious questions. In a December 2016 text to his paramour, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, Strozk wrote: “Think our sisters have begun leaking like mad. Scorned and worried and political, they’re kicking in to overdrive.” Then, in an April 2017 email to some of his FBI colleagues, Strzok wrote: “I’m beginning to think the agency got info a lot earlier than we thought and hasn’t shared it completely with us. Might explain all these weird/seemingly incorrect leads all these media folks have. Would also highlight agency as source of some of the leaks.”
Limbaugh addressed the “fascinating” development on Tuesday. “Now, this is significant, because we now know that there was no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion,” he said. “It looks like the CIA was, in fact, leaking false Trump-Russia stories to the press to undermine Trump. These are leaks that even the FBI agents running their own version of a coup thought were wrong and incorrect, and it was John Brennan running the CIA at the time.”
“[T]hey’re concluding that Brennan and the CIA are leaking and putting this stuff in the media that they, then, have to deal with themselves,” he said after dismissing the idea that this was a “CYA” attempt by the FBI. “And they are concluding here, these are ‘incorrect leads all these media folks have.’ That is a solid indication that the FBI’s looking at this as it’s happening, and that the CIA is releasing a bunch of BS that even the FBI thought was BS. And the media was just swallowing it all up, not questioning any of it.”
Why was the media unquestioningly accepting this “BS”? Because “it came from Obama’s CIA, which they revere,” said Limbaugh.
The host then highlighted one of those early leaked claims that proved to be false: that Putin was “personally involved” in colluding with Trump, a claim reported just two days before Strzok’s December text:
“U.S. Officials: Putin Personally Involved in U.S. Election Hack.” That has to be Brennan. It has to be. It has to be the CIA. From the article: “U.S. intelligence officials now believe with ‘a high level of confidence’ that Russian President Vladimir Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.”
“So here’s Strzok Smirk, and they’re looking at this, and they see this. They know they didn’t put that out there, and figured it had to come from their ‘sisters’ at The Agency,” said Limbaugh. He then quoted again from the report on the false claim:
“Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.”
“That’s all from an NBC story December 14th, 2016, and it syncs right up with Strzok Smirk’s texts,” he said. Rush then “flash-forwarded” to today, with a new poll finding that 55% of Democrats believe that Trump is a traitor. “There it is! If that’s all the kind of garbage these people, these Democrats have been consuming for two years, what do you think they’re gonna think?” Rush exclaimed.
“Folks, there has to be a price paid by the people who have done this,” he said. “I mean, this is a flat-out lie. Somebody literally made this up, or they got scammed by some agents in Russia who are running a scam on Brennan and they knew what Brennan wanted to hear, so they told him.”
Transcript via RushLimbaugh.com