In response to Donald Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen implicating the president in potential campaign finance violations in his guilty plea heard ’round the world, Rush Limbaugh chose to dedicate a segment of his show Wednesday to highlighting “Democrat hypocrisy” on the issue.
Citing a 2013 story by Maggie Haberman for Politico, Limbaugh pointed out that the “Obama 2008 campaign [was] fined $375,000” for campaign reporting violations. “Nobody on the left cared,” said Limbaugh.
“That’s just one story. I have stories of how Eric Holder looked the other way at constant Obama campaign violations, financial violations,” he said. “They just weren’t gonna hold Obama accountable to any of it. But the point is, they didn’t care. And they didn’t think anything was threatened. They didn’t think the American political system was in danger. They didn’t think that the activity was criminal. It certainly didn’t warrant being pursued. And it was the same media reporting it.”
Limbaugh then read the opening passage from the Politico piece:
President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign was fined $375,000 by the Federal Election Commission for campaign reporting violations — one of the largest fees ever levied against a presidential campaign, POLITICO has learned. The fine — laid out in detail in FEC documents that have yet to be made public — arose from an audit of the campaign, which was published in April.
“The point is that Maggie Haberman, now at the Times, then at Politico, was writing about Obama’s campaign violations resulted in the biggest FEC fine ever, and nobody on the left cared about it after they reported it,” said Limbaugh. “And there are countless other stories like this that illustrate the hypocrisy of the left over and over and over again, and it never seems to have any kind of impact whatsoever.”
The feds putting the screws to Cohen to get him to talk isn’t about defending campaign finance laws, Limbaugh argued, it’s about trying to remove Trump from office. To help make his point, he cited a piece from former Clinton pollster Mark Penn in which he details “the plot to get President Trump out of office.”
“It hasn’t changed from the day after the election,” said Limbaugh, agreeing with Penn’s description. “This plot was hatched actually as part of the campaign, but that’s what it remains. This is a plot to get Trump out of office. I don’t think they’re thinking impeachment. They may want to impeach, but they’re never gonna get a conviction in the Senate; so how they get him out of office has gotta be Nixonesque. And they’re still trying to do it. They’re still trying to overturn the election results. There is a silent coup going on.”
Limbaugh then read at length from Penn’s piece, including excerpts of the following key passage, which highlights Rush’s “Democrat hypocrisy” angle:
Contrast what is going on [with the feds’ handling of Cohen’s “hush money” payment to Stormy Daniels] with the treatment of the millions of dollars paid to a Democratic law firm which, in turn, paid out money to political research firm Fusion GPS and British spy Christopher Steele without listing them on any campaign expenditure form, despite crystal clear laws and regulations that the ultimate beneficiaries of the funds must be listed. This rule was even tightened recently. There is no question that hiring spies to do opposition research in Russia is a campaign expenditure, yet no prosecutorial raids have been sprung on the law firm, Fusion GPS or Steele. The reason? It does not “get” Trump.
So, Trump spends $130,000 to keep the lid on a personal story and the full weight of state prosecutors comes down on his lawyer, tossing attorney-client privilege to the wind. Democrats spend potentially millions on secret opposition research and no serious criminal investigation occurs. Remember that the feds tried a similar strategy against Democratic candidate Edwards six years ago and it failed. As Gregory Craig, a lawyer who worked both for President Clinton and Edwards, said, “The government theory is wrong on the facts and wrong on the law. It is novel and untested. There is no civil or criminal precedent for such a prosecution.” Tried it there anyway and it failed.
Limbaugh underscored Penn’s point that it is “not a violation of federal election law to personally pay people money.”
“And the stretch is all these Democrats and the DOJ say, ‘Well, that is an in-kind campaign contribution,'” said Limbaugh. “Well, let’s go to down that road, because what is all this media coverage against Trump worth to the Democrats? Well, you want to talk about in-kind campaign donations, how many billions and billions and billions of dollars in free media have the Democrats been given in the last year and a half? And that’s the stretch they’re making here with these payments to Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels. But they were personal.”
In the end, said Limbaugh, this is all about trying to figure out a way to slap Trump with a “collusion” or “obstruction” charge, but there’s just one big problem: “There is not a Trump connection to collusion. There isn’t a Trump connection to obstruction. There isn’t a Trump connection to this,” he said. “They are forcing Cohen — and he’s scared to death of them — to allocute and to admit that he did these things at Trump’s behest because the prosecutors know it’s never gonna be tested in court. He’s copping a plea. There won’t be a trial. But he can say whatever he wants and the prosecutors can make it appear that that’s dead, 100 percent certain, and the effort here is to link Trump to all of this.”
Transcript via RushLimbaugh.com
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