Rush Limbaugh dedicated a large portion of his first hour on Monday to unpacking the “blockbuster scandal” blown open Monday morning by Bloomberg‘s Eli Lake. In a bombshell report, Lake revealed that Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice had repeatedly requested information regarding members of Donald Trump’s transition team in part to unmask their identities to people at the top of the Obama administration and outside of the intelligence community.
In addition to proving that Rice lied when she said last month that she knew “nothing” about any Trump associates having been caught up in incidental surveillance, Limbaugh stressed, it proved that “the real scandal here” is not Trump colluding with Russia, for which there still remains zero proof, but that the Obama administration “weaponized politically our intelligence agencies” against Trump.
Limbaugh began by launching into the report by Lake, the key information of which, the radio host noted, others, like The New York Times, knew days ago but sat on because it damaged their pro-Obama/anti-Trump narrative:
LIMBAUGH: We now know that what I suspected all along — and I’m not alone — that what was happening indeed did happen, that Russians were surveilled, and that they were talking to Americans. The transcript of the conversations was turned over to people in the Obama administration, such as Mike Flynn, and there are others. And now Susan Rice has been fingered as one of the sources who asked that these people be unmasked so that details of the conversations could be leaked. And they were leaked. But these people were not targets of the surveillance. They are never to be identified.
“The real scandal here,” said Limbaugh, “is that the Obama administration weaponized politically our intelligence services against the Republicans and against Trump.” The real story is not about Trump and the Russians, but about the Obama administration’s illegal use of the intelligence apparatus to target political opponents (hyperlink added):
LIMBAUGH: It is not a story about Trump and the Russians. We know that the Obama Regime surveilled Trump’s transition team. We know now that the Obama White House unmasked people who were not targets of legitimate surveillance and investigation. We know now that the Obama White House illegally leaked protected information. And, by the way, we knew this long ago. The media is our source. The Drive-By Media reported all of this. We know that there had to be unmasking. We know that there had to be leaking. The media proudly told us that sources who could not be identified, blah, blah, blah, blah, fed them data. We know now that the media was complicit. And here’s a little detail. Mike Cernovich reports in his story on all this today that Maggie Haberman at the New York Times has known for two days that Susan Rice was behind the unmasking and sat on it to protect President Obama.
This revelation, said Limbaugh, is not surprising. “The Obama administration weaponized everything else to use against the GOP, from the IRS to NOAA to any of these agencies, EPA, involving climate change.”
Limbaugh also made the point that the premise of the Democrats’ central accusation against Trump is fundamentally flawed. If Vladimir Putin and his agents wanted to take down Hillary Clinton so badly, why would they endanger Trump’s candidacy by involving him?
LIMBAUGH: Remember, James Comey testified the Russians just wanted Hillary to lose. So why would they involve Trump in their scheme? The Russians know their calls are monitored by U.S. intelligence agencies. Why would they risk their effort to defeat Hillary by colluding with Trump’s people? If that had come out before the election, she would have won for sure. In fact, everything that was known today has been known for quite a while by people in the intelligence community, by people at the FBI.
Limbaugh later elaborated on his point that the establishment media deliberately sat on the “blockbuster piece of news.” Not only did Rice know about the surveillance, which she publicly denied, she “was instrumental in this.” After all the rumors that the NSA had a “bombshell” about Russian intelligence, we learn that they did in fact have a big reveal: “it was Susan Rice who was requesting that all of these Americans incidentally caught up in foreign surveillance be unmasked, and it has to be agents of the Obama administration (which we know instinctively) who were leaking all of this to the media.”
The radio host also took a moment to hammer home the point that there is no evidence of Team Trump colluding with the Russians. Limbaugh noted that Democratic Rep. Adam “Pencil Neck” Schiff, who had previously asserted that there was hard evidence of Trump associates colluding with the Russians, was forced to admit on Sunday that after months of investigations, there was simply no definitive evidence of it.
CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Schiff on Sunday morning, “Can you definitely say that there was collusion, that there were people affiliated with the Trump campaign who were working with the Russians to time the release of damaging information about Hillary Clinton that had been hacked either from John Podesta or the DNC?”
Schiff’s response to Tapper, followed by Limbaugh’s response to Schiff:
SCHIFF: I don’t think we can say anything definitively at this point. Uh, we are still in the very early stage of the investigation. The only thing I can say that it would be irresponsible for us not to get to the bottom of this. We really need to find out exactly what the Russians did, because one of the most important conclusions that the Intelligence Committee reached is that they are gonna do this again to the United States. They’re doing it already in Europe. So we can say, y’know, conclusively: This is something that needs to be thoroughly investigated. Uh, but it — but it’s way premature to be reaching conclusions
LIMBAUGH: Really? He had just reached a conclusion a few days earlier when he went out and said that there was evidence of collusion. He had to pull it back because there isn’t any. This is gonna blow up on ’em. The media’s gonna cover for ’em when it happens, I understand, but it’s gonna blow up on them. […] Gorsuch is gonna blow up on ’em too.
Read and listen to Limbaugh’s full discussion here.
Transcript via RushLimbaugh.com.
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