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You got to hear this.
Katrina Pearson is one of Trump's spokespeople.
You like Katrina Pearson?
You like Katrina Pearson, do you?
Well, interesting.
Interesting.
The official program observer has a soft spot here for Katrina Pearson.
Well, anyway, she was on with Wolf Blitzer last night in the situation room.
As you may know, one of Trump's people accused Cruz of using Gestapo-like tactics to win the Colorado delegate selection process.
I think it was Cruz, and in general, Gestapo-like tactics were being employed.
And of course, there was righteous indignation over the association of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS in any way being similar to what the Cruz campaign is employing tactically.
Wolf Blitzer particularly was very, very bothered by this.
So he scheduled an appearance by Trump spokeswoman, Katrina Pearson.
And the first soundbite begins with Wolf saying, is that really appropriate, Katrina?
I mean, come on.
Gestapo tactics?
There are a lot of delegates that are receiving, let's just say, interesting phone calls from people that might sound intimidating.
So we're going to find out, aren't we?
Is it appropriate to use the word Gestapo?
Because I assume you know what the Gestapo did.
Well, it is a word to define exactly the type of malice that is involved with going after some of these delegates in a very hostile and intimidating way.
So she wouldn't pull it back.
She wouldn't dial it back.
She would not concede that Gestapo-like tactics was an incorrect verbiage.
So Wolf could not believe what he was hearing and persisted.
You know what the Gestapo did during World War II?
That word should not be used to talk about the tactics that the Cruz campaign engaged.
That was inappropriate, right?
You're talking about a campaign that doesn't really care much for political correctness.
And if it's a term that just simply describes how malicious this activity has been, it is.
You don't use the word Gestapo to talk about a political campaign in the United States.
That gives the Gestapo too much credit, right?
Don't you wish he could have taken that back?
But where was all this hostility and concern when Mr. Trump was being called Hitler?
So no, I mean, I think this is just this another situation where it is a word to determine just how hostile that this has gone on in these states for these delegates.
And I think it was a word that just lets everyone know exactly what he was talking about.
So you don't regret using it.
You want to pull it back.
You're what the Gestapo did.
Yeah, right.
We think it's an appropriate use to describe what's happening to some of these delegates out there.
She's not pulling it back at all.
Finally, Wolf gives it one more college try.
No, and the K-SIT campaign also talked about the strong-arm tactics that the Cruz campaign is doing.
Strong-arm tactics is one thing, but the Gestapo, you know what they did during World War II.
You know, the millions of people, especially Jews who were murdered.
Yes, he was talking about exactly the same thing, the strong-arm tactics that the Cruz campaign has been using, the intimidation, and a lot of people feel a little hurt by that.
The point is, no matter what, Wolf said she wouldn't dial it back.
She wouldn't concede that there was a mistake at all in describing the Cruz campaign as Gestapo-like tactics.
And then somehow this term of strong-arm tactics came in.
In one of the exchanges, I think Wolf says, strong-arm tactics, that's not as bad as Gestapo.
She was saying, well, if you're going to get strong-armed tactics, same thing as Gestapo, Wolf just wouldn't hear of it.
But she wouldn't dial this back at all.
And Wolf simply could not believe it.
Now, on the Democrat side, we're back to Odigg Sumba at 11 here.
On the Democrat side, Bernie Sanders has decided to pick up the riff and start saying that the game is being rigged against him.
I mean, he sees, A, that it is.
The Democrat side is rigged.
And we've known that from before it began.
The Democrat side is definitely rigged.
And by the way, I mean, really rigged.
Now, on the Republican side, I would not go so far as to call their system rigged because it's all happening right out in the open.
The establishment is doing everything it can to hold on to what it has.
You can't say that they're rigging the game simply because they don't just roll over and let everything they have built be taken away from them.
They're going to do everything they can to hold on to what they've built.
It's the way they value themselves.
It's their self-worth.
It's their lifestyle.
It's everything.
I mean, literally everything in their lives is membership in that club.
And they're just not going to lay down and let somebody walk in and take it from them, particularly using the Democrat process.
They do not think that they have to sit by and let the votes of the people determine who's in the establishment and who isn't.
It's that simple.
But they're doing whatever they're doing pretty much upfront.
The Colorado thing was not done in darkness.
It was not done in deceit.
I mean, you can't announce what you're going to do in August.
You make your announcement in August what you're going to do in April and have anybody say you're sneaking up on them.
But on the Democrat side, every one of these primaries that Bernie Sanders wins, and it's a lot of them, it seems like every primary the last seven or eight, the winner is Bernie Sanders.
And then we're told that Hillary Clinton picks up most of the delegates after each one of these Bernie Sanders wins.
The exact opposite is happening on the Republican side.
When you win a majority of the popular vote in the state, you get a majority of the delegates.
You get a delegate bonus for being the frontrunner and for winning a majority of the delegates.
There's always bonus delegates in many of these states.
But it's, I don't think it's happened that the second place finisher has cleaned up more delegates.
There have been instances where you get into these congressional district delegates, and it's not so much who wins the whole state, it's who wins districts and by how much that determines the number of delegates.
But again, that's wide out in the open.
The Democrats are using this superdelegate process with many of them pre-pledged to Hillary Clinton so that the outcome of these primaries, if there's any bunch of people that really ought to be fit to be tied, it is the Bernie Sanders supporters.
Because they are doing everything according to the book and it isn't mattering.
They're out fundraising Hillary.
Oh, you know something else I saw?
Let me see if I can find it in the stack.
I found the most incredible story.
It's about Hillary.
Yeah, here it is.
It's a story from Michael Issakoff.
He of spiked news fame on the Lewinsky story.
It was his story originally.
Newsweek spiked it.
Drudge picked it up and the rest is history.
Are Hillary's big speaking fees being used to help fund her campaign?
Well, that's about as silly a question as is Barack Obama involved at all in the Department of Justice decision whether or not to indict Hillary Clinton.
Both silly questions.
Recently filed campaign finance reports may shed light on how Hillary Clinton is using some of the money she collected from her hefty speechmaking fees from Wall Street banks and other special interest groups.
Hillary is plowing an increasingly large amount of her funds, $560,000 as of last month, back into her presidential campaign.
A Yahoo News review of Clinton's campaign disclosure reports finds that in the weeks after launching her bid in April of 2015, she paid $278,000 to her campaign to cover so-called testing the waters expenses.
These included consulting and legal fees, travel bills, salaries for top staffers like Huma Abeddin and deputy political director Bryn Craig, as well as other testing the waters expenses that were paid out during the early months of last year.
Since then, the reports show that Clinton's kicked in another $282,000 with payments to her campaign committee, Hillary for America, averaging about $90,000 a month.
And most of that revenue, $228,000 of it, has gone to the Clinton Executive Services Corp, a Clinton family payroll operation that is compensating staffers engaged in campaign-related work for her chief surrogate, her husband, and former President Bill Clinton, according to campaign reports and a Clinton campaign official.
And from the bottom of the article comes this little passage.
The timing of some of Hillary's speeches, especially when matched up against the payments to her campaign, raise questions about whether her lucrative speech fees effectively amount to a pass-through of money from special interest groups to help bankroll her candidacy, according to ethics advocates.
Is there any doubt that this is going?
She goes out and she makes speeches at Goldman Sachs and Citibank, JP, Morgan Chase, wherever.
She gets around $250,000 for a 20-minute speech.
They don't release the transcripts of what she says.
And is there any question as to why that happens?
I'll tell you why they don't, because she's out there praising them to the hilt.
But it's also clear what these are.
Nobody is paying her a quarter of a million dollars for her insight.
Nobody is paying her a quarter of a million dollars to come entertain them at a conference.
Nobody's paying her a quarter of a million dollars for 20 minutes of remarks designed to enlighten them about whatever subject.
They are paying Hillary Clinton.
They're investing in her presidency on the come.
A quarter of a million dollars for 20 minutes?
Let's not kid ourselves what's going on here.
So people are now acting shocked, shocked that the money would end up in her campaign.
Shocked, shocked that she might be paying staff salaries with this money.
Why the surprise?
What about this elicits any kind of who are we talking about here?
These are the Clintons, after all.
And they always use other people's money for everything.
They are the king and queen at that.
Or of that.
The point is that the campaign and its fundraising are not having to spend money to hire her experts and assistants, that the banks essentially are.
That's the allegation, that this is just the speech was a, it's like a shell company, essentially.
It's a pass-through corporation where the banks get to pay Hillary for whatever she's going to do for them.
They pay in advance.
She gets to use the money however she wants.
She's chosen to use it to pay for her staff so she doesn't have to dip into campaign funds for that.
And everybody says, I wonder if there's something questionable going.
You wonder?
Really?
Seriously?
You think there's something legitimate about this?
The reason they won't release the transcripts is because Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are both running, promising their voters that these bankers are going to go to jail someday, that these are the guys that caused the crash.
And these are the guys that we bailed out, that you bailed out.
These are the guys that took all that bailout money so they would never lose any money of their own.
These are the guys that jacked around with the financial system and nearly caused it to collapse, and we bailed them out.
And she's making speeches telling them how important they are, how great they are.
There's no way they're going to ever release these transcripts.
It would undercut everything she's saying about these banks and her campaign.
And there's a wink and a nod between Hillary and the banks.
She says, look, I got to go out and rip you guys.
You understand?
It's all about getting me in the White House where I can really pay you back.
And they wink and you say whatever you want about us, Hillary.
We are cool.
We're fine.
And that's the deal.
And how the money ends up being used?
Like I say, they're not giving her a quarter of a million dollars for a 20-minute speech because they think she's worth it in a substantive sense.
You might pay Seinfeld that if you really want some bang-up show at your conference, but you're not going to pay Hillary.
She can't draw a crowd to a book signing for crying out loud.
I wonder how many people even show up to hear these things that she says.
Anyway, Bernie's finally figured this is all rigged.
And he doesn't have access to this kind of money.
And the superdelegates and the way this is all panning out, and it's causing real problems on the Democrats.
I had a story from yesterday from the Huffington Puffington Post, a 10-point story, story featuring 10 points, how the Democrats are on the verge of losing the presidency in November because they're getting behind Hillary in a stupid following way that is causing them to abandon or not see the reality on the ground for their voters, their base, all across the country.
I'll share it with you as the program unfolds today.
And Trump is starting to unload on Hillary now.
Last night during his campaign event in Albany.
Everybody knows that she is guilty as hell, okay?
Everybody.
Her whole life has been a big, fat, beautiful lie.
It's been a terrible, terrible lie.
Everything about her is a lie.
Right.
Okay, and that's important because there's nobody on the Republican side talking about Hillary that way.
And you know my lament.
I mean, no matter what you think of what's going on on the Republican side, no matter how rotten to the core you think some of the people are, no matter how damaging you think some of the supporters of some of these candidates are, they are not the people responsible for running this country down the tubes.
The Democrat Party owns that, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and they should remain the people in the political crosshairs.
And I've always thought that going after Hillary and going after the Democrats should be a prominent aspect of our primary campaign as well.
We shouldn't reserve this and hold this for the general while all this attention is being focused on the Republican primary for whatever reasons, for all this media attention, use it and identify for everybody the real reason that people in this country are miserable and not looking positively at the future.
We'll be back after this.
And time to go to the phones.
We're going to start in Waldorf, Maryland.
This is Bob, and I'm glad you waited, Bob.
Great to have you.
Hi.
Good afternoon, Mr. Limbaugh.
You know, in this country, sir, we have a few things that are worth fighting for.
Voting is damn sure one of them.
To sit back and watch the people of Colorado have their vote basically taken from them and have the people of Louisiana have their vote undermined, to have everybody cheer the will of the party to undermine the voters of the United States and to do everything they can to steal an election is ridiculous.
To sit back yesterday and listen to you cheer for these people that stole that election in Colorado when the party bosses jumped up, stole those delegates, did not allow those people to vote, and to listen to Rush Limbaugh, a man I've been listening to for 20 years, think that was a good thing?
I cannot tell you, Mr. Limbaugh, how disappointed I am to hear that.
To have a constitutional attorney stand up and cheer Mr. Cruz, oh, it's a great day.
It's a great day in Colorado.
We won 33 delegates.
This is Soviet-style tactics.
And to listen to you guys cheer about this is ridiculous.
The one thing Mr. Trump has done is exposed all of you who have forcing you to take your mask off.
You might as well just go ahead and endorse Mr. Cruz.
You might as well just get it over with.
Can you hang on through the break?
I've only got a few short seconds left here, and there's not enough to respond to you.
I'll respond if you want to hang on for it and I can get your reaction.
That's fine.
If you have to go, that's fine, too.
What do you want to do?
He hung up.
How many crawlers would refuse an opportunity to be held on through the break?
What are you nodding your head at in there for?
Hey, well, maybe.
I wasn't aware I was cheering anything yesterday.
I was simply, I just reported what happened.
Anyway, we'll be back.
Welcome back, El Rushboard here in the Cutting Edge, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Okay, so the prevailing thought is that Ted Cruz didn't win anything.
No!
That Colorado cheated everybody.
Colorado went out there and they denied people the right to vote.
And it's a constitutional right.
It's a God-given right.
We get to vote.
We get to choose what happens.
I want to read a quote to you.
I want to remind you again of the name Curly Haugland.
He might pronounce it, Hoflin.
I'm not sure how, but he is an unbound Republican delegate from North Dakota.
To many of you people, that's the sticks.
But I'm going to tell you what he said.
He was on CNBC Squawkbox.
He said, we choose the nominee, not the voter.
He said, the media has created the perception that the voters choose the nominee, and that's the conflict here.
He went on to say the rules are still designed to have a political party choose its nominee at a convention.
It's just the way it is.
I can't help it.
Don't hate me because I love the rules.
He went on to say the rules are still designed to have a political party choose its nominee at a convention.
It's just the way it is.
Remember all the outrage that got?
Well, it didn't get much outrage, and I was stunned that it didn't.
The Republican Party and the Democrat Party are private organizations.
They are not public.
They are private.
They feed off the public, and they do business with the public, and they attempt to sell things to the public, and they attempt to influence the public, but they are private organizations.
And the illusion is the public gets to determine what the party does.
But that's not the case.
The party determines what it does.
The party determines what it thinks.
The party determines its strategy.
What more evidence do you need than the last seven years?
The reason so many people are not supporting them anymore.
They're not responsive.
They have made people think they're listening to them.
They have made people think that they've made you think by asking you for money that they're going to do what you want to do.
They campaign for your vote by telling you they're going to do what you want, but it never happens, does it?
So what choice do you have?
Abandon them or keep putting pressure on them or what have you.
But they can set up whatever rules they want.
And people entering their business have to play by those rules.
Folks, this isn't complicated.
You may not like it, but there's no cheating going on here.
There is no rule that says every state has to do it the same way.
Colorado chose to do it the way they want, and they made no bones about why.
I don't want to waste my breath explaining this again because actually it's going to fall on deaf ears because I explained this in so much great detail yesterday, but it obviously didn't permeate.
What survives is that Colorado cheated.
Colorado was undemocratic.
Colorado denied people the vote.
And to top it off, Ted Cruz is out there claiming he did something brilliant and won it when it was rigged in his favor.
You may not want to hear it, but Colorado structured its rules precisely to prevent Cruz from winning it.
They structured their rules specifically to prevent Trump from winning it, all the way back in August.
The rules that Colorado put together were designed to make it almost automatic that an insider, that an establishment candidate was going to win, because you had to have money, big staff, knowledge, wherewithal to go out and work the system.
You had to basically go out and win the votes of all those delegates in all those districts throughout that state rather than campaigning for votes from the public.
They did it that way figuring Jeb Bush, maybe Marco Rubio, would be the only two, maybe there was a third capable of winning.
It was a way back in August that the Republican establishment in Colorado attempted to ace out the outsiders.
And it ended up biting them in the rear end because Cruz is an outsider as well.
And Cruz ended up learning the rules, mastering the system, and comes out of there with a win.
This is not what the Colorado GOP was envisioning back in August.
Now, you can blame me all you want for the fact that Trump didn't play there.
I had nothing to do with it.
I didn't write the rules.
All I'm doing is telling you what happened.
And it's been widely known since August that that's the way Colorado was going to do it.
And Colorado's not alone.
There are other states where delegates after the election, the primary's taking place, the delegate selection process is still not complete after the primary vote.
It's still going on, and it's going to go on throughout the convention.
Look, this is the whole reason Trump exists because people are fed up with this.
They're fed up with the establishment.
They're fed up with the unresponsiveness, the lack of any kind of empathy, connection, what have you.
But what do you want Ted Cruz to stand up and refuse the votes because Colorado was undemocratic?
Would that be the manly thing to do for Ted Cruz to stand up and say, you know what, I can't in good conscience accept my victory in Colorado because they cheated.
They did not fully let Donald Trump compete fairly out here.
And so I've got to give my votes back.
Is that what you want?
Can I go back and read this note to you that I got from my friend, the Trump supporter?
I would guess that most of us, he begins, most of us Trump supporters believe the country is effed beyond repair.
However, we love this nation, what it stands for, what it has done, and what it could do.
I think that what most Trump supporters have in common is that there is a scintilla of a chance.
If there is a scintilla of a chance of saving our country, Trump is it.
Very small chance, but the last chance.
If Trump can't pull it off, it's over.
What's going on is very depressing for even me.
I always thought that a candidate that took it to the media would win.
I never factored in my thought process betrayal by the candidate's own party.
I couldn't believe the last sentence.
I never factored in my thought process, betrayal by the candidate's own party.
If somebody came along and could run rings around the media, I thought the media would the party would embrace this guy.
And that hasn't happened.
I don't know how to ask this.
Do you Trump supporters really think that the GOP is just going to lay down and let you have this?
Do you think it was ever going to be a fair fight?
Somebody wants your house.
You're going to open the doors, let them come in and take it.
Not a good comparison, Rush.
My house isn't public.
Neither is the Republican Party.
It's a private organization.
It's run by a very few elite people, and it has always been.
I can give you analogies all day long, but this is not Civics 101 playing out here.
It is the political or party basis of life and death.
And they're just not going to sit out there and let you kill them.
They're not going to sit by and let the votes of people who are not official members of the party determine what happens to them.
They're going to do everything they can, including, as they've said, vote for Hillary if they have to, to hold on to what they've got.
I know the illusion is this.
This is what people think.
The party should be sitting there, and you transfer to the party your attitude.
We really don't like the Democrats.
We think the country is hanging by a thread, and we're all united and trying to save the country.
We realize the media is a number one impediment.
They're also part of the enemy, so to speak.
And we're all united in this sense of purpose of saving America and reinstituting constitutional principles, limited government.
Well, you have just, I'm sorry, but that's not the Republican Party today.
That's not who they are.
You don't have that in common with them.
So you think here comes Donald Trump and he's doing things nobody's ever done before.
He's running rings around the media.
He's drawing huge crowds.
He's doing it without campaigning for other people's money.
He's not raising money.
He's got no donors.
That's the biggest threat this party has yet, that he's doing it without donors.
They've got to stop that.
Because these people don't have Trump's money.
Without donors, these people don't have a way to put their kids in college for crying out loud.
You think they're just going to sit there, wow, look at a guy, we got a guy who may even be able to beat Hillary.
We got a guy, we got a guy who could run rings around the media.
And they're going to unite behind the guy?
There's no way.
I lived under this illusion for a long time, too.
I thought everything I thought and every desire I had, every political objective I had, my party shared it.
I was wrong.
They don't.
And it was a hard awakening.
It was a shocking discovery when I figured this out.
It wasn't all that long ago either.
There are all kinds of different agendas here.
And right now, the Republican Party's number one objective is to save itself from Donald Trump and his supporters.
It's not to embrace them.
It's not to grow the party using Trump as the magnet.
That's the worst thing.
They don't want Trump to be the one that grows the party.
That puts Trump in control of the party.
They're never going to give that up.
That's going to have to be taken from them.
As James Carville said, this is a wall.
It is.
And just because I understand it, am I able to explain it to you as simply and as easily understandable as anybody else can make it, you think I'm cheering it.
I'm just trying to help you understand it.
And I got to take a break.
We'll be back and continue after this.
I'm going to try to say it one more time.
I don't expect for this to be understood.
I expect to have to say this again.
But I'm still going to say it in my mind one last time.
The Republican Party, the Democrat Party, the Politburo of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Supreme Soviet, the CHICOMs, the Kestro brothers, whoever will always write rules that maintain their control over their enterprise.
They are never going to write rules that enable outsiders and non-members to storm the gates and take over.
The rules that are governing this convention this year and this primary were written in 2012 after the party saw what nearly happened to them then.
And these rules are designed to stop Ron Paul or somebody like Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.
Well, they didn't anticipate somebody like Donald Trump, so they didn't write any rules specifically about Trump, but the rules are written to make it impossible for any outsider to come in and take over.
The Republican Party is not going to allow the party to be taken over by the result or as the result of a popular vote anywhere.
Otherwise, there would not be delegates to a convention that they control.
The first order of business of any business is to stay open.
The second order of business is to make sure the people run it continue to run it.
To stop coup d'états, so to speak.
Anybody therefore attempting to take control of such an organization had better figure out how in hell the organization has written rules making it hard to do.
I'm sorry to say, but my belief is it is incumbent on somebody challenging the existing rule to figure out how the insiders play their game and beat them at it.
And in order to do that, you have to know what they've set up.
You have to inform yourself what the rules are.
You have to learn how they are trying to stop you.
You have to know what that is so you can make an end run around them or so you can make a full frontal approach and smother them.
Whatever your tactic, you've got to know how they have attempted to protect themselves and thereby prevent you from succeeding.
And if you think, if anybody thinks that a popular vote of American citizens will be enough to take over a political party, you've got another thing coming.
They're simply not going to allow it.
Why do you?
The Electoral College is the same circumstance.
It's not the people of this country that elect the president.
It's the electors.
And you need 270 of them to win.
And each state has their own number.
And there are all kinds of rules.
If the popular vote does not produce 270 electoral votes, and guess what?
The House of Representatives picks the president and the people be damned.
Except the people elected the House of Representatives.
So it's not the people be damned.
It's the representatives of the people deciding who's going to be the president if the Electoral College technique fails.
And you know why the Electoral College was set up?
To prevent direct democracy from deciding who is president.
There's nothing happening here that is unprecedented.
There is nothing happening here that has never happened before.
There is nothing happening here that's even under the table.
Everything that's happening in every state, Colorado, Louieza, Louisiana, New York, wherever you want to go, all you have to do is read the owner's manual.
Hire somebody.
There isn't any cheating.
There isn't any trickery.
All there is is a bunch of powerful people telling every one of us, no, we cannot have what they have.
And no, we cannot run what they run.
So if we want to take it over and run what they run, we've got to figure out how they've written rules to deny us and outsmart them within their system.
It's the conflict.
Outsider, but you got to become an insider to beat them.
Figure it out.
Back after this.
Okay, all right.
I can tell I'm going to have to go even further because now I'm getting questions.
Well, then why are we even doing this?
And then, well, so the Democrats aren't cheating either.
Is that your theory?
That it's their rules and Bernie doesn't have a chance.
So it's just what it is.
No, no.
Look, I'll keep going.
I'll explain this.
I'll give it one last try.
And I'm not going to be repeating anything I just said.