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July 5, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
31:11
July 5, 2016, Tuesday, Hour #3
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Half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair.
Rushland Bohr, now more than ever.
Needed and necessary.
Happy to have you here in the fastest three hours in media, 800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, check the emails.
It's lrushbo at EIBNet.com.
Look, let's just go to some of the audio soundbites from the FBI Director James Comey today.
So that you can hear, if you missed it, you can hear in his own words a review and content of what he actually said here.
Here's the first one.
Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.
Stop the example.
Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws, blah, blah, blah, governing the handling of classified info, there is evidence they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.
What does that say about her qualifications?
My only point is here, there's plenty of room to go after her on incompetence.
Can't trust her.
I don't think she should get a pass.
Hey, you know, she deleted emails just like you and I do.
She deleted a portion of her inbox, it got too big, she takes some emails out.
You and I do the same.
Well, the Secretary of State's not you and me, number one.
Number two, you talk about intent.
Why have an off-site server in the first place?
Why have a server that is not a part of the State Department, therefore the government record, if you are not intending to traffic in secrecy?
And if you are intending to traffic in secrecy and you happen to be trafficking in top-secret classified data and you are extremely careless, grossly negligent in it, we want somebody like that at the helm of this country.
Here's the rest of the bite.
Seven email chains concern matters that were classified at the top secret special access program at the time they were sent and received.
There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton's position or in the position of those with whom she was corresponding about those matters should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.
All right.
Now, look, I'm going to go out of the limb here.
I don't know Comey.
I only know people who do know Comey.
I first heard of James Comey back when he was John Ashcroft's aide.
He was one of his top deputies.
And Ashcroft is from Missouri.
Impeccable character.
And so Comey benefits from that in terms of my knowledge of him.
I only know people who know Comey, and they say the same things about Comey they said about Pat Fitzgerald.
He's above doubt.
He's a straight shooter.
He's law and order and he's not corruptible and so I've heard all this stuff.
Okay, so let's just go with that.
Yeah, I know his conclusion was no reasonable prosecutor would go after this case, but he has certainly laid out in great detail exactly what she did that is against the law.
And the shield is that she didn't intend it.
He has laid out a case of gross negligence.
He has laid out a case that she was irresponsible in the way she was doing this.
That cannot be denied.
His conclusion, no reasonable prosecutor would go after this case, therefore he's not recommending such.
Fine and dandy.
But it doesn't erase that the substance of his remarks here is to portray Hillary Clinton as grossly negligent and incompetent and reckless.
He did that.
Here's the next bite.
Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.
Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before deciding whether to bring charges.
There are obvious considerations like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent.
Responsible decisions also consider the context of a person's actions and how similar situations have been handled in the past.
In looking back at our investigations into the mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts.
Well, I don't know what to do with that.
I mean, because there are people who have had charges brought against them for this.
There are many who have had charges brought against them.
In cases like this, Comey detailed violations.
They may be grossly negligent.
They may be careless, whatever he detailed violations.
The fact that he says at the end of it, well, I don't think there's evidence of potential violations of the statutes.
Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor.
What I'm thinking here is for you, legal beagles, is even in such a case, prosecutors threaten the perp in order to make some kind of a deal to get some kind of a concession admission of guilt.
It's rare that in a case like this or similar cases that the prosecutors, you know what?
Nothing to see here.
We'll see you later.
Adios Cheerio.
They're always calling the potential defendant's counsel, trying to make some kind of deal, lesser charges for an admission of this, an admission of this.
There was none of that in this case.
There doesn't appear to me that there was any evidence or any intention, any effort to actually find Mrs. Clinton culpable.
Now, I know the reputation of James Comey.
I've cited it myself for you here, too.
But I also know who runs this outfit.
And that's Barack Hussein Obama.
And ever since he and Eric Holder got hold of the DOJ, it has been politicized from top to bottom in every which way you can imagine.
So, you know, I'm going to have to ask people who know these things professionally and more knowledgeably than I do.
But if you look at what Comey's done, if you go back and listen to this like we're doing here, he lays out, he details her negligence, her carelessness.
He mentions the fact that they have, there's evidence.
It's extremely careless, the handling, no evidence of potential violations of the statutes.
Our judgment isn't no reasonable prosecutor to bring such a case.
But he clearly lists item after item after item that makes it look like something seriously wrong went on here.
So in the political sense, there are things to pursue in the political process that go to her competence, her judgment, her qualifications.
Here's one more bite.
As a result, although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case.
I know there will be intense public debate in the wake of this recommendation, as there was throughout the investigation.
What I can assure the American people is that this investigation was done honestly, competently, and independently.
No outside influence of any kind was brought to bear.
I know there were many opinions expressed by people who are not part of the investigation, including people in government, but none of that mattered to us.
Opinions are irrelevant.
And they were all uninformed by insight into our investigation because we did our investigation the right way.
Only facts matter.
And the FBI found them here in an entirely apolitical and professional way.
I couldn't be prouder to be part of this organization.
You know, in a way, I can hear DeGenova, you don't know what you're talking about.
You never did know what you were talking about.
You were out there telling people stuff going on in this office, and it wasn't going on.
You weren't here.
You didn't know.
That's what I hear him saying there.
Not just to Joe DeGenova, but to everybody else who claimed that they had inside sources at the FBI who were saying that there was scuttlebutt, that the FBI would face mass resignations if there wasn't an indictment.
If there wasn't a recommendation for charges, because the goods are there, they've got her.
How many times do we hear this?
And even with all that, I kept saying, folks, we're being played here.
And today we got the final act, and we are being played.
But that doesn't end it.
Look, I mentioned earlier there's a piece in the Washington Post today by Chris Salizza.
And here's its headline.
Hillary Clinton's email problems might be even worse than we thought.
The piece was posted after Comey's press conference.
Begins this way.
Here's the good news for Hillary Clinton.
The FBI has recommended no charges be brought.
Here's the bad news, just about everything else.
And let me give you some pull quotes from this.
Again, Washington Post crystalized, FBI Director Comey dismantled large portions of Clinton's long-told story about her private server and what she sent or received on it during a stirring 15-minute news conference following which he took no questions.
While Comey exonerated Clinton legally speaking, he provided huge amounts of fodder that could badly hamstring her in the court of public opinion.
Exactly the point that I made.
He did exactly that.
He detailed crime after crime after crime, even though there's no prosecution.
He detailed irregularity after irregularity after irregularity.
He detailed impropriety after impropriety.
He detailed gross negligence after gross negligence.
He went through it all.
And that's what Saliza means by.
Well, he may have exonerated her legally, but he provided huge amounts of fodder that could badly hamstring her.
Comey said the FBI found 110 emails on Clinton's server that were classified at the time they were sent or received.
That stands in direct contradiction to her repeated insistence.
She never sent or received any classified emails.
And I'm going to add something else to that.
Those 110 emails and the 36 threads were from the 30,000 emails she deleted.
It's even worse than it stands in direct contradiction to her repeated insistence that she never sent or received any classified emails.
She had 60,000 plus total on that server.
She deleted half of them, saying they were not relevant.
Yoga lessons and Chelsea's wedding and all that.
She sent 30,000 over to the prosecutor, the FBI, the State Department for parsing and examination.
The 30,000 that she did not send, she deleted.
And it was in those 30,000 deleted they found the 110 classified at the time they were sent or received.
Another pull quote.
Now for the key question.
How much do the FBI findings hurt her campaign?
Clinton did avoid indictment, a ruling that would have effectively ended her campaign or left it so badly weakened that there would have been a major move within Democrat circles to replace her.
That said, campaigns are not governed by the ultimate legality of what Clinton did or didn't do.
So while dodging an indictment's a good thing, she isn't under criminal investigation and remains a candidate.
It is a far different thing from being cleared or even close to it in the court of public opinion.
I find this a fascinating admission by an admitted leftist member of the drive-by media that this dodging an indictment is a far thing from being cleared.
In other words, she hasn't been found not guilty.
They just decided not to pursue it on the thin, thin, thin basis that she didn't intend to do any of it.
For a candidate already badly struggling on questions of whether she's honest and trustworthy, and don't forget that, she is, she and Trump are both in trouble.
It's not just Trump.
She is horrible in the polling data.
It's like F. Chuck Todd last week in the NBC Washington or NBC Wall Street Journal poll.
It had her up by five or six.
But every important internal question she was getting creamed, like cares about people like me, best to handle terrorism, best to handle the economy.
She was getting her clock cleaned on every internal issue.
And that's what he's talking about here.
For a candidate already badly struggling on questions of whether she's honest and trustworthy enough to hold the office, Comey's comments are devastating.
Watching them.
I can close my eyes and imagine them spliced into a bevy of 30-second ads, all of which end with the FBI director rebuking Clinton as extremely careless.
It's exactly right.
Again, look, I don't want to impute intentions to anybody because I don't know Comey, but he did find, he did recommend no prosecution, but he laid out step by step an indictment that they choose not to seek.
But he made it clear this woman is not clean and pure as the wind-driven snow.
So he's not going to prosecute.
That leaves it up to Trump.
That leaves it up to Trump and the Trumpists and whoever else in the Republican Party wants to join that effort.
One final pull quote from Chris Delizza: All things considered, this is a very bad day for the Clinton campaign.
It's not the worst outcome, but it badly disrupts her attempts to move beyond the email server story as she seeks to unite the party in advance of the convention later this month.
And it suggests the email issue will haunt her all the way through Election Day on November 8th.
And just to remind you of an alternative theory: that had she been indicted, it might have, Saliza thinks it would have finished her.
I'm not so sure.
If she'd been indicted, you know, these Democrats might have circled the wagons around her like the leftist media did when Dan Rather was canned for forging documents in that story on George W. Bush National Guard.
They circled the wagons and gave him an awards dinner to protect the institution of the media and themselves.
Tom Brok on and Peter Jennings did it.
When Clinton got in trouble with Lewinsky, he was impeached.
Democrats rallied around.
Clinton had 65% approval rating among Democrats.
So it could have been that Hillary could have circled the wagons or had the wagons circled for her.
Democrats could have joined forces.
Or it could have been that they'd have dumped her and brought in Biden.
That's not going to happen.
I've got to take a break.
Hang it.
Be tough.
Be right back.
And we go back to the phones.
This is Kathy in Cleveland, Tennessee.
Great to have you with us.
Hi.
Hello.
Thank you for having me.
You bet.
I called today because I told Sterley, I'm not depressed about this news conference.
To me, we have somebody running that's not a rhino, somebody that will take what Comey said and go with it.
You know, it makes me, it makes me optimistic.
Well, that's the hope.
Yeah, that's the hope.
I've seen a couple of Trump tweets so far today.
And, you know, it's still early in the campaign.
But let me tell you something.
He's not running any ads.
I mean, Chris Salizza writes his piece where he can say he can see, close his eyes and see all these Comey statements and ads.
There aren't any.
Trump's not running any.
Not yet.
Not yet.
It's just like the Swift boat.
It took a couple days to get that going, you know?
Wait, wait, took a couple days to get what going?
Well, back when the Swift boat was in the middle of the street.
Yeah, remember?
And it was on talk radio a couple days later, Fox, and then pretty soon it was the mainstream media.
But, you know, we've never, Romney wouldn't have done this.
McCain wouldn't have done this.
They would have said, well, this just wraps it up, and we know there's nothing there.
And, you know, she would have been pardoned, I think, by Obama anyway, just like Bill, any crimes present, past, future, she would have been pardoned.
I don't think she would have ever been served time.
It just wouldn't, that would have not happened.
So, I mean, I really feel like Comey just laid it out for Trump.
And if he is smart, he'll use it.
And I think he is.
And he's not going to be able to do it.
Well, you know, I didn't want to put it that way.
I was hoping people would conclude that's what I meant when I was going through it because I don't want to impute that motive to him.
But whether Comey intended to or not, you believe that Comey has given Trump a roadmap.
Oh, and he laid it out well.
Yeah.
Well, I think you're right.
Somebody like McCain would not have run with it because the Department of Justice, the FBI are above reproach.
They've recommended no charges.
I cannot see myself taking issue with such revered officers.
You're probably right about that.
I hope Trump does run with it.
I hope the Swift vote guys, that was a pack that came up with that.
George W. Bush didn't have anything to do with that.
That was a pack.
Political action committee that did that.
We'll see if one pops up for Trump that tries to capitalize on this.
And of course, the timing, you don't want to be too early with this stuff.
So we will, let me ask you a question.
Kathy, you're a Trump supporter.
I wasn't initially, but I am now.
How long have you been an enthusiast?
No wrong answer.
I'm just curious because I've got another question, depending on your answer here.
How long have you been an enthusiastic Trumpist?
I think since Ted Cruz dropped out of the race, I could see that that wasn't going anywhere.
Like I said, Trump wasn't my first choice, but he definitely is now because he's not Hillary.
And there's so much at stake in this election, just the courts and all of that.
Right.
Okay.
So, well, you don't really qualify for my question.
Okay.
No, I have friends who have been Trump supporters from the very beginning.
Okay, well, then let me ask you: how do they seem to you now?
Are they still as excited as they ever were?
Yes.
They are.
Yes.
Okay.
Yes, definitely.
All right.
Okay.
Just my friends.
Could I say a shout out to two people that took water girls with me when we were real little, Ann and Jenny, who are listening, I know.
Sure, absolutely.
We're good listeners, Rush.
We've been around a lot of kids.
Oh, God bless you.
I know you all are.
I have to tell you, I went home for a couple of days over the weekend, and we had dinner over at my cousin Steve's.
What was this?
This is Sunday night.
And a couple of federal judges there, because my cousin was presiding over a naturalization ceremony last night on the courthouse steps, the common police courthouse steps.
I was not able to stay for that.
But another federal judge, friend of the families, was in town for it, Judge Benton.
And so we played golf earlier that day.
And one of the guys, my cousin Jim, couldn't make it.
So we went and got a stand-in.
I got a local man by the name of Andrew Morton.
And he's a former patent attorney and an agriculture expert and farmer and so forth.
And he's a millennial.
And at dinner, we got to talking about what is happening to the millennial generation because a bunch of them sitting at the table.
And he said something fascinating to me about his friends.
Now, he's not the kind of millennial that we hear about on college campus.
That's these tender snowflakes that can't handle controversy and don't like opposing point TV.
He's a standard rum-the-mill, he's an all-American kind of guy.
And he said the thing that troubles him most about his generation is, and this was a first, but it totally clicked.
His nickname is Morty.
He said, you know, he looks like Brent Bozell, by the way.
Beard in cooling.
That's why I thought I was playing golf with Brent Bozell.
He said, he's 31, 32.
He said that the people he knows in his age group define good government by how many laws are being made.
And if anybody is perceived to be standing in the way of laws being made, they're the bad guys.
Well, that would mean limited government types are the bad guys to these people.
The more laws you make, that's the sign of success.
The more laws, that's the sign of progress to these people.
We didn't get to that.
That's not laws being upheld.
It's irrelevant to these people.
To them, progress is government action.
Writing laws, dealing with guns, they're of the moment kind of people.
So you have, let's say you have a terror of it, like Orlando.
Government's got to do something.
Government's got to do something.
There's a flood somewhere.
Government's got to do something.
A tornado hit.
Government's going to do something is their attitude.
And if government doesn't do something, it's a crisis.
If government doesn't do something, it's bad.
And government not acting, government not writing law is a sign that things are not going well.
And I sat there and listening to this, and it's something, I guess, you know, when he said it, I instinctively understood it, agreed, but it's, it's, it, it, it's not something that I've automatically associated with millennials.
I've associated other things, but but love of government and and the, no, that's not the way to put it, but just the judgment that writing more laws dealing with the things that are bad are or wrong is the sign of good government.
But we, I don't know how many, how common that is among the entire millennial generation, but there's no greater obstacle we can face to smaller government limited government than having a generation of people who believe that good government equals active writing law, writing new regulations, government.
The more laws, the better.
And in fact, it's the exact opposite that is needed here.
We are so over-regulated.
We are so overlawed, if you will, that it's getting in the way of everything.
It's getting in the way of, I mean, it's just shocking to me.
Now, I've always known that there are those people out there.
Don't misunderstand.
I've always known that there are people who believe government shutdown people.
This brought this home for me.
The reason a government shutdown is bad because the government's not doing it.
The government can't write law.
The government can't fix things.
They look at government action as fixing.
These people have no concept that it is the government breaking everything.
They have no concept or understanding that the government is making the messes.
You and I sit here and we marvel.
Government makes the mess, and then people look to government to fix the mess that they made, which defies common sense.
Why would you, if your kid stands on a stepladder of a chair and keeps busting your chandelier every night, why would you hire the kid to fix the chandelier?
It's essentially what we do.
Government makes a mess of health care.
Government makes a mess of whatever it touches.
Government makes a mess of Social Security.
Government makes a mess of immigration.
You've got to fix it.
You've got to fix it.
And if the government's not doing it, then something's wrong.
And that has to have come from education.
It has to have come from pro-government professors and teachers who have been inculcating these young skulls full of mush with the idea that the only time anything productive ever happens in the country is when the government's doing something.
When a private sector does something, big business does something, it's bad.
The government has to be the ones that do it.
The government has to fix it.
The government has to police it.
The government has to regulate it.
So our work continues to be cut out for it.
Rudy Giuliani was on Fox recently.
I hope to have the audio sometime tomorrow, maybe.
But he said on Fox that if the report that Comey gave today was an FBI background check, then Hillary would never get a security clearance.
You want it summed up in one sentence?
There you go.
The report Comey gave today, if it was a background check that the FBI had done on her, she would never get a security clearance.
Now, no reasonable prosecutor would ever seek charges on these kinds of things.
She didn't intend to do any of this.
But he laid out every gross, negligent act she committed with U.S. national security and top secret data and documents.
You know, the original announcement of Comey's appearance said it was also going to feature QA with reporters, but he didn't.
The report I saw said that Comey was going to address at 11.
By God, he showed up on time, too.
He actually started at 11 o'clock.
But the thing I saw, the promo for it, said that he was going to take reporters' questions later or afterwards.
And I can't remember if I saw that was going to be on camera or off camera, but I don't think he did either way, did he?
Not that that means anything.
I'm just pointing it out.
But I thought Rudy's way of looking at this pretty fascinating.
If this was an FBI background check, there's no way she gets a clearance, which means she could not hold these offices that she's had or is seeking.
She trafficked in classified information.
Comey admits that that happened.
The FBI admits that she was grossly negligent sending and receiving top-secret classified information on a private email server that was not protected.
She has not been cleared, folks.
This is the key.
You're going to have a lot of people say to your Democrat buddies, hey, man, I love it.
Hillary is quick.
She wasn't cleared.
She just wasn't charged.
It's a difference.
Well, that's it.
Another exciting excursion into broadcast excellence is about to come to a close.
Giuliani also said that it would be unreasonable for a prosecutor not to bring charges and that it would be an abdication of duty.
So Rudy, who used to run the U.S. Attorney's Office, he was the U.S. Attorney, Southern District of Manhattan, is in direct opposition to James Comey.
He said, again, that if this were an FBI background check, she would never get a security clearance, and that it would be unreasonable for a prosecutor not to bring charges, that it would be an abdication of duty to not bring charges based on what they uncovered.
Another thing Comey said was that other people might be charged under the same circumstances.
He said, now to be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences.
To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions, but that is not what we are deciding now.
I mean, I don't know how you interpret that other than she's different.
She's not other people.
Other people have faced sanctions or consequences, but she's not going to.
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