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Jan. 13, 2017 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:31
January 13, 2017, Friday, Hour #3
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Hey, greetings.
Welcome back.
Great to have you.
Rush Limbaugh's Open Line Friday.
I'm going to dispense with the open line Friday jingle for now since we're going to kick off here with uh a little chat with Bill Gertz, formerly of the Washington Times, now uh journalist at large, and one of the, if not the greatest reporter on the Pentagon and the Defense Department of Defense Systems, uh National Security of the United States, been around for as long as I can remember.
He's got his new book out.
It's called I War, like an iPhone, the letter I I War, War and Peace, the Information Age.
And Bill, welcome here.
It's uh it's great to talk to you.
It's been a long time.
How are you doing?
Hey, Rush.
I'm doing great.
Great to be on the show.
Thanks so much for having me on.
Uh you're more than welcome.
Now, uh your book covers much, much more than just what's in the news now.
It's uh folks, it's a it's an historical compendium of many of the challenges we've had with cyber attacks going back years and years from North Korea from the ChICOMs, uh cyber attacks we've engaged in, success stories, failures, uh areas were strong and weak and so forth based on Bill's investigation.
But before we get to that all that, since you've written this book and since you have been studying and reporting on the Pentagon and national security for so many years, as you watch the presidential campaign and now the transition, and you you hear like we all do every day that the Russians hacked our elections, that the Russians hacked Hillary Clinton's emails as somebody who knows about cyber wars and cybersecurity.
How do you, Bill Gertz?
I mean, how do you process this stuff?
How do you react to it?
Because you know whether some of the stuff is true, legitimate or not.
So what how do you deal with it yourself?
Yeah, this is an amazing phenomenon.
What we're seeing is what I call information warfare.
Um it's basically uh the kind of warfare that's going to dominate our society because we live in an information age.
And we're we're under assault from all quarters, not just the Russians, the Chinese, uh, the Iranians, uh, and I I even uh put the uh the liberal left in the kind of domestic information warfare.
Um it's uh a broad uh scale assault, and the United States is ill-prepared to deal with it.
We just don't have anything that can counteract these this lies and disinformation the way we did during the Cold War.
By that, do you mean we don't have act we don't have uh secure systems that would block cyber attacks, that we do not have good firewalls, we don't have system in systems in place to be able to identify these attacks when they're happening and be able to stop them.
Yes.
Uh we've learned that the internet is basically a lawless environment, and every time we build defenses, the bad guys find ways around them.
Uh the real solution is to go on the offensive, and under Obama, he has done absolutely nothing to counteract massive uh cyber attacks from the Chinese, now the Russians, and also the the Iranians and North Koreans.
Uh Obama's uh view was he said back in O October, he thought, oh, if we if we do something against the Russians for their hacking, that we start a uh a wild, wild west uh uh exchange of the body.
Well, no, wait a bill, I remember Obama told us that he called Putin in September and told him to cut it out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Obviously uh the message did not get through to the Kremlin.
I wonder why.
Yeah.
Okay, so let's get specifics.
Now I you're fully aware of the politics, and I'm I'm I have to admit I'm being a little unfair to Bill because Bill's book is not per se about about intra-party politics.
It's about the overall vulnerability of our country to all of this uh increasing cyber warfare, and he details how we have been hit uh that people don't know.
In other words, Chinese, Russian, Iranian, even Israeli success stories over the years.
But specifically with everything you know, Bill, when when you hear the actual phrase in the media, Russians hacked the election.
I mean, you know that that's not actually what happened, correct?
Uh actually i it's a combination.
Uh Instead, in the past, cyber attacks were primarily for stealing information for espionage purposes.
That was the specialty of the Chinese.
But in the case of the election campaign, not the vote, but the election campaign, the Russians attacked certain political figures, both sides, you know, Cole and Powell's emails were hacked.
General Breedlov, the NATO commander, his emails were hacked by the Russians.
And then these emails were then leaked to select media that were conduits for Russian propaganda to achieve a certain political goal.
That's the difference here.
It's not just cyber espionage and stealing secrets to help Russian industry or Chinese industry.
It's really trying to influence and w which by the way the Russians, the old Soviet Union propaganda was the coin of the realm.
In fact, Bill, I think one of the if you if you want to try to categorize any of this as a positive one of the things that has come out of this is that the Democrats, the Liberals, whatever, they have had to admit now what they denied for decades, all during the 70s and 80s and 90s.
They denied the Soviet Union was infiltrating American universities.
They denied the Soviet Union was trying to infiltrate the government.
They denied the Soviet Union tried to infiltrate State Department.
They denied the Soviet Union was trying to to to propagandize universities and now they're practically admitting it because it happened to them and their computer systems at the DNC.
Yeah and I can tell you in the early part of the Obama administration when Hillary did her ridiculous reset attempt the U.S. government throughout the law enforcement and national security community was ordered not to say anything negative about Vladimir Putin.
In other words Putin was their central person that they were trying to reset relations with.
Well and then of course Crimea happened they invaded Crimea and things turned south from there.
But there's been no pushback against the Russians.
And Vladimir Putin realized that he's dealing with a patsy in the Obama administration.
That's so crucial to point out, because the Obama administration and the Democrats are trying to position themselves as the warriors opposing Putin.
And Trump and the Republicans are the ones who are trying to sidle up and befriend Putin, which is dangerous because Putin's a bad guy, he's an enemy, and Trump thinks he's a good guy.
When in fact, it was Obama who didn't do anything negative to Putin, who didn't challenge Putin, and who in fact told one of Putin's aides, tell Vladimir I'll have more flexibility after the election they were talking about reducing our nuclear arsenal at that point.
So now the chapter in my book on Russia is titled In Russia President Assassinates You.
This is a guy who has killed his political opponents with impunity and and continues to do so.
This is a bad actor I think we're going to see uh attempts by the Trump administration to try to reset relations but uh Trump said the other day look he may get along with Putin but the chances are that he probably will not it's absolutely clear to me that Putin views the United States as its main enemy and is working to undermine and ultimately destroy the United States.
And that's nothing new.
That's been the uh strategic objective of Russians and then the Soviet Union and now the Russians for all of our lifetimes do you do you uh have any confidence do you have confidence or not that that the that Trump and his emerging national security team have Putin and the Russians properly understood and in perspective?
Are you worried that they don't I think it's uh it's becoming clear that uh he's going to try to reset relations but it's not going to work.
Uh I was encouraged by a number of statements by his nominees General Mattis was spot on in saying look we've got a major threat uh coming out of the Russians uh Rex Tillerson the Secretary of State threw down the gauntlet against the Chinese in the South China Sea he said look not only do they have to stop this but we're going to block China from using the 3,000
acres of islands that they've built in this strategic international waterway as as you have studied all of this you have any impressions yet on whether and I'm sure that's why you write in the book actually how How complacent do you think our population has become to threats against our country from foreign actors like Russia, like North Korea?
For example, you chapter two in your book is about North Korea and and their their rocket program and so forth.
And I'm just share some when when when the North Koreans launch a missile that lands 200 miles nowhere in the middle of the ocean, friends of mine joke that the North Koreans are a bunch of inept jokes and they don't we nobody needs to be worried about them, but you don't think that's the case at all, right?
Oh, absolutely.
I think North Korea is one of the most dangerous threats, and it emerged as a greater threat under Obama, where he ignored uh missile and submarine launch ballistic missile developments, uh, five nuclear tests.
There's been no sanctions imposed on this regime.
This is a regime that has been accused of crimes against humanity.
And here we are in the 21st century, and this regime is allowed to continue.
The reason is is the Obama administration farmed out its North Korea policy to Beijing.
And guess what?
Uh the Chinese communists in Beijing supported the North Korean communists in Pyongyang.
Right, because it's destabilizing and that's to their benefit.
Yeah.
I mean, communists are communists, even though the Norks may be rank amateurs at it on the world stage, but here's now here's something else you write in uh chapter three, folks, which is entitled United States 80% of success is showing up.
This assertion that you make, especially when when I measure it against what we're hearing today.
For example, in setting up this point, folks, the news daily regarding the Trump victory and the transition is that the CIA is utterly competent, that the CIA is on top of everything, and that the CIA is desperately trying to get Trump to listen to him, and the CIA is infallible.
Now, prior to this, the Democrat Party hated the CIA.
Frank Church and other Democrats have tried to impugn and and impair their activities.
Now they're their best friends, but listen to what Bill writes here.
Former CIA operations officer Brad Johnson, quote, if the CIA were directed to conduct information warfare today, it would be unable to do so because it no longer has an effective and capable directorate of operations.
It's right on page 77 of your book.
Now, in this DNA, how in the world can that be?
That we could not mount our own information warfare today if we had to.
I mean, everybody thinks the CIA is on top of everything now.
It's totally alarming.
Uh this has been uh politicization that has been underway for a long time, and it has accelerated under John Brennan, where what happened was they took political appointees, turned them into analysts.
Most of them come from the left-wing academic community anyway.
Oh no.
You're kidding.
See, I've told you folks, they politicize everything.
They've taken political left-wing hacks and turned them into analysts.
Yeah.
And then they send them down to this training center in near Williamsburg and they give them a perfunctory course in uh the directorate of operations make them spies.
These are people who think the United States is the greatest problem in the world.
Yes.
Yeah.
That is the b that that is the problem.
I mean, the the academic community has been uh become an anti-American uh system.
They're part of the new left radicalism uh that made the long march through the institutions, and they uh they reached their zenith under the Obama administration.
Now, in practically every answer that you've given me about the CIA and our national defense, cyber defense, uh every answer outside the campaign.
I've heard you say the Obama administration.
It sounds to me like you're saying that the deterioration has occurred uh during the Obama years, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you're making it sound like it's almost purposeful rather than the result of incompetence or inattention.
It it is purposeful.
Um One of the startling things I uncovered from some of these leaks that came out during the campaign was that uh it was a vetting report for Susan Rice, who would go on to become Obama's national security advisor.
And the vetting report said that she shares the president's view that the United States must engage America's enemies.
Literally.
It said that that that was one of the driving policies of President Obama was to engage America's enemies.
So you have the chance to help uh Iran become a more democratic place back in 2009.
Instead, he sided with the mullahs.
Uh same thing with Cuba.
Uh same thing with Russia and China.
Uh this is a guy who has damaged national security in ways that are going to be felt for decades.
Holy smokes.
Well, I mean, a number of us knew it was bad.
I didn't I I didn't know that they were turning academic hacks into analysts.
I mean, the the problem with that, folks, literally is these are people who think that the problem in the world is the United States as a superpower.
And if they don't see the United States as a solution to anything.
I mean, these are these are Uber leftists.
Um here look further in the same chapter.
And I know about the uh the CIA, or rather the FBI uh wiretapping and monitoring Martin Luther King.
I had no idea that KGB had penetrated Martin Luther King's inner circle.
What what was their purpose there?
Well, that was uh at a time when they were trying to influence the uh black nationalist movement as as a subversive element uh to subvert the United States.
And they had planted uh a number of agents uh within what they called the black nationalist movement.
This was disclosed by a Russian de defector called uh Vasily Metrokin.
What was his name?
Vasily Metrokin.
He wrote a book called the Metrokin Papers, which were uh didn't get a lot of attention, but it was clear that uh uh the uh uh black nationalist movement was was thoroughly penetrated by the KGB.
I thought you said Vitaly Cherkin, who has been a propagandist as long as I've been alive.
No matter what regime is running the Russians, uh is the Soviets or the Russians, he's there.
Uh Bill, I've got one more quick question.
I've got to take a break.
Can you hang on?
Sure.
Okay, Bill Gertz here, folks, with his new book, I War, War and Peace, the Information Age, greatest Pentagon reporter of our lifetime.
Don't go away.
We'll be right back.
And we are back.
Bill Gertz, the book I War, War and Peace, the Information Age.
The Arabian Nuclear Deal.
Uh uh, Bill, there's some confusion.
Uh the Democrats in Obama maintained, I saw him say in his swan song speech that he stopped the Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon.
Other people say, no, this speeds up the process.
What's the truth?
And is there anything about this deal you've uncovered that we don't know that is really eye-opening?
Uh two words, Neville Chamberlain, uh peace in our time.
Uh the Iranian nuclear deal assures that Iran will have nuclear weapons in ten years or less.
Uh this is going to happen.
Uh, just as we saw North Korea sign up to the non-proliferation treaty only to use it as a tool to gain nuclear technology for weapons.
Iran is doing exactly the same thing.
Uh it remains to be seen as to whether the Trump administration will uh uh get rid of this uh terrible agreement.
I I I can't get my arms around the president says he just stopped them from getting a nuclear weapon.
Now, does he think that he did, or is he lying to us?
I mean, I'm I don't mean to put the onus on you, but this this doesn't compute.
Yeah, no, he they uh they are convinced that uh an agreement with based on the quote, the hope that Iran will never uh seek to acquire nuclear weapons is going to be enough to prevent the mullahs in Tehran from developing both nuclear missiles and warheads for those missiles.
That's why the Nettle Chamberlain comparison.
So you you think there's a good faith belief that the Iranians are good buys and good guys.
I wouldn't lie to Obama.
That's what they think.
Yeah.
And it was the whole uh engaging the enemy kind of thing, too.
Well, I and in in uh perusing the book, Bill, we don't have time to get into it now, but there's also he's uncovered some uh uh other information about the San Bernardino attack, how that happened and what it really meant.
Uh and it's that his book is just chocked full.
You know the headlines, you think you know the story, but you don't in terms of what Bill has been able to uh to uncover.
Bill, where where were you working daily now?
You you still submit stuff to the Washington Times?
Yes, I'm I'm a National Security Columnist at the Washington Times, and I'm a senior editor at the Washington Free Beaking and free beacon and uh having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Come on.
Hey, uh Bill, we every everybody on the phone today is getting their choice of a new iPhone 7 or 7 plus.
Would you would you like one or the other?
Uh sure, yeah.
Which one seven plus.
Seven plus.
Who's your who's your carrier?
Uh I have Verizon.
Verizon.
Fine.
Okay.
I'm going to send you an unlocked SIM-free.
Bill knows this jargon if he knows something.
So just whatever, what kind of phone you have now?
I got an iPhone uh six plus.
Fine.
Take the SIM card out, put it in this new one, you're up and running.
I'll be upgrading.
Do you have a color preference, uh, Bill?
Uh uh anything, uh gray or silver or dark, yeah.
Fine and dandy.
I got you covered.
Okay, Bill Gertz, thanks again for your time.
I appreciate it.
Again, his book is I War, War and Peace in the Information.
Bill, don't hang up.
We need to get an address where we can send you the phone.
And we'll take a brief time out here at the bottom, and we will be back and continue right after this.
It is open line Friday.
Rush Limbaugh executing his signed host duties flawlessly zero mistakes.
One other story I haven't touched on other than to allude to the fact I was going to talk about it later.
And now is later.
Later is now.
And it is you may have heard about this today, that the Department of Justice, Inspector General, has announced that they're going to investigate what went on at that Hillary Clinton email investigation.
Now, before you go, yeah, yeah, it's about to no, no, no, no.
The investigation is of Comey.
This is the Obama DOJ.
And the inspector general works for Obama, works for Loretta Lynch.
They're not investigating themselves.
They're not investigating anything about Loretta Lynch getting on the plane with Bill Clinton.
No, no, no, no, no.
They're not explaining anything about investigate why they told the FBI no indictments.
The FBI couldn't get subpoenas because the DOJ wouldn't indict.
The DOJ wouldn't impanel a grand jury.
The FBI was frozen out in its investigation of what went on.
That's one of the reasons Comey held his press conference, because he that was so abnormal.
I mean, FBI directors do not detail investigations that are ending.
The only reason he did, I'm I'm convinced he wanted people to know what they had learned, but the Obama DOJ shut it down.
So now it's payback time.
Andy McCarthy has written extensively about this at National Review Online.
Now, the one of the questions that arises here is, well, wait a minute.
This is just a week before Trump takes office.
What why are they doing this now?
Is Trump obligated to continue this investigation?
And folks, that all depends on what happens with the Inspector General.
Now, the Inspector General is an interesting position.
If you go back to 2000, 2001, when George Bush was sworn in, sworn in.
Bill Clinton, as one of his outgoing appointments, appointed a guy by the name of Fine.
His name was Glenn Fine as the inspector general at the DOJ.
George W. Bush kept the guy in a show of bipartisanship.
This after the Florida aftermath, The recount and all that.
And George W. Bush, in an effort to show collegiality and cooperation and working across the aisle, left Mr. Fine in place.
And this man harassed the Bush Department of Justice at Department of Department of Justice the entire two terms of the Bush administration.
And he is still there.
And so the question becomes what will become of him when Trump becomes president.
And it's it's it's a it's a dicey thing because it's going to be up to Jeff Sessions, essentially.
And once Jeff Sessions is confirmed as attorney general, they will then set about the whole business of nominating the other presidential appointees for top positions in the Department of Justice.
We only know one right now, and that's Kelly Conway's husband, George Conway, who's a brilliant constitutional lawyer.
He has been named solicitor general.
That means he represents the U.S. in cases tried before the Supreme Court, appeals at the Supreme Court.
But besides him, we don't have any other names.
Bush keeping this guy, Glenn Fine in position.
He's a tried and true leftist.
He's an activist, he's a hack.
You know, these inspectors generals are supposed to be totally independent and unaffected by partisanship.
It's not the case with this guy.
So we have not had here's the bot.
We have not had a Republican appointed inspector general in the Justice Department since 1991, folks.
George H.W. Bush is the last Republican president to put the inspector general from a Republican president in office.
We've had Democrat leftist IGs ever since.
And so now it's going to be up to Sessions and Trump to decide who gets the gig.
And of course, there's politics here.
If they get rid of Glenn Fine, who has just started this investigation of Comey and the FBI, you remember what happened when George W. Bush fired a bunch of U.S. attorneys?
That was like the left had a cow.
Even though Bill Clinton did routine, folks, it's SOP, it's standard operating procedure.
Every new president gets rid of the existing U.S. attorneys, because they're political appointees, I don't care what anybody says, and replaces them with his own.
And Trump is going to do that, and they're going to raise holy hell.
And when we get to the inspector generals, will Trump replace this Glenn Fine guy?
And if they do, it's going to be holy hell.
The left will raise holy hell.
I've got a little blurb here about fine being retained by George W. Bush.
Okay.
It's a it's a it's a dicey situation.
But here's something that I learned just before the program began today from a Washington lawyer that we trust.
Obama is trying to move Glenn Fine over to the Defense Department, the same way Clinton did, trying to keep him in office as trying to force him on the Trump Defense Department.
Obama has nominated Glenn Fine this month to serve as the Department of Defense Inspector General.
And they're basically daring Trump to fire a guy that Obama put in one week before Obama leaves.
And I think they're hoping that Trump does get rid of the guy, and they're going to be prepared to raise holy hell when it happens, and to talk about evil partisanship and all of this.
But this investigation of the FBI.
This is just the left getting even.
They think Comey stole the election, working with the Russians.
And of course, again, just to re review, nothing about the DOJ is being investigated at all.
Loretta Lynch meeting with Bill Clinton, refusing to listen to what Comey said, produced in his investigation.
It's more left-wing Democrat politics.
As per usual.
And a brief time out.
We will come back and continue in mere moments.
Have you been keeping up with this Terry Bradshaw, Mike Tomlin, Kerfuffle?
Well, there's an to me, this is an interesting cultural thing.
It started with Bradshaw on one of the Fox Cable Networks saying he didn't think this Tomlin, the coach of the Steelers, was particularly good coach.
He's more like a cheerleader.
We don't know what he does.
He just rah-rahs on the sideline.
This was considered to be profoundly insulting.
Terry Bradshaw Steelers' royalty.
Why go out and attack the head coach?
Nobody can figure it out.
Well, it's called creating controversy getting an audience.
Anyway, Tomlin reacted to it and said, you know what?
He didn't care.
He really was a Dallas Cowboys fan going up, particularly Thomas Hollywood Henderson.
Well, Hollywood Henderson is a guy who said before one of the Cowboys Steelers Super Bowls in the 70s that if you spotted Bradsaw the the C and the T, he still couldn't spell cat.
So that that is how Tomlin decided to get back.
He admitted he's not a great coach yet.
He hadn't been doing it long enough to have enough championship.
Bradshaw's right about that, but I this cheerleader stuff that's uh Brad Shaw apologized.
But then said this is where it gets interesting to me.
Bradshaw then said Mike shouldn't have come back at me.
Mike shouldn't have responded.
Now, the young millennial sports writers are taking Brad Shaw's reaction and saying, Well, who does this guy think he is?
Is he think he can just sit out there and say whatever he wants, and whoever he says it about has no right to come back?
And it's not what Brad Shaw was saying.
This is cultural.
Bradshaw was saying, if I were Tomlin, I would have ignored it.
I wouldn't have paid me any mind.
I would have let it go, but Mike responded to me.
Mike shouldn't have responded.
And these young people who do not understand that, because everything to them is an online battle.
Screw you, no, screw you.
Up yours, no, up yours.
And then how these they don't it it's a fascinating cultural illustration to me.
That they think Bradshaw was saying that Tomlin had no right to come back at him.
And they think Bradshaw's stupid.
They're totally misunderstanding Bradshaw's point.
Even though I looked at it, he kind of made it even clearer in his statement what he was saying, but they missed it.
Here is Mallory.
Mallory is in Manhattan.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
Thanks for having me on time listener and a rush baby, so this is exciting.
Well, thank you very much.
So I wanted to talk a little bit about my experiences being a born and raised New Yorker and uh not necessarily having the same political beliefs as a lot of my peers.
Um I'm 29 years old.
I work in the music industry.
I grew up in New York.
And, you know, during the Bush era, things were tough, but they have got me much, much more difficult and antagonistic towards me.
Um today, actually, one of my best friends called me or compared me to someone who listened to Joseph Goebbels so it was uh it was a tough day because this is someone who I'd sort of seen as being more conservative, a little bit more like-minded, and it just seems like um from a New Yorker's perspective, there's no hope for people under the age of like 35.
And I don't know, you know, but what do you what do you think about that?
Well, is this conservative?
Is this conservative liberal or they know you're a Trump supporter and they're not?
Um, you know, it used to be conservative liberal, and then when I started supporting Trump, it got even more extreme.
I mean, you know, uh the few times that I do talk politics with people in my office, I usually have to be very um sort of like uh make fun of myself.
No, I laughed it off.
I I've had my forays into the entertainment business.
Some would say I'm in it, and I'm ostracized from that element of it too.
Um I've I those people beyond me, they're they're not rooted in the same world that you're living in.
And And they believe that they are the epitome of tolerance and understanding when they have none.
I I mean that's from firsthand perspective exactly what I've seen.
The number of times people have uh giggled and cried at uh Joe and Barack being best friends and talked about how much they love Michelle.
That was actually what this conversation, you know, be me being called or referenced to Joseph Goebbels about was basically me saying that to my friend you're buying into a narrative about Barack and Joe being best friends over that medal of freedom, which was such a joke.
Um that just rubbed me in a way that it had never rubbed me before.
Uh I've thought about calling you before, but it pushed me over the edge, you know.
Yeah, you're gonna it's like students in school.
What do you do?
Do you pipe up and risk the grade?
In your case, do you pipe up and risk friendships and maybe getting jobs?
A do you shut up and eat it?
And and uh and and try to live amongst them uh being a little bit phony.
And it's a very tough thing.
The problem is they're not who they say they are.
They're not open-minded, they're not tolerant, they're not understanding, and they don't even live in the same reality you do.
Look, I'm out of time here, Mallory.
I appreciate your call.
Mr. Snerdley will inquire as to whether or not you'd like a new iPhone 7 or 7 Plus and what kind, the carrier color and all that in the airpods.
We have to take a brief final break here, folks.
We'll be back and wrap it up in a minute.
All right, I still have one thing.
I I talked about it some, but I wanted to get in more detail about the media and the left thinking Trump is blowing up all these societal norms.
Oh, this is horrible.
Thousands of years of of common normal behavior, Trump is blowing the smithereens.
I can't wait to expose this, but I ran out of time today, so we'll do that Monday and whatever else happens between now and then.
We'll see you then, folks.
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