Durham Disputes The IG Report and Rush Limbaugh Says “This is big!”

Here's the transcript from El Rushbo's show today:

RUSH: The IG report is out. Nobody’s read it in detail yet, but they’ve presented a summary, and the Drive-By Media’s all over it. And let me tell you what it is. The FBI’s application for a FISA warrant to spy on a Trump campaign volunteer was perfectly fine. There was no political bias whatsoever on the part of McCabe or Comey or Strzok. Neither Comey nor McCabe nor Strzok showed any bias in their investigation. Oh, and a PS: Climate change is real and we all only have 12 years to live.

I told you this is what the IG report was gonna say. This guy’s a swamp rat. Now, here’s what it means. And, by the way, in a previous IG report James Comey — people have forgotten this. In a previous inspector general report on something — it was about, I think, the press conference he did with the Hillary Clinton emails. He was referred for criminal prosecution, and the DOJ refused to do it. Horowitz cannot charge anybody with anything. The IG cannot prosecute, cannot charge. All he can do is refer, suggest.

And he suggested in a previous report that Comey be charged. And the DOJ said, “Nah, not gonna do it.” Now, what this means — here’s a statement from Barr. “The inspector general’s report now makes clear the FBI launched an intrusive investigation and found 17 areas of misconduct in the FISA warrant application, that it launched an intrusive investigation into a presidential campaign on the thinnest of — this is Barr’s statement on the IG report. So what’s the conflict?

If Barr is saying that the IG report proves that the FBI launched an intrusive campaign into a presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions, then how can there be no political bias shown by Comey or McCabe or Strzok? Let me explain this to you. As I understand it, all that means is that Horowitz did not encounter a witness who said so. It doesn’t mean that there wasn’t. It just means he didn’t find any because nobody copped to it.

These IG reports are not what everybody thinks they are. It’s more like a watchdog, but there’s a protective — this is not BIA. This is not the Bureau of Internal Affairs. Do not be confused. Everybody associates the inspector general with the equivalent of internal affairs at a police department. It’s not the same at all. When the IG comes to do an investigation, nobody quakes in their boots. If internal affairs is after you, and you’re a cop, you’re not happy. And all it means is is that nobody admitted and no witnesses provided any evidence that there was any political bias.

So if the IG says to McCabe, “Were you motivated by political bias?” “Oh, no, not at all, Mr. Horowitz.” “Okay. Fine.” You can’t find any evidence for it because there wasn’t any testimony. As far as I’m concerned, just because he couldn’t find a witness — of course they’re all circling the wagons in there. You think they’re gonna spill the beans on each other? That’s for later. That is for the Durham investigation. And Barr’s statement here that the DOJ IG report makes clear the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a campaign on the thinnest of suspicions, that ought to reassure everybody. That’s the attorney general’s assessment of the report now.

RUSH:  Okay.  A couple things happened during the break. So we’ll get to the phones here in just a second.  Mark Meadows has just spent two hours being shown and having reviewed for him the IG report.  He has two tweets.  First tweet: “I just got out of a nearly 2 hour briefing on the IG report. It is deeply disturbing. Some former FBI and DOJ officials are about to have some serious explaining to do.”  The second tweet: “And after reading this, it’s no wonder we’ve been seeing defensive leaks in the New York Times and CNN.

“And that the Democrats rushed to hold an impeachment hearing the same day,” to cover this up. “It’s every bit as bad as advertised. And certainly worse than the media has been suggesting.”  So it looks like the best they’ve got is to say that the IG couldn’t find any political bias to explain what happened.  But one of the things that the IG report details is that the FBI relied totally on the Steele dossier for the FISA warrant, and that they never cared who paid for it or whether it was verified.

That is damning.  That confirms so much of what many of us have known, that the dossier was all they ever had, that it was never verified. It was Hillary Clinton opposition research, and apparently the report mentions that that’s all they had to get the FISA warrant, and that the FBI knew that’s all they had. They knew that it was unverified and that they were not interested in who paid for it.  Now, how you get that without then concluding there was political bias, I don’t know.

Unless Horowitz can’t presume anything, and if nobody alleged it and if nobody admitted to bias, then he can’t report that there was any.  But that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t some.  There have been. There have been defensive leaks now for the past three or four days suggesting the IG report, “Ah, nothing to see here.  This thing is gonna pretty much confirm that the investigation was legitimate and everything about it was okay,” and apparently that’s not the thrust of this report.

So it’s gonna be trickling out, and — exactly, by the way, as I predicted — Fox has dumped out of the hearings now to cover this.  CNN has not dumped out of the hearings to cover this, which is another indication that it’s not good.  If the IG report… If the IG report were a total exoneration, CNN would cut away from these impeachment hearings and go and report it, but they are not.

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, an even bigger piece of news, if it’s possible.  The special counsel appointed by Attorney General Barr to look into the coup, John Durham, has issued a statement: “I have the utmost respect for the mission of the Office of Inspector General and the comprehensive work that went into the report prepared by Mr. Horowitz and his staff.  However, our investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department.”

What that means is exactly what I told you: The reason there’s no political bias found is that nobody that Horowitz talked to admitted any, and Horowitz can only talk to DOJ people.  He can only talk to people in the midst of this operation, Crossfire Hurricane, and of course none of them were gonna admit that they were politically biased.  So Horowitz reports that he found none.  But Durham says, “Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities…

“Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the inspector general that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.”  This is a slap in the face.  This is John Durham telling Horowitz (translated), “Your whole take on this is not true.  It’s not right.  We have more evidence than you’ve found.  We don’t agree at all with your conclusion that the beginnings of this were warranted and justified.”

That is why Barr’s statement today is as, shall we say, biting of the inspector general’s report as it is.  So again, John Durham — and let me say something about this, by the way.  Let me point something out.  Do you realize how unusual this is?  For example, during the Mueller investigation with all the wild-ass, crazy crap being reported, did he ever pop up and say, “No, no. That’s not right! No, no, that’s not right”?

Only one time.   It was almost near the end when BuzzFeed or some Millennial newsgroup reported something outrageous, and Mueller said, “That just isn’t true. We haven’t found that. We didn’t say that.”  For this guy, for John Durham — a fellow DOJ investigator — to issue a statement expressing abject disagreement with the conclusion in the IG report? That, my friends, is big.  That kind of thing doesn’t happen, but Durham felt compelled.

After reading the IG’s report and then measuring and balancing it against what he found, he felt compelled to issue a statement stating not that he just disagrees, but that he has way beyond what Horowitz has, and that’s why he disagrees.  There’s another reason this is happening.  I gotta be very careful pointing this out, however.  You don’t want to tell anybody I said this.  But that’s the political component of this.  Barr knows exactly what’s going on here. The whole thing, folks — every damn bit of this — is a political operation, is a silent coup political operation to get rid of Donald Trump.

Durham knows that his report’s not ready yet.  He’s got some time yet remaining, a lot of witnesses to go.  He’s got a grand jury, which means there are gonna be criminal indictments here, and he doesn’t want this… He and Barr both do not want this misleading conclusion from the inspector general to go unanswered in the public domain, for both legal and political reasons.  This is big.  This is a very, very good thing that Durham did this.

RUSH:  Another tweet here from Mark Meadows who has spent two hours seeing the inspector general report.  He says, “Wow… page 341. IG says FBI used an Aug. 2016 ‘defensive briefing’ with the Trump campaign as an ‘opportunity to gather potentially relevant investigative information’ about Michael Flynn.”  In other words, what the IG report says — and it really… By the way, from everything I’ve been able to tell so far (while digesting it all while also doing the award-winning program here), this IG report slams the FBI on all kinds of things.

The original report was they could find no political bias.  That’s the best they’ve got, and all that means is that the inspector general didn’t encounter anybody who admitted it, not that he didn’t find it.  And we know that Durham has issued a statement disagreeing almost categorically with the IG report that says the beginning of this investigation was warranted and valid.  So fireworks are coming.

But this page 341: “FBI used an Aug. 2016 ‘defensive briefing’ with the Trump campaign as an ‘opportunity to gather potentially relevant investigative information’… on Michael Flynn.” What that means is you got presidential campaigns.  Both of them get briefings — foreign policy, defense, you name it — because one of the two’s gonna be elected president and you want them inaugurated hitting the ground running.

You don’t want ’em to know nothing.  You want ’em to be up to speed. It’s common practice. It’s been that way for many, many, many years that both campaigns — well, the out-of-power campaign — gets briefings.  What this report says is the FBI was using these briefings to conduct investigations on people who did not know they were being investigated, like Flynn.

Flynn thinks he was literally being briefed.  He’s the incoming national security adviser for Trump.  He thinks he’s being briefed.  They’re running an investigation on him, and the IG report says the FBI was doing this frequently — which aligns perfectly with so much of what we know about the way the FBI operated here.