Published on Apr 24, 2019
RUSH LIMBAUGH: HILLARY CLINTON ‘NEEDS TO BE INDICTED AND SHE NEEDS TO BE IN JAIL’
‘Unelected people came close to pulling off what is a coup,’ he says
APRIL 24, 2019
Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh tore into Democrat presidential loser Hillary Clinton, saying she is the person who colluded with Russia, not President Trump.
“Hillary Clinton is who tried to rig a presidential election…Hillary Clinton and her pals in the Obama Department of Justice and the FBI, they are the ones who colluded with the Russians. They colluded to produce this entirely bogus Steele Dossier,” Limbaugh said Monday on Fox News.
“Talk about irony,” he continued. “For Hillary Clinton to be talking about impeaching Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton needs to be investigated, she needs to be indicted and she needs to be in jail [with] many of her co-conspirators in this whole sordid affair.”
Limbaugh went on to say that Clinton’s attempts to overthrow Trump using the debunked Steele Dossier compiled with Russian intelligence amounted to the real collusion.
“Unelected people came close to pulling off what is a coup,” said the Republican host.
“Who’s working with Russians? Steele, Hillary’s guy! They are working with the Russians…the dossier traces right back to Hillary and her campaign in the DNC.”
Limbaugh’s comments come after Clinton said that Trump would have been indicted for collusion if he wasn’t the president.
“I think there is enough there that any other person who had engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted,” Clinton said Monday during the Time 100 conference.
MUELLER REPORT CONTAINS CLAIM RUSSIA TAPED BILL CLINTON, MONICA LEWINSKY HAVING PHONE SEX
Reference was redacted from public version of report
By Steven Nelson
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report mentions a claim that Russians recorded President Bill Clinton having phone sex with White House intern Monica Lewinsky — but the reference was redacted from the version released to the public.
The redaction is likely to anger Republicans, because the allegation has been known since at least 2001 and the Mueller report’s reference to a claim that President Trump watched prostitutes urinating in a Moscow hotel room was not struck out.
Clinton allegedly was recorded by Russia in the 1990s, allowing Russia to learn of the affair before American officials. A reference to the Clinton intercept was redacted from the Mueller report to protect “personal privacy,” but sources told the Washington Examiner that the context makes clear what was blacked out.
According to the report, Center for the National Interest President Dimitri Simes sent Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner a 2016 email with recommended talking points to counter Hillary Clinton’s Russia attacks. The email referenced “a well-documented story of highly questionable connections” between Bill Clinton and Russia.
[Related: Monica Lewinsky: ‘If. f–king. only’ a four-page summary of the Starr Report was released]
At a meeting in New York, Simes told Kushner the details: Russia allegedly recorded President Clinton on the phone with Lewinsky, opening questions of foreign leverage over the ex-president-turned-potential first spouse.
“During the August 17 meeting, Simes provided Kushner the Clinton-related information that he had promised. Simes told Kushner that, [redacted],” the Mueller report says. “Simes claimed that he had received this information from former CIA and Reagan White House official Fritz Ermarth, who claimed to have learned it from U.S. intelligence sources, not from Russians.”
Ermarth, 78, a 25-year CIA veteran and chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 1988 to 1993, said he was concerned with the wording in the report. He said the report inaccurately suggests he mishandled classified information, when in fact he used public sourcing.
“The line in the Mueller report that says any of this was based on intelligence information is the product either of faulty remembering by Dimitri or a flawed inference … or a hostile fabrication by the Mueller people,” Ermarth said. “[The report wording] implies my misuse of intelligence or use of intelligence that is classified in this context. And that is completely false.”
Ermarth thinks he told Simes that the Clinton-Lewinsky phone call was intercepted while the president was traveling on Air Force One, but that detail is believed to not have been conveyed to Kushner or included in the report.
[Also read: Monica Lewinsky dishes details on infamous dress]
The former CIA officer, who was not interviewed by Mueller, said he discussed the intercept with Simes during a trip to Washington in either 2014 or 2015. The story’s omission from the Mueller report hints at a double standard for the Clintons, he said.
Mueller spokesman Peter Carr declined to comment, as did Simes. A White House spokesman and Kushner attorney Abbe Lowell did not respond to requests for comment.
The report was redacted by Justice Department leadership in cooperation with Mueller’s team. There were 855 redactions, according to the Smoking Gun. Only 7% of of those redactions were justified by “personal privacy,” according to an analysis by Vox. Most information was withheld because it involved grand jury deliberations or because it could harm an ongoing criminal case.
According to the report, Simes told investigators Kushner appeared to consider the phone-sex story “old news,” as news outlets had long ago reported that Russia had advanced knowledge about Lewinsky. Meanwhile, Kushner told Mueller’s team he did not receive information from Simes that could be “operationalized” and doubted new negative information could be unearthed on the Clintons.
Though the report was redacted to protect the former president’s privacy, it does reference an alleged sex tape featuring Trump watching prostitutes urinate in a Moscow hotel. The Mueller report says Russian businessman Giorgi Rtskhiladze texted former Trump attorney Michael Cohen that he “[s]topped flow of tapes from Russia.” Rtskhiladze told Mueller’s team that “he was told the tapes were fake, but he did not communicate that to Cohen.”
MSM defends ‘extremely accurate’ Russiagate coverage despite Mueller report
Even with the ‘Russian collusion’ narrative buried by the Mueller report, some mainstream journalists have come out to claim their anti-Trump coverage was backed up by the report. Were they reading a different report?
The Mueller report, CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz said on Thursday, “really corroborated a lot of the good journalism that was done” during the last two years.
“One of my main conclusions from the #MuellerReport so far is that the vast majority of *reporting* on Trump and Russia was extremely accurate,” GQ magazine’s Julia Ioffe chimed in.
Prokupecz is not entirely wrong. Both CNN and Mueller’s team shared an obsession with chronicling every last inconsequential encounter between anyone connected to candidate Trump and anyone remotely connected to Russia, no matter how peripheral. From handshakes at the Republican National Convention to missed calls and unanswered emails, Mueller’s report is completely absent of bombshells, but heavy on humdrum contacts.
When it came to examining these tidbits, however, they were often completely wrong.
Both Mueller and the media focused heavily on the infamous Trump Tower meeting, during which Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner met with a Russian delegation to discuss US/Russian relations, and potentially damaging information to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The meeting was, as Kushner told Manafort, a “waste of time,” and no information was provided.
Not to CNN, who reported the “collusion bombshell” that President Trump knew about the meeting in advance, accompanying the headline with the lede: “holy crap.” Of course, the source for the article was none other than former Trump lawyer and convicted perjurer Michael Cohen, but that didn’t stop CNN from suggesting that Cohen’s word could “be the biggest step to date in proving real collusion,” and finishing with the poetic and barf-inducing: “Where have you gone Robert Mueller? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”
Well, Mueller was investigating, and found “no documentary evidence” that Trump knew about the meeting or its “Russian connection.” Sorry CNN.
And it wasn’t just Trump tower. CNN claimed that Trump Jr. was given “advanced access” to the WikiLeaks archive of leaked Democratic Party emails in 2016. Mueller’s report proved this to be false, and even at the time CNN issued a retraction. A year later, three CNN employees resigned over a false story about an alleged investigation into “a Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials.”
CNN was far from the only outlet to cry collusion where Mueller found none. Buzzfeed famously broke the scoop earlier this year that Trump had directly instructed Cohen to lie to Congress about shelved plans to build a Trump Tower property in Moscow. Buzzfeed’s lie was so egregious that Mueller himself spoke out and denied it, three months before the report landed.
As the media peddled conspiracy after conspiracy about Trump and Russia, Mueller’s team combed through federal statutes, looking for a way to make something stick. They ultimately failed to “establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
CNN had circled the wagons ever since Attorney General William Barr released a summary of the report’s main findings late last month, with host Jake Tapper claiming “I don’t know anybody that got anything wrong” in the network’s two years of puffing from the collusion crack pipe.
“We never stated that there was conspiracy/collusion,” Tapper tweeted at the time. “Yes some others did.”
CNN certainly dropped enough “collusion bombshells,” and regularly featured guests who swore up and down that collusion had taken place. Tapper himself seemed happy to send his Twitter followers to articles claiming the same, including one from the Washington Post entitled “bungled collusion is still collusion.”
Now, several weeks and a full report later, the business end of that crack pipe is still hot to the touch. After a panel discussion attacking Attorney General Barr for his “excessive” pronouncement that there was “no collusion,” CNN’s chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin drew his own conclusion, tweeting that Trump’s frustration with the investigation against him was somehow “evidence of guilt.”’
Never change, CNN.
‘Blink twice if you’re ok!’ Twitter watches Rod Rosenstein’s eyes for proof of collusion
Eagle-eyed Russiagaters landed on potential new evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia on Thursday: Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wasn’t blinking enough during his boss’s press conference on the Mueller report.
Twitter lit up during Attorney General William Barr’s press conference in advance of the release of a partly-redacted version of the report, with many speculating that Rosenstein’s facial movements — or lack thereof — were providing clues about the contents of the full report.
Some found Rosenstein’s face and insufficient number of blinks “disturbing.”
“Blink twice if you are ok Rod Rosenstein,” wrote former State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, whose calls were echoed by a former Hillary Clinton aide urging him to “please blink twice if Barr is mischaracterizing the report.”
Rosenstein “does not look like man at peace,” NBC reporter Ken Dilanian chimed in, perhaps hoping to do his bit to keep the conspiracy alive.
Rep. Nadler ‘Deeply Troubled’ White House Briefed On Mueller Report Before Release. Here’s What He Said About Starr Report In 1998.
By Ashe Schow
Politicians wouldn’t be politicians without a healthy dose of hypocrisy.
Daily Wire TV
The latest example comes from Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), who tweeted Wednesday afternoon that he was “deeply troubled” that the White House was able to get a briefing on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report before it was released.
“I’m deeply troubled by reports that the WH is being briefed on the Mueller report AHEAD of its release. Now, DOJ is informing us we will not receive the report until around 11/12 tomorrow afternoon — AFTER Barr’s press conference. This is wrong,” Nadler tweeted.
So, the White House was briefed before everyone else. Maybe some people see this as a problem, but Nadler’s dismay is simply not believable because of how he responded to the release of an investigation report when the president was a Democrat. Specifically, when that Democrat was President Bill Clinton.
Way back in 1998, America was waiting for Ken Starr’s report on Clinton’s sex scandals to be released. On September 11, 1998, Nadler took to the House floor to decry the fact that Clinton was not able to see the report before it was publicly released “se he can prepare a response.”
“What is at issue here this morning is not his conduct but the fairness of the resolution before us, which is manifestly and grossly unfair,” Nadler said at the time. “It is manifestly unfair because it denies the President the privilege we have given to every other person accused, as the gentleman from Michigan stated, the ability to see the accusation before it is released publicly so he can prepare a response.”
So, Trump getting briefed on the report before its release is “deeply trouble[ing]” but allowing Clinton to see a report before it was released was the height of fairness? Got it.
The hypocrisy was pointed out on Twitter by Jay Caruso, the deputy editor of the Washington Examiner’s magazine.
“Oh, now you’re troubled? In 1998 you said it was ‘manifestly and grossly unfair’ that President Clinton didn’t get to see the Starr report before it was ‘released publicly so he can prepare a response,’” Caruso tweeted.
This is the same congressman who said in early March that he planned to investigate Trump for “obstruction” if and when Mueller found no collusion, which he didn’t.
“Tomorrow, we will be issuing document requests to over 60 different people and individuals from the White House to the Department of Justice, Donald Trump, Jr., Allen Weisselberg, to begin the investigations to present the case to the American people about obstruction of justice, corruption and abuse of power,” Nadler said on ABC at the time.
Mueller recommended no further indictments, and Attorney General William Barr said there was insufficient evidence to make the case for obstruction. As a side note, the claim is that Trump “obstructed” an investigation into a crime that never happened.
AG Barr has ‘no objection’ to Mueller testifying as Democrats say he ‘spun’ report in Trump’s favor
US Attorney General William Barr has “no objection” to Special Counsel Robert Mueller testifying before Congress regarding his investigations into now-disproven “collusion” between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian officials.
Barr was addressing reporters gathered for a press conference ahead of the release of what is expected to be a “lightly redacted” version over Mueller’s final report.
During his remarks, Barr reaffirmed to reporters that the two-year long investigation concluded that there was “no evidence” that any American — whether part of Trump’s campaign or otherwise — colluded with Russian officials in an attempt to sway the outcome of the election. Barr quoted the report itself and was emphatic about the fact that there was “no collusion” during the campaign.
Democrats, however, have been speculating that Barr has spun the report in Trump’s favor and want to hear directly from Mueller. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler tweeted on Thursday that Congress must hear from Mueller “in person” to “better understand” the findings of the report.
Minutes after Barr wrapped up his press conference, Nadler published a letter asking Mueller to testify no later than May 23.
House speaker Nancy Pelosi attacked Barr and the “staggering partisan effort” by the Trump administration to “spin” the public’s view of the Mueller report. It is unclear whether Pelosi believes Barr is lying about the report’s contents or mischaracterizing Mueller’s findings, but with the report to be released in a matter of hours, the public will be able to assess the situation for themselves.
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