Rush Limbaugh: Felt Ruins Future Woodward & Bernstein Book

RUSH: (AP) "W. Mark Felt, who retired from the FBI after--" Have you ever heard of him, Mr. Snerdley? I haven't heard of him either but MSNBC, Chris Matthews, "Oh, yeah, yeah, long been one of the suspects." Come on, Chris, nobody ever heard of this guy. First time I've ever heard of his name. "W. Mark Felt, who retired from the FBI after rising to its second most senior position, has identified himself as the 'Deep Throat' source quoted by The Washington Post to break the Watergate scandal that led to President Nixon's resignation. 'I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat,' he told John D. O'Connor, the author of Vanity Fair's exclusive that appears in its July issue. Felt, now 91 and living in Santa Rosa, Calif., reportedly gave O'Connor permission to disclose his identity. Felt said he was 'only doing his duty' and did not seek to bring down Nixon over the cover-up of a break-in at Democratic Party offices in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C." Now, he was head of the FBI's investigative division at the time. So basically what -- (Laughter) what we have here is an FBI guy leaking criminal investigative information to reporters. (Laughter) Great, folks. Let's celebrate this guy. Let's celebrate him.

Now, this guy is a hero to the left today. Fox isn't doing anything on this right now. CNN has gone wall to wall with this, since about 11:45. They did it wall to wall at 11:25. They're talking to Jeffrey Toobin. They're talking to Bill Schneider. They're talking to a bunch of people. What does it all mean? The Vanity Fair story, I have it, it's in a PDF version, 7 pages, felt worried that he could be prosecuted if he came forward too soon. I wonder why he worried about that? Here's the guy heading up the investigative division at the time, the FBI, leaking criminal investigative information to reporters. I wonder why he thought that he could get in trouble over that? Anyway, there is a little silver lining here in the cloud, folks, and that is that a giant reveal book or stories, whatever, that Woodward and Bernstein had planned are now up in smoke. Their thunder has been stolen and I guess all we're waiting on now is for one of them or both of them to come forward and confirm that W. Mark Felt was, indeed, their guy. Was Deep Throat.

RUSH: CNN is still doing the Deep Throat story! They're coming up on an hour almost on the Deep Throat story. Developing story. What's the news? We got a guy claiming to be Deep Throat. This is CNN's 25th anniversary, by the way. They're celebrating 25 years and one of the things that CNN thinks they've got to do is get back to doing what they did and stop letting themselves be defined by their enemies. And I'm thinking, "CNN, you kind of helped define yourselves." I mean, it wasn't just your competitors that defined you. They're all over this Deep Throat stuff. Now, you might say, "So what, Rush?" Well, here again, ladies and gentlemen, time to learn a little lesson. This is a template. Deep Throat's a hero to the left. They're so happy to have learned who this guy is, we're going to celebrate this guy, give him the Congressional medal of freedom or honor or whatever it is. This guy is going to become the new hero. He came forward. Here he's 91 years old, obviously before he dies, to receive the accolades now, and we're just reliving 72 all over again, reliving the Nixon resignation. We're reliving what rotten guy Nixon was. We're reminding the country what a horrible time it was, and what a great job the media did, Woodward and Bernstein, in getting rid of Nixon.

It's important to understand this because the template for going after Bush was forged right here with Watergate. W. Mark Felt and the whole press push to force a president out of office survives to this day. Whenever another Republican gets into office, the same tactic is employed. Watergate is the template. Same thing with the Vietnam War. You know, you have various heroes of the Vietnam War according to the left and those are the people that caused us to lose it and so those are the two templates that pretty much guide the mainstream press today and, you know, CNN has many people asking, "I don't understand why people think we're liberal." An hour on Deep Throat? While there's other news going on, an hour with analysis on Deep Throat? It kind of identifies what is most important to you and of course this is really the press talking about itself, and heaping praise on itself and slapping itself on the back saying, "Oh, wow, this is such a great job we did." Now here's the guy that came forward and made it all possible, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. As I say, there's a silver lining in the cloud and that is that Woodward and Bernstein have now been denied their big reveal story which-- (interruption) What Mr. Snerdley? What's the -- uh-huh, uh-huh. Okay, that's a good point. Dawn has mentioned I might want to advise some of you in the audience, the youngsters out there, how Deep Throat got his name, because with events that have happened subsequent to Deep Throat, there might be some in this country, particularly young people, who get the wrong idea about -- well, you have the Clinton years and you have the modern pop culture.

We got all these stories from high school how popular oral sex is. I wouldn't blame America's youngsters if they thought W. Mark Felt -- well, you know. So the term Deep Throat for you youngsters out there simply is the term Woodward and Bernstein assigned to the guy leaking all of this inside data about what had happened at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. Lawrence O'Brien was the chairman of the party back then. He later went to the NBA as the commissioner of the National Basketball Association. Yes, he did. Lawrence O'Brien. Larry O'Brien was indeed the NBA commissioner.

But Deep Throat, they met him in a parking lot, a parking garage. He was wearing a trench coat. He was immortalized, by the way, in the movie Trading Places with Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy, although this Deep Throat was selling crop reports to a couple of crooked Wall Street brokers. But still, nevertheless, that Deep Throat was a rotten guy. This Deep Throat is a hero. But Deep Throat simply has to do with the fact that he knew a lot and he leaked it. He spoke it and that's the reference to Deep Throat. Please, you youngsters, don't get any incorrect ideas about this.

RUSH: To Annapolis, Maryland. We'll start today with Harry. Nice to have you, sir. Welcome to the program.

CALLER: Good. I'm a first-time caller, first time through. I'm surprised I got through this quick. I was just calling, talking about, you know, Mark Felt. He was in the news back in the '70s, him and another high ranking bureau official named Miller, remember, were indicted for supposedly violating the rights of subversive groups and antiwar groups back during the Vietnam War.

CALLER: And Carter apparently pardoned all the people who were deserters and draft dodgers and all. Well, when Reagan got into office, he decided that if these people who were draft dodgers and deserters could get pardoned while with Miller and Felt, they could, you know, also be pardoned for them trying to maintain the security of the country, so he had been in the news before. Very high-profile news. So it was quite a story at that time.

RUSH: Yeah, it was. I have a copy of the actual pardon itself. It's from April 15th of 1981. All I said was, I don't remember the guy. I don't remember this pardon. It was April 15th, 1981. This was just, you know, three months, four months after Reagan had assumed office. At the time, folks, I was busy. I was in charge of ceremonial first pitchers and National Anthem singers at the Kansas City Royals and 1980 was a World Series year for the Royals and I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to this stuff to this degree at that time. But I did hear that Chris Matthews said today that this guy, Felt, W. Mark Felt, had long been on the upper tier of suspects for Deep Throat. And that's what I've not heard. Have you heard that, Mr. Snerdley? Here's the way the -- (interruption) oh, Al Haig, I ran into him on the golf course Saturday, by the way. Yeah, it's always fun to run into General Haig. He was actually coming off the tennis court. We had some very saucy conversations about the Senate Republicans and the gang of seven, the gang of 14, but it's always fun to run into him. He always has interesting comments about foreign policy and so forth. Yeah, Haig was considered to be Deep Throat and a whole bunch of people.

I just never heard this Mark Felt guy mentioned, but here's some of the wording of the pardon, April 15th, 1981. "Pursuant to the grant of an authority in Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution of the US, I have granted full and unconditional pardons to W. Mark Felt and Edward Miller. During their long careers, Mark Felt and Edward Miller served the FBI and our nation with great distinction. To punish them further after three years of criminal prosecution proceedings would not serve the ends of justice. Their convictions in the US District Court on appeal at the time I signed the pardons grew out of their good-faith belief that their actions were necessary to preserve the security interests of our country. The record demonstrates that they acted not with criminal intent, but in the belief that they had grants of authority reaching to the highest levels of government. America was at war in '72 and Messrs. Felt and Miller followed procedures they believed essential to keep the director of the FBI, the attorney general and the president advised of the activities of hostile foreign powers and their collaborators in this country. They have never denied their actions but, in fact, came forward to acknowledge them publicly in order to relieve their subordinate agents from criminal actions. Four years ago, thousands of draft evaders and others who violated the selective service laws were unconditionally pardoned by my predecessor. America was generous to those who refused to serve their country in the Vietnam War. We can be no less generous to two men who acted on high principle to bring an end to the terrorism that was threatening our nation." That was Reagan's pardon of W. Mark Felt and Edward Miller, and obviously at the time Reagan did not know that Mark Felt was leaking criminal investigative information to Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post.

I was sorta distracted by other things but heard Rush and news reports ,... what kept rattling around my head was , FELT was a bigdeal in THE HOOVER FBI , not warm&fuzzy

Nixon was a "hawk" on Viet Nam, as JFK probably would have been. However, he was no fiscal conservative and gave us such bureaucratic nightmares like the EPA, he expanded Social Security by linking it to inflation, he froze wages, etc.

I suggest you pay close attention to the speeches that Ronald Reagan gave during the Nixon years, because he was clearly talking about taking the country in a conservative direction. Reagan would never have insulted Nixon, by name, but it was clear that he was unhappy with his policies.

Reagan Speeches

Ehhh... Nixon wasn't my kinda Republican anyway.

Way too self conscious and dour.

I like my Pubbies bright, shiny and upbeat.

rush is right. his is a good observation.

i'm tired of woodward and his pretentious presentations. for example, i read his "veil" and no one to this day can figure out how he got into the dying william casey's hospital room. you just don't walk into the head of the cia's room.

also, there was the book "silent coup: the removal of a president" an interesting account of woodward's doings prior to joining the wa wa post.

he was a u.s. naval officer assigned to the ultra secret task of transferring orally sensitive information from the pentagon to the president of the united states daily.

then, after leaving the navy, he applied at the wa wa post but was turned down. so, he spent 6 months over at a small town paper in potomac, md--hardly the place to get noticed by the post.

then the post hired him.

conclusion: someone probably greased the skids for him to get hired at the post.

Nixon had completely lost the support of his own party. The Democrats had a huge majority in the House and the Senate, he was going to be impeached and removed. Goldwater and others went to visit him a few days before he resigned to inform him that he could not survive and that even they were inclined to vote against him on some of the articles of impeachment.

You're gonna get flamed, but I agree with you. Nixon was the young conservative who knocked the liberal darling Helen Gahagan Douglas out of the Senate, for which the left and MSM never forgave him. He was put on the ticket in 1952 to add appeal to conservatives to balance Ike's squishy moderate tendencies. Nixon went to the wall for Whittaker Chambers and after Alger Hiss, again for which the left and MSM never forgave him. At the time, Taft's main street Republicanism defined the conservative domestic policies. But no one knew that just over the horizon was Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and the conservative revolution in domestic policy.

Nixon was a staunch conservative for his era, even if he did have some pretty stupid ideas about domestic policy, like wage-price controls, the EPA and affirmative action. His saving grace was he was a fierce anticommunist.

Maybe that's why Felt came out with the information. He was also sick of seeing a couple of liberal nitwits getting so much exposure. Now WB has no more story to tell, and if they try most will see it for what it is, just hype.

"I suggest you pay close attention to the speeches that Ronald Reagan gave during the Nixon years,"

I wrote in Reagan in 1972 and never voted for Nixon.

But Reagan was still a liberal when Nixon was chasing communists out of government and we owe him a lot. It was very tought to fight the tide of liberalism/socialism/communism back then and sure, Nixon made concessions to get elected. But knew the big picture and that was that communists had killed 90 million in the prior 60 years and that they were on the verge of killing another 10 million. And that the marxist usefull idiots were keeping the public blind to this genocide in the hopes of taking over the world. Don't forget that Greece, Italy, France were on the verge of communist takeover and that the Russians had just stolen the secrets for the bomb.

This was a very scary time and Nixon will come to be known as a real American Hero.

The MSM of the 1960's and 1970's snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Vietnam, and then engineered a coup that deposed Nixon after his 1972 landslide, which gave us Gerald Ford, which gave us Jimmuh Cahtah, which gave us malaise, high unemployment, high inflation and the retreat of the West around the world.

Some kinda record for the weasels at the Communist News Network to crow about.

"Nixon was the young conservative who knocked the liberal darling Helen Gahagan Douglas out of the Senate, for which the left and MSM never forgave him. He was put on the ticket in 1952 to add appeal to conservatives to balance Ike's squishy moderate tendencies. Nixon went to the wall for Whittaker Chambers and after Alger Hiss, again for which the left and MSM never forgave him."

You got that right - Nixon was hounded worse that a Swift Boat Convention in Taxachusetts.

Sure, his wage and price controls sucked but it was tought to win an election back then with all that Kennedy Camelot
BS and Johnsons "Guns and Butter" Blue
Sky Welfarism. And even harder to win when you had MASSIVE voter fraud in the Kennedy election. Nixon could have demanded a recount and would have won against Kennedy but he did not want to subject the country to turmoil.

Reagan would not have happened if Nixon did not hold the fort in the 50's and 60's.

The guy was pardoned for acts similar to what Nixon's guys did.

Charles Colson went to prison for letting one reporter see a part of someone's FBI file. This guy was leaking information in a very criminal way, and he's a hero.

Linda Tripp tells law enforcement about an attempt to obstruct justice for a woman who was sexually harressed and she is a pariah. This guy Felt gives out information in a criminal way, contrary to a sworn oath he has taken as a person in a position of trust with in the goverment, and he is a hero.

"As much as I detest Woodward and Bernstein and what they did, I fail to see how what Felt disclosed was illegal let alone treason."

If he was concerned he should have disclosed his concerns to the proper jurisdictional legal authority, not to a couple of then-unknown media punks. It was most certainly not treason, and it may not have been illegal, but it was clearly unethical.

I certainly agree that it was unethical and probably should have cost him his job, but I don't think it was unethical and it damn sure wasn't treason.

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