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.

"That is my opinion also. Everyone praises Reagan, while I see his continuation in Nicuragua as a crime. Selling the equipment to Saddam to manufactur mustard gas wasn't his finest moment IMO!"

Never happened. We gave him sat photos of Iranian troop movements. That's about it.

Rumsfeld actually chastized one of the top Iraqis, I believe it was Aziz, during their meeting back then, can anyone recall what about?

Lynrd Skynrd:

"Watergate don't bother me.... does your conscience bother you?"

Rumsfeld actually chastized one of the top Iraqis, I believe it was Aziz, during their meeting back then, can anyone recall what about?

Since before RR's first term the US had been providing Saddam with materials which had legitimate uses in farming, but could also be used to develop chemical weapons. When it was determined thats what Hussein was doing with them, RR stopped the deliveries. Rumsfeld was the presidential envoy to the MI 82-84 & might have addressed this issue with Saddam - maybe thats what you remember.

"Since before RR's first term the US had been providing Saddam with materials which had legitimate uses in farming, but could also be used to develop chemical weapons. "

I'm pretty ccertain that all we sold them were trucks and civillian Bell helicopters. We also sent them anthrax and some other substances, but they were the animal/farm versions only good for farm research, not military grade stuff.

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