My On-the-Spot Analysis of Hemmer’s Barr Interview

RUSH: I know it shouldn’t, but it continues to boggle my mind. To listen to the Drive-By Media go about doing their jobs every day, it still stuns to me. I’m amazed that it stuns me, and I’m a little mad at myself that it stuns me. William Barr gave an interview to Bill Hemmer at Fox News down there, I guess, in El Salvador. They’re looking at MS-13, and Barr talked about his investigation of the investigation. The Drive-By Media can’t believe that the attorney general’s talking about the investigation.

Well, what the hell were they doing for two years, for crying out loud? These guys are reporting leaks; they’re funneling everything the investigators are telling them. They’re trying to find what Mueller is doing. We got the FBI, we got the DOJ, we have the CIA, we have MI5 and MI6. We got the British spies. They’re all leaking! We got the Steele dossier; the media’s reporting every bit of it! Now here Barr is giving an interview and they say, “This is just not right! Investigators don’t talk about the investigation.”

At least he’s not leaking it! You’ve got people on CNN saying, “I have never seen an attorney general behave this way before!” Well, we’ve never had cause for an attorney general to behave this way. I’m gonna spend a little time here on the Barr interview with Bill Hemmer at Fox because they keep releasing new elements of it. I don’t know if they’re gonna broadcast it front to back at some point. My guess is they will. But all morning long, they have been playing little excerpts from it, and it’s really, really worthwhile.

It’s something, if you haven’t had a chance to watch it, you need to hear it — and, of course, it wouldn’t be complete without my on-the-spot, instant analysis.

RUSH: Okay, Bill Hemmer, Fox News, went down to El Salvador with William Barr. He’s down there. They’re doing a number of things down there, among them, trying to figure out what to do about MS-13, the gigantic terrorist gang coming out of that region, and some things remotely to do with illegal immigration and so forth. So Hemmer goes down there and grabs an interview with Barr and really unloaded. I mean, I don’t think there are any questions that were left on the table about the investigation, into the investigation, about Barr’s opinion of this or that.

Barr was amazingly forthcoming in some of this. So let’s just start. Our first bite, Barr is talking about how this is handled at very senior levels by an ad hoc, small group of people — the investigators — and that he’s asking them about some things that don’t make sense to him, such as the dossier. He’s pointing out that the answers he’s getting are not sufficient. So Hemmer’s question: “At the hearing about a month ago, you said you’re still trying to get your head around everything. What are you trying to figure out in this?”

BARR: The thing that’s interesting about this is that this was handled at a very senior level of these departments. It wasn’t handled in the ordinary way that investigations or counterintelligence activities are conducted. It was sort of an ad hoc, small group — and most of these people are no longer with the FBI or the CIA or the other agencies involved. I think there’s a misconception out there that we know a lot about what happened. The fact of the matter is, Bob Mueller did not look at the government’s activities. And we have a number of investigations underway that touch upon it, the main one being the Office of Inspector General was looking at the FISA warrants. But as far as I’m aware, no one has really looked across the whole waterfront.

RUSH: This is such a key answer! He spells it right out. “As far as we know, Mueller didn’t look at what the government was doing.” Of course he didn’t! It wasn’t the purpose! Remember when Mueller… There’s another key in here. He says, “I think there’s a misconception out there that we know a lot about what happened.” That is such a well-timed statement. What he’s referring to is that we think we know by way of alternative reporting, sources outside the Drive-By Media.

We think we have an idea of what really happened here with the dossier, with Steele, with the Hillary campaign buying and paying for it. But what Barr is saying is that we really don’t, not officially, because nobody’s looked at it — and that’s what he’s doing. He points out here that the vaunted special counsel, Robert Mueller, did not look at anything the government was doing, and as far as Barr’s concerned, there’s a whole lot of stuff the government was doing that’s highly suspicious.

So he talked about the inspector general investigation underway and others, his appointment of John Durham — and also that this was handled at “a very senior level,” meaning the FBI director was involved and the CIA director was involved, and that’s not how these things are normally handled. The ordinary way investigations are handled or counterintelligence is that agents are assigned. Agents do the work. But in this case, the department heads were doing the work, and now many of them are gone.

The implication there is… Well, I’m gonna draw it. The inference there is, the fact that they’re gone is gonna make it a little tougher to find out what went on, ’cause they’re all gone. Some of them have been fired. Some of them have resigned. Some of them have… You know, we haven’t spotted ’em in foreign countries yet, but if we do, then we’ll know. That answer contained a lot, and that’s why the Drive-Bys are… The Drive-Bys, you know, they’re wettin’ the bed here. “Oh, we can’t believe the attorney general is discussing the details of his investigation!”

What do you mean, you can’t believe the attorney general…? You just spent two years making up a bunch of garbage about an investigation that wasn’t. As I say, I continue to be surprised and I wish I weren’t. It makes me mad that I’m surprised every day when I get up and watch CNN. It makes me mad. I ought not be surprised anymore by how unprofessional and biased and totally gone these people are. Next question from Bill Hemmer: “You also said back in April you thought there was spying going on on the Trump campaign. When do you think that started?”

BARR: I’m not gonna speculate about when it started. We’re gonna find out when it started. What I will say that I’ve been trying to get answers to questions and I’ve found that a lot of the answers have been inadequate, and I’ve also found that some of the explanations I’ve gotten don’t hang together. So in a sense, I have more questions today than I did when I first started. I think people have to find out what government was doing during that period. If we’re worried about foreign influence, for the very same reason we should be worried about whether government officials abused their power and put their thumb on the scale.

RUSH: All right. Now, again, great answer. This is a reassuring answer, provided that there is something that they find and admit to it. We still have to react to this with a guarded optimism about it. But he says he’s not gonna speculate about when it started. He’s gonna find out when it started. See, we all think we know — well, actually that we don’t know. That we don’t. That’s why we want the president to declassify all these documents. They will tell us. It’s known when this started and what did it, but we don’t know that yet.

So he’s already been asking, and he says that the answers that he’s been given are inadequate — and as he has been in office and as he’s been looking into this, he’s got even more questions than he had when he started. The point he made again here is crucial. Everybody was focused on what the hell the Russians were doing, but what about our own government’s efforts that might have been used to undermine a campaign and then a transition and an election? He points out that Bob Mueller did not look into any of that.

RUSH: I just want to share one thing with you because it is in context with the Barr interview sound bites that we played so far. This comes from Chuck Ross at The Daily Caller: “Dossier author Christopher Steele identified a former Russian spy chief and a top adviser to … Putin as being involved in handling potentially compromising information about” Trump. Meaning, Steele is admitting that he got data from Russians on his dossier that is all made up.

Meaning, the Hillary campaign was colluding with Russians in the creation of a phony-baloney dossier. “Steele identified a former Russian spy chief and a top adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin as being involved in handling potentially compromising information about President Donald Trump, State Department notes show.” The State Department knew this and told the FBI about it before they went and got their FISA warrant based on the Steele dossier.

The State Department knew that the Russians had helped provide false BS for the Steele dossier seven or eight days before the FBI used it to go get a FISA warrant. “In her notes, State Department official, Kathleen Kavalec, also referred to the two Russians … as ‘sources.'” Sources! One of these Russians “also has links to Stefan Halper, an FBI informant who collected information from…” He didn’t “collect information from” Papadopoulos! He passed it to Papadopoulos.

Papadopoulos didn’t spread anything. He was told things by Halper. Anyway, we now have reports of confirmation of Steele colluding with Russians to create fake allegations about Donald Trump that then show up in the dossier that are then used by Rosenstein and Comey — the leadership, as Barr points out, not some agents — to go get the FISA application to spy on Carter Page and thus the Trump campaign.

RUSH: Now, go back. Audio sound bite number 3. I think this is a good catch. This is something fundamentally fascinating about what Barr said. Here again is Bill Hemmer’s question: “You also said back in April you thought there was spying going on in the Trump campaign. When do you think that started?”

RUSH: “I’ve found that a lot of the answers [and] explanations I’ve gotten don’t hang together.” What does that mean? I’ll tell you what I think it means. I think it means that these guys he’s talking to are not saying the same thing. They’ve gotten their story straight. To attach names to it just for explanation… I don’t know if this true, but Comey is saying one thing… Well, we know this is true. Comey is saying one thing and Brennan’s saying another, and they’re now accusing each other in public. So Barr’s sitting there saying the answers “don’t hang together.”

I’m hearing one thing from one guy, another thing to another guy, I’m getting differences versions of the same story, and I think those words, “the answers/explanations I’m getting don’t hang together,” could be causing these coup people to start quaking and to start thinking about Argentina. Virtually all of them are lawyers. They know this is exactly how the legal case against each of them can be made, leveraging their stories against the others.

And if they’re not on the same page and if they’re not telling the same story, then there is a story to be found and to find out who’s telling the truth and who isn’t. And I think that’s why Comey and Brennan are starting to point fingers at each other, and I’ve noticed that this is — and Rosenstein is dumping on Comey. And Comey’s dumping on Rosenstein. And the former lawyer for the FBI, Baker, is dumping on some people.

Because, as Barr said, everybody looked at what the Russians were doing — and they really didn’t look at that, ’cause they knew before they started the Russians hadn’t done anything. Not to collude with Trump. But now we gotta find out what the government did. This is never supposed to have been on anybody’s mind. This was never supposed to happen.

These people did all of this to cover up for Hillary Clinton and Steele and the dossier. This was never supposed to happen, this investigation.

RUSH: Now back to Barr, back to Barr and the interview with Bill Hemmer. We’re up to audio sound bite number 4 on this. Bill Hemmer, Fox News: “Can you say when Bob Mueller knew that there was no collusion with Russia between Trump?”

RUSH: Now, now, we know. There wasn’t any collusion. When Mueller took the job, folks… Remember, all they ever had was this dossier. (sigh) Again, there was never any evidence of collusion. That is why this investigation was not a criminal investigation. It was always a counterintelligence investigation, because they were not pursuing evidence that would prove the creation or performance of a crime because they knew there wasn’t one. It was counterintel.

Counterintelligence investigations do not gather evidence for the purposes of going to trial or indicting people. There never was a crime. All they ever had was the dossier, and they knew that it was bogus when had went to the FISA court. Therefore, when Mueller took the job after being named special counsel, he gets the file. He goes to the office the first day, asks Comey for the file, opens it up and (in a figurative sense) there’s nothing in there because they never had any evidence because there wasn’t any Trump-Russia collusion.

So Hemmer has obviously figured this out or has heard other people, other guests on Fox that he’s interviewed say that there never was any evidence. So he’s trying to get Barr here to admit that Mueller knew (chuckles) from day one that there was no collusion. But even if you know to acknowledge that, you can, if you go back and look at the timeline when Mueller took the gig, there is a point 18 months where Mueller knew for sure there was no collusion and didn’t close the investigation. He kept it going, looking for crimes that others could be forced to commit during the investigation, process crimes, and he found them, created them.

RUSH: This is Barr. (chuckling) He’s so direct. “When are we gonna see it?” “When it’s finished.” “Is it fih?” “No.” “Well, then when are we gonna see? Next month? In June?” “When it’s finished.” It’s not the kind of answer people are used to, that direct answer. Okay. Let’s see. Next question from Bill Hemmer interviewing William Barr in El Salvador: “How do you think John Brennan and James Clapper handled the Russia investigation?”

BARR: I don’t want to speculate about the facts because I don’t know the facts at this point.

HEMMER: Can you tell us what the Steele dossier had to do with this? What role did that play?

BARR: It’s a very unusual situation to have opposition research like that — especially one that, on its face, had a number of clear mistakes and a somewhat jejune analysis — and to use that to conduct counterintelligence against an American political campaign is a strange — would be a strange development.

BARR: I don’t know if I’d describe it as a rat. I would just say that the answers I’m getting are not sufficient.

RUSH: Uh-oh. Uh-oh. There we are, go again. (summarized) “The answers I’m getting are not sufficient. The answers I’m getting are not hanging together.” “Can you tell us what the Steele dossier had to do with it?” “Well, it’s very unusual to have opposition research like that used to conduct counterintelligence against a candidate.” He gets it. He knows exactly what happened. He’s telling us he knows exactly what happened.

Without divulging what he’s going to do about it or what proof and evidence he has of it. But to call it “opposition research” is to acknowledge that it is not legitimate intelligence and to acknowledge that it was used (in his language) “by the government to conduct counterintel on an American political campaign,” his word is strange. It’s not strange, it’s criminal. But he’s not ready to go there yet.

RUSH: Now, this next bite — and I like all of these. This next Barr sound bite’s one of my favorites of the interview. Bill Hemmer of Fox News talking to Barr in El Salvador today. Question: “How do you think John Brennan and James Clapper…?” Whoa, whoa, whoa. Uh, uh, uh… Wait. Wait. (interruption) Yeah, it’s number 7. It’s the next one. This heading covers two bites. Next question: “In the period of time between Election Day and the inauguration, did anyone in government or in intelligence take action to justify their decisions?” Now, this… Listen to this answer.

BARR: I think there were some very strange developments during that period. That’s one of the things we want to look into.

BARR: Such as the handling of the meeting on January 6th between the intelligence chiefs and the president and the leaking of information subsequent to that meeting.

HEMMER: Can you characterize how far advanced you are in understanding that meeting?

RUSH: Let me tell you about that meeting. Barr knows what happened in this meeting. The fact that he’s bringing this up is awesome. We talked about this yesterday. This meeting is with President Trump at Trump Tower on January 6, 2017, a couple weeks before he’s inaugurated. In the meeting are Comey, Clapper, and Brennan. Now, the previous day on January 5th, they met in the Oval Office — all three of those guys — with Obama. A plan was devised. At this time, on January 6, 2017, the Steele dossier had been all over Washington.

It had been there since the summer. McCain had sent somebody over to the U.K. to bring it back. The media knew. Everybody in the media knew about the dossier. The FBI had used it for FISA warrants. Everybody knew about it, and they all knew it had not been corroborated. This is key to understand. Everybody knew from the beginning that the Steele dossier could not be proven. Not a single thing in it could be proven.

Yet the media desperately wanted to run it. They were trying to harm Trump. They wanted to damage Trump. They wanted to get Trump out of office as soon as they could. They knew the FBI had used the dossier to get FISA warrants, but they knew that it wasn’t verified, and they knew that as a news source, they could not use it and assure news consumers that the dossier was true. But they just wanted to report that it existed. But they didn’t have a hook.

They needed a hook. So Comey and the intelligence heads — Comey and Brennan and Clapper — were telling Trump that he needed to talk to the intelligence people every day when he became president, that it was key. And Trump was publicly saying (and privately to them) that he didn’t need to talk to the intel people every day, that he was smart and that he had a good memory and that he doubted things are gonna be changing day to day, and he didn’t want to meet with them every day.

Well, they wanted to meet with him every day because they wanted access. Access is power. The intelligence apparatus of this country — that’s the NSA, the CIA, the DIA, all of these people, including our British counterparts — love the access of being able to go to the Oval Office every day and tell the president the latest of what’s happening around the world. They love being able to shape foreign policy. You could say, as an example, that the intelligence community succeeded in getting an invasion of Iraq.

The intelligence community convinced George W. Bush and the United Kingdom and all of our allies that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Now, it wasn’t just them. I mean, Bush independently thought so as well. But the intelligence community was confirming and probably advocating. Trump was telling them he didn’t want to grant them this access, essentially. “I don’t need to talk to you guys every day.” They were not gonna put up with that. They needed access to Trump, particularly if they were gonna run sabotage operations.

And I’m not exaggerating here. It’s much easier to manipulate the guy if you can talk to him every day. It’s much easier to lie to him if you can go to the Oval Office under the guise of an intelligence brief and tell him things are happening around the world which may not be or might be exaggerated. And Trump was telling them he didn’t want to do that. They also were looking for a way to get this dossier in the media.

So the meeting the day before with Obama in the Oval Office is where a stratagem was conceived. We don’t know if Obama had anything to do with it. But we do know the stratagem because Comey has acknowledged it. The strategy was this: Comey, Brennan, and Clapper go meet Trump at Trump Tower, and they give him an example of the kind of intelligence that’s out there that he needs to know about every day.

He needs to know how his administration is threatened, how the United States is being threatened. He needs to know. They decided to tell Trump one story from the dossier, and that was the gold showers story. They went and they told Trump, “See, this is the kind of stuff that’s out there that you need to know about. This is what’s being said about you right now. These are the kind of ways you are being attacked. People are trying to destabilize you already.”

They told him, “There are people that actively believe that when you were in Moscow, that you hired prostitutes to urinate on a bed when you found out that Michelle and Barack Obama had slept on it.” They told Trump that. They didn’t tell Trump the dossier was Hillary Clinton opposition research. They didn’t tell Trump the dossier was unverified. They didn’t tell Trump anything about it. All they told Trump was that they had secured this intel and that people were already trying to destabilize Trump by spreading this kind of story about him.

They wanted Trump to be sufficiently shocked so that he would agree to meet with the intel people every day of his administration. More importantly, they wanted a hook. They wanted to be able to get that dossier reported in mainstream media. Comey asks Brennan and Clapper to leave the room. This is part of the subterfuge. They’re about ready to leave, and then Comey asks Brennan and Clapper to leave, saying that he’s got something for the president’s ears only. Clapper and Brennan leave.

The drama has been ramped up. Comey, in the room alone with Trump, tells him about the golden shower story. Comey leaves the Trump Tower office; tells Clapper, “Mission accomplished.” This is something Comey has already acknowledged. “Mission accomplished.” Clapper, upon hearing the words, “Mission accomplished,” called CNN, where he was soon to be hired as an analyst-commentator. He told CNN, “The president of the United States has just been informed of the dossier!”

That became the way the dossier was entered into the American Drive-By Media news cycle. The problem was that CNN picked it up but nobody else did, ’cause everybody else knew it was bogus, folks. So BuzzFeed sometime later decided to publish the whole thing, acknowledging it was unverified, acknowledging it was not corroborated. But they published it on the basis, “You need to know what’s being said about your president,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they were off and running.

CNN gets a Pulitzer Prize for journalism and for deep reporting, finding out that Trump had learned about the dossier. When, in fact, they’d been told by Clapper. Later, Comey was being interviewed by Bret Baier on the Fox News Channel. Bret Baier said, “Why didn’t you tell Trump any more about the dossier? Why didn’t you tell him that the Clinton campaign had paid for it? Why didn’t you tell him that nothing in it had be verified? Why didn’t you tell him that nothing in it could be confirmed as true? Why didn’t you tell him about Christopher Steele?”

Comey’s mission was to tell Trump about golden showers — the pee tape — get it in the media, and then try to secure a daily I give you from Trump to the intel community to have a daily brief. The real reason was to sabotage Trump and his presidency by getting the dossier in the media. Now, Bill Hemmer asking this question (summarized exchange): “In the period of time between the election day and the inauguration, did anyone in government or intelligence take action to justify their decisions? And that’s what Barr says, “These are very strange developments.”

“The handling of that meeting on January 6 between the intelligence chiefs and the president and the leaking of information…” That’s means calling CNN and telling them that the dossier had been presented to Trump. That was Clapper, after Comey told him “mission accomplished.” So Barr is acknowledging that he knows this and that this is highly unusual, and he wants to find out more. Because who sent these three guys there? Whose “mission” was it, really, to go meet Trump and tell him about the golden showers and then tell CNN?

Remember, all three of these guys had met in the Oval Office on January 5th, the day before, with Obama. But nobody is saying yet that Obama gave any kind of an order. People are thinking that Obama at least had to know, but nobody is yet confirming whose idea this was. What Barr is acknowledging here is that this is highly, highly unusual, the handling of the meeting with intelligence chiefs and then the leaking of information after the meeting. So they know, and the coupers… The coupers, the people that did the coup.

They know that others now know. That’s why they’re pointing fingers and laying accusations off on each other about who knew about the dossier when and who used it when and who had any fingerprints on it when. Barr knows. But that’s what he’s talking about. I remember that week when it happened when the dossier was made public by BuzzFeed, when CNN started reporting it, and I’m just gonna remind you again. From the moment — I mean the moment — that I heard that that was one of the high points the dossier, I knew.

Instincts. I didn’t “know” know, but I knew that it was bogus, that that had to be totally made up, that there is simply no way that Trump would hire prostitutes to urinate on a bed because… For one thing, Trump and anybody trying to do business in Russia knows that no matter what hotel you stay in, there are cameras in there. There are microphones.

The Russians are bugging everybody for who knows however many different reasons. There is no way, and I remember being flabbergasted and beside myself when I learned that they were trying to act like they actually believed it, like Comey actually believed it, like Clapper and Brennan believed it. And the more it went on and the more people in the media started talking about it as though they believed it, it just kept adding up more and more to me to be totally bogus.

RUSH: St. Louis. Kevin, you’re next. It’s great to have you with us, sir, hi.

CALLER: So you’re right about Trump and Barr knowing what’s going on, and it’s, you know, too late for Clapper and Comey and, et cetera — and Brennan — to come up with an excuse or an explanation because Donald Trump already has the declassified information and he knows what’s going on.

RUSH: Well, I’m not ready to say that yet. I’m not ready to say that these guys know that it’s too late for ’em. We don’t know what Barr’s conclusion is gonna be. We don’t know when it’s gonna be. We don’t know what the recommendation will come. Why are you so confident that that this is gonna go where we think it goes?

CALLER: I mean, if you and I know that this whole thing was bogus, obviously Donald Trump does.

RUSH: Oh, yeah. We know it’s bogus. But after that, are they gonna do anything about it? This is the one thing. We never get closure on these things. We know the actions taken by people like this, and they always end up getting away with it, for one reason or another. “We don’t want to roil the country. It’s already gone through enough here. It’s enough these people have been exposed.” I’m not… I don’t want to distress anybody here, but I’m not confident that these people are gonna actually be dealt with other than the truth be told. That might be enough, but I —

CALLER: Yeah, well, I think that’d be enough for the truth to be told and everybody know what happened. But I do think more is gonna happen to these guys because, I mean, they’re digging a bigger grave by —

RUSH: Well, it damn well should, and Trump can declassify documents to add even greater exclamation points to all of this too. I think one of the reasons Trump has been so confident through all this — and, frankly, so mad — is he knows that all of this has been bogus from day one.

CALLER: No, that’s my point, that Donald Trump knows what happened and he’ll do deal with it, and Barr knows also.

RUSH: All right. Well, you know, I hope that you are right when you say it’s too late for these guys — meaning there’s no story they can tell to explain what they did — and we don’t know that. We don’t know what concoctions these guys are capable of coming up with. I mean, I can just see Clapper sitting there (impression), “Well, I was sure! (muttering) I was very convinced that Trump was a Russian agent. I was speaking to, uhhh… I had spoken, uh, to the CIA director, Brennan. Uh, we couldn’t take the chance very serious allegations here and the Russians attempting…”

I can see all these guys coming up with every excuse and try to, you know, wrap themselves in the flag of patriotism trying to protect the country. But they’re already starting to turn on each other so that kind of mitigates that. Look, there’s a Fox News poll out there today that I, frankly, didn’t… I looked at it and I said, “You know what? It’s Open Line Friday. I don’t even know if I’m gonna mention this.” But in the Fox News poll, Robert Mueller is said to be far more believable to the American people than Trump or Barr on this, and it isn’t even close. Which demonstrates, if nothing else, the still-appalling power the mainstream media has to convince the American people in great numbers of literal lies and falsehoods.

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