by Rush Limbaugh in the Limbaugh Letter, September 2018
A privilege to speak with the indefatigable Fox News analyst about his new investigative book, The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump, which sits atop The New York Times Best Sellers list for a reason.
RUSH: Gregg, how are you doing, sir?
JARRETT: Rush, thank you very much. I owe you a huge debt of gratitude for reading my book and then a very kind word you had to say about it on air to your listeners. Thank you so much for that.
RUSH: Well, you're welcome. I'll tell you why I was excited about it even before I read it. Due to the title of your book, I knew I was going to like it, because of all the people in your world, I'm talking about the media in Washington, you're the first I think who literally nails what this is. And it's right there in the title, "The illicit scheme to clear Hillary Clinton." That's really what drives this whole thing. "Framing Trump" is the next part of it. But I want you to talk me through how you identified this. Everybody in the FBI associated with this knew they had a potential big problem. A democrat nominee had violated several laws. They had to exonerate her. And they had to make sure she could never be charged with any of this stuff. In the process, they had to do what they could do to then shift the blame to Trump to cover up what they were doing to her, or for her. Correct?
JARRETT: You're absolutely right. And as I point out in the book, there is nothing that will motivate people in Washington more than the threat of power forfeited. That was the motive of these top officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice in their scheme to clear Clinton and frame Donald Trump. Trump had vowed to drain the swamp, and the swamp didn't want to be drained. They would lose their positions of power.
So instead, they came up with a scheme that involved abusing their positions of power to subvert the rule of law and undermine the democratic process. They conspired to clear Clinton despite overwhelming evidence of her criminality. And then on the same day that Comey is making that announcement in front of the television cameras, FBI is meeting secretly in a building in London with Christopher Steele armed with this phony dossier. Then the FBI used that as a pretext to launch this dilating investigation of Trump to destroy him.
RUSH: Is that really true, the same day, July 5, when Comey is basically assuming the role of Attorney General, telling us why Hillary is not going to be charged, why nobody else would charge her, she didn't intend to do anything, he's making up the law that very day they're meeting with Christopher Steele over in London?
JARRETT: That's correct. And Steele was not only on the payroll of the Hillary Clinton compaign, but we now know he was on the FBI payroll. They made 11 different payments to him, beginning in January of 2016, seven months before they formally signed the papers launching the Trump-Russia case. So it appears as though they were working on this well in advance.
RUSH: Okay, before we go any further into the nuts and bolts of the book, I want to get your opinion on some current events that are related to this. What did you think of the recent Wall Street Journal report that Trump says he's got a "fantastic" relationship with Rod Rosenstein, and that they had a meeting before Trump went to Russia, and it was Trump who requested that Rosenstein announce the indictment of 12 Russians to put leverage on Putin? I was shocked to read that Trump thinks he's got a great relationship with Rosenstein. Do you believe that, and if so, what happened?
JARRETT: Trump, I think, is playing the hand he's got, and until he is completely exonerated, as he should be, he's dealing with the people he must, and that includes Rod Rosenstein, who is really the Attorney General. It's not Jeff Sessions. Sessions has, I think, proven to be quite feckless. The President deeply regrets appointing him as Attorney General. Without that appointment, there would have been no Special Council probe. So I think the President is wise to decide, "I'm going to do my level best to get along with the people who are in power now," realizing that at this juncture he cannot fire Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein. That would be politically untenable.
RUSH: Why do you think he does not just declassify everything that Congress wants to see, the documents that really spell out the true beginning of this investigation -- when, where, who, why? Why does he not declassify? Are they afraid he'd be accused of obstruction? Is it a defensive maneuver? Or does he know what it says and he's waiting for a more timely moment to drop the bomb?
JARRETT: He may be getting bad advice from the White House Council, Don McGahn. That's my suspicion. I think the President well knows that not only does he have the right to declassify, but he should declassify. There are three sets of document: the "Gang of Eight" documents, which have not yet been revealed; 21 pages of the FISA warrant application, which were heavily redacted; and finally, a slew of documents about the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation. I believe if those are declassified, and the President absolutely should declassify them, that would go a long way to wrapping up this investigation and clearing Donald Trump.
RUSH: Why doesn't he, in your opinion, or will he at some point?
JARRETT: I don't know, and it's rather frustrating. I know the members of Congress who have sought these documents under lawful subpoena and have a legal right to them are deeply frustrated over it. I think in the end they will prevail, and the documents will come out. I think the President will likely declassify them.
RUSH: Now, let's specify here, and you make it clear in the book, that you are not a Trump apologist, you're not a Trump sycophant. In your coverage of Trump in the past, you've been critical of him. You imply in the book that you became a defender partly as a result of your research. You write, "As facts emerged, I became incensed that top figures of the FBI and Department of Justice misconstrued the law in a manner that could only have been deliberate." And then you talked about how difficult it was to keep up with events as you were writing this book -- and it's still happening as you're trying to keep up with it.
JARRETT: That's right. It was an immense challenge, but I wanted to get the book out because Americans only know bits and pieces of the story. It's a jigsaw puzzle. Somebody had to put it together under one cover, in one book, and explain it with the facts, the evidence, and the law. I wrote it all myself.
I began in December. I wrote seven hours a day, seven days a week, until I finished it at the beginning of May and then spent a month updating it with, as you say, new events that had taken place and more recent documents that had been revealed. It's certainly not a complete book, but I think we know enough now to know that people abused their positions of power, and the law enforcers became the lawbreakers. Trump is really the victim of all this, not the villain.
RUSH: That is a profound statement. The law enforcers became the lawbreakers. How high up does that go? I know you're talking FBI, but we've got people throughout the Obama DOJ and his Administration. We've got James Clapper, we have John Brennan. It seems there are a lot of people with a lot of culpability. And you've got hundreds of footnotes in this book. People need to know that everything you write here is documented with research; they can look it up.
JARRETT: For example, the use of the dossier improperly and I believe in front of a FISA court, knowing that it was unverified, that's a violation of six different felony statutes. The people who signed the warrants are James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates, Rod Rosenstein. All of these people could be charged with abuse of power, perjury, false and misleading statements, obstruction of justice, major fraud and conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Those are just some of the statutes I believe they violated, and I lay all of this out in the book.
RUSH: You also met with the President in the course of researching the book. How forthcoming was he, and how substantive were your talks?
JARRETT: They were extensive and substantive, although I promised him they would be off the record, so the value was simply to inform my narrative as I was writing. It was quite helpful. But I made the decision early on that I wasn't going to use anonymous sources. I wasn't going to use background or off-the-record conversations because I knew I would be attacked. So, as I say, I only use the facts, the evidence, the law, and I source them all. But yes, conversations with the President were helpful.
RUSH: Gregg, you just mentioned the various felonious violations just at the FISA court application level. Is there one event that stands out to you as the most egregious, or the biggest surprise, or the most incredible thing for which there hasn't been any accountability in all of this?
JARRETT: Yes, I would say it's this. I dug deep into federal regulations and the FBI regulations and I learned that the FBI was violating its own rule and regulations in launching the probe. There was no probable cause, no credible evidence of crimes, no plausible intelligence to justify a counterintelligence investigation. The FBI invented facts, exaggerated others. They worked to absolve Hillary Clinton of the myriad crimes that she committed and then they conjured out of thin air a false case against Donald Trump to destroy him.
They knew Trump would upset the order of things in Washington and they wanted to perpetuate their own power. People like Comey, Clapper, and Brennan are supposed to be nonpartisans. They turned out to be hyper-partisans. Brennan, for example, did more that anyone else to instigate and propagate this false dossier. Clapper is the guy who was leaking it to the media. So there were rampant acts of illegality, obstruction of justice, certainly in clearing Hillary Clinton in the face of overwhelming evidence that she committed crimes.
RUSH: Much of the framing of Donald Trump happened during the campaign. I didn't realize how much until after the election. Until I got into it, I thought most of this occurred after they were all shocked and stunned that Trump had won. But that was just phase two. They were actually running this operation against Trump as a candidate. What surprised me about it was that I don't know of anybody in Washington who thought he was going to win, including these people. So what was their purpose? I know the importance of clearing Hillary. They thought she's going to win, she's the nominee, they've got to get rid of every bit of baggage they can so they are untouched by what she did, and so Obama remains untouched. I understand that. But why frame Trump during the campaign when nobody thinks he's going to win?
JARRETT: It was, in the words of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in their infamous text messages, an insurance policy. It was the backup plan. If plan A doesn't work, promoting Hillary Clinton, plan B -- target, damage, and destroy Trump -- would work. Those Page-Strzok text messages provide a powerful narrative of how severe bias against Trump prompted these top officials to clear Clinton and target him. And when that failed, these same people then doubled down and pursued their insurance policy, the contrived investigation and what was really an attempt to undo the election results and remove him as President. And it's still going on to this day, with the obstruction of Congress and the documents they are legally entitled to receive.
RUSH: Yes, I know. In fact, it's not even a criminal proceeding, as you point out. Mueller was not give a crime to chase. This is purely political. They're never going to impeach Trump, they're not going to get the votes in the Senate to kick him out, so in my opinion all along was that they're trying to drive down his approval numbers and destroy his relationship with the American people. Get his approval numbers into the 20s.
JARRETT: Right.
RUSH: They thought they could do this in six months. They thought this media barrage -- CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, four stories a day, anonymous intelligence sources worldwide -- would get Trump's numbers down into the 20s, he would lose support in Congress, he would have to leave. None of that's happened. I think they're just beside themselves at their inability to damage Trump in ways that they thought they could. So you're right, they just ratchet it up. They're so frustrated, they're continually trying to do this.
JARRETT: Right. And it's unravelling for them, I believe.
RUSH: Is it?
JARRETT: The media was complicit in all of this. They drove the narrative of collusion. Collusion is not even a crime in a political campaign, and there's no evidence of any other relevant crimes. I heard George Stepanopoulos say, "Collusion is conspiracy to defraud the government." Well, no, it is not. The U.S. Supreme Court has said twice that you have to prove deceit, trickery, or dishonesty. There is none of that, for example, in the Trump Tower meeting, which seems to be what they hang their hat on. Another journalist said, "Oh, it's honest services fraud." No, the Supreme Court says that requires a bribe or a kickback. Nobody has ever alleged that.
But most frequently the media and Democrats, which is redundant I realize, say, "Oh, it's a violation of campaign laws, because the information that the Russion lawyer provided is a thing of value." They're absolutely incorrect. The Federal Election Campaign Act is very specific. Foreign nationals may volunteer services in a political campaign, and information is not a thing of value under the law.
So there is no such thing as collusion, except in antitrust law, and it's a violation of no other statute in the criminal codes, and I challenge anybody to come up with one.
RUSH: But all they want to do is create the idea in the public mind that "Trump colluded with Putin to steal the election". They're still on that. Gregg, once they create this damage, they have destroyed the integrity of every election going forward. Even after the Ohio special election, they ran around saying "the Russians" were behind the Green candidate, who got 1,000 votes and kept the Democrat from winning.
What they are doing and have done, I don't know how we undo it. I don't know how you go back now and convince the American people that our elections are legit -- when, of course, there's nothing the Russians could have done. Nobody can steal a Presidential race. It's too complicated, you wouldn't know where to go, given the Electoral College. But they've done it. And it's obscene.
JARRETT: That's right. Always the media seems to conflate Russian meddling during the course of an election, which they've done for decades, as I explain in the book, dating back to the Soviet Union. They didn't have computers back then, they used different methods, but they're always attempting to sow discord, to undermine the democracy that they so loathe. But what I find more often than not is that people put the terms "Russian meddling" together with "collusion".
The Russians did mettle. I don't argue that's the hoax. The hoax is this notion that Trump and Putin colluded to influence and win the election. When you read this dossier, it claims that Putin and Trump were working for five to eight years before the 2016 election. You would have to be so prescient and clairvoyant to believe five to eight years before the election that Trump was ever going to be President of the United States. I don't even think he knew that.
RUSH: That's an excellent point. But that's the kind of thing they're trying to propagandize in people's minds. Look, let me jump back to our discussion about exonerating Hillary Clinton. What crimes were they trying to shield her from being charged with and convicted of? Do they include anything to do with her foundation, or is it strictly her email server and trafficking classified data on an unsecure server?
JARRETT: In the investigation that James Comey presided over, they cleared her of a variety of crimes. In my judgment, she committed the following crimes: gross negligence under the Espionage Act; intentionally mishandling classified documents under the same act. There's another statute: knowingly removing classified documents with intent to retain. Theft of government documents is another one. Concealing and removing and destroying government documents is still another. And obstruction of justice, because she is the one who oversaw the destruction of her server device and having it wiped clean and deleting some 33,000 emails that were under Congressional subpoena. Those are just the crimes that I believe Hillary committed.
But as to her foundation, it appears, as I argue in the book, that she used her office to confer benefits to Russia in exchange for millions of dollars to her foundation. That's bribery, that's illegal gratuity, a felony statute, plus mail fraud, wire fraud, and honest services fraud. It's even, potentially, money laundering. There has been no accounting and justice for the acts of Hillary Clinton.
RUSH: As Trump continues to serve in office and assuming he gets reelected, do you think that the people you've mentioned, Clapper, Comey, Brennan, Strzok, Lisa Page, that whole cabal, will ever face charges, and will Hillary? I know she's been exonerated on the server side of things, but are they going to get away with it, do you think?
JARRETT: With Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein at the helm of the Department of Justice, the answer is yes, they'll get away with it. The treatment of those who broke the law is really anathema to the rule of law. There is no "J" in "justice" when it comes to the conduct of these individuals who abuse their positions of power.
The statute of limitations hasn't run yet on Hillary Clinton's mishandling of classified documents. Not all of the statute of limitations have run. This should merit not a special council, necessarily, but how about an honest federal prosecutor who presents the compelling evidence in front of a grand jury? I guarantee you there would be a multi-count criminal indictment against Hillary Clinton. In fact, there should be 110 charges representing 110 classified documents on her unsecured email system. Other people have been prosecuted and convicted for a whole lot less than what Hillary Clinton did.
RUSH: Rudy Giuliani is Trump's lawyer, but he's really acting as a political pit bull. He's taken the gloves off now. He's calling the Mueller probe "corrupt through and through", a "totally illegitimate investigation", and predicts the case "isn't going to fizzle, it's going to blow up on them." He says, "There's a lot more to what they did that nobody knows about yet." You probably know what he's talking about. Can you say? Do you have a general understanding of the substance Rudy is talking about here and what his strategy is?
JARRETT: First and foremost, I think Rudy knows that talking to Bob Mueller would be Donald Trump walking into an ambush. There should be no questions about obstruction of justice. Under the law, an inferior officer has no basis to question a President about exercising his Constitutional authority to fire somebody. As to the Flynn case, "hoping" and "wishing" that somebody's cleared is not obstruction. It requires a corrupt purpose. Even Comey admitted in his Congressional testimony that he'd never heard of a prosecution like that. A corrupt purpose requires a lie, threat, bribe, destruction of documents, concealing of evidence. None of that is alleged here, so obstruction should be off the table, as Rudy Giuliani has already said.
The President might consent to some limited questions to try to diffuse the situation. Preferably the questions should be in writing, the scope should be narrowed. The President should not be questioned about collusion, which is a non-crime. Why should he undergo questions about something that isn't even in the criminal codes?
RUSH: What are your thoughts of Rudy's public strategy? It seems to me he's trying, in the political realm, to drive down Mueller's approval numbers. Just like the Clintons tried to turn Ken Starr into a sex pervert, they're trying to turn Meuller into this unfair zealot, who has nothing, trying to get Trump. Is Rudy going to succeed, do you think?
JARRETT: I think Rudy Giuliani's strategy is to point out at every turn the unfairness of this, and by attacking Mueller, he's succeeding. Mueller should be attacked. Mueller had multiple conflicts of interest and should never have accepted the job. And then Mueller assembled a team of partisans. How is that fair to the President, how is it fair to the American people, to have such a one-sided investigation that appears to have a predetermined, preconceived outcome?
So Rudy is attacking that, and I think he is making a formidable case in the court of public opinion. Somebody has to do it. I think my book does it, I think Rudy's public appearances are doing that. You have to counter what the media has done. They have convicted Trump in the court of public opinion for things he didn't do and without ever citing any laws. The media is famous for making legal pronouncement without backing it up with the law, and that's why in my book I try to unveil how the media has been so unfair to the President by citing the real law.
RUSH: You've worked many places before Fox. You were, for a time, at MSNBC. Were you there during the Lewinsky story?
JARRETT: Oh, yes.
RUSH: I thought so. Are you getting any blowback for this book from people you've known throughout your career?
JARRETT: I have not, and I'm rather shocked by it. I anticipated a torrent of denunciations. I haven't received them. I think the reason is that I tried to make the book as bulletproof as possible.
RUSH: They don't want to call attention to your book. They don't want anybody to see it because it's too effective. That's my theory.
JARRETT: I agree with that theory. When the attacks did not come, as I anticipated they would, it seemed evident to me that they were simply trying to ignore the book. Saying anything about it would only elevate it and get more people to read it. I hope people read this book before the midterm elections, because if they see the truth about how these people subverted the rule of law, I think it will give them pause as to how they should vote come November. And November will be critical.
If Republicans lose the House and/or the Senate, that means that Democrats might move towards articles of impeachment without any legitimate basis. After all, impeachment is a political maneuver, not a legal one.
RUSH: And they're going to be looking at any mechanism they can to paralyze Trump, constant oversight. People should read you book because, Gregg, it's irrefutable. And to casual news consumers, this is not what they think their country is. They don't think this kind of thing happens here. Law enforcement is not this corrupt. They just don't believe it. This is going to shock even people who have been following this along the way. It's stunning. When you stop and think what has gone on here, it is, as far as I'm concerned, unprecedented. I know things have gone on in our government that none of us will ever know, but this is beyond anything that I thought was possible. I thought the media would shine a light on this. They're supposed to hold people in power accountable. They're now accomplices with them.
JARRETT: They are, and I spend much of the epilogue of the book explaining and quoting members of the media who were complicit in the hoax. Governance of, by, and for the people is only as sound and effective as the people who run it. And it's susceptible to abuse, greed, prejudice, hubris, dishonesty, moral weakness. All of these things came into play in the Russia hoax.
These flaws of human condition allow people to trifle with the reins of power and government. And yes, you're right, the media is supposed to be a part of the checks and balances. But when they misuse their positions of prominence, systems can be unduly influenced, the laws subverted, misdeeds can be covered up, all of this is really the story of the Russia hoax.
RUSH: Look, I hope your book does great. I hope as many people get hold of it and read it as possible. The 700 footnotes are as impressive as anything. You document everything in this book that matters, you separate your opinion from fact, and I can tell how much work you put into it. It's well done, and I really, really hope for the best with this for you.
JARRETT: Well, Rush, thank you so much. Your high opinion of the book means a great deal to me. I've been a huge follower of yours since I was anchoring the news in Wichita, Kansas, and a buddy of mine said, "There's this guy on the radio, you've got to listen to him. He's brilliant." That was somewhere around 1990 and I've been listening to you ever since. So, thank you so much for all you've done.
RUSH: I appreciate your time, too. Thanks much and best of luck with it. We'll do our part here.