Friday on his nationally syndicated radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh criticized FBI Director Christopher Wray for his reaction to the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report.
Limbaugh noted Wray interpreted the report as saying the FBI had no “political bias,” which Limbaugh said was a semantic word game. He added that Wray’s pledge for more training contradicted that notion because if there were not political bias, there would be no need for training.
Partial transcript as follows (courtesy of RushLimbaugh.com):
LIMBAUGH: Grab sound bite 3 — and then, of course, the sound bites that will follow it, sound bites No. 4 and 5. I made a prediction yesterday that the media would go on offense and try to mischaracterize this report, and they did. And you know how they did it? If you read the executive summary of the inspector general report, and if that’s all you read, you’re not gonna know anything.
You’re gonna think that this is a big pile of nothing. It’s stunning! You read the details of the report (chuckling), and you are prepared zero by reading the executive summary. There’s something really odd about this, because the executive summary does not summarize the real important details and discoveries in this report. It’s almost as though the executive summary is there for the media to focus on and highlight while ignoring the nuts and bolts in the effort to make this no big deal. Here is how I predicted it yesterday on this program…
LIMBAUGH ARCHIVE: I’m gonna predict to you that before the end of this day, the media is gonna convert this, and they’re gonna go on offense, and they’re gonna tell you what this report doesn’t say. What they’re gonna tell you is (impression), “There isn’t any evidence that Hillary was doing anything wrong, and there isn’t any evidence that the FBI was trying to rig it for Hillary. There isn’t any evidence!” … Whatever is in it, they’re gonna point out what isn’t in it, what hasn’t been found. Mark my words. I know these people, folks. I’ve been studying ’em. I’ve been dealing with these people for 35 years…
LIMBAUGH: Well, then when I got outta here yesterday and saw the entire report and saw the executive summary, I said, “Well, I’m pretty close, because the executive summary is almost tailored exclusively for people who want to report this as a big nothing — and believe me, it’s what the media is doing. The media is trying to say, “This doesn’t exonerate Trump. This doesn’t make Comey look bad.” I mean, it’s the exact opposite of what actually is in this report — and let me guess.
I’ll bet some of you got up today thinking, “There’s no way the media can avoid this now! There’s no way they can look the other way. There’s no way.” My friends, if you got up thinking that this was gonna be the day the media had to finally admit the truth about the Russia investigation and the Hillary investigation, I’m here to tell you that day is never going to come. The media is never going to admit what they’ve been doing. The media is ever been gonna admit that Trump is right about anything. Don’t get your hopes up. You’ll just be disappointed.
So now we go to a really odd couple of sound bites. Christopher Wray, the FBI director, did a press conference yesterday afternoon at 5:30 Eastern. Sound bite 1 from it here…
WRAY: I take this report very seriously, and we accept its findings and recommendations. (pause) It’s also important, though, to note what the inspector general did not find.
LIMBAUGH: See this?
WRAY: This report did not find —
LIMBAUGH: See?
WRAY: — any evidence of political bias.
LIMBAUGH: See?
WRAY: — or improper considerations actually impacting the investigation under review.
LIMBAUGH: See? I predicted it! The establishment will focus on what’s not in the report, and right there is the FBI director. Now, I know he’s gotta protect his agency and I know he’s gotta protect his people. But look: “To note what the inspector general did not find: The report did not find any evidence of political bias.” It most certainly did, if you go beyond the executive summary. In fact, the political bias and other kinds of bias are documented. I take that back. They are illustrated!
The truth is that there isn’t documented evidence of bias. By that… This is a trick, folks. This is a game. When the IG says, “There’s no evidence of bias,” what he’s saying is that he couldn’t find a piece of paper or an email or a text — from Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, any of them — that said, “We are Republican haters. We are Democrat lovers. We want Hillary to win. We want Trump to lose.” He said, “There is no documentary evidence,” and that is true.
But that’s a semantic word game. In the meat and potatoes of the report, the inspector general illustrates that there was bias against Donald Trump every day in the FBI and at the DOJ. It’s inescapable. But because there’s not in one little telltale, bombshell, smoking-gun memo, he can that there was “no political bias or improper consideration.” That’s just absolutely false.
Here’s the next bite from the FBI director…
WRAY: We’re gonna train every single FBI employee — both new hires and veterans alike — on what went wrong so these mistakes will never be repeated.
LIMBAUGH: What?
WRAY: That includes drilling home the importance of objectivity, of avoiding even the appearance of personal conflicts or political bias in our work.
LIMBAUGH: Now, excuse me, but who are we talking about here? We’re talking about the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Where are they? They are in the Department of Justice. What is the icon of the Department of Justice? It is the scales equally balanced, meaning that there is no bias in justice, that everybody is innocent ’til proved guilty What do these people need to be trained about? These people have gone to the FBI Academy! They have passed; they have become FBI agents. What is this, Romper Room?
“There will be training of every FBI employee, drilling home the importance of objectivity”? For crying out loud! You shouldn’t have to remind anybody of that. That ought to be the order of the day in the pursuit of crime and justice. This itself… I’m telling you, this admission by the director tells us there’s bias. If he’s gonna conduct training seminars and teach them how to avoid political bias, then, damn it, it must mean that there’s a lot of it in there! Otherwise, why would they need the training?
They’re gonna drill home the importance of objectivity?
Where that needs to happen is in the Drive-By Media, but it isn’t gonna happen there because these people don’t want to be objective. That’s the whole point of what we’ve learned about this report. The FBI leadership and the people in this report were devoted to destroying Donald Trump, first in the Hillary investigation, and then in the Russia investigation. The people that were important in the Hillary investigation in exonerating her and making sure she was never charged just changed offices, and they went right over to the Mueller investigation.
They went right over to the Russia investigation. It’s the same people! There’s not a single pro-Trump FBI agent anywhere in the upper ranking of this investigation or on the Mueller team. Not one! And it’s not because they don’t know about objectivity. It’s because they don’t care about it! Because they had a mission: To keep this country away from the candidate that you uneducated, lazy POS were gonna vote for. They couldn’t risk turning this over to a guy elected by you, ’cause “You’re nothing, and you don’t know anything.
“You’re stupid! You expect jobs to be given to you. You get caught up in all this rah-rah America enthusiasm. You’re just a POS.” They all think that, and it’s not confined to the FBI where that attitude exists. The attitude exists about “flyover country,” the men and women who make this country work, and it’s about the case for decades, folks. It’s not new. It’s not new to Obama. It’s not new to Trump and this point in time in our history. It’s been developing this way for decades. It’s just that it’s been exposed here.
It’s been exposed because they lost.
They lost control.
They finally lost the ability to make sure you lazy, uneducated POS had no power, and that as much as anything else sent them on a downward spiral causing them to engage in all of these illegal, unethical, rig-the-game type operations. It’s really sobering. This is devastatingly bad, what we instinctively knew was going on, and now to have it documented. And I’m asking myself, “How does this get fixed?” The damage is ongoing. How does this get fixed? Every one of these people deserves to be fired. James Comey should have been fired by Obama at some point. This is… Comey, St. Comey? The guy is living in a cloud of personal love and worship that is… It’s just not right. There’s something off about it.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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