The establishment media “smell blood” in the wake of the resignation of national security adviser Michael Flynn, and they’re now more determined than ever to bring down President Trump, talk-radio king Rush Limbaugh warned on his Tuesday show.
“[T]he drive-bys now smell blood, and they’re pig-biting mad they weren’t able to ask Trump the Flynn question yesterday ’cause Trump is calling on conservative media now in these press conferences, and it’s really ripping the drive-bys a new one. They just can’t abide it,” Limbaugh said.
During a news conference Monday, Trump took questions from the Daily Caller and WJLA-TV, an ABC affiliate in Washington. Reporters from CNN, Time, MSNBC, ABC, Yahoo News and other news organizations were angered that Trump didn’t take Flynn-related questions from them.
Listen to Limbaugh’s comments during his Tuesday show:
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Now, Limbaugh said, the “drive-by” media are in a frenzy, demanding to know what Trump knew about Flynn’s December discussion concerning sanctions with the Russian ambassador.
But they’re asking the wrong question, he said.
“To show you just how lame the media is and how little they’ve got, they’re already asking what did Trump know and when did he know it, and that’s not the question,” Limbaugh said. “The question is, what did Barack Obama know and when did he know it and what has he engineered here?
“This all happened with Flynn back in December. Trump had not even been inaugurated yet. And it’s still mysterious to me what really happened. Even if, even if Flynn, as the incoming national security director, had called the Russian ambassador to talk, so what? That’s not hard to imagine. That’s not a big deal. It really isn’t a big deal.”
If Flynn did, indeed, lie to Vice President Mike Pence about his Russia discussions, then perhaps Flynn made the right move when he stepped down, Limbaugh said.
The White House said Tuesday that President Trump had asked for Flynn’s resignation because he “was very concerned that Gen. Flynn had misled the vice president and others” and was concerned “there was a trust issue.”
Nonetheless, the underlying issue is the coordinated and relentless effort by the establishment media and the left to bring down Trump, according to Limbaugh:
I realize that a lot of people do not pay a whole lot of attention to this, which is good, but for those of you who are, I can imagine the impact on you, and you’re asking, “Well, when’s he gonna stop? I mean, how much more of this can anybody take? How much more of this kind of assault and attacking nature can any administration handle? And then the other question, how long can the Republicans in Congress handle it? How long are they gonna stay bucked up and stiff-spined about it? And time will tell on that.
I’m gonna tell you, Trump’s not stopping. There will be more ICE raids this afternoon to make people forget about this. The media’s gonna try as hard as they can not to let go of this, because now they’ve got their scalp. They think they have blood in the water, they’ve got a scalp, and they think they can get another and then another and then another and then another until finally they get Trump.
They have become the full-fledged resistance to Trump and they have decided that that’s going to be their modus operandi for the next four years. They’re not gonna do news. They have now mobilized and made it official, they’re even talking about it, some of them are, on cable networks that — I mean, they disguise the words they use, but the impact is clear that they are going to do everything they can to get Trump out of Washington and out of the White House and out of office.
So what we have here, we have a political assassination that’s taken place here, a political assassination, Mike Flynn, who, do you know he worked for Obama four different times? You didn’t know that? Let me find the details. In September 2011, Mike Flynn was promoted to lieutenant general assigned to the office of the Director of National Intelligence by Barack Obama. On April 17th, 2012, President Barack Obama nominated Michael Flynn to be the 18th director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. …
So we have a resignation over a phone call, a freaking phone call. The Democrats don’t resign when they’re caught red-handed with their hand in the till or in bed with an intern or whatever else transgression the Democrats engage in. There are no resignations, and there are no demands for resignations.
Limbaugh was especially skeptical of establishment media suggestions that Flynn was open to blackmail by the Russians – particularly when the argument is being made by Hillary Clinton supporters:
Are we serious about this? Flynn was open to blackmail? Who was it that the drive-bys wanted to see as president in? That would be Hillary Rodham Clinton, who could have been blackmailed six ways from Sunday by the Russians and who the heck else we know.
We don’t know who has those 34,000 emails that she deleted. We don’t know who has Tom Brady’s jersey. (He laughs.) We’re trying to find both. We don’t know what top national security secrets were revealed in those 34,000 emails. This is a woman whose home brew server was hacked by world powers, the ChiComs, the Russians. This is a woman who, with her famous Russian reset, embarrassed the United States of America. Blackmail?
Here’s Hillary Clinton who had collected campaign contributions supposed in advance that were nothing more than advance payments for policy considerations. She was selling access to the Oval Office via the Clinton administration. You want to talk about blackmail? You are worried about blackmail and Michael Flynn and Donald Trump when you were going to have Hillary Clinton in the White House if you had your way? …
It was going to happen, just like the protests that magically and immediately sprang up after Trump announced his executive order. This is who the left is. This is what you voted against. This is what you wanted no more of, this behavior. Not by Trump, not by Flynn. What you voted against — the reason you voted for Trump — is exactly what you’re seeing day to day now from the left and from the Democrat Party and from the media.
Former Obama administration officials and national security administrators may be in on the effort to leak sensitive information and transcripts of Flynn’s conversation with the Russian ambassador, according to Bloomberg’s Eli Lake.
“The questions someone in the White House should ask the National Security Agency is why it didn’t use minimization procedures to protect Mr. Flynn?” the Wall Street Journal editorial board asked Monday evening. “Or did it also have a court order to listen to Mr. Flynn, and how did it justify that judicial request?”
Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who chairs the House Select Intelligence Committee, told Bloomberg:Â “There does appear to be a well orchestrated effort to attack Flynn and others in the administration. From the leaking of phone calls between the president and foreign leaders to what appears to be high-level FISA Court information, to the leaking of American citizens being denied security clearances, it looks like a pattern.”
President Trump expressed concern over leaks in a tweet Tuesday.
“The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington?” Trump tweeted. “Will these leaks be happening as I deal on N.Korea etc?”
Former Obama administration officials were behind a secret campaign to “plant damaging stories about Flynn in the national media,” according to the Washington Free Beacon.
“The effort, said to include former Obama administration adviser Ben Rhodes — the architect of a separate White House effort to create what he described as a pro-Iran echo chamber — included a small task force of Obama loyalists who deluged media outlets with stories aimed at eroding Flynn’s credibility, multiple sources revealed,” the Free Beacon reported.
One veteran national security adviser with ties to the White House team told the paper: “It’s undeniable that the campaign to discredit Flynn was well underway before Inauguration Day, with a very troublesome and politicized series of leaks designed to undermine him.”
Another source, a congressional adviser, told the Beacon that the Obama administration was concerned Flynn would reveal Obama’s secret agreements with Iran.
“The Obama administration knew that Flynn was going to release the secret documents around the Iran deal, which would blow up their myth that it was a good deal that rolled back Iran,” the source told the Free Beacon. “So in December the Obama NSC started going to work with their favorite reporters, selectively leaking damaging and incomplete information about Flynn.
“After Trump was inaugurated, some of those people stayed in and some began working from the outside, and they cooperated to keep undermining Trump,” the source said, detailing a number of leaks coming from the White House in the last few weeks that targeted Flynn.
“Last night’s resignation was their first major win, but unless the Trump people get serious about cleaning house, it won’t be the last.”
