Here's Rush's actual transcript on the matter....
Dirty Trick! Cruz Audio Sabotaged During Fox News Broadcast of New York Speech
April 15, 2016
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Well, I guess I'm wrong. Guess I'm the only guy that I know who thinks that a dirty trick was pulled last night. I mean, if it was a dirty trick, it has to be one of the best that I've seen, in I don't know how long, and they've got everybody playing along with it. It's the most amazing thing, but it must not have been a dirty trick 'cause I'm the only guy who thinks it was.
No, what happened at that Republican thing last night, the New York GOP speech, I'll show you here in a minute. I'll show you what I'm talking about. It's the most amazing thing and everybody is just playing right along with the whole premise that is accompanying what happened there last night.
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RUSH: I also watched last night the New York Republican Party black-tie event where the three Republican contenders showed up to address -- it's kind of a mini-version of the Al Smith dinner for Republicans only.
Donald Trump led off, followed by John Kasich, followed by Ted Cruz. And something remarkable happened a short time into Cruz's speech that did not happen during either Trump's or Kasich's speech. I watched this on the Fox News Channel, and the timing of this, it happened to coincide with the Kelly File, the TV show hosted by Megyn Kelly. She had a focus group in there, minus Frank Luntz, just had a bunch of people there from New York, bunch of New Yorkers, and there was a break between every candidate's speech. Trump got up and spoke, and then there was a little downtime before Kasich came up.
And during that downtime they go back to Megyn Kelly's show and she would discuss what they had just seen or what they thought of it with the focus group. The focus group was diverse, it had supporters of all three candidates in there, and it was feisty. It was kind of a hoot watching these New Yorkers go after each other. Cruz fans, Kasich fans. There were some Kasich fans in there. And, of course, people for the Trumpster. But something happened when Cruz got up there.
Now, by the time Cruz started making his remarks, I had my iPad Pro out, I was multitasking. I was doing some other things while listening. I had watched a little bit. I didn't watch the totality of everybody's speech, but I watched the last half of Trump's and I watched the intro to Kasich and most of his speech. He went a little long. I think I probably had all of it on, and I had my iPad Pro on. Cruz comes on after the focus groups -- he goes last -- and I've got my head down the first I don't know how many minutes, maybe three minutes.
Frankly, I'll be honest with you, I tuned out a little bit because Cruz was doing a stump speech. He was talking about his campaign's the only campaign that's beaten Donald Trump 11 times and he was talking about how he's gonna do his first day in office. He's gonna rip up Obamacare and he's gonna abolish the IRS. I said okay, I'll tune out a little bit here and focus more on what I'm researching here on my iPad Pro. And something happened. My iPad Pro, there was a website I was looking at which had a video on it, and all of a sudden the audio in my library just went berserk. And I looked, I said, "What in the hell happened?"
So I thought maybe my iPad, maybe something happened on the iPad, because it was striking. Cruz was speaking the one moment and then a cacophony, I mean literally in a split second. And my hearing is such, all sound is noise to me, even communicating with people in person, it's noise. It's all irritating, folks. The way you have to understand this, for me, so that you can understand how I heard this. All noise, even talking to people, is noise to me. To people who can hear normally, speech is not noise. To me it's all noise, 'cause it's all bionic, it all sounds artificial to me. I don't hear anything the way anybody else hears it.
I am so at home in complete, total, utter silence. I keep the TV mute on oftentimes and just read the closed-captioning 'cause it's just noise. But I had the video and the audio up, and when this cacophony hit, I thought a video had started on my iPad, and the first thing I did was turn the volume down 'cause I thought I had two different audio sources competing and it was just irritating as hell so I turned the iPad audio down, there wasn't anything on the iPad. The change had occurred totally at the New York GOP affair.
So I studied it, I looked at it, and in 30 seconds I figured out what happened. They had cut Ted Cruz's microphone at the podium and they had replaced it with what sounded like microphones at five or six tables where you heard nothing but the table noise. The clinking of knives and forks on plates, people swigging beverages. You could hear people smacking their lips while they were eating. At least it sounded like it to me. You could hear people chatting with each other. I said, "What the hell is this?"
It was so different from anything I had heard all night at this thing that my attention was riveted. And I said, "Something's gone wrong here." This is obviously an audio glitch, and I stayed riveted for the Fox News Channel to fix it. And I stayed riveted, and I stayed riveted, and I continued to watch. Five minutes went by and not one change. Then another two minutes went by and then there was silence for a couple seconds. "A-ha," I said, "they're gonna fix it." But when it came back, it was all the same. I could not hear Ted Cruz. Cruz had no idea. He's still up there gesticulating, he's doing his normal speech, can't hear him anymore, don't know what he's saying. All you hear is what's going on at the table. You hear the waiters running around; sounds like people were dropping plates and knives and forks on the floor and stomping on them.
 And then the next thing that happened was I saw the face of Sean Hannity, who said, "Sorry. Audio problems." And then he turned to Eric Bolling to begin discussing the virtues of Trump and Corey Lewandowski. And I said, "Well, hot damn." I said, "This is one of the best damn tricks I have ever seen. They just sabotaged Cruz at this thing." I didn't know who did it, but somebody -- I said, this is amazing. And I waited for the lid to blow.
I started reading people's Twitter feeds. I started reading all kinds of things, and there wasn't one reference to it. I said, "This can't be." I can't be the only person that noticed this. I can't be the only person that saw it. And then I finally saw a thread, and I was even more impressed. I was even more incredulous, because the thread had a theme. You know what the theme was? Cruz was so boring, Cruz was so bad, Cruz is so hated that nobody listened to him. We had Drive-By Media supposedly on site as witnesses tweeting and reporting that nobody listened to Cruz, that the crowd was getting up and walking around and milling around and being rude, that the whole room had turned Cruz out.
I just smiled. I said, "Whoever put this together is a genius." 'Cause they have coordinated every bit of this. In the first place, they sabotaged Cruz, then they get to the media and make it look like what happened was totally natural, Cruz is hated, despised, everybody started ignoring him. Such tweets as, "Wow, this crowd is not digging Cruz's speech. A lot of people talking amongst themselves as Cruz speaks at New York GOP gala. So far the most enthusiastic crowd reaction to Cruz has been a couple of moments of tepid applause. It's legitimately loud in here, people talking and eating and ignoring Cruz."
That's not what was happening. The only people who thought that were the people watching on Fox News because the microphones, something happened to them, I don't know. I'm gonna take a brief time-out and I'm gonna come back and show you, I'm gonna play the audio here and you'll see what I'm talking about. But what brings it all together is, even today, I'm watching Fox News, and they are talking today about, "Wow, just terrible last night for Ted Cruz. Nobody cared what he had to say. I mean, you should see it, people getting up and milling around and walking around, it was rude, people didn't care. It was really a big problem for Ted Cruz."
 I said, "That's not what happened." (laughing) It isn't what happened at all. And then I saw Kellyanne Conway on Fox. She is Cruz's pollster and she didn't even reference it. She went along with the idea that a United States senator had been disrespected and how unfortunate it was. Wow. Whoever planned this, whoever orchestrated this, and whoever executed this, this was pulled off flawlessly. This was a brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed slam on Ted Cruz.
And I'm sure it's all about New York values. I'm sure some people have been planning this for weeks when they found out Cruz was gonna show up. People that probably hate each other got together on this to come up with this scheme. I mean, if they have pulled this off, I just hope and pray that they do something like this against Hillary when the time comes. I'll show you what I'm talking about when we come back.
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RUSH: Okay. Here we go. We're gonna first start off with Trump. And Mike, I don't need to play the whole bite here. Just play it 'til I tell you to stop. Just need to establish enough here to let you know how everybody at the podium sounded last night. Up first, the Grand Hyatt, which Trump used to own, I'm sure still has some connections there, Grand Hyatt hotel, Grand Central Station, at the 2016 New York state Republican gala, here's Trump.
TRUMP: I loved the potential of the building. It's called the Commodore Hotel. It was built in 1909, and it was a mess. And they had a spa, and the spa was called Relaxation Plus. And nobody ever got into what the Plus meant. You don't want to know.
RUSH: Okay. That's enough. Perfectly normal, right? You could hear everything Trump was saying no problem. Here's John Kasich next. His audio also loud and clear.
KASICH: When we live in the dark, when we practice politics in the dark, over time people don't like it. I think when the public looks at a politician whose lips are moving, they figure that politician is lying. And I'm a citizen myself. And when people come to tell me about what they want to do and why they want to be elected, I always say to them, "What have you done in your life? Why should --"
RUSH: Enough of that. That's Kasich. And here is the first part of Ted Cruz. Cruz goes last. And this is what it sounded like at the beginning of Cruz's speech. Totally normal.
CRUZ: The heart of our economy is not Washington, DC. The heart of our economy is small businesses all across the United States of America. (Applause) And if you want to see the economy take off, it's very simple: You lift the boot of the federal government off the back of the necks of small businesses. If I'm elected president --
RUSH: Okay, so we've established that circumstances for all three are perfectly fine. You could hear them each equally and well. They were all being listened to. And then magically, I mean, remember, my face is down, I'm looking and reading something on my iPad Pro, and my room goes berserk with audio that's twice as loud as any of the speech audio was, and it turned out it was somebody giving Ted Cruz a taste of New York values.
CRUZ: If we remain divided we will lose. And so I recognize many of the people in this room (unintelligible). They started on the (unintelligible). Maybe they started out supporting Jeb Bush. (unintelligible) supporting Rubio (unintelligible) or any of the fantastic candidates who began (unintelligible).
RUSH: Stop it. Stop it. That is how the final eight minutes of Ted Cruz's speech sounded. You couldn't hear him. They turned the podium mic off, somebody turned the podium mic off and turned on all the other microphones in the room to pick up all the room noise, and then there were tweets like this one. "It's sort of painful to watch someone speak passionately to a crowd who wouldn't even notice if he killed himself on stage." I mean, the media was in on the trick, Fox News was in on the trick, everybody played along as though all of a sudden Cruz lost the room. Now, Mike, here's what I want you to do. I want you to grab sound bite number three and just as soon as it ends, start number four.
CRUZ: The heart of our economy is not Washington, DC. The heart of our economy is small businesses all across the United States of America. (Applause) And if you want to see the economy take off, it's very simple: You lift the boot of the federal government off the back of the necks of small businesses. If I'm elected president, we will repeal every word of Obamacare. (mic cut) If we remain divided, we will lose. And so I recognize many of the people in this room, who started out supporting other candidates. Maybe you start out supporting Jeb Bush. (unintelligible) Maybe you started out supporting Marco Rubio (unintelligible) or any of the fantastic candidates who began this race. (unintelligible).
RUSH: And I expected all hell to break loose. I expected there to be outrage from pro-Cruz people over how he had been sabotaged, double dirty tricked, whatever it was, and there was nothing. All there was was a bunch of media people talking about how disrespected Cruz was, that people got tired of listening to him and got up and started walking around and making all this noise. And even today, everybody continues: "Nobody cared about Cruz. It was so boring. Poor guy."
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RUSH: One more demonstration of this just 'cause I know many of you, "Gee, play that again, I want to hear it again." I'm gonna play it one more time. Now, keep in mind, folks, to show you how brilliantly this thing's executed. They got three guys showing up making speeches. The speeches go I think 15 minutes max. There's a bunch of prespeeches. I'm watching this. It's at nine o'clock and nobody has eaten yet.
 It is important to understand that whoever orchestrated this also was smart enough to realize not to serve dinner until Cruz got up to speak. There were no plates and knives and forks and all that to make any noise when Trump and Kasich were speaking. But between the break between Kasich and Cruz, they served dinner. So people were also eating during Cruz's remarks, and it was at some point during Cruz's speech somebody turned off the podium microphone and turned on all of the room microphones, picking up all the white noise in the room, making it look like that was the only noise in the room, that nobody was listening.
Meanwhile, if you're watching this, there's Cruz, his arms are waving around and he's giving a speech, nothing has changed, in his mind. He's not off tempo. He's not seeing a bunch of people walk around and mill around and ignoring him. He's watching people still listening to him. He doesn't know anything that's happened. He doesn't know until it's over when somebody tells him, I'm sure. The TV audience is thinking there's some audio glitch that's happened here and Fox is gonna find it and fix it, but that never happens.
And then later that night, the Drive-By Media and into today and everybody at Fox News is reporting what a dull, dry speech Cruz made. It was so bad, it was so boring that everybody ignored him, started walking around, talking to themselves, making noise. How embarrassing. And I am sure this is payback for New York values. I'm sure that's what this is, Cruz got a dose of it last night.
Whoever planned this pulled this off and not only did they pull it off, they had to coordinate this with the media or else they relied on the stupidity and gullibility of the media. They relied on what they know is the media's prejudice against Cruz. They probably didn't even have to tell people, "My God Cruz was so boring, nobody listened." They probably didn't even have to tell the media that, that's the media's natural disposition, to dispossess and disrespect Cruz.
So here, listen again, exactly as I heard it, listening to the beginning of Cruz's speech, my head's down not watching the screen, multitasking, doing some show prep on the iPad Pro, and then all of a sudden the noise changes. And, by the way, the noise in the second bite, the room noise when you're watching TV, it was twice as loud as the audio of the speeches from the podium. Here we go.
CRUZ: The heart of our economy is not Washington, DC.
RUSH: Perfectly normal.
CRUZ: The heart of our economy is small businesses all across the United States of America.
RUSH: No problems at all here. Applause. Here they're listening.
CRUZ: And if you want to see the economy take off, it's very simple: You lift the boot of the federal government off the back of the necks of small businesses. If I'm elected president, we will repeal every word of Obamacare. (mic cut) If we remain divided, we will lose. And so I recognize many of the people in this room, who started out supporting other candidates. Maybe you started out supporting Jeb Bush. (unintelligible) Maybe you started out supporting Marco Rubio or Scott Walker (unintelligible) or any of the fantastic candidates who began this race. (unintelligible).
RUSH: That is not how it sounded in the room. It only sounded that way on TV. In the room all was normal. There wouldn't have been any perceived difference. You're watching on TV, that was all you heard. And you would think, okay, something's happened, there's an audio glitch somewhere. But it went on for five or eight minutes, and they never fixed it. It just continued, and finally they bumped out of it. The next thing they saw was Sean Hannity saying, "Sorry, audio problems. We want to welcome Eric Bolling. Eric? What is a great guy like Corey Lewandowski doing tonight?"
It was not even addressed. So I think, if I'm just patient, I'm gonna see a bunch of Cruzers just blow up, fit of tirades all over the media watching last night, and I didn't see anything except the media tweeting and posting blogs, blog posts about how boring Cruz was, how nobody listened, it was a shocking thing. I said, "Gee, they must be in on it." At no time last night did I see anywhere anybody questioning what happened, what might have gone wrong with the audio during Cruz's remarks.
So I get up today, I start show prep, I've got Fox on in here, and still they're continuing with this premise that Cruz was so dull, so boring, so hated, that the room, fellow Republicans just totally disrespected him. They got up, they walked around, they talked amongst themselves, they were eating, they were making noise with their plates and knives and forks.
And I just had to marvel at it. I said, "This is a multipart trick that involves the cooperation of a whole lot of people, and every one of them played along." Not one person blew the whistle on this. Even now nobody has blown the whistle. The media is still writing about what a dull dryball Cruz is. They're still writing about how the audience totally tuned out. They even had Kellyanne Conway on. She's with the Cruz campaign. She's a pollster and works with the Keep the Promise super PAC. She's the president of it.
She was on this morning on Fox, and the question she got, "You were there last night. You've seen a lot of the reporting this morning, that Senator Cruz was ignored." Did you see this? This is Martha MacCallum carrying on with this charade. "You've seen a lot of the reporting this morning that Senator Cruz was ignored, the people were intentionally not paying attention, and the thinking is that it's because of the New York values comment. What was your take?"
CONWAY: Some people waited up to 90 minutes just to get through metal detectors last night. Mr. Trump has Secret Service security. So by the time dinner was served, the event started an hour late, I think Senator Cruz was speaking as people were eating for the first time all night. And I think it would be unfortunate if people, as you suggest, were intentionally ignoring a United States Senator from their own party and a presidential contender from their own party because of a comment he made, which he has since explained really goes to Donald Trump's comment. That was a phrase Donald Trump used many years ago to explain his position, his support for partial-birth abortion.
 RUSH: Apparently, she didn't even know what happened. She was accepting the premise that her candidate was universally despised and reviled and thus he was ignored and mistreated and treated rudely, and she could only say that it was a sad thing that this happened to a sitting senator and that sought to justify the New York values comment.
It continues, folks, as we sit here today, as we sit here at this moment, that is still the premise. That's still the narrative. And I'll tell you if you're the Cruz campaign, since this happened once, and you know that whoever was involved in this, they could do it again. (interruption) Brian, the broadcast engineer, you think something broke? Oh, come on, Brian. He's like Moe Thacker, you know, the old United Screeners of America union thug head back in New York. So you're not gonna cast aspersions on your engineer brethren?
So you think something broke last night, like maybe the wires, the cables connecting the podium mic to the amplifier just accidentally came unplugged maybe and they couldn't figure it out in 10 minutes of trying to troubleshoot the problem? Yeah, just one of those unfortunate technical glitches that nobody in 2016 could figure out how to find and fix.
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