Here we come to the climate issue. Whenever you have a scandal on the Republican side it’s said well the president wasn’t involved – we were talking about this in Abu Ghraib – but there was a climate where you could do this kind of stuff and abuse prisoners or whatever. Well there certainly was a climate here. The climate was, as you say, a lot of Democratic Senators and others urging really heightened scrutiny about the Tea Party.

The climate, where the president of the United States says that these groups are a threat to democracy; where the president of the United States in the State of the Union Address denounces the whole idea of these groups and intimates that some of them could be taking foreign money and undermining our electoral process [and] says it in the presence of the Supreme Court, insulting them.

And you can imagine the pressure. If you are working in the government you get a sense that Democratic Senators are anxious about heavy scrutiny, particularly of the Tea Party, the president is [furious?], says it’s a threat to democracy. And think of the main stream media and how they treated the Tea Party.

When we had the shooting in Aurora where the guy goes into the movie theater and shoots it up. There was a story – was it NBC or ABC who reported that they had matched the name of the shooter with a Tea Party list. I mean, why would you even look at a Tea Party list? It was ABC.

The mindset of the media elite that this is a lumpenproletariat, it’s Reagan/O’Neil fascist ready to burst and explode – THAT was the atmosphere under which all of this has happened. And that’s a climate and it starts at the top.