RUSH: Have you seen the fake news? That Trump supposedly ordered the name of the USS McCrazy — sorry. Take two. Have you seen the fake news that Trump supposedly wanted the name of the USS John McCain covered up in Japan – do believe this? You’d think that Trump had ordered the ship renamed the USS Keating Five, the way people are reacting.

Man, oh, man, and now I’m hearing, folks, do you know what’s going around out there about what Mueller’s real problem with Trump is? I had not heard this. I have no idea if there’s anything to some of this. Some of this I know is true, actually, but, apparently, Mueller joined a Trump golf club somewhere and had to pay a $15,000 deposit and then wanted it back when he was gonna move.

He was gonna leave the club and Trump wouldn’t give him the $15,000 deposit back. I’ve not heard this until today. I don’t know if there’s anything to it. The idea that this could be that petty. I wouldn’t put anything past this bunch in that town. I really wouldn’t.

So apparently Trump wouldn’t give — I don’t know which club. I mean, Trump has a club out in Virginia, and I, of course, have played that club. I don’t know if it’s private, if you have to be a member or not. His club out in Rancho Palos Verdes is not private. Anybody can play. It’s a public course. But, I mean, Trump has a lot of golf clubs around. It could be one in Pennsylvania.

Anyway, Mueller gave a $15,000 deposit to join this place and then moved away, wanted his money back, and Trump refused, $15,000. And then supposedly Mueller was really ticked off that Trump turned him down to be head of the FBI. Now, this, apparently, is true, that Mueller did want to be director of the FBI and Trump turned him down.

Mueller interviewed for the job, and Trump turned him down. Mueller didn’t interview, he lobbied for the job. Trump said “No, thanks,” and the very next day Mueller takes the special counsel gig. I don’t think — and I have no way of knowing this. My only thinking on this is this performance yesterday.

Mueller has been around a long time. In any establishment, in any elite group of people, when you reach a certain age you become a figurehead, and you are rewarded, you are compensated, you’re paid for past achievements. You’re hoisted on a petard, you’re hoisted up on a pedestal, and you are revered and celebrated so forth. And your position is largely ceremonial.

In a law firm, the position is called “of counsel.” They want your name on the letterhead, you’re a rainmaker, but they don’t let you go into court anymore because you don’t know what time of day it is. You’ve done great work in your past, you’ve got a great reputation, a bunch of people want to take advantage of it, but they don’t really let you near any real work.

And I think it’s very likely this is what Mueller was in this special counsel. I think all these people that he hired did the actual work led by Andrew Weissmann. But they can’t put Weissmann’s name on this because that would be an instant bull’s-eye. This guy’s had cases overturned suborning perjury, he’s been sanctioned by federal judges, he sat on the Enron task force when every one of those cases that he was involved in was overturned at the Supreme Court. He had relationships with some of the lawyers in the Ted Stevens case, which was also thrown out of court because of prosecutorial misconduct.

I think Weissmann probably did most of the work on this. I’m only saying this because as I went back and I looked again at the eight minutes of Mueller – I’m not trying to be mean here. Everybody gets old and there’s nothing you can do about it. But it just seemed kind of fumbling and doddering and all of that. I wouldn’t be surprised — I don’t know this — I wouldn’t be surprised if Mueller was literally a figurehead in all of this and had the statement that he read yesterday.

It doesn’t change anything. I’m just sharing an opinion. It’s not gonna change the outcome of anything, the impression of anything. I mean, the Drive-Bys are still gonna say that Mueller is Mr. Integrity, Mr. Boy Scout, Mr. Honorable and all of that.

I’ll tell you something, folks. I want to go back and play for you a sound bite, a clip of me from this program November 22nd, 2016. This is after the election. This is right at the beginning of the transition. Trump is still months away from being inaugurated. And I issued a heads-up, a warning to everybody within the sound of my voice. And I want to replay this ’cause I imagine there’s some people today feeling forlorn, maybe a little down in the dumps, if not full-fledged depressed.

And I just want to remind you that all of this was predicted, all of this is simply prophecy coming true. None of this should surprise any of you. A lot of you probably think that by this time there should have been a mechanism developed to stop it, meaning the left’s attempt and the deep state’s attempt to destroy Trump. By now, there should have been some mechanism to stop it.

Well, who’s gonna stop it? The Republicans in Washington? Who’s gonna stop it? The Drive-By Media gonna stop it? Who’s gonna stop it? Trump alone cannot stop it. And all of his media allies, to the extent that they can’t stop it. I mean, Democrats are gonna do what they’re gonna do. The deep state’s gonna do what they’re gonna do.

There’s no stopping it. There’s only dealing with it and defeating it, which has always been the case. But I just want to remind you — and this is not to call attention to my prescience, although it will do that. It’s just to remind that you none of this should be in any way a surprise.

RUSH ARCHIVE: The Drive-By Media is going to be devoted to getting Trump out of office. Not just bottlenecking his presidency and not just ruining it. Their objective is going to be — I don’t care whether it’s impeachment, resignation, I don’t care what. They’re gonna do everything they can to destroy his presidency. And if they can’t force him out of office, the next thing they’re gonna do is make sure that he fails at everything he wants to do. They’ll do this for a bunch of reasons, among them — and at the very top of the list, I think — is so they can prove to themselves they can still do it.

RUSH: Do not… Well, all of that is now obviously in play. I mean, it’s happening daily right before our very eyes. And I don’t expect a lot of you to have remembered that I said these words specifically. But again, November 22, 2016. This is just not even three weeks after the election. You might be wondering, how did I know this? I know the left. This is why I always say, “Don’t doubt me,” when I tell you about these people because I know them. I know how elites and establishment organizations work, particularly when they’re dominated and run by leftists and Democrats.

They’re the easiest thing in the world to predict, and they are doing exactly what I knew — and at the top of their list, is to show themselves that they still have this kind of pull. They still have the ability to target a political enemy and destroy him, or her. That’s as much a motivation for this as is the substance of it. This has always been a political effort to destroy Trump, before the election and after, during the transition and after his inauguration. It has always been that. It has always been telegraphed. It’s always been there for all of us to see.

Now, it is an existential war — and the stakes? I cannot tell you how high they are for our country. I think the stakes, without question, are the highest they have ever been in my life. The stakes for the country, what kind of country we’re going to be going forward, have never been higher in my life. Let’s see. I was born in ’51… I’m 68 years old. I don’t know how this would compare to Civil War. Obviously, it would pale in many ways to the divisions in the Civil War. But that was then, and this is now. And I am telling you that the stakes for the country are the greatest, the highest they’ve ever been in my life.

And if we let the people running this coup off, then we will have lost the republic to the deep state. These people must not get away with this. It looks every day like they are getting away with it. It looks every day like they are going to get away with it. I know the drill. For two years, you’ve been turning on television and radio, and you’ve been effectively promised that the truth of this is gonna come out, and it hasn’t. And the president the other day said that he was gonna declassify, ordered the declassification of documents. He told Barr to do it.

We haven’t seen anything on it yet.

We know what happened here. We know the truth of this coup. We know why it happened. We know who did it. We know how they did it. What we don’t have is official acknowledgment of it and indictments and official accusations. Now, all of this probably sounds melodramatic. But it’s true. Comey. Mueller. McCabe. Clapper. Brennan. Throw Obama in there. Hillary. Susan Rice. Sally Yates. Samantha Power. I mean, the list is long of all of these rogue plotters. And, by the way, to those who say, “Well, Mueller wouldn’t go rogue.” Mueller won’t rogue yesterday!

I don’t care what anybody says. Mueller went rogue yesterday. “But Rush, he didn’t say anything that wasn’t in the report.” Well, in a sense that’s true. Even in the report, Mueller does acknowledge that the guidelines from the Office of Legal Counsel do provide a barrier to indicting. But Mueller came out yesterday and he made a point (while the attorney general was out of town) to say (paraphrased) “The attorney general didn’t tell you the truth about what I think.” That’s what Mueller did. He went rogue yesterday. You doubt me on this?

On two separate occasions, the attorney general assured the country — once under oath — that he had questioned Mueller. There are witnesses to this, Rosenstein and others working with Barr. They questioned Mueller, and they said, “Let me ask you very quickly: Is the only reason that you’re not indicting because of the regulations the Office of Legal Counsel?” Barr said that Mueller emphatically said, “No. That’s got nothing to do with it,” three to four times. Mueller went out there yesterday and said the exact opposite.

“The only reason that I didn’t indict the president is that I can’t!” That’s the message he conveyed. So he went rogue in the sense of disagreeing with the attorney general while Barr’s in Alaska. So this gonna be fascinating to see what happens with that. I imagine Barr is fuming, calculating, reacting somehow wherever he is here. But it is really important that all of these rogue plotters — who, at the very least, are destroying the basic premise of American jurisprudence by claiming that perps must prove their another one, and that if a prosecutor can’t exonerate them, they may as well be guilty?

Folks, that’s not us. That’s not the United States. That’s not our criminal justice system. It’s the exact opposite. If they can get away in the process, if they can get away with changing the… Your natural state as a citizen of this country is you are innocent of criminal allegations of anything. The natural state… This is part of the founding of our country. In rogue dictatorships, in nations of tyranny, the citizen is guilty from the get-go. The citizen is always guilty.

The powerless are guilty. It is their permanent state. That’s one of the reasons for American exceptionalism. The citizen in this country, is — in his natural state — innocent. When such time as prosecutors at various state, federal, local levels come along and think somebody committed a crime, it is incumbent on them to prove it. The accused does not have to prove he didn’t do it. Now, sometimes in trials you have to do that in order to persuade a jury.

But in our system, the presumption of innocence and the demand and the requirement for proof beyond a reasonable doubt is what separates us. And if these people get away with reordering that, they will have succeeded in getting away with politicizing, criminalizing political differences. As in, “You are a conservative. You’re guilty! You are a Republican. You’re guilty!” They are standing long, traditional, time-honored jurisprudence on its head here.

Even the esteemed Professor Dershowitz is calling out Robert Mueller for this. But the problem is, he’s one of the few. Everybody with half a brain ought to be outraged with what Mueller did yesterday. But they’re not, because Mueller is an ally in getting rid of a politician they don’t like. They couldn’t defeat the politician at the ballot box, and they couldn’t find any crimes that this politician committed.

So they’re just gonna tell everybody they think he’s guilty and that he intended to commit crimes. “But, for crying out loud, we just don’t have the evidence yet! We can’t catch him, but we know he’s guilty. Therefore, because we know he is, he is.” That’s what they are constructing here. If they get away with this — if they get away with the criminalization of policy differences — then we’re finished. I mean, given the assets they have?

They have the deep state. They have the media. They have the power of the federal Treasury. Look at what they’re doing now with open borders, flooding the nation. Hollywood, the pop culture corrupting our society. Academia. Wall Street. They have all of this at their disposal. Right now, all we have is the people on our side and maybe 51, 52% of the country. These people have to be defeated. The people that did this have to be held accountable.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is Kent in Mount Pleasant, North Carolina. Hi, sir.

CALLER: Rush, small correction. Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, just across the bridge from Charleston, South Carolina.

RUSH: I’m sorry about that. It’s a typo up there.

CALLER: That’s okay, sir.

RUSH: ‘Cause everybody knows that North Carolina is not South Carolina. And I assure you that I do.

CALLER: What about folks in Rio Linda?

RUSH: They may not even care. I can convince them.

CALLER: All right. Yes, sir. I was told to get straight to my point. Rush, your opening monologue, I found it quite stimulating. You made a point to say that when we, as a society, or, should I say, the left starts to criminalize our political differences, we are done. As a longtime listener and student of your show, you have taught me that what liberals do is never by accident; it’s by design —

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: — heading towards a goal. And while I agree with your opening monologue premise, I’d like to remind you and the audience that this criminalization, if you will, has been going on for a couple of decades. If you recall, if we disagree with liberals on global warming, then we are polluters. If we disagree with the folks at the modern NAACP, then we’re racists. If we disagree with the LGBTQ, et cetera, et cetera crowd, then we’re homophobes. If we disagree with the modern liberals’ notion of abortion, then we are anti-women or we —

RUSH: Well, I get what you’re — that is character assassination and that is the attempt — but that’s not criminalization. I get what you’re saying, that they’re already and have been well on the way toward demonizing political opposition. But criminalizing it, meaning you can be found guilty and go to jail for what you believe? They’re not there yet.