RUSH: Trump called Fox & Friends today. You know, folks, it’s very difficult. You know, I’m not a backslapper, I don’t turn around to try to find my own back with my own hand very often, but I came up with this explanation to people this week, the context of all these things that happen.

And, if you understand the context, it all makes perfect common sense. And it is amazing how many people now are utilizing that contextual theory. In fact, Peggy Noonan writes a column today saying even the president’s defenders are not even defending what he did. There’s nothing to have to defend! There’s not a single thing to have to defend here. How in the world can putting all of this in context so that it makes utter perfect common sense be a weak defense? What’s weak is the charges, the allegations. There have been nothing to them from the get-go for three years. Anyway, everybody’s now using this context business, including the president himself.

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RUSH: I do want you to hear some of Trump’s appearance today on Fox & Friends. ‘Cause he was unloading.

I still maintain that people cannot possibly understand what Trump goes through every day and what he has to be quiet about. The stuff he sits there and has to listen to about himself and watching this official Washington, D.C., worldwide deep state. Who do you think’s behind trying to sabotage Bibi Netanyahu? Do you think the deep state’s only in Washington? The deep state’s not just in Washington. It’s in the European Union. Israel has their own version of a bunch of bureaucrats that are unelected, trying to undermine the will of people in democratic societies.

It’s really what we’re all up against here. It’s us, the democratic process versus a bunch of invisible, unelected people who don’t think that the people are the final arbiters of who serves, who’s elected, and who has power.

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RUSH: You know, Trump made the point, they wanted to impeach Nixon because he wiretapped the Watergate headquarters of the Democrat National Committee, and yet he was wiretapped. He was spied on by the FBI via the FISA warrant on Carter Page, and they want to impeach him!

So Trump was on Fox & Friends today. Let’s start here with audio sound bite number 3. He was on for, what, 25 minutes with them today on a phoner. And we have just a few of the sound bites. He’s talking about the altered documents to the FISA warrant application to surveil Carter Page, the bombshell that was reported late yesterday afternoon. This is what Trump said about it.

THE PRESIDENT: They wrote up the phony, fake dossier. Hillary Clinton paid for it, and the Democrats. A lot of it had to do, they say, with Ukraine. They gave the server to CrowdStrike or whatever it’s called, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company? That’s what I asked actually in my phone call, if you know, I asked it very point-blank because we’re looking for corruption.

Why should we be giving hundreds of millions of dollars to countries when there’s this kind of corruption? You look at my call, I said, you know, corruption. Also, by the way, going back to that, why isn’t Germany putting up money? Why isn’t France putting up money, all of the European nations? Why aren’t they putting up? You have the European Union. How come it’s always the United States that puts up money? The suckers. Why is it always the United States?

RUSH: What he means is, how come other people aren’t trying to take care of Ukraine versus Russia? Why’s it always us? The French aren’t doing anything to protect Ukraine. The Brits aren’t doing anything to protect Ukraine. Well, the answer is they don’t have a defense to help out with because we pay for theirs too.

Now, this business of the CrowdStrike company, they are headed by a former Ukrainian who hates Putin. This theory that the Democrats’ server is in Ukraine, that’s kind of out there. There are two Ukraine – I want to say activities that relate to the attempt to undermine Trump’s campaign and presidency. Now, the popular belief is that the CrowdStrike version of Ukraine involvement’s kind of bogus, nobody can prove it, that nobody knows where the DNC server is and that it’s in Ukraine or not, nobody knows.

Now, Fiona Hill shows up yesterday, and what she cleverly did was debunk that and then take the debunking of that to suggest Ukraine had nothing to do, it was all the Russians. But she was dead wrong about it and she knows that she was wrong. This is a woman who shows up claiming she’s a nonpartisan. She’s not a nonpartisan! She is a left wing activist like they all are. She worked at the Brookings Institution, an uber-left-wing think tank. They’re not nonpartisan.

The truth about Ukraine is that there were Ukrainians attempting to undermine Trump’s campaign. Whether the Russians were in on it with them or not is irrelevant. The Ukrainians did have people trying to undermine Trump. That happened. She tried to make it look like that that didn’t happen because the CrowdStrike version of Ukraine involvement is not true.

But we know that the Ukrainians were involved. Politico and the Washington Post, any number of others did stories. The Ukrainian court even convicted a couple of people for trying to undermine Trump’s election. It did happen. Ukraine was involved. And it’s key to understand that because that explains why Trump was so reticent to give them any money. It’s why he was demanding that they show they had ended that era of corruption.

The previous Ukrainian president prior to Zelensky is who had helped undermine Trump’s campaign, had worked against it. Remember The Politico story that I think we were the first to bring to your attention that the Ukrainians now had to do a 180 because Trump won the election and they had to now show that they were sorry and wanted to be on Trump’s good side.

There’s no question that Ukraine meddled in the Trump election, the Trump campaign. Whether the Russians did or didn’t, either, the Ukrainians did. Trump knows it. So they elect a new president, Zelensky. Remember all through the Obama years we didn’t give them a dime. This is another thing.

Here’s all of these witnesses, including Fiona Hill, so worried Ukraine was defenseless against these mad, evil Russians. Well, Ukraine now has defensive aid because of one man, Donald Trump. Your guy, Obama, denied them everything because he didn’t want to tick off Putin. It was Obama in league with Putin, not Trump.

God this stuff is maddening. So Ukraine wants the money that Obama never gave them. Trump says, essentially, what are you gonna do for it? We’re not passing out U.S. dollars anymore, willy-nilly. That’s not what I campaigned on, that’s not what I believe. We’re gonna give money to legitimate allies. We’re only going to help people who want to help us.

So Trump gets on the phone with Zelensky and starts demanding that the anti-corruption efforts that he ran on are actually gonna be implemented. It makes perfect sense, particularly when he’s talking to the president of a country which had just years prior tried to undermine his campaign. In order to find out if Ukraine was now playing straight, he sends his buddy Rudy over there because Rudy is a great crimefighter, former U.S. attorney Southern District of New York, former mayor of New York.

He cleaned up crime in New York City, for crying out loud, was the author of the broken windows policy, got rid of the squeegee guys that were harassing everybody coming out of the tunnels. Rudy cleaned up crime in that city. Trump trusts him, has known him a long time, sends him over there. He trusts him more than he trusts the ambassadorial crew and a bunch of the Obama holdovers. They want to impeach him for that. And Vindman — O say can you see — pretty much admitted it. They all did.

“Trump went outside channels. He used alternative channels. He did not use the interagency group,” because he couldn’t trust it. They had tried to undermine his election. None of this is hard to understand. The context of this makes Trump’s actions perfectly sensible and brilliantly smart. That’s why everybody’s starting to adapt a contextual argument, by the way, because it makes all of this easily understandable and takes away any cloud of supposed criminality, lawbreaking, whatever cloud they want to cast over Trump’s behavior here.

It’s the exact opposite. He loves America. He wants to make sure America’s no longer used, taken advantage of, not respected. Exactly what every president ought to do, not hand out money all over the world for whatever reasons! Diplomats love handing out money. It’s how they buy love and respect from all the people they give it to. It’s not their money. It’s the U.S. Treasury’s money, it’s U.S. taxpayers’ money. They love giving it away. They love spreading it around.

Trump thinks it’s stupid to give away money to countries that are not our allies, and particularly a country which has attempted to undermine his own campaign, without first ascertaining that they’ve cleaned up their act. That’s all Trump did. They ended up getting their money. And guess what? The president told Zelensky supposedly, “You want a meeting with me in the Oval Office? Then you gotta do this.” Well, whatever, Zelensky got his meeting with Trump.

And he got his aid. And there never has been an investigation of the Bidens that Trump supposedly demanded. So all of this makes perfect sense that every one of Schiff’s witnesses came up there and tried to distort everything I just told you into some sort of criminal behavior or incompetent behavior or dangerous, risky behavior. All it was was utter, uber-common sense. Next Trump sound bite, number 4 here. Well, there’s no question. Trump just kept talking. Here’s the next bite…

THE PRESIDENT: I watched Joe Biden with the prosecutor — who a lot of people said was a great prosecutor — and they took him off. And he was prosecuting that company. And the kid, who never made 10¢ in his life and all of a sudden is making millions of dollars —

DOOCY: Hunter Biden.

THE PRESIDENT: I mean, you tell me. This is a guy who got thrown out of the Navy dishonorably, gets thrown out of the Navy and made no money — went through, made no money. All of a sudden, his father becomes VP and he’s making millions and millions of dollars. But there’s another reason that is maybe to me the most important. Why isn’t Germany, France, the European Union…? Why aren’t all those countries in Europe, why aren’t they paying? Why is it always the United States the sucker? I got elected on that.

RUSH: He makes the point again — and of course, if you go talk to the diplomatic corps, “Well, it’s the United States’ role in the world to fund allies.” But Trump’s exactly right. This is what he ran on. He ran on the fact we’re gonna get us out of meaningless wars where there’s no U.S. national interest vitally at stake. We’re gonna get out of these situations where we just endlessly send American money with no reciprocity. We’re not gonna start paying money to nations that aren’t our friends, that are not our allies.

Here he is talking about Rudy. We’ll have this last bite before the break. Here this one is…

THE PRESIDENT: Rudy is a great crimefighter. Rudy is the best mayor in the history of New York City. Rudy Giuliani is a very legendary figure in our country. Rudy Giuliani was one of the great crimefighters of all time. He’s also a friend of mine. He’s a great person. He’s like an iconic figure in this country for two reasons. He was the greatest mayor in the history of New York, and he was the greatest crimefighter probably in the last 50 years. When you’re dealing with a corrupt country, with Rudy Giuliani, he’s got credentials because of his reputation. When Rudy Giuliani goes there and you hear it’s a corrupt country, it means a lot.

RUSH: Okay. So we want to convict Trump for trusting Rudy and why? Well, how is Rudy being portrayed? Rudy’s being portrayed as a bumbling Inspector Clouseau kind of guy. Rudy is being portrayed as some guy that goes on TV, doesn’t know what he’s talking about, gets confused, mumbles and stumbles around. He’s kind of a little lackey idiot. It’s not who Rudy Giuliani is. But this is what they do, folks.

They destroy (try to) the credibility of anybody who effectively opposes them. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because Trump won the election, he’s president, and he can send anybody over there he wants to represent him. He can send anybody over there he wants as a… My grandfather once was a one-time, little, specific-trip ambassador to India in the Eisenhower administration. The president can send anybody they want. It was 1958.

They can send anybody over there they want. They’re elected. And just because it doesn’t go through the usual channels does not mean the president’s committing any kind of a crime, for crying out loud. Nobody elected this bureaucracy. Nobody elected the diplomatic corps. Nobody elected the State Department. And yet these people are running around acting like they have dibs on all this, and presidents with whom they disagree don’t even have to be listened to or respected or paid any attention to.