RUSH: Now, where is the seriousness-of-the-charge angle? I mean, that’s why we’re investigating this Russian link to the election. And there isn’t one! Again, everything that we’re talking about — even now, Trump’s tweets about Obama wiretapping him, all of this — is predicated on one thing, or one thing is causing this, and it is this fully, totally bogus allegation that Trump was working with the Russians and together they somehow managed to alter the election so that Hillary lost.

There is no evidence of this. It could not have happened. They have looked and looked and looked. They have been looking for months. They haven’t found anything. They’re not gonna get close to anything because there isn’t. And yet they continue to investigate. Why? They continue to publish leaks from unnamed sources that don’t add any new information. Why? There’s only one answer! The attempt is to undermine the Trump presidency and pollute the minds of the American public.

Now, they would say, “No, no, no. This is a serious charge. We must look into this. The seriousness of the charge is what requires us to get to the bottom of it.” Okay, fine. What about the seriousness of the charge that Donald Trump has made that Barack Obama and his administration wiretapped or surveilled Trump Tower? Because in fact we know that they did. They surveilled a server in Trump Tower hoping to find linkage between Trump and his businesses and Russian banks. We know that it happened.

And yet the media is insistent on shutting down Trump’s charge and doing everything they can to prove that it didn’t happen. But they can’t — they haven’t been able to do so. There isn’t a single source authority with the moral authority to tell everybody for certain it didn’t happen. There’s nobody who can be believed. James Clapper can’t be believed. Obama can’t be believed. His spokespeople can’t be believed because of their previous experiences with lying. There isn’t a single person that can refute this.

Yet the media has abandoned the whole concept of the seriousness of the charge. This is a pretty serious charge that Trump has leveled, that the former president is surveilling him. I myself, using intelligence guided by experience, have no doubt that elements of the Obama administration are indeed… We know! It’d be foolish to deny it. Trump’s phone calls to foreign leaders, transcripts, leaked. We know that the Russian ambassador was being surveilled by the NSA. That’s how they got Mike Flynn. And there’s a transcript of that entire phone call.

Now if the Russian ambassador’s being wiretapped, we know that foreign ambassadors could also be agents, so it’s not uncommon for the NSA to be tapping them and anybody they talk to it’s gonna be overheard and that’s where Flynn ostensibly was overheard. There’s a transcript of that. Why don’t they release it? If they’ve got the goods on Flynn, why don’t they release the whole transcript instead of cherry-picking it? But why is there no effort whatsoever to even take Trump’s allegation seriously? Because everybody involved is scared to death of it being true, and they don’t want to get anywhere near it.

So they have to treat it as insane, as lunacy, as something from a crackpot and just diminish it.

But they’re certainly not curious about it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You know, I know I’ve spoken about this so much that you can predict what every next word’s gonna be. But, you know, since November — and actually, you know what? Before the election — the Democrats were trying to make the case. After WikiLeaks did a review of Podesta’s emails, the Democrats have been trying to make the case that Trump was working with the Russians to somehow hack the election. And I’ll never forget something that I think, folks, illustrates the great divide.

Donald Trump has been on the public stage at the time this happened for over a year, 14 months. Now, it’s at a stage of the campaign where WikiLeaks is revealing emails of Podesta, and the subject of Hillary’s emails, 60,000 emails, 30,000 of which she turned over, and another 30,000 that she said she deleted. Well, about this time — and this is around September, October — people are claiming, various sources, “Well, somebody’s got those 33,000 emails that she deleted. Somebody’s got ’em.” So a buzz developed over this, but nobody could find them.

So Trump’s doing a press conference or he’s doing a rally somewhere — I think it was a presser of some kind — and as an aside, as an afterthought, Trump said something along the lines of, “Hey, if the Russians are listening, maybe you can find ’em. Maybe you can find Hillary’s emails, and if you do, turn ’em over to the DNC” or whatever. He was cracking a joke. It was hilarious. He was being typically Donald Trump. He’d been on the public stage for over a year.

If you cared to get to know Donald Trump, if you wanted to study Donald Trump to know his speaking patterns, his sense of humor, he was out there five-10 times a day for an entire year and a half. Yet they still… They thought, the left — the media, everybody thought — that Trump was actually sending a message to the Russians to start trying to find the Hillary’s emails, instead of cracking a joke. The point that Trump was making is, “Come on. Somebody’s gotta know where these things are. You don’t want to find ’em. You want these 30,000 emails kept hidden.”

So he cracked a joke, maybe the Russians could find the emails, because the Democrats were blaming the Russians for everything. That joke is probably 75% of the fuel that has fueled (since that joke was made) this entire meme that Trump and the Russians worked together to hack the election. This is the most unreal, the most surreal, impossible thing. I mean, to show you how twisted and out of balance everything is in terms of news and media and politics, the idea that the election was tampered with by the Russians and that that’s why Hillary lost…

The fact that that’s what’s driving this still even though countless news sources have affirmed they can’t find a shred of evidence — and yet it propelled everything that we are still going through here, which is the effort to stall, to undermine, to sabotage the Trump presidency. Now, since November, since the election, the Democrats, the left, the media, have all been throwing around this stupid phrase, “The Russians hacked the elections.” You know, wouldn’t it be funny when this is all over if what we find out is that Obama hacked the election and Hillary still lost? Wouldn’t that be just juicy? Wouldn’t that be just deserts?

So and again, I want to remind you, New York Times, January 20th: “Wiretap Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides.” There’s no question that somebody was wiretapping somebody. And Trump’s allegation — a serious charge — has got more basis in fact and reality than the charge that the Russians hacked the election. Trump’s allegation about Obama and his administration has much more legitimacy, much more weight, much more credence than the one thing that’s driving all of this opposition to Trump, because without that they’ve got nothing.

There isn’t a single area in the world where the Democrats can point and say, “That’s better than America.” They blame the United States of America for things that have gone wrong in our country. They blame the United States of America that things have gone wrong in the world. The United States is the problem. It’s not the solution in the world, in their mind. And yet they can’t point to a single place where what they believe has created a better way of life than has the United States of America. Their policies have been repudiated, and I think, folks, if the truth be known here, we are watching the Democrat and the American left crack up.

If you stand back and look at this objectively, the people losing their minds are the people on the left. The people losing their grip are the people in the media, the supporters of the left, the supporters of the Democrat Party. In pure political, raw power terms, they are losing their grip. They are being repudiated and sent packing election after election after election. So they’ve got this one little thread that they’re hanging onto. Since they cannot convince people — a majority of Americans — to vote for them, they’re going to find a return to power in other ways. And we are witnessing it. And in one sense, it’s good.

It used to be the Democrats did all this stuff on the down low. You never really saw it. It required people like me and others in conservative media telling you, warning you, informing you how they operate, how they can’t be honest about who they are and what they believe. But now this has drawn them out.