RUSH: All right. Just as an overview of things, I just want to repeat a point that I made yesterday in an attempt to establish a framework for this. What we are in the middle of and what we have been in the middle of, essentially since election night and all the days following, is a silent coup.

There has been an effort, silent, meaning nobody is actually expressing this desire verbally. Nobody is saying this is what’s going on. But there is a coup underway, being led by the media with accomplices in the Democrat Party and a number of international players to reject the outcome of the election, to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump, and, if the wish list were realized, to get rid of him.

That is what we have been living with. That has been the sole purpose of the news business since the day after the election. And in this ensuing period of time, say from early November to now — what is that, nine months? — the American people have had to endure a daily assault of innuendo, allegation, accusation, supposition with literally no evidence whatsoever to support any of the charges that have been made.

We don’t even know the names of the anonymous sources in all of the Drive-By Media who have put this so-called bombshell information in the public domain. We have literally no evidence of the primary purpose of the media for the past nine months. We have no evidence that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to alter the outcome of the election and thereby cheat Hillary Clinton out of what was rightfully hers and the Democrat Party’s and the media’s.

I’ve never seen a wild-goose chase like this. But actually it is incorrect to call it a wild-goose chase. There is a chase, and there is an objective. There is a light at the end of the tunnel for these people. In all this time, virtually every allegation, virtually every bombshell has added up to what? Nothing. There has been nothing in terms of hard, cold, substantive evidence, something that you can touch, something that you can see, something that convinces you inalterably that it’s true. None has been produced by anyone at any time.

Now, the Drive-Bys make mention of this in hidden passages in practically every story, but the hidden passages are a short little paragraph or even just a sentence or two surrounded by all of the allegations. Now we arrive at this latest episode involving Donald Trump Jr., and let’s explain what happened here. Back in June of 2016 Junior gets an email from a music promoter in the U.K. named Goldstone, who claims to have a friend in Russia who is a pop musician and is the son of a powerful oligarch there who knows Putin and claims that high levels of the Russian government has information on Hillary Clinton that they would like to share.

And Junior looks at it and says, “Okay, fine.” We’ve seen the email thread and everything. I didn’t make my view on this clear yesterday. This just stinks. I mean, the whole thing smells rotten. It’s too pat. It’s too exactly what they would need for yet another allegation. At the end of all of this, the premise under which this meeting was to take place never happened. No information from anywhere about Hillary Clinton was passed to Donald Trump Jr. or anybody else that was in the meeting. Nothing. There was absolutely nothing.

When the supposed carrier of the information, the woman I refer to as the honey pot — oh, by the way, there are pictures of this honey pot all over the place now sitting behind people in the Obama administration during Hillary’s time. She’s at congressional hearings with the American ambassador to Russia as his the guest sitting in the front row of these hearings. The whole thing just has a skunk aroma to it.

Now, this Goldstone guy is denying that he ever said that there was high-level information from the Russian government that was going to be imparted. The point is, none was. So what we have here is Donald Trump Jr. appearing eager to accept information from a foreign government that would be harmful to a Democrat nominee for president. This is being called treason now by Senator Tim Kaine. Others are saying it is approaching treason and say you can’t do this. He should have immediately called the FBI when this was offered and so forth.

But again, with this, there’s nothing. What there is is a hope, another little carrot dangling in front of the media and the Democrats that they can make this instance into something that would convince the American people that the Trump campaign was willing to work with the Russians to sabotage Mrs. Clinton. And if they can establish that, then they will have the opportunity for this story to never, ever go away. But in the end, nothing happened, no information was imparted. Donald Trump himself was unaware of this.

Now, to me, again, as part of the nine-month timeline, this is just the latest of a bunch of blanks that have been fired at the Trump administration. Some of you, I know, think it looks bad, and there are several Republicans and so-called conservatives now jumping ship because of it. That shouldn’t surprise any of you. The conservatives and Republicans jumping ship are largely people who were never on board in the first place. And they have been waiting for something like this to come along to validate their long held opposition to Trump.

So they’re now excited to run around, beat their chest and say, “See? See? Told you so.” These are the people who never fight the Democrats anyway. These are the people who never oppose the Democrats. These are the people that willingly accept second class status in the Washington, D.C., establishment. They happily accept their second class status in exchange for membership in the group.

But in terms of ever fighting back, in terms of ever actually trying to stop and roll back the left, other than the printed word, we don’t see much. So there are many people inside the Washington establishment on either side of whatever party line there is that now see an opportunity to do what they have been trying to do and failing to do for the last nine months.

Think of all of the bombshells. Think in the last nine months — I’m asking you again, folks. I want you to try to keep this, put this, and keep this in perspective. Think of the last nine months, how many days did you think, “Uh-oh, oh, no, oh, gosh, oh, this looks horrible!” and nothing came of it. Every time, every blockbuster. For a month every afternoon, five o’clock, there was a blockbuster, either the New York Times or the Washington Post, and every day people, “Oh, no. Oh, no.”

Now, some people, many of them Trump people, long ago said, “We don’t care.” They see right through this, it hasn’t affected them at all, and they’re tired of this. They’re worn out. They are fed up. And they wish the losers would just grow up and realize they lost and deal with it that way rather than continuing to try to destroy the presidency and in the process destroy the country, destroy the integrity of elections and so forth, which is what’s going on.

Now, let’s look at, compare the media’s reaction to some things. Donald Trump Jr. not a candidate for anything, ever. Donald Trump Jr. has never served in public office. He releases an unflattering email chain. The media says, “A-ha! A-ha! Gotcha! You’re an idiot. You’re a fool. You’re stupid. You want to be a player. You’re never gonna be what your dad is. Junior, you’re an idiot, you’re stupid, and we got you! We got you, idiot. You willingly said that you would help the Russians defeat Hillary,” and they can’t contain themselves. Media goes to DEFCON 1, treason. Treason.

Donald Trump Jr., not a candidate for anything ever, nor has he served in public office, is now being alleged to have engaged in treasonous activity. Over here, Hillary Rodham Clinton, a former secretary of state, a twice-defeated candidate for president, a defeated director of Clinton health care reform in the early nineties, the leader of the bimbo eruptions unit during the Clinton administration where she was to destroy the women who came forth and said that Bill Clinton had bedded them or worse. Hillary Clinton, who, upon becoming secretary of state, presented a plastic red button to a Soviet diplomat, typifying a reset between the United States and Russia and, of course, it was considerably laughed at.

But this woman, in addition to all of that, Hillary Rodham Clinton didn’t release, she destroyed tens of thousands of work-related emails under subpoena. The media? “Nothing to see here.” FBI? “Nothing to see here. “When she was shredding those documents, she didn’t intend to.” “When she was deleting those documents,” Comey said, “She didn’t mean to be doing anything wrong. No reasonable prosecutor would ever bring charges.” Donald Trump Jr., treason.

Now, I’m fully aware, ladies and gentlemen, that some Republicans say we can’t excuse Trump’s conduct with the Hillary excuse. I’ve read it. I’ve seen it. They’re out there saying, “You can’t excuse what Trump did just because you say Hillary did it. You can’t get away with that. That doesn’t wash.” I’m not excusing anything. I don’t think anything happened with Donald Trump Jr. and the Russians and secret information on Hillary. If anything, the Russians were working with Hillary! We went into it yesterday in great detail. Nobody cares in the Drive-By Media or the Democrat Party, obviously.

I’m not excusing anything here. I’m comparing the media’s response to two very different situations. The media has an agenda that cannot be normalized. The media has an agenda that essentially is a silent coup to destroy the duly elected president of the United States. An accurate institutional memory matters if we are to be able to keep all of this in perspective. Not everybody has the time to keep track of the torrent of rumors, phony narratives, and occasional real news. But I do.

You cannot lynch, you cannot try to thoroughly destroy one person for a minor offense and let a hardened serial abuser of law walk. But we are doing that. There’s nothing honorable, moral, or ethical about it. But our side says, “We must take the high road. We must not stay focused on the past. Mrs. Clinton’s in the past. She lost the election. And it does no good to try to exonerate Trump Jr. on the basis of a comparison to Hillary Clinton.”

I’m not trying to exonerate Trump Jr. I’m trying to continue to illustrate how public opinion is manipulated and created. And, by the way, I don’t like being told how to respond when my country is under attack, which it is. If people don’t care to fully examine issues from all sides and with perspective, that’s fine. Those people are fools, because this information is everywhere. Setting up an effective argument requires getting everybody on the same page with the same set of facts and arming them with the confidence to believe and say what their instincts tell them.

There is a not-so-subtle coup underway, and the people engaged in that coup are willfully mishandling classified information and breaking the law. They are not being pursued for it. They’re illegally spying on political enemies, and they are not being criminally pursued for it. They are illegally leaking classified data to corrupt media. They are not being pursued for it. They are engaged in character assassination of good people, whose only offense is that they won an election that they supposedly had no right winning and really had no right seeking.

This isn’t a battle restricted to the fortunes of political candidates. The stakes involved here, folks, are our Constitution, our property, our liberty, our freedom, our values, our ability to think clearly. We’re not operating in a vacuum here.

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RUSH: Meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day, Rush Limbaugh here at the EIB Network.

I’ve had a couple of days to think about this and digest things, and we’ve just scratched the surface on some things I want to touch on in this today. I’m looking forward to getting to your phone calls as well. But, folks, I’m gonna tell you something else. I’m watching the reaction to this Donald Trump Jr. story. You know what? Actually, if you can just back off and ignore what is being said and look at how it’s being said.

And I’m talking about the media like with CNN all day yesterday with a banner on the bottom of the screen saying: “Email referenced high-level information from Russian government against Hillary” or some such thing. It never happened. There wasn’t any. There was no information of any kind like that delivered to Donald Trump Jr. None. What they’re trying to say is: “Well, he was willing to take a meeting on that basis, Rush. That’s treason. That means he was willing to collude with the Russians.”

It doesn’t mean anything of the sort. But here’s my point. The over-the-top reaction to this tells me, in my world of common sense, they don’t have anything else, folks. These last nine months have given them nothing. They’ve fired blanks. They don’t have anything other than a never-ending stream of allegations. The desire, the energy that they’re putting on this story tells me they don’t have anything at all.

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RUSH: My friends, I think — and I want to repeat this because it’s a salient point here — the reaction to this Donald Trump Jr. story on the part of the media — look at it. I mean, they’re like kids on Christmas morning back when kids celebrated Christmas, back when families were families and back when woke up on Christmas morning, nice stuff under the tree. They’re giddy. They are beside themselves. They cannot stop it. They think this is it, and the reaction that they have to this I think illustrates they’ve got nothing. And I want to elaborate on this.

This over-the-top reaction, somebody who’s never sought office, never served in office, never had information pass from anybody to him, reaction to this is so over the top and so unrealistic and so out of proportion that what it tells me is that the media and the Democrats don’t have anything else, folks. That is so important to understand. The past nine months, bombshell after bombshell, anonymous source after anonymous source.

Do you remember — you may not remember specifically, but do you remember every day there was a bombshell. Some of it looked bad. Some of it looked like the dam was breaking and all kinds of stuff, yet they had nothing. It added up to nothing. And the over-the-top reaction to this is evidence that this is it. This is all they’ve got.

As I watched the reporting, I don’t see them adding this to other evidence that they have amassed and collected in the last nine months and saying, “This could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.” They don’t have anything else, and they don’t have this. This is it. That doesn’t mean they’re gonna stop; don’t misunderstand.

But they don’t have anything. And the reaction, the eagerness, the excitement. These people in the media, they have awakened every day hoping and praying that this is the day that they get the scoop, that they find the dirt, that they unearth the evidence that Trump and Putin had dinner and put all of this together in a giant conspiratorial plan. They know it’s there. They know it’s there. And each one of them get up every day and tell themselves they’re gonna be the one to find it.

And every day nobody finds anything, because there isn’t anything to be found. It’s not buried. It’s not in plain sight. It’s gotten so bad that they have to make it up. Like that phony Trump dossier, they have to make it up. Like all of the leaks of all of the so-called classified information. The crimes that have occurred here have occurred and been committed by the people trying to take Trump down. Anonymous officials in the government leaking classified information, unmasking American citizens who’ve been overheard in classified wiretaps and so forth.

After nine months, folks, they have nothing. And their over-the-top reaction here, to me, illustrates that they don’t have any evidence whatsoever of any collusion or any other crimes. They’re acting like it’s all here. If this doesn’t pan out, where we gonna go? This is as close as they’ve gotten. In their minds, they’re so close they can taste it. They’re so close they can see the trial in the Senate. They’re so close they can see Trump announcing his resignation. They’re dreaming about it. Some of them having nightmares, but they’re dreaming,

But they don’t have it. It is clear that what has happened up ’til now is worthless. None of it can be used in conjunction with this to create a pile of evidence to which there is only one conclusion. They’ve got nothing. And that’s why they are doing everything in their power to make this look like a crime when it isn’t. In other words, if the media and if the Democrats thought they had any other evidence, they wouldn’t be making this big a deal out of Donald Trump Jr. emails and the subsequent meeting that wasn’t about what they’re trying to tell people it was about.

Because the emails and the meeting are not proof of anything, let alone collusion or conspiracy. The most they can say is that this Trump Jr. was willing, he was willing to collude with the Russians. He wasn’t. He said he would take a meeting, period. And that’s it! If this is somehow a crime, then every politician and every campaign worker is gonna have to do an FBI background check on everybody who writes them an email or who meets with them in their office.

Adding to my theorem here, I have a piece in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers by Dan Balz of the Washington Post, columnist, “A Revelation Unlike Any Other in the Trump Investigation.” This column is actually what led me to see this frenzy, this incoherence over this email thing with Donald Trump Jr., see it the way I do. You know what? Let me read some of the Balz piece to you.

It is possible that the media sees this as their last gasp chance to come up with anything that even approaches the appearance of evidence. So they are doing their most, they’re doing their best, they’re doing everything they’ve got to make the most out of this. But they’re trying to make chicken salad out of chicken excrement, which is what they’ve been trying to do for the past nine months.

I think it is crucially important that you never forget that none of any of the allegations of the past nine months have led anywhere. They have all died. They now lie dormant, other than the overall umbrella, “Trump colluded.” But there’s no evidence. None of what they’ve uncovered, none of what they’ve written about is worth anything to them today. None of it is! Everything’s wrapped up in this now. This is it.

“A Revelation Unlike Any Other in the Trump Investigation,” is the headline. “There have been other moments in the lengthy investigation of Russian government interference in the 2016 presidential election that have registered on the legal and political Richter scales, but none with the power and explosiveness of the email chain involving Donald Trump Jr. that became public Tuesday.”

See, this is very telling, my friends. Balz is actually admitting that all the previous revelations have amounted to zilch, zero, nada. Which must be true. This is the best they’ve got, a revelation unlike any other, this is the best they’ve got, and it doesn’t even involve Trump!

“The emails between President Trump’s oldest son and an intermediary for the Russians provide the clearest indication to date that Trump campaign officials and family members were at least prepared to do business with a foreign adversary in the mutual goal of taking down Hillary Clinton.”

So it’s now a crime for someone in the campaign to even talk to somebody from a foreign country? Somebody better start prosecuting the Clintons. They’ve gotten campaign money from foreign governments like the ChiComs. Remember the days of Charlie Trie and his little Chinese — no, in a barbecue restaurant. In Little Rock, it was a clearinghouse for illegal foreign donations. We all know this. Nobody cared, it was the Clintons.

And, folks, let me tell you something. While all this is going on, there are people who have done what Trump Jr.’s accused of. There are people who have met with the Russians. There are Republicans and Democrats who have met with the Russians about the election, about things in the campaign. Senator McCain is one of them. Well, he sent an emissary. Hillary Clinton and her campaign in Ukraine. What they’re accusing Trump and Donald Trump Jr. of, there are countless examples of Democrats actually doing it!

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RUSH: Upstate New York and Keith. Welcome, sir. It’s great to have you here.

CALLER: Well, Rush, good afternoon. I’ve been a long time listening, first-time caller. Glad I made it through. I had a comment, pretty simple, that the media, the Democrats are half right with their Russia thing. It’s not Russia, but it’s Rush that got Trump elected.

RUSH: (laughing).

CALLER: The reason I say that is Trump —

RUSH: Mr. Snerdley —

CALLER: — never got distracted by all their comments, their naysaying. He always stuck to his point. And that’s what you’ve been doing for so long and driving the left crazy for so long, but it’s so effective. So I’m giving you all the credit, Rush, not Russia, for his election.

RUSH: Well, Keith, look, I appreciate that. And I’ll take some of the credit, of course. But not all of it. (laughing) But, you know, I have a sound bite here I was not gonna use today because you know me, this isn’t about me. I’m not one of those kind of people. But now he’s led into this. It’s a Juan Williams sound bite on Fox News last night.

They had a special late edition of a Fox News special, this is the Eric Bolling show that airs at five p.m. in the afternoon. And so on the program last night Eric Bolling speaking with Juan Williams, said, “Juan, your thoughts on Maxine Waters saying it doesn’t matter what he does, Donald Trump, it doesn’t matter, the GOP is gonna excuse it anyway.”

WILLIAMS: Donald Trump still has tremendous support. It’s close to 80%, maybe it’s over 80% of Republicans back this president, despite the drip, drip, drip that we’ve heard described, despite all the problems. You think about people like Sean Hannity who did the interview tonight. You think about the leading talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, and all these other guys, they are still solidly with Donald Trump.

You look at the U.S. Congress today, people who you would expect would have some response who went silent. And then, of course, you had the reaction on the internet, which was to say Donald Trump Jr. just blew the New York Times away because he was transparent and he put out the emails. This is a defense, in my mind, that invites people to say, “Uh, are Republicans blind?”

RUSH: What Juan Williams doesn’t understand and maybe is not capable of understanding is that Republicans look at all of this in a way that he doesn’t. See, Juan Williams doesn’t think the media is anything other than him and people like him and straight down the middle, there’s not much bias. He has to admit there’s some. He doesn’t see the media as the primary player here.

So people sticking by Trump — and it is 80% of Republicans, if not higher. And I guarantee you, that has them frustrated like you can’t believe, I mean, the media. Part and parcel of what they’re doing is to destroy Trump’s support base. But I told you from the get-go, they can’t. I told you starting in June of 2015 the media can try until the end of days to destroy Donald Trump, and they can’t do it. They will not be able to, especially if they use the standard operating procedure that they used to destroy Republicans in Washington, that will not work against Trump.

And they are frustrated beyond all get out. They’re frustrated Trump won’t leave. They’re frustrated Trump won’t resign. They’re frustrated Trump won’t give up. They’re really frustrated they can’t talk you into abandoning Trump. They don’t realize that much of Trump’s support base is rooted in a steadfast opposition to the media achieving its objectives.

Trump supporters are not just gonna sit around idly and be talked out of supporting Trump by people they know are trying to destroy him. It isn’t gonna happen. Juan Williams can’t see it. He doesn’t see the media as anything at all in the story. They’re just the dogged professionals chasing the news wherever it takes them and reporting whatever they find.

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RUSH: There’s a lot more here, including the honey pot. We have learned a lot more about the honey pot, the supposed lawyer who was the emissary with all the high-level Russian news that was gonna help defeat Hillary. The liar?