RUSH: So James Comey has an interview he’s already taped. George Stephanopoulos, the former director of the Clinton war room now disguised and masquerading as a journalist at ABC, did the interview. It’s gonna air in a special edition of ABC’s 20/20 on Sunday night.

And in the interview, Comey calls Trump a mob boss! He thinks Trump is a mob boss, he acts like a mob boss. And the story is that things that Comey said in this interview stunned everybody on the staff that was watching it. So they’re hyping this thing coming up on Sunday night. And I’ll tell you, the full-court press, the Washington establishment focusing on destroying Donald Trump, it is in full gear, and it doesn’t appear there’s anything to stop it. We just keep chronicling it here and trying to expose it for what it is.

Great to have you, Rush Limbaugh, another three hours of broadcast excellence. You deserve it, and it’s the only way I know how to do it. 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.

I want to start with audio sound bites today, because the audio sound bites will get us close to the primary things I wish to discuss today, and there are a lot of them. First, Professor Dershowitz. Professor Dershowitz advised the president last night. He went over to the White House, had dinner, had a meeting with the president. Professor Dershowitz, of course, has become highly critical of Robert Mueller, the independent special counsel, that entire investigation.

He is beside himself over the raid of the offices of the home and the hotel room of Mr. Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer. He thinks it’s blatantly unconstitutional what happened, that raid. He’s very worried about it. The left is distressed that Dershowitz has chosen sides, and it happens to be Trump’s side. They can’t believe that a Harvard Law professor would be a traitor like this.

After Dershowitz finished dinner at the White House last night, he made tracks for Fox News for an appearance on Hannity, during which appearance Hannity posited for Dershowitz my theory that what’s going on here is an attempt by the media and other interested parties to goad Trump into firing Robert Mueller, because they don’t have anything. Mueller doesn’t have anything on Trump. If you have any doubts about that, the stuff that Trump is doing and saying in opposition to Putin and Russia, is astounding.

It’s so astounding that even the Drive-Bys have picked up on it. A CBS infobabe who really believes that Trump and Putin colluded can’t figure this out. It doesn’t make sense why Trump would be taking this kind of serious detrimental action toward Putin and Russia. ‘Cause she believes they colluded. So she thinks that Trump is gonna be doing whatever he can do to placate or satisfy Putin because, course, Putin has blackmailable material on Trump. It’s right there in the Trump dossier. It’s comical. Except that it isn’t, because they believe it.

Rank stupidity has become mainstream thought, opinion, and belief in the American left, including the media. But I really do, folks. We had the audio sound bite yesterday of the montage of so many people literally asking Trump to fire Mueller, asking Trump if he’s gonna fire Mueller, asking Sarah Huckabee Sanders, “Is Trump gonna fire Mueller?”

Why do they want Trump to fire Mueller? Because they want their own Watergate. They’ve read about Woodward and Bernstein. Oh! Bernstein. I have an audio sound bite. Carl Bernstein says that this raid was designed to scare the president. And he’s applauding it. He’s applauding the full force and power of the law enforcement and deep state community to scare the president. He’s all for it.

But the Drive-Bys, they can only dream. They can read about Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein taking down a president, but there hasn’t been an opportunity for them to do that, the newbies, until now. They hate Trump. They want Trump gone. They’ve gotten out of bed every day for the last year and a half believing that day, every day was gonna be the day that they would find the smoking gun, silver bullet that would take Trump out. And of course the whole world has been looking for that silver bullet.

The Democrat Party, the CIA, the NSA, FBI, the DIA, MI5, MI6, the GRU, the KGB, they’ve all been looking for it and nobody has found it, because it doesn’t exist. There is no smoking gun. There is no gun. There is no smoke. There is no silver bullet. There is no werewolf. There is no evidence Trump colluded with Russia. You know why? ‘Cause he didn’t. And Russia didn’t collude with Trump. It didn’t happen.

I don’t know if they really admit that, but they’re getting worried. They really thought Trump would be gone within six months. And so did the deep state. And Trump’s still there. And did you see what Trump did today? No, you didn’t, because it hasn’t been in the media. Donald Trump reinstituted work requirements for welfare recipients. Wait ’til they see it. That’s gonna tick ’em off like you can’t believe.

So Trump continues to just plod on, implementing his agenda as best he can. Sometimes he sidetracks himself by responding to all these distractions by participating in the distraction with some of these tweets, but despite that he keeps on. He continues. So does Scott Pruitt. They are continuing to implement the Trump agenda.

And so the Drive-Bys are slowly realizing, or maybe fearing, that Mueller doesn’t have anything. ‘Cause, believe me, if he did it would have leaked. ‘Cause they know they are willing participants in this investigation. The media is helping the investigation.

Oh. Speaking of that, Zuckerberg — I don’t know if he got fooled or “Zucked” into this yesterday, but Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook is working with Mueller. Amidst all this talk from Zuckerberg about how they don’t choose sides and there’s no bias and there’s no this, “We are working with them,” and then he said, “I think it’s best we don’t go any further.”

So Facebook’s working with Mueller. So even Facebook — Facebook has done more to acquire your data than the NSA has — they can’t find a smoking gun. So the Drive-Bys want Trump to essentially fire himself by firing Mueller. They’re asking him to. They’re asking if he’s going to. They’re asking Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Look, they’re goading him into doing it because that’s the only way they think that they’re gonna succeed and be able to participate in the great project of bringing down Donald Trump. So Hannity ran the theory by Professor Dershowitz yesterday after Dershowitz arrived at Hannity’s studio after having dinner with Trump.

RUSH ARCHIVE: The revelation of this news is also designed to goad Trump into firing somebody, firing Mueller is what they actually, I think, are seeking. They want Trump to do something after which they can go get him because they haven’t found anything yet to get him.

HANNITY: That was Rush Limbaugh making a great point earlier today saying the breathless hysteria media coverage of the Cohen FBI raid, that’s all designed to provoke the president to fire Mueller.

RUSH: You know, it’s interesting. I was sitting at home last night minding my own business. I don’t know what I was doing, but all of a sudden the phone started flashing and ringing and the alerts and notifications, and I was getting blasted, the emails and text message, “Hannity just said he’s gonna be talking about you coming up. You need to turn it on and watch.” I must have had 15 or 20 of those.

One of them was my brother, who, by the way, is going in for a root canal right now. I hope everything goes well. I did nine root canals in one night. After I had my first one, I said, “I’m not doing this a whole bunch of different times.” So I asked the dentist, “Can I do nine of these in one night?”

He said, “Well, if you can handle it.”

I said, “How long will it take?”

He said, “Maybe five or six hours.”

I said, “Let’s do it.”

So I did it, nine of them, and I only missed two days of work. The pain that you that lets you know you need a root canal, I wasn’t gonna do that, however many root canals I was gonna have. So I did nine of them as a preventive thing after having my first one. There’s my brother going in for one today. He said it will probably be less painful than listening to your show. He was teasing.

So I thought when I got all these flashes that what Hannity was gonna be doing was playing my — let’s admit it, folks, it was right on point — suggestion that firing anybody would be a big mistake ’cause it wouldn’t stop anything. You fire Mueller, they replace him. You fire Rosenstein, they replace him. Fire anybody. It doesn’t matter who you fire, you’re not stopping the investigation. If you want to stop the investigation, pardon everybody right now, pardon everybody tonight, pardon ’em tomorrow.

Pardon Cohen, pardon Flynn, pardon Manafort, pardon Page, pardon yourself. Shut it down. And I explained how George H. W. Bush did this in December 1992 to shut — do you know that Lawrence Walsh, special counsel investigation into Caspar Weinberger, you know how long that went on? That went on six years, folks. Six years. Everything thinks Mueller ought to wrap this up. Six years. And George H. — now, admittedly he was leaving office. He had lost the election a month prior. But he pardoned everybody. And there was nothing anybody could do.

I think Trump pardoning these people would be much less of a problem. It would be a problem, but it would be much less of a problem than firing these people. Presidential pardons, there’s absolutely no question about the constitutionality of it. There are precedents galore.

Who’s gonna fire Trump? Who’s gonna impeach Trump after he does that? The Democrats still have to win the House to bring that off, but firing a bunch of people while not eliminating the investigation, there’s no point in that. So that’s the bit that I thought Hannity was gonna play. But he didn’t. He played this thing for Dershowitz about the media and everybody trying to goad Trump into firing Mueller so that they can then get Trump. Here’s what Dershowitz replied.

HANNITY: I thought Rush — I’ll use his word; I thought was right on target — that what we see the prosecutor doing here is, because there’s no evidence of collusion, they seem to be trying to goad the president. It seems like they want to precipitate some type of crisis ’cause they found no Russia collusion.

DERSHOWITZ: I don’t believe the president will fire anybody. Mueller has now acknowledged that he doesn’t have the authority to look into Mr. Donald Trump’s prepresidential activities, and so he’s filtered that off and given that off to the Southern District of New York. It seems like a subterfuge by which Mueller doesn’t have the authority, so he gives it to somebody else, gives them the information. It’s like laundering information to another prosecutorial authority.

RUSH: Now, in all due respect, I am going to just, in a very small and very respectful, professional way disagree with Professor Dershowitz on one thing. I don’t believe that Mueller acknowledged he doesn’t have the authority to look into Trump’s prepresidential activities. He could easily go to Rosenstein and say, “Hey, look, we found this business with the porn star, the Make America Horny Again Tour, this campaign check, whatever, I want to look into it.” Rosenstein would have authorized it.

Mueller did not avoid this part of the investigation because he doesn’t have the authority. I think he did this to expand the investigation. You take it to a new entity, the Southern District of New York, the U.S. attorney’s office, you’re throwing this right back to the Department of Justice. You’re opening a brand-new investigation. You’re expanding the investigation! And the SDNY guys, they’re at phase 1 of this. Mueller has been at it a year and a half. These guys could take a year and a half on this. Who knows?

I think rather than Mueller taking this in under his wing or under his umbrella, which he could have done. All he would have had to do was go to Rosenstein and ask permission. And Rosenstein would have granted it. And if Rosenstein didn’t, then passing it off to SDNY. That’s, by the way, insider lingo for the U.S. attorney’s office Southern District of New York. And it’s the mother court. We insiders, we know these initials and these acronyms, SDNY, EDNY, the Eastern District of New York, and it’s in Brooklyn, and they get the second, third tier cases that SDNY doesn’t want. There’s competition between the EDNY and the SDNY, and then there’s the WDNY, the Western Division of New York, which is I think — well, I don’t know where it is. I would guess it’s in Buffalo, but maybe not because they get a lot of snow.

But I think Mueller, just to repeat, passed it off to SDNY to expand this. And it surely has been expanded. Now they’re looking into Trump’s lawyer. Now they’ve busted through attorney-client privilege. And a supposed uninterested or disinterested third party is now gonna go through all the stuff that they took from Cohen’s office and his hotel room. And this uninterested, disinterested, dispassionate third party is gonna say, “Yeah, that’s attorney-client. Can’t use it. Yeah, that’s attorney-client. Can’t use that. Oh, look at this? Oh, my God! Oh, my God! We can use this!”

And he pummels — and we’re told this is perfectly legal, and I’m sure it is, but it is unassailably aboveboard and it’s been done many times and nobody can question this, okay? So if you ask me, the investigation here has been expanded. It’s not Mueller, “You know, this is chump change, I don’t want this.” Or Mueller saying, “I don’t have the authority.” If Mueller wanted to investigate Trump’s time at the Wharton Business School, Rosenstein would let him do it. So Hannity says, of Dershowitz, “You think all of this violated Trump’s constitutional rights?”

DERSHOWITZ: You can’t just go and sweep up all lawyer-client privileged information and then give it over to some FBI agent or a low-ranking U.S. attorney and say, “Well, go through it, and the stuff that isn’t privileged, turn over to the prosecutors. The stuff that is privileged, well, you can read it, you can study it, but you can’t give it to prosecutors.” The Fourth and Sixth Amendment don’t just protect against use of evidence in a criminal trial. They protect privacy. Imagine if instead of going into lawyer-client privilege they tape-recorded a person’s confession to his priest or rabbi or went into somebody’s home and recorded conversations with his wife or conversations between a doctor and a patient. The lawyer-client privilege is as sacrosanct as that.

RUSH: All of that’s true, but there are mechanisms to pierce through it. The lawyer is not allowed to be a criminal. I mean, this is how they get mob boss lawyers. I mean, mob boss lawyers, the risk they run is they become part of the criminal operation. And the FBI, DOJ have long had procedures for piercing attorney-client privilege if it is established beyond shadow of a doubt that the lawyer is facilitating or engaging in criminal activity. Attorney-client privilege is not free and clear permission to break the law. But that’s way beyond what’s going on here. Way beyond.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I mentioned earlier Jeffrey Toobin, a bunch of the Drive-By Media seething now that Alan Dershowitz had dinner with Donald Trump because this means that Dershowitz has chosen sides. You don’t go in there and break bread with a mob boss. You don’t go in there and break bread with Satan, which is what they think. This is last night, CNN, Wolf Blitzer talking to Toobin. “What advice is Dershowitz gonna give the president tonight, Jeffrey? What are we concerned about here?”

TOOBIN: To the surprise of many, including me, Alan has become a deeply outspoken defender of the president. On these legal issues, Alan has become a regular on Fox News, and, you know, like Jeanine Pirro, he is now welcome in the White House. I love Alan Dershowitz. He’s a great mentor of mine, but he’s picked sides here. He has picked sides. He’s with the president. And you don’t have to eat dinner with someone to support. He’s there eating dinner.

RUSH: Can you believe these guys? Alan Dershowitz has picked sides? He’s always picked sides. It’s just the side he chose here they don’t like. As though Toobin doesn’t pick sides? Toobin, you’re on a side! You have long ago chosen your side. You’re on your side and you’re trying to mask yourself as some independent commentator. Not true.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The Drive-Bys were trying to goad Trump into firing Mueller. Today the Drive-Bys are leaking that Trump is gonna fire Rosenstein. Mueller yesterday, Rosenstein today. Yesterday they were trying to goad Trump. “Is Trump gonna fire? Should Trump? Is Trump?” asking everybody around, “Trump may be, we’ve heard may be firing Mueller.”

Today it’s Rosenstein. And there’s nothing but anonymous leaks and speculation. You want the height of irony, the media is cheering the raid on the law office and the hotel room and the home of Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer. They think it’s great. They think it’s great that the SDNY has gone in there and taken every presidential paper they get their hands on. They think it’s wonderful. Can you imagine if this has happened to Obama and his lawyer.

But at the same time, they are cheering the jackbooted government running into this lawyer’s office and taking all of Trump’s papers and Cohen’s papers, they’re pretending to be outraged by Facebook, letting Cambridge Analytica collect their members’ names and likes and their birthdays.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Snerdley comes in to me — I shouldn’t tell you this. This is inside baseball. He comes in every day — and this is not suck-up, Snerdley sucks up in different ways. Not this.

He comes in, “You just don’t realize how you set the agenda. If you weren’t on the air, it is amazing what would not be talked about out there.”

I said, “What are you talking about?” So he starts giving me examples, ’cause I don’t watch cable news much anymore. I always pooh-pooh it because I’m a very humble person. And I always say, “No, no, no, there’s too much out there for you to claim that I’m the one shaping the agenda.” But he may have a point on this, because the sound bites keep rolling in. We’ve got two more from Fox News on my apparently salient point yesterday that the media is trying to goad Trump into firing Mueller. Today it’s Rosenstein. Yesterday it was Mueller.

But remember part of my theory. The theory for this is, there’s two reasons for it. A, they know Mueller doesn’t have anything. And they would know because Mueller’d be leaking it. Mueller’s team would be leaking. If they had evidence of collusion with Russia, it would have been leaked long ago. They don’t have anything. In fact, I don’t think Mueller has anything to prosecute Trump with right now.

I think that’s where this is, and I think these people know it, because they’re the ones that get the leaks. They started getting leaks from these people during the Obama presidency, and they have continued even with Obama out of office. Oh, speaking of that, I have a story, I think it’s Breitbart. We’ll get to it. The names, the numbers of former Obama people that are now working at Google and Facebook will blow your mind.

Washington politicos used to have a revolving door between themselves and the media. And it still exists, but now you add social media to it. Obama’s speechwriters, policy officers, any number of people are at Facebook, they’re at Google, or they are at venture capitalist firms. They are essentially taking over Silicon Valley, former Obama and former Hillary presidential and campaign staffers.

They’re everywhere. And they got used to being leaked to during the Obama years by intelligence people and law enforcement. Obama’s out of office, but those same people are still there in what we popularly now refer to as the deep state. They continue to leak. And if there was any, any evidence or almost evidence of the primary premise here that Trump colluded with Russia, that would have leaked months ago. They don’t have it. It doesn’t exist.

And I actually say again for exclamation point purposes here, I don’t think Mueller yet has anything to charge Trump with. The people he has charged have nothing to do with Trump, other than Flynn. Cohen has not been charged. He’s been raided. But Manafort, Gates, these people were doing ever got ’em in trouble here long before Trump came along. The media knows this. And the media has gotten up every day thinking that day is gonna be the day they get the silver bullet, the smoking gun that takes Trump out.

So now Trump has to do something to take himself out. They thought he had colluded. That didn’t happen. They’re still holding out hope. But now they’re trying to goad Trump. They know Trump watches Fox News. They know Trump watches media.

They are trying to goad him, is the best word, into firing somebody. Because that will then allow them to take off on the story that Trump has to go, that Trump is behaving weirdly, oddly, instability on parade, obstruction of justice, whatever.

Yesterday during the press briefing, April Ryan, who works for American Urban Radio Networks, asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders, “During all of this, has Trump ever given any thought to just resigning?” And Sarah Huckabee Sanders: That’s the stupidest question, that’s the most insulting, that’s the most ridiculous question I think I’ve ever had here.

And April Ryan blew up. (imitating Ryan) “What do you mean? He’s under investigation. It’s relentless. It’s not stopping. Why wouldn’t he want to quit?” So now April Ryan has been a star on all the cable networks today. Since Sarah Huckabee Sanders attacked her credibility as a journalist the Drive-Bys have had April Ryan on all morning to defend herself and to explain her question.

The conventional wisdom now is that Trump’s not happy, he’s not happy, he ought to quit. He didn’t have any idea it was gonna be like this. He thought he was gonna be loved and adored. He doesn’t want any part of this, Trump ought to go ahead and quit. So they’re firing both barrels to try to get Trump to do something that will force him out or that would make him decide to leave on his own. And this carried over again to a Fox show at noon today. Here’s David Asman, the guest on the show.

ASMAN: What Rush Limbaugh is saying, be a big mistake for the president to start firing people. And as you heard from Rush, it wasn’t just one person, Mueller he was talking about. He said “people.” So Mr. Rosenstein as well. I mean, there are other people that have been suggested that maybe he should fire. A lot of people that President Trump listens to and whose opinion he cares about say don’t do it.

RUSH: Right. So it’s now in the mainstream out there. Here’s Melissa Francis, one of the cohosts on this show.

FRANCIS: I do agree with Rush Limbaugh. They’re trying to bait him into doing it. That would be a big mistake, and they’re just daring him, trying to push him harder and harder, and that’s really what the goal is.

RUSH: Right. Because they want to get rid of him. They want to cover it. They want to be Woodward and Bernstein. They want to cover a president being forced out of office. And for some of them it really is nothing more than that. To most of them it’s political, obviously, Trump’s a bad guy, gotta go.

But to some of them, they just want to cover a president being forced out because look at what happened to Woodward and Bernstein, they became stars, they became synonymous with what the news is. And these young pups doing it now, they want the same opportunity, because that’s what journalism is is destroying people. Journalism is taking out Republicans in power. If you can do that, you can write your ticket, you’ll be respected, you’ll be a star in the news business for the rest of your life. So that’s what’s driving this.