RUSH: We’re gonna start in Hartland, Wisconsin. Nikki, you’re first as we hit the phones today. Great to have you.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. The Russian hoax, it was a setup — I believe you’re right — from the start. They needed… To make the hoax fly, the collusion thing, they had to have Trump connected to Russians. Now, you mentioned the Papadopoulos thing, but then there was the Russia lawyer. The lawyer met with Fusion GPS before the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower and right after. And then, after that in December, end of December, they were complaining, remember?

Trump didn’t want to have daily briefings ’cause it was the same thing over and over again. They were real upset about that. Well, if you remember the meeting with Obama on January 5th where he meet with Brennan and Clapper and Comey was the day before Comey briefed Trump on the dossier when they leaked that to the media.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: Well, then they wanted to move on, I think, from that to the obstruction thing. Because I remember early on in the administration when he took office, McCabe went to the White House, and he cornered Reince Priebus and said to him, “Well, you know, the FBI knows that’s all bogus, the whole thing with Russia.” And when Reince Priebus says, “Well, how do we straighten that out with the media?” McCabe says, “Well, call me later, and the minute he called him, then they leaked to the media again that the White House is calling them trying to squash the story.

RUSH: Right! Exactly! They got on Priebus for trying to manipulate the FBI. You’re so right! In every instance of this, we have setups. Practically every element of this investigation results from a setup. And I guess at the root of this… Now, you may think this is a rhetorical question or a question that answers itself, but stop and think of the effort that has gone into denying Donald Trump the presidency — and then after he wins it, doing everything…

I mean, these people have thrown the kitchen sink. They have taken every trick in their arsenal and they have deployed it against Donald Trump for the express purpose of getting rid of him, forcing him to resign, lowering his public approval numbers to the point that he’d lost all support. This is what they were trying to do. Now, stop just for a moment. We know who these people are. They are the Washington establishment. These are the people who consider themselves elites.

These are the people that are better than all the rest of us, and these are people — in their minds — who run the world. And the United States is nothing but a cog in the whole wheel that is the world. It’s nothing… It’s one of the biggest, but these people don’t have any particular allegiance to it like you and I do, in terms of American exceptionalism, moral leadership, moral superiority. To them, it’s a golden goose economically. It is a vast military power and has the ability to project it.

But beyond that it is nothing more than one of the many elements of the world that they control. And look at the panic. Look at abject panic at the thought that they might lose control of the United States as they run the world. And that happened during the campaign. Because, believe me, at some point during this campaign, they began to believe Trump could win, which is what all of this before the election was about. Remember, all of this started in July of 2016.

The election was in November. Now, they were not talking about Russian collusion per se in this era because they didn’t want to taint Hillary’s win, which they hoped and thought would happen. But they did try to make the case that Trump was colluding with Russia, not Hillary, that the Russians were trying to aid Trump’s victory. These people had a genuine fear they were gonna lose their grip on controlling the United States as they control the world.

And the thought of losing control of the United States sent them into degrees and levels of panic that I don’t think we yet fully realize, even though we see it all and all of this registers. Now we’ve learned — Nikki here is really correct — everything that has ended up making news designed to show Trump colluded or Trump obstructed is the result of setups. Her example of Priebus is great. Reince Priebus, the chief of staff, is in the White House one day, and the news at this particular point in time was intensely anti-Trump.

This was the period of time where the deep state was feeding the New York Times and CNN four stories a day on Trump-Russia collusion, and Priebus… It was so bad, Priebus came on this show a couple days after all this to try to straighten this out. What happens is Priebus says that Andrew McCabe happens to be in the White House that day and seeks Priebus out, goes to his office and says, “Look, we know all this stuff in the New York Times…

“We know it’s BS. We know there wasn’t any collusion. We know that this didn’t happen.” And Priebus is dumbstruck. “If you know it, why is it being reported? If you know it, why aren’t you correcting it?” McCabe then tells the media that Priebus was leaning on him to influence the media! McCabe does not tell the media that he happened to seek Priebus out and tell him it’s all BS. McCabe tells the media that Priebus sought him out.

This is the same thing that happened with Comey and Trump. Comey set Trump up to get the dossier in the news by presenting him the dossier. James Clapper tells Comey to tell Trump about the dossier, and particularly the pee story, the golden showers story. ‘Cause that’s what they wanted out there. So Comey has admitted that was his assignment. He tells Trump about the dossier; Clapper then is informed by Comey that mission accomplished.

Clapper then tells CNN and CNN runs a story four days later on January 10th that the intelligence community has shown President Trump this dossier and they’re very concerned about. That put it flat-out right there in the news, and it was nothing more than a setup. And CNN, back in May, maybe late April, got an award from the White House Correspondents’ Association for this daring, brave breaking news which was nothing more than a setup engineered by James Clapper who lied about it and then didn’t lie about it, and then who ended up being hired by CNN.

So you could even say that Clapper was paid to do this, in the end. Then the story of George Papadopoulos, who, after the Carter Page angle bombed out as the supposed reason for the investigation, reason for the FISA warrant, then they set up George Papadopoulos, a little peripheral foreign policy so-called adviser. He wasn’t even that. I don’t mean to diminish Papadopoulos; please don’t misunderstood. But in the big scheme he was not a player.

But he was spotted as somebody that wanted to be a player, so he was cultivated by British intelligence and who we know how is the British informant or spy the FBI was using. And they implant information with Papadopoulos that the Russians have thousands of Hillary Clinton hacked emails. They tell him this. Effectively, the FBI and their associates in the United Kingdom tell Papadopoulos this.

That was to set up a meeting that they arranged with Papadopoulos and the Australian ambassador at a bar in London in which Papadopoulos, after having too much to drink, starts bragging about what he knows to the Australian ambassador, that the Russians have a whole bunch of hacked Hillary Clinton emails.

This allows the Australian ambassador ostensibly to call the CIA and the FBI, “Guess what? I just heard from a Trump campaign official that the Russians have hacked Hillary Clinton emails, and the Trump campaign knows about it.” Papadopoulos didn’t know anything. They told him. That then triggered the current phase of this investigation, as announced by the New York Times over New Year’s weekend in a very lengthy story.

This is, as I say, the CliffsNotes version this of. But the point is none of this is real. It was all set up. To call it entrapment is maybe a little bit much because entrapment is used to get somebody you know is guilty. This was just a circular firing squad in a sense, circular intel, if you will. They plant essentially what they want to be attributed to the Trump administration. They plant it in a peripheral Trump foreign policy adviser. Then they arrange a meeting for him with an Australian ambassador, who then hears this news and we’re off to the races.

And none of it is real, none of it.

And the collusion has fallen apart, and the obstruction. There isn’t any obstruction. The president cannot obstruct by doing his constitutional duties. So what we’re left with here is look at the lengths to which these people have gone to, A, prevent Trump from winning, and then, after that, doing their best to get rid of him, to force him to resign, to force all public support to abandon him.

This desire to control the United States — you know, Bret Baier’s book, the parallels here between Reagan and the Soviet Union and Trump and North Korea and Trump and Israel and Trump and foreign policy, they’re eerie! Because in both cases you have legitimate outsiders. Though Reagan was from politics. He was a governor of California. But as far as the Washington establishment was concerned, including the Washington conservative establishment, Reagan was a no-go, Reagan was a nonconformist.

Reagan did not see the New World Order the way these people did. Reagan did not see the United States as a gigantic part of the world. He saw the United States for what it is and posed a threat for eight years to these people who think they run the world. And when I say “run the world,” I literally mean it, folks.

And the lengths to which they have all gone here, making things up, creating what are false realities. It’s no wonder this thing is imploding. And it will. I mean, there’s no foundation here. There’s nothing for these people to fall back on, unless they can create crimes in their investigation, which is exactly what they’re trying to do.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: No, no. I started looking into all this when — it was last week, Kimberley Strassel, Washington Post alluding to the fact that the FBI had an informant in the Trump campaign, a spy. Damn right I’m tracking that down. Kimberley Strassel didn’t want to identify who it was until she could have it confirmed by intelligence sources. After I found out who it was, it doesn’t matter who it was. I mean, the name is not a household name for most people in this country. It doesn’t matter who it was. What they did, and damn right when I found out they’re spying, when they’re informing, when they are planting, when they’re setting people up.

And it’s not just the FBI and the DOJ. Folks, this involved U.K. MI6 people. This involves U.K. academics, which are, you know, Oxford and MI6 are practically inseparable. Oxford University. (interruption) Well, you know, Obama’s fingerprints. I don’t think Obama’s fingerprints need to be on it unless you want to say that Brennan and Clapper were doing Obama’s work. But they didn’t need Obama’s fingerprints. That’s my point. These people didn’t need a memo from Obama to do this. This is instinctively something they had to do to protect themselves.

They simply cannot allow for somebody like this to come in and win and accomplish things. They just can’t permit it. It undercuts a lifetime of work that they have done to condition people to have low expectations about major achievements that would improve life around the world and in the United States. They have done everything they can to sustain themselves as the only people qualified to deal with these humongous, big, and complex issues. And creating complexity is primarily what they do.

They manufacture complexity because that then eliminates a large number of people from even being qualified to deal with it. And if you notice people referring to Obama and his brilliance, they talk about his ability to deal with the complexities of the world. These are manufactured complexities, all to service the notion that only they are bright enough to navigate these complexities. They can’t allow somebody they think is a simpleton to come in here and demonstrate that they have created a house of cards.

They’re in the process of being exposed as a bunch of pseudointellectual, phony intellectual frauds. And they know it, and they’re in panic mode about it. And it double grates on them that the person exposing them is somebody they personally detest because of the way he talks, the way he communicates, his manners or lack of in their view, his behavior, his lack of sophistication.

Donald Trump, and to a lesser extent Reagan, really put the lie to the idea that only a select few and a very rare kind of person is qualified to deal with all of these massively complex problems that we face in the world. Trump is showing that’s all a crock. And they’re being exposed. It’s like Trump is taking an article of clothing off of them each week, and they have no ability to put their clothes back on.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Folks, the special counsel himself is the result of a setup. James Comey’s supposed memos that he wrote after his meetings with Trump were written expressly to create enough noise that we would have to have a special counsel. Everything about all of this is a setup!

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is Barbara. She’s in Dayton, Ohio. I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Gee, it’s fun to talk to you, Rush.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I guess I’m old because I remember Watergate. I was a young mother and interested in politics then, but not like I am now. But trying to follow this, it’s a maze. I don’t understand — and I mean this sincerely — I don’t understand why this isn’t tarred the same way that Watergate was. This seems to me to be far worse when our own government is willing to —

RUSH: Well, wait. No. There’s a simple answer to that. Watergate was to get rid of Richard Nixon. This is exactly what Watergate is. I mean, the objective here is to get rid of Trump. This is far worse than what Watergate was. You’re wondering why this isn’t being exposed. It’s because the people who would expose it are complicit in it. The media is complicit in this.

The New York Times wrote the long story that recast the beginning of this investigation centering on George Papadopoulos and not Carter Page in the FISA warrant about the Steele dossier. They are complicit. That’s the point. Well, the media was also complicit in getting Nixon and Watergate. They’re actually pretty parallel except Watergate is Romper Room compared to what this is. And Barbara, you’re not too old to understand this.

If you don’t understand it, it’s ’cause I’ve not done a good enough job of explaining it. Because this is really simple to understand. It might take me two or three times explaining it, but at its heart, this thing is very simple. It’s hard to believe, maybe, that people would do it, would go to these lengths. It’s not for me to believe that, but understanding what has been done here is not complex.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Look, in Watergate, the media and the American left exposed what they said was corruption with Richard Nixon and his people in the White House. With this, essentially what the media’s trying to cover is corruption in the investigation. The media has attempted to cover up corruption in the FBI, in the DOJ, at the CIA — all of the investigatory agencies that are trying to run this scam. The media is… I guess, in a sense, they’re trying to expose the so-called corruption of the Trump campaign and presidency with collusion with Russia and obstruction.

But what’s really going on… Right now, the Mueller investigation is simply a deflection; it’s a cover-up of everything that has been done to portray Trump as this colluder and somebody who’s obstructing. And they’re also trying to get people to commit crimes during the process of the investigation. There’s no way that they’re gonna ever impeach Donald Trump. They’re not gonna get rid of him constitutionally. The only hope they’ve got is to force him to resign, which was the original objective of this.

They thought they could do it in six months. Destroy him. Ruin his reputation. Destroy public support; get it down to the twenties. The next thing they want to get is an interview. If they can get Trump lying to them, they’ll call a process crime: Lying to the FBI. But in terms of impeachment? Ain’t no way, Jose. It isn’t gonna happen. There’s no way the Senate is gonna two-thirds vote to get rid of Trump, not in the midst of all of these successes. It just isn’t gonna happen, and that’s why panic is setting in.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Columbus, Ohio. Dan, glad you called, sir. Great to have you here.

CALLER: Thanks for taking my call, Rush. I just wanted to mention, I had this theory back I guess in February when it was revealed that Carter Page was the subject of the FISA warrant.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: I don’t think that Carter Page was necessarily an informant. I kind of think that he was used as a setup. I think that —

RUSH: That’s right. He was not an informant.

CALLER: Right. The FBI sent him in there to start the conversations about Russia, to get people in the campaign with Russia in the campaign. I think that he had full knowledge the whole time — just my theory — that he would have the FISA warrant issued to him. And I think it’s important to note as well that it was a FISA 1 warrant, which is the most severe type of the FISA warrant, which meant Carter Page was actually like a walking wiretap. Anybody that he talked to while he was under that FISA warrant would have then been able to be surveilled by the FBI as well.

RUSH: Exactly. Except the problem was that Carter Page had no link to any Russians who were colluding with Trump for the election. He was simply set up and used as a potential to get the FISA warrant, and a lot of it was based on the Steele dossier which was then exposed at fraudulent. SO Carter Page was forgotten about. His name is not even talked about anymore, replaced by Papadopoulos and that whole story.