RUSH: The Drive-Bys caught up with Dianne Feinstein, who made it easy to be caught up with. She wanted to be caught by the media. This was a question about the floor vote on Friday. You know, the Turtle… We have the sound bites. The Turtle! The Turtle! For the Turtle, he was on fire moments ago. Last night and just now, McConnell… In fact, let’s do those first. Grab audio sound bite… Well, let’s play No. 3. Let’s set this up. This was yesterday me on my own show…

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RUSH: This has got to be stopped, because it’s not real! The Democrats are allowed to make it up as they go. Submit names they want the FBI to talk to? Investigations don’t work that way! The FBI follows evidence, leads, and when they don’t find anything — unlike Bob Mueller — they stop. Mueller has been looking for collusion with Trump and Russia for two years and hasn’t found any, but he’s still going, and that’s exactly what this is gonna be if somebody doesn’t stand up and stop this.

Somebody on the Senate Judiciary Committee needs to stand up or Mitch McConnell needs to stand up and start vouching for the investigation that’s taken place. There are six separate FBI background checks of Brett Kavanaugh. Somebody needs to speak up for him. Somebody anybody vouch for him. Somebody needs to stand up and say, “They have been thorough, and they haven’t found anything, or he wouldn’t be where he is now, sitting on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.” But that’s not happening.

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RUSH: Well, but it is now. Late yesterday afternoon, Senate floor, here is the Turtle.

MCCONNELL: On top of its six prior investigations of Judge Kavanaugh, Democrats demanded a supplemental investigation. If you listen carefully, Mr. President, you can practically hear the sounds of the Democrats moving the goalposts. But the goal hasn’t moved an inch. Not an inch. The goal has been the same all along. The time for endless delay and obstruction has come to a close. Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination is out of committee. We’re considering it here on the floor — and, Mr. President, we’ll be voting this week.

RUSH: Late yesterday afternoon, Mitch McConnell on the floor of the Senate, and he got so much support for what he did yesterday. Amazing how that happens, isn’t it? He heard from so many people what a great thing it was, that he went out and he did it again. He went out there again, and he recycled the old Bill Clinton line to boot! Here’s McConnell from just a couple hours ago.

MCCONNELL: When Judge Kavanaugh demonstrated his widely acknowledged brilliance, open-mindedness, and collegiality at his confirmation hearings, some chose a darker road. The politics of personal destruction were willfully unleashed. After the FBI shares what they’ve found, senators will have the opportunity to vote. We’ll have the opportunity to vote “no” on the politics of personal destruction. We’ll have the opportunity to vote “yes” on this fine nominee.

RUSH: That doesn’t even touch what he did. He went out there and he… He didn’t call these guys out by name, but he quoted some of the most outrageous lies that Democrats have been telling, including members of the Judiciary Committee. He pointed out their hypocrisy. He pointed out their prevarications. He pointed out their straight, up-and-up lies. It was so good that it forced Chuck You Schumer to go to the floor to rebut it! Chuck You went out there and tried to make chicken salad out of what. It was incredible listening to Chuck You.

(impression) “I believe Christine. She was eminently credible. Judge Kavanaugh is not.” It’s the other way around! We have a lifetime of investigation of Brett Kavanaugh, folks. There have been six, now seven FBI investigations and background checks. We have had more people looking into every nook and cranny of Brett Kavanaugh’s life, and we haven’t even begun to look at hers. We’re just assuming she’s credible because that’s the Democrats’ position on this.

They can go back and they can look at anything Kavanaugh’s done, but she is off-limits for some reason. We can’t go and find out what she did at all those beach parties. We can’t go out and found out what she did when she was out there skiing and surfing and flying around. Pfft! None of that’s been done, and yet she is credible and he isn’t. And now DiFi. Drive-Bys ran into DiFi. She was going someplace up on Capitol Hill. A reporter said, “Senator Feinstein, would a floor vote Friday on Kavanaugh be too soon?”

FEINSTEIN: Oh, I believe it is. I believe it’s too soon. It’s Tuesday, and, uh —

RUSH: Stop the tape! It’s what everybody agreed to. Oh, by the way, you know what Flake is now saying? This guy, Flake… There’s a part of me that thinks that he was in on this from the get-go. There’s a part of me that thinks he was not scared to death when he got harassed and protested in the elevator. There’s part of me that thinks he’s in on it, ’cause he hates Trump and that’s what all this really is. All of this is aimed at people hating Trump, and Kavanaugh’s in the way. In order to get Trump, they gotta get Kavanaugh.

But Flake is out there saying, “You know what? I, um… I — I — I… (sputtering) Kavanaugh’s too partisan for me. I don’t think we need that on the court.” Wait a minute! You said you were gonna vote for him Friday morning, Flake, and then you did! Flake voted for Kavanaugh after claiming he was gonna vote for him. Now he’s out saying, “He’s too partisan for me. I don’t… (sputtering) I don’t want that on the court. I don’t think we can do that.”

Flake is demonstrating that his name is actually an apt description of his personality. Now here’s Feinstein. He wanted a week! He wanted a week! Everybody agreed to a week! And as predicted by me and many others, within hours of agreeing to one week the Democrats said, “That’s not long enough,” and here’s DiFi. Take this from the top again. “Senator Feinstein, would a floor vote Friday be too soon?”

FEINSTEIN: Oh, I believe it is. I believe it’s too soon.

RUSH: Yes, oh yes.

FEINSTEIN: It’s Tuesday, and, uh we have to put all the facts together.

RUSH: We have.

FEINSTEIN: Uhhh, um… And this is… I guess it’s my tenth Supreme Court hearing that I sat on, and there’s never been one like this, with the issues like this.

RUSH: Yes, there has.

FEINSTEIN: And I don’t take it lightly. So we need to do our due diligence.

RUSH: That’s not what you’re doing.

FEINSTEIN: And there are other issues too. There’s reproductive choice for women.

RUSH: What!

FEINSTEIN: There’s presidential authority.

RUSH: What!

FEINSTEIN: There’s an opinion that he wrote where he said in a D.C. assault weapons case that assault weapons could not be regulated because they were in common use.

RUSH: What!

FEINSTEIN: So there’s things like that that need to be looked at.

RUSH: Wait a minute! Wait a minute! I thought the investigation was to look into what’s-her-face, Blasey Ford, maybe Ramirez, and at the outside, Swetnick. They’re all being looked into, and there’s nothing there, and so Friday? “Oh, it’s way too soon. Besides, we gotta look into reproductive health because, you know, Brett Kavanaugh wants women to die! And Brett Kavanaugh this and Brett Kavanaugh that.” That’s why I say, “Somebody has gotta stand up and stop this.” Shut it down, because it isn’t going to stop.

It is never gonna be time to vote.

It’s never gonna be time to end the investigation.

It is never gonna be time to move this thing forward.

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RUSH: Okay. So we just heard Dianne Feinstein say, “Wait a minute. We gotta go back and look at Kavanaugh’s rulings on Roe v. Wade and assault weapons.” What? What is that? You weren’t able to stop him on those during all of your exhaustive hearings, so you went for rapist and you went for ice thrower, and now you’re back to saying his decisions pose a threat? Folks, it means they’ve got nothing on all this sex stuff, if DiFi’s taking this back now to his danger represented by the decisions that he’s made, which they’ve already been through inside out.

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RUSH: CNN. This happened just before the conclusion of the previous hour, I’d say 10 minutes ’til 1, CNN aired this.

JOHN KING: There are some Republicans who say if Kavanaugh went down, if he was defeated or was forced to withdraw, that that would just gin up Republican turnout because the court is their Holy Grail and they would come rushing out. Here’s Rush Limbaugh saying don’t bet on it.

RUSH ARCHIVE: [I]t’s very easy to sit here and say — in the midst of this all this Democrat trickery — that it’s gonna fire people up on the Republican side. “They’re gonna be so ticked off and so mad, they’re gonna show up and vote like they’ve never voted before.” But is that gonna be the attitude if he’s not sworn in? … Because if that happens, that moment where Kavanaugh is not sworn in — meaning he is not confirmed in the Senate — do you think it’s gonna be easy for the Republicans to say, “Did you see what happened to Kavanaugh? We’re in the majority, and we couldn’t get him confirmed! You need to come out and vote for us!” How does that work?

JOHN KING: “How does that work?” Pretty good point. I do think that that’s an important point, that if Kavanaugh goes down, it will be because moderate Republicans decided to not vote for him, and that could depress turnout in some ways. That could lead to a number of people saying, “What’s the point?”

RUSH: The point I was making is, and I’ve been hearing this this from a lot of people, that if Kavanaugh goes down it’s just gonna fire up troops because Republicans are seen trying to make it happen and if it goes people…. I understand the thinking, but it just flies in the face of human nature. Beyond that, why do we have to lose in order to win? I never understood that. Why do we have to lose Kavanaugh in order to gin up turnout?

Depending on how it would happen, I’m not sure it would gin up turnout anyway. You got the majority party saying they couldn’t get their nominee confirmed and they go to voters say, we’re the majority and we tried we tried but we couldn’t get ’em confirmed, you need to vote for us and you need to give us more Republicans in the… There’s a disconnect there.

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RUSH: Okay. Back to the phones we go. We’ll cram our next exciting phone call into our remaining moments here. Auburn, Washington. Kirk. It’s great to have you, sir. How are you?

CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush. I’m doing okay.

RUSH: Good, good, good.

CALLER: I just wanted to talk about the two people we gotta worry about about credibility here are Ford and Kavanaugh. Okay? So Ford. You have to believe that Ford would leave her best girlfriend alone with four boys — two of which just sexually assaulted her — without attempting to get her friend out of the house or even talking to her friend about it later. Or you’ve got Kavanaugh who the U.S. government trusted so much, they trusted him with the nuclear launch codes under G. W. Bush.

RUSH: Well, you know, you may have a point there. That is one of the jobs of the White House staff secretary, which Kavanaugh was for George W. Bush.

CALLER: Well, Kavanaugh actually even mentioned that in the hearings.

RUSH: So you… Yeah, and you cannot carry the suitcase, the football, the nuclear codes without having a very, very high clearance. That’s a good point. I had missed him saying that.

CALLER: Yeah. It was almost a throwaway line. I think it was in his opening statement where he was really sticking it to ’em.

RUSH: Kirk, thanks very much for that. I appreciate the call. As I say, folks, I get the impression here that the Democrats know this is kind of collapsing or falling apart on ’em. When I heard Dianne Feinstein start talking about, “We need to look again at his rulings, Roe v. Wade, reproductive freedom, and, uh, and, uh, assault weapons.” Wait a minute! Wait a minute! I thought this was about gang rape and throwing ice in a bar? I don’t think they’ve got anything here. Of all these witnesses, none of them apparently have any evidence corroborating witnesses of the sort.

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RUSH: I need to go back. I need to filed Sheldon Whitehouse. Here it is. No. 9. Sheldon Whitehouse. This guy’s funny. This was the Democrat who on Friday morning, the morning of the vote, held up one of the enlarged pages of Kavanaugh’s calendar and said that he had figured out how to translate it.

The date in question, he figured out, could be the date where the incident Dr. Ford described happened. He sought to try to translate some of the nicknames and phrases that Kavanaugh used on his calendar — of course, in incriminating ways toward Kavanaugh. So on Good Morning America today, George Stephanopoulos of the Clinton war room is talking to Sheldon Whitehouse. He’s a Democrat from Rhode Island. He said, “Are you satisfied with the scope of the FBI inquiry? Can they finish this by Friday?”

WHITEHOUSE: I think I’m satisfied. We don’t know, uh, all the details yet, but clearly if they have been given free rein to interview whomever they want then that’s a very good sign. The last thing we want is a sham investigation. I also think that there’s a fairly small universe of witnesses here and a very big FBI. So yes, I think they probably should be able to, uhh, get this done by Friday if they really, uhhh, put the effort into it.

RUSH: Now, wait a minute. That just makes too much sense. That just doesn’t fit with Chuck Schumer today on the floor of the Senate — who we have. Grab audio sound bite No. 8. This is Chuck You. He went to the floor right after the Turtle did and basically made the case that we’re nowhere near ending this FBI investigation. As the Turtle said, Schumer and the Democrats are moving the goalposts.

SCHUMER: We are looking at what Judge Kavanaugh says at age 53, not what he did at age 18. We are looking at his credibility now as a grown adult, and if you believe Dr. Ford, then Judge Kavanaugh is not telling the truth. Just yesterday, NBC News reported that either Judge Kavanaugh or people close to the judge were in communication with his Yale classmates to get them to rebut allegations by Deborah Ramirez. … It seems that Judge Kavanaugh was at least very misleading to the Judiciary Committee about Miss. Ramirez’s story.

RUSH: So now it’s about Kavanaugh lying? It’s about Kavanaugh perjuring himself, and that means he’s not qualified? They’ve gotta make up their minds! First, he’s a serial gang rapist. Next, he throws ice on people at a bar. Then he’s a fall-down drunk, and now he’s a liar. They are flailing. But Sheldon Whitehouse totally out of character with his minority leader in the Senate, Chuck You Schumer. “Yeah. I think Friday’s fine.

“Yeah, there’s not too many people to talk to here! The FBI’s got a lot of people. Sure we can get this done.” That’s just too sensible. Maybe Whitehouse is out there chucking the spear here to be the public face of a reasonable Democrat Party while everybody else stays insane. But they are moving the goalposts — and yes, for delay — but they’re also trying to move the goalposts as a target where they can catch Kavanaugh in anything.

There’s one more that I want to play and I’m looking for it and I just found it. I want you to go to audio sound bite No. 12. The question of who leaked Dr. Ford’s letter to Dianne Feinstein. You know, this business of leaking this letter, my memory on this is kind of fuzzy. But I remember Feinstein doing a press conference either on the floor or at the Judiciary Committee. I remember her showing the letter holding it up or talking about it.

I remember… I don’t know if that was the leak, but she clearly talked about it and said that she’d had it since July and that she told us all about it that whoever had sent it didn’t want to be named and didn’t want to go forward. She didn’t know what to do with it. She’s holding this thing and saying, “I don’t know what to do with this.” It was all part of a strategy.

So late yesterday afternoon on Sheppard Smith reporting on the Fox News Channel, Trace Gallagher was sitting in for Shep Smith. And he had the legal affairs correspondent for National Public Radio on there, Nina Totenberg. He said, “Mitch McConnell said Friday he thinks the Democrats won’t agree to a limited scope in the FBI investigation. Now today, they’re asking for 24 more witnesses to be interviewed! What are your thoughts on that, Ms. Totenberg?”

TOTENBERG: I remember when I broke the Anita Hill story, I thought this was the closest kept secret, and I managed to f-find out about it. I later found out there were probably a hundred people in Washington who knew this secret and kept it for a very long time. You and I are not stupid people.

GALLAGHER: Right!

TOTENBERG: We may not be brilliant, but we’re not stupid. And once you get us on a case like that, and lots of people are talking to each other, one leads to another. And it doesn’t have to be a member of the Senate who leaked this.

GALLAGHER: Yuh.

TOTENBERG: It doesn’t even have to be a staffer who leaked this! It doesn’t have to be a member of her law firm! It just seeps out, and that’s what happened here.

RUSH: Why didn’t I think of that? “It just seeps out,” kind of like it’s in a pressure cooker and after a while, the pressure cooker develops a seeping leak, and here comes the news of the letter. A hundred people must have known about this! A hundred people knew about Anita Hill, but they waited ’til the last minute to try that too. So she’s running interference for Dianne Feinstein. Believe me, they’re buddies.

Nina Totenberg, Dianne Feinstein, NPR, the Drive-By Media, the Democrat Party, they’re buddies. So she’s doing a CYA for Feinstein here. (impression) “Well, you know, a lot of people knew about it and more people know about it and it just kind of seeps out there.” (chuckles) Somebody “seeped” it. Whether you want to change the term to “seep” from “leak,” somebody did it. It didn’t just leak out on its own. But that’s what Totenberg wants you to think happened here.