RUSH: Okay. So it’s like Groundhog Day. It’s deja vu all over again! The New York Times and the Washington Post with gigantic stories on literally nothing! But headlined to make it look like there’s a new development in the Trump-Russia case, and that is that Trump was actually working and reporting to Russia.

There is no evidence in these two stories. There is still no evidence — and they admit it — of any collusion whatsoever. And yet two brand-new and fresh stories about something that I would expect you to be bored silly by now. So the question is why, why now? And, in fact, I’ve got some information here just to set this up.

Investor’s Business Daily: “Public Disdain For Russia Probe Intensifies, Impeachment Talk Called Premature. Trump Approval Climbs — Most people think President Trump’s critics are trying to use Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation to delegitimize the 2016 elections.”

You hear that? “Most people think.” The Drive-Bys are not gonna report this poll. They’re not gonna report the results of this or any polls similar. The only polling data you’re gonna see from the Drive-By Media is Trump’s approval rating is at an all-time low, people want Trump impeached, people want the reelection of 2016 to happen. It’s nothing but total bull! And I almost said the second part of that.

This has gone beyond rational now, even if you look at it from the standpoint of a gigantic deep state conspiracy. These people have completely and totally lost it. And I think that I know why. And to illustrate why I think I know why, it’s time to go to the audio sound bites. And first I want to start with Carl Bernstein. We got two things I want you to hear.

Now, Carl Bernstein happens to be echoing something that I said last week, if you will remember. I reported to you a couple or three rumors I have heard, scuttlebutt about the Mueller report and what it’s going to be since there isn’t any collusion, there wasn’t any collusion. There wasn’t even any attempt by Trump or anybody on his team to collude with Russia. There was never anything there. And yet we’ve had this Mueller investigation going on for, whatever, a year and a half.

And you know as well as I do that just as these Looney Tunes are offering to slop a day off of their lives to give it to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, these people are deranged. They have become so poisoned with hatred or whatever that they have become convinced that Trump stole the election, cheated, is an agent of Vladimir Putin. They believe it. All rationality is gone. It’s been reported to them for so long. They’ve been so invested in it that they really think all of that happened. But the fact of the matter is it didn’t.

Rational people like you and I know that it didn’t, and eventually Mueller’s gonna have to admit this. But he can’t just admit that. Not after all this time. Besides that, no special counsel ever concludes by saying, “Hey, guess what, America? We didn’t find anything here. Our investigation’s closed, and the only crimes we got is a bunch of people lied to us during the investigation.” They never announce that. Even if that’s what they found, they never announce that. So listen to Bernstein. This is the first sound bite.

BERNSTEIN: Donald Trump has tried to convince us that unless there is some kind of smoking gun, a recording of him in the room with Putin saying, “Yes, Vladimir, I’ll do your bidding,” there’s been, quote, no collusion. That’s nonsense. This is not about the deep state. This is about the most serious counterintelligence people we have in the U.S. government saying, “Oh, my God. The president’s words and action lead us to conclude that somehow he has become a witting, unwitting, or half-witting pawn certainly in some regards to Vladimir Putin.” He has helped Putin destabilize the United States and interfere in the election no matter whether it was purposeful or not.

RUSH: See that, the end of that, “whether it was purposeful or not.” This is one of the rumors I heard last week, and now it’s been announced as something that’s actually happened. In other words, they don’t have any evidence that Trump did anything. But Trump’s so stupid and Trump is so incompetent and Trump is so deranged, he’s essentially human debris, and Donald Trump is so unfit, he’s got no business walking, working, living, having anything to do with Washington, D.C. And because of all of that he made it possible for Putin to interfere in the election.

So rather than portray Trump as a witting, willing, in-on-the-game participant, they’re gonna say that Trump is so stupid and so out of it and so incompetent and so incapable that Putin was able to do anything he wanted. They can’t say that Trump did anything, ’cause he didn’t. So all they’ve got is to suggest that people like Trump never be allowed in Washington again because this is the kind of risk they present. Somebody so unsophisticated, so unaware of the real enemies of our country that he unwittingly allows them to have total access to our country. That’s scuttlebutt rumor number one.

Now, that’s gonna be a big letdown. I’m gonna tell you, if that’s what Mueller reports, that Trump didn’t do anything, just his stupidity allowed it to happen, it will be kind of like kissing your sister, if even that. Then there’s this, and this is even more on point. This Jonathan Karl yesterday on ABC’s This Week.

Then there’s this, and this is even more on point. This Jonathan Karl yesterday on ABC’s This Week…

KARL: People who are closest to what Mueller has been doing of interacting with the special counsel, caution me that this report is almost certain to be anticlimactic. But if you look at what the FBI was investigating in that New York Times report, look at what they were investigating, Mueller did not go anywhere with that investigation. He has been writing his report in real time through these indictments, and we have seen nothing from Mueller on the central question of was there any coordination, collusion with the Russians in the effort to meddle in the elections or was there even any knowledge on the part of the president or anybody in his campaign with what the Russians were doing.

RUSH: Let me translate this for you. Jonathan Karl is telling his colleagues at ABC News and throughout the viewing audience that the Mueller report is going to be a letdown. That it’s gonna be anti-climactic, that it’s not gonna have anything in it that every one of us have expected. In other words: Mueller doesn’t have a syllable. He doesn’t have a paraphrase. He doesn’t have a vowel or a consonant, even, on Trump-Russia collusion. And Jonathan Karl is saying that — and also, by the way, Mother Jones.

You may not read it, but a bunch of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez types do, and they’re asking the same question. “What if Mueller has nothing?” I’m telling you what, the special counsel’s office, somebody is trickling it out there trying to lower people’s expectations, ’cause there isn’t any collusion! There never was any collusion! Just like this story (this, to me, is the epitome) rehashes Trump’s joke while he’s down in Miami at Doral, “Hey, Russia!

“If you’re listening, maybe you can find the 30,000 missing Hillary emails — and if you do, turn ’em over to the media in the United States. They’d love to see ’em.” This story claims to purport that the FBI literally believed Trump was inviting the Russians to hack. The problem is Hillary’s server had already been destroyed by then. This was so obviously a joke! This is so obviously Trump goosing these people — and to this day, they took this seriously.

You know the prejudice and the bigotry on the part of these people at the FBI that required them or permitted them or opened the door to them believing some of these things that are just obvious jokes, it really makes me wonder the kind of people we have in Washington at the top level of anything. They don’t recognize basic comedy, human behavior. They’re so disconnected from normal, everyday life that they’re unable to recognize how real people chat with each other.

Do you realize what a problem this is when you get down to talking to people in law enforcement and investigating people that supposedly break the law? If they don’t have any idea how you and I actually talk to each other and instead assume that normal, everyday conversation — telling jokes, goosing people — is evidence of a crime or the invitation to commit a crime? I can’t imagine anybody with any modicum of intelligence literally believing this.

The other thing that we are led to believe in this New York Times story and (sigh) I’m conflicted on this. I’m going back and forth on this. The Steele dossier. The golden showers dossier. The story that Trump hired some prostitutes to urinate on a bed in a Moscow hotel room when he found out that Barack and Michelle had slept on it. We are being asked to believe that the FBI really believed that. We’re being asked to believe the FBI believed the Steele dossier.

Folks, there’s not one true thing in it, and yet we’re being told they believed it, and the reason they believed it is because they had a prior relationship with Christopher Steele and they trusted him. But I don’t know. I just can’t believe… They’re undeniably smart people. Of course, how you define “smart” now is an interesting challenge. But the idea that they believed everything in it? I think they’re wanting everybody to think they believed everything in it because they used it to defraud the entire FISA court system to go get warrants to spy on Carter Page.

And, by the way, it was never about Carter Page. This has always been about Trump, and one of the things that Trump did that really ticked these people off was admit publicly what Comey told him. Comey told him (and Trump announced it three times) he was not a target of the investigation. Rosenstein and Comey were both telling Trump not to announce that, that it would tamper with the investigation, and Trump couldn’t understand it.

(summarized) “Everything in the news today is about how I’m the target. You’re telling me I’m not the target. I’m gonna tell people I’m not the target, that you’re telling me that,” and they’re trying to get him not to announce this. And then he did, and that spurred them even to further action. I think this New York Times story… The real question to me, since it admits — and I’m gonna read it to you. It admits again as in every one of these stories the past two years, there’s no evidence for anything the headline of the story alleges!

None! This story… If you just landed from Mars and knew nothing, this story makes the FBI look horrible! Not Donald Trump. But if you have a basic understanding of the story as reported and you see the headline, you’re gonna think that the FBI was legitimately spying on Trump because he was an agent of the Russians. But in the real world, this story has no evidence like no other story has had any evidence that Trump did anything that he’s been alleged to have done.

Why leak this now? This is the question I’ve been asking myself ever since this has hit on Friday, and the reason is because the scuttlebutt is hitting that Mueller doesn’t have anything on the central premise that Trump stole election, cheated with Russians. Hillary was gonna win, but Trump took action with Putin and screwed the pooch and ended up being elected president. Mueller doesn’t have anything on that because there isn’t anything on that because it’s never been a legitimate premise.

Again, a reminder: This FBI investigation has never been a criminal investigation because there isn’t a crime. It is why it was always a counterintelligence investigation. Counterintelligence investigations have no crimes whatsoever. They’re not designed to find crimes. They’re not designed to find evidence of crimes. This has nothing to do with crimes, counter-intelligentence investigations — and there’s no end to them. This thing has always been a counterintelligence investigation.

But I think the reason they’re leaking this now is because everybody’s starting to get worried that Mueller’s report is not going to indict Trump for stealing the election, which is what everybody on the left, from the smartest to the dumbest — and that’s not a very wide scale — is expecting: Mueller to have the smoking gun and the silver bullet. Also, who is responsible for this story being out there now? Who actually made the decision and when to convert this into a counterintelligence investigation rather than criminal?

I think much of what’s going on here… I think McCabe… After Comey got fired, McCabe got frightened that he would be next. I think they all panicked when Trump was elected ’cause Trump was gonna have access to all of the counterintel documents the FBI’d been looking into. He’s the executive branch head honcho. He can see whatever he wants. They start panicking. They create a counterintelligence investigation of him to try to keep him from seeing what they have done to protect themselves and to protect Hillary.

And Trump then… I don’t think they ever expected Comey to be fired. Rosenstein writes the memo to Trump recommending that Comey be fired. By the way, I’ve got a story here with about 15,000 Democrats saying Comey should be fired before the election of 2016. You remember they hated Comey until Trump fired him. Now he’s their biggest hero. When Trump fires Comey, I think McCabe panics. He knows he’s next.

So here comes a counterintelligence investigation that’s designed to keep Trump off the scent by making sure he can’t get anywhere near it because they leaked that he may be the target while telling him he’s not. But the public doesn’t know that until Trump, once again, blows it up on them by announcing what Comey told him three different times that he was not the target. He was always the target. But Mueller has not much. Jonathan Karl, Carl Bernstein, there’s a number of other media people now alluding to the fact that people on the left had better prepare themselves.

So this story comes out Friday to counter that, I believe, and accomplish a couple of other things. Anyway, I’m thinking about parsing it for a little bit more detail ’cause it’s just… It is really dangerous what has happened to our country, even independently of Trump, what these people were doing: Getting involved in foreign policy, criminalizing the politics of a political opponent simply because he was a political opponent. These head honchos of the FBI in this era were really, really dangerous bad actors.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s why I’m leaning toward the idea that the FBI never thought this dossier was real. I don’t think they’re that stupid. They knew it was unverified. They knew it had been uncorroborated, that it could not be corroborated. I think that these people — McCabe, Comey, Strzok Smirk, Page. I think these people were corrupt at all get out, but I do not believe they were stupid. I think they knew this thing was BS and I think they knew it came from the Hillary campaign.

And I think they knew it came from Fusion GPS, ’cause the guy was wired into the FBI as was one of the guys at the FBI’s wives wired into Fusion GPS. But having everybody think they believed the dossier kind of lets you go lax on the idea they used it to spy. “Well, you can’t blame ’em, Rush! If they really believed it, it makes sense that they would go lie to the FISA court to get a warrant to spy.” So they have to say they believed it. But no amount of persuasion is gonna make me think they did — and look at how successful the Steele dossier has been. You think it’s a joke and it’s a laughable matter because it was all BS.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I just want to run through a couple of more things in this latest New York Times, and maybe in an ancillary way the Washington Post’s story. But again, one of the key elements that the FBI wants everybody to think is that they believe the Steele dossier because that gives them cover. They use that dossier to basically get FISA warrants to spy on Trump, not Carter Page, on Trump. It was all about Trump.

It’s never been about Manafort. It’s never been about Carter Page. It’s never been about Papadopoulos. It has always been about Trump going all the way back to the campaign, even before anybody thought he might really have a chance at winning. And it certainly intensified after he won during the transition and has continued during his presidency. But they’re asking us to believe that they really believed it. And I don’t believe it for a moment.

I’ve gone back and forth on this. They’re not stupid. They are corrupt as hell, but they are not stupid. By having everybody think that they believe the dossier, they had cover to gain all their FISA warrants. They knew that the Hillary campaign paid for this. They knew that it was a bunch of salacious lies created by Russian agents and fed to Steele. And they’re telling us, “No, Rush, no. No. We didn’t know at the time that it was BS because we trusted Steele.” That’s another stupid thing asking us to believe. They trusted this guy even in the midst of the fact that nothing in this, they also admit, could be verified. Nothing could be corroborated.

They didn’t believe this for a minute. It was a tool of opposition research from the day it was conceived and they were active participants in it. The FBI, the Democrat National Committee, all of these people from the Obama campaign, from the Obama administration, every damn one of them all the way down to his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. Fusion GPS, the Perkins Coie law firm. And here’s what it allowed them to do with no proof of collusion, after all of these many years, with no proof of collusion.

And I mean with no proof of collusion, in fact, even as of the most recent New York Times and Washington Post stories, there it is in black and white. There is no evidence for anything alleged in our story. Nine paragraphs into the story, the reporters in the New York Times admit that there is and was literally no evidence to support the idea Trump worked for Russia, as has been in every one of these stories for two years, buried toward the end in a two-line paragraph or part of a much longer paragraph. It is nine paragraphs into this New York Times story where the reporters admit there is and was and has been literally no evidence to support the idea Trump worked for Russia.

So why even write this damn story? It cannot get more powerful than literally no evidence to support the idea Trump worked for Russia, which is the entire premise of our story. Okay? So with literally no evidence that Trump worked with Russia, with literally no evidence of collusion with Russia, with literally no evidence the Russians had any impact on the election, which has been admitted to by Rosenstein, with literally no evidence the Russians had an iota’s bit of relevance in what happened in 2016, the dossier has allowed and permitted Mueller and the media to succeed.

The Democrats won the House. Opposition research for 2020 has now been gathered. Trump’s approval numbers in polling data out today are down, have been damaged. 2020 is better set up to prevent Trump’s reelection because of an unverified, uncorroborated dossier that led to two years of lying BS everywhere in the American media. The dossier is a collection of smears, plausible smears paid for and created by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

The FBI and the media can say, “Hey, we believed it.” Because as the Democrats always say, it’s not the nature of the evidence, it’s the seriousness of the discharge. And so this dossier has permitted two and a half years, two years of salacious, lying, stinking, total BS allegations that have been supported by endless news stories in print and on cable TV that have targeted the reputation, the integrity, and the sanctity of Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

So to say the dossier didn’t work would be foolish. The dossier has been a dream for these people, and it’s predicated on these clowns at the FBI trying to make us think that they believed it, when they knew that it was exactly what it has been used for: opposition research. It was the foundation for an unnecessary, totally corrupt investigation by Mueller that was led to by corrupt FBI officials from Rosenstein to McCabe to Comey to Peter Strzok Smirk to Lisa Page.

Don’t tell me it hasn’t worked! It’s worked like a champ! And now these people are running stores in the New York Times and Washington Post to protect themselves and their integrity. “Well, we believed the dossier. We couldn’t afford not to believe the dossier! What if the dossier was true? Just because we couldn’t verify it didn’t mean it wasn’t true.” They knew from the get-go what it was.

This is and has been what many of us have thought it has been from the get-go: nothing more than a concerted deep state coup, silent coup to overthrow the 2016 presidential election and its results and to eventually get rid of the winner of the 2016 presidential election. And all the rest of this is just fodder. All the rest of it is dressing, icing on the cake, all the rest of it is a bunch of fluff designed to buttress what these investigators supposedly did in tracking down this Russian collusion, when there never was any.

This is one of the most successful political hoaxes that has been perpetrated on the American people. Now it has led to the entire population of this country that is Democrat and leftist, expecting to see evidence that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin colluded to steal the election from them and from Hillary Clinton.

And since no evidence exists for that, the people responsible for creating this belief now have to kind of soft sell and cover their tracks, which they’re beginning to do by saying, “Well, you know, could be anti-climatic. You know, there might not be any evidence of collusion. The best we might have is that Trump is such an idiot that he allowed the Russians to get away with whatever they want.”

But nobody can tell us what the Russians did. The Russians didn’t do anything! The Russians had no impact on the election. Not one vote was changed. Not one election outcome was affected. So the dossier worked like a champ. They never thought they were gonna lose the election, but when they did, it was time to get into gear. And all the other reasons too.

They had to do this investigation to hide their own corruption, to hide their own efforts here to undermine Trump during the campaign. Trump winning the election is panic time, man, because that gives him permission to see any document he wants to see. So you convert the investigation from criminal — well, you don’t convert it, you never started as criminal, you just call it counterintel which means it’s gonna be easier to shield documents from him and from Congress ’cause it’s ongoing.

See, counterintel investigations never end ’cause all you’re doing is gathering information. You’re collecting intelligence, and your analysts analyze it and come up with conclusions. But there’s no crime involved. There never has been a crime involved. We’ve been hoaxed. Although the real frustrating thing is we’ve been hoaxed while we have been aware we have been hoaxed. I have known from the get-go what this is, I’ve shared it with you, and it’s still been happening.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: There’s a Washington Times story all the way back in April of 2017. We’re coming up on nine months ago, and even Steele, the author of the dossier, “acknowledges that the part of the 35-page dossier that identified Mr. Gubareva as a rogue hacker came from ‘unsolicited intelligence’ and ‘raw intelligence’ that ‘needed to be analyzed and father investigated/verified.'” So even Steele is saying that you can’t verify some of this, and yet the FBI’s trying to tell us they believed it, when even the author admitted that some of it was unverified?

This whole thing has been actually a brilliantly conceived silent coup of a political opposition research operation — with the full awareness, by the way, of the media. The media is not just a bunch of observers. The media is not just an echo chamber here. The media is a full participant, a knowing and full participant in this. This is an entire deep state combined operation, and the really frustrating thing for me is we’ve known this from the moment it began.

Here’s Joyce in Pittsburgh as we start on the phones. Joyce, it’s great to have you. How are you doing?

CALLER: I’m doing great Rush. How are you doing today?

RUSH: Fine. Thank you very much.

CALLER: Great. Well, the point I wanted to make is Rosenstein is the foundation of this entire issue, and it started the day that Trump declared his candidacy. I guarantee you that. They were scared of him. They weren’t afraid of the other 16 candidates. They were scared of Trump because he is fearless, and from the setup with Sessions… He was too quick to recuse himself and they knew he was an honorable man. So from the get-go, it all fell under Rosenstein hiding himself from the FISA warrant, the firing of Comey. He writes the memo. Shortly after that he’s in charge of picking Mueller? Just to protect himself, to protect the Obama administration. She doesn’t —

CALLER: (crosstalk)

RUSH: Now, hold it a minute. Hold on. You’re racing through here, and that’s a good point, but I want to stop you one.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: Rosenstein writes a memo recommending that Comey be fired. Now, it is at the time and during an atmosphere where the Democrats are livid with Comey, and it’s all about the fact that Comey, on July 5th, decided to pretend he was attorney general. He calls a press conference, and he lists all the crimes that they uncovered Hillary Clinton having committed with her email server, and then says that there will not be any charges because “no reasonable prosecutor” would ever bring charges because Mrs. Clinton had no intent.

The Democrats are livid at Comey in October when he reopens this investigation for a weekend because some emails are found on the computer of Carlos Danger. The point is, Rosenstein in this atmosphere when this happening, writes a memo to Trump recommending Comey be fired. Trump does it. They wanted Comey to be fired, in other words, so that they could then say Trump was obstructing and go get a special counsel. The whole thing was a setup. You’re claiming Rosenstein was at the center of all this. I would not be surprised.

CALLER: Absolutely.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Absolutely — and the fact that he won’t testify? He’s covering for Strzok, he’s covering for McCabe, he’s covering for Lisa Page, and it goes all the way up to Obama.

RUSH: That’s who they’re all covering for.

CALLER: This entire thing was orchestrated for years.

RUSH: The bottom line is, that’s who they’re all covering for. But, believe me, even if Obama weren’t involved, Obama’s the guy that let it all happen. And, by the way, I don’t think Obama let it happen. I think we’re talking about the politicization of the Justice Department. And for the longest time people really thought that it was not politicized, that it was the scales. Justice, fairness, equality, it resided there. I don’t believe that’s the case. I think the Justice Department has been corrupt ever since liberals got their hands on it.

When that was is a matter of debate. But I don’t think what is a matter of debate is that Barack Obama put the exclamation point to it all and firmly politicized the DOJ and used it to advance the liberal Democrat agenda of his party, his own personal agenda, and used it to wreak havoc on political opponents. He used it to criminalize policy differences, and to whatever extent the DOJ had been politicized prior to that, Obama came in and made no bones about it when Eric Holder was nominated as attorney general. I don’t think there’s any question about it.

The guy at the top determines the culture.

The guy at the top sets the boundaries.

And everybody that’s involved in this thing, I am certain, was sure that they had the support of people at the highest levels in doing this. Meaning, they were not rogue. They may have been rogue if you just look at the FBI and say, “Not everybody in the FBI was this way, just these leaders.” But they were not rogue in the sense that they were obedient. Just like Lois Lerner at the IRS and Eric Holder DOJ, they were doing what they knew Obama would allow and what he wanted, imperator what they wanted this whole thing.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Rudy Giuliani with a text: “It is now clear that the Mueller investigation is the illegitimate product of Peter Strzok’s ‘insurance policy’ to remove the president and the McCabe-inspired revenge for firing Comey. It explains why they proceeded on the idiotic theory that the president firing Comey was a crime.” Well, they did. The whole key to this… Well, that’s wrong to say too. It’s not the whole key. But one of the fundamental aspects of this is that it was a counterintelligence investigation instead of criminal — and when did it become that?

See, that is the question: When did it become a counterintelligence investigation? There is some debate about that, because the two are wholly different. For there to be a criminal investigation, there must be a crime. Well, there was never any evidence of a crime, there was never any evidence that Trump committed a crime, and yet originally this thing has always been portrayed to us as a criminal investigation and that’s why Mueller was appointed. But it was really never a criminal investigation, always counterintelligence — and by definition, there is no crime in counterintelligence.

And so when you get to the whole notion of firing Comey, since there wasn’t a crime, they were looking at getting Trump on obstructing justice. The joke Trump told about asking Russia to find Hillary’s emails, they tried to say that that was in part — or could be, a case could be made, that it was — obstruction and that firing Comey was obstruction. But of course, it isn’t, because Trump can do anything he wants. He can fire anybody he wants at any time for whatever reason.

The price he pays if he goes crazy with this is political. But there’s nothing anybody can do to stop the one person in charge of the executive branch. There is no committee there. There is one person in charge of the entire executive branch, and it’s the president of the United States. If he wants to fire the FBI director, he can. They tried to turn that into an obstruction case over firing Comey and so forth. Anything they could do to legitimize what they were continuing to look into.

Rudy’s point here is that the Mueller investigation is the “illegitimate product of Peter Strzok’s ‘insurance policy’ to remove the president.” Remember when he was texting back and forth with Lisa Page that they needed an “insurance policy,” but he didn’t specify what it was? Everybody was left to guess, “What insurance policy?” The insurance policy was, “What do we do if Trump wins?” The insurance policy was, “How do we get rid of the guy if he wins?” While they’re texting each other, you know, that it’s not possible.

(Page impression) “He’s not gonna win, right? He can’t win, right?” Strzok is trying to play the valiant, strong, alpha male hero guy. “Noooo! No way! No way! I’m not gonna let it happen, dear. Don’t worry. I’m not gonna let such a horrible thing happen to you. But, hey, we need an insurance policy anyway,” and that’s the Mueller investigation. The Mueller investigation has always been a distraction. It has always been designed to take our eyes off of the people who really committed crimes in all of this.

The Mueller investigation is designed to give the media a completely different set of targets to destroy and focus on. The Mueller investigation is a cover-up. It’s no more complicated than that. It is a cover-up of the crimes, the real crimes and the real collusion that was committed by Hillary Clinton personally. Not just with her email server but colluding with Russians, because commissioning the Steele dossier, asking it to be written, commissioning it like a piece of art, commissioning that dossier, opposition research product on Donald Trump…

She knew that Steele was gonna be colluding and talking with Russian agents. Then there’s the hacking of the DNC server that has been covered up. There is the FBI not even permitted to forensically examine it to find out who really did that. Then there’s been the attempt to say that the Trump campaign was in collusion with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in leaking the John Podesta emails. None of that was true.

The Democrats and the media and the left were all part of a giant cabal to prevent Donald Trump from being elected and then to get him out of office after he was, and the Mueller investigation is a cover-up of all of that. It is designed to make sure that there is not an investigation of Hillary. Comey exonerated her. Acting as attorney general on July 5th, 2016, he exonerated her from the email server crimes. The solution to this, of course — the recourse for this — is Trump.

But his attorney general had been recused or had recused himself from anything to do with this. So you’ve been asking me for as long as this has been going on, “Well, Rush, when are we gonna investigate what the Clintons were doing?” I don’t know. I wish I had an answer for you it. I wish such an investigation had taken place. Jeff Sessions supposedly hired somebody to be looking into a bunch of this stuff around with the various inspectors general.

But nothing has come of it precisely because the Mueller investigation is so big, so omnivorous, so omnipresent that it obscures and covers up virtually anything else — and in fact, prevents anything else from happening. And the Mueller investigation has been sanctified as legitimate from day one, even though it hasn’t been. Not even… You cannot have a special counsel convened without a crime, and there has never been a crime specified. That’s another reason why it was converted to a counterintel investigation, because theoretically you could find all kinds of crimes in a counterintelligence investigation.

So you’re looking for the crime.

They start with the premise that was faulty and filled with lies that Trump colluded with Russia. So the audience, the American people, think there’s a crime that Mueller is investigating. But more importantly, so does every damn Democrat in this country and every stupid leftist thinks there’s a crime, because this hoax has been run on everybody. You’ve got Democrat voters from the top to the bottom of that list of people — from the rich to the poor and everybody in between — who think that. And you can’t really blame ’em if all they do is listen and watch the mainstream media.

In fact, most of them have probably grown impatient waiting for Mueller because they think Trump colluding has been a slam dunk. They’ve heard it on TV. They’ve seen it on at every; they’ve heard all this. “When is he gonna report?” They were hoping it would be before the election. There wasn’t anything, of course. So now they’ve gotta do another day rain dance and a little bit of a coverup to cover up the fact that Mueller doesn’t have anything. Well, Mueller was never gonna get anything because there was never anything to get.

So Mueller finds a bunch of process crimes, creates a bunch of process crimes in the process of running this faux, hoax investigation. So he’s got legitimate people going to jail: Manafort and now Cohen. (Snort!) Two of the most ancillary, irrelevant, had-nothing-to-do-with-anything people regarding the original premise: The Russians colluding with Trump to steal the election. So all these people that have been hoaxed have now been primed with the highest of expectations that Trump is going to jail.

This is the epitome of treasonous espionage, what Trump’s been accused of, and it’s been two solid years every day, multiple stories, newspapers, cable news. Now it’s beginning to trickle out, “Hey, don’t get your hopes up high. It could be anti-climatic.” Jonathan Karl, ABC, says it — and not in a tweet. He said it on TV yesterday with George “Stephy” Stephanopoulos. (paraphrased) “Yeah, I’m hearing from people that it could be anti-climactic,” meaning a giant letdown. Carl Bernstein was acknowledging the rumor I heard last week is true, that what they’re gonna do is report that Trump is an imbecile, incompetent, has no business living/working in Washington.

He had no business being elected. He’s such a dupe, such a rube, such an incompetent, such an idiot that Trump’s very presence allowed the Russians to take every opportunity they wanted to corrupt America. That’s gonna be the extent of it. Trump didn’t do anything, but just the fact that he was there made it easier for the Russians than they’ve ever had it — and as I said, you can’t say it didn’t work. The Democrats won the House. Trump’s approval numbers are teetering. They’re going up and down depending on what poll you looked.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So the story the New York Times had fed to them by the FBI — again, for which there’s not a scintilla of evidence. (laughing) The way to look at it to simplify this, boil this down to its essence, is, “The FBI was investigating Donald Trump because he was a national security threat.” When that’s your premise, not that he had committed any crimes, “He’s a national security threat,” it justifies the investigation. Nothing could be more absurd in the world, and everybody involved in this is aware of it.

But there are people… I have to tell you, there are people who are disagreeing with me who I’ve checked in the email. “Rush, I think you’re wrong. I think the FBI did believe the dossier. I think people there are so deluded — I think Washington is so disconnected from the real world, I think these people are so full of themselves, Mr. Limbaugh, they are elites in their own minds — that they think the worst of everybody who is not in their club. And if they’ve got an intelligence document that claims Trump did all this, there’s no question in my mind, Rush, that they believed it,” and I understand the sentiment.

I just… Whatever else they are, I don’t believe that they are that stupid. I believe they are that corrupt. (sigh) And the evidence of the corruption to me is no greater, no more difficult to see than just how deep this disconnect is, how wide this disconnect is between people in Washington and the rest of the country.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Back to the phones we go to Brooklyn. This is Lee. I’m glad you called. Great to have you here. How are you?

CALLER: Hi, Rush. The Obama administration is probably broken every law including murder if you include Seth Rich. Why do they create evidence and frame Donald Trump just out of thin area? They did that with the dossier.

RUSH: Why just create — you mean plant evidence, why not just create evidence to frame Trump out of thin air?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Well, I mean isn’t that kind of what the dossier is?

CALLER: They’re not using it, no one’s been indicted. He hasn’t been indicted yet.

RUSH: I don’t think they were looking at indicting the president because I don’t think that is the objective. I think impeachment has been the first objective and then destroying Trump’s election chances in 2020 is the next objective. In terms of the overall premise, why not plant evidence? You could say that they tried. The whole George Papadopoulos thing is the planting of evidence. It’s not tangible evidence but it is nevertheless the planting of evidence that would allow for the discovery of what Papadopoulos was supposedly out saying to further extend the investigation.

The short version of the story is that Papadopoulos, ancillary foreign policy worker in the Trump campaign in the early days — never even met Trump, doesn’t know who he is, Trump doesn’t — is invited to London, given a $3,000 payment to make some speech on something or other by Stefan Halper, who is an FBI plant. And while he’s there, he’s asked if he knows that the Russians have a bunch of Hillary Clinton emails. And he says he doesn’t know. “Oh, yeah, well, they do. They do. Don’t forget that, George. Don’t forget that.”

They next arrange for him to have a meeting with the Australian ambassador at a bar in London where he starts bragging to the Australian ambassador that the Trump campaign knows, because the FBI just told him, that the Russians have 30,000 emails. The Australian ambassador then contacts the FBI, who started this in the first place. The Australian ambassador working with the FBI say, “This guy from the Trump campaign just told me that the Russians have 30,000 emails.”

Bango, the FBI is able to say the Trump campaign’s telling people that there are 30,000 emails of Hillary Clinton’s in possession of the Russians. Now, that’s not the planting of tangible evidence but it certainly is tampering and creating a bunch of evidence that does not exist and isn’t true in order to extend the investigation. There were all kinds of examples of that.