RUSH: Greetings, my friends. The surreal nature of our lives today — those of us who are engaged and enmeshed in politics. The surreal nature, the Twilight Zone nature of all this just continues.

Okay. So we got the Mueller report out. It finds no collusion. There never was any. Don’t get me started on this. I’m not only probably driving you crazy, I’m driving myself crazy talking about this. There was no collusion. There was no investigation. All of this is a trumped up hoax.

And Mueller didn’t find any because there wasn’t any to find and he had to go hopscotching all around and writing — this obstruction chapter of his report, by the way, this is one of the most — the attempt that Mueller — it’s not the attempt. The thing that he did in writing that obstruction section, section 2 of this report, essentially is a smear. It is a gigantic smear of the president under the guise of desperately trying to decide whether or not we could indict or whether or not we could proclaim that the president obstructed justice.

The setup continues. The word “unfairness” is just flashing in all caps right before my eyes. And then in the midst of all of this, here comes a so-called Republican senator on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr from North Carolina, who does not have the support of any other Republican on the committee, issuing a new subpoena or request for Donald Trump Jr. to come up and offer more testimony, after the case is closed.

Mitch McConnell, who runs the Senate, he’s the Senate majority leader, a couple days ago said, “The case is closed,” and everybody is trying to figure out, what is Richard Burr doing? It’s not hard to understand. The guy that runs that committee, even though he’s in the minority, is Mark Warner, Mark Warner, the Democrat from Virginia, I’m certain — I don’t know this, but, I mean, how else could this have happened?

There aren’t any Republicans that are supporting Burr in this. It has to be the Democrats on that committee. And I guarantee — I can’t guarantee you, but it seems to me that they think based on something they’ve seen, read, or heard, that somebody there thinks that they can get Donald Trump Jr. on perjury or having lied.

I suspect what it is is an attempt to unnerve and unravel Trump himself, President Trump, by going at and targeting his kids. The belief that you go after Trump’s family and that’s when Trump starts pay attention to you. You can hit him with everything you’ve got and he’ll fire back at you, but you take out after his family, and you’re gonna get his goat.

This is one of the things that may be propelling this. There is no earthly reason for this. And so now the question becomes, “What’s Donald Trump Jr. gonna do about it? Is he gonna answer the subpoena? Is he gonna show up?” Probably not. We can all only guess what is going to happen. It’s like I say: It’s surreal. This is over. There never was anything here. There never was a damn thing in this investigation. It has all been made up. It was all tied to the Steele dossier, which everybody’s admitting now was paid for by the Democrat National Committee and Hillary Clinton.

And in the midst of all of this, the Democrats are now claiming that the country is in the midst of a “constitutional crisis” because Jerry Nadler said that it is. Unlike the crisis at the border, which is a crisis, and unlike the crisis in the media, which is a crisis, the Drive-Bys are not calling this a manufactured crisis ginned up for political reasons. Oh, no, no. This is a real constitutional crisis. And why? Because the Trump administration has asserted executive privilege. It is going to refuse to allow their attorney general to break the law.

We have a constitutional crisis because the attorney general of the United States will not break the law. The House Judiciary Committee has voted to hold Barr, the attorney general, in contempt — party-line vote, of course — because the attorney general will not break the law and give them the unredacted Mueller report. And the unredacted portions of the Mueller report are largely grand jury testimony, which may not be revealed. By federal statute, it may not be revealed.

In point of fact, the attorney general was under no legal requirement to even make this report public. The attorney general was under no legal requirement to share this with the United States Congress. Now, you might be saying, “Rush, that can’t possibly be true, because every one of these previous special counsel reports have been made public and we know about ’em.” That’s true. But the regulations and the statutes attaching to this particular special counsel — remember, this is special counsel, not independent counsel. Starr was an independent counsel. The whole arrangement was legally different back in the Starr days versus what’s going on now with Mueller.

And I’m telling you, Barr did not have to release this report. It is required, and it must be kept confidential. Now, the attorney general can make an exception if he wants, and he said that he would during his confirmation hearings. So he’s following through on a commitment that he made, but he’s not required to release it. It’s not mandated by law that the attorney general release the report or make it available to Congress.

But he has done both. And yet they still are holding him in contempt. Contempt of Congress. There wasn’t even a subpoena. His appearance was to be voluntary. You can’t hold somebody in contempt who was gonna voluntary show up, who was not there under subpoena, not there under demand. And Barr decided he wasn’t gonna go and the Democrats on the committee said they are not qualified to ask questions, and they wanted some of their staff lawyers to start doing the questions.

Barr said (paraphrased), “To hell with this! If you people can ask the right questions — you’re the people’s representatives — then I’m not showing up.” So now they vote out contempt citation all because Barr won’t show. The contempt is not for that. The contempt is that he won’t release them the full Mueller report with all of the redactions made available.

So now the Democrats are claiming that this is grounds for impeachment. And now this is where this gets really crazy because the Democrats are claiming this is grounds for impeachment while at the same time they are saying that Trump is trying to goad them into impeaching him. We had this yesterday.

That’s right, my friends, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi — who increasingly cannot be understood when she speaks. She is increasingly more and more incoherent. But she is out there. When you can wade through the incoherence, the Speaker of the House is claiming that Trump is trying to goad the Democrats into impeaching him, that they really don’t want to do it, but that they may not be able to help themselves because Trump is out there trying to get them, trying to goad them, trying to trick them, trying to fool them into impeaching him while the Democrats are claiming that Barr refusing to break the law is now grounds for impeachment. Another way Trump is trying to goad them into impeaching him is by declaring and asserting executive privilege.

And, by the way, they say it is working. Little Pencil Neck, Adam Schiff, says that if Trump continues to stonewall Congress, Congress is gonna have to prosecute, which I assume means impeachment. But what has Trump stonewalled? Trump hasn’t stonewalled anything. Donald Trump Jr. testified, what is it, 10 hours before the Senate Intelligence Committee? Maybe it’s even longer than that. The president’s lawyer, Don McGahn, testified for 30 hours. The White House turned over… All of this is pointless to even point out because that’s not what this is all about.

This is nothing more than the continued effort of a party that’s got nothing using the willing accomplices they have in the media to manufacture a case that doesn’t exist, that has no substance to it whatsoever, that Trump is stonewalling, that Trump is obstructing, that Trump is dishonest, that Trump colluded. They are hell-bent on making this work because they were so sure it was gonna work when the Mueller investigation began.

So for the record and despite the media’s claims to the contrary, up until now, Trump has only invoked executive privilege for the full Mueller report. And guess what we’ve learned? Trump did that at the request of the attorney general. It turns out that Barr requested that Trump assert executive privilege. It’s not even Trump’s initiative.

Now, that may be splitting hairs, but the point is important because the Drive-Bys are trying to paint a picture of a slowly deteriorating Donald Trump losing his mind, becoming Captain Queeg there in the Oval Office, slowly and surely becoming insane, at his wits’ end, unable to keep up with all the news about all the losses and the tax returns and now his kids are being subpoenaed again and all this.

They’re trying to paint this picture that Trump is holed up in the White House and he’s not helping — he’s trying to circle the wagons and declaring executive privilege — when the truth is, the attorney general asked him to.

Now, there’s something else happening out there, folks, in addition to all that. We had this in a Morning Update a couple days ago. There’s a columnist for the New York Times called Thomas Friedman, Thomas “Loopy” Friedman. And Friedman is part of the Washington establishment that just can’t accept Donald Trump as a human being. They can’t accept him as a human being. They can’t accept him as president. They just can’t accept it. They cannot deal with it.

And so they have strategized, and they have plotted, and they have planed. They have tried everything they can think of since prior to the 2016 election to first deny the Trump the victory and then after he won to try to get him thrown out of office, and nothing has worked.

Now, they’ve paralyzed the administration. They’ve done great damage public opinion-wise. But in terms of the objective of getting rid of Trump, they haven’t. And it’s very frustrating because they thought they would have able to do this by now. If this bunch of people really wants to get rid of a Washington politician, they can do it. They can do it any number of ways.

They’ve got a playbook that they can cite and go back to that shows them how to do it because they’ve done it so often. And they literally have tried everything that has worked in the past. They’ve tried to create new weapons to get rid of Trump. Nothing has worked. They are at their wits’ end.

So “Loopy” Friedman had a column the other day advising Republicans what to do to help get rid of Donald Trump. To paraphrase his idea, Thomas Friedman suggested that the Republicans need to get together — the Never Trump Republicans need to get together —  and find a Republican Never Trumper such as a Mitt Romney or a Ben Sasse to run for president in 2020. And not as a Republican because that means that person would lose in the primaries.

The objective is to get a third-party candidate on the ballot who is a mainstream so-called Never Trump Republican and primarily in the states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, these Rust Belt states that Trump surprisingly won. But just get a Never Trumper on the ballot in as many states as possible to siphon votes away, Republican votes away from Trump, thereby ensuring the election of whoever the Democrats have nominated. Right now, the conventional wisdom is that it’s gonna be Biden.

So Thomas Friedman poses this idea in his New York Times column a couple days ago, and I am reliably informed that Never Trumpers throughout Washington are now actively engaged in trying to do this, in trying to make this happen, in trying to find somebody willing to run for president who does not want to win, just wants to get on the ballot and siphon enough votes away from Trump so that he can’t win and ensure the Democrats will win the White House in 2020. Because to them, all that matters is getting rid of Donald Trump. That’s all they can see, that’s all they care about, that’s the only thing motivating them and animating them.

Now, how difficult do you think it’s gonna be for them to find somebody like a Romney or a Sasse to actually try to get on a ballot in a way that would harm Trump? I don’t think they’re gonna have any trouble doing this. And I can’t tell you how much damage these people are gonna end up doing to themselves and the Republican Party as a whole if they do this. And I think they have to know it. I think they don’t care.

I think the degree, the level of hatred for Donald Trump and all of you who voted for him is so great that if they have to destroy the Republican Party, if that’s what it takes to get rid of Donald Trump, they are gonna be more than willing to do it because their egos tell them they’ll be able to put the Republican Party back together after all of this and it will be better and it will be stronger and it will be more moderate than ever before.

It will finally be a Republican Party where they can say they’ve gotten rid of all of the conservatives because that is objective number two of the Never Trumper Republicans and the so-called mainstream Republicans, is to get rid of the conservative influences in the Republican Party.

So for them it’s a twofer, get rid of Trump and just anger conservative Republicans so much that they never, ever again vote Republican. That would be a dream come true for the Mitt Romneys and the Ben Sasses and all these Never Trumper intellectual magazine writers and publishers and you name it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to go to Palm Springs in California. This is Janet. And welcome. Great to have you here. Hi.

CALLER: Thanks, Rush. Hey, Rush, these Democrats know they can’t touch Trump. They know Trump and Barr have this. And what they are doing is trying with their insanity to rile up their base, to split this country like it’s never been split before. And somebody needs to tell us, hold your powder dry. What’s coming down is not gonna be pretty, and they’re gonna — you think these Democrats are asking —

RUSH: Wait, wait, wuh wuh wuh wuh. Hold it a minute. I want to understand. Whose powder needs to be kept dry?

CALLER: We, the people who are awake, the people who understand that what Trump and Barr are doing is going to come down on the heads of these deep state people who have done what they’ve done to this country, and their last hope is to make their base so nuts and so crazy and on so insane with their hatred for Trump. They know they can’t touch Trump. They’re going after their base. They want their base so furious at we who are awake that —

RUSH: Wait a minute, now. Are you saying that they’re trying to incite their base to violence?

CALLER: Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s exactly what’s going on. If you could hear the rhetoric out here —

RUSH: Hey, hey, hey, now. Hey, now. I hear it. I read it. I’m aware of how Looney Tunes and insane the Democrats are making their people. It’s hard to separate the two, by the way, the Democrats and their base. But, no, I get it. Look. I’m out of time. I’m glad you got it said in the limited time. Great brevity.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Donald Trump Jr. testified for over 20 hours, 25 hours, about a 25-minute meeting at Trump Tower, and now they want him to come back. Looks like harassment to me.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Elkhart, Indiana. This is Kay. I’m glad you waited. You’re up, hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. The other day you said something I’ve been thinking about. You said if it can happen to the president, it can happen to us. And I’ve been thinking about that, and I think that’s true. That if the Department of Justice can be weaponized against one person, it could be weaponized against all. And I think that the people who fight and bend laws to take freedoms away, they don’t understand that at some point they’ll be the ones who are not free, either. I mean, I taught my children a simple little thing called the law of sowing and reaping, and even they could understand that. And that’s why in my mind this is not a Democrat issue, it’s not a Republican issue, it’s an all of us as American citizens issue.

The other thing is that I learned, my kids taught me the bigger smoke screen they were blowing, the bigger the platter of baloney sandwiches they were trying to cover up. So when their reaction was greater than the inciting event, I knew it was time for me to do a little digging. So I’m thinking inciting event, what was the inciting event? We had an election in 2016. This is America. That’s what we do.

But with this one, Trump won, heads exploded, hair caught on fire, and part of the country went incoherent. So the platter of baloney sandwiches, this is what I’ve been thinking, Rush, must be really deep and really wide. And it bears some digging.

RUSH: Okay, I see this giant platter of baloney sandwiches.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Who’s carrying it? Who’s got the platter of baloney sandwiches?

CALLER: The people that are throwing the smoke screen to cover it up.

RUSH: What are they covering up?

CALLER: Well, the laws that they bent to go after the president and to get all of — I mean, scorched-earth, you’ve talked in the past about how the Clintons used the scorched-earth campaign, and they would just torch anybody that came forward, anybody that was associated with these women. And that’s what they’re doing to the president, his family, his friends, they are just destroying. Why the intensity of these reactions? What are they covering up?

RUSH: And what are they covering up?

CALLER: Well, I think there’s a lot of illegality that would never have come to light had Trump not won. And that’s why it’s so important —

RUSH: Okay, finally. I’ve been thinking you’re talking about voters all this time, and you’re talking about the administrative state types. Okay. Okay. I misunderstood. I’m glad you called, Kay. Thanks much.