RUSH: So we had a caller up there that asked a serious question:  Mr. Limbaugh, how do we know that Trump is gonna follow through on his demand that all these documents involving the Russia collusion story, the FBI’s Crossfire hurricane counter intel investigation… How do we know that Trump’s not going to all of a sudden pull up stakes and say, “Stop, don’t release the documents.”? How do we know that Trump is gonna go through with this?  I think Trump has always intended to go through with this.

In fact, grab audio sound bite number 1.  I want to take you back to May 3rd, basically three and a half weeks ago.  It didn’t get a lot of publicity, but one of the president’s lawyers, Emmet Flood, sent a letter to William Barr, the attorney general, and this letter was I think the opening salvo in the White House going to war against the people who ran this coup against him.  I just want to refresh your memory.  I’m not gonna read the whole letter again, but I want to refresh your memory on some of what I said back on May 3rd on this program.

RUSH ARCHIVE: Emmet Flood to William Barr indicates that Trump is on the warpath.  And I had that really confirmed for me last night when I saw Trump being interviewed by Catherine Herridge at Fox News, in which he said he’s very close to declassifying everything having to do with the FISA warrant applications and that he’s held back — he’s held back — because he wanted all of this to settle.He knows the people running this scam against him, he knows how dirty they are, and he wanted it to wrap up.

I think this explains why we got this op-ed from Comey.  Why does he keep inserting himself in this?  Self-preservation.  It’s why the New York Times ran the story about the honeypot working with Stefan Halper trying to entrap Papadopoulos.  They are trying to get out in front and spin what they know is coming.  But, folks, there’s gonna be too much of it.  They aren’t going to be able to spin their way out of this. When any president uses the bully pulpit to put a story out, and if he has good people like Emmet Flood and William Barr — and if you’ve got pit bulls like Rudy Giuliani — to go out there and tell the story, and at the same time declassify all the stuff that they have been petrified was gonna be declassified, there isn’t anybody that can compete with it. Jerry Nadler is gonna be so outmatched.  Pencil Neck is gonna be outmatched.  Pelosi’s gonna be outmatched.  Chuck You Schumer and Feinstein are gonna be outmatched.

RUSH:  This is what they have been literally scared to death Trump is gonna do, because once this starts and once the public reveal begins… Because there isn’t any way to beat it back, there isn’t any way to control… Well, I mean, there are ways, but it’s just really tough to compete against a fortified, coordinated operation that comes from the executive branch, from the White House, the bully pulpit.  Even when you have a media that is doing its best to thwart everything that Trump is trying to do, this is gonna be tough for them to stop.  And, you know, Lindsey Graham was on Fox News Sunday yesterday. We’ve got the audio of this, but before we go to the break I just want to give you an upshot of what he said.  He said that the former government officials opposing this declassification are worried about being exposed.

Now, do you find it curious that there isn’t anybody on the left, there isn’t anybody in the media who wants to actually find out what happened here?  Isn’t it fascinating that not a single journalist in that town, not a one — and there must be hundreds of them that were on this story — not one of them actually sought to find out and report what was really going on?  Not a single journalist sought to make a name for him- or herself, not a single journalist decided to make one of the greatest career advancement moves he or she could make.  Instead, they all got down and were complicit in this.

By the same token, now that documents that contain answers to questions that a lot of people have had are on the verge of being declassified, there isn’t a single person in the media-Democrat complex that seems the slightest bit interested in knowing the truth.  Is that not odd?  Journalism used to be a business that was devoted to keeping government power in check.  You know, making the comfortable afflicted, speaking truth to power, you know, all those crazy cliches.  But now they have become totally complicit.

Now, we all know why; everybody hates Trump.  And the reasons for that are many and varied.  But I find it fascinating that, on the verge of declassification, everybody is scared to death and they don’t think it should happen and don’t want it to happen… Not one person saw this story for what it was and tried to get to the truth of it, become this era’s Woodward or Bernstein.  Not one person even now is interested in finding out what actually happened.  Well, we know they know, I know.  But there’s a career or two waiting to be made.  There are gazillions of dollars to be made writing a book about it.  But not one shred of interest on the part of anybody.  It’s just fascinating to me.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: And then there’s this. “A majority of Americans want congressional Democrats to stop investigating President Donald Trump over Russian interference during the 2016 presidential election. A new poll released by CBS News Wednesday shows 53% of Americans say they’ve seen enough of the investigation, and 44% say Democrats should continue to investigate the Russia matter.”

So that’s losing ground for them. And now they’re trying to run this sham business that Trump’s covering something up, and Pelosi’s out there trying to say that Trump is trying to get impeached as though she’s got nothing to say. He’s trying to trick us. He’s a trying to get us to impeach him. Trump has nothing to say about it.

Now, Sharyl Attkisson, who we revere here at the EIB Network — she used to be a CNN infobabe reporter way back when. Then she moved over to CBS. She once invited me to be her guest to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, way, way back, this is after I had stopped going to them. I almost went when she invited me. I mean, this is 20 years ago now, not recent. She’s been spied on by the Obama administration, she’s documented that.

She now writes for TheHill.com and some opinion pieces and has one out today called “Why Obstruction and Cover-Up Charges Smack of Desperation.” She’s got a good analogy here. Every time Trump spoke up for himself and, according to Mueller, declared his innocence, his enemies accused him of being a liar and cited nonexistent secret evidence.

This is one of these pieces that rehashes the truth of what happened. For two years people lied about Donald Trump, two years. Three years, four years, whatever. But we’ll contain it within the Mueller investigation, give it basically two. For two years, how many times said it, the New York Times, Washington Post, four stories a day, nameless, anonymous sources, former and current government officials, intelligence agencies or whatever.

And every damn story was a lie! Every damn story was a lie, and every damn story had a 13th paragraph in which they acknowledge that what was in the story couldn’t be proved or corroborated but it was only a matter of time before the walls would be closing in on Donald Trump. And throughout these two years, Donald Trump said it was all bogus. Donald Trump said he didn’t do it. Donald Trump said there wasn’t any collusion. Donald Trump said there wasn’t any obstruction or collusion, none of it happened.

During the two years, Trump was called a liar, Trump was called a traitor, Trump was insulted and referred to as a treacherous, dangerous fool and incompetent. And as each false allegation was made, further and numerous other false allegations followed.

And so Sharyl Attkisson here is pointing out that every time Trump spoke up for himself and rightly declared his innocence, the Democrats in the media accused him of lying. And then they cited nonexistent, secret evidence.

“Those who think Trump is unfit for office, or who otherwise oppose him, might carry more weight if they publicly acknowledge that they chased their tails for two years and, when they finally snagged it, realized they hadn’t captured the enemy. Then, they could more credibly move forward to another focus, such as targeting the Trump policies they find objectionable. In the end, Trump wasn’t the liar on this major point; instead, his critics were the ones who were sorely mistaken.”

She’s being generous here. “They accused the president of the worst sort of treachery but, according to Mueller, Trump was telling the truth all along when he said there was no collusion with Russia. I’m no political expert but, to me as an Average Joe, the continued focus on supposed obstruction of a crime that wasn’t committed simply smacks of desperation.”

And that’s the point of her column. And another one can be made. Not only did every single journalist in the Washington establishment comply with the effort to get Trump, they were complicit in it. Not one of them attempted to get to the truth. By the same token, not a single one has acknowledged the mistake. Not a single reporter, not a single analyst, Clapper, Comey, not a single one of these people has apologized or has acknowledged that they were wrong or has acknowledged that they had bad information.

No. Instead, they’re doubling down and moving on to this obstruction, then to impeachment. Not a one of them has apologized to their audience. You look at these two years — CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post — not a single, “Oops. We goofed.”

Now, the point of this is that it goes to credibility and it goes to respecting the audience. It goes to what I constantly refer to as the bond that exists. Like Trump, the bond he has with his voters or the bond a performer has with an audience. They, in the media, couldn’t care less about this bond. You know what? Because their audience is each other. It really is.

I mean, they hope you tune in to watch and read and so forth, but they’re writing and broadcasting for each other. They are writing and broadcasting to show each other they’re still on the team, that they’re on the same page engaged in the fight. They have literally no respect for the audience. That’s what this means. They have no respect for their consumers, for their customers, however you want to phrase people that digest news. Not a single, “Oh, my gosh, did we get this wrong, forgive us.”

No. Instead, what do we get? “Barr is covering it up. It’s actually in there. Mueller has the goods on him, but Barr is redacting it. We need Mueller to come testify.” That’s really how they want to play this. And it is striking.

A friend of mine sent me a letter to the editor in an obscure newspaper, the Press of Atlantic City. I guess somebody, a friend of mine has a news search with my name, any time my name is in the news, he gets it, whatever. It’s a letter to the editor, Voice of the People, May 26, this is two days ago.

“Media Should Admit Role in Anti-Trump Effort — After the disastrous inaccurate reporting during Donald Trump’s campaign and the subsequent rash of obviously fake news, it’s hard to understand how so many so-called journalists didn’t question what the Mueller investigation was all about, as well as how and why it was initiated.”

Meaning, they had no curiosity about anything. They just slavishly reported whatever they leaked and dished. “In the end, the closest thing to collusion was President Trump’s joke that we should ask the Russians to give us copies of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

“Not only have there been few if any mea culpas after no collusion was discovered, but news and opinion reporting got even worse.” This is the letter writer here. “I can’t even rationalize how and why the media is buying what the Democrats are doing to discredit Attorney General William Barr and continue supporting the failed coup of the duly-elected president. Democrats and journalists are only proving that Barr and Trump are precisely what we need. They are the right men at the right time.

“Now Rush Limbaugh, who is primarily an entertainer, is more of a journalist than most of those pretending to be journalists. As biased as Limbaugh is, at least he doesn’t rush to judgment or present erroneous talking points. He digs in to substantiate what he professes with specified rather than unnamed ‘reliable’ sources. Try fact-checking him after he’s had the opportunity to fess up to the rare occasions when he is wrong. How much fessing up are we getting from CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post or Associated Press? Very little, if any.”

The letter writer is Ed from North Cape May in The Press of Atlantic City. It’s a great point. And the icing on the cake is mentioning me in there. But referring to me as entertainer — but as more of a journalist than a professed, real journalist, it is a fascinating thing that not a single — I know it’s not a surprise. I’m doing this for emphasis. Not a single reporter, analyst, guest, columnist, whatever, not a single one has acknowledged that they were wrong.

I don’t expect them to beg for forgiveness. But when everybody in the world knows that what we got as news the past two years was wrong, the people that delivered it continue to act as though, “Oh well, we’re just gonna keep on with the same effort, to get Trump. The last two years didn’t do it, so we have to move on to something else,” which is exactly what it is.

Let me share with you a couple of sound bites from Trump on the declassification. People are still worried about it. We’re up to sound bite number 2. This is Trump Friday in Washington on the White House lawn making his way to Marine One before leaving for his trip to Japan.

THE PRESIDENT: We want to be very transparent, so, as you know, I declassified everything, everything they want, I put it under the auspices of the attorney general. He’s gonna be in charge of it. He’s a great gentleman and a highly respected man. So everything that they need is declassified and they’ll be able to see how this hoax, how the hoax or witch hunt started and why it started. It was an attempted coup or an attempted takedown of the president of the United States.

RUSH: It was. It was not a hoax. It was not a hoax. A hoax you’re trying to pull a joke on someone. That’s not what this was. This was not a hoax. It was a coup. It was a scandal. Here’s one more bite, a reporter shouting to the president, “What do you hope to accomplish with your personal attacks on Speaker Pelosi? You’re out there saying that she’s lost it.”

THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me, this just shows how fake you and the news are. When you say a personal attack, did you hear what she said about me long before I went after her? Did you hear? She made horrible statements. She knows they’re not true. She said terrible things. So I just responded in kind. Look. You think Nancy’s the same as she was? She’s not. Maybe we could all say that. All they want to do is investigate because they failed with Robert Mueller and the Mueller report. They want to try and get a do-over of the Mueller report.

RUSH: They do. But now that the investigation of the investigation has begun, we put together one of our famous montages here. The Drive-By Media and the Democrats are now writing off Trump’s declassification order as a mere distraction. This isn’t going to prove anything. This is dangerous. Trump should not be doing this. This is unproductive. This is what they say.

RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: It seems much more like an effort to distract.

PIERRE THOMAS: Democrats are accusing Barr and the president of trying to distract.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Trump distracts to hide his ignorance.

KATE BOLDUAN: A stunt and an attempt to distract.

ANDERSON COOPER: Is this just trying to distract from a day of very bad news for the president?

JENNIFER GRANHOLM: One thing Donald Trump is a genius at, it is distraction.

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: A Donald Trump distraction.

DON LEMON: Do you smell a distraction tactic here?

JESSICA YELLIN: I do think this is an important distraction for him.

JOHN KASICH: Of course, he’s trying to change the subject.

JAMES CLAPPER: Is a way to sort of focus attention away from not such a great week for him by let’s investigate the investigators.

RUSH: Oh, we can’t have that. No way. We can’t have the truth coming out of what happened here. But you notice again every one of these people referring to this as a distraction. The marching orders, the faxes, the tweets, emails, whatever they are containing instructions goes out, they all get the instructions, and they all follow them. It’s just amazing.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So what are all of these people afraid of, the investigators who are now being investigated? The question answers itself. They don’t want what they did and how it began to ever be known. So why document it in the first place? Why are there all of these documents that are ready to be declassified? I mean, if people are gonna start a coup, if they’re gonna start an operation that is phony from the get-go, why document it?

Have you ever wondered about this? I do. If I were gonna run an operation like this, the last thing I’d do is put it down on paper. You think Ernst Stavros Blofeld actually wrote down every operation James Bond had to uncover and it was there to be found in hidden documents somewhere? He ran Spectre, Ernst Stavros Blofeld.

But these clowns did it. Look at the text messages between Strzok Smirk and Lisa Page, and all the other documentation, the stuff with Steele and the dossier. We know that Hillary Clinton and the DNC paid for this. This stuff is there. It’s waiting to be uncovered.

Let’s go to sound bite number 5, Lindsey Graham, Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace. Question: “Critics make two points particularly about this issue of declassifying documents. 1. Can Barr be trusted with these secrets? And 2. Can Barr be trusted not to cherry-pick the information to make a case for the president?”

GRAHAM: The people who are worried about this are worried about being exposed for taking the law in their own hands. It doesn’t surprise me that the people we’re looking at, they don’t want transparency. We’re trying to create a system to make sure this never happens again by shedding light on what happened with the FISA warrant process, the counterintelligence investigation. Did they have a lawful reason to surveil President Trump’s campaign? Did they lie to the FISA court?

RUSH: The question, look, here we are, we are more than two years into a documented coup. We’re two years into an effort to undo the election results of 2016. We’re two years or more into an effort to proclaim Donald Trump a traitor and a foreign agent working on behalf of Vladimir Putin and Russia. And all this went on for two years, and it was reported multiple times a day.

And every damn bit of it was made up, every bit of it was a lie. There wasn’t one thing truthful about it. Now the attorney general, William Barr, who has acknowledged he thinks the Trump campaign was spied on is gonna investigate it, and what’s the question? Can Barr be trusted with these secrets? Can Barr be trusted? What about Comey? What about Clapper? What about Brennan? What about every one of these people involved at the FBI? What about Obama?

What do you mean, can Barr be trusted with these secrets? And can Barr be trusted not to cherry-pick the information to make a case for the president? We’ve had two years of dealing with people who were standing the law upside down, two years of dealing with people who could not be trusted. And there wasn’t one question about their honesty or veracity. The media just accepted every lie and every leak that they presented.

And every one of those lies and leaks, or many of them, actually ended up in FISA warrant applications as though they were supporting documents. And Robert Mueller did the same thing. Robert Mueller buttressed his findings with news stories that were nothing more than the result of leaks that Robert Mueller’s team had given to the media.

Not one question about the honesty of the FBI people that did this. Not one question about the honesty of the intelligence agency people that did this. Just blind acceptance that they thought they were doing what was right and that they somehow got it all wrong, not even a whiff of suspicion about them? But now we’re gonna be looking into who they are and what they did, and we’re asking if the people doing that can be trusted with these secrets?

And what that means is, “Well, what if they give away intelligence methods? And what if they give away names of agents?” Hey, gang, the damage has been done. The damage to the intelligence gathering, the damage to the reputation of the intelligence apparatus has been done. The damage to the reputation of the FBI has been done. Can Barr be trusted with these secrets?

Sunday on ABC’s This Week, Martha Raddatz was filling in, talked to Liz Cheney, Republican, Wyoming. Oh! You know this is about the video. This is another thing. That Pelosi video that’s out there, what was it, on YouTube? (interruption) Facebook. It was a Facebook video? Okay. So somebody doctored a Pelosi video to make it look like that she didn’t know what she was talking about, which I’m sure didn’t require much effort. And it supposedly had her slurring her words, which she does. And it has her speaking about things that don’t seem interconnected and related, which she does.

But apparently this thing was edited. And was posted. And it was out there. And the media, my poor little tech bloggers are devastated that Facebook didn’t take it down. Others did but Facebook didn’t. Twitter left it up, but YouTube took it down or something like that. And just how could this outrage happen, how could fake video of Nancy Pelosi, how can this happen, how could the social media titans not tighten down on it and declassify it and ban it and so forth?

And I watched this — and I try not to take any of this stuff personally because you can’t. Do you people realize how many doctored videos of me there have been over the years saying things I didn’t say and taking silent video of me sitting here gesticulating and saying that I was making fun of disabled people or what have you. And nobody demanded that it come down, and nobody demanded that the people using it tell the truth about it.

But here goes one little parody attempt at Nancy Pelosi and the left has a cow and a breakdown. “How could this happen? How could social media not ban this? How could this be allowed to continue?” And yet they have free rein, they have no interruptions, no obstacles whatsoever. They can defame, they can impugn, slander, and libel anybody they want and however they wish to do it on social media.

So, anyway, Martha Raddatz is asking Liz Cheney about the Pelosi video that Trump tweeted. And, by the way, I have to tell you, I got the audio of this video. It was sent to me. I think it was last — what would have been? It had to be Thursday. And I didn’t get to it. It didn’t intrigue me. We’ve had enough Pelosi audio that was like that and this just seemed overkill to me. So I didn’t use it.

Anyway, Liz Cheney’s being asked about it. Question: “The back and forth this week between Speaker Pelosi and President Trump. The Speaker calls for an intervention with the president, the president attacks back. Is retweeting these videos the right thing to do?”

CHENEY: What is really, crucially important to remember here is that you had Strzok and Page, who were in charge of launching this investigation, and they were saying things like we must stop this president. We need an insurance policy against this president. That, in my view, when you have people that are in the highest echelons of the law enforcement of this nation saying things like that, that sounds an awful lot like a coup. And it could well be treason.

RUSH: Right. That’s a great answer. “But Rush, she was asked about the Pelosi video.” That’s right. She took the occasion of the question to answer what she wanted to say on this show rather than follow the lead of the fill-in host, Martha Raddatz. It was excellent.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: West Sacramento, California. I offered to move there once if they would rename it Limbaugh, California. They refused, but I still went. And this is Ron. Ron, great to have you, sir. How are you?

CALLER: Fine. Thank you, Rush. You know what? Where’s Bernstein and Woodward and 60 Minutes with this AG report coming out? I mean, do they have any credibility anymore?

RUSH: With news consumers?

CALLER: Yeah. I mean, you know, these guys were Watergate people. You know, Deep Throat, where are they at? You know, Bernstein and Woodward. I mean, these guys were heroes. Aren’t they? I mean, you know, 60 Minutes —

RUSH: Oh, you’re asking about Woodward and Bernstein specifically?

CALLER: Oh, yes. You know, what’s going on?

RUSH: Let me tell you something. Woodward and Bernstein know damn well there’s never gonna be a repeat of that. You don’t go back to that. You get rid of one president, you call it a day and you move on. To try to repeat that, that’s… you ever thrown a great party, a Saturday night special, just a spontaneous bash, nobody intended it to happen, a bunch of people come over, you have a great night. It’s so great, you think you’re gonna do it next weekend. The difference is you plan it. It never, ever is as good as the first time around.

These guys aren’t gonna do it. Look. It makes the point. They’re not into it anyway. They’re not. That’s the point. Nobody here is interested in the truth. You can dress this up any way you want. You can ask the question, you can point out like I have, out of how many hundreds of journalists, not one, not one chose to pursue what is the real story here and make a Woodward and Bernstein type of name for them. Not one.

Every one of them complicit.

And now, now that they know that they were wrong — but, see, it’s not even a question of that. Phase one failed. Now it’s on to phase two. It’s not that they were wrong. Whether they were right or wrong was irrelevant. Could they do it, was the question. Could they get rid of the president? Could everybody in the Washington establishment, be they in the think tank, be they in the media, be they in the Democrat Party, be they in the deep state, could they come together and get rid of a president? Could they overturn the election results?

They’re not through trying. Phase one didn’t work. They thought it was gonna work. They thought that Mueller was gonna get the goods. Everything else about this was a lie. Why wouldn’t Mueller come out and close the loop on it? But since that didn’t happen, now they’re on to another phase of trying to make this happen. And that’s why there’s no mea culpa. That’s why there’s no apology. That’s why, “Oops. Sorry. We really got this wrong.” ‘Cause it wasn’t about right or wrong. It was about being Woodward and Bernstein. And they failed.

But no matter how you slice it, it remains true that there’s not a single one of them that’s interested in the truth. They do not want to report the truth. They don’t want to uncover the truth. They don’t want the truth to be uncovered by Barr, anybody else. They want it suppressed. They do not want the truth of this to ever be known. And yet they say they are journalists and so forth. It’s astounding in its own way.

But if you look at it not as journalism, but as a political operation, it’s had a number of phases, and they all failed. Phase one was to make sure Trump didn’t get the nomination. Phase two was to make sure Hillary was not indicted, make sure she was exonerated for the criminal activity she did engage in. Phase three was to make sure that Bernie Sanders didn’t get the Democrat nomination. Phase four was to make sure that Hillary Clinton won the presidency.

Since that didn’t work, phase five was to start the process of getting rid of Donald Trump, and I’m sure they hoped to accomplish that during the transition. I have no doubt that these people had as an objective to make sure Donald Trump was never sworn in. Phase six, he was sworn in, and phase seven was the effort to drive his numbers down to the twenties and thirties so as to be able to succeed with impeachment or driving him from office. That failed.

Now we’re into phase seven, and phase seven is the going back and forth on impeachment. Phase eight will be the 2020 campaign and so forth. But it is an effort that was begun in 2015, its overriding objective was to get Hillary Clinton elected and to cover up all that was done to make that happen. That’s really what this is about, is covering up all of the shenanigans that were undertaken to see to it Hillary Clinton won.

And the people involved here were gonna be rewarded handsomely for their work had she won. But they allowed her to engage in criminal activity. They exonerated her from that. They played fast and loose with the law. They lied to FISA judges or the FISA judges are complicit. There’s so much here that they do not want known. So that’s why there’s no journalism on this because there never has been.

Journalists have never been on the outside looking in trying to find out what’s going on, trying to find out what’s happened. Journalists have been useful accomplices with a role to play in all phases of getting rid of Donald Trump, be that denying the nomination, then screwing up his transition, then making sure Hillary got the presidency, you know the drill.

So there can’t be another Woodward and Bernstein here because they haven’t accomplished the objective. And this objective will not be accomplished with journalism. It will be accomplished with the illusion of journalism, but journalism is not really what’s going on here. This is a massively coordinated coup.