RUSH: What do you mean, they’ve lost the monopoly of the news cycle? Folks, it’s all over the news that there is now a criminal investigation of the investigation into Trump! That’s all over the news cycle now. It’s everywhere. The New York Times, the Washington Post. And they’re doing CYA stuff on it.

What’s the first thing CNN did? They went and got one of the conspirators, they went and got Andy McCabe to come out, and Andy McCabe told the Papadopoulos lie. I’m telling you, this is gonna be warp speed now because they think they have lost the news cycle with this indictment talk. You know, indictments? That’s what a grand jury means. Criminal investigation, we’re not at that stage in this impeachment yet. This impeachment business stuff is still an illusion. They’re still trying to create an illusion. This is real over here.

This is a criminal investigation of what happened to Donald Trump, not a criminal investigation of Donald Trump. This is a criminal investigation of Brennan, of Comey, of Clapper, of Stefan Halper, of MI5 and MI6. Many people in the FBI, James Baker at the FBI, the Ohrs.

Folks, I’m gonna tell you something else. We’re just getting warmed up. Next week — you know, I’ve cited the work of a man named Lee Smith to you throughout the past two and a half years as I have sought to tell you the truth about this investigation and about the FBI’s attempt to plant spies, embed spies in the Trump campaign. I got up and dug out the details of what actually happened with the Papadopoulos story. We’ve interviewed Papadopoulos for The Limbaugh Letter. He’s told his story on those pages.

And Lee Smith does some of the best work. And I’m gonna tell you who everybody really owes in all this is Devin Nunes. Devin Nunes, who ran the Schiff committee before Schiff ran it when the Democrats won election in 2016, Devin Nunes ran the intel committee. Devin Nunes is who uncovered 90% of this. It was Devin Nunes who fed what he had uncovered to media that was interested. If Devin Nunes had not uncovered what he’s uncovered about this, we wouldn’t know half or more of what we know.

Well, Lee Smith has a book that is going to hit next week. Now, I have, because I’m a powerful, influential member of the media, I have a copy. But there’s an embargo on it. But I’m just gonna tell you, I’ll give you one little hint. There’s gonna be some miniature bombshells about the Steele dossier in the Lee Smith book.

When this stuff pops — and I fully expect the mainstream media’s gonna ignore this, they’re gonna try to lump Lee Smith in with all these other people on the right that they think are cuckoo and cockeyed and so forth. But the bottom line of all this is they now, if they don’t realize it yet, they are still thinking about the possibility of losing the monopoly of the news cycle.

Impeachment, that dwarfed everything else, right? Impeachment talk, impeachment inquiry, whatever these fool witnesses were supposedly saying, whatever leaks that Schiff provided to the Times and the Washington Post, that was the news cycle. Not today. An official criminal investigation. They know what that means. It means grand jury. Grand jury’s the way you get indictments. That means indictments are coming. And we don’t have to wait for the indictments. You know, it can be leaked. We can play this game too.

Once indictments start getting leaked, then you’re gonna really see the rats surface and start scurrying for cover. I think when this all blew apart on them — and this is something I’ve said, I’m being repetitive, but I must say it — I think they thought that the final blow in getting Trump was gonna be this whistleblower reporting on the phone call that Trump had with the president of Ukraine. Do not doubt me on this. I think that was their slam dunk.

I think that was their 2019 October Surprise. Even though there’s not an election, this was to be it because they never thought or calculated Trump would ever release the transcript, so they would be able to say that Trump said anything. They put it in the words of the whistleblower, who has anonymity! So the whistleblower gets to say whatever he wants about what Trump said to the president.

And Schiff went out and gave it away by claiming that the whistleblower told him that Trump had demanded the president of Ukraine dig up dirt, make up dirt, said this eight or nine times. Trump releases the transcript and it blows the entire whistleblower plan sky-high. It just preempted it.

They never thought Trump would do it. They thought he would protect the presidency. They thought he would rely on separation of powers, executive privilege, and not endanger, by setting a precedent, that future precedents would reveal and release the contents of private phone calls. The problem is that Trump can’t sit by and let people lie about what was on the phone call. So he released the transcript. Blows the whistleblower out of the water every other whistleblower.

We don’t even hear about the whistleblower now. The Democrats are saying, “Well, we may not even need whistleblower.” That’s not what it is. The whistleblower is worthless. The whistleblower has been exposed as knowing nothing. The whistleblower admittedly secondhand, didn’t hear the phone call.

They were gonna lie through their teeth like McCabe is lying about Papadopoulos. Like Brennan and Clapper and Comey are lying about everything they’ve done here. They were gonna lie about what this whistleblower said. This was gonna be it. This was where they were gonna get Trump and his supporters split apart.

This was where they were going to show that Trump does collude with foreign governments. This was it. They may not have been able to prove it in Russia, they’re saying, but we’re gonna get him in Ukraine. We’re gonna prove that Trump was asking Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden just like he did get help from Putin! This was gonna be the narrative. Schiff met with the whistleblower, we now know, spearheaded and shepherded the whistleblower through the process. Then it blows up when Trump reveals the transcript.

I thought they thought they’d have a slam dunk, a narrative with a direct, nonstop route to impeachment. Now that’s all blown. They’ve lost the magic of impeachment. The whistleblower’s gone away. Now there is a criminal investigation that has been officially set up with a grand jury. We have Barr and Durham back from Italy where they have returned with some BlackBerry’s that contain communications details of some of the principals here.

So this is what I mean by having lost the monopoly of the news cycle. You can boil it down by saying that this — this is kind of like when Barr admitted in testimony or acknowledged in testimony before another House committee that, yeah, I think the Trump campaign was spied on. Remember how that was a bombshell? Remember how they went nuts? Because that switched it. That took us from being on defense, moved this over to offense. This is what has happened today.

So that’s all I mean by losing the monopoly of the news cycle. They can’t hide or prevent this element of Barr’s investigation from now being part of the news cycle.