RUSH: Do you notice it, folks? Have you picked up on it? Have you picked up on what is obviously a palpable fear running through the Washington establishment now that Attorney General Barr and his investigator have officially opened a criminal inquiry into the investigation of the investigation of Donald Trump? It may take the entire program for me to unpack all of this for you today, so hang on.

JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny South Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!

RUSH: We’re gonna go back, we’re gonna be revisiting some previously covered territory because they are on TV today en masse lying like they have been from the get-go about the Trump-Russia collusion investigation led by Andrew McCabe, who is one of the people that ought to be in jail, but where is he? He’s a commentator, paid commentator on CNN, and he lied through his teeth this morning about an hour and 45 minutes ago.

Greetings, my friends, Rush Limbaugh, Open Line Friday — you don’t have to talk about this today if you don’t want to. Whatever you want to talk about is fine, telephone number is 800-282-2882. The email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.

Last night, folks, I had a — well, I’m not gonna call it an epiphany, but, you know, I am constantly trying to analyze and figure out what the left is doing, the context in which they’re doing it, what their next moves are gonna be, but more importantly, what’s really behind it all. And the thing that, of course, is top drawer today and has been all week is what little Adam Pencil Neck Schiff is doing behind closed doors in a so-called impeachment inquiry that doesn’t feature the opposition party, it doesn’t feature cross-examination, no transcripts are released, everything’s being done in private, only selected leaks. You know the drill.

So okay, what’s the purpose of this? And we’ve all assumed that the overall purpose, I mean, the gigantic umbrella under which all this is happening is get rid of Trump, reverse the election results 2016. However, I think there’s something more specific now that is more obvious to me than ever. I think what Schiff and Pelosi and this entire so-called impeachment inquiry is really all about is derailing the Barr investigation. And I think that’s why they’re in such a hurry.

I think it’s really about trying to come to something, they’re trying to convince the American people that Trump is guilty and should not be president before Barr and Durham and Horowitz have time to reveal anything. And there’s one downside to what happened here. We now have an official criminal investigation. That means that Durham and Barr can impanel a grand jury. And this is why the McCabes and the Brennans and the Clappers are running around today in a near panic.

A grand jury, that’s where they go in and they don’t get their lawyers in there and they don’t get their representatives in there. They’re not on CNN. They’re in a grand jury and everybody knows what happens with grand juries: indictments. And so the race is now really on. But because of that we’re not gonna get any answers to that any time soon. That’s the downside. If they’re just now forming an official inquiry, the grand jury has to be impaneled and the testimony has to be taken.

It’s obvious that Barr and Durham are going to be thorough here and it’s obvious that this step has been taken because they have found criminal behavior. And I’m pretty certain that they are dead serious about getting to the bottom of it, which means they’re not going to hurry through it.

Now, as I have emphasized a lot, what’s going on in the country right now with this particular story is not so much a partisan divide, left versus right, conservative versus liberal, Republican versus Democrat. It’s bigger than that. What we are in the middle of — and it does not ever get presented this way in the nation’s mainstream media — we are literally the middle of constitutional crisis.

We have the entirety, almost, of the Washington government, the elites, the establishment effectively attempting an end run around the Constitution. They’re trying to reverse the election results of 2016. They’re trying to nullify them without another election. This is the height of anti-constitutional or unconstitutionalism.

This is a brazen attempt by the people in Washington to tell the rest of the country, “What you think and how you vote really doesn’t matter in the end because we’re gonna have this country run the way we want to run it with us running it. And every election is just a little exercise making you think you matter, but you really don’t.” That’s what this is. Make no mistake about it. That’s what this is.

They feel threatened by the election of Donald Trump. They feel threatened by the existence of 60 some odd plus million of you willing to vote against them and unseat them and unseat their precious perch and blow up their precious existence. And they’re simply not gonna sit around and let you do it. And that’s really what this is. The partisan divide is that the Democrat Party is siding, because it’s the home of the people who are doing the end run around the Constitution.

These are really big stakes. I mean, they’re trying to make it look like this is just an average political issue, part of the next campaign. It’s about much more than that. It’s why I don’t understand this reluctance to defend Donald Trump on the part of Republicans.

It’s not about defending Donald Trump. It’s about defending America right now. The country as we know it is what is in the crosshairs. It isn’t just Donald Trump and his mannerisms and his personality and his tweets. It literally is the founding of the country that’s in the crosshairs.

So as such for this to make sense today, to put into context what Durham and Barr have done by impaneling the grand jury, we’re gonna go back and revisit some of the highlights of the outrageousness of the so-called investigation into Trump-Russia collusion, Russian meddling.

Andrew McCabe today, who was one of the leaders of the FBI effort, the intelligence community effort to unseat and to run a coup against the duly elected president was on CNN today and literally lying through his teeth about how this whole investigation began. I think one of the things that’s causing these people to panic is that they’re losing control of the news cycle. They’re losing the monopoly of the news cycle.

The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, they’ve had a monopoly on how the American people are being told about all this. They’ve had a monopoly on the way Schiff is running his committee and what its purpose is and that it’s impeachment. And they don’t have that monopoly anymore. It’s falling apart. And now with this announcement of a criminal investigation, this now is an official criminal investigation. There’s no place to hide here!

They can’t go on CNN and simply mouth talking points and try to change public opinion. Now it has moved outside the realm of public opinion and is now in the legal system, which is where they have operated. What we’re going to learn today, what I’m gonna pass off to you today, what I’m going to share with you today is essentially every phase or the vast majority of all of the phases of the Trump-Russia investigation were made up.

They were made up and led by John Brennan and James Clapper. The events were orchestrated, like Michael Flynn was invited to a dinner at Cambridge where he was introduced to a Russian expert, a woman, and then later somebody else at the dinner calls the FBI and says Michael Flynn was having dinner with a Russian expert shortly before Trump was elected. The FBI then takes this whole dinner that they set up and treat it like, “Oh, my God. We’ve got Trump campaigners meeting with Russians before the election, oh, my God.”

And the whole thing’s orchestrated like the Papadopoulos thing was set up, it was planned, it was orchestrated, put into motion. And then they acted like they didn’t know anything about it, used it as the starting point for the investigation, when in fact they made it all happen.

I think so many elements of the Trump-Russia investigation were exactly like that. Events were created. Those events were then reported on to the FBI, which set up the events. The FBI then pretends they knew nothing about it, pretends to be shocked, says that we need to look into it, an investigation of a series of events like that which only happened because they were set up by the investigators.

Then it’s fed to the media, which is a willing partner in this reporting on these events as though they happened on their own volition when really nothing more than a script was being played out. I’m sorry if I’m confusing you. I’ll give you specifics as the program unfolds.

Now, on the point of Schiff and his impeachment inquiry really being aimed at derailing the Barr investigation, I think these people, more than we know, have been sweating this. ‘Cause, folks, they know what they did. They know that they’re sitting ducks waiting to be caught if they can’t control the investigation. They know that if somebody’s really serious about uncovering what they did, it can be found. The race here is for the minds of the public.

I look at what Schiff and his committee are really doing, I think it’s aimed at derailing Barr in the minds of the American people. I think their belief is that if they can somehow find a way to say that they are impeaching Trump, which they have found — a lot of people, “There’s impeachment going on. Trump has been impeached.” He hasn’t been. There isn’t even an official inquiry yet, folks. No votes have been taken. But I think they think that impeaching Trump — the ongoing effort here is to destroy his poll numbers, to destroy public approval, to separate Trump voters from Trump and then flip senators.

You know, like I said, just get a couple, just get a couple of senators to go along with what the Democrats are doing so they can claim the effort is bipartisan. And I think this effort is to overshadow and give more weight than whatever Barr is doing because Barr is not gonna be announcing any results any time soon.

So if they can get the American public to think that Trump has been impeached and that Republicans are beginning to cave, then they can make Barr look like a toady. They can make Barr and Durham look like pathetic figures desperately at the last minute trying to save Trump. The reason I say that — you know, one of the things I was looking for last night, when I found out that an official criminal investigation had been opened, one of the things I wanted to note was the media reaction.

Now, normally the media would have no reaction. The media would wait for Democrats to react and then report that. But the media are complicit. The media are activist participants in this. And one of the ways we need to know — we know we don’t need any evidence, but further evidence would be if the media has a reaction to the news that Barr has opened a criminal inquiry.

And, lo and behold, they did. They didn’t wait for Democrats to react, which is what an unbiased, objective, fair media would do. “Oh, man, there’s a criminal inquiry. We better go out and find what the Democrats –” They didn’t wait for that. Here’s the New York Times. This is their narrative. This is their headline. “Justice Dept. Is Said to Open Criminal Inquiry Into Its Own Russia Investigation — The move is likely to open the attorney general to accusations that he is trying to deliver a political victory for President Trump.”

The media’s already characterizing this without even waiting for Democrats to react to it. Here’s the Associated Press. “It’s a move” — so the Times and the AP both start out with, “It is a move” — “likely to raise concerns that Donald Trump and his allies may be using the powers of the government to go after their opponents.”

So we’ve got two media takes on this that tell us everything we need to know about the media’s involvement, about their own hypocrisy. Trump and his allies using the powers of government to go after their opponents? What the hell has been going on the last three years, is the point.

Barack Obama and his political allies have been using the powers of the intelligence community, which is the government and the FBI, which is the government, and the entire Department of Justice, which is the government and the State Department, which is the government, and the media, to go after their opponent, Donald Trump.

But now when the tables turned right, all of a sudden this is not fair, this is not right, this is not good. Trump and his allies can’t use the government to go after their opponents. So we’ve got the media telling us what this all about, which, again, not a surprise. Just waiting for confirmation of it.

So now it seems, I’m sure, to the Democrats and media like a race. Can Barr finish going after them while Trump is still viable? That’s their objective. They’ve gotta destroy Trump. They’ve gotta destroy his reelection capability before Barr comes out with whatever he has learned or is going to learn about how they sabotaged Trump even before the election in 2016.

Can they wound, can they kill off Trump before Barr can indict? That’s the race. We got two parallel locomotives heading toward the station. Ours is ahead right now. They’re on defense. Our locomotive is leading these guys. We’ve got a criminal investigation that’s been opened. This could blow the entire Obama legacy sky-high. This Ukraine thing, it is so transparently rigged, and it is nothing, that it doesn’t make sense, except as a last-gasp effort to stop our locomotive from getting to the station first.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

Folks, we have finally a criminal investigation. What happens in criminal investigations? One of these creeps — and believe me, there is criminality galore in this investigation. There is lying; there is actual criminal behavior; and it is big. And one of these creeps, one of them is gonna flip.

One of them is gonna decide, “You know what? Do I really want to go to prison for James Comey? Do I really want to spend time in jail for John freaking Brennan? Do I want to give up my future for James baldy Clapper?” These things are gonna become factors as the grand jury’s work begins. These are things that these people never believed possible to happen to them, just like Hollywood actresses cannot believe they’re going to jail for trying to get their kids into USC.

These people, their lives are spent believing they are immune from the regular rigors of the law like you and I are not. They believe they are. They did not think this day was gonna come. They may have fretted about it, but they never let themselves believe this day would come. Now it has, and all of the perceptions that they hold are going to be change dramatically.