RUSH: Man, oh, man, the surreal nature of all this is mind-boggling. We got this leaker, this whistleblower’s attorney giving up the game! He even used the word “coup” back in 2017. He even said that CNN was gonna be utilized to run this coup to get rid of Donald Trump.

Now, it seems to me that since we know that, that all the rest of this should kind of just be canceled out. We know this whole thing is manufactured. We’ve known it for a long time. Don’t misunderstand. I don’t mean to sound like I’m learning something I don’t know. It’s just we now can actually, rather than have you rely on my credibility, which is not in question, we’ve got it in their own words.

Mark Zaid has been a Never Trumper, a Trump hating guy since 2016, the lawyer for the so-called whistleblower. Now, the way to look at this, imagine if we would have known this at the beginning. If at the very beginning of this we would have known what Mark Zaid said about this being a coup, that he was starting it, that it was going to involve CNN.

He has described exactly what is happening and what has happened in the House of Representatives. Imagine if this had leaked and we had become aware of it two years ago, where would we be today? We certainly wouldn’t be where we are. And the fact that it has come out, I’m looking at the headline here on drudge: “Bolton to Defy White House, Testify.” Why? None of this is real!

You know, I was talking the past couple days to somebody saying — I don’t know who it is. It doesn’t matter — the president needs to have a substantive response to the charge. There is no substantive charge. That’s the whole point. There is no substantive charge.

Another friend of mine, when Zaid’s tweets were revealed last night, the whistleblower’s attorney, Mark Zaid, Z-a-i-d, when his tweets were revealed, a friend of mine sent me a note, “You know, Rush, when I write about this stuff, I do everything I can to stay behind the evidence. I try not to get ahead of the evidence. And these guys continue to fool me.” What he meant was he knows what’s going on, but until he sees evidence of it, he’s not gonna write about it.

I wrote back, “What do you mean you don’t have the evidence? Radical liberalism is the evidence! How do you think I know this stuff before it happens?” He said, “Well, yes, but radical liberalism would not be allowed to be used as the evidence in a court.” We’re not in a court! We’re in a kangaroo court. We’re in a so-called House of Representatives grand jury for crying out loud. And why do they call it grand jury? So Trump didn’t get to have his lawyers in there.

To me liberalism, radical liberalism, what we’re dealing with is the evidence. But here’s “Bolton to Defy White House, Testify.” So what? About what? We know that this is all a manufactured scam. Wait ’til we go through the actual transcripts of Bill Taylor, Mr. Unassailable, he’s right up there with Robert J. Mueller the 19th. We can’t criticize. We can’t question Mr. Integrity, Mr. Honorable.

Do you know this guy admitted in his testimony that the only way he knew something was that he read it in the New York Times? He read it in the New York Times! Just like the FBI submitted stories from New York Times to the FISA judges and it said, “Look, Judge, this is further evidence of what we found.” Well, the problem was the only reason the New York Times had anything was FBI gave it to ’em.

So the FBI gives them evidence of Carter Page and all this stuff going on with the Russia collusion, then the New York Times prints what the FBI gave ’em. Then the FBI takes the New York Times story, puts it in the application packet, goes to the FISA court, says, “Look, Judge. Why, even the New York Times knows what we know.”

So Bill Taylor said that some of the things he knew he only know ’cause he read the New York Times. Well, we know the New York Times is making things up. This thing ought to be shut down is what ought to happen. It ought to be for the sake of preventing embarrassment on the part of all these people, this needs to be shut down. And I’m gonna tell you, folks, if things break right over the next week or so, then Pencil Neck is gonna melt away.

As we talked about yesterday, the quid pro quo is disappearing. There never was a quid pro quo. Oh! Something else that we’re learning. Three of the star witnesses, Tim Morrison, Bill Taylor, and Ivana Yovanovitch or Michelle Yovanovitch, whatever the first name is, I don’t know. You know what all three have admitted?

That Ukraine is in much better shape now than we were under Obama. That the aid Obama did not give them has been provided and Ukraine is in much better shape. They are much better prepared to defend themselves, their economy is much better after three years of Trump than after eight years of Obama. That hasn’t been released of course. Schiff didn’t release that stuff in his leaks of excerpted testimony to the New York Times.

So, yeah, the quid pro quo is disappearing, replaced now by obstruction, I pointed out yesterday. And when they go there, that means things are falling apart. Obstruction they went to after Mueller’s collusion failed. Now bribery? (laughing) The quid pro quo has been replaced by bribery, which is following the Mueller meltdown script as collusion is evaporating.

You know, folks, I made an observation yesterday, and that observation is when these people can control this by having it all done in private like for two and a half years, two years, whatever, the Mueller investigation. There wasn’t one leak.

Oh, folks. Pardon my interrupting myself here, but I gotta tell you this. You know, ABC News had a whistleblower. Somebody working at ABC revealed that Amy Robach had the goods on Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign, and they spiked the story because it would have been damaging to Hillary. They refused to run it. Amy Robach is saying, “Well, my bosses are fine people and I’m not the whistleblower and I had nothing to do with it.

“I was very surprised they spiked it but that’s their business, they can do what they want to do.” Anyway, the whistleblower at ABC who told everybody, went over and is now working at CBS, except he’s not. They’ve already identified him and fired him! CBS has fired the ABC whistleblower, while at the same time they’re defending this Pajama Boy clown so-called whistleblower trying to nail Trump!

I just was emailed a bunch of pictures of the whistleblower — the leaker — and the pictures… I guess they’re on… Let’s see. It just hit Twitter. Here’s the guy with Elizabeth Warren. Here he is with Pelosi. Here he is with Chuck You Schumer. There he is with Hillary. The guy is the Pajama Boy! He looks just like it. I don’t have time to copy, paste, and send you these pictures right now, but I will as the program unfolds, because there nobody else to do it, ’cause I’m the tech wizard here.

If I ask somebody else to do it, it’ll take two hours. I can do it in a two-minute break if I apply myself. There whistleblower with Fauxcahontas, whistleblower with Pelosi, whistleblower with Chuck You Schumer, whistleblower with Hillary Rodham Clinton. This stinks to high hell — low hell — and there’s none of it that is legitimate. But is it not hilarious that ABC’s whistleblower gets canned and then gets hired at CBS? What ABC did, is they investigated. It took ’em all of a week to find out what the whistleblower was.

They found out he was at CBS, they called CBS, and they said, “You’ve got a guy that really just stuck it to us,” and CBS said, “No, we don’t. He’s gone. We’ve fired your whistleblower.” So the Drive-Bys are sticking together. In one week’s time, ABC and CBS identified a whistleblower and then canned the guy. Meanwhile (impression), “We don’t know that we should identify the whistleblower identifying Donald Trump and Ukraine. We have to be very, very careful — and certainly whistleblowers can’t be fired.”

Have you heard that? The primary whistleblower protection is they can’t be fired. (Well, not unless they happen to work at CBS or ABC.) Anyway, it’s just… (chuckles) I marvel at the people still taking this seriously as though it is a legitimate political or legal or what have you inquiry when it isn’t. It’s nothing more than a stunt. It’s nothing more than oppo research, and I’m gonna tell you this: If our guys in the media and in the Senate had been more united and tougher, this thing would have imploded much sooner than it’s going to.

But these tweets from Mark Zaid, they’re smoking guns. The guy, the lawyer lays it all out what we’ve been saying for three years. This means that the whistleblower (whose name is Ciaramella) and Lieutenant Colonel Vindman are no longer useful. They went from bombshells to now they are embarrassments, and they will not testify. They have been dropped. I doubt we will ever see or hear about them again except from hopeful media people. Now what we have, is we have State Department functionaries.

We got mid-level, upper-tier career State Department diplomats playing their careerist angles to try to save themselves with the establishment, to establish their own reputations within the establishment. They’re all adjusting their stories. Another friend of mine thinks that we’re gonna see this blow up even before Barr and Durham issue whatever they’re gonna issue, their report or what have you. Now, Mark Zaid has issued a statement. You may not have heard his tweets. I’ve made an assumption that everybody knows what I’m talking about here, and maybe I should inform you.

This is Mark Zaid, the attorney for the whistleblower — the leaker. “He stated just days after President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2017 that the ‘coup has started’ and that ‘impeachment will follow.'” Here are the tweets from the whistleblower’s lawyer: “‘#coup has started. First of many steps. #rebellion. #impeachment will follow ultimately.’ … In another tweet, Zaid responded to President Trump’s government account after Trump announced that he was appointing Dana Boente as acting attorney general.

“Zaid wrote, ‘#coup has started. As one falls, two more will take their place. #rebellion #impeachment.’ In a statement provided to Fox News, Trump campaign communication director Tim Murtaugh said, ‘The whistleblower’s lawyer gave away the game. It was always the Democrats’ plan to stage a coup and impeach President Trump and all they ever needed was the right scheme. They whiffed on Mueller so now they’ve settled on the perfectly fine Ukraine phone call. This proves this was orchestrated from the beginning.'”

Yeah, it does.

You have known it’s orchestrated from the beginning.

You’ve known it from the beginning.

Now, Mark Zaid, in the midst of all this, has issued a statement, and here’s what his statement says: “Those tweets” where he suggested a “coup” is underway and “impeachment will follow” and that they’re gonna get rid of Trump… “Those tweets were reflective and repeated the sentiments of millions of people. I was referring to a completely lawful process of what President Trump would likely face as a result of stepping over the line, and that particularly whatever would happen would come about as a result of lawyers.

“The coup comment referred to those working inside the administration who were already, just a week into office, standing up to him to enforce recognized rules of law.” Wait a minute. You say that this is no big deal; this is just the result of people in the White House who one week in recognized what an abomination Trump was? Mr. Zaid, Trump had not made the phone call to Ukraine yet. That didn’t happen until 2019. That happened two years later, 2-1/2 years later. So these guys…

Even in his statement, he’s giving up the game that there were people in the Trump administration one week in — Obama holdovers — who were beginning to try to undermine the Trump presidency, and he’s writing this as though he deserves credit for it. “Why, Trump was overstepping the…” He’d been in office one week. Overstepping what? January 2017: “#coup has started” and “#impeachment will follow.” Now, Donald Trump Jr.’s gonna be here at the top of the next hour. He’s got a new book out. I’ve never interviewed Donald Trump Jr.

I know him. I’ve had a couple conversations with him recently. I chatted with him on the golf course, but he’s never been on the program before. So he’ll be here at the top of the hour. We’ll get some of your phone calls in. But man, folks, really, this has never been about anything. All of it has been made up and contrived. Now there’s evidence that the contrivers and the people running this scam have admitted it. So if you ask me, everything that happens from today forward is nothing but the continuation of a soap opera script.

It’s a play.

It’s a Washington, D.C., production.

You know that Monmouth poll that we had yesterday with the devastating news for Democrats with the impeachment data? The media’s not even using it. The media hasn’t even talked about it. They’ve taken one thing from that poll, one result to prove that Trump followers are a cult. It was the Monmouth poll that 62% of Trump voters said there’s nothing you can do to make me not support Trump. So they’ve run with. “See! See! It’s a cult.”

If Trump had a cult following, then Matt Bevin would have won the Kentucky race for governor. That same poll also showed that an even bigger number of Democrats are not gonna be change their minds and support Trump no matter what he does. The same poll makes the Democrat voter group seem an even bigger cult than Trump’s. Anyway, folks, none of this is legitimate. You realize how hard it is to talk about? None of this is legitimate.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So there’s a little bit more to this Mark Zaid guy, who is the whistleblower lawyer who acknowledged that a coup to overturn the presidential election began one week after — actually, it began during the transition. It began with Flynn. All of this began probably even before the election, if you want to know the truth. That was Strzok Smirk and Lisa Page with their Plan B insurance policy.

Mark Zaid tweeted on January 30th, 2017, “A coup has started, first of many steps. Impeachment will follow ultimately.” He also tweeted, “Coup has started. As one falls, two more will take their place.” “As one falls, two more will take their place.” What was he talking about there? I’ll tell you what he was talking.

Mark Zaid was responding to the news that Trump had just fired Sally Yates. She was the acting attorney general. Remember, Sessions had recused himself. So Trump fired Sally Yates because Sally Yates instructed the Justice Department not to defend Trump’s executive order, the travel ban. It was a temporary ban on the admission of refugees barred travel from terrorist hotbeds. Sally Yates told the Justice Department to ignore the president. So Trump canned her, fired her.

Mark Zaid was cheering on Sally Yates, cheering on an executive branch employee for refusing to carry out a lawful presidential order. However, this guy’s call for a coup did not stop there. In May of 2017, Mark Zaid tweeted, “Johnson 1868, Nixon 1973, Clinton 1998, impeachment hearings. Next up, Trump.” And in June of 2017 he tweeted, “45 years from now we might be recalling stories regarding the impeachment of Donald Trump. I’ll be old, but it will be worth the wait.” In July 2017, Mark Zaid tweeted, “I predict CNN will play a key role in Donald Trump not finishing out his full term as president.”

And now this guy’s (impression), “Oh, no, no, there’s nothing to see here. I was simply reflecting on what millions of patriots were reacting to when we saw what an abomination Trump was.” I never heard of Mark Zaid before. This is the classic illustration of deep state, folks. I never heard of this guy. But everybody in Washington apparently knows who he is.

I talked to a friend of mine, “Oh, yeah, this guy’s well known, Rush. He’s hated Trump since before Trump ran for president. This guy’s a Never Trumper, may be the head of the club.” And he magically ends up as the lawyer for the so-called whistleblower.

July 2017: “I predict CNN will play a key role in Donald Trump not finishing out –” Imagine if we had known this back then? Just imagine how the landscape would have changed. Now, again, folks, we did know. We just didn’t have this backup. But we knew what they were doing. We knew there was no Trump-Russia collusion. There was no Russian meddling in the election. They didn’t change the outcome of anything.

There’s another tweet later in July 2017, Mark Zaid: “We will get rid of him, and this country’s strong enough to survive even him and his supporters.” Note that in this tweet Mark Zaid included you in his hatred. He hates Trump and he hates you. Us. And this is exactly the point that we have been pounding here. That we actually may be the real targets of the hatred because if it weren’t for us, Trump would not have been elected. And make no mistake, they hate us.

These radical leftist deep state Washington establishment types literally hate us. The evidence of it is all over every mainstream media outlet: New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, ABC, CBS. Zaid tweeted that the coup would occur in many steps. And it wasn’t just Mark Zaid. Another one of the whistleblower’s lawyers, Andrew Bakaj, tweeted in August of 2017 that Trump ought to be removed under the 25th Amendment.

If you want an illustration of deep state, this is it, folks. People you’ve never heard of, people that were never elected, but they are career Washington elitists. Amazing, isn’t it, how the whistleblower just happened to find this guy as a lawyer? How do you think that happened?

And to repeat Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign communications director, the whistleblower’s lawyer gave away the game. It was always the Democrats’ plan to stage a coup and to impeach President Trump, and all they ever needed was the right scheme. They whiffed on Mueller; so now they’ve settled on a phone call. This proves this was orchestrated from the beginning. It certainly does.

And, by the way, when Zaid was tweeting all of this rotgut back in 2017 the phone call between Trump and Ukraine’s president has not even happened, and it wouldn’t happen for two years. Now, stop and think of that. Then he says it’s gonna happen in stages, that CNN is gonna be instrumental in it.

This is a big deal, folks. They’re attempting to overturn a duly constituted and legal election. This is not just politics-as-usual. This is a direct assault on the Constitution. It’s a direct assault on the American voter by a bunch of people who don’t want to have to put up with what voters do or think. You elect the wrong person and they’re gonna try to take your choice away from you, and they’re gonna try to destroy the people you vote for as a means of destroying you and dispiriting you.