RUSH: This is Bobby in Washington. Great to have you, sir. Welcome to the program.

CALLER: (silence)

RUSH: Bobby hung up. Well, don’t take it off the screen. What Bobby was gonna say was, “The Iranians did the best thing they could have done. They posted pictures of Trump’s properties. A threat now. Democrats can say anything Trump does is personal.” He thinks this was a smart move by the Iranians. So the Iranians have posted a picture of Mar-a-Lago. They’ve posted Trump Tower. They’ve posted pictures of all the Trump golf courses.

I assume this guy means as targets. He thinks it’s brilliant. It’s brilliant for the Iranians to post pictures for their murdering terrorists and sleeper cells if there are any. “These are Trump targets, go hit ’em,” and the Democrats can now say that anything Trump does in defense is personal. He thinks it’s a brilliant play by Tehran, because after posting the pictures, any further action Trump takes they can say is personal and not related to national security.

And old Bobby in Washington (who didn’t hang on when he knew he was coming up next), thought that that was a pretty good move on the part of the Iranians. As though they have to post pictures of Trump’s property, like nobody knows where Mar-a-Lago is and nobody knows what Mar-a-Lago looks like, and nobody’s ever seen Trump Tower. Nobody’s ever seen Trump’s golf course in Bedminster. Nobody’s ever seen any of Trump’s properties.

“The Iranians are really brilliant now, because any action Trump takes following the pictures of his properties being posted can be said to be personal.” This is typical. This is somebody who wants Trump to lose this engagement — and, by extension, the United States, to lose this engagement. Look, this is where Twitter is valuable today because I don’t have to say it. I have been saying it. What’s bad for America is good for the Democrats and vice versa. What’s good for America is bad for the Democrats.

They’re actively… By the way, folks, I’m not exaggerating here. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to give a speech at Columbia, do you know why he was? ‘Cause he was ripping Bush, and the administration at Columbia University loved Bush being ripped. So they invite Ahmadinejad. They invited Hugo Chavez as well. It was during the United Nations annual meeting in September and October.

So they bring Ahmadinejad over and he makes his anti-American, pro-Iranian speech about how they’re loving and they’re compassionate, filled with all the language designed to fool a bunch of brainwashed liberal students, and they open it up to Q&A. Somebody some of the audience asks Ahmadinejad about homosexuals and homosexuality in Iran, and Ahmadinejad said, “Well, we don’t have any homosexuals in Iran,” and the audience had some pockets erupt in laughter.

Not everybody because some were scared of the guy. But people erupted in laughter when Ahmadinejad said, “We don’t have any homosexuals in Iran.” When the audience began laughing, Ahmadinejad says, “Oh, do you — do you know some? Could you tell — could you tell me where they live?” So this regime (laughing) literally does put to death known homosexuals (and now, I’m sure, transgenders — and if somebody wants to take a goat or a sheep behind the barn and the Iranian government finds out about it, those people are done, too.

This is who the American left is siding with. By the way, did you hear about a guy trying to join the country club out in California? Rural California. There’s a country club. I forget. I think it’s, uhhh… I forget where it is. He wanted to join, and the club president looked at him and said, “We’ve got a problem with you. (sigh) The word’s gotten out that you have been known on your property to have (ahem) very improper relationships behind your barn with goats and sheep and chickens,” and the guy said, “Chickens!”

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Hey, somehow we got Bobby back from Washington, D.C. So let me have him tell you in his own words what his point is. Welcome back, Bobby. Great to have you here.

CALLER: (garbled cell) Hey, thank you, Rush. Story, I go disconnected. Yeah. So I think that was extremely part (unintelligible) I’m not gonna belabor the points you’ve already made but what I wanted to say is after the Iranians attack and we counterattack, this would be Ukraine 2.0 after Trump wins the 2020 election. (crosstalk)

RUSH: Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold it a minute. It’s my hearing. I need you to slow down just a bit. You’re acknowledging I explained your first point on it’s smart for the Iranians to post pictures of Trump’s property. Now you’re moving on. You say after the Iranians attack and we counterattack —

CALLER: (unintelligible)

RUSH: — this will be Ukraine 2.0 after Trump wins in 2020? So they’ll impeach Trump over this, you think, in 2020?

CALLER: Yes. And I think the president needs to be careful on Twitter. Anything he says that can be deemed as him taking this personally will be used against him in his second impeachment trial. Like you acknowledged, the Democrats are never gonna stop. They’re gonna continue to try to do whatever they can to get him removed from office, and I think this will be the Ukraine 2.0 after he’s reelected ’cause they will say it is personal and he’s doing it to protect his business entities across the world.

RUSH: Perhaps. I don’t think that they’re gonna wait to use this for after 2020. I fully expect — well, no. Let me rephrase. I’m not gonna be surprised if they make a move to reopen the impeachment inquiry in the House. They’ve been met with a cold shoulder on having new witnesses in a Senate trial. Pelosi hasn’t even sent the articles over. Pelosi’s not gonna send the articles over as long as there’s gonna be an acquittal.

I have explained this I don’t know how many times. There’s nothing in it for her to send these things — even if there’s a trial. If there’s a trial there’s gonna be an acquittal. And they’re not gonna get a conviction while Trump is engaged in this Iranian stuff, not with Republicans running the Senate. It just isn’t gonna happen. I don’t care what the Democrats think, the Republicans are not going to vote to kick a president out of office in the midst of something like this doing something that needs to be done, protecting national security and all of that.

So Pelosi’s only gambit here — you know, she can only take it so far to blame all of this on Republican partisansihp. She can get as much mileage probably as she already has on trying to blame McConnell and the Republicans for being partisan and unfair and unjust and all that. So what would be left would be to find a reason to reopen the House inquiry. Impeachment can happen any time they want it to. It hasn’t happened much in this country because, strange as this may sound, it actually has not been a political weapon. It was not designed as a political weapon. The Democrats have turned it into that now.

Since they have, since they have crossed that barrier, since they have now corrupted the entire original intent of impeachment, what is to stop them? They can impeach Trump for anything they want if they can get the votes for it. And in the House they clearly can.

So Schiff or some other committee chairman can open hearings on whether or not Trump is usurping his power by not consulting Congress and ordering military action, say, against Soleimani or anything else that might happen in any theater of military operations. Nothing to stop them from doing this other than common sense and political restraint, which they have demonstrated they have none.

So I don’t think, Bobby, they will wait until 2020 to use this to try to get rid of Trump. They’re already talking about making noise, about limiting Trump’s options. Now the House is gonna go back into gear soon here, and Pelosi and her people are talking already about legislation and shoring up the War Powers Act and all that could limit Trump’s options and ability.

The one thing you’re right about, which needs to be stated again, if Trump wins reelection 2020, they’re not gonna stop this. They’re gonna continue to try to impeach, impede, slow down — can’t say retard any more — his presidential process. All of which he knows, by the way. Bobby, thanks much.

This is John in Amarillo, Texas. Great to have you with us, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, thank you for taking my call. I’ll be brief. I served in the Persian Gulf in the early eighties when Iran and Iraq were duking it out. Oil tankers were attacked, ceilings were mined. Nothing has changed over there. My point is this. Trump had every legal right to take this Soleimani guy out. What about Clinton’s actions in Kosovo? What about Obama’s actions in Libya? Why is it that Democrat presidents get carte blanche and suddenly Trump is a lawbreaking traitor? I watch several news outlets, and the hypocrisy in reporting is astounding. I’m not concerned one iota about Iran.

RUSH: Your point is extremely shrewd, and it’s a question we’ve been asking for years. The Democrats get away — well, the short answer to your question is the media. The media has ceased being media. You know the media’s constituency now actually is government, whereas the media used to think of themselves as the watchdog of government making sure to ride heavy on power, to make sure they were kept in check. The Democrats have now become part of the power, the media, in their own minds they’re part of the establishment.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: And now they run protection schemes for it.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Rather than to expose it. Trump is an enemy of the establishment and therefore there are two different standards. Two legal systems if Trump’s involved, there’s two sets of policies or standards for government operations, Democrat versus Republican. I had a guy send me a note last right along the lines of your thinking here. He said the very media that attacked George Bush — W — for not reading the tea leaves prior to 9/11 is now attacking Trump for having read the tea leaves on Soleimani, as you said.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: It’s exactly true. After 9/11 what’d the Democrats do? They bumped all over Bush. After two weeks of solidarity went by, they then said that Bush screwed up by not reading what was clearly seeable in the intel that bin Laden was gonna hit. Look, Soleimani was planning something, we don’t know what, but it was big because he had to go back and get the approval of the mullahs. He had something on his mind, some operation that was gonna be huge. It’s one of the reasons Trump hit the guy. This wasn’t personal.

CALLER: No.

RUSH: This wasn’t —

CALLER: No.

RUSH: — because this guy rejected a membership offer at Mar-a-Lago or something like that. This guy was planning something huge and Trump got wind of it and read the tea leaves and took him out in advance. So kudos to Trump, and that’s the real problem they’ve got. Trump looked brilliant here. Trump looked sharp. Trump looked with it. The intel —

CALLER: Exactly. Exactly.

RUSH: So yeah, your line of thinking is right. I’ll tell you, the one thing conflicting me on this, folks, this is the same intelligence community that gave Trump — well, no, it’s not. I take that back. John Brennan and Clapper had nothing to do with this intel. I mean, if you’re Trump, how do you trust the intelligence community now? Seriously. How do you trust them? Given what they did in trying to take him out of office with this phony Russian meddling coup and all that, he’s obviously very satisfied and confident, trustworthy of the people in the intelligence community now.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: My friends, it has happened again. I just offered what I thought to you would happen. I made a prediction, and, lo and behold, here is a tweet from TheHill.com. Are you ready? Breaking news: “Adam Schiff calls for open hearings on Trump’s Iran action.” What did I tell you? They’re gonna fold this in to their overall impeachment move. Anyway, gotta take a brief break here at the top. The president in a half hour from now. Don’t go away.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: For those of you who may have missed it: So, just in the last 25 minutes, I had a call from a guy talking about how he thinks that if the Iranians have posted pictures of Trump’s property, then anything Trump does to the Iranians after that makes it personal, not national security – -brilliant move by the Iranians, he thinks — that that would then become the reason that the Democrats would impeach Trump after he wins reelection in 2020.

I said (laughing), “They’re not gonna wait for that.” In fact, because Pelosi’s articles of impeachment are gonna go nowhere, she cannot follow through with this and get an acquittal. That just… That destroys the whole effort. The only thing she can do is wait and delay and use the presentation of the articles to, say, blunt some other news event like the release of the Durham investigation six months from now, whenever that is.

I said, “What’s more than likely to happen is that the Democrats will reopen this current impeachment process, and use whatever Trump’s done in Iran as evidence that he is committing high crimes and misdemeanors, needs to be reined in, needs to be stopped.” Less than five minutes after I said that, a tweet from TheHill.com: “Breaking News: Adam Schiff Calls for Open Hearings on Trump’s Iran Action.” Do not doubt me, my friends. Schiff’s committee is the Intelligence Committee.

So the Democrats want to begin hearings on Trump’s actions because, remember, the premise for all of this is that Trump is not legitimate. It’s the only arguments Democrats can make. It’s what they made after George W. Bush after the Florida recount. In their view, Trump is illegitimate because he stole the election with Russia’s help. “Oh, come on, Rush. The Mueller report said..” It doesn’t matter what the Mueller report says. I’m telling you what the Democrats have chosen to operate under.

The premise that Trump stole the election, that it was unfair. It was Hillary’s and that Trump colluded with Russia. “But.. but the Mueller report said there wasn’t any.” It doesn’t matter what the Mueller report says. The Democrats are making up their own news. Their media’s making up their own news. That’s why it’s fake news. On what basis does Adam Schiff have reason to investigate Trump’s conduct in Iran with this operation? Schiff’s got nothing to say about it.

The whole premise is, “He was not just in making that move because his presidency is illegitimate,” on the basis of the proof they think that they have elucidated. Anyway, this all started, as you’ll recall, with an attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. I have to tell you, folks, one of the terrorists — not “Salami,” as our caller called him. (chuckling) I understand it’s tough to get these guys’ names right. So just come up with a word that sounds similar and we’ll all know what you mean.

So Qasaam Salami, the Quds Force general. One of the people involved in the attack had, in fact, a meeting in the Oval Office with Obama. Were you aware of this? It was another thing that Twitter pointed out. Now, when I saw that, I’ll be honest with you, my first… (interruption) Wait a minute, folks. Hang on just a second here. I just gotta do this. I just got a message here from somebody at the White House. (interruption) “He’s gonna be calling in soon.” Please tell him, remind him it’s 2:33.

If he wants to come on sooner, that’s fine, but make sure I know. Sorry about that. Anyway, when I saw this, the U.S. embassy and I saw the tweet that the guy, one of the people — not Salami, but one of the guys in the attack — had had a meeting with Obama, my head started spinning, the gears. And I said, “What if this whole thing…?” I mean, I quickly rejected it, but I said, “What if this whole thing is a setup?” I mean, who’s in that embassy? The same kind of people who testified against Trump in the Schiff committee.

It doesn’t take long — once you learn who these people are and how they operate, and the lengths that they have been willing to go to manufacture things that did not happen made to look like they did happen. My initial thought was that this whole thing was a setup designed to entrap Trump somehow. Well, obviously that wasn’t the case, but that’s just how I have been conditioned to think of the whatever you want to call it — the deep state or the establishment — and how they operate.

Here is another tweet. This is from somebody in… I’m not sure. It looks like it’s somebody from inside Iran, and again it’s Twitter, which is a sewer that has value on some days, like in the past two or three. Here’s the tweet: “The Islamic Republic propaganda is trying to tell the world that [Salami] was popular. As an Iranian living inside Iran, I want the world [to know], the majority of us hated him and we are so delighted for his death.” This is somebody identified as @Miss_Maropelle on Twitter, and there’s a photo.

I don’t know if it’s legitimate or not, because Twitter’s like anything. Anybody can lie and make anything up. We have traced and documented how they do it. “The Islamic Republic propaganda is trying to tell the world that [Salami] was popular.” This is exactly right. All these photos of the mourners gathering outnumbering the number of people at the Trump inauguration.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is Dave in Buffalo. Welcome, sir. Great to have you on EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Rush, I thank you for taking my call. It’s an honor to speak to you for a second time. Just one quick question. How long can Nancy Pelosi hold on to these articles of impeachment? I’m afraid what she’s gonna do is she’s gonna hold on to them until December 2020 after Trump is reelected and she’s a possibly hoping that the Senate will turn to Democrat, and then she can successfully impeach him and remove him.

RUSH: Look, these theories that people have, any of them could be possible because we’re dealing with the mind of Pelosi. And I don’t think that mind knows from day to day what it’s gonna do and how it’s gonna deal with this because I think she’s waiting. This has gone beyond where she intended it. The reason she did this was to save her speakership.

The reason she did this was to fend off these wackos from The Squad, the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of them, because at the beginning of this it’s always been known. The Senate is gonna acquit. There’s no reason to do this. Unless you can get some kind of really valuable, long lasting, negative public relations hit. But that’s wiped out with the acquittal.

So if she holds these things through 2020, she’s gonna become a joke. At some point if she doesn’t present these the argument’s gonna be made that Trump’s impeachment’s a nonevent, that it hasn’t really happened. Josh Hawley, senator from Missouri, scuttlebutt over the weekend was he’s gonna introduce a resolution just have a vote and dismiss this now because it’s not serious.

So your guess on this is as good as mine. It’s clearly situational. It’s not rooted in any fact that would support Trump not being fit for office. It has nothing to do that. It has to do with the attempt they’re making to get him thrown out of office or defeated in 2020. So we’ll just have to see how it manifests.

You know, holding onto these things until after the election hoping that Democrats win the Senate, if she does that, you know, there’s gonna be an election in November of 2020. If she hasn’t done anything with them by then these people are cruising for a bruising like they can’t imagine right now on the presidential side.

The Democrats are losing voters massively in these suburb and rural areas of Wisconsin. Have you noticed Florida has now gone red? It’s pretty much not in play. Ohio is the same. The three states that catapulted Trump are still where the action is, and the Democrats are not rescuing themselves in the areas of those states that Trump won. It’s getting worse for them.

And it doesn’t help that Biden is out there telling coal miners (imitating Biden), “Look, get into coding, for God’s sake. When I shut down your coal mine, learn coding, for God’s sake.” He always says “for God’s sake” this or God bless it or God whatever it. I know everybody thinks he’s gonna be the nominee. I just – have you seen picture lately, slap me? Bring it on is the point.