RUSH: So it appears that the Democrats think — and you’ll hear this in the audio sound bites coming up — they think that Trump and Pompeo are lying to ’em, that there was no reason to get Soleimani because Soleimani was not planning imminent attacks. Trump has said that he was. Pompeo has said that we have active intel that he was planning attacks. He had hit the Saudi oil field. He had attacked an embassy in Iraq. And they’ve got intel that he was planning to hit the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.

Do you know how big that embassy is? People have no idea. Our embassy in Baghdad rivals the Vatican in terms of size. There are 16,000 people in our embassy there. It’s a lot of potential damage just waiting to happen. But they’re trying to claim that Trump made it all up, that there wasn’t any intel. Trump said at his rally last night that the reason he didn’t let Congress know first is ’cause they would have leaked it.

And there’s no doubt about that. If Adam Schiff had gotten hold of this or Pelosi, you know damn well they would have called somebody in the media and tried to sabotage the mission, not because they love terrorists because they’d try to undermine Trump. That’s all they’ve got. The only thing the Democrat Party has is attempting to undermine Trump at whatever stage and with whatever policy that he happens to be interested in or engaging in. And there’s no question he’s right about it.

But on this imminent threat, this is really how empty they are and how baseless they are. “Trump didn’t have any evidence. There’s no imminent evidence that Soleimani was going to hit our embassy.” Do you remember — and I pointed this out yesterday — George W. Bush, after 9/11, after a week or so had gone by, maybe two and the dust had settled and the fake unity had finally evaporated and the Democrats once again became partisan, what did they say?

They said that George W. Bush didn’t connect the dots. They said Bush is an idiot. They said Bush and his administration are a bunch of fools. It was clear as day what bin Laden was gonna do. The signs were all there. But of course the FBI couldn’t talk to the CIA because of the wall the Clintons had built between various agencies so they couldn’t share data. That was Jamie Gorelick. I’m sure you remember this as I bring it up. But their point was that Bush had all the data. He had all the information to conclude that something was up, but he didn’t do anything.

So Bush didn’t connect the dots and therefore Osama Bin Laden hitting us on 9/11 was Bush’s fault, even though it was the Clinton administration who twice had a chance to take out bin Laden and both times failed to do so. There were two different occasions where Bill Clinton was told we’ve got bin Laden on a silver platter. One was in Africa. I forget where the other one was. And Clinton decided not to do it for a host of reasons rooted in the fact the world would hate us, we’re a super power, he’s this little terrorist guy. It just wouldn’t have made sense. It wouldn’t have fit with other elements of the Clinton foreign policy.

But my point is that all of that took place over years. There was no imminent threat, meaning there was no intel saying in the next five days bin Laden’s gonna attack the World Trade Center. But there was all kinds of chatter. So now let’s jump forward to Soleimani and this incident. Trump has done exactly what the Democrats were demanding and accusing Bush of not doing. Trump has connected the dots. We’ve got intel, says this guy, number two in Iran, number one terrorist, planned on hitting a bunch of American targets in addition to the over 600 Americans he’s already responsible for killing. And so we’re gonna take him out.

So in this case Trump has done exactly what they said Bush didn’t do, and now they want to go after him for war crimes? This is how baseless they are. They are standing in quicksand.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to go back to Monday on this very program and something that I, eh, pretty much predicted.

RUSH ARCHIVE: 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.

RUSH: All right. So there I was predicting they could reopen impeachment, bring Soleimani and terrorism into it. Here’s Eric Swalwell on CNN this morning. Question: “In your briefing from the [regime] on the death of Soleimani, did they tell you that there was a threat to U.S. embassies?”

SWALWELL: In the multiple briefings I’ve received on this, they have not shown imminence. But they have also now consistently shown that the president — whether it’s on Russia, Ukraine, or Iran with this recent Wall Street Journal reporting — puts his interests above America’s interests. And this Wall Street Journal reporting seems to be more consistent with who Donald Trump is, that over the holidays, GOP senators who would be crucial to him for the impeachment trial were urging him to take actions in Iran, and that’s connected to what he did.

RUSH: There you go. Now they’re folding this into their whole impeachment thing, that Donald Trump doesn’t do anything for America that isn’t good for Donald Trump first — and then you heard the word “imminence.” “I didn’t see any imminence in the…” This imminence business can be nuked easily (I showed how to do it in the first five minutes of the program today), and turn it right back on them with Bin Laden or any other terrorist they fail to take out when we had the chance, when they were running the show.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Before we get to breaking that down any further, last night Shannon Bream on her show on Fox, which is called Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream, she had as her guest a former deputy national security adviser, K.T. McFarland. And they were talking about Trump’s decision to take out Qassem Soleimani and U.S. foreign policy toward Iran in general.

And to set things up, Shannon Bream introduced — well, she used me and Pelosi to illustrate the difference in the two sides on this. Here’s the sound bite.

BREAM: Rush Limbaugh takes on critics of the president’s America first foreign policy.

PELOSI: It’s not about how bad they are, it’s about how good we are, protecting the people in a way that prevents war.

RUSH ARCHIVE: This country (deep sigh) for too long, has had a foreign policy that is rooted in the notion that we provoke the rest of the world. That we are the problem, that we’re not the solution. And that it is our superpower status that is the problem. We’re too powerful. It isn’t fair. We’re too big. It isn’t fair. And the rest of the world hates us because of that. None of that is true.

RUSH: But that is — if I say so myself, that is a perfect description of the Democrats and their view of the United States, particularly in foreign policy. That’s probably the most perfect description there’s ever been of the Democrats, offered there by me. And of course Pelosi got close to it. It’s not about how bad they are. It’s about how good we are. And in her view, we ain’t very good with Trump at the top. That was her whole point. It’s not about how bad they are, see?

It’s always about us, folks. We’re always the ones with the deficiency. We are always the ones with the problem. We’re causing the problem; we’re not solving anything. So Shannon Bream threw it to K.T. McFarland, said, “So what do you make of those who are drawing the line between the president’s actions and the innocent lives lost on that Canadian plane that they shot down?”

MCFARLAND: Donald Trump is the guy who says, “I’m gonna put America first,” and he’s running against people who are saying, “Let’s blame America first.” And I think it’s a tragedy not just for the country and the political divisiveness in the United States, but other countries look at us and then they conclude, well, America is so dysfunctional, America can’t get its act together, democracy is finished, and I think they feel they can take advantage of us. It really does handicap the ability of the United States to conduct foreign policy, if foreign nations look at us and they see us divided and weak because it’s a fundamental rule of foreign policy, weak at home, divided at home, weak abroad.

RUSH: Right. And that’s exactly — she’s right. So the Democrats are trying to affect is that perception because their hatred for Trump has now gone way beyond even the irrational. So they’re trying to get Trump on war crimes. Now they’re trying to say Salami was not planning any attack, there wasn’t any imminent threat. “I didn’t hear imminent.”

Let me one more time walk everybody through this. After 9/11, the World Trade Center towers go down, the Pentagon hit, another airplane downed by its passengers in a field in western Pennsylvania before it could hit its intended target. After this happens, the Democrats start chomping all over George W. Bush for failing to connect the dots and stopping bin Laden from committing the atrocity. All the intel was there. Well, we couldn’t connect any dots because of the previous administration putting walls up between the FBI, CIA, and other domestic intelligence agencies. They couldn’t share data.

But, anyway, the point was, in 1999 and the year 2000 there was nothing imminent, meaning next week, next month on the part of bin Laden, but there they were ripping into Bush for not doing something about it a year in advance. So here’s Trump, got data, got intel on the intentions of Soleimani, including hitting our mammoth embassy in Iraq. He takes him out and the Democrats, “There was nothing imminent. There was nothing imminent. This is a war crime. I haven’t seen any imminent –”

So everything they accused Bush of being lackadaisical on, they now want to say that Trump has usurped his powers. I tell you, folks, at the end of this one, like everything else, they’re standing in quicksand, they’ve got nothing. Because remember, everything that they’re doing is designed to force public opinion away from Trump. They’re trying to ratchet up his negative numbers. That’s what they have failed miserably to do. That’s what they are continuing to try to do.

I’m convinced that part of Pelosi’s reason for holding onto the articles was waiting to see, “Okay. We’ve got an impeachment. Trump has actually been impeached. We’ve done it.” They were hoping for a massive plummet in Trump’s approval numbers. And guess what? The numbers went up. Just like Clinton’s did.