RUSH: Here’s Robert in Cypress, California. Great that you called, sir. Great that you’re on the program.

CALLER: Hi. Rush, I think the recently released Nunes memo should not only bring about an immediate end to the Mueller inquisition, it should also spawn another investigation into the weaponization of our national security apparatus, including our Justice Department, the FBI, the IRS, and other federal agencies that are then aimed by the Democrat Party at the Constitution and our democrat republic and our very freedom itself.

RUSH: Is what?

CALLER: I’m sorry?

RUSH: You were finished. Okay. I thought you weren’t through reading, is the point. Trey Gowdy says that whatever is in the memo has nothing to do with Mueller’s Russia investigation. And Trey Gowdy is one of the authors of the memo along with Nunes. But Trey Gowdy is one of only two people that’s seen the intel that was necessary to write the memo. And he was on television, one of the Sunday shows saying that this has nothing to do with the Mueller investigation, that the memo does not disqualify the Mueller investigation in any way, shape, manner, or form.

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RUSH: I think, was it Meet the Press or Face the Nation, I forget which, that Trey Gowdy was on, but he made it a point of saying that whatever this memo is, it does not affect the Mueller investigation into Russian collusion. I think this whole subject of Russian collusion has been so poorly defined that most people have no idea what’s being investigated. Well, they know what’s being investigated, but not what really happened.

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RUSH: I have the two Trey Gowdy sound bites and a reminder, Devin Nunes, House Intelligence Committee chairman, will be here in about a half hour at the beginning of the next hour. Gowdy was on Face the Nation. They had a guest host, Margaret Brennan, and she asked Gowdy if the Steele dossier was the sole piece of evidence used to justify four authorizations of the surveillance warrant on Carter Page. Here’s what he said.

GOWDY: No. It was not the exclusive information relied upon by the FISA court.

BRENNAN: Would it have been authorized were it not for that dossier?

GOWDY: No, it would not have been.

RUSH: Okay. So to avoid any confusion, Gowdy is one of two people on the committee — Nunes being the other — who have seen all of the intelligence that was used to write the memo. And that’s how Gowdy is able to answer these questions. Nunes and Gowdy wrote the memo based on examining the intel provided by various agencies upon request of the committee. So this answer is kind of — well, I don’t want to say misleading or confusing, but if you’re not up to speed and informed on this, this answer can kind of mislead you.

The question: Was the Steele dossier — that lying, made-up piece of opposition research that was not a dossier and it was not intelligence and there was nothing in it that was factual, was that the only piece of evidence used to get the FISA warrant and the reauthorization three different times?

Gowdy says, “No. It was not the only information relied on by the FISA court.” So if that’s all you heard, then you would think, “Oh, well, they had much more than the dossier. Yeah.” Then she said, “Would the renewal, would the application to spy have been authorized were it not for the dossier?” Gowdy: “No.”

So, in sum, the dossier was, for all intents and purposes, the go or no-go bit of information in the application. And Gowdy admits that if there had been no dossier, then there would not have been a warrant granted to spy, but that it was not the only thing in the application. Gowdy then thought it was necessary to go further, and he said this.

GOWDY: We’ll never know because the application contained three parts. It included the dossier. It included reference to a newspaper article which, by the way, no court in America considers a newspaper article to be evidence. And it included other information they had on Carter Page. So what I would say to the FBI and DOJ is if you had enough on Carter Page with just him, why did you include something that the National Enquirer might not run?

RUSH: Right. Okay. This is not what — there’s also a Gowdy sound bite where he says that this dossier has nothing to do with the Mueller investigation. I don’t have the transcript of what he said right in front of me. Oh, it’s number 23. Okay, hang on a minute. Let me find number 23.

GOWDY: You still have a Russia investigation even without it. I am on record of saying I support Bob Mueller 100%. I think you would have a Russia invest — look, Russia tried to interfere with our Russia in 2016 with or without a dossier. So you need an investigation into Russia. You need an investigation into Trump Tower and the Cambridge Analytica email separate and apart from the dossier. So those are not connected issues to me. They may be for other Republicans, but they’re not for me. I say investigate everything Russia did but admit that this was a really sloppy process that you engaged in to surveil a U.S. citizen.

RUSH: Okay. Well, here’s the problem people are having with that. The investigation is not of Russia. It’s of Trump. And if the dossier, which is about Trump, is bogus, and nothing in it can be verified or corroborated, then what are we investigating here? There seems to be a bit of conventional wisdom. And that is the Russians attempted to interfere in the election.

I want to be precise in how I express this. People are saying this as though it’s a given, as much as baby’s drink milk. Oh, yeah, the Russians attempted to influence the election. Well, yeah, maybe they did. Maybe they do every day try to influence life in America. We know that they have. We never once stopped to investigate their infiltration of college campuses. We didn’t stop to investigate the Russians doing this or that. The Democrats are always running cover for them.

The only reason there’s an investigation into Russia and the election is because the Democrats lost the election and they’re trying to come up with some flimsy excuse to explain why. And so they’ve made up the idea that Trump colluded with Russia. If they’re using a dossier to get a warrant to spy on Trump’s people that is bogus, then the investigation here is not really about Russia; it’s about Trump. Now, I think Trey Gowdy, he’s a lawyer from South Carolina, he’s apparently just a cutthroat prosecutor. You do not want this guy trying to put you in jail, because you’re going, he is that good. I think he has mountains of respect, therefore, for the criminal justice system.

He does not want the DOJ sullied. He believes in their mission. And he does not want to participate in anything that might dent its reputation or what have you. And that’s why he’s making the statement that well, yeah, there’s a Russian investigation way bigger than the dossier. I mean, the Russians colluded in the election, they tried to affect the election. We gotta investigate that.

Well, I agree, but we don’t do it this way. We’re investigating this as though it has been a crime. And it’s being made to look like a counterintelligence investigation when what’s really going on is the criminal pursuit of Donald Trump. And that’s what’s so backwards and off center about this, is Trump didn’t collude! Trump didn’t conspire. Trump’s crime is that he won the election. Trump’s crime is he defeated the establishment’s anointed queen.

And since they can’t come to grips with the fact that that could have really happened, there has to have been something that took this election away from. It can’t be Trump because he’s a boob, he’s a zero, he’s a reprobate. So it had to be something else.

Now, when this all started, I don’t think a lot of people really believed this Russia collusion stuff. It was itself an opposition research plan. This had two primary purposes: to paralyze Trump and perhaps in a dream world get him thrown out of office. And the second thing, second aspect was to convince Democrat voters that the Democrats did not lose, that the election was stolen from them. And on both fronts, mission accomplished.

Now we’re investigating Russian collusion in an election, when the Russians have been trying to infiltrate the Pentagon, the CIA. You ever heard of double agents? The Russians are everywhere. So are the ChiComs, the North Koreans, the Cubans. This is what enemy countries do. We are colluding in ChiCom operations. We are conspiring to screw up what the Norks are trying to do. This is statecraft. It’s normal day-to-day operations. Except in this instance we’ve decided we’re gonna criminalize it because it involves Donald Trump.

So this investigation is not really of Russia. It’s of Trump. You know it and I know it and they know it, and that’s why they’re not stopping even though they can’t find any evidence. They’re gonna keep going until they get something, if it’s nothing more than a process crime, if somebody’s lying to the investigators or what have you.

Bottom line is this, my humble opinion. I think all these people on TV bleating and whining and moaning about Russian interference in the election don’t care a whit about it because they know it’s an ongoing thing. And they don’t really think the Russians stole the election. And they don’t really think the Russians did anything to change the outcome of the election. They’re just ticked off that they lost.

This is like getting beat by the New York Jets. It just doesn’t happen! They can’t come to grips with the fact that somebody not even in their world outsmarted ’em, outran ’em, outworked ’em, outdid everything. So they create these scenarios and explanations to placate their lunatic fringe base, when it’s been going on for so long now that I think many of these people now actually believe it. It’s become their day-to-day existence. I think they’ve gone from being reasonably sane about this to having lost their minds. Because they knew when this started Trump didn’t do anything.

What was it that he did? What was it that had happened? What was the hack? What was the collusion? What was the conspiracy? They can’t name it. So we’ve been involved here, folks, in at least a 15 month and probably a 27-month scam. And I say 27-month because much of this was going on during the campaign trying to keep Trump from winning, but after he’s elected and then the transition and then the inauguration, this stuff really ratchets up, ramps up, and it’s striking.

There’s nothing there. There is nothing to this. And to say that the Russians colluded and that’s why we must investigate and it’s great to have the special counsel, to me it’s an insult to my intelligence because all this is is a disguised effort to get rid of or paralyze Donald Trump.

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RUSH: Here’s another thing, folks — and it’s a really, really glaring oddity that this investigation is not really about trying to get to the truth. Do you know that there was no evidence — nobody can find any evidence yet — that they ever tried to talk to Steele’s sources? The FBI’s got this dossier, and this dossier’s filled with such stories as the golden showers, and nobody at the FBI — as best we can tell — ever tried to track down Steele’s sources.

They just believed what Steele included in this so-called dossier. They never tried to speak to them. That’s just bizarre. That’s just as bizarre as the FBI not demanding the DNC turn over its Russian-hacked servers! Let’s not forget that. The DNC told us that Russia hacked its servers. That’s the hack. (They tried to hack the GOP network; it was denied. They had better security, I guess.) The DNC would not let the FBI forensically examine their computers and servers, their network, to find out where the hack came from.

The DNC went out and hired a private firm called CrowdStrike, and CrowdStrike then submitted its forensic evidence, and nobody questioned it. So the FBI didn’t even try to track down these sources that were in Steele’s dossier. Here’s another question — and I want to go back to what Gowdy said here. I now have the transcript in front of me. “I think you would have a Russia inve… Look, Russia tried to interfere with our election in 2016 with or without a dossier. So you need an investigation into Russia.”

Well, would there be any of this going on if Hillary had won? Would there be any concern whatsoever about Russian interference if Hillary had won? We wouldn’t have even heard that it happened! They would not taint her victory by claiming the Russians tried to interfere. Unless… The only way that would have happened is if they would have started bragging. “The Russians tried to interfere and we caught ’em and he with nabbed ’em and we made sure the Russians weren’t able to!”

There would not have been an investigation. Don’t misunderstand. There would not have been any concern much less an investigation about Russians interference if Hillary had won. Trump wins, so now automatically we have to investigate Russian interference? Why? So my point is we’re not investigating Russian interference. We’re investigating Donald Trump!