RUSH: Here’s John in Port Huron, Michigan. Great to have you, John. I’m glad you waited. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. I think you see John Brennan especially, but Clapper’s not too far behind, they are in what I like to call pre-perp panic. They are doing everything to continue the distraction of the Russian collusion story to get away from where this is now headed, which is right at them and their ilk and people that were there and part of this.

Two things longtime listeners know about you that you don’t buy into even when loyalists want you to. One is the electability of a third-party candidate. The other big one is the fact that you don’t see a conspiracy around every corner. You never have. And when you saw this ridiculous Russian collusion story, I think you analyzed it the way you do. You did not buy into the conspiracy. What you said is let’s follow the money. What is the practical, real-world reason this is being done?

First it looked like an excuse for Hillary. But I think it’s obviously looking like a lot bigger thing than that. You have people that were on the inside, think about a business or any other organization where they know there’s gonna be a new CEO or president coming in, they all want to do those things beforehand that are gonna endear them to that person, put them close to power. Now, you multiply that times a thousand when you’re talking about the presidency of the United States. And they all were clamoring to be able to go in and say, “Look what I did.”

She was ready for a coronation and it didn’t work out. So now you gotta backtrack. And I think it’s your ability to not see conspiracies that allows to you dissect things. And the Nunes situation is another example. You know, that really opened my eyes. They were looking for a fall guy or a patsy to be another leaker, and that was gonna be Devin Nunes. That was their distraction or defense.

What I was telling Snerdley when I called is that I think there’s also an offensive component to that. And the offensive component is the deep state working behind the scenes with Clapper and all the other loyalists from the past administration, you put them out there in the media to make this spy and to make this situation, not only a push —

RUSH: Hang on. I was hoping you would get there, and you almost did, but hang on.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. We’re gonna go back to John in Port Huron. I want to pick up where you said that you think there’s an offensive part of this, too, that they’re engaging in now, not just trying to cover their tracks and deflect people. What’s the offensive part of this?

CALLER: The break made me be able to do this quickly. Clapper is the quarterback. The offense coordinators are the deep state members. They’re feeding Clapper and other people like Clapper that came out of that mess with the previous administration with the information and the strategy on the spy within the campaign and everything that surrounds it. And that is this.

Not only is it not a bad thing to spy on your political opponent, when there are huge things at stake like Russian collusion, it’s a good thing, and the point person who was involved in the campaign, spying on the campaign, that is, is actually going to be made into an American hero. And, oh, by the way, he’s a Republican, so he must have been totally objective, if his only object was to save the Democratic process in the United States.

It’s almost like making someone into a whistleblower. So not only is that not a bad thing anymore, it’s a good thing, and anyone who participated in it, including Clapper and Brennan are American heroes. And there it is. That’s the offense. That’s the story they have to run because it’s getting too close to home now.

RUSH: I think that may be part of what’s going on. I think it’s clear that the original objective failed. The original objective was to get rid of Trump. And, folks, do not doubt me on this. They thought they could get it done in six months. I could run through again why they thought they could. Remember these people have incredible arrogance, and in their own personalities you cannot intimidate them. They are everything, they know everything, they run everything.

Nobody’s in their league. They’re so powerful they can write whatever script they want and sell it to the Drive-By Media, have it run. And they were, I think, cock certain that they were gonna be able to get Trump hated and despised in the first six months by convincing people that his election was fraudulent because the Russians hated Hillary and wanted him to win because he’s a doofus and the Russians had blackmailable stuff on him and the Russians were gonna run rings, the Russians gonna devastate us because Trump is unprepared, unqualified, he’s a boob, he’s a rogue, he’s all these horrible, rotten things, look at what the Russians did. It all starts with the Russians supposedly hacking the DNC server, blah, blah, blah, blah.

When that didn’t work, well, now was time for Plan B. And Plan B was to ramp it up and to flood the zone. Four different stories every day from anonymous sources deep inside the intelligence communities furthering the idea that there was collusion by Russia with Trump. And the way they ratcheted it up was that Trump was working with Russia. That didn’t work. Nothing they have tried worked.

Then Mueller comes along, and I think the Mueller appointment was to cover up, to provide a cover-up for all of the efforts they had engaged in to try to get rid of Trump, such as informants and spies and using the media and all these abject lies, lying to a FISA court judge in order to get a warrant based on opposition research. They had to hustle to cover up the exoneration of Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton was guilty of so many felonies for which people are in jail, they had to distract people from that, they had to misdirect people away from it. They exonerated Hillary. They had made the decision early on she was not gonna face charges. She was not going to be prosecuted. Nothing was gonna happen, had to cover that up.

Now, the caller was very complimentary to your host, and I appreciate that, saying that one of the reasons I’m able to get down to the real nub of these things is that I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories or conventional wisdom. And he’s exactly right. Can I tell you why the Russian collusion theory never worked on me? It’s not possible. It’s not possible to steal an election the way these people were setting it up to be done. And Obama himself said so. It simply isn’t possible.

Obama said so October 16, 2016, three and a half weeks before the election. He made it clear. It simply would not be possible. It’s no more complicated than that. Okay. If you don’t think that’s true, I want you to figure out for yourself how you would do it. You’re sitting in Russia, you’re Vladimir Putin, you’ve got agents everywhere, you can put agents wherever you want. And you’re going to collude with one of the candidates in order to get him elected. You’re gonna make sure that when the votes are counted, your guy wins.

How are you going to do that? How’s anybody gonna do that? It can’t be done. That, to me, is the real danger of all this. Look at the number of Americans, probably in the millions, who now think it not only can be done, but did happen and will happen again. These people, in their zeal to protect themselves, have destroyed the integrity of the American electoral process. And they keep adding to it because the Russian collusion story doesn’t go away.

And now whenever anything unfortunate happens to the Democrats in an election or wherever, guess what the first excuse given is? The Russians. The Russians do not have the capability to do this. You wouldn’t know where to go. You wouldn’t know which precinct, which districts.

Then you get to the Electoral College. The Electoral College is set up in part to make sure that population clusters like California of millions and millions of like-minded people are not given a greater percentage of weight in a presidential election than their proportion should be. That’s the brilliance of the Electoral College. We’re not a democracy. We are a republic.

Elizabeth Warren is out there, Elizawatha — he-he-he– Elizawah, Fauxcahontas, she’s out there claiming that the system has already been corrupted because Hillary got more votes than Trump and she should have been elected president. “Something is desperately wrong in America.” No. Something is amazingly, brilliantly correct in America. The Electoral College was set up to make sure that small population centers, rural states and so forth had a chance to be involved in who wins presidential elections.

The Electoral College was devised precisely to make sure that in this case a whole bunch of liberals would not congregate in one place, California, and steal an election. The Electoral College is a brilliant function of our constitutional republic. How would you tamper with that? You wouldn’t even know which states you’re gonna need to try to screw things. Our voting machines are not connected to the internet. How are you gonna do it? To me, it was not possible.

It is why I went on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace shortly after the first allegation was made, and I said, “Chris, this is preposterous. Why isn’t anybody thinking about this in practical terms? It isn’t possible. Why is everybody accepting this premise, the Russians colluded and stole the election.” Well, then it became the Russians colluded. Not “and stole.” They just colluded. They wanted to get Trump on colluding with the Russians to try to steal the election. They couldn’t prove that.

Now they’re trying to prove obstruction. They can’t prove that! Nothing they have alleged has happened, except on the Clinton side. There was collusion there. We all know this. This whole procedure’s designed to cover that up. To make sure that eyes do not focus on that. That’s the whole purpose of all of this now. And I think it’s beginning to unravel in real terms. You may not see evidence of it if you watch news every day, but, folks, they have failed to get rid of Donald Trump. And I don’t care whatever else you think about this, that is the big take-away. They have failed.

Now, they’re not through trying. They still hope they can win the house in 2018 and prepare articles of impeachment and work their magic there. They haven’t given up. But they have failed. And it’s beginning to unravel. Now they are admitting all of these things, spies, this, that, and the other thing in the campaign. Now Clapper comes along — Clapper, by the way, is not in the upper echelon. He’s a foot soldier. I disagree with the caller about that. I don’t think Clapper’s one of the organizers.

If you want to get to the top of this, you gotta go to Barack Obama, folks. All of this happened under the auspices of Barack Obama. It’s his FBI that did all this. It’s his Department of Justice that did all this. It’s his attorney general that looked the other way. It’s his attorney general that met with Bill Clinton. It was his Department of Justice and FBI that presented a phony document to the FISA court to get a warrant to spy on a member of the Trump campaign. This all happened while Barack Obama was in the White House.

Some might want to say, “Well, he might not have known, Rush.” Yeah, right. So many aspects of this, protect the Obama legacy, which is already gone now, in some part. But the whole premise, to me, has been easily refuted and rejected. And then when I see the groupthink latch on to it, okay. So the Democrat National Committee server is hacked, they tell us the Russians did it, they don’t produce any evidence, and yet everybody begins operating on the theory the Russians hacked their server.

And for a year and a half, two years, for two years we’ve been operating on that. And there isn’t any evidence for it. Nobody’s once shown us any evidence. Nunes is asking. They won’t show him. There isn’t a shred of evidence for it. And everybody except the deep state, the deep media, some in the Republican Party, to this day there are Republicans that believe the Russians colluded, the Russians hacked. I mean, to the extent that they were able to shape the outcome of the election, I simply don’t believe it’s possible.

I think Trump won legitimately. I think Trump won fairly. I think Trump won justly. Hillary Clinton was a lousy candidate. Hillary Clinton didn’t inspire anybody. Hillary Clinton didn’t fire anybody up. Hillary Clinton didn’t excite anybody. Hillary Clinton doesn’t have the ability to do that. Donald Trump did. Everything about the Trump campaign had the word “winner,” the label “winner” attached to it. It made total sense that Donald Trump won. It didn’t surprise me a bit.

I predicted Trump was gonna win two days after he came down the escalator and announced, or whenever I first saw the polling data. When I saw a majority of Americans loved Trump him, uh-oh. Then I started seeing the rallies. It was not hard to see what was going on. But if you are distracted by narratives, distracted by conventional wisdom, if you get caught up in conspiracy theories, then you could easily get sidetracked here.

But it’s nothing more than common sense each and every day. Observe it, act on it, and what happened made total sense. But to these in the deep state, it didn’t make sense because it’s not supposed to be able to happen. They have it wired, in their minds, they’ve got it rigged, they can’t lose. That’s why they have the power to make sure even when they lose they don’t really lose.

But if you want to get to the architect of this, if you want to find out where this actually began, if you want to find out who had to okay and authorize all of this, then you’ve gotta find your way to the Obama White House Oval Office, because that’s the origin.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I think Brennan is panicking. Trump is right. And Clapper is following — I think Comey is panicking right now. And if I didn’t know better, I would say Mueller thinks he’s in a tight spot.

They didn’t ever expect this spy stuff to come out. You can’t convince me that they did. This stuff was never supposed to hit, the stuff that the Post and the New York Times ran on Thursday and Friday last week. Are you kidding me that they ever intended that to happen, that there were spies, informants running around in the Trump campaign? That was never supposed to come out. They dropped that to try to lessen the impact of it when it’s real news, whether it’s in the upcoming IG report or some other investigation down the road.

They didn’t expect what they were doing in this regard to ever be understood or known or uncovered by anybody. They didn’t think Devin Nunes would survive their attempts to destroy him. They didn’t think he would stick with it. They didn’t think that he would keep bulldogging them to find out what the hell was really going on here.

So now they have to get ahead of it. So they send Clapper out there to tell everybody that it’s a good thing we had a spy in the Trump campaign and we weren’t spying on Trump, we love Trump, we were trying to protect Trump. Do not insult my intelligence! You hate Donald Trump! You’ve hated Donald Trump since before he ran for office! Now you really hate him. And after he survived the Access Hollywood video, you have so much hate that it spits out of you! It oozes out of every pour and orifice in your body. You hate the guy! You weren’t trying to protect him!

If you’re worried about the Russians spying, why the hell didn’t you turn the Clinton campaign upside down and have a spy inside her campaign? You people are lying through your teeth. You weren’t trying to protect anything. You’re now trying to get out in front of this by saying what you did was altruistic. What you did was patriotic. You were saving your country. You were protecting your country from those evil, dastardly Russians who are only marginally worse than those evil, dastardly Republicans.

I mean, you people may think everybody’s saps because so many people in the Drive-By Media eat up this garbage you spew each and every day, but I’m telling you, your average Trump voter is not buying one morsel of this rotten concoction that you are selling, spreading, or what have you. We’ve been inoculated. We have all been inoculated against a disease that is Drive-By Media infectious. We are immune to it. A lot of people aren’t. And you get away with it with some of them.

But this is so feeble. “We were trying to protect Trump.” Right. James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Sally Yates, Andrew McCabe were trying to protect Donald Trump. I don’t know what kind of idiots you think you’re dealing with. But you’re gonna have to try something else, and you’re gonna have to try somebody better at this than Clapper. “Well, yeah, I think it’s a very good thing, spying, very valuable lessons learned.”

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: But another thing, too. I just… The whole infiltration of the Trump campaign be it a spy or informant… I love the Drive-Bys now trying to change definitions of terms. “It wasn’t a spy. It was an informant.” And what they’re trying to say now is, “No, we didn’t plant anybody in there. We had a whistleblower! We had somebody in there who knew that Trump was a pig. We knew that Trump was a reprobate. We had a patriot in there that was trying to warn us about Trump.” That’s what they’re trying to say now, that their spy was not a spy. It was an informant.

This is… I’ll tell you, it’s a deeply, intricately woven web of deceit that they are still trying to steer us away from. Do not… One thing that we have to constantly keep in mind: Whatever is reported in the Drive-By Media is what they want us to see, not what they don’t want us to see. They divulging Stefan Halper as a spy, an informant, and some of these other people because they want us looking that way. Which means there are other people they don’t want us seeing. Now, who are those people and what were they doing?

That’s how you have to wade through this.

The media are complicit, and all of this is misdirection.