RUSH: One of the things CNN can’t let go of is the Mueller report says that Donald Trump told Jeff Sessions, quote (paraphrased), “I’m screwed. Oh, my God. I’m screwed. This is the end of my presidency,” when Mueller was appointed. Well, now, you can imagine how that is going to be analyzed and amplified on. “Well! (sputtering) That obviously means Trump knew he was guilty. It obviously meant the inspector was going to get to the bottom of it and that was the end of his presidency.” Again (snort), Robert Mueller concluded that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia — and about that, he is perfectly clear.

Trump is exonerated on the collusion business. There isn’t and wasn’t any. So why put in the report that Trump told Sessions…? That could have been a comment actually on his opinion of Sessions. But why put it in the report? Precisely to feed these appetites that Mueller knows the media is going to have. It’s just… The fact… I’m sitting here and I’m asking myself, “Let’s say that I am accused.” What crime can we invent here for me to stand accused of?” Let’s say that… Oh, I don’t know. Let’s say that I set somebody’s house on fire.

I know that I didn’t do it, and then I hear that there is this massive investigation into it. But I know that I didn’t do it. I know, in fact, that maybe it’s not even the right house that they’re talking about. Whatever. I didn’t do it, and there’s even some question whether it happened at all, whatever this crime is. And then I watch the police expand their investigation and they start subpoenaing people. I’m sitting there this whole time knowing that I didn’t do it. What am I gonna do?

Am I gonna try to obstruct the investigation knowing full well I didn’t do it, or am I gonna not trust the investigators to get the truth? “Are they out to get me?” I’m gonna be asking. “I didn’t do this, everybody knows I didn’t do this, and yet look at what they’re doing,” and yet it goes on and on for two years. What would you do in this circumstance? Because I will guarantee you that from the moment this allegation was first made, Trump knew he didn’t do it!

I don’t know whether he learned that he was being framed, and I don’t know when he learned that he was being set up, and I don’t know whether he learned that this whole thing was actually an effort to plant such collusion evidence, but, at some point, he did, at some point he learned that’s what this was. What would you do in that circumstance? Because this is… I mean, look, it was a frame job, in one sense.

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RUSH: Now, here’s what Trump actually said about the appointment of the special counsel. “The president returned to the consequences of the appointment and said, ‘Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency. It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worse thing that ever happened to me.’”

That’s what he said, not the way CNN is excerpting it. (summarized) “Oh, my God. I’m screwed! Aw, jeez,” as though the independent counsel’s gonna catch him in illegalities. Trump was not talking about that. He was talking about how these investigations paralyze presidents. This is… Folks, this is so damned despicable, I’m having trouble not being profane here today.

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RUSH: Again, what Trump said about the appointment of the special counsel. “The president returned to the consequences of the appointment and said, ‘Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency. It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worse thing that ever happened to me.’”

CNN is saying the president acknowledged that the special counsel being appointed screws his presidency. They are attempting to conclude here that Trump was guilty and the special counsel was gonna find the guilt and that Trump knew it! They’re doing this specifically to counter the conclusion that there was no collusion!

CNN is still attempting to convince their viewers that there was collusion and Trump knew it! And that somehow he skated by because Trump aides didn’t do what Trump told them to do. If you read further in the report, you find that Trump said further things about this.

He said what really bothered him about the special counsel and the intelligence community was that he won this presidency and it’s one of the greatest achievements of his life and now everybody’s gonna think the Russians made it happen and he was livid about it because it didn’t happen, which, I might add, is a perfectly normal human reaction to have.

You accomplish the greatest thing in your life ever and then somebody somewhere in your orbit puts out a report that you were helped, that you cheated and that some nefarious group of people actually made it happen trying to deny you your achievement, that’s how Trump was reacting to this, not that he was guilty of anything, because he wasn’t, because there wasn’t any conclusion.

There was this was a coup. This was an effort to diminish Trump, to diminish his victory. They couldn’t allow it to stand that Trump had outsmarted them and outsmarted Hillary Clinton and had beat back their coup attempt. They are the ones who tried to rig the 2016 election, the intelligence community, the Obama Department of Justice, Hillary Clinton, they tried to rig the 2016 election, not Trump.

Trump won that thing overcoming every imaginable odd that you could think of and after he wins it then they try to take it away from him by claiming that he didn’t win it, that the Russians cheated for him and that he participated. Folks, this is so outrageous, I don’t have the words in polite society to describe how I’m feeling about it! I really don’t! This is the most outrageous thing in my life I have ever experienced in American politics.

I have never seen anything that even approaches this in scope, in attempt, in execution, in dishonesty, in skullduggery, in absolute depraved perversion, I have never seen anything like this. I have never seen, despite all the media bias in the world that we know there is, I have never seen this kind of collusion between a presidential administration and his Department of Justice — Obama, FBI, DOJ — and the entirety of the mainstream media in an effort to bring down someone that they simply personally dislike.

I don’t even think that they’re worried about Trump policy-wise. Some of the Brits are with his comments about NATO and all that, but this goes so far beyond policy differences. This is an attempt to criminalize a man because he had the audacity to win the presidency, in defiance of everything they could think of to deny it to him. It is entirely understandable that he’d be sitting there in the White House while this thing unfolds, worried that they’re trying to take away his achievement, trying to take away his accomplishment, trying to take away his presidency.

He didn’t do any of this stuff. He knows he didn’t do any of this stuff. He knows this stuff didn’t happen, yet here’s this enlarging investigation every day. And it’s being reported on eagerly in the media all over the country. And he’s got the power to fire all these people, constitutionally, he’s got the power to fire Mueller. He had the power to fire Comey.

And so after a bogus two-year investigation into this, which is to cover up what these people actually did trying to screw Trump, they have to conclude that there wasn’t — do you know, if they had the slightest, if they had a speck of evidence that Trump had colluded, they would have put it in this report and gotten rid of him. They couldn’t!

I imagine it was one of the most disappointing, depressing days in the history of all these people working for Mueller when they had to admit that there was nothing. So now they have two sections in the report, one on collusion, one on obstruction, and guess what? Obstruction is where everybody is headed, and it’s nothing more than an endless parade of fake news.

People are reading excerpts from the Mueller report at CNN and MSNBC, New York Times, and they’re rewriting it in the form of transcribing it or simplifying it, taking some of the legalese out of it so that their audiences can understand it. And in the process of doing this they are literally manufacturing things. Like they put out a story at CNN: Trump, when Mueller was appointed, realized his presidency was screwed. He told Sessions his presidency was screwed, it was over.

It’s not at all what Trump was saying. CNN’s casting it as though Trump was guilty and knew he was guilty and the appointment of a special counsel would eventually arrive at that proof. Well, it hasn’t.

But see, here I am talking about it again as an investigation when that’s not even really what it was. It’s maddening. It is maddening to watch this. I sit here and I hope against hope that at some point all of this is gonna backfire on these people, but then I say it would have by now and in fact it has backfired. There isn’t any collusion. Everything they devoted their lives to for the past two years has blown up in their face.

So they act like that never happened. Now they’re off to the obstruction angle. You know, another analogy to the obstruction charges because of his comments about Sessions would be hearing somebody telling lies about you and you saying, “I’m gonna kill that guy” and then being arrested and charged with murder when all you were doing was reacting to it.

You get arrested for threatening to kill somebody when you never had any intention of doing it. So now they’re putting it out there, yeah, Trump told McGahn to fire Mueller and he told this guy to fire that person, he told that person to fire that person, and Trump wanted to obstruct the investigation. Well, the bottom line is, nobody was fired. And the next bottom line is that nobody was stopped from investigating even though it wasn’t an investigation.

And, in fact, on the contrary, Trump cooperated completely! Over a million White House pieces of paper, documents were furnished to Robert J. Mueller III and his band of Hillary-loving, Trump-hating investigators. But because in a moment of anger Trump said that he would like somebody fired, that is obstruction of justice.

And never mind that Trump allowed everybody in his administration to be interviewed. He turned over every one of the millions of pages of documents requested by Mueller without once bringing up executive privilege. Barr pointed this out today.

Barr said the president would have been well within his rights to claim executive privilege on a lot of this stuff. He didn’t even declare executive privilege once. He did not “not cooperate” with this. Quite the contrary.

The Drive-By Media also seizing on the part of the Mueller report where it says — I’m paraphrasing here — “if we had confidence Trump didn’t obstruct justice, we would so state.” Now, stop and think of that for a second. “If we had confidence Trump didn’t obstruct justice, we would so state.” There you have it.

That is a made-to-order morsel for these loon brains at CNN and MSNBC and everybody else in the Drive-By Media to pick up and run off with. “If we had confidence Trump didn’t obstruct justice, we would so state.” Well, that’s crazy.

In other words, even though they couldn’t find a single example of Trump obstructing justice, they aren’t sure he didn’t and they just didn’t find it. I mean, this is a prosecutorial investigation. As John Dowd said, this report can be done in two pages. The rest of this stuff is totally unnecessary.

But this is really — “If we had confidence Trump didn’t obstruct justice, we would so state.” In other words, even though they couldn’t find a single example of Trump obstructing justice, they aren’t sure he might not have anyway, and they just couldn’t find it. This is not permitted under Justice Department law.

You do not “not charge” somebody after an investigation and then list all the things you think they did. That’s what Comey did to Hillary, and that’s why he got into a little heap big trouble here. Not supposed to do that. That’s why some people are worried about what’s happening to our rule of law, the Department of Justice — this, folks, it is beyond description.

There are so many false narratives here that have been constructed to make people believe that everything that happened here is legitimate when none of it is. I’m talking about the so-called investigation.