RUSH: I’m not even gonna try to characterize this. All I’m gonna tell you is that Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the committee, had to intercede and stop Mazie Hirono from slandering the attorney general. Well, I will characterize it. I’m not gonna characterize what she said. I’m gonna wait ’til I get the audio so that you can hear it. I’ll just tell you that I’ve never seen anything like it before.

The vicious, unrestrained, pure, raw hatred from the Democrat senator from Hawaii, Mazie Hirono, for Donald Trump — and then secondarily directed at the attorney general, William Barr. (interruption) Yeah, I’ve got it. I just need to turn around here and grab it. I’ve not seen anything like this. We have not got all of it, but we’ve got about two minutes and 45 seconds of it. This began right as the previous hour was concluding.

BEGIN HIRONO CLIP

HIRONO: Mr. Barr, now the American people know that you are no different from Rudy Giuliani or Kellyanne Conway, or any of the other people that sacrificed their once decent reputation for the grifter and liar who sits in the Oval Office. You once turned down a job offer from Donald Trump to represent him as his private attorney. At your confirmation hearing, you told Senator Feinstein that, quote, “The job of attorney general is not the same as representing,” end quote, the president. So you know the difference, but you’ve chosen to be the president’s lawyer and side with him over the interests of the American people.

To start with, you should never have been involved in supervising the Robert Mueller investigation. You wrote a 19-page, unsolicited memo — which you admit was not based on any facts — attacking the premise of half of the investigation. And you also should have insisted that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein recuse himself. He wasn’t just a witness to some of the president’s obstructive behavior. We now know he was in frequent personal contact with the president, a subject of the investigation. You should have left it to career officials.

Then, once the report was delivered by the special counsel, you delayed its release for more than two weeks. You let the president’s personal lawyers look at it before you even deigned to let Congress or the public see it. During the time you substituted your own political judgment for the special counsel’s legal conclusions in a four-page letter to Congress. And now we know — thanks to a free press — that Mr. Mueller wrote you a letter objecting to your so-called summary.

When you called Mueller to discuss this letter, the reports are that he thought your summary was giving the press, Congress, and the public a misleading impression of his work. He asked you to release the report summaries to correct the misimpression you created, but you refused. When you finally did decide to release the report over a congressional recess and on the eve of two major religious holidays, you called a press conference to once again try to clear Donald Trump before anyone had a chance to read the special counsel’s report and come to their own conclusions.

But when we read the report, we knew Robert Mueller’s concerns were valid and that your version of events was false. You used every advantage of your office to create the impression that the president was cleared of misconduct. You selectively quoted fragments from the special counsel’s report, taking some of the most important statements out of context and ignoring the rest. You put the power and authority of the office of the attorney general and the Department of Justice behind a public relations effort.

END HIRONO CLIP

RUSH: And that’s not all of it. She continued and told him that he should resign, that he is a disgrace, that… Now, this woman is… If you remember during the Kavanaugh hearings, she is the woman who said that what men need to start doing is just “shut up,” just shut up and go away, just get out of everything. This is an example of the poisonous hatred that has taken over the Democrat Party and the American left. She’s no different than an anonymous tweeter or blogger issuing comments.

She is ignorant, a liar, mischaracterizing what Barr’s work has been, mischaracterizing and slandering his honor and his integrity, when he has done nothing even close to what she has alleged. He didn’t change anything in the Mueller report. There is a copy of it for people like her to go look at; only two members of Congress have. They have not been denied the opportunity to see it. He did not massage it; he did not change anything of it. Robert Mueller has never expressed any dissatisfaction with Barr’s substantive summary of what the Mueller report says, and we’ve all read it now.

We all have read the report. The report clearly says there was no collusion, and Mueller would not come to an opinion on obstruction. But I maintain that Mazie Hirono today and the other Democrats are exactly what Robert Mueller wanted. This is exactly what he and his team wanted to happen. This is why they wrote a 488-page report that could have been written in two pages. Mazie Hirono, as far as I’ve been able to tell, has not gone to see the unredacted report. “Just Two Lawmakers Have See Less-Redacted Report —

“Barr offered access to a less-redacted version of the report to … 12 members of Congress — six Democrats and six Republicans. But as of Tuesday afternoon, only Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Lindsey Graham,” have gone to look at it. No Democrats have taken the time to go look at what the report says, the unredacted version. But we’ve already seen it. Mueller does not allege collusion! But this is exactly why he wrote 488 pages, so that we could get lying, stinking slander and libel aimed at Donald Trump and anybody who works for him or anybody in his administration.

Now, Lindsey Graham finally stepped in and stopped this because she didn’t ask a question. It took her a long time to get to the actual questions that she had, and they were baseless, mindless questions and answerable with one word: “No.” Barr started to say, “How in the world did we get to this point?” and then Lindsey Graham decided to step in and shut it down and say that her opportunity for slander had ended. If she had some questions, she could continue.

But she didn’t because she had accomplished what she wanted to accomplish. “Mr. Barr, now the American people know that you are no different from Rudy Giuliani or Kellyanne Conway or any of the other people who sacrificed their once decent reputation for the grifter and liar who sits in the Oval Office. You once turned down a job offer from Donald Trump to represent him as his private attorney.” You know, the United States Senate used to be an institution where people like this never even stood a chance at getting elected.

I listen to Mazie Hirono go on and on, and I’m reminded of all the people who have said such caustic things about talk radio, all of the so-called horrible behavior and horrible things said on talk radio — and here is a United States senator plumbing the depths of disgrace with her own words. The attorney general just sat there. He listened to it. I mean, there was no opening for him to reply, and she didn’t give him any opportunity during most of that because she never went to questions. It was the kill session.

Her mission during these hearings has been to kill Barr professionally, and his integrity. But the bottom line is that after all of this, nothing has changing. There still is and was no collusion between Trump and Russia. There was no obstruction. They can try as hard as they want, and it really… It’s mind-boggling. You have a 488-page report that says no collusion, no obstruction, and yet you’ve got an entire political party who is devoted to trying to convince the American people there was and that Mueller actually concluded…

“You can read it! You can read between the lines,” they’re saying. “Yeah, Mueller is signaling! There’s collusion in there. He just didn’t want to pull the trigger. But it’s in there, and Barr is covering it up.” And they are counting on the ignorance of the American people. They’re counting on the fact that their accomplices in the media are gonna report this narrative that Barr is acting as the president’s personal lawyer, covering up the fact that Mueller found collusion and Mueller complained last night. The Washington Post “found” the letter.

This is all a gigantic set up to continue the only thing Democrat Party has. They know they can’t run against the Trump economy. They can’t run against that. The latest economic news today is the news on payrolls being skyrocketing high again. African-American, Hispanic unemployment are at all-time-record lows. I mean, the news day to day that reflects life on the ground for the American people is up, and it is improving, and it’s getting better.

It has been ever since Barack Obama left office, and this is what they have to try to cover up and make people ignore or forget. Hence, the lies throughout the media that the tax cut really wasn’t a tax cut and that the tax cut did not result in people having any more money except for the rich. So this party has willingly conquered a segment of American politics where virtually everything they hope to use to win is a lie.

Virtually everything. That seems to have been their total effort here, to embrace every lie that they can invent and manufacture and try to convince people that all of these lies are the truth and then win elections based on all of those lies, ’cause it’s abundantly clear they can’t compete in the arena of ideas or reality. Brief time-out. There’s a little bit more. We didn’t have time to get all of Mazie Hirono. We’ll have whatever was left of what she said and Lindsey Graham getting into her face and accusing her of slander soon, as we get that up and running.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: One of the possible explanations for Mazie Hirono to slander and smear Barr so that when Democrats are indicted for spying and lying, the indictments can be called partisan and so forth. I think that could be an explanation for this, although with her I think it’s just her base hatred. I think it is her essential consuming, poisonous hatred for Donald Trump, and Barr is the way she can get to Trump today, so Barr becomes her target.

If Kavanaugh were sitting there, it’d be the same thing. It doesn’t matter who was sitting there today, she would launch. She hates, she despises, she is being poisoned with her hatred for Trump. But she’s not alone.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Yep. Yep. Exactly what I thought. I just watched here a little bit of Kamala Harris. Folks, these people are just… They’re not very smart. They have to filibuster. (summarized exchange) “Let me ask. Did you check, Attorney General Barr, you grifter…? Did you check, uh, with the DOJ department of ethics before you let Rosenstein help you look at the report?”

“For what?”

“To see if he was conflicted!”

“Conflicted about what?”

“Well, he was a witness!”

“A witness to what?”

“Well, he was a witness to Comey being fired.”

“Well, yeah. It was his memo that recommended that Comey be fired.”

“That’s right! So did you consult with the office of ethics in the DOJ before allowing him to look at the Mueller report with you?”

“Well, I assumed that he had been ethically cleared because he was doing it already.”

“But did you check with the office of ethics?”

“I didn’t think it was necessary. If he’s looking at it, he’s probably been cleared. You people confirmed him 94-to-six.”

“That’s not my question!”

” I am so glad you brought this up. Well, I think…”

“I’m not through asking you my question!”

(groans) I’m sure, ladies and gentlemen, after I’ve had time to further digest this, I’ll have even further analysis. I’m giving you the off-the-cuff reaction to this. But, you know, in the old days, these people would be committing political suicide today. But we don’t know how many people are ever gonna see any of this, number one. Number two… Like, Snerdley was just asking me, “Okay, look. What about the Millennials and the independents, these people that just want us to get long, these people that want us to cooperate, and they see these Democrats being mean-spirited and acting like this?”

I said, “To the extent that they see it…” A, I don’t believe independents are independent, number one. I think being an independent is one of the biggest snow jobs ever perpetrated on the American people. Independents get to portray themselves as open-minded, nonjudgmental, nonpartisan. “We are not closed-minded. We do not make up our minds in the beginning. We wait and look at all sides the issue.” Most of them are liberal Democrats anyway. Not all.

But I said to Snerdley, “Well, with the status of the Republican brand right now, Millennials looking at this could be applauding Mazie Hirono, for all I know, and they could be applauding Kamala Harris.” That’s partly what I mean when I talk about the (sigh) descent of our culture and our society and its dumbing down, and I think it may not even be complicated at all.

We just may be witnessing the behavior of people who literally are governed by pure and raw hatred. It may be no more complicated than that. It may not be strategic. It may not be that Mazie Hirono is laying down markers for when Democrats and others are indicted in an investigation into the investigation. It could well be she’s just a single-minded person filled with so much hatred that she doesn’t have enough outlets for it.