RUSH: So I get this email during the break. “Rush, you do this all the time. You tell us what the big Democrat media bombshells are, but then you never talk about it.” That is very shrewd of you. That is very perceptive. Why should I turn this show into CNN? It’s nothing but a bunch of lies, folks. Why should I help them promote it? I’m just gonna tell you what they’re doing.
I’ll use this as an example. This latest guy, this Bill Taylor. How many bombshells can there be? Not a single one of them has borne fruit for these people, depending on how you define bearing fruit. They still don’t have an impeachable offense; they don’t have an impeachment; they don’t have Russian collusion; they don’t have obstruction. They have got nothing, folks. You understand that, right?
It may look to you like they’ve got everything because of the way the media covers them. They’ve got nothing. We’re now into our third year of this, folks, and it starts with Trump-Russia collusion. What happened to that? Now we have an impeachment over a phone call that in 2016 and 2017 and 2018 nobody knew was gonna be made. The phone call happens in July between Trump and the president of Ukraine. That’s the bombshell?
And now we’ve got, since that didn’t pan out, where’s the whistleblower? Who is this guy? The whistleblower, that didn’t bear out. That’s gonna poof. So now we’ve got this endless parade of diplomats and State Department and Pentagon people who are going in in private and telling Adam Schiff these blockbuster stories. Really? They’re throwing things up against the wall. They’ve got nothing. They never have had anything. I’m not suggesting that their intent isn’t serious, don’t misunderstand.
Let me get back to my impeachment analysis here because, folks, impeachment is purely political, and you can’t do it without public support for it. You just can’t do it, especially with the current lay of the land. There are 53 Republicans in the Senate. You would need 20 of them to vote with the Democrats to get a conviction. But what if that’s not the objective? It isn’t the objective because it’s not possible.
You’re not gonna have 20 Republicans vote to essentially kill the Republican Party, because that would do it. If sometime in the next 12 months 20 Republicans — with this economy and with Trump’s approval numbers hovering steady, they’re not plummeting, Trump’s approval numbers, depending on the poll, are inching up. CNN was lamenting this yesterday. John King on CNN was lamenting the fact that despite all of this his approval numbers are holding steady. They’re pulling their hair out!
You’re not gonna have 20 Republicans vote to convict unless they want to end the Republican Party ’cause I’m gonna tell you this. If sometime in the next 12 months during the heat of the presidential campaign with less than a year to go before the election you have 20 Republicans vote to convict the president, they can say good-bye to reelection and the party is finished, it’s over. They’re not gonna do that. The Democrats know this.
The game is not conviction because it can’t be achieved. And the game is not acquittal because that blows everything up. The last thing they want is to go to trial in the Senate and have 20 Republicans not vote to convict. That would mean Trump is found not guilty. That would be the worst possible things for Democrats after four years of Trump did everything, after four years of them trying to lie to the American people Trump’s guilty of every damn thing they’ve charged him with, three, four months before the election here comes an acquittal in the Senate? No way.
What they want is useful idiots like Mitt Romney to publicly express they’re support for getting rid of Trump. Then they can claim that this phony impeachment effort is bipartisan. And that’s their campaign. This is their 2020 campaign. They don’t think they can win it with any of the candidates they have seeking the nomination. They really don’t. The New York Times has told us that today.
They don’t think they can beat Trump on issues. They don’t think they can do that. All they’ve got — and I mean all they’ve got — is the ongoing effort to try to convince a majority of voters that Trump is unqualified, inept, and shouldn’t have been elected in the first place. Their effort, the objective here remains what it started out as, overturning the election results of 2016. They simply don’t have the time to get Trump thrown out of office before the 2020 election.
So what’s the gambit? Let me start at the top. I think a pause is coming on this, this impeachment business. You know, I keep falling for the trap. It isn’t an impeachment yet. There hasn’t been a formal vote. You cannot have an impeachment in private. It must be public. You cannot have an impeachment where the president’s party is not permitted to participate. You can’t have an impeachment where witnesses are not cross-examined. You can’t have an impeachment where the president doesn’t get to present his case. None of this is happening with Schiff’s little sham here that he’s running.
And it’s very crucial that Pelosi is still afraid to call a vote. She doesn’t want to endanger 40 seats. She got 40 seats in Trump districts in 2018. She doesn’t want to risk those. There was nothing to the Ukrainian phone call. Why is the bombshell today all of a sudden this ambassador or this diplomat named Bill Taylor, why is that the bombshell? What happened to the whistleblower, folks?
Remember the whistleblower a month ago was the bombshell. Remember how everything came to a screeching halt when news that a whistleblower had blown the whistle on Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president. Then what happened? Trump releases the transcript of that phone call. The moment he did that, the whistleblower and any subsequent whistleblowers to follow were rendered irrelevant because the whistleblower admitted that he did not have firsthand knowledge, meaning he did not actually hear the call. He wasn’t in on it. He had been told by people who heard the call what was said.
So the whistleblower was secondhand. I’m sorry. Secondhand versus actual call transcript, secondhand doesn’t have a chance. Secondhand has thus become irrelevant. What happened to the whistleblower? Where is he? Why are they not even talking about him anymore?
Why is the whistleblower gone and every day now there’s a new bombshell with a new witness? First it was Volcker, then it was Godnoff or Godney or whatever his name, now it’s Bill Taylor. I wouldn’t be surprised if they bring Sally Yates back, James Comey. It’s about time they start recycling things here.
Let me put this in the context of the last three years. It starts with Trump-Russia collusion. That’s gone. The walls were closing in. Trump was history. It was only a matter of time, nothing, zip, zero, nada. Whistleblower, gone, zip, zero, nada.
Now it’s Bill Taylor somebody nobody’s ever heard of. And I’ll tell you what his story is here in a minute. There was nothing to the Ukraine phone call. There’s nothing but trouble with the whistleblower. And, by the way, the whistleblower has other problems. His own past liaisons, his contacts, his motivations. He is an Adam Schiff friend of a staffer! Adam Schiff walked the whistleblower through the process.
Nobody thought Trump would ever release the transcript of the phone call. This all is a setup. It turns out that this star witness today, Bill Taylor, he’s been coached by an Adam Schiff staffer that flew to Ukraine and met with all these people. This has been in the works for a couple of months now, folks. None of it is just happening. They want you to think that Schiff has a committee going, and they’re calling in witnesses, and every day they’re learning something new, and every day it’s a bombshell.
They’re not learning anything. They are executing a previously planned program. The whistleblower was phase 1. That blew up. Every witness after this is somebody they’ve already been in contact with and have set up. And it is being learned that all of these people have relationships or relationships with staffers of Adam Schiff.
None of this is real, folks. I mean, it’s happening. It’s real. But it is not what they are leading you to believe. That Adam Schiff is a great patriot, he’s sitting there in his committee room in the basement, and he’s trying to get to the bottom of this. It’s so bad. Gotta get people to talk, trying as hard as he can to get to the bottom of this. And every day somebody comes in and they’re learning things they didn’t know and it’s even worse than anybody thought. None of that is true.
Like Christine Blasey Ford was not true. Her stories about Kavanaugh were not true. Like Anita Hill’s stories about Clarence Thomas were not true. Like Ted Kennedy’s allegations about Robert Bork were not true. There just isn’t any truth to this. That’s one of the reasons why I can’t believe the Republicans are so shell-shocked and not pushing back to this.
It is easy to characterize what this is. And the last thing this is is legitimate. But there is another important factor in this. We forget that Adam Schiff is a former federal prosecutor. Federal prosecutors have a lot of power with the grand jury. What is the grand jury? The grand jury is the epitome of the expression of power of a federal prosecutor because the opposition and target is not permitted in. The target’s lawyers are not permitted in. It’s just the prosecutor and the grand jurors.
And he can tell them anything he wants. He can ask them anything he wants. And the people that he’s trying to nail are not permitted in the room. And, furthermore, it is against the law for anybody in the room to say anything about what went on in the room. Well, this is what Schiff is doing! He’s essentially playing off his experience as a federal prosecutor, he’s running a grand jury, a mock grand jury hearing here and calling it impeachment. It isn’t!
It is the epitome of unfairness when you get right down to it. It is the epitome of a stacked deck. Adam Schiff is not just a liar. He’s incompetent. He cannot figure out how to sell his star chamber and yet he can’t run an open hearing because he doesn’t have any evidence, folks. He doesn’t have any evidence. Adam Schiff is on the hook.
Adam Schiff, since election night 2016, has been telling everybody that he has incontrovertible proof that Trump colluded with Russia. But he doesn’t. He’s lied about it. He’s never presented it because it doesn’t exist. He doesn’t have any evidence. “Well, Rush, I don’t know what these ambassadors are saying. It’s pretty bad.”
Folks, don’t fall for this. Where were these ambassadors three years ago? Oh, that’s right, they couldn’t say anything ’cause the phone call hadn’t happened ’til July of this year. One bombshell after another just explodes on ’em and blows up and, poof, it’s gone.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, see here right on schedule, here is CNN with a story, “Number 2 Senate Republican not a good picture of testimony.” This is the bombshell testimony of the day. This William Taylor guy, I’m gonna explain it here in a minute. Republicans are idiotic to even react to this. “Well, that’s not a good picture out of there.” What’s happening in here is an absolute scam.
By the way, here is a little news item. Democrats are hysterical that the Republicans who stormed into little Adam Schiff’s room today took cell phones. “Laura Cooper’s scheduled deposition has been upended by a group of House Republicans storming the hearing room, members say. Republicans took cellphones into the secure area, which is a huge violation. We’re told the room will need a security sweep before the deposition can continue.”
Folks, there’s nothing classified going on here! There is no testimony that’s classified. None of Hillary Clinton’s emails are being discussed. There’s nothing classified. They open each of these hearings by saying that nothing’s classified. There’s no reason for this to be happening at all other than the illusion that Schiff is attempting to create here. Now they’re having to bring everything to a screeching halt because Republicans took cell phones in there?
How the hell do the Republicans not even get allowed in there? One of the reasons I don’t spend a lot of time talking about this is because the more I think about it the more fit to be tied I am. I get literally angry over what is happening here and until today, the absence of any pushback against it. Schiff is running a scam. The guy is a total, colossal wandering shred of human debris in this. He’s just a punk! The guy can’t engage in anything that’s truthful if his life depends on it. “Well, they run the House, Rush, so they can do what they want.” Sadly there’s truth to that.
Okay, the Democrats have their hair on fire today over Trump’s tweet where he said his impeachment was a lynching. Now, as I mentioned at the top of the program, I think this actually now was strategic on Trump’s part. I think he knew what the reaction to this would be, and it was. The media went nuts. “You can’t say that! You can’t say the word ‘lynching.’ That’s so insensitive. That’s so bogus. That’s so ogre-ish. You can’t do that.”
And it totally covered up the intended conch of the testimony of this latest bombshell artist, a guy by the name of Taylor from some bureaucracy who was testifying before Schiff’s committee. In fact, NBC has the story. “Trump’s ‘Lynching Tweet’ Overshadows Bombshell Testimony – As a key witness testified in a Tuesday hearing as part of an ongoing impeachment inquiry on Tuesday, President Trump stirred controversy online, describing the investigation against him as a ‘lynching,’ a word deeply tied to America’s history of racially motivated murder.”
That’s just a crock! As I pointed out yesterday, the largest single mass lynching in this country occurred in 1891 in New Orleans of Italians. Yeah, blacks were lynched, but was not an exclusive to blacks crime, but look at the way this was worded. “A word deeply tied to America’s history of racially motivated murder.” God I hate these people. I just.
“Something like lynching is far beneath the office of the president of the United States,” said James Clyburn of South Carolina. “California’s Rep. Karen Bass said the comment was part of a pattern. ‘Every time his back is against the wall he uses race,’ Bass said. ‘He throws out race as a bomb to divert the attention.’”
Wait a minute. Who’s diverting attention here? Who’s diverting attention? You really think Trump thought that this — He knows calling impeachment a lynching is standard fare in Washington. Bill Clinton said he was being lynched. Biden said Clinton was being lynched. I’m not even gonna bore you with the sound bites, but we’ve got an endless parade of people on tape who have accused various Democrats of being lynched over impeachment, Clinton and otherwise, Biden. Biden’s out there apologizing today for having said it.
“The controversy drew attention away from the highly-anticipated deposition with acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor. ‘This is my most disturbing day in the Congress so far,’ Michigan’s Rep. Andy Levin said after hearing Taylor’s testimony. In a September text message, Taylor wrote ‘I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.’ U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland responded there was no quid pro quo, though he recently testified the president directed him to write that.”
This, folks, all of this is a great example of why these hearings should be open to the public. According to the Republicans who were in the room, Sondland supported Trump and completely contradicted Taylor. Taylor’s just the latest guy that Schiff has coached. There is a connection between a member of Schiff’s staff and Taylor. Schiff’s staff member went to Ukraine earlier this summer, coordinated things with Taylor.
This thing that Schiff is doing has been in the works since August. It is now October. The Democrats are using the testimony of this Taylor guy to move the goal posts again. Instead of Trump’s crime being his demand of a quid pro quo and his phone call, we’re now being told that the quid pro quo took place after that phone call.
Taylor, the bombshell witness of the day, is claiming, with no evidence — and we don’t know what he’s actually saying because there aren’t any transcripts. We just have to rely on what Schiff leaks and then what the New York Times publishes. Taylor claims that Trump’s envoy to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, told an adviser to the Ukraine president that the military assistance would not come until Zelensky publicly committed to pursue the Burisma investigation.
Now, this is another change, folks. The Democrats had moved away from alleging Trump wanting to investigate the Bidens to claiming Trump’s crime was wanting to investigate CrowdStrike. They keep going back and forth. They can’t settle on one thing ’cause they know the media is gonna keep confusing the issue.
Now we’re back to the crime being Trump wanting to investigate Bidens. Yesterday they were all upset about CrowdStrike. The day before that they were all upset about investigating the Bidens. The day before that it was a quid pro quo. Then Sondland said there wasn’t any quid pro quo. Then the Democrats admit there wasn’t a quid pro quo on the call; there was a quid pro quo that happened after the call.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian president is denying there was ever a quid pro quo, but they don’t believe him because he likes Trump. Now, Bill Taylor, ambassador Ukraine, bombshell witness, also claims that Sondland told him on September 8th that Trump is a businessman and that, quote, when a businessman’s about to sign a check to somebody who owes him something, the businessman asks the person to pay up before signing the check.
Taylor claims that Sondland said that President Trump wanted Zelensky in a public box by making a public statement about ordering such investigations. Yet the military aid was fully released on September 11th! The quid pro quo is now supposedly Trump threatening to withhold military aid after the phone call unless Zelensky did what Trump wanted. But the military aid was released on September 11th! The phone calls happened in August, July!
There wasn’t any public announcement about the military aid being released, but it was. Ukraine started any investigation of the Bidens without any of this — there was no quid pro quo here. Again, notice this is the secondhand account of what Sondland supposedly told Taylor. We just have Taylor’s word for it. There’s no cross-examination.
In Taylor, you’ve got a Sally Yates. You’ve got an Obama holdover. You’ve got a deep state person. All of this is the ongoing effort to try to sabotage Trump. It’s why I don’t like talking about this stuff. I don’t like airing what these leftists are alleging. I don’t even like putting it out there. And I got through two hours of this today without having to do it.
There is this minor detail. Ukraine president, foreign minister, everybody else involved said there was no quid pro quo ever. And that’s just being totally ignored on behalf of and in favor of secondhand testimony again. What happened to the whistleblower? Where did that go? When everything that Schiff has planned blows up magically, somebody else appears with bombshell revelations!
You know what? When we first heard about the whistleblower, we were told that there was an actual first whistleblower. I mean, we’d have to say that the first whistleblower was the first, but we were told, you know, he had secondhand information, that he was told by somebody. So in truth there was a whistleblower who blew the whistle to the whistleblower. I think it was Taylor. I think Taylor’s up to his eyebrows in this stink.
I think Taylor is the so-called second whistleblower who blew the whistle to first whistleblower who then goes to Schiff. We were told the second whistleblower, the attorney is a Republican with a long history in Foreign Service. That would be Taylor. This all just stinks.
Now, here’s the story. This from Breitbart. “Adam Schiff Staffer Met with Impeachment Witness on Ukraine Trip — Itinerary for a trip to Ukraine in August organized by the Atlantic Council think tank reveals that a staffer on Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a meeting during the trip with acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor, now a key witness for Democrats pursuing impeachment.
“The Atlantic Council is funded by and works in partnership with Burisma, the natural gas company at the center of allegations regarding Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.” Burisma is all over this. “Taylor has been called by House Democrats to appear next week to provide a deposition as part of the investigation being led by Schiff into President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.”
By the way, it’s a phone call Taylor himself never heard ’cause he’s never even read the transcript of it. Taylor did not hear the Trump phone call with Zelensky. Yet there he is as a witness, which makes me think he’s one of the whistleblowers here, a secondhand receiver of knowledge passing it on.
“Taylor himself has evidenced a close relationship with the Burisma-funded Atlantic Council, writing analysis pieces published on the Council’s website and serving as a featured speaker for the organization’s events. He also served for nine years as senior advisor to the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council, which has co-hosted scores of events with the Atlantic Council.”
We have a bunch of Democrats here, a Democrat think tank organizing with a Democrat committee chairman, a bunch of people claiming firsthand knowledge and secondhand knowledge of a phone call that’s now irrelevant because the transcript of it has been released.
Again, the key to Taylor’s testimony — this is such a convoluted timeline — the original allegation was — remember what Schiff said from his committee chair. He said that Trump told the president of Ukraine to dig up dirt, to make up dirt if he had to, on Joe Biden and his son Hunter. And, furthermore, he told him to do this eight or nine times on the phone call, promised to withhold American aid until the Ukraine president did all that. And then he told the Ukraine president not to call back until he had done all this. This is what Schiff said that Trump said.
Then it blew up on Schiff, and he had to say, “Well, no, no, that was parody.” So from that stage Schiff then kept maintaining that Trump was asking Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election by conducting an investigation into Biden and his son Hunter, Burisma and all of this. And Trump threatened to withhold any aid from the United States to Ukraine unless Ukraine followed through on Trump’s demand. That blew up when it was revealed that the aid had already started flowing before Trump even made the phone call.
Then they added, well, wait a minute, they added a quid pro quo. Trump said, Trump demanded that they do the investigation or that aid would stop! Then that blew up when the whistleblower couldn’t make the case. Now here comes Taylor and his bombshell testimony is that the quid pro quo happened after the call! But what really happened was that Trump told the president of Ukraine the aid would stop if he didn’t investigate Biden.
So we go from Schiff claiming Trump telling Ukraine there won’t be any aid unless they investigate, to, oops, sorry, we got the timeline wrong. Trump told them the aid would be stopped if they didn’t investigate. Why the change? Because Schiff never counted on anybody realizing the aid had already begun to flow before this phone call occurred. Now, this is why I don’t like doing CNN’s job, spreading the story of this.
I have to tell you what the media is reporting, and it is a pack of falsehoods, near falsehoods, some outright lies, and a lot of innuendo, given credibility by yet another deep state, we cannot distrust somebody from the State Department. Just like we can’t distrust anybody from the intelligence community. We have to trust them. They’re the best and the brightest. And all it is is the ongoing, conditioned, coordinated effort to come up with something to drive Trump’s voters away from him, lowering his approval numbers.