RUSH: I tell you what, I didn’t ever do one, but if I had had to do a doctoral thesis to get my Ph.D., that’s what show prep today would have, or did, probably feel like. I mean, so much of this stuff is in the weeds now that it is difficult to siphon through it. but that’s why I’m here, my friends, to make the complex understandable. And we will endeavor to engage in that quest today.

And we’re gonna do Open Line Friday on Thursday today because I’m out tomorrow. It’s an annual summer event, member-guest golf tournament out of town that runs Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

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RUSH: The honey pot. Folks, this story has taken so many twists and turns. And after immersing myself in it from the time I got home yesterday — well, I piddled around a little. From the moment I began to immerse myself in it until this program began. And reading things I don’t normally read, such as the New York Times.

And then knowing how to read between the lines in the New York Times, I now understand, if I put myself in the position, in the shoes of the media who hates Trump, and they want Trump to become Richard Nixon II and they want this to become Watergate, I understand why they think this episode gives them the opportunity. As opposed to the previous episodes of the last nine months not really providing that opportunity.

The New York Times is quite instructive on this today. Bear with me on this. I know you probably don’t like me quoting the New York Times, but bear with me on this. Because I am endeavoring to make all this complexity understandable. And unlike many, I will have a hard and fast conclusion when we get there.

But the New York Times has a story and a headline today that indicates it was Jared Kushner’s law firm which outed Donald Trump Jr. and the emails. If you read the story and if you don’t know how to connect something two paragraphs earlier to an innocuous sentence in a paragraph three paragraphs later, you’re gonna miss what this is really about.

You’re gonna end up concluding that Jared Kushner dropped the dime on Don Jr. I don’t think that’s what happened. But the New York Times writes their story and headlines it in such a way that most people are gonna conclude, and they’re gonna have mind-dropping, jaw-dropping reactions to it. What happened was that Jared’s legal team, Jared’s lawyers, he’s Trump’s son-in-law, so in the pecking order of the family he would rank below Don Jr., right? Plus, Jared is an official White House adviser.

Junior is not. Junior is over there running Trump Enterprises. In fact, part of the deal for the Trump family to not have to put everything in a blind trust is that Don Jr. got nothing to do with the government. He’s not a lobbyist; he’s not an adviser; doesn’t have a West Wing or East Wing office. He’s not there. He’s over there running Trump Enterprises.

So Jared Kushner and his lawyers had to amend their disclosure forms as part of security clearance and compliance with government service. And when all of this excrement hit the fan, they came across this meeting, which, up until recently, in most people’s view, was not much of anything. But the meeting between the honey pot and Don Jr. and Manafort and Jared. And so they amended the disclosure to admit that the meeting had happened because this babe is supposedly tied to the Kremlin. That’s arguable as well.

And if you read the New York Times story and you stop there, you might think, you might ask yourself, “Are you kidding me? Jared Kushner sold out his own brother-in-law? Jared Kushner dropped the dime on Don Jr.?” And then you’ll start asking, “What Trump’s gonna do? Oh, my God, is he gonna fire Jared? Can’t fire Jared. Jared’s married to Ivanka! And Ivanka won’t let him fire Jared. If anything, brothers and sisters, Ivanka will demand that Don Jr. walk the mile over to the prison and be done with it.” That’s what people are speculating.

I don’t think the Jared camp actually dropped the dime. My thinking and the thinking of quite a few others, I must say — this is not original to me — just common sense. Who, when you amend, if you’re a government service employee such as in the White House, Jared and his legal team, if they feel the need to upgrade, update disclosure form information, to whom do they give it? Who administers this?

The FBI. The FBI is it background checks. The FBI clears people. The FBI at the Department of Justice is where this kind of stuff goes. Well, then the next question is, how did New York Times find out about Don Jr. meeting with the honey pot? There were only three people in the honey pot meeting. Don Jr., Manafort, and Jared. President Trump says he didn’t know a thing about it when it happened. Did the honey pot leak? We don’t know. The honey pot was there under apparently false premises. She wanted to talk about adoption and the McGinsky Act.

So the conclusion here is that it’s the FBI who called the New York Times and reported on this meeting that Don Jr. had with the honey pot, and the email thread then enters the scene and we all know at the end of it Donald Jr. decided to get out in front of this and release the whole email thread, beating the New York Times to it, who also had the email thread as well. The theory was to get out in front of it.

There’s another faction in the Trump White House that doesn’t believe that at all. One of Trump’s guiding mentors was a New York lawyer named Roy Cohn. He was from the Truman Capote era. He was a battler. And Roy Cohn believed you don’t tell anybody anything. You don’t disclose anything. You don’t do it until God makes you, ’til a judge makes you, you don’t. But Junior went out and executed an entirely different corporate philosophy, just flood the zone, let’s get it all out there, it’s coming anyway, let’s get it out there and try to control it.

But the question remains, how did the New York Times find out about it before all of this happened? It looks like there’s another FBI leak here that made all of this public. Not to say — don’t misunderstand — not to say just ’cause the FBI leaked it that what happened is irrelevant and doesn’t have any meaning. I’m just trying to make sense of a New York Times story which makes it look like Jared dropped the dime, makes it look like an internal family squabble. It makes it look like Jared and his lawyers decided to throw Donald Jr. under the bus.

And yet if you believe the New York Times and their story construction here, it would not have been. They turned over the data. The FBI specified that this is proper government sources. Well, that would be the FBI in this case. So that’s one thing. Keep that in mind. All of this is relevant as this jigsaw puzzle gets put together.

Now, let’s do a simple timeline of the honey pot’s activities, based on various news stories that we have and will choose to believe or not. In October of 2015, the honey pot has an extraordinary hearing at the U.S. attorney’s office of the Southern District of Manhattan, Southern District of New York, an extraordinary hearing in which she is seeking permission to enter the country. She at the time does not have proper credentials to enter the country.

Remember, now, the Obama Justice Department’s running the show at this time. She received what’s called immigration parole. You ever heard of that? I hadn’t either. The U.S. attorney’s office in New York confirmed yesterday to TheHill.com that it let the honey pot, Veselnitskaya, into the country on a grant of immigration parole that ran from October of 2015 to early January of 2016. Meaning the Obama DOJ enabled the honey pot to enter the country without a visa.

She had been turned down for a visa to enter the U.S. lawfully but then was granted special immigration parole by then attorney general Loretta Lynch for the limited purpose of having a company owned by a Russian businessman, who happened to be the honey pot’s client, defend itself against a Justice Department asset forfeiture case in federal court in New York City. That’s ostensibly why she wanted to come into the country and was granted immigration parole.

In June of 2016, six months beyond the length of time of her immigration parole, she lures Trump Jr. into a meeting on the pretense of opposition research, that she has earth-shattering news from the highest levels of the Kremlin on corruption and sleaze on the part of Hillary Rodham Clinton. An email chain is established and leaked. The source of the leak remains unknown but I happen to believe, after having read the New York Times today, it’s the FBI.

The honey pot, Veselnitskaya, a documented liar, has said that her contacts with Trump Jr. and others in Washington was simply part of a lobbying campaign to get members of Congress and the American political people, members of Congress, so forth, to see the real circumstances behind the Mignitsky Act. And in fact her meeting with Trump Jr. and Manafort and Jared was about nothing but that. She had no drop-dead corruption info on Mrs. Clinton.

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RUSH: Okay. Now the thing in question at this point that I want to next go to is the honey pot claimed in her… Well, she didn’t. This Goldstone guy, the music publicist from the U.K. — who actually wrote these emails to Junior and was representing another third-party, the son of an oligarch in Russia who is very close to Putin. It is the British publicist who claims that this lawyer, the honey pot, has got news from the highest levels of Russian government about Mrs. Clinton and her corruption. And the honey pot never said so.

She never participated in the emails. It was just Donald Trump Jr. and the publicist — and, by extension, the son of the Russian oligarch that the publicist was talking to. He was in the email thread as well. So Trump Jr. and everybody takes the meeting on the basis that the honey pot’s got some knock-down-drag-out news about Mrs. Clinton.

When she shows up, she has none of the sort. She has nothing but an appeal to them to help with this McGinsky Act. Now, there a number of people who are speculating this isn’t true. There are a number of people who say, “This doesn’t make any sense.” A lawyer from the Kremlin is going to call the son of an unlikely winner, i.e. Trump? This is June, 2016! At this point in time, nobody thinks Trump’s gonna win anything. He’s gonna get the nomination, but he’s not gonna win at all. Hillary’s gonna win in a landslide.

So with that mind-set, what is this? Some lawyer, some honey pot from the Kremlin calls the son of a candidate likely to lose to make a pitch on an adoption issue involving Russians that nobody cares about? People think that isn’t true.

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RUSH: Let’s go back to the honey pot timeline now. October 2015 she has an extraordinary hearing that allows her to enter the country, immigration parole, U.S. attorney’s office, Southern District New York — that’s Manhattan — confirmed that they let the honey pot into the country on a grant of immigration parole from October 2015 to January 2016. This is without a visa she gets in.

The reason she was granted special immigration parole by Loretta Lynch was for the limited purpose of helping a company owned by Russian businessman Denis Katsyv, who was honey pot’s client, was to allow this guy to defend his company against the Justice Department asset forfeiture case in federal court. That’s why, she’s a lawyer, she was granted temporary immigration parole.

So why was she allowed to stay when that parole expired in January of 2016? It’s six months later that she meets with Trump Jr., under the false premise that she has dirt on Hillary Clinton from the highest levels of the Russian government. Justice Department, State Department officials have yet to explain how the honey pot was still in the country six months after her immigration parole had expired for a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and other people.

And, by the way, remember her original reason for wanting immigration parole was to help a client of hers defend his business against a Justice Department asset forfeiture case. Well, we don’t know anything about that. She is here to deliver hard information about Hillary Clinton from the highest levels of Russian government. When she shows up, she’s not asking for help in this case against her client’s business against the Justice Department. She’s asking for help with the McGinsky Act, which has to do with Russian adoptions.

And again, there are a lot of naysayers, a lot of people who do not believe this simply because they can’t believe that somebody this close to the Kremlin would actively seek a meeting on the McGinsky Act with the son of somebody who everybody thinks is gonna lose the election.

In other words, there’s a cadre of people who think Trump Jr. is lying and that the honey pot is lying. There are a lot of people who believe that she actually did pass along something of substance that has not yet been disclosed. This is one of the reasons the media won’t let go of it, folks. The media, and even some on our side, are convinced that this immigration story is a cover and that whatever the meeting was about, it was substantive. And the media thinks that it could equal collusion. The best I have been able to determine by consulting legal beagle after legal beagle is that no law was violated by Donald Trump Jr. in either accepting the meeting or taking it.

But at this point let me throw something else into the mix. Let’s do a hypothetical here. Let’s say that she did have something of substance, and let’s say the meeting did contain that something of substance, and everybody’s having a cow over it. My friends, we have to go back to the famous dossier which I further confirmed today that John McCain and Jim Comey were instrumental in this dossier becoming a basis and formidable part of every bit of the investigation of Trump.

Now, as best we can tell, despite the doubters, as best we can tell Donald Trump Jr. received nothing from the honey pot. Nobody can produce whatever they think it was. The people who think that there’s no way that immigration was actually what was on the honey pot’s mind. They still don’t have any idea of what was passed on. What did Donald Trump Jr. receive? However, the dossier is a different issue, and that’s on the Democrats. That dossier comes from Russia. I found a piece today by a Stanford Russian expert, Hoover Institution, back on January 12th, who read the dossier.

Now, it is reported that a British MI6 agent actually wrote the dossier. This Russian Soviet expert at Stanford says, “No way. This was written by KGB people.” He can tell by the sentence structure. He can tell by which words in it are capitalized. He can just tell that the Russians wrote the dossier. It has been attributed to Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS because that’s probably who the Russian agents passed it on to in order to get it into circulation.

Once McCain heard about it, he sent an aide across the Atlantic to get a hard copy, Comey got a copy of it, Brennan at the CIA got a copy, and we’re off to the races on the Trump investigation on the basis of a phony 36-page dossier written by the KGB. Meanwhile, the honey pot had nothing. And Lindsey Graham is out there saying that Donald Trump Jr. better be careful or he’s gonna go to jail for this.

Meanwhile, look at all of the American officials that have foreign fingerprints all over themselves with the passing around of this dossier! The dossier was substantive! It came from Russia! It was a pack of lies! It was determined! It was disguised! It was purposeful in destroying Trump and his campaign! And look at the American officials who eagerly accepted it! James Comey, John McCain, John Brennan.

Then what did they do with it? They used it to form the basis of an investigation that Trump was colluding, after they did. They colluded with whoever wrote the dossier. Steele, if you want to maintain that the MI6 agent wrote it, go ahead. I choose to believe the Stanford expert on Soviets and Russians, that it was a KGB work product.

There wasn’t one thing in it that was true, and there were many things in it that were demonstrably false, such as the location of one of Trump’s lawyers in this dossier. He’s placed in Prague, Czechoslovakia, meeting with — Prague, Czech Republic — meeting with certain people when his passport shows he’s never been there, he wasn’t out of the country on that day.

And then, of course, there’s the golden showers aspect of this that the dossier says Trump hired prostitutes to go urinate on the bed that Barack and Michelle Obama slept on at a swank hotel in Moscow. Anyway, while Donald Trump Jr.’s under the microscope for accepting, colluding intel from the honey pot, who had intel from the highest levels of the Kremlin, with mean stuff on Hillary, we don’t know that. We don’t know that she had anything other than some baseless appeal for assistance on an immigration law that was important to Putin and the Russians.

There’s no proof that she passed on anything of substance. But over here, the dossier, the dossier forms the basis on which to begin an investigation, the purpose of which is to destroy Donald Trump. And that was Russian. That was either Russian created or Russian distributed. Now look at what’s out of proportion here. Donald Trump Jr. didn’t do diddly-squat. In fact, what they’re trying to say about Donald Trump Jr., he was willing to accept, he was willing to accept foreign government intel to alter the outcome of an election.

Well, James Comey did. John Brennan did. “But, Rush, but, Rush, come on, they’re in the intelligence business, the national security business, it’s their job to keep America safe.” Yeah, with fake dossiers, fake documents that form the basis of an investigation that just happened to advance their own personal political policy preferences, which is to get rid of Trump? This dossier, this is all on the Never Trumpers. It’s all on all of these people. These people have cited and used it, Chuck Schumer, all of these Democrats who knew for months that Trump was not a suspect. Even after the dossier was used to form a foundation or basis for the Trump investigation, Comey told people for three months that Trump was not a suspect.

Schumer and all these people, Adam Schiff, Pencil Neck in the House running around like Trump is the target, is a person of interest. A lot of things are way out of proportion, way out of focus. But this doesn’t hide the fact that the media really thinks this Donald Trump Jr. story is the thing they can use to get rid of Trump.

I’ll tell you what their mind-set is right now. Their mind-set is they can get rid of Trump any time they want to by virtue of what they think they’ve got here. Their question is do they want to get rid of Trump before the ’18 midterms or after? They want to get rid of Trump where President Pence is not in office long enough to win reelection. This is what their current thinking is.

On the other side of this are people who believe that Vladimir Putin is behind all of this, that Putin sent honey pot here, that Putin did this not to destroy Trump, but to paralyze him. There’s all kinds of theories out there to explain what’s going on here. That Putin does not want to get rid of Trump, that he wants to own Trump, that he wants to be able to manipulate Trump because he’s got all of this so-called blackmailable information on Trump.

Well, that doesn’t quite wash, because Trump just spit back in Putin’s face by deploying the missiles in Poland that Putin does not want and that Obama had taken out. So the case cannot be made that Trump is doing Putin’s bidding, at least on this one instance.

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RUSH: So, I’m sorry. I just have to ask here. Did the Obama Department of Justice let the honey pot into the country with immigration parole so that she could eventually attend a meeting with Trump Jr.? Let’s just connect the dots as they appear to be connectable.

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RUSH: Now, I have just three things here that continue along these lines, and then we will head back to the phones. I have a story here from Bloomberg which kind of upsets a working media theory and a working theory that others not in the media who are not particularly crazy about Trump have. Let me just share some of the details on this with some analysis.

Donald Trump Jr., this story is from yesterday, late yesterday afternoon. Bloomberg: “Donald Trump Jr. was tantalized by an offer of Russian government documents that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But the Russian he met days later had been shopping around information that was hardly a bombshell.

“Around the time of last summer’s meeting with Trump Jr., Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya was peddling a new political spin on a well-worn international scandal, according to one person familiar with her work. She was focusing on hedge fund manager William Browder, the subject of her scorn and of a film she was promoting, and on Ziff Brothers Investments LLC, which had invested with Browder, the person said.”

Now, see, the reason this grabs my attention is because I thought the media narrative was that the honey pot just wanted to talk about Russian adoptions. The Magnitsky Act. How many of you ever heard of the Magnitsky Act or Russian adoptions before this came up? But that’s what the media narrative is, that the honey pot wanted to talk to Trump Jr., who is the son of a candidate nobody thought was going to win, about Russian adoptions. And, by the way, Putin has banned Russian adoptions in retaliation for the U.S. installing the Magnitsky Act.

“Russian prosecutors said they were opening new lines of inquiry against these investors.” William Browder, Ziff Brothers Investments, LLC. “What Veselnitskaya saw in these steps were alleged tax improprieties that would be a black mark on the Democratic Party, because Browder and at least one member of the wealthy Ziff family had contributed to the Clinton Global Initiative, the person said.”

So now all of a sudden the Clinton operation worms its way into this story. And as you read the whole story it sounds to me — I know I’m cynical, but it sounds to me like Bloomberg and whoever gave them this are trying to get out in front of the revelation that the honey pot did have real information incriminating the Hillary campaign and that they want to knock it down as old news before it becomes a big story.

Again, “Donald Trump Jr. was tantalized by an offer of Russian government documents that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But the Russian he met days later had been shopping around information that was hardly a bombshell.”

This is Bloomberg’s attempt to downplay this. Around the time of last summer, the honey pot was peddling political spin on a well-worn international scandal involving a hedge fund manager, an American named Browder, who she didn’t like, and of the Ziff Brothers Investments, LLC, which had invested with Browder.

Again, I don’t mean to be repetitive, but I need to make sure there’s no confusion here. We’re told the honey pot wanted to come in and talk about Russian adoptions. And instead before even the meeting she’s running around trying to make the case on this Browder guy. Look, it’s all in the weeds. The bottom line is that Bloomberg is claiming that the honey pot actually did have information on Hillary as it relates to her foundation taking donations from questionable hedge fund operators and their questionable partners. And it contradicts, especially NBC News and her interview with her, which all she cared about was adoption. Moving on.

Now, before I move on, I think it could be right. I think the Bloomberg story could be right. I think she did have something above and beyond adoption, and the Bloomberg story is just about trying to get out in front of it to downplay it, because what’s entered the fray now, thanks to Bloomberg, is the Clinton Foundation and the honey pot angry at some of the goings-on regarding donors there.

Now, the adoptions bit may not specifically be a media narrative. It could be the Trump narrative. It could be what the Trump team is saying the honey pot wanted to talk about. Here’s the bottom line. If the honey pot did give Trump Jr. this information on Hillary, accepting questionable donations from a couple of American hedge funds and investment firms, and even if it is the BS that Bloomberg describes, you could say that it has recriminations for Trump, because the media doesn’t care about Hillary.

Hillary’s old news. She lost. I don’t think the media is gonna care if what the honey pot was doing is actually passing along information that was damaging to Hillary, because Hillary’s old news in everybody’s mind except Hillary. She’s old news. Everybody knows she’s not gonna be president. Everybody knows that no matter what happens to Trump, she’s not gonna be president. She’s a has-been. They’re moving on to other things at the media and in the Democrat Party.

What they care about is showing that Putin wanted Trump to beat Hillary and that Putin gave Trump damaging info. That’s what’s getting them up every morning. That’s what’s keeping them going. If they think this story gives them the opportunity, if there is the chance to suggest that Putin gave Trump information damaging to Hillary via the honey pot and the Don Jr. emails and the June 9 meeting, give the media just enough of both of those things to pursue this. That’s why they’re running so hard with it. This is the collusion aspect. This is not the obstruction aspect.

Then there’s this, and I mentioned this in the last hour and I’m gonna mention it one last time. The media narrative on this collusion business is that Trump is owned by Putin. The narrative is that Trump received information from Putin via the honey pot that was damaging to Hillary, that Putin, therefore, is owed by Trump, that Trump owes his victory to Putin.

This is what they’re trying to construct. They’ve been after this for nine months, that Trump and Putin colluded. And the idea that Putin is the master puppeteer and Trump is the novice that doesn’t know what he’s doing and Putin’s brilliant and Putin’s tough. And Trump is an egoist and he’s a narcissist and he can be played and manipulated easily.

They’re trying to make the case here that Putin owns Trump. And yet I don’t believe that’s the case because Trump just agreed to sell Patriot missile defense systems to Poland yesterday in an apparent counter to the growing Russian threat on European’s eastern board. The memo was signed by Trump on his first day in Poland, according to the Poland defense minister.

He said, “A memorandum was signed tonight that the U.S. government has agreed to sell Poland Patriot missiles in the most modern configuration. I am glad that I can pass on this information on the day of President’s Trump visit to Warsaw.” This happened when Trump was in Poland. It’s now actually done.

So if Putin owns Trump and if Putin’s a marionette, if Putin’s a puppeteer and he’s pulling the strings and he’s got Trump in his debt because he helped Trump beat Hillary, Trump isn’t doing a good job of paying him back here. If Trump was owned by Putin, those missiles would not be deployed in Poland today. That deal would not have been made.

It was Obama who wanted to take those missiles out and never deploy them. It was Obama who wanted to curry favor with Putin. It was Obama who was asking Putin for more time and flexibility. Trump is not acting like Putin owns him. Trump’s not acting like he owes Putin anything. I think all this is gonna turn out very badly for the media who think they’re on to something here, because some of these things just don’t add up, as they haven’t added up for nine months.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Open Line Friday on Thursday here on the Rush Limbaugh program, the fastest three hours in the media. Greg in Amarillo, Texas. Welcome, sir. I’m glad you called.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. It’s a pleasure talking to you.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: I have a question.

RUSH: Yeah?

CALLER: Going back to the honey pot story, when she was supposed to meet with Trump Jr., wouldn’t she have gone under an FBI background check before meeting with him?

RUSH: Don’t know. Don’t know. All I know is that she was granted immigration parole because she was not legally permitted to enter the country. She wanted to stay longer than just, you know, a day trip/couple days. So she needed a visa.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: She was granted immigration parole by the Obama Justice Department for something totally unrelated to what her meetings with Trump junior about. Her meetings with Trump Jr. occurred six months after her temporary visa expired and she was still in the country. I don’t know what kind of background check she would have undergone with the FBI.

CALLER: That’s why I was wondering if the FBI did a background check since she was meeting with a family member all of presidential election (sic), ’cause that would have been something I would think they would have caught in the background check is the fact that she —

RUSH: I know what you’re saying. You know what he’s saying? “The FBI knew that the woman was dirty and they let her in anyway because they wanted to corrupt Trump!” Remember when this was happening. Look, folks, the timeline on this is really odd. This is June of 2016. Trump doesn’t even have the nomination yet. At this point in time, everybody’s waiting for the Republican National Committee to pull some stunt to deny Trump the nomination. Does anybody remember who really got the subject placed in the public domain of Trump colluding with Russia? I believe it was Hillary during a debate. I can’t cite the specific.

But when the honey pot shows up, nobody in Washington thinks Trump is gonna be president. You know, very few people are… It’s June. I mean, Trump’s won the nomination for all intents and purposes unless the GOP can come up with some stunt to deny him the victory by virtue of delegate votes. But my point is, it would have been really, really early to start plotting the demise of Donald Trump. And that’s been, for me, a very difficult thing to believe, that the honey pot flies all the way across the ocean to talk about something like the Magnitsky Act with the son of a guy that nobody thought was gonna win, which makes it suspicious to me. I don’t know about the FBI background checks on people like this, and I’d be afraid to speculate.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here Paul in a Minneapolis, Rush Limbaugh program, Open Line Friday on Thursday. Welcome, sir. How you doing?

CALLER: I’m doing fine, Rush. It’s great to talk to you.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I have a question and a couple comments, if you have time.

RUSH: Sure.

CALLER: My main question is, could this attack on Donald Jr. prompt President Trump to push for more overt investigations into Hillary Clinton, Loretta Lynch, all of that? Trump seems to be able to handle the grenades pretty easily, but I don’t think he takes too kindly to people going after his kids.

RUSH: Yeah. I was wondering about this yesterday. I asked people to put themselves in Trump’s shoes and how they think they would deal with this onslaught every day, plus the responsibility, he’s gotta be president, he’s gotta be presidential, he’s gotta do the daily requirements of the job. It requires a clear head. It requires a number of mental and psychological commitments to do this job responsibly. And every day this kind of stuff, the most savage personal stuff’s coming at you; now his children thrown in on it. I asked people how they would ponder it.

Somebody asked me, I think either yesterday or last night, if I thought this would inspire Trump to take back his promise not to investigate Mrs. Clinton. He was simply engaging in what everybody’s been taught to believe are good political manners. When you win, you win with politeness, and you win with sportsmanship, and you don’t take the occasion to go after your vanquished opponent. It’s enough that they have to concede and so forth. And so Trump said, ah, it wouldn’t serve any purpose.

But I wonder, like you, at some point if they’re not gonna essentially inspire this kind of reaction. And I think if he did it, the vast majority of the Republican Party today — and I’m talking about voters — would applaud it like nothing you’ve seen applauded. I think Trump would have so much support for this. The media would ratchet up and they would blow another gasket. It would be worth it to see.

CALLER: I agree with you.

RUSH: What’s the other question or your comment?

CALLER: Well, the other comment was kind of building up what you just said, that the Republican voters would kind of jump on board with that. What always got me is this whole popular vote argument that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, blah, blah, blah. Well, if you look at it from an ideological standpoint, I think Republican ideology won the popular vote. If you add up Trump, Johnson, and McMullin versus Clinton and Stein, they went over a million more votes.

RUSH: Yeah, you could dissect this any number of ways. You could also say that Hillary won the popular vote in one state, and it’s true. Her popular vote victory margin is identical to her popular vote margin in the state of California. And Trump didn’t campaign there. That’s the point of the Electoral College. He didn’t campaign there, he didn’t spend much time in New York. He didn’t go to these states that were automatically gonna go to Hillary, why waste your time and money.

Had those states been in play, had we had nothing but a popular vote, I guarantee you the campaign would have been fought in California, and she wouldn’t have won by two million votes or whatever it was. Now, as to your first question about — look, that’s just the left trying to convince themselves that she actually won. They still can’t come to accept it, but I want to call your attention to something I led the program with.

This is one of these stories — the Washington Post, I was even told last night was gonna front-page it. They didn’t. They ended up putting it deep in the paper under the “Virginia politics” section. Ed Gillespie, who is Republican establishment extraordinaire. He has worked for every Republican establishment official there is to work for. He was a chief counselor to George W. Bush. He has run the Republican National Committee. And he’s a nice guy. I know Ed Gillespie. He’s decided he wants to run for office.

So Terry McAuliffe, The Punk, the current governor in Virginia not running. So there are primaries in both the Republican and Democrats for the Virginia governorship. And it was assumed by everybody Gillespie was gonna win his primary against his Republican opponent in a walk, because these guys all believe that Donald Trump is hated, despite the fact that he won. They have this condescending arrogance toward Trump voters and they don’t think they live in anywhere but the sticks and the swamps and the trailer parks of America.

“There certainly aren’t any Trump voters here where we live in Virginia. No way, Sally. And we know there aren’t any Trump voters in Manhattan. No way. And there aren’t any Trump voters, no way, in Washington.” And there really aren’t, in Washington. And Gillespie barely, barely squeaked by his nameless opponent when the smart money in the GOP thought he was going to rock a landslide primary victory.

In the Washington Post story headline: “Gillespie’s Primary Scare Has White House, Others Urging ‘Trump World’ Hires.” It turns out that everybody on Gillespie’s staff, his pollsters, his advisers, his spokesman people, his consultants are all Never Trumpers. And he nearly lost what should have been a cakewalk primary. So the resulting theory, which I think is more fact than theory, is that even now traditional establishment Republicans have no idea who their voter base really is.

It’s staring them right in the face, the people that elected Donald Trump, but since they are in their own version of denial like the Democrats are — I mean there’s a lot of Never Trumpers on the Republican side, particularly in our media. But as evidenced here with Gillespie hiring practically all Never Trumpers and barely winning and now he’s been told, “You know, you need to hire some people who know the current base of Republican voters,” because apparently Gillespie doesn’t know how to appeal to them.

Apparently Republican establishment types think that the mainstream Republican voters are embarrassed of Trump, doesn’t like Trump, and wouldn’t vote for Trump again. And they’re totally missing the boat on this. So I think both parties are scrambling trying to figure out what happened and trying to tell themselves that what happened really didn’t happen, but for a couple of weird anomalies. They cannot face the facts.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Mark in Fort Worth. Welcome, sir. It’s great to have you here.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Lone Star dittos from the great state. Rush, regarding this meeting with Trump Jr. and the honey pot.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: I think it’s really tempting to think that somehow this is a setup. I mean we certainly have evidence that the Obama DOJ would do whatever they could in any sort of way to disrupt Trump and his agenda. But I really think, given the way the last year has played out, I really think we can rule out the thought that there’s any kind of setup here because if this had been set up, then they would have documentation of it. They would have known that the meeting happened, and they would have not spent the last nine months wandering around in the wilderness looking for evidence for collusion if they had this.

So, A, it doesn’t make any sense, it’s a really odd setup, it’s a really odd occurrence, but I don’t think that she’s a plant or at least not from the Democrat side. She may be a Russian plant. But I don’t think the Obama DOJ or the Democrats really had anything to do with this because they would not have sat on this for nine months. They’ve been wandering around looking for hard evidence of collusion for months making themselves look stupid doing it.

RUSH: There is something to what you are saying here, Mark, by virtue of a New York Times story yesterday or today, I don’t remember which.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So our previous caller said that he just doesn’t see how this could be a setup. (music) A little Marvin Gaye here: “What’s Going On?” Many people ask themselves that many times a day. Anyway, the theory is that the honey pot gets into the country with a visa exception called immigration parole, and she’s allowed in for a period of time that expired in January 2016. Yet in June of 2016, she’s still here. And that’s when she is set up by the British music publicist as wanting to meet with Trump Jr. to pass on some information — from the highest levels of the Kremlin — which is quite telling about corruption with Mrs. Clinton.

His theory is that, this is June of 2016; the last nine months to 12 months, the Drive-Bys and the Democrats have been unearthing everything, trying to find evidence of collusion. If this was a setup, it would have been set up a year ago, and they wouldn’t have sat on it this long. They would have known about it before this week, and so they would have used it way, way back before now. I think there’s something to that, especially with the New York Times story. Now, folks, the setup doesn’t necessarily have to be that it was a setup for Trump.

Remember, she was given what’s called immigration parole. She was working to defend against an action that people were taking against… The Clinton Foundation was involved in the case that she had clients, and that was why she was let in. Now, the New York Times story today — headline and the body of story — would lead you to believe that it was Jared Kushner’s legal team which dropped the dime on Donald Jr. If this was a setup, everybody would have known about this long before this week, or somebody would have — and the somebody who would have known would have been very simpatico with the media.

So they would have known long before this week or this past weekend that this happened. The New York Times story today says that it was the Jared Kushner legal team, which dropped the dime on Junior. That’s what they want you to conclude. What happened was that because of this meeting that Jared Kushner attended, they had to amend disclosure forms that are reported to the Department of Justice. You have to disclose who you meet with and what went on as part of the attempt here at constructing the impression our government clean and pure as the wind-driven snow.

So they had to amend disclosure after this meeting took place. What people don’t know is how did New York Times find out about it? The only people in the meeting were Jared Kushner and Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. and the honey pot. So how in the world did the New York Times find out about it? If you don’t know how to read their story, you’ll conclude that Jared Kushner’s lawyers dropped the dime and reported and leaked it to the New York Times. If that’s the case, then the Trump White House is in total disagree. If the son-in-law is trying to destroy the No. 1 Son, then what the hell is going on there?

But that isn’t what happened, in my reading of this. I think the New York Time outs the source. They don’t do it specifically. You just have to know how to read the way they write things. And what they stay is that the Jared Kushner legal team amended disclosure forms and turned the information over to “the proper authorities” to whom disclosure information is provided. But that happens to be the FBI. So I think the New York Times inadvertently… They didn’t expressly or directly do it, but I think they inadvertently identified their source.

In this case, it’d be somebody at the FBI who found out about the meeting after looking at the updated disclosure forms furnished by Jared Kushner’s legal team. I don’t know how else it would’a have happened. If Jared Kushner did leak this (chuckling) in an action to take out his brother-in-law? Whew! What would Trump do in that case? You’ve go on the brother-in-law who is a key top adviser married to your daughter, versus your son over here who’s running Trump Enterprises and you’ve got an internal squabble going on? I don’t think that’s what was going on.

But that’s what you would conclude if you read this in a very cursory way. As far as it being a setup by the Obama the Department of Justice to go after Trump? (sigh) That is a stretch. But it’s not a stretch because it’s remained secret for all this time. If the Obama Justice Department set it up and sat on it, somebody would have leaked it certainly in the past year. But she was let in for a reason. She was granted immigration (whatever it is) for a year or six months that she was allowed to overstay. Maybe because she was here and she’s already well known in the Kremlin, that’s why Goldstone decided to use her to take the meeting with Trump Jr.