RUSH:  So I checked the email during the break.  “Rush, are you seriously downplaying the importance of the Russians trying to tamper in our electoral process?”  Yeah, in one way.  I think it needs to be kept in perspective. The Russians do try to sow discord.  What the Russians try to do… Folks, they didn’t care who won.  In fact, this indictment from Mueller makes it clear to me that Putin and the Russians thought Trump was gonna lose.  What the Russians try to do is create division and opposition to whoever wins in the United States.

So in that sense, it’s not that they push a particular candidate.  Look at what the indictment says.  Before the election, you had a bunch of people out there from Russia organizing pro-Trump rallies.  After the election, the same bunch of Russian people were supporting and running anti-Trump rallies.  They’re trying to sow discord, but there are Americans trying to do this on Twitter and Facebook that make the Russians look like rank amateurs.

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RUSH: I saw John Sununu on Fox this morning. He asked a couple questions I asked last Friday. Why did Rosenstein announce that indictment? And why was it on Friday in the midst of the shooting story out of Florida?

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RUSH: Now I want to move to the Mueller indictment, which, when it happened on Friday, you know, all kinds of things were popping, because the school shooting was fresh, and it was the lead story on every network. It was the only story, and then out of the blue, everybody got a heads-up that Mueller was going to indict some Russians in the Trump-Russia collusion investigation. And this brought everything to a screeching halt. And then it was time to announce it, they send Rosenstein out there on a Friday. And I remembered asking, “What is this?”

Friday is normally when you dump a bunch of stuff that you don’t want anybody to see. Document dump Friday is how it’s known. Now, usually document dumping happens after 3 p.m., and this was right at 1 p.m. But still it was very curious to me. Why wouldn’t Mueller announce these indictments? Why was it Rosenstein and then doing it on a Friday in the midst of this other story? And, of course, the answers are pure speculation, but believe me there is a reason for this, although it’s gonna sound crazy.

I think that they were hoping that the story would be overridden by continued coverage of the school shooting. They knew it was gonna be covered. They knew that everybody would stop for a while to talk about it, but then would get back to the school. It’s still curious why it happened this way. And of course the upshot of it is that none of what the Russians did changed anything in terms of the outcome of the election. And that if any Trump people interacted with these Russians, they did so unwittingly, meaning they didn’t know it.

You ought to see my tech blogs. My tech blogs are distressed over this. And then the piece de resistance — and you may not know about this — a former Facebook employee who was a vice president for advertising sales, came out Friday and said that the bulk of Russian advertising purchases on Facebook happened after the election. This has totally deflated my Millennial left-wing tech bloggers, who believed that Mueller was gonna come in and nail Trump with this.

And now they feel especially betrayed because Facebook is who ultimately pulled the rug out from under ’em. But what does it mean? And Trump seized on it, by the way, and he started — I think this guy’s name was Goldman, if I’m not mistaken. Trump started tweeting exactly what this guy said. The Russians spent — it was a ridiculously low amount of money compared to the aggregate total of political spending.

But you don’t require a lot of money when you spend it on Twitter or Facebook by the time it gets retweeted, refed whatever it is, it reaches many more people than you could buy. But then this Facebook guy comes out and says, “Well, wait a minute. The bulk of Russian advertising revenue was purchased after the election.” Well, you talk about air going out of a balloon. That meant that the Russians’ ad spending was not to try to elect Trump. And with that went 90% of the investigation’s purpose. Oh, yeah, the tech bloggers writing about it.

So what we found out is, if you read the indictment, what the Russians were doing was trying to incite discord against whoever won. And that’s why most of their action was targeting Hillary Clinton, because everybody thought she was gonna win. Nobody thought Trump was gonna win. In fact, the Russians actively thought Trump was gonna lose.

So all of this anti-Hillary stuff, that’s how it was characterized as the Russians colluding with Trump. But that’s not what it was. It was the Russians sowing discord against who they thought would be the eventual winner. And then when Trump wins, what do they do? They do a 180 and they start organizing rallies in opposition to Trump. The Russians organized a “He’s not our president” rally. Tens of thousands of people all over the country. We now learn the Russians did it.

But before the election the Russians were sponsoring pro-Trump rallies. Then Trump wins, and they turn into Trump haters. And this has befuddled and confused all who have believed every lie and bit of fake news the Drive-Bys have reported. There wasn’t any collusion. There was the Russians attempting to sow discord against who they thought was gonna win. The Russians love discord.

They would love to be able to discourage Americans and cause Americans to think that their system is no longer workable, that it’s been corrupted and is no longer trustworthy. They would love for that to happen. But the Drive-Bys got all caught up in the fact that, no, this was trying to get Trump elected ’cause the Russians like Trump and the Russians think they’re gonna get more out of life with Trump. It’s not at all what was going on.

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RUSH: Sound bite number 11. Bill Hemmer today on Fox. Replayed a sound bite from my interview yesterday with Chris Wallace, a point that I made that is, well, you’ll hear. You’ll hear.

HEMMER: Rush Limbaugh has a very different theory than most. Watch.

RUSH ARCHIVE: This is all politics and, Chris, it hasn’t changed from the get-go. It is about protecting Hillary and Obama. Obama is the primary person being protected here because all of this spying and all of this collusion to destroy Trump happened with his knowledge and probably encouragement. And the reason Hillary isn’t charged is because that would mean Obama would have to be exposed as participating.

RUSH: Now, this came up because if these guys had been indicted, the Russians, does that mean we go after Hillary and Steele and all these others? No. Because these guys, the Russians were charged with wire fraud and mail fraud. They weren’t charged with colluding with Trump. They weren’t charged with anything that anybody thinks this investigation was about. And the reason for that — well, it’s twofold, and I’m gonna explain the second reason after the break. But the primary reason is precisely so that Hillary and Obama will not be charged.

Now, Jason Chaffetz was on responding to this, says, “I don’t know that we have any information Obama’s been –” Yes, we do. Obama lied to the American people about knowing that Hillary was using an illegal server. He was communicating with her on that illegal server and lied about it. If she’s charged in any of this, he’s involved. That can’t happen. That opens up the unmasking and whatever his administration was doing to spy in the first place.

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RUSH:   I don’t think there’s any question that the objective to protect Hillary and Obama is one of the primary guiding aspects of the Mueller team.  The only collusion that we know of — that could actually be established — is that between Hillary Clinton and the Russians, through Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS.  Judicial Watch has just discovered yet another dossier, and this one…  Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch has tweeted out, “Don’t be distracted.  Judicial Watch lawsuit uncovered another Russia dossier used to undermine Donald Trump, this one created by the Obama State Department.”

And then he writes, “By my count, there are now at least four Obama-Clinton, get-Trump dossiers.”  And this is why we have… When I talked to Devin Nunes, he kept pointing us to the State Department as where this was next gonna go, and that involves the letter that Grassley and Lindsey Graham sent to the inspector general, the FBI demanding… Well, it was a criminal referral.  They’re demanding an investigation into Steele for having lied to the FBI.

That’s a felony.  Cody Shearer, another Clintonite from way back, wrote another dossier.  The collusion, if there was any of the Russians, was all on the Democrat side.  But the things these Russians were charged with in the Mueller indictment are wire fraud, defrauding the United States, mail fraud.  These charges that the Russians were hit with in this indictment have nothing to do with the avowed purpose of the special counsel investigation, literally nothing to do with it.

And if these Russians were charged the way everybody thought charges were gonna happen, then they could charge Hillary, and they could charge Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS.  But they can’t be charged just because the Russians have been, because the charges are different.  Here’s the reason why, and I think a lot of people are missing the point of this indictment.  When the Department of Justice files an indictment in a case that it knows is never gonna be tried — and, folks, that is fundamental here.

This is a key point to understand.  Mueller, Rosenstein, everybody knows that these perps will never see a courtroom.  They will never be extradited.  We will make show of asking the Russians to extradite them and send them here, but they’ll get together at the KGB headquarters with a bottle of vodka or two and have a party, laughing themselves silly that they’re making a mess of the American political system so easily.

Ninety people and $2 million, and look what they got for it!  They gotta be doing handstands, the sober ones.  So when the DOJ files an indictment in a case that it knows is never gonna be tried in court, guess what?  It’s not really making allegations.  This is a political narrative, my friends.  And that’s why I’ve been so curious why Mueller didn’t… Why this all happened on a Friday in a school shooting story.  These are not allegations.  This is a political narrative.

This creates a story, a narrative for the Drive-By Media to go to town with to further this absurd notion that the Russians tried to make sure Trump won.  It’s the exact opposite.  That’s not what they were doing.  If you read the indictment, what comes through is that Putin wanted Trump to win and wanted to the disparage Hillary. That is the narrative, and that’s exactly what Mueller got.  That’s exactly what the media is reporting.  So the indictment becomes an historical document standing as the official finding of what happened.

“It’s the law.  It’s the DOJ!  It is court documents,” except this indictment will never be tested, because there will never be a trial.  So the defendants will never get the chance to prove that they didn’t do it.  So this… Even though Trump was exonerated, even though Rosenstein made a big deal out of the fact that what the Russians did didn’t affect the outcome of the election, and that any Trump participation — Trump people participation — was unwitting, it doesn’t matter, because the media now has its narrative.

“The Russians wanted Trump to win!” That’s all they need to continue reporting this hoax.  The Russians had, as their policy, to sow discord against the winner, and they expected that to be Hillary.  They were already trying to undermine Hillary under the belief she was gonna win.  (I’ve been through this.) The same thing happened with the financial crisis, if you want to know the truth about it.  They wanted to create a narrative that it was evil financial institutions and not government policy that caused the meltdown in 2008.

They didn’t want you knowing that the subprime mortgage crisis was their fault.  They wanted you to believe it was the big banks — the biiiig, evil banks — royally screwing their customers, screwing the United States all for continued profit.  And they wanted you to believe, everybody to believe that the banks caused the meltdown.  So what did they just, the DOJ?  They filed a bunch of civil actions with a few indictments and then settled them all on the cheap with settlement payments and a few pleas.

Never saw trials.  The perps never got a chance to disapprove the charges, because they were never tested in court.  So, the indictments and the lawsuits stand as the official government account of what caused the crisis — and, lo and behold, it wasn’t the government.  But it was.  It was the government demanding these banks make these idiotic subprime mortgage loans to people that couldn’t pay ’em back, and that was started by Bill Clinton and the enforcer on that was Janet Reno, the attorney general at the time.

These banks were threatened with investigations if they didn’t follow through and make these subprime loans.  Well, we all know what happened.  Nobody could repay the loans! So the people packaged these worthless mortgages into a new category called mortgage-backed securities, and they started selling these things to unwitting buyers.  “Look at all these mortgages! Look at all these monthly payments.

“We’re gonna combine ’em and make ’em one gigantic package and sell ’em to you,” and they had people buy ’em, and then those people didn’t take long to realize they were worthless, and they kept repackaging and selling worthless stuff to the next unwitting buyers until there weren’t any buyers left.  And that’s when it crashed.  So here comes the financial crisis narrative that it was the big banks that caused it based on some lawsuits that were filed.

Same thing here with Mueller and this indictment of the Russians.  Now, you may not think it’s very cynical, but this is exactly what is happening.  And here’s another thing.  You note that the real Russian interference is supposed to the hacking, but have you noticed in this indictment of these Russians — 16 Russians and three Russian entities — there’s not a word about hacking in this indictment?  They don’t mention it because they know they’d have a hard time proving it.

And they have no excuse for failing to take physical possession of the DNC servers. Remember Debbie “Blabbermouth” Schultz refused to let the FBI have the servers after they said they were hacked. They hired some outfit called CrowdStrike to come in and forensically exam them. The point is you won’t find the word “hack,” the subject of hacking anywhere in the indictment. All you find is the Russians polluting social media.

Well, wait a minute. I thought everybody thought this is about the Russians hacking everybody. There isn’t a hack. What is a hack? It’s not Podesta. That was a phishing scheme he fell for. What’s the hack? And where is the hack in the indictment? This indictment is a public relations document designed to provide a foundation for the media to continue their narrative that the Russians wanted Trump to win.

That is not what was happening. The Russians were trying to undermine Mrs. Clinton who they thought was gonna win because they undermine our winners to sow discord. You can spin that to make it look like they were trying to help Trump, but they weren’t. They don’t care who wins. Whoever wins, their policy doesn’t change. Sow discord, undermine the credibility and validity of the election itself and of our system.