RUSH: So let’s see. A guy who has been known to the Drive-By Media for many years, but let’s just say the last four, has been considered a sleazebag, a shyster, a reprobate, an SOB, just a piece of scum, and that would be Michael Cohen. Today he is a man of paragon and virtue because the one thing that hasn’t changed —

By the way, greetings. Great to have you, folks. Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network. We’re at it for the next three hours.

The one thing that hasn’t changed here, the one thing that all of this is about is forcing Donald Trump out of office because the Democrats lost an election. There are no crimes that have occurred here that involve the president of the United States starting with Russian collusion, moving on to obstruction of justice, and even this stuff now with the porn star, Stormy Daniels, Kara McDougal, and the stuff with Paul Manafort, none of it, none of it is going to result in criminal charges against Donald Trump. None of is gonna result in high crimes and misdemeanors.

What it’s all gonna lead to is the forthcoming blistering report from the special counsel, Robert Mueller, who remains blind to the actual crimes that have taken place in this entire sordid story. There is clearly now a double standard, a dual system of justice at the highest levels of our Department of Justice. You can see it in the way the DOJ and the FBI exonerated the Democrat presidential candidate when real crimes were taking place for years and years right under their noses, crimes they perhaps even participated in.

Those crimes, because they involved the Democrat nominee, were exonerated. The Democrat nominee herself was exonerated. You go to the Trump campaign, the Republican, the opponent, where there aren’t any crimes, there wasn’t any collusion with Russia, there hasn’t been any obstruction of justice, and yet this is where the allegation of crimes is occurring? And it’s occurring with people who are peripheral to the original charge of all this — Russian collusion, stealing the election?

What is actually happening now is the losers of the election attempting to steal it back. And that’s what all of this yesterday means, it’s why it all happened, and it is what it continues to add up to. The people who lost the election simply can’t accept it and are doing everything they can to overturn that election result.

And what makes it really frightening, and the reason people are losing faith in some of the greatest institutions this country’s ever had, leading with the Department of Justice, is because it’s plain as day what I just pointed out to you. There is a dual system of justice in this country. If you’re a Democrat you’re gonna be exonerated or given one hell of a benefit of the doubt. If you’re Republican, you’re gonna be presumed guilty, and a never ending pursuit to get you will then commence.

Look at what we have. We have a special counsel who is actually being positioned by the Drive-By Media and the Department of Justice as a currently sitting supreme branch of government who has the power to oversee the Trump administration day to day and pronounce whether or not it’s fit. That is the role that Robert Mueller has assumed. This is the role the media has justified. This is the role the Department of Justice apparently has justified.

This is the image they’re trying to create in the minds of as many Americans as possible, that Trump is so corrupt, he stole the election, he worked with the Russians, that we need ongoing, everyday oversight of this man and his administration. Because we just know that he could not have won that election fairly, and we just know that Hillary could not have lost it. And we just know that we hate Donald Trump more than we ever hated anybody short of Richard Nixon. And we just know that the American people want us to get rid of Donald Trump.

They think that’s what the American people want. And so this is the circumstance we’re set up with now. So Robert Mueller is indicting every ham sandwich he can find. He is trying to create anti-Trump sentiment. This is the man, again they keep telling us, that has the impeccable honor, more integrity than anybody in Washington, D.C. Why, if there is anyone who is eminently qualified to sit in judgment of the president of the United States on a daily basis, it’s Robert Mueller.

Well, the big problem with that is, folks, that the Constitution doesn’t provide for such oversight by a fourth branch, a supreme branch. The Constitution doesn’t provide for there to be a special counsel who basically gets to sit there and investigate anything he wants to investigate involving the president of the United States.

I would go so far as to tell you, as a patriotic American and somebody very worried about all of this, Robert Mueller, as I said yesterday, and his team are plowing through the Constitution. They’re shredding it as they go. They’re leaving it in tatters. Same thing with the presidency.

I believe that the assault on our Constitution that is taking place here as a result of this worthless special counsel investigation, I believe all of the politicizing of policy differences that are taking place here, the effort by the losers in the 2016 presidential election to essentially render that election null and void, the effort to overturn the results of that election and everything they’ve done in connection with that, is a far, far greater threat to our country than anything they can cite Paul Manafort having done or this Cohen character or Stormy Daniels or any of these other bit players, Omarosa Manigault, whatever the last name of her husband at the moment happens to be.

Yeah, it used to be Omarosa Manigault Stallworth. Then the next thing was Omarosa Manigault, then it’s Omarosa, then it’s Omarosa Manigault Newman. You know what Newman is? Newman is a preacher down in Jacksonville. These two people, apparently their house is deteriorating. It’s become a pestilence focus in the neighborhood. Their swimming pool has become a breeding ground for mosquitoes. The town is livid, the neighborhood is. And she married a preacher bankrupt, having his Buick LeSabre repossessed.

Anyway, that’s side stuff. I’m serious, folks. I think what is happening here with the Mueller special counsel investigation, this is so fraudulent. As I told you on previous broadcasts, I’ve run out of words to describe the outrage that this is. There’s literally nothing foundational beneath the Mueller investigation justifying it.

These crimes that Mueller is chasing down could have been pursued by any U.S. attorney’s office anywhere. And, in fact, when the Manafort crimes were first mentioned some years ago, the authorities at the time passed and weren’t interested in it, wasn’t big enough to warrant their time and money. But now all that’s different because the objective is to get Donald Trump.

We have some of the greatest abuses of prosecutorial discretion and power taking place here, the office of the special counsel. And its express purpose is to create in as wide a swath as they can throughout this country, an anti-Trump mood, because all of this remains as it was at the beginning, an attempt to drive down Trump’s personal approval numbers, to distance his supporters from him, to force Republicans in Congress to abandon him.

Because these people are replaying Watergate. I was watching TV today. There’s Richard Ben-Veniste. I’m surprised he’s still alive. He was one of the Watergate prosecutors. Remember him? Richard Ben-Veniste, the guy is perfectly well spoken, he never stutters, it probably takes him four hours to eat lunch. I mean, he’s that slow and precise, and his lunch would be a salad, four hours. He’s the kind of guy that would send a salad back if it had a thimble too much salad dressing on it. He would measure it.

Anyway, he’s saying this is Watergate all over! We’ve got hush money, we got hush money payments just like Nixon, and of course they’ve dragged out of the cemetery Carl Bernstein to basically say the same thing.

But I can show you people who used to work at the Federal Election Commission who will tell you that these payments do not constitute illegal campaign contributions. But the thing about Cohen, this guy is obviously sleazy, he’s obviously scared to death. He’s rolled the dice.

And, you know, Jonathan Turley has a good point about Manafort and the conviction. HE said the conviction that Mueller got in Manafort has actually weakened Mueller’s position. Well, because there’s no more great damage Mueller can do. But Trump can pardon him. Now that there is a conviction, Manafort is saying I made the right move here. I held out, I didn’t turn state’s evidence, I didn’t flip. I’m gonna take my medicine for whatever it’s worth, and that’s going to be a pardon down the road. And the fact that Mueller got his conviction means his leverage with Manafort now is greatly diminished. So goes the theory.

Cohen, on the other hand, for whatever reason, decided early on he wasn’t gonna wait for a pardon. He wasn’t gonna rely on Trump. He wasn’t gonna be loyal, whatever. He’s gonna throw in with the enemies of Trump. He’s gonna throw in and hire Lanny Davis, who does not even try cases, folks. Lanny Davis is the epitome of a television lawyer. He doesn’t try cases. His allocution before the judge, the prosecutors wrote it. They’re inventing crimes. They’re inventing some of the most comical sounding charges.

And you know the thing about the Cohen side of this is not one of these is ever going to be proven in court. This is another DOJ trick, which is not new; it’s something prosecutors have been using, the power they’ve got, the power of lifetime imprisonment, ruining, financial fines, whatever. And they have all kinds of leverage over perps and particularly a guy like Cohen. And so Cohen, in order to get the least punishment possible, both jail time and money, will say whatever they want him to say in his allocution. He’ll cop to anything, and he’ll do it, and that’s who he’s thrown in with.

And the problem that everybody needs to keep in mind is that not one of these charges will ever be tested in court. We’ll never find out if this stuff was actually true because we don’t even know if Cohen’s telling the truth in what he’s pleading to here. And the fact the prosecutors do not have to go to court and prove this? So Cohen decided to throw in with the people that scared him the most. And now the stories are that Cohen is begging Lanny Davis to get him a meeting with Mueller, that Cohen can’t wait to talk to Mueller, that Cohen’s got the goods on Trump and Russia. That’s what they’re trying to make everybody believe.

Cohen has the goods on Trump and Russia? Nobody has the goods on Trump and Russia, because there aren’t any goods to have. That’s what all of this means! What all of this means is that Mr. Mueller, Mr. Integrity, doesn’t have diddly-squat related to his original purpose, his original reason for existing. They don’t have anything. But they still want to overturn the results of the 2016 election.

But I’m telling you, folks, what these people are doing to our Constitution, what they’re doing to the Department of Justice, what they’re doing to these ancillary players is a far, far, far greater crime and I think far, far greater damage than whatever anybody is accusing Donald Trump of having done for which nobody has any proof or evidence, even now. And yet look at what we’re being told.

They’re asking us to believe that Donald Trump represents the clearest present danger to the United States of America. Yep, Donald Trump, the guy whose administration has brought forth an economy that is booming in ways that retailers say they don’t remember. Walmart, Home Depot, now Target are all saying that this economy is unlike anything they’ve ever seen and they never expected to see it. Because everybody’s been conditioned to a nation in stagnation.

Eight years of Bush, eight years of Obama especially, where America in decline was the new standard of belief. And Donald Trump has come in and in less than two years has turned all of that upside down. Massive tax cuts resulting in this economic growth. New revenue pouring into Washington via more taxpayers.

The tax cuts, putting more disposable income in the back pockets of the American family, which is then spending the discretionary income that’s driving the economy through the roof. We have a record low unemployment. We have record low unemployment in the African-American and Hispanic communities. We have the African-American presidential approval numbers for Donald Trump at an all-time high. Our military is being rebuilt and re-strengthened and repurposed after eight years of neglect and disrespect by Barack Obama.

We have a president who’s doing everything he can, practically single-handedly, to shore up national security, particularly at the borders. We have a president who is deregulating the federal bureaucracy at rates never dreamed of, except in theory and on paper. We have a president who got us out of a deal with Iran that would have allowed Iran with $150 billion in cash we paid them to have a nuclear weapon inside of 10 years. We’re out. We’re gone. It isn’t gonna happen.

We’ve had a president pull us out of a phony Paris climate accord deal sponsored by the United Nations that was only going to punish the United States economically. We’re out. We’re done. We’re having an end to unfair trade deals with Mexico, Canada, China, and the EU. Trump has instituted tariffs that are going to bring our economic opponents to their knees, including the ChiComs.

Trump has appointed some of the greatest constitutional judges and Supreme Court nominees in the history of our lives. He moved the embassy in Jerusalem. On and on and on and on and on and on and on. This is what they’re trying to tell us poses the greatest, clearest present danger to the country. It’s the exact opposite. They’ve gotta stop this good stuff from happening, folks. They cannot let this happen and at the same time say that Trump is unqualified as the leader of the free world.

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RUSH: Folks, it’s really crucial that you keep something in mind as all of this comes down. I probably don’t even need to remind you of this, but I want to anyway. None of this… Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates. None of this is about what? Russian meddling! None of this is about collusion with the Russians to steal an election. These people have an unlimited charter, Mueller, to go anywhere with the express purpose of overturning the results of the election in 2016. That is what continues to happen here.

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RUSH: Now, I want to go back to all of this. The Cohen plea, remember, folks, prosecutors have not proved anything. This is relevant to me. They haven’t proved diddly-squat. They strong-armed an agreement with political consequences. They didn’t dare test any of this before a jury. They didn’t dare present any of these so-called facts. They wanted to get all of this done before the midterms. You know what these plea deals are?

If we’re gonna start saying that payments to porn stars are campaign contributions in kind, what is the value to the Democrat Party of all this garbage that’s going on, all of this free media from the Drive-Bys and all the time spent pursuing Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal and now Cohen and the results here with these charges, Manafort? What is the value in campaign donations in kind to the Democrat Party from all this rotgut? And why doesn’t that count?

If we’re gonna say that payments to porn stars and other women that you want to hush up are violations of campaign finance law, then what the hell is this? The Democrats are benefiting here. It would be impossible to calculate the financial value in terms of campaign donations to the Democrat Party just by virtue of CNN’s daily broadcast day! And you add the New York Times to it, PMSNBC. It’s an ongoing billion-dollar campaign donation to the Democrat Party, and it happens every day. And there’s not a person that says anything about it.

Now, it takes me to Brad Smith. Brad Smith is a former chairman at the Federal Election Commission. He says that Trump’s lawyer’s hush money is not a campaign donation. Wait a minute. I just saw Lanny Davis on TV today, and Lanny Davis on TV last night, and then Lanny Davis on TV this morning. I saw Lanny Davis about 10 minutes after that. Then I saw Lanny Davis five minutes after that. Lanny Davis was back again in another 15 min. Lanny Davis all over the place. Lanny Davis is rivaling Professor Dershowitz. And Lanny Davis said it is, they are campaign donations.

Quote, “Payments used to silence people who have potentially damaging information on a political candidate cannot be classified as a campaign contribution, according to the former chairman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Bradley Smith. ‘Not everything that might benefit a candidate is a campaign expense,’ Smith wrote in an editorial for the Wall Street Journal.

“Personal debts, for example, are ‘related to’ the campaign—if unpaid, the candidate’s reputation might suffer, Bradley wrote. ‘A Rolex watch, a new suit, or a haircut might help a candidate look good on the trail. … If paying hush money is a campaign expense, a candidate would be required to make that payment with campaign funds.'”

But then what happens — let’s say the campaign, let’s say the Stormy Daniels payment — I’m just gonna make up a number here — let’s say it was a hundred thousand dollars and Donald Trump donates $100,001 to his campaign. If Trump personally donates and funds his campaign in an amount greater than whatever amount was paid to Stormy Daniels, then where is the violation?

How can it be a violation when Trump’s own money is funding the campaign and a payment goes out to somebody from the campaign. Well, they say that Trump’s not benefiting. Trump is paying it. So how in the world does any of this equal a campaign contribution, much less an illegal one? It doesn’t. But see, this isn’t the point.

There’s nobody to check and balance what these people are asserting. There’s nobody gonna be in court challenging these allegations that all of these are illegal campaign donations. They tried to convict John Edwards on the same type of stuff, folks. You remember John Edwards had the girlfriend, she got pregnant while his wife had cancer. He did some despicable stuff. And they claimed that he was commingling funds and paying hush money here. They took him to court on it, and they got their butts handed to ’em.

John Edwards was acquitted on every one of those charges that he had abused the election system via illegal campaign contribution. These people remember that. They know that. There is no way this is ever gonna get tested in court long as they’ve got this guy Cohen who’s scared to death he’s done so much — and this guy may be a Dem — he’s a New Yorker. What are the odds the guy was a Democrat all the time anyway, been a Democrat all along? I don’t know. Taping his client. As I say, everybody has that you let of this guy as one of the biggest sleazebags in town until now he becomes a paragon of virtue.

Now, Brad Smith: “Cohen’s payment to the woman who claims to have had an affair with Trump would have to be paid with campaign funds if it is to be viewed as a campaign contribution. But paying someone to keep silent about an alleged extramarital affair is not an expense solely related to a campaign, Bradley explained. ‘There are many reasons, including personal and commercial ones, why Mr. Trump might want to keep allegations of extramarital affairs out of the press,’ Bradley wrote.”

And see, this is the thing and everybody’s forgotten it. When it comes to illegal campaign contributions or donations in kind, if there is another entirely reasonable explanation for the expenditure, then it’s exempt from being an illegal campaign contribution.

So if Trump wanted to pay Stormy Daniels, whatever, to keep her quiet so that his family didn’t find out, it doesn’t have to be the campaign. It doesn’t have been to save his candidacy. It can just be he doesn’t want family members to find out. That makes it justifiable and not touchable by federal election law. And that’s been in place for the longest time.

You know where these laws come from, by the way? The FEC and all this stuff on illegal campaign contributions? Watergate. This is what they got Nixon on.

Let me grab a quick phone call here because this is relevant too. This says Mitch in Grove City, Ohio. Mitch, I’m glad you called. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. Nice to talk to you, man. I’ve been trying for a long time, man. And I just want to say it’s an honor and a privilege.

RUSH: Thank you, sir. I appreciate. Glad you made it.

CALLER: Me too, man. I’ve been calling for years. Anyway, I think the time has come with all the corruption we’re seeing out of Mueller and Rosenstein that it’s time for Trump just to say, “You know what, you’re not doing the job you were hired to do, you gotta go.” Fire Mueller, then fire Rosenstein, and then, to top it off, call Sessions to the White House and say, “You know what, dude? You’re gone too.” And just start fresh.

I think the American people support Trump enough to where who cares what all the politicians say. We want him to fire this group because they are doing everything they can to bring down the republic of the United States. And it’s very open as to what they’re doing, but they’re all in their own little world, and they don’t even see it. They don’t even know it because they’ve been indoctrinated so much. So I just think it’s time for Trump. If he had any other business and hired somebody that wasn’t doing the job they were supposed to do, they’d have been gone a long time. And I think the time’s come.

RUSH: Well, you know, the timing of your call is propitious. Right at the bottom-of-the-hour break as I turned to my computer to see what’s the latest in anything, NBC has a story saying that congressional Democrats are at this moment paranoid that Trump is gonna fire Mueller and they’re working on a backup plan even now to get Trump thrown out of office, start immediate proceedings of something. They don’t know what, if that happens. So they’re clearly thinking that this might happen.

You know what I think? I think, as I’ve been saying all week, Mitch, look, this is really dicey. If you go back to the New York Times story from Sunday with Don McGahn, the purpose of that story was to say that Trump was trying to fire Mueller but McGahn heroically stepped in and talked sense into him. They are trying to politicize and criminalize Trump’s intentions.

Make no mistake, because they think if Trump would fire Mueller, they think they could get him out of office before the end of the year on obstruction. If he fires Rosenstein, even better. If he fires Sessions, even better. If he calls Comey and says, “You know what? You were fired, and you’re still fired,” then that would really load the boat and they think they’re gonna get rid of him. They think that if Trump does that, that they’ve got him dead to rights on obstruction.

And they don’t care what the American people think, Mitch! They couldn’t care less what the American people think! That’s what this is all about, when you get right down to it. They don’t care what you think! They don’t care that you might like what’s going on. They don’t care that you might be benefiting from Trump policy. They don’t care about you. They don’t care about the little guy. They don’t care about the downtrodden, the thirsty, and the hungry. They care about people who are not citizens yet, because they represent potential voters. But they don’t care about you.

They couldn’t care less if you got mad at ’em. They couldn’t care less, because they think you don’t have a single shred of power to stop them once they put the ball in motion to get rid of Donald Trump. In the McGahn story, they literally tried to create the aura that Trump is guilty because he wanted to! Wanting to fire Mueller equals obstruction. They’re trying to bait him into doing it.

I think some of this that Mueller is doing, all these charges and so forth, I think they’re really trying to bait him into firing Mueller ’cause I think in their world if they can make that happen, they think they’ve got Trump, it’s over. The other side of it is your theory.

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RUSH:  No, that’s right.  They’re trying to set Trump up with this in a lot of different ways.

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RUSH: I mentioned Jonathan Turley earlier. Turley has a piece at TheHill.com. “Manafort Guilty Verdict Raises Chances of Pardon by Trump.” In a nutshell, Jonathan Turley says that Mueller has actually now lost leverage with Manafort now that he’s convicted. Because no matter what Manafort will be facing, the rest of his life in jail or a large part, don’t forget, there’s another Manafort trial in D.C. Manafort — who knows what sentence a judge is gonna decide on here. He was guilty of eight out of 18 counts. What did I see? Something like nine years, maybe, and Manafort’s in his sixties. So you add up guilt in the next trial, Manafort could be looking at spending the rest of his life in jail.

So the theory is that Mueller has lost all leverage. Now that Manafort, no matter what Mueller does, is got the rest of his life in jail, the only hope Manafort has is a pardon from Trump. And then Turley goes on to make the case why Trump should pardon Manafort. And those reasons are, one, Mueller was working outside the scope of his employment — and, boy, is that true.

Remember, Department of Justice guidelines demand that a crime be specified for a special counsel to pursue and investigate. Here there wasn’t one. But everybody thinks that what this was about was finding collusion with the Russians. Well, Manafort has been tried and convicted on things that had nothing to do with that! In fact, he’s tried and convicted on things that had to do before he even met Trump, much less went to work in his campaign.

The second reason that Trump should pardon Manafort is that Manafort might not have been prosecuted at all if not for his association with Trump. And I think that’s absolutely true. So a pardon could be justified legally! The guy had nothing to do with the original purpose of the counsel, special counsel; and besides that, he wouldn’t have even been prosecuted if it hadn’t been for this association with my campaign and so forth. It’s a bogus conviction. It was abuse of power. It was perverting the course of justice and so I’m pardoning the guy. That’s what Manafort’s counting on.

Cohen, of course, threw in with the bad guys. Cohen threw in with people — well, I say “bad guys.” In Trump’s world, they’re the bad guys. It makes me wonder about Cohen and Trump’s relationship and what it really was and for how long. Clearly in Cohen’s mind it wasn’t worth much.

Anyway, Turley, in the end, says it would probably be a mistake for Trump to pardon Manafort because Manafort is a criminal, he did do it, he’s not an admirable guy, and probably in the end would not help Trump to pardon. I would just point out that a lot, if not most, of the people who get presidential pardons are criminals. Look at Marc Rich. Most of the people who get pardons did do it. That’s the whole point. Not all. As many of them have been unfairly or wrongly convicted. But most of them did it.