RUSH: Now you have former secretary Robert Reich writing that the ultimate aim here ought to be not just impeachment ’cause we can’t do that. We need to annul the Trump presidency, which means cancel every legislative act, cancel every executive order, and withdraw every judge. Every judge that Trump has appointed and who has been confirmed would be called back.

And if Robert B. Reich is writing this, do not think he’s the only one there thinking it. And I continue to be struck by the idea that there are still some people who think that we’ve got some common ground with these people, that there’s some overlap where we can find something in common.

Now, TheHill.com reported: “House Republicans say the closed-door testimony of Justice Department (DOJ) official Bruce Ohr on Tuesday has heightened their concerns that federal authorities abused surveillance powers during the 2016 presidential election.

“GOP lawmakers, trickling in and out of the roughly eight-hour interview, claimed Ohr indicated in his testimony that FBI officials knew more information than they led on in their application to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.” John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), a House Judiciary Committee member, said, “Thus far, [Ohr] has done nothing but exacerbate my concerns that the FISA process has been abused.”

It clearly has. Again, there’s something about all of this that the longer it goes on, the more incredulous I am at it. When you realize the depth, the planning, the number of people involved in this — I’m talking about this deep state effort to, first, prevent Donald Trump from winning, and then after he won, to basically undo the election and get rid of him however it can be done. This plan that has been fairly well executed until it was discovered and details were learned, this plan has to go back much farther than any of us are aware right now.

These people inside the Beltway, however we want to characterize ’em — and I use a bunch of different terms, deep state, Washington establishment, elites, whatever, they must at some point in the 2016 presidential race, they must have been really scared about something. They had to have been very deeply troubled about something to arrange and do all this.

Now, I can imagine there are people in the audience saying, “No, Rush. You’re overthinking this. People, it’s just who they are. They’re a bunch of Stalinists, totalitarians, and they’re making plans to make sure they don’t lose.” Well, I don’t deny that. Don’t misunderstand. But they already thought they had the election in the bag, at least according to everything publicly that they said and were relying on.

But they obviously didn’t think that. That’s the point. They obviously did not think that Hillary Clinton had this election in the bag. They obviously believed that she was very flawed, campaign was very problematic, because to put this plan together and then to begin implementing it, even before Trump became the nominee, as I said, makes me wonder if this was a plan that was gonna be hatched against any Republican who might have won the nomination. Or if it was only for Trump and had somebody else won it they would not have even put this plan into motion.

But they had to be really, really scared or worried about something to do this. And then we have to ask, is this the only time anything like this has ever been done? I doubt that. I think this is so widespread and eye-opening. And I think we’re getting a great view inside a door as to how these people have been operating for the longest time. I firmly believe these people do not trust elections, they don’t want to depend on ’em, they will do everything they can to win despite the fact people have a say at the ballot box.

But I’ll tell you what’s happening now. They have done such a great job of destroying so much that I think there are — you know, what most people think is their remedy for things happening in Washington they don’t like, their remedy is the ballot box. The average American. How many times have you been listening to this program and somebody has called, “Rush, what can I do besides vote? What can I do? Can I send emails, call people? What can I do besides vote?”

Everybody is slowly starting to realize that prevailing at the ballot box may not even mean that much, as is evidenced by what happened in 2016. Donald Trump won at the ballot box, according to every regulation and law in the Constitution and in every state he won the Electoral College, he won the election fair and square. And yet, look, the losers are doing everything they can to undo it under the basic premise that the vote of the American people doesn’t really matter to these people. That it is not the final word on winners and losers in American politics.

Well, the more the American public begins to think that their votes don’t count — now, people have always thought this, but they’ve meant it in the fact that there’s so many voters, and they are only but one; how can their vote possibly count? That’s not what people are talking about now. We’re talking about an effort to disqualify and roll back the votes of 60-some-odd million Americans.

Americans have grown up believing, encouraged to believe, being taught that their vote is what matters, that people voting elections are how power is determined in this country, the will of the people, all of that. Well, guess what’s gone out the window now? You have more and more people beginning to fear and think that the one remedy they have to change the way things are going in the country, and that is to show up in the ballot box and polling place to vote, even that now is under assault and being taken away from ’em. And you can’t blame people for thinking that, because that is exactly what is happening right now.

There is an effort underway to undermine and overthrow or undo the 2016 election. And that’s all all of this is. I don’t care how complicated it looks. I don’t care how much legalese there is in the daily cable news explanations and stories of what’s going on. I don’t care what you think of the Mueller investigation, the people he’s interviewing, what we do know, what we don’t know. The objective hasn’t changed from the get-go. From the get-go it was prevent Donald Trump from winning. When that happened, it was to make sure Donald Trump didn’t serve. When that failed, now the effort is to undo the entire election itself by getting rid of Donald Trump.

And one thing we need to learn from this if Robert B. Reich piece. If they get rid of Trump, however they do it, is not going to be the end of it. They really are then going to next say that everything Trump did needs to be disqualified and withdrawn.

It’s like they’re now saying we shouldn’t be having these hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, we shouldn’t be doing this until Mueller’s investigation is over and Trump is cleared. Donald Trump right now is so precariously balanced that we should not be doing anything that cements his legacy, because he may end up being disqualified or impeached.

But in the meantime, at the same time there isn’t any evidence whatsoever that anything they are trying to make us believe happened. Trump is as legitimate as any president has ever been, his election as legitimate as any has ever been. His presidency is as valid and legal as any has ever been.

Something scared the hell out of these people in the deep state. Something that we haven’t even contemplated yet. I know it’s related to an outsider coming in and winning and Trump’s pledge to drain the swamp. But this I think started even before that. I don’t know that we’ll ever really know what it is that has these people scared of their own shadows. But their personal and professional fear is behind all of this.

So many of them are just dead certain that Mueller already has the evidence that Trump and Russia colluded and cheated. It’s really frightening how brain-dead so many Americans are. It’s frightening how stupid so many are. And I’m talking about people you think are qualified to be leaders.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: There’s one more piece today from USA Today that I have in the Stack. It was underneath the Robert B. Reichhhhh piece, which is related. We’ll get to it in just a second.

Something else, folks, that I’ve been thinking about. You know, I’ve known people at or near the top of the FBI since 1990. That’s when I first began to meet those people. Jim Kallstrom ran the New York office of the FBI. He was instrumental in doing work that brought John Gotti eventually to trial and conviction. I knew his deputies. I knew his FBI friends. And over the course of the years, you know, Kallstrom was the guy that handled TWA Flight 800, which fell out of the sky in East Moriches on the way to Paris.

People thought it was terrorism. He conducted the investigation, found that it was fumes in a fuel tank. He had to deal with people thinking he was lying, conspiracy theory trying to hide terrorist activity to avoid people panicking. Anyway, I’ve got to know a lot of these people. And at no time — what made me think of this, there was some candidate running for office somewhere who was quoted as saying, “You know, what’s really strange about this is when we used to think of the FBI, we’d think of agents, the first thing they did was get in the car and turn on Rush Limbaugh.” Meaning that these were conservative, deeply patriotic FBI agents. And now look at the way the Republicans are talking about ’em.

And, you know, that’s a good point. Because what I’m trying to say here is in all of the time that I was friendly with Kallstrom and still am and some of his friends, at no time was the FBI ever considered to be the way it’s looked at now. You look at this cabal that has risen to the top — Comey, McCabe, throw Rosenstein in there even though his deputy AG, Christopher Wray, these people have been around for years, but this cabal, all of Them, Strzok, Page, Bruce Ohr, McCabe and others, how did this happen?

The FBI underwent some massive transformation, leadership did, at some point. Because it is inconceivable, in my limited — look, I don’t claim to have known a lot of ranking leaders of the FBI, but I knew their bosses, and I knew a sufficient number of them that this would no more be happening in those days — and I’m talking late nineties, early 2000s — but now Comey is there, and he’s the top of it, and you’ve got his underlings, and they’re all on this page. And they’re united with the intel guys and they’re united with Clapper and Brennan.

And they’re instrumental with the intelligence community in trying to eliminate Donald Trump and render his presidency null and void! To undo an election. This is just not — I haven’t known in my lifetime that kind of people in the FBI. And that’s been one of the shocking things for me about this, to be quite honest.

Now, the USA Today piece, it’s written by a guy named Christian Schneider, and it is a great follow-up to the piece by Robert Reich saying that when we get the evidence that Trump rigged the election, we need to annul his presidency.

The headline of this piece in USA Today: “Russian Collusion Isn’t the Scandal to Worry About. The Scandal is Donald Trump.” Christian Schneider, USA Today opinion editor. Now, what this is, this is called a pivot.

He writes, “Perhaps Trump is telling the truth and he didn’t strike some deal with the Russians, but he deserves zero credit for the appallingly low example he has set in the wake of the allegations. In the end, the real scandal isn’t collusion. It is Donald Trump himself.”

So here’s a guy, they’re starting to realize, some of them are, that Mueller doesn’t have anything and probably won’t. So they have to now pivot. All of their eggs have been in the basket that Trump is unjustified and illegal ’cause he cheated and stole the election with Putin. Well, if that blows up in their face, they still need something to get rid of Trump, and the pivot is, to hell with collusion. That’s not even the real problem. Hardy-har-har. The real problem is Donald Trump himself.

Let me give you some quotes from this piece. “Exactly what Trump knew about this meeting and when he knew it remains somewhat cryptic, but there is no shortage of other information to provide clear evidence that Trump is unfit for office. Exhibit A: Virtually everything out of Trump’s mouth in front of microphones since he took the job.”

Yep. Yep. Everything that Trump has said, every tweet, everything disqualifies him, regardless of whether there’s been collusion. Here’s the conclusion: “Perhaps Trump is telling the truth and he didn’t strike some deal with the Russians, but he deserves zero credit for the appallingly low example he has set in the wake of the allegations. In the end, the real scandal isn’t collusion. It is Donald Trump himself.”

So from their own computer keyboards, evidence that the left, Democrat Never Trump, deep state attacks have nothing to do with the Russians, it’s about stamping out Donald Trump himself and his supporters. They’re admitting it now, is my point. They were hiding behind the collusion, hiding behind stealing the election, but there isn’t anything there, and there isn’t gonna be anything there because it’s not possible to steal a presidential election. And they’re all forgetting that Rosenstein’s even said so in announcing the most recent Mueller indictments. So now they’re just admitting it.

This is about Trump himself. This is about their personal distaste for Donald Trump, the human being. And in their arrogant, conceded, superiorist view of things, he doesn’t even qualify to live.