RUSH: Hi, folks. Rush Limbaugh here and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.

I’m just jumping straight into it. This report is exactly what I thought it was gonna be, and it is being reacted to exactly as I thought it would be reacted to. There is no need for a 400-page report. There’s only one reason for a 400-page report, and that is to create the news environment that is occurring right now.

This report could have been issued in one page: We found no evidence of collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign, period, and we don’t have enough to say that there was any obstruction of justice. You could have done this in one page, maybe two, and be done with it.

But, no. I’ve had a chance to read some of this report today — by no means all of it, it’s 400 pages. And, my friends, I’m telling you, this report is made to order for the Democrat Party to ignore what is the only important thing about this: no collusion, no obstruction, period. That’s it!

But if you turn on cable news today — and it doesn’t matter what channel — all you’re going to get is ongoing discussions and reading of various excerpts from the report with expert analysts explaining how, “Why didn’t Mueller charge obstruction? Why, it’s all in here.” No, it isn’t.

This entire thing is bogus from the beginning. I am unable to avoid redundancy here, folks. I’m unable to avoid repeating things I’ve said over and over. None of this actually is real, except that it is. None of this was ever necessary. There never was any collusion, and there never was any evidence of any collusion.

This report is just the latest installment of the ongoing effort to convince as many Americans as possible that Donald Trump is illegitimate, that his election was illegitimate, that he’s a bad guy and that he doesn’t deserve to be president. He may not have colluded with Russia, but he sure as hell tried to get in the way of our investigation.

There should not have been an investigation, is the whole point, and this wasn’t an investigation. This is the seminal point that I can make. It is incorrect to characterize what Robert Mueller’s thing was as an investigation. When Robert Mueller was shown the file, the James Comey investigation file, when he was shown that after having been named, there was nothing in it.

There has never been any evidence of collusion with Russia between Trump or anybody on his campaign to affect the outcome of the presidential election. And the attorney general said so today again and again and again. And this morning before the report was released the Drive-By Media and media complex and Democrat complex were livid that Barr was gonna go first. They were livid.

Well, this is what happens when you lose elections, Democrats. You don’t get to set the agenda on things. The Justice Department does press conferences all the time announcing the results of investigations. They’re out there claiming that this thing was rigged from top to bottom. Barr is acting as Trump’s personal lawyer, ignoring for the fact that Eric Holder said a couple of times he was Barack Obama’s wingman. They applauded that, didn’t have any problem with that.

Jerry Nadler, Chuck Schumer, these people are making fools of themselves, continuing now their belief that Trump did do something and no matter what Barr said today, this report is gonna prove it.

Let’s go to Barr. This is what is important. Folks, I can’t express this enough. And I wish I had two or three different ways of saying this all the same. This wasn’t an investigation. It was an attempt at a coup. It was an attempt to throw Donald Trump out of office and nullify the election results of 2016. It was disguised as an investigation.

It was disguised as an attempt to find out if the Russians had indeed affected our elections. And so this thing that was actually a coup occurs under the auspices of an investigation, and everybody called it the investigation so it was established in the mind-set of the American public it was an investigation, but it never was.

You read this report — as I said, I have had a chance to read some pages — and it recounts everything you’ve read in the New York Times and the Washington Post about collusion before concluding there wasn’t any! It’s made to order for people who want to continue running this operation to get rid of Trump. It is made to order to be able to ignore and obfuscate what Barr has now informed and what the report itself informs. The report itself says there was no collusion.

So two years ago we start out here with a so-called investigation on collusion. The report admits there is none, that no American was involved at any time in any way colluding with the Russians to affect the outcome of the election. For two years this nation was roiled. For two years the people of this country were made to believe that there was such collusion, that their president was a traitor.

Now on the day the report comes out, that has been forgotten, as though it never happened. And now it is the president obstructed justice. And Mueller has conveniently dropped 10 little bird drops in there for the media to explore and examine. I’ll give you an example. “We can’t conclusively exonerate –” that’s a partial quote. That’s not the standard. People don’t have to prove their innocence in this country. That’s by no means the standard here.

“We cannot exonerate.” That’s not the role of the prosecutor. It’s not the role of any investigator. You can’t exonerate somebody, and they can’t exonerate themselves. That’s why verdicts are guilty and not guilty. Not “not guilty” and innocent. Not “not guilty and exonerated.” There’s no such thing.

“We are unable to conclude no criminal conduct occurred.” You’re unable to conclude that no criminal conduct — then what the hell are you writing 400 pages for? You don’t do this to people you’re attempting to prosecute. You find nothing on ’em and then submit a 400 page report about it? That isn’t done except in this case.

The Drive-Bys are really focusing on something in the report. Apparently one of Trump’s lawyers, Don McGahn, says that Trump told him he’s fed up. He’s fed up with Sessions, he’s ticked off at Sessions, he wants Sessions to go out there and denounce Mueller. And McGahn says that Trump told him to go fire Mueller but McGahn says I don’t want to do that because I don’t want to create another Saturday Night Massacre.

Well, how about looking at it from Trump’s perspective. He knows he’s being set up here. He knows that he didn’t do what all of this is alleging day in and day out four or five times a day for two years in every media outlet in this country. He knows he didn’t do it. He knows they’re trying to run him out of office. He knows that in their term he’s innocent. What would you do in this circumstance?

But the bottom line is, Mueller wasn’t fired. So now they’ve gotta say, “Well, Trump wanted to. His intent was to obstruct.” I heard Jeffrey Toobin actually just say this. If you intend to obstruct justice, you may have well have obstructed justice. No, you don’t obstruct justice just by intending to. That requires third-party testimony — what do you mean? He intended to obstruct justice, therefore he did? He didn’t. They cooperated, millions of documents. The president answered written questions.

Mueller was not fired. Nobody on Mueller’s team was fired, even though Trump had all of the power in the world to fire him if he wanted to, and firing Mueller would not have ended the investigation. So we start out two years ago, two and a half years ago collusion, collusion, collusion, collusion, and today that’s all gone, and now we’re focusing on our president obstructed something that this report says did not happen.

And Mueller has written it for this exact, precise reason so that this can continue. He even says, Mueller even says in this report, “Congress still has the opportunity to find obstruction of justice.” Never mind Barr has looked at it, a lot of people looked at it, we don’t find any of this rises to the level of obstruction of justice. Doesn’t matter to the media, doesn’t matter to the Democrats. And then here’s old Bobby Mueller turning over the responsibility now to Congress.

But Trump knew from the beginning of this that he was innocent. He knew that he didn’t collude with Russians. Yet he’s sitting there having to watch this. It’s one of the reasons he’s mad at Sessions for recusing himself in this. It did not happen. Sessions didn’t collude. Sessions didn’t have any reason to recuse himself.

This report reads, in fact, as if Trump was supposed to cooperate in his own obstruction. And because he didn’t, he’s guilty of obstruction. Donald Trump attempted to obstruct our coup, is how this should read. Donald Trump attempted to obstruct our effort to throw him out of office, is how this report should read. Here’s Barr. We go to the audience starting at the top.

BARR: The special counsel’s report states that his, quote, “investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” I am sure that all Americans share my concern about the efforts of the Russian government to interfere in our presidential election. As the special counsel report makes clear, the Russian government sought to interfere in our election process. But thanks to the special counsel’s thorough investigation, we now know that the Russian operatives who perpetrated these schemes did not have the cooperation of President Trump or the Trump campaign.

RUSH: Bingo. That’s it. A report could have said the same thing in one or two pages, but it didn’t. There are 400 pages. You know what I also zeroed in on? I zeroed in on the Papadopoulos section. I wanted to see what they said about it, because so many people think that’s when this investigation began. There wasn’t an investigation. They tried, they tried to make everybody believe that the Papadopoulos incident is when they got worried.

They set up that whole Papadopoulos thing. They put the words in his mouth, they put the words in his mind, and they arranged for him to repeat the words about Russia having Hillary emails to a bunch of different people that report back to the FBI. I wanted to see what the report says about. The report lays it out exactly as it happened, and it makes it look like it was a legitimate reason to investigate. It mentions Mifsud, mentions Stefan Halper, mentions everything here. And a lot more.

If you read this report, got John Podesta globe-trotting all over the planet bragging about the fact the Trump campaign knows that there are Hillary emails in the possession of Russia. Well, if that’s the case, then how is Trump found not guilty of colluding? You read this report and you would be able to — once the media goes beyond their obstruction stuff I’m gonna make a prediction to you.

They’re focusing on obstruction because they know there wasn’t any collusion, but once they go back to this report on the collusion part, they’re gonna be able to revive everything and they’re gonna be able to ask questions, “Why did Mueller find no collusion? Look here.” They’re gonna be able to go to the Papadopoulos story, they’re gonna be able to go left to right, top to bottom, up and down, make it look like there sure as hell there was collusion ’cause this guy Papadopoulos was globe-trotting all over the world bragging about what the Trump campaign knew. Doesn’t mention that Papadopoulos was set up by the FBI in any of this.

Here’s the next Barr sound bite, which ought to be sound bite two of the only worthwhile news story today.

BARR: The special counsel did not find any conspiracy to violate U.S. law involving Russian linked persons and any persons associated with the Trump campaign. So that’s the bottom line. After nearly two years of investigation, thousands of subpoenas, hundreds of warrants and witness interviews, the special counsel confirmed that the Russian government sponsored efforts to illegally interfere with the 2016 presidential election, but did not find that the Trump campaign or other Americans colluded in those efforts.

RUSH: Right. So statement number two should be open and shut, that’s it, that’s all this was about, was there Trump-Russia collusion. Two different statements from Barr. The fourth time now Barr has made this conclusion or reported it. And here’s the final bite we have from Barr on this.

BARR: After finding no underlying collusion with Russia, the special counsel’s report goes on to consider whether certain actions of the president could amount to obstruction of the special counsel’s investigation. After carefully reviewing the facts and legal theories outlined in the report and in consultation with the Office of Legal Counsel and other department lawyers, the deputy attorney general and I concluded that the evidence developed by the special counsel is not sufficient to establish that the president committed an obstruction of justice offense.

RUSH: Well, you may as well ignore that because that’s all you’re gonna be seeing on cable news the rest of the day if you’re gonna watch it. You’re gonna see examples, you’re gonna see proof, you’re gonna see angry Democrats, you’re gonna hear allegations that Barr is on Trump’s team and trying to cover up his obstruction.

And all the while keep in mind no collusion, no collusion, two years, no collusion, made official for the second time today. And yet there was all of this obstruction of something that did not happen, that the special counsel admits did not happen. So we have a political document here written by pro-Hillary investigators and Mueller, designed to create the very news environment that we are in the middle of today.

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RUSH: So the Robert Mueller report… Another way to look at this, folks, is persecution by public insinuation rather than a legitimate investigation and enforcement of the law. One of the things the Drive-Bys are harping on is that in the report, Mueller — and we’re paraphrasing the way Mueller wrote this. But Mueller says that Trump’s public statement and Trump’s public actions can be considered obstruction. Now, again, I’m trying to avoid the, “N’yah-n’yah-n’yah-n’yah-n’yah! See, I told you so.”

But this was also predicted that the report would be very unflattering, would castigate Trump as a human being and would allege all kinds of nefarious behavior on the part of the president. What Mueller’s report says is that every time Trump spoke on this, he was either tampering with witnesses or he was trying to confuse future witnesses or he was intimidating or attacking the prosecutor or whatever. Now, here’s the point in all this. It’s exactly my point. This report is full of this kind of innuendo and allegation.

Yet the conclusion on both in the report is nothing. No collusion and we don’t think we can go after the president on obstruction. All of that is being overlooked, it’s being ignored, and they are attempting to erase it, and instead now start from ground zero using this report to construct a brand-new charge that Donald Trump obstructed justice. “And that’s why there’s no collusion! Because Trump succeeded in intimidating witnesses. He succeeded, and that’s why there aren’t any indictments because Trump is a bad guy.”

And this is horrible, what they’re doing here.

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Grab sound bite number 21. Rudy Giuliani was on Fox just before the program began and was asked for his initial reaction and what we’ve learned so far.

GIULIANI: Well, we’re very, very happy. I mean, it’s a clear victory. I think any lawyer would say when you get a declination, you just won. Now, this is a little strange because the special counsel has used a standard of proof that’s unheard of. He says he can’t be conclusively sure that the president didn’t commit obstruction. Well, you know, that means the president has to prove his innocence, which kind of upends 2,000 years of jurisprudence. But be that as it may, he says, “We can’t conclude the president committed a crime but we can’t exonerate him.” Well, nobody’s asking him to exonerate him.

RUSH: Oh, not so, Mr. Mayor. That’s become the standard. And Mueller didn’t exonerate. Mueller threw that one little sentence in there. “We can’t conclude the president committed a climb, but we can’t exonerate.” That’s all he needed to put in there, that’s it, and they’re off and running now, and I’m gonna show you how.

Here’s Jake Tapper on CNN mere moments ago theorizing about why there were no obstruction of justice indictments. Wait ’til you hear this.

TAPPER: The reason why more White House aides or administration officials have not been themselves indicted or charged with obstruction of justice is because they ignored President Trump’s orders. President Trump could tell the White House counsel Don McGahn fire Robert Mueller, Don McGahn said to himself “no,” and therefore Don McGahn is a free man.

The same thing with Corey Lewandowski or any number of other individuals named in the Mueller report is that the way that all these administration officials preserved their freedom and are not in jail right now or at least charged and in court right now is because they refused to carry out the orders that President Trump demanded of them.

RUSH: So you see how this is gonna work. What the hell is that? This is manufacturing crimes where none occurred and none are alleged. This is all under the rubric of obstruction. Don McGahn, one of the White House lawyers, in the report says that Trump told him to fire Mueller and that McGahn refused to do it ’cause he didn’t want to relive the Nixon days. And so they’re theorizing, that’s the only reason McGahn’s not in jail, if McGahn had carried out Trump’s orders, he’d be charged, he’d be in jail.

No. The president can fire anybody he wants. Look, the way to understand this, it’s just an ongoing parade of additional fake news. Look at it this way. Look at it as the fuel supply for the original two years of conclusion has run out and today Mueller filled the tank.

The Drive-Bys pulled their SUV in here, which was out of gas, nearly out of gas after two years of trying to get Trump on collusion, and the gas station attendant is Mueller, and Mueller fills the tank of their SUV and they’re off and running down the road now on a whole new tack, Trump obstructed justice, all because Mueller, when he filled up the tank said, “We couldn’t find anything to charge him with, but we can’t exonerate him.”

And then he knows once these guys start looking at the report — folks, the report is just a rehash of everything in the New York Times, all the fake news in the New York Times, all the fake news in the Washington Post is in this report, to one degree or another. And the impression the report leaves is that Trump attempted to obstruct our coup to throw him out of office, and for that we weren’t able to find any evidence, but we think he did it, so we can’t exonerate him.

Their objective is to make everybody forget the only thing that matters here: no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. That’s what they want everybody to forget. But again, I feel like I am not doing my job right if I even acknowledge that premise. Because this wasn’t an investigation. And I’m unable to talk about it that way because everybody thinks this was a valid investigation.

I’ve got to do my commentary on this under that premise. But I don’t believe the premise. I don’t believe this was an investigation. I think this was an attempt to get rid of Donald Trump despite the fact there was no evidence. They wanted to get rid of Donald Trump ’cause they didn’t like him. They wanted to get rid of Trump because they wanted Hillary. Whatever reason you want to conjure.

There has never been any collusion. There’s never been any evidence. There was no reason to collude. These two years should not have happened. And yet here we are, on the one hand, we are applauding yet again the conclusion that there’s no collusion between Trump and Russia. Now we find the need to defend Trump on this bogus business of obstruction when there is no collusion that happened, therefore no obstruction theoretically could have happened.

Why would Trump want to obstruct something he didn’t do? Why would he want to obstruct an investigation of something that he didn’t do? The only reason would be that he doesn’t trust the so-called investigation. And again, folks, it wasn’t an investigation. This was not a legitimate attempt to find out if the Trump campaign colluded with Russia because there’s never been any evidence that he did. This was an ongoing effort.

They tried to thwart Trump’s primary election. They tried to thwart Trump during the transition. They tried to rig the presidential election against him for Hillary. And when all that failed, the objective became impeachment by driving his approval numbers down as low as they could get them.

Let me get started on the phones here, ’cause everything I’m saying here is true, but I’m starting to feel guilty of repeating it so damned often, but I’m at my wits’ end. I hate to see these false premise news stories give life. I hate to see them injected with new life. This entire thing is a false premise. This the whole thing is a lie. It is a gigantic, false construct.

I’m having so much trouble talking about it within those confines. This needs to be reconstructed and repositioned as to what it really is, because the way this thing has been structured, everybody’s now going out trying to prove Trump’s innocence again, which you cannot do! That’s why our system of justice does not require it.

The prosecution has to prove your guilt, and they didn’t, and yet look where we are. We’re still now back and doing a 180, maybe a 360, where all of a sudden Trump’s gotta prove that he didn’t do it, this time on obstruction. But it doesn’t matter. They don’t care what did or didn’t happen. They just want the narrative. And Mueller has given them that.

I guess the one thing we can hope for is that these people, the Democrats and the media, begin to look like the absolute lunatics that they are, their inability to give this up. The New York Times banner headline should be, “Mueller Report: No Trump-Russia Collusion.”

But that’s not what the headline’s gonna be. The report didn’t need to be longer than two pages. Trump’s lawyer, John Dowd, is exactly right.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s the bottom line. The bottom line is that Donald Trump was exonerated. I don’t like the use of that word in all of this, but he was exonerated. They found no evidence of collusion. Most people think it was a legitimate investigation. Nothing. They’ve got Trump on nothing. Zilch, zero, nada. The president has been vindicated. And that is the news of the day, and that is why the media is in meltdown. The media is literally in meltdown and cannot cope here.

The bottom line is there’s nothing attached to Donald Trump that was alleged to have attached to him. The Russians did not elect him president. He didn’t collude with them. It was his achievement. It was his accomplishment. It’s one of the greatest achievements and accomplishments in American politics for what he overcame and who he overcame and the ongoing attempt to get rid of him after he won.

They failed. The bottom line is the effort to get rid of Donald Trump has failed, and so now all they’ve got is all they ever had is flaying away at impeachment. And where that is concerned, let’s encourage them to do it! We got a little over two years before the 2020 election. We got 18 Democrats running for president who I’m sure don’t want to hear about impeachment. Let’s — well, not “let’s encourage it.” Let’s just not try to talk ’em out of it.

What we are dealing with today is a collection of literally thousands of media people who for the past two years have known, quote, unquote, that they were gonna get Donald Trump. They’ve known it. They have trusted it. They have relied on it. They have believed it. They’ve gone to bed every night and awoken every morning believing that was going to be the day where the bombshell report was discovered that would send Donald Trump packing back down to Trump Tower once and for all.

That day never came, and now it won’t. That day never came, and now it won’t. They have realized it, and they are melting down here throughout the entirety of the Drive-By Media. Thousands of people are losing their minds because they were dead set certain that they either individually or collectively were going to get Donald Trump.

And they threw all of their marbles into the Mueller investigation, and the Mueller investigation has, at the end of the day, let them down. So now they are busy manufacturing chicken salad out of chicken poop.

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RUSH: By the way, little Pencil Neck is still out there today claiming he’s got evidence of Russian collusion. At some point when does somebody demand that Pencil Neck produce it? You know, folks, I’m gonna tell you something. When people claim they know there was probably obstruction of justice, but they couldn’t find any, what do you call that?

You got Mueller, you got Weissmann, you got these pro-Hillary investigators, and they are saying, “Well, we know there was probably obstruction of justice, although we couldn’t find any,” what do you call that? That’s called a witch hunt! It’s precisely called a witch hunt. And, by the way, calling it a witch hunt equals obstruction, did you know that?

The Mueller report — and I predicted this just this week — the Mueller report even lists Trump calling the investigation a witch hunt as an example of an obstructive act. “In analyzing the president’s decision to fire Comey, the following evidence is relevant to the elements of obstruction of justice.”

It goes on to say, “and the president followed Comey’s termination with public statements that were highly critical of the investigation. For example, three days after firing Comey the president referred to the investigation as a witch hunt and asked, when does it end? Those actions had the potential to affect a successor director’s conduct of the investigation.”

Calling it a witch hunt. You know you didn’t do, you know you didn’t do what’s alleged, you know it didn’t happen, there is this massive team of people who hate you, who donated and helped Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and they are investigating you on this charge that you know it didn’t happen. What would you do? It is a witch hunt.

And these clowns admitting, “Well, we know there was obstruction, but we just couldn’t find any,” that is the definition of a witch hunt. Calling the probe a witch hunt, he might have done that a thousand times, so there might be a thousand pieces of evidence of Trump obstructing the investigation.

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RUSH: The Mueller report, by the way, only mentions “collusion” 23 times. (chuckling) “Obstruction” is mentioned 176 times in the Mueller report. “Witch hunt” is mentioned nine times. Patrick in Bemidji, Minnesota. Great to have you, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hello. Thank you for having me.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: I want to talk to you about Schiff and his collusion. He’s been saying for over two years now he had all this evidence, and he’s been blowing that smoke up our skirts now for this whole time. Why can’t the Republicans subpoena him and supposedly get that evidence out of him? Now, if he doesn’t have anything —

RUSH: You can’t subpoena a fellow member of Congress. You can’t even call ’em stupid.

CALLER: There should a way to make him prove that he’s got some kind of evidence to show up one way or the other.

RUSH: I agree with you! I agree with you! But he doesn’t have to prove it. He’s a liberal Democrat. He doesn’t have to prove it. If he were a Republican asserting this, the media would be camped outside his bathroom, his urinal, his house, his office, demanding to see it! But the media is not going to require Adam Schiff to produce his “evidence,” because they’re on his team. They are not there to make him look bad. They are there to promote what he alleges. So… But I agree. He ought to be forced somehow to turn it over if he’s got it.

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RUSH: You’re not gonna believe this. The Mueller report says that Trump’s joke to the Russians to find Hillary’s emails proves that they were working together. CNN is out there saying that the Mueller report proves that Trump was cooperating with Russia and WikiLeaks! How can they say that! The report doesn’t say that. The report says there was no collusion. CNN is reporting that Trump cooperated with the Russians and WikiLeaks. But Trump’s joke about the Russians comes up in the Mueller report.

They claim that it made the Russians try to hack Hillary’s emails. Are you kidding? My friends, this… This… (sigh) I’m speechless. Trump’s jokes, “Hey, Russia, if you’re listening, maybe you can find Hillary’s missing emails,” and the report says that five hours later, the Russians started trying to hack Hillary’s emails. Are you kidding me? Oh, my God. (sigh) Oh, gee And now CNN says, “It wasn’t a joke! It wasn’t a joke! See? Trump cued the Russians to hack Hillary’s emails.”

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RUSH: Okay. Folks, a reminder. I have meeting tomorrow, not a vacation day. I don’t know when I last took one of those. But Mark Steyn will be here guest hosting the program tomorrow, and I — if all goes well (I’m just kidding) will be back here on Monday. Hee-hee-hee.

RUSH: Look, keep a stiff upper lip out there. The Democrats think… They’re renewed. I’m watching Jerry Nadler. (sputtering) “Aw, man, this — this — this is great! Mueller left us bread crumbs to impeach Trump a-a-and now we gotta go do it!” So hang in.