RUSH: Does anybody but me find it just outrageous that Nadler is calling John Dean up there and that the Drive-Bys are excited about it? (laughing) I’m sorry. Look! “John Dean to Testify on Presidential Obstruction!” What’s he gonna say? “Nixon did it!” How many times have I told you? The only thing these people have is what’s in their playbook from the past. These people on the left cannot innovate. So they’ve gotta replay Watergate here. So they’ve gotta go get John Dean, who’s 81 years old.

As far as I know, he has never been in the Trump administration, had nothing to do with the dossier, and if they want to talk about obstruction here, there isn’t any on Trump’s part. They haven’t found any. But yet they’re gonna have John Dean (laughing) up there to tell ’em what obstruction looks like from his experience in the Nixon administration. I don’t know. I may be… I guess I’m the only one that finds this funny. A lot of people are scared about it. “Rush, I can’t believe they’re going to this extent.”

Folks, it’s what we always get each and every day. It’s not even news, it’s fake news, and it’s all oriented toward destroying Donald Trump.

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RUSH: John Dean. John Dean (audio sound bite number 24 ) was on with CNN this morning. Question to John Dean: “Today you’ll be back before Congress all these years later,” after you helped get rid of Richard Nixon. “We have your prepared statement here, but tell us what your overarching message is to” Congress.

DEAN: I’m clearly not a fact witness, but I hope I can give them some context and show them how strikingly like Watergate what we’re seeing now — and as reported in the Mueller report — is. The fact that, uh, Nixon was hands on very early is just like Trump was hands on very early. The firing of Comey was certainly not dissimilar from some of the actions that Nixon took.

RUSH: The firing of Comey was entirely called for! It was legal! It was recommended by the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. It was not obstruction of justice. It should have happened earlier, as Comey has continued to prove with his post-FBI directorship life. He should have been fired long ago. He should have been fired the day after that July 5th press conference where he assumed the role of attorney general, determining who’s gonna be prosecuted and who isn’t and announcing why, then going out and listing all the crimes Hillary Clinton committed, and then saying,” We’re not charging her?”

You never do that! You never do that. You never… If you’re not gonna charge somebody, you shut up about them! But remember, that whole thing was really the exoneration of Hillary Clinton. That was what that was all about, and it was that firing… When people started clamoring for Trump to be charged with obstruction, that’s when Barr wrote his first memo. Just out of the blue, not as the attorney general, he wrote a 19-page… No, it wasn’t 19 pages. He wrote a long memo about how the executive (Trump) could not obstruction justice by executing constitutionally mandated duties.

He could not obstruct justice by following through on duties the Constitution allows him.

That was the point of Barr’s first memo that the Drive-Bys hated, and the left demanded, “Who asked you to write this?” “Nobody. I’m just shocked at what I’m seeing here, and I wanted to get my reaction to it on the record.” It’s outrageous. Fired? Obstruction of justice for firing an FBI director? Here’s John Dean trying to say… What is this, “Nixon was hands on like Trump is hands on”? He’s president, for crying out loud! What does that mean? “The fact that Nixon was hands on very early on just like Trump hands on…” So? Firing of Comey not dissimilar from some of the actions that Nixon took? Trump was not trying to stop the investigation. This is… It’s just bogus.

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RUSH: The Drive-By Media is anxiously assembled on Capitol Hill, eagerly awaiting an upcoming congressional hearing. The Democrats are beginning a public airing of the Mueller report. Here’s how AP reports it: “President Donald Trump says it’s ‘case closed.’ But Democrats are just getting started with Robert Mueller .

“House Democrats have scheduled a series of hearings this coming week on the special counsel’s report as they intensify their focus on the Russia probe and pick up the pace on an investigative ‘path’ — in the words of Speaker Nancy Pelosi — that some of them hope leads to impeachment.”

Now, the Mueller report is out. It’s been out since the first part of May. And in it Mueller found no evidence of any collusion. Look, I know, folks. It gets tiresome. There was never any evidence, and Mueller knew this the day he took the job. But none of that matters.

As far as Jerry Nadler and the Democrats are concerned, the Mueller report found collusion, the Mueller report found obstruction of justice, and they’re now gonna conduct hearings on it. It is the most surreal thing.

Imagine a jury coming back and finding a defendant not guilty and the prosecutors deciding to go to a different court and start the trial all over again without a judge, picking a jury to go in there and fake another trial without a judge, just rent out a courtroom and do it even though they’ve got a not-guilty verdict, which is essentially what’s happening here.

And they’re operating under the theory that Mueller did find evidence that William Barr has covered up, redacted, or withheld, and they’re trying to get more documents released from the DOJ to prove their case.

But what this actually is is a pretend or preliminary impeachment hearing. They’re giving it a dry run. That’s what this is. And that is why the Drive-By Media is so excited, so anxious, can barely contain themselves. But what Nadler is doing — that’s why John Dean’s up there. Does somebody want to try to compare — what’s Dean got to talk about here, really?

If you want to make a comparison to Watergate and this situation, what was Watergate? A bunch of guys working for Nixon, tried to break into the Democrat National Committee. They left evidence that they were there and they got caught. Okay. Well, what is the connecting event to today’s scandal?

The connecting event is somebody tried and succeeded in hacking the Democrat National Committee computer network. Except that it wasn’t Donald Trump. And the Democrats don’t even say it was. The Democrats are saying that it’s the Russians. But nobody has any evidence that it was the Russians. And what evidence there is suggested that this hack or attack had to come from inside because of the recorded data transferred speeds.

Data being downloaded from their computer network to external drives could not have happened over the internet because the speeds were much, much faster, even with gigabit Ethernet and fiber, much faster than you could get so people think it was an inside job. But there’s no record of Trump, there’s not even an allegation of Trump trying to break into the Democrat National Committee computers. The Russians supposedly did that.

Now, originally it was the Russians doing that to benefit Trump. But then we were told the Russians also tried to break into the RNC computers. And then we were told the Democrats wouldn’t even let the FBI examine their servers or their network. They hired a private sector firm called CrowdStrike, and CrowdStrike is who said the Russians tried to break in the Democrat network. But we don’t have any official evidence.

So what’s John Dean talking about? There’s nothing to conflate here. DNC headquarters broken into by people working for Nixon in 1972, but what happened here is nothing to do with Republicans breaking into the Democrat computer or network.

So what this really is, Jerry Nadler is convening his show trial, the AP, the Drive-Bys are calling it a public airing of the Mueller report, and Nadler and the Democrats and Pelosi are assuring their lunatic base that there’s more in this than what we know. Mueller redacted a bunch of and Barr redacted a bunch and we’re gonna get to the bottom of it. And their late-night comics — late-night haters are proceeding on the basis that there’s something in the Mueller report that we still don’t know that’s being covered up, and it proves Trump colluded.

But what this really is is a dry run for a future, real impeachment proceeding. That’s what Nadler’s going for. And in doing this, I must say that he’s doing this not with the consent of Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi does not want him doing this, Pelosi doesn’t want him getting close to this, she doesn’t want this to happen. And Nadler couldn’t help himself. He’s proceeding anyway. And the Drive-Bys are assembled breathlessly because they are hoping and praying just like they were every day for two years that some new bit of information proving Trump colluded is going to be found and is going to be produced and Trump is gonna be sent packing and Hillary is gonna become president by the end of the week.

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RUSH: I got an idea. I got an idea for Jerry Nadler. By the way, Nadler’s popping pills. I just saw him pop a pill, grab a bottle of water, you know, people jiggle it around in their mouth before he swallowed. He just popped a pill sitting there in the chairman’s chair. Remember that video, the audio we had of the guy eating like crazy while he was being interviewed? He just popped a pill. You know, he had an incident there, he was at an event with the mayor of New York, de Blasio, and they thought he had dehydration.

Anyway, I have an idea. If they’re gonna call John Dean, you know what they ought to do? They ought to bring in a concessionaire, pop a bunch of popcorn — this is a great idea I got in an email note from a friend. Pop a bunch of popcorn, play All the President’s Men, and then bring in Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford and call them as witnesses.

If you’re gonna call John Dean as a witness in Trump-Russia collusion, go all the way, play All the President’s Men, to hell with anything else, and then get Dustin Hoffman in there and Redford and then follow them up with Woodward and Bernstein. I mean, if you’re gonna go Watergate on this, go all out.

CNN is so breathless, they can barely contain themselves that John Dean is going to testify on the Mueller report. John Dean has done nothing but read the damn thing. He didn’t have anything to do with — well, it’s senseless to waste time pointing out.

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RUSH: Well, the latest from Governor Cuomo in New York is that one is dead in the helicopter crash into the skyscraper, the 54-story building in New York City. The helicopter apparently trying to make a crash landing on top of the building, one person dead, Governor Cuomo alleged fire occurred and is out now and apparently all is — the only thing that’s happened is this has really put a monkey wrench into Jerry Nadler’s Watergate hearing — I’m sorry — Trump-Russia collusion with Russia stealing the election from Hillary hearing.

I mean, here’s Nadler, his big moment, this is the impeachment dry run, this is it, this is a mock impeachment hearing beginning, this is to test it, this is to see how to do it, to see how it plays, and then we have this incident in New York which has captivated all of media, and Jerry Nadler cannot get a camera turned on inside his committee hearing room. Can you imagine how he’s sitting there fuming about this?

And John Dean, wherever he was, he had to drive all the way in to Washington, sit there, he’s gonna be a big witness in the Trump-Russia collusion story, despite having nothing to do with it. And now his big return to glory will not happen. Maybe Nadler will postpone. Maybe Nadler will delay until the coverage in New York ends, and maybe Nadler won’t get started ’til 7 o’clock tonight.

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RUSH: I’ve put out a media APB for Jerry Nadler. I cannot find the guy. I have scanned… Maybe he’s on C-SPAN, but I can’t find Jerry Nadler and his mock impeachment hearing anyway. And about the building in New York City, I do not know for a fact that the building was next door to Fox News. My first email about this was from somebody at the Fox News building who said they were told it was the building next door, but I don’t know that that’s actually true. Pilot was killed in that helicopter crash. That’s the one death.