RUSH: In addition, we got Nikki Haley. I have one question for Nikki Haley. Did you tell Trump what Kelly and Tillerson were doing, or did yor save it for the book? And if you didn’t tell Trump and you only saved it for the book – (interruption) what do you mean, you know about the book? Right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers, Nikki Haley, former U.N. ambassador — and, by the way, I need to remind everybody that our impressions of Nikki Haley were great from the beginning of the Trump administration.

She was doing a great job at the United Nations. She seemed all-in and all over it. She seemed to be a very, very loyal Trump administration figure. And I don’t know that she wasn’t, but she’s published a book, and in the book the big leak is that she says that the chief of staff, Marine General John Kelly and Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, sought to recruit her to subvert Trump, but that she kept all of this to herself until now, until her book! She didn’t tell Trump? Obviously she didn’t tell Trump. Is anybody surprised?

I’ll tell you, I’m surprised by Tillerson. I’m not surprised by Kelly. But I got Tillerson all wrong. I guess I liked his name too much. I thought the name Rex Tillerson was a perfect name for the CEO of a big, bad fossil fuel oil company. He followed a CEO by the name of Lee Raymond, who was another — gotta see a picture of Lee Raymond on a happy day. This guy is classic, and he was the guy that preceded Rex Tillerson.

I thought Tillerson was good, but apparently Tillerson and Kelly were trying to undermine Trump from the get-go. Of course they were not alone. I remember when McMaster was hired. Trump hired McMaster over the holidays down here at Mar-a-Lago, had a gigantic signing ceremony type thing to be national security adviser. And I saw how the Drive-Bys and the Washington establishment was going nuts, “This is great, this is great, this is great, this is great.” I said, “Uh-oh. If the establishment likes somebody, the red flags go up.”

By the way, we’re also learning that it seems like — yes, we’re still learning — if there was a nexus, if there was a central point, if there was a sun around which the get-Trump movement was in order, the sun was apparently the national security structure, the national security apparatus, which is a catch all for national security, which would include the diplomatic corps at the State Department. It would include military elites. It would include the CIA, John Brennan, director national intelligence, Clapper. And it seems like the National Security Council is where most of the Obama holdovers still are.

The National Security Council has not been swept out. The vipers are there. And I recalled a story from long ago in Politico talking about this. I went back and found it, and I will share the details with you as the program unfolds.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to go back to May 16th, 2017, we’re about, oh, four and a half months into the Trump presidency, and I warned everybody about this.

RUSH ARCHIVE: There is an ongoing effort to sabotage Trump personally, political, professionally, and this sabotage is occurring from within the government and perhaps even from within the Trump administration. It is being aided and abetted by the establishment media. Without that, the saboteurs and leakers would really not be able to make themselves known or heard.

RUSH: Well, you know, I’ve had a rethink on this. Being known or heard, they could have still tried what they’re trying without the media. They would not have nearly the nationwide acceptance without the media. But if the media were neutral, for example, it would have been almost impossible for them if the media were actually neutral, were actually a watchdog — by the way, a little side note. I was reading something today, a story about the decline of local newspapers, the decline of newspapers in middle and small-town America. And it was written by a journalist wringing his hands over how horrible it is.

You know why? Because all of these little towns and mid-sized towns are now not going to have a watchdog. And it served as a constant reminder of how these people see themselves. They see themselves as watchdogs. They’re out there spotting corruption, looking for people that are doing whatever it is that’s not right and then blowing ’em up and exposing them.

But that’s not what they are anymore. They are not watchdogs. They have become advocates. There’s not anything close to that original purpose, journalism being a watchdog on behalf of the citizenry. They have become full-fledged advocates, as we well know. But now we know just how deep the deep state is. And I’ll tell you one thing, folks. Donald Trump has exposed it. You know, I always try to find the positive in all these things. It’s very easy to be pessimistic and negative.

Donald Trump has exposed the existence of this entity that everybody calls the deep state. What it actually is is a relatively small, when compared to the overall population, it’s a very small, unelected group of people who actually think, and in many cases do, run the country. The belief in things like this has always been laughed at, sneered at as nothing more than kookism and conspiracy theory devotion.

But now we know that it’s true. And we also know that the media is part of this cabal and has been for the longest time. And as this realization hits people and strikes people as time goes on, it’s not gonna be beneficial to these people. These are the kind of people that must operate in anonymity. They know each other. And everybody in Washington knows who they are. But nobody talks about it. They’re unelected. Many of them are career. Some of them are in appointed positions, but there literally is this small group of people who believe they run the country. And when somebody comes along — and it never has happened to this extent — when somebody comes along and threatens ’em, look what they do?

In the process they have come out of hiding. They literally are exposing themselves. They’re making themselves known. They are illustrating to everybody what they are, who they are, what they do, and for how long they’ve been doing it. And they are letting everybody know that the entitlement to power is legitimate and real and you have nothing to say about it. I don’t know anybody but Donald Trump who can expose this.

It takes me to Nikki Haley. She was on CBS Sunday Morning yesterday. The news anchor Norah O’Donnell during the interview, question: “You say John Kelly and Rex Tillerson confided in you that when they resisted the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country. And then the Secretary of State Tillerson went on and to tell you the reason he resisted the president’s decisions was because if he didn’t, people would die. You memorialized that conversation. It definitely happened?”

HALEY: It absolutely happened. And instead of saying that to me, they should have been saying that to the president, not asking me to join them on their sidebar plan. It should have been, “Go tell the president what your differences are and quit if you don’t like what he’s doing. But to undermine a president is really a very dangerous thing. And it goes against the Constitution, and it goes against what the American people want. It was offensive.

RUSH: Well, no kidding! Did you go tell the president, Nikki? I don’t know that anybody’s asked her that. Did you tell the president these guys were trying to subvert? Did you tell him that they were trying to undermine him? One is the chief of staff; the other one’s the secretary of state. Now, as I said, I was surprised. I was dead wrong about Tillerson. I’m not surprised about John Kelly. And I should have been more up to speed on Tillerson.

And, by the way, it was my fault. There were people early on who were saying Tillerson’s out of place, this is not good, is a bad choice, Trump shouldn’t have chosen him, he’s not all in. I can’t tell you the number of people that came up to me early on, “Tillerson literally thinks Trump is a blithering idiot. He thinks Trump’s the stupidest person he’s ever run into.”

And I’m saying, “How did he get appointed secretary of state, then? I mean, how can you hide if you think somebody’s that stupid?” Well, lack of experience early on, need to fill out the cabinet, these kinds of excuses were given to me. Anyway, it’s just more exposure. It’s just more fact-based evidence that there has been a gigantic cabal in relative terms attempting to overturn a duly constituted presidential election.

Norah O’Donnell then said, “The president asked for a favor” – she’s talking about the transcript of the phone call now to Ukraine President Zelensky “– the president asked for a favor in the transcript. Is it appropriate for the president to ask for a foreign government to interfere in a U.S. election?”

HALEY: Ukraine didn’t do the favor, and the president released the money anyway.

O’DONNELL: So that absolves him?

HALEY: I told you I don’t think it’s good for us to ever want a foreign country to investigate an American. I’ll always say that. That’s just not something we want to get into the practice of doing. So, no, I don’t feel comfortable with that, but I also don’t feel comfortable with the fact that we’re having an impeachment process during an election year.

RUSH: Okay. The news here is that Ukraine didn’t do the favor and president released the money anyway. So no bribery, no quid pro quo, nothing impeachable here. But then she follows with what is a typically perfunctory answer, “I don’t think it’s good for us to ever want a foreign country to investigate an American.” Of course she has to say that. What is she talking about? We do this. What do you think, Nikki, Hillary Clinton and the entire Democrat Party were doing?

They were using Ukraine to facilitate the effort to investigate Trump. They were using Russian spies. They were using Christopher Steele and his contact with Russian spies. That’s what makes this so ironic is all these people, “It’s so distasteful to ask a foreign government to investigate an American citizen.”

We have a treaty with Ukraine. We have a mutual pact with Ukraine. Both countries will ferret out corruption within their respective governments that’s sponsored by the other country. So we have a deal with Ukraine that if any Americans are engaged in corruption in Ukraine that we’ll expose it, we’ll investigate it. Ditto the exact reversal, Ukraine to the United States.

All Trump was doing was acting on a treaty that was signed back in 1999 by Bill Clinton. There literally is nothing untoward here. The real thing Trump was doing anyway, we say for the 15,000th time, he was asking for assistance in investigating CrowdStrike and the efforts the Democrats made with Ukraine to investigate him. The Ukrainians were all-in with this American cabal to try to overturn the election results. And then Trump wins, and Ukraine has to do a fast dance 180 because they know they’re gonna be on Trump’s bad side.

Ukraine was every bit as involved as was the FBI and the CIA in trying to run this phony Trump-Russia collusion story. Trump just wants to get to the bottom of it. But all of these Washington people wringing their hands, “It’s so bad, it’s so terrible for a foreign country to investigate an American.” For crying out loud, does anybody recall the kinds of things the Obama administration attempted to do to subvert elections in Israel? And nobody cared. Everybody was praising Obama for doing what he thought was right in trying to maintain hold of his own agenda, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

All of this, folks, is just another gigantic element of this ongoing grand illusion being created. There is nothing real in any of this. It is all manufactured, every bit of it. There’s not a single thing here that is real. In terms of a criminal act, in terms of an impeachable offense, in terms of bribery, quid pro quo, the guilt in this is all on the left side of the aisle.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

This is Dennis in Las Vegas, new home of the Oakland Raiders. Great to have you on the EIB Network, sir.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Rush, I think Mrs. Haley actually did tell President Trump that Tillerson and Kelly were actually working against him, because John Kelly really didn’t last very long, and Rex Tillerson was summarily discharged while out of the country on State Department business.

RUSH: Okay. You’ve got a very, very bad connection there. I think what he said is he thinks that Nikki Haley did tell Trump because Tillerson and Kelly are gone. Kelly survived a long time after this so-called happened. Tillerson didn’t last long as Kelly. Kelly has not been gone that long. But, again, folks, this is just somebody saying they think that Nikki Haley told Trump. We don’t know. That’s why she needs to be asked the question.

If she didn’t, if she saved this for a book — look. Is it safe to say — and it has been speculated upon previously — that Nikki Haley might seek the Republican presidential nomination down the road, 2024 shall we say? And in so doing might it not be good for her to publish this information and then she’s on TV, “Trump didn’t do anything, Trump did not withhold any aid and he didn’t get the investigation he wanted so there’s nothing here.” That’s a defense of Trump. She is defending Trump.

She was recruited, she says. She says that Kelly and Tillerson came to her and asked her to join them in their effort to get rid of Trump. So the question is, did she tell Trump about this? And we don’t know. I haven’t seen anywhere that she has been asked that.