RUSH: Okay. So, I checked cable news during the break, and, ladies and gentlemen, there’s a gigantic disconnect. I just got through listening to a bunch of people talking about what an impressive witness Bill Taylor was. “Oh, my God, what a great voice. He took copious notes! He was able to put quote marks around everything. Ah, this guy was devastating to the president.” You know, I don’t want to lie to you people, and I don’t get caught up.

I make it a point not to share with you what I hope the reaction is. I tell you what I literally think. I was bored silly. I try to put myself in the position of people who are not immersed in this stuff every day, and they have been hyped, they have been primed. They have been told, “What’s coming here is going to be the coup de grace, the cherry on top, the final bomb.”

“Trump’s gone today!” And there wasn’t anything like that. In fact, these first two witnesses didn’t witness anything. George Kent says he “believed” there was a quid pro quo, and Taylor got it from Tim Morrison, who got it from Gordon Sondland! These two witnesses didn’t witness anything. “But, boy, they were very impressive people with great…” They bored the audience to tears, I’m telling you!

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Some of the staff was in here watching with me before the program began, and they said, “You know, you really do need to JIP this and do some of this running play-by-play commentary,” because I got so animated at some of this, like the leading the witness with these questions. And, folks, I’m not surprised that there’s this gigantic disconnect. I turn on Fox; I listen to the people saying, “Ohhhh, this Taylor, he was impressive! Oh, man, that voice! Oh, he had copious notes. Oh, he just…”

I’m watching, and I’m watching as objectively as possible, and I know, by the way (and we all know) Schiff doesn’t have anything. There is no crime. There hasn’t been a crime since they first alleged Trump colluding with Russia, since they first alleged that Trump was a traitor. There hasn’t been any evidence of a crime. Everything here is an illusion, and so the real question here is, “Can Adam Schiff do it?

“Is Adam Schiff the guy to literally pull off the impeachment of a president without a crime?” That is the objective that they have undertaken here. Given that, I can’t forget what Harold Ford said earlier this week. Harold Ford is a former Democrat member of Congress from Tennessee. He is well connected throughout the Democrat Party. He’s not a radical leftist. He’s not from that new wing of the Democrat Party. I don’t know what he’s doing now.

He has been a Wall Street financier, stockbroker, this kind of thing, and he comes from a deeply rooted political family in Tennessee. He said with Bret Baier on Fox that if this doesn’t go well by the end of the week, that Pelosi will pull it. I’ve heard nobody else allege that or allude to that. Except just now I saw that Jonathan Turley at TheHill.com has a piece on this question: “Is impeachment…?” In fact, let me get the actual headline here. Let me scroll back here, folks. Sorry.

“Are Democrats Building a Collapsible Impeachment?” I haven’t had a chance to read it, so I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what “collapsible impeachment” means. But I’m gonna take a wild stab. Is a collapsible impeachment one that you can fold up and go away, or is a collapsible impeachment something else? I probably shouldn’t even allude to this yet because I haven’t had time to read the piece, so I don’t know what he means by “collapsible impeachment.”

All I’m telling you is impeachment is a political thing. You need public opinion to pull it off. These two guys today, I’m telling you, did not persuade an anthill. I don’t care how persuasive they might have sounded to people in Washington who book these kinds of dryballs on TV shows. This thing as a TV show today did not have any evidence. It did not have anything that people were led to believe it was going to have.

There wasn’t anything blockbuster. These two guys are not even personal witnesses to anything. Taylor has never even spoken to Trump. There was nothing here that even approached the kind of bombshell allegations there were in the Kavanaugh hearings. There was nothing here that even gets close to what were bombshell allegations in the Clinton impeachment. There we had perjury. We had suborning perjury. Prior to all that, we had the semen-stained blue dress.

There is nothing here except a bunch of Washington dryballs upset that they were left out of Trump’s foreign policy regarding and involving Ukraine, and it’s filled with so much hypocrisy. For example… (Snort!) I’m getting repetitive with this. These two guys claim to have been very, very alarmed — they were very concerned — that Trump withheld “assistance.” “Assistance” is aid. They have their own terminology: “The interagency group,” “the various foreign policy channels”… That’s another one.

Trump had his own channel. He didn’t use their channel. He didn’t use “regular channels.” “Regular channels” means using the established foreign policy establishment and people in it. And of course why would Trump? They’re undermining him. They are leaking his phone calls to foreign leaders. They’re attempting to link him to something with Russia that didn’t happen. Trump was brilliant to avoid these people.

He was right on the money to ignore these people and not let them have direct input into his policy. It was the only smart way Trump could go. So these guys are bent out of shape that he did this, and they’re trying to say this is impeachable. So these guys are very concerned that Trump withheld the aid, the Javelins, the missiles, the weapons of war that Ukraine could use to fend off the evil Russians.

Trump did not withhold the aid!

This is the irony here. Ukraine got the aid. They got aid and they didn’t investigate Biden. All of this is about nothing. Now, if you want to go back to the Obama administration, he did not provide them any aid. Ukraine went eight years without American aid and assistance. These guys then say, “Well, the reason Trump didn’t provide the aid immediately was that he had personal political preferences, and that’s just beyond the pale.

“That’s something intolerable for us in our bow ties and our proper diplospeak. You simply do not put your personal political preferences into foreign policy.” Really? You’re trying to tell me that Obama never had personal political preferences? Like, you think Obama wanted the Iranians to have nukes? How about Obama delivering $150 billion in cash to the airport in Tehran, for crying out loud?

You think Obama doesn’t want the United States part of the whole climate change imbroglio that’s a fiasco? You think Obama didn’t input his own personal policy preferences? How about George W. Bush. What’s one of the reasons we went to Iraq? George W. Bush had a vision that if we spread democracy into one Middle Eastern country it would spread. Is that a personal political belief? Hell, yes, it is. The idea that presidents do not?

Why the hell do they run for office if they don’t have personal political beliefs? That’s the whole reason you run for office. You believe in your beliefs. You believe in what I want to accomplish. They’re trying to disqualify Donald Trump because he had personal political ambitions in his foreign policy with Ukraine. They’ve got nothing here, folks. They are attempting to approach the American people as though you are a bunch of idiots and ignoramuses and don’t know how the world works.

And they’re trying to tell you that the way Donald Trump is being president is so out of regular channels that it is impeachable. It isn’t! It’s exactly why elections choose the president and not these people. None of these people are elected. None of these people are accountable. But of course, Washington is gonna think these guys are brilliant and wonderful because they are part of the entire Washington establishment that everybody in Washington is part of. Trump is not.

But no matter how you strip it away, the American people that tuned in to watch this today had to be bored silly. “Rush, that’s very, very dangerous of you to say. These men had substantive things to say, Rush. They had very important things. They had very, very learned, uh, educated things to say, and it’s not a question of whether or not they were boring. It’s whether or not they were informative.” Oh, I beg to disagree. We may lament the pop culture as it is, but it is what it is.

And you simply cannot tell people that they’re gonna get one bombshell after another and then not provide it — and Schiff didn’t. There’s no way public opinion was moved an iota. If what they’ve done up to now with all the lies and distortions and allegations, if that hasn’t moved the needle on impeachment, this certainly wasn’t going to today. Now, again, I will admit that the media, by the time this is over, can repackage this thing, and they can make it look like it was one bombshell after another.

But as it happened live, it wasn’t. We don’t know how many people watched it live versus how many people are gonna watch the repackaging. So don’t misunderstand. I don’t think it bombed out yet. I don’t think it’s over with yet. But I’m telling you this did not go the way Schiff and Pelosi were planning it. It did not go the way Schiff told Pelosi it was gonna go. It couldn’t have! There’s nobody that would have put on this show, this hour and a half today, on purpose.

Nobody would have said, “Man, we got it! We’re loaded for bear. We’re gonna get Trump today. Watch us!”

This is not that. So I’m up against it on time again.

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RUSH: Devin Nunes has destroyed Adam Schiff this morning in his opening statement and response to Schiff, and he’s doing it again right now. He’s destroying the entire premise of what’s happening today on the substance of it. He’s already begun. It’s underway. We’ll have audio sound bites of it as the program unfolds. In fact, I want to play for you as soon as I can get to it portions of Schiff’s opening statement today followed by Nunes. It’s a stark contrast.

Nunes literally blows Schiff out of the water. Don’t know if Schiff knows it or not. And he’s doing it again right now. He just made the point that one of Schiff’s star witnesses, Alexandra Chalupa, admitted to Politico that she was collecting dirt on Trump during the 2016 campaign. And she’s one of Schiff’s star witnesses.

The problem for Schiff and the Democrats, they have no evidence. There’s nothing. They don’t have an impeachable offense or a high crime, bribery, or any of that. Adam Schiff is literally running an effort, an impeachment of Donald Trump, trying to get him thrown out of office without one crime having occurred. This would be a very difficult challenge for anybody to do, and I’m telling you Schiff can’t do it.

I had a chance also to check on Turley’s piece. And my interpretation of the headline, as I knew, was correct. Turley is saying that the Democrats’ charges here, their so-called impeachment offenses are so narrow that the architecture of the case is collapsible. He’s making the point that if you want to go for impeachment, impeachment is a big damn deal, and you better have a very strong and wide berth, foundation for it.

And they don’t. They don’t have a foundation for it. This is a wing and a prayer. As Democrat congressman Al Green said (doing impression), “We have to impeach the SOB, otherwise he gonna be reelected.” That’s exactly how they’re looking at. We gotta impeach him, otherwise he’s gonna be reelected, gonna win reelection. We can’t stop it, so we gotta impeach him.

Their foundation is so narrow that it practically doesn’t exist. It’s not built on anything substantive, and so Turley’s point is that anything built on a very flimsy, narrow, maybe even nonexistent foundation will collapse. So I put that together with what I heard Harold Ford say, and I may be attaching too much weight to what Harold Ford said, but the reason, he was the only guy who said it, the only Democrat who has ever spoken of any concern about this.

And I know that he knows Pelosi, probably still has a relationship with her, and for him to come out and say that if this thing doesn’t have legs by Friday, she’ll pull it, I think they’ve known from the get-go they’re rolling the dice on this. They are counting so much on the media to be able to take big nothing burgers like today and turn them into shocking breaking news events.