RUSH: I’m holding here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers a piece today at Breitbart by Joel B. Pollak, and the headline is: “Adam Schiff’s Report Cites No ‘Bribery’ or ‘High Crimes;’ Only Tweets.” Now, I wonder why this is. If you recall, let’s go back to early days of the Schiff committee hearings. You remember what they were preceded by? Pelosi out there saying the president had committed “bribery.” Bribery! They had never alluded to bribery at all, and then all of a sudden before the Schiff hearings get going, it’s bribery.
You know why? ‘Cause bribery is one of the things mentioned in the Constitution’s impeachment clause: High crimes, misdemeanors, bribery. Yet Schiff’s report doesn’t mention bribery. These witnesses today, they haven’t talked much about bribery at all. You know what they’ve been talking about? Abuse of power. That’s what all their messages have been about. So, once again, the Democrats struck out. They went out and they focus grouped the terms they were using.
Remember “quid pro quo” didn’t work but “bribery” did. So they shifted to bribery. Then they had their hearings, and guess what? The audiences plummeted during those two weeks. So bribery didn’t even come close. So now it’s time to change the strategy. Well, wait a minute. Why do you have to change the strategy if there are real impeachable offenses here? Just lay ’em out. Whatever the president’s done that is a high crime and misdemeanor, tell us about it. But they haven’t because there isn’t anything.
Instead, we are getting focus group-directed strategies by the Democrats. So now obviously… Bribery’s not in the Schiff report. All those witnesses, Yovanovitch, Fiona Hill, Bill Taylor, George Kent — O Say Can You See Vindman, all of them, were focused and oriented on the bribery aspects, that Trump was bribing the president of Ukraine with aid if he didn’t get the investigation of Biden. So they got Wile E. Coyoted. Now, they’re on to something new here. So what we are witnessing is an actual strategic maneuver that isn’t based on anything impeachable.
The Democrats are running political opposition research. They are creating a campaign issue to create a black mark on Trump’s resume for the 2020 presidential campaign, and now they have settled on “abuse of power,” and what is this abuse of power? Well, according to the programmed and scripted question-and-answer testimony today, the abuse of power is Trump “colluding with a foreign government to investigate a political opponent.” Trump colluding with… They’re heading back to Russia, folks.
Well, they never really left it. But they’re trying to tie what they think into it. They have created this belief, this phantom belief in the minds of millions Americans that the Russians tampered with the election and Trump helped ’em and colluded. “Russian meddling” means frustrations messed around with voting machines. That’s what they mean by it. That’s what they want people to believe, and so now Trump has all of a sudden… “Forget bribery. Nope! I guess there’s no bribery.
“Uh, high crimes and misdemeanors? Well, we don’t know what those are. The academics are trying to tell us what, uh, high crimes and misdemeanors are. High crimes and misdemeanor is now putting a picture of Mar-a-Lago on the State Department website. A high crime and misdemeanor calling the press ‘the enemy of the people’ and ‘fake news.’ He’s abusing his power. He’s calling us names. He’s calling liberal Democrats names. He’s insulting us.”
So now they moved on to presidential abuse of power. It’s patently obvious to me. Now, is presidential abuse of power easy to understand than bribery? Is it easier to prove, is it easier to illustrate to mind-numbed robots on the Democrat side watching this? Because that’s been the sole focus. Every one of these three hacks acting as scholarly lawyers has focused on abuse of power and how it threatens the Constitution and how George Washington warned everybody about it, and about how James Madison warned everybody about it — and even the king of England was worried about.
All these people were worried about abuse of presidential abuse of power.
(chuckles) How many presidents don’t? As they’re defining it today, how many presidents do not abuse power? The whole nature of the establishment of our government is a fight for power. The three branches are constantly fighting for more and more power. The legislative wants to get power from the executive. The executive wants to deny them and get more power for himself. Abuse of power? The way they’re setting this up, there isn’t a president in the future safe from impeachment. They don’t care. But all of this — bribery and then abandoning it, and whatever else — now settling on abuse of power, it still adds up to one thing.
They’ve got nothing.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
rush: Proving my point that they’ve moved on from bribery, the Democrats now have a coordinated effort to accuse Trump of abuse of power. A New York Times headline a little over an hour ago: “Impeachment Hearing Update: Scholars Testify Trump’s Actions Are An Impeachable Abuse of Power.”
I’m telling you, folks, the media has convened the Democrats, they’ve come up with a new coordinated strategy. Gone is bribery. Gone is extortion. Hello abuse of power. I know these people like I know anything else well, folks.