RUSH: So a lot of people, “Rush, what does it mean, what the judge is doing allowing Watergate prosecutors to weigh in on the Flynn thing?” Well, I’ll be happy to try to explain this to you, my friends. Man, is there a lot brewing out there today, as there, sadly is each and every day. We’re on top of all of it, looking forward to the next three hours broadcast excellence hosted by me, Rush Limbaugh. Really great to have you with us, folks. Telephone number is 800-282-2882. The email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.

So the judge in this case is Emmet Sullivan. And just to refresh, the Department of Justice has decided to throw the Flynn case out. There’s no case. They literally have no case. There is no evidence. There was nothing. The whole thing was manufactured. The DOJ is throwing it out.

So a bunch of Watergate-era, dinosaur lawyers have petitioned the judge to file amicus briefs. A friend of the court is what amicus brief means. And it’s entirely without getting into the — into the here on legal issues, it’s entirely irrelevant, uncalled for and not relevant or necessary in this case. But the judge is going to permit it. The judge is Emmet Sullivan. He’s a Clinton appointee.

And the thing about this that’s curious is Emmet Sullivan presided over the Ted Stevens trial, which he threw out because of the same kind of prosecutorial abuse that has gone on here. Yet in this case, Sullivan, the judge is on record as having called Michael Flynn a traitor. He’s on record as wanting Flynn to be punished far more severely than the DOJ even when it was an active case, wanted Flynn punished.

So the judge doesn’t want to let them get away with just dropping the case. Now, the judge cannot try a case the DOJ doesn’t bring to court. So it isn’t about that. It’s not about Judge Sullivan trying to force Barr and the DOJ into submitting for a trial and to present the evidence or lack of it. It’s about something that’s — well, depending how you look at these things, far more sinister.

Judge Sullivan, you should know, refused 25 times to allow amicus briefs written and to be submitted on behalf of Flynn. During the phase of this where it was an actual case, before the DOJ had dropped it, there were 25 separate requests for friends of Flynn to file amicus briefs on his behalf, and this judge refused all 25 times.

Legal experts will tell you that case law generally prohibits trial court judges like this from second-guessing the government’s decision not to prosecute a defendant. But it is really rare for a judge to ask for or, in this case, permit amicus briefs when prosecution has decided to drop the case. So what’s happened here, the DOJ and Barr announced they’re gonna drop the case, and these Watergate guys led by Richard Ben-Veniste — we’re talking about lawyers whose heyday was in the 1970s, folks — are demanding to be heard.

They want to prolong this. They want to be able to give the media something they can go on record to counter this case because the news of the case is there isn’t a case. There wasn’t any collusion. The Russians, if anything, we have now learned, were helping Hillary. And we have that sourced from none other John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director. That’s coming up here in just a second.

So what these lawyers — pure, partisan, left-wing Democrat hacks — have asked the judge to do is to give them a forum to file these briefs in which they can claim Flynn is guilty, that Flynn did it, that Barr is a reprobate, that this is nothing more than Trump politicizing justice and, oh, how horrible because they know that the media is gonna cover and expose and promote and amplify whatever it is they submit as their amicus briefs.

It’s simply a way, and the judge is complicit, of creating a phony news cycle that will continue the original attempt to suggest that Flynn is guilty. I mean, friend of the court brief, friend of what, friend of who here? Who are they friends of? Who are these Watergate lawyers friends of? Well, they’re the friends of the court in this case. What are they arguing? They’re arguing DOJ should not drop the case.

They don’t have a case. That’s why it’s being dropped. It’s that simple. Ask any lawyer. There’s no case here. “But, Rush, but, Rush, Flynn pled guilty.” Ah, ah. Been through this. Flynn pled guilty twice because they were threatening him with ruination. They threatened K.T. McFarland. The same thing with Roger Stone. That’s how you get guilty pleas. It’s how this particular bunch of lawyers, the Mueller team, the Enron task force, it’s how they operate.

It is outrageous what these people have done. They’ve put people in jail who have not committed crimes with the willing participation of judges. They cost Ted Stevens his Senate seat, then he had a heart attack and dies, the case gets dropped. They never had a shred of evidence against Ted Stevens. It was made up. The star witness in the Ted Stevens case, senator from Alaska, he was threatened by these lawyers. He was told to recite, i.e., this is your story, this is what you’re gonna say under oath. It was all lies suborned by the prosecution led by people like Andrew Weissmann, part of the Enron task force and part of Mueller’s merry band of investigators.

So the purpose of the friend of court brief is to provide a forum for a bunch of Watergate-era lawyers to write how Flynn is guilty. This is a travesty of justice. It’s not gonna change anything. Andy McCarthy was on Fox this morning and it was Ed Henry who said, “You say this is a bizarre order, Andy. What is really going on here?”

MCCARTHY: There’s a bunch of lawyers who are actually more ancient than I am who call themselves the Watergate prosecutors, and they figure the Rolling Stones still go on tour so why shouldn’t they get the band back together and they’ve been doing that since Trump came to office trying to get him impeached. Judge Sullivan, who has been so unhinged on this case that he originally characterized it as a treason case, decided this was just a peachy idea. So now he’s inviting basically an anti-Trump group therapy session. It will make no difference in the end, but it will just drag the process out.

RUSH: Well, who’s to say? Yeah, it won’t make a difference in the end. Flynn is not gonna be tried. He’s not gonna be prosecuted. But by the time this is all over, by the time the media is finished promoting and amplifying these friend of the course briefs, what’s gonna happen is that a certain percentage of the American people are gonna think Flynn did it, and he got away with it because Donald Trump is corrupting the DOJ. That’s what this is about.

We could sit here, oh, wring our hands, how horrible this is, these guys just miss the limelight. It’s far more devious than this. Let’s see. Sound bite number 10. This is another former prosecutor. Brett Tolman was his name. He was on Fox & Friends today with Brian Kilmeade. Tolman is a former U.S. attorney. I don’t know when he served. But the question, “Judge Sullivan, 72 years old, delaying his decision on whether to drop charges against -” he’s got no choice. Look. What if the judge doesn’t drop the charges? What happens is the DOJ has to try the case if they’re not gonna try the case. The judge can’t do anything. The judge cannot bring charges himself and act as the prosecution. That’s the DOJ. They have announced they’re not gonna proceed here. That’s what this really all about.

They’re trying to find a way to go on with this thing so they can get to the end of it with Flynn guilty, and that’s what these friend of the court briefs’ ultimate objectives are — or is. So, anyway, the question to Brett Tolman. He’s now allowing outside groups to weigh in with these friend of the court briefs. “What’s your take on the judge’s move?”

TOLMAN: I thought I’d seen everything in 20-plus years in the federal criminal justice system, but this is a first. This is an outrageous decision by a judge who’s now placed himself into that awful category of an activist who’s willing to set aside rules, set aside ethics, set aside precedent and just go in a direction because he is politically motivated to do so. Sidney Powell is correct that this court is now going against its own rulings, which is sacrosanct in the judiciary, that you follow your rulings so that there’s consistency in cases.

RUSH: All this is out the window. What’s sacrosanct? What precedent? What’s happened to criminal justice system is all out the window, as far as I’m concerned, with this so-called Russia collusion case happening in the first place. This is a bastardization of American justice. It’s a bastardization of the FBI.

It has totally torn down the credibility of both the DOJ and the FBI, at least the people who were in leadership positions in both, and so it’s not a surprise that you have a corrupt judge! It’s not a surprise, because, folks, the one thing… I don’t care (chuckling), it hasn’t changed. In the last three years, 3-1/2 years, it hasn’t changed.

The hatred for Donald J. Trump is as strong and intense as ever, and it is flavoring and directing and influencing what everybody in that town is saying and doing about virtually everything they’re saying and doing. Be it the DOJ, be it the FBI, be it various other elements of the administrative state, the avowed objective — stated or unstated — is to get rid of Donald Trump.

So since, again, Barr has come along in the DOJ and they’re dropping the case because they don’t have one — Flynn was set up — the deep state has decided, with a judge complicit, that they’re going to act like there is an active case. They’re going to be allowed to pontificate on it, and by the time they finish and the media promotes it all, most people will think that Flynn got away with serious treason-related crimes.

That is the objective. There’s also a little companion story here. You’ve heard that Richard Grenell, who is the acting Director of National Intelligence and the current ambassador to Germany… He’s serving in both posts. You have heard that he has declassified a bunch of documents that will lead to the unmasking of what we’re told is thousands of Obama administration people.

There’s a story here in PJ Media: “Some Obama Officials Ought to Be Mighty Worried About What Richard Grenell Just Did.” I don’t think anybody in the Obama administration is worried about a damn thing. I don’t think Obama’s worried. I don’t think Michelle Obama is worried. I don’t think Susan Rice, I don’t think Brennan…

I don’t think any of these people are worried. They should be. They should be much more than worried, but I don’t think they are. You know what unmasking is? Unmasking is, say you’re surveilling targets — the DOJ, the FBI, National Security Agency, CIA, whatever. In this case, the Russian ambassador who goes to lunch all the time, Sergey Kislyak.

He’s under surveillance. He knows it; everybody knows it. Not just him. A bunch of people at the Russian embassy. We have ’em under surveillance. Their phone calls are monitored and so forth and so on. Now, in the process of Kislyak going about his day, he’s gonna be talking to lots of Americans. He’s gonna be talking to lots of Americans in the Obama administration, the Trump transition team.

And the law says that you cannot reveal the names of Americans who are caught up in these surveillance operations when they’re not the targets of anything. So if Kislyak is the target and he takes a phone call from Flynn, it is against the law to release and tell anybody — to unmask — Flynn, to say that Kislyak was saying X, Y, and Z to Michael Flynn, Obama’s named national security policy.

Well, somebody did unmask Flynn. Somebody unmasked a whole lot of people, against the law, and so this is what Grenell is said to have in his possession, the names of the people who unmasked various Americans. It’s a felon. It’s a very… It’s a huge crime, because it has the ability to ruin people. They may not be doing anything wrong.

They’re just talking in the normal course of their jobs to the Russian ambassador. But all you gotta do is unmask Flynn. If you already got an operation to destroy Flynn, then somebody in the Obama administration unmasks him and says, “Yeah, he’s talking about sanctions to the Russian ambassador, in violation of Obama’s…”

That’s all it would take, and that’s exactly what happened.

So the story says a lot of people “Ought to Be Mighty Worried About What Richard Grenell Just Did.” Grenell just declassified the documents to tell us who the Obama administration unmaskers are — and we know who it is! We know it’s Susan Rice. We know that it’s Samantha Power. We know all of this. We know who was doing this, and we know that Obama was up to it in his eyeballs.

What’s new today — as of last night, actually — is John Brennan actually had intel saying that Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win the White House, ’cause she was a known quantity, plus she was a dupe. He knows this, and yet he’s testifying on television every night that they want Trump to win and that Trump is colluding and that Trump is an agent, Trump is a managed asset by Putin — knowing not only is that not true, knowing as well now that the Russians were hoping to have Hillary Clinton.