RUSH: As per usual in these circumstances, this is an amazing thing to watch. You got all these Democrats on this committee that’s led by Serrano from New York, Jose Serrano from New York, and they got Bill Barr, the attorney general. They think they’re gonna get to the bottom because the Democrats without fake news and without conspiracies don’t have any news. They’ve got nothing going on unless they make it up or get a conspiracy.
So they are convinced, they’re convinced that they’re gonna get the truth out of Barr today. They are convinced that they’re gonna put so much pressure on this guy that he’s not gonna know what hit ’em. They are convinced that Barr is going to be begging them to go easy on him after they pummel him and pummel him and get him to admit that the report says that Trump did collude with Russia, that he’s lied about it in his summary and please forgive him.
They are convinced that this happened and they are convinced that they’re gonna make Barr say it. It’s amazing. (paraphrasing) “Well, I don’t think what you’re telling us is the truth. Your four-page summary, it was an immediate conclusion, you couldn’t possibly have known. We know there was collusion.”
“Well, there wasn’t.”
“But, but, but, the special counsel, two years, and we know, the New York Times.”
“There wasn’t any.”
“But, but, you know there was. There has to have been. None of this can be explained otherwise.”
“Sorry. You know, the special counsel even told us before he submitted the report that there wasn’t gonna be any collusion.”
“No! No! No, no, no, no, no! That has to be another lie.”
“Well, I’m the chief law enforcement officer in the country, and I can’t come here and lie to you.”
“Still, it can’t be true, it can’t be true. This is suspicious. This is very suspicious. You’re just covering for the president.”
“Well, I’m just telling you what the special counsel said. And, you know what? Special counsel even told us before he submitted the report the direction it was going. We’ve known for maybe a year and a half there wasn’t any collusion.”
“No! No! No, there was collusion, there was collusion, there was –”
“Well, I’m sorry, but there wasn’t.”
“No ho-ho!” They’re going nuts. They’re literally — folks, these people literally thought that they were gonna be able to browbeat Barr into admitting that he cut some corners and took a circuitous route and was actually papering a bunch of stuff over for the president. And then Barr stunned them by saying, “Not only that, Congresswoman, but we offered the special counsel a chance to review my four-page summary before I released it.”
“Yeah? Yeah? Mueller saw it before you released it?”
“No, he didn’t see it. He said he didn’t need to see it, Congressman. The special counsel declined our offer to see the report, the four-page summary in advance, because he said he had faith in my work. We had a very positive working relationship. Mr. Integrity, Bob Mueller, and me, Mr. Integrity Jr., we work together –”
“No ho! No ho-ho-ho-ho-ho! There’s got to be some collusion in there. We’re gonna find it, we’re gonna find it.” It’s been comical to watch. It’s pathetic. The Democrats are literally making fools of themselves and do not know it. They believe that they are superior. They believe and are fully convinced that there’s collusion in there and that somehow it’s being covered up and that they’re gonna be able to get Barr to reveal it.
Barr is unflappable, he’s unmoved, and you know what he’s learned? I was telling Mr. Snerdley earlier, William Barr has learned to suffer fools. Some people can’t. Some people don’t have any patience with idiots, and they cannot hide the fact that they know they’re dealing with idiots. Bill Barr knows that he’s dealing with imbalanced, out-of-balance people here, but he doesn’t betray that he knows that.
Let’s go to the audio sound bites very quickly, give you an example. Here is Nita Lowey. She is from New York. This wasn’t about the report. This wasn’t about the special counsel. This is all about funding for the Department of Justice, and it had an application to Obamacare, and it did come up in a couple of questions. But Nita Lowey is the chairman of the House Appropriations Sub-Committee, and this is just a portion of her opening statement.
LOWEY: We have no idea how long it actually is. All we have is your four-page summary, which seems to cherry-pick from the report to draw the most favorable conclusion possible for the president. Even for someone who has done this job before, I would argue it’s more suspicious than impressive.
RUSH: It’s more suspicious. Your four-page summary, we don’t even know how big the whole report is and you reduce it to four pages. (imitating Barr) “And, yeah, I offered Mueller a chance to look at it in advance. He said no, don’t need to see it. I trust your work, Bill Barr.”
The Democrats are being driven mad. By the way, have you heard the phrase “handpicked attorney general Bill Barr” what cabinet secretary isn’t handpicked? They are all handpicked. And everybody in the Drive-By Media is using “President Trump’s handpicked attorney general William Barr.” Oh, you mean Jeff Sessions wasn’t handpicked? He was forced on us by Kislyak, the Russian ambassador at lunch one day?
So now there’s a big move on the Democrats are criticizing Trump for packing his cabinet with loyalists. Yeah. Trump is getting grief for putting supporters on his cabinet. I guess what he’s supposed to do is hire saboteurs and have a confederacy of enemies advising him so that he will not be able to accomplish his own agenda because he’s supposed to put people in there who will not help him move it forward.
I mean, this is — perverted is not the word. It’s just, these people, I keep looking for new ways to express the depths to which they have sunk. I think it’s all rooted in their abject hatred. And I think it’s resulted in severe poisoning of their emotions and of their mind. You know, at one point I thought this was a pretty good act. But it’s gone on longer than any of these people have the ability to consistently act this. I know that’s saying something, because they do have an incredible ability to act and be phony. But this has taken hold of them.
Now, here’s Barr. We’ve got a couple sound bites with him just to show you how unflappable he’s been. The Democrats have a problem with his summary. His four-page summary, they think, is a cover-up of real collusion that Mueller found. Despite the fact that Barr has said, “No, Mueller was given a chance to read my summary. He turned it down. He trusted me.” Mueller hasn’t spoken up. Nobody on Mueller’s team has spoken up and said, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Barr’s lying.
“There is collusion. We found lots of it.” None of that has happened, and yet they still insist — and do you know not a single reporter in the Drive-By Media (not a single reporter) is even fascinated with the truth of any of this? Every reporter is still invested in reporting the narrative advancing the mirage, if you will. So if the Democrats have a problem with Barr’s summary, they have Mueller to blame for it, because he blew off his chance to review it!
BARR: The letter of the 24th, Mr. Mueller’s team did not play a role in drafting that document, although we offered him the opportunity to review it before we sent it out, and he declined that. The letter on the 29th, I don’t believe that that was reviewed by Mr. Mueller or that they participated in drafting that letter. I think that from my standpoint, within a week, I will be in a position to release the report to the public, and then I will engage with the chairman of both judiciary committees about that report and about any further requests that they have.
RUSH: Now, he was responding to a question there from the chairman. (Wait a minute. Nita Lowey’s not the chairman. Serrano is. Yeah.) Serrano’s the chairman, whose question was, “With regard to the March 24th and March 29th letters to the judiciary committees, did Special Counsel Mueller or anybody on his team have a role in drafting them or reviewing them?” Meaning: “Did you write that four-page letter on your own? Did Mueller have anything to do with that? Did Mueller see what you were doing? Did Mueller know what you wrote?”
That’s when Barr said (paraphrased), “I gave him a chance to look at what I wrote, and he turned it down. He didn’t need to see it ’cause he knew that I had seen his report! He knew I’m an honest guy! He knew that I’m gonna summarize it accurately.” They can’t handle this. They are living in this fantasy that there was collusion, and they just can’t give it up, and they… I’ll tell you, I think this party’s been captured by the lunacy of Twitter. More on that as the program unfolds. Let’s see… So the next question here is from Nita Lowey. We’re back to her.
(impression) “You received a very serious, detailed report — hundreds of pages, high-level information — from the special counsel. You weighed the factors and conclusions at length. You outlined, prepared, edited, and released your memo in less than 48 hours. To me, to do this, it seems your mind must have already been made up. How did you do it?” Translating her question: “You got a multiple-hundred page report and in two days you summarized it into four pages. You couldn’t’a done that! There’s nobody that could do that unless their mind was made up and you’re just making it up.” Here’s Barr’s reply…
BARR: The thinking of the special counsel was not a mystery to the people at the Department of Justice —
RUSH: Oh!
BARR: — prior to his submission of the report. He’d been interacting —
RUSH: Stop the tape! Cue it back to the beginning, Mr. Broadcast Engineer. Do you know what he’s saying here? He’s saying, “Uh, Madam Congresswoman Lowey, it was more than 48 hours. I had advance notice from the special counsel of where they were going. See, I’m the attorney general, and they were keeping in touch with me — as is required by law — and they were telling me where they were going to end up.” In other words, he’s telling her, “I knew long before I got the report that there wasn’t any collusion because the special counsel was telling me.” The special counsel himself knew for at least 18 months that there wasn’t any collusion.
So here’s how the full answer sounded…
BARR: The thinking of the special counsel was not a mystery to the people at the Department of Justice prior to his submission of the report. He’d been interacting — he and his people had been interacting — with the deputy attorney general and lawyers supporting the deputy attorney general in his supervision of the special counsel. And in that context, there had been discussions. So there was some inkling as to some of the thinking of the special counsel. Furthermore, on March 5th, I believe, the deputy and I met Special Counsel Mueller and his team and had a preliminary discussion about the report. So we had an inkling as to what was coming our direction.
RUSH: Whoa, see? (paraphrased exchange) “We knew what was coming. So it wasn’t hard to do the four-page summary, ’cause I knew before I saw the report what was in the report because the special counsel was telling me.” “Well, why didn’t you tell us? You have a duty to tell us!” “I couldn’t tell you. The report wasn’t final yet. I had to see it.” “But you knew! You knew! So you’ve been helping to cover up the president’s collusion!” “No. What we’re saying is that there wasn’t any collusion and there hasn’t been any cover-up here.”
Now, some of this obviously could be fake and contrived outrage that is intended for their base that they are, in point of fact, actually attempting to react to this as they think their lunatic base voters are reacting to it. The other alternative, the other possibility is that they are as lunatic insane as their base voters and have bought hook, line, and sinker the whole notion that there was collusion and that somehow something’s gone wrong and it’s been covered up even by Mueller.
Now, it’s a toss-up which is the one. But it doesn’t matter, because for public consumption these people are making themselves sound like spoiled-brat children who don’t even deserve to be in the same room with this guy. He’s unflappable. He’s totally decisive and informed. They can’t entrap him, they can’t ensnare him, because they aren’t dealing in reality. He is, and that will kill their efforts every time. He’s dealing from a total immersion in reality, and they aren’t. They are dealing in a fantasy.
They’re operating from a contrived conspiracy born and supported by fake news, and they can’t give it up for whatever reason. So whether they’re acting it out or whether this is genuinely them is in the end irrelevant because public consumption is what it is, and they are not scoring any points, they are not making any headway, they are not helping to persuade the American people that there’s been any kind of a cover-up here whatsoever.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Next question is Tom Graves, Republican of Georgia, and his question: “General Barr, under federal law, does a member of Congress have the power to arbitrarily decide what portions of the special counsel court they might release, redacted or not?”
BARR: Not if violates the law, and we believe 6(e) does apply to members of Congress. This whole mechanism for the special counsel, as I said, was established during the Clinton administration in the wake of Ken Starr’s report. And that’s why the current rule says that the report should be kept confidential, because there was a lot of reaction against the publication of Ken Starr’s report, and many of the people who are right now calling for release of this report were basically castigating Ken Starr and others for releasing the Starr Report. I don’t intend, at this stage, to send the full, unredacted report to the committee.
RUSH: Oh-ho-ho! Man, the knife points just keep being jabbed in these people! Now, he’s right about this. When the Starr Report came out… For those of you in Rio Linda, who were not old enough, who were not born yet, or who were not paying attention, the Starr Report was a lurid account that included all of the raunchy details of the sexual peccadillos of the president of the United States at the time, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton.
It involved details of a cigar and its sexual usage, semen-stained blue dresses, any number of things, and not just with Monica Lewinsky. And before the Starr Report came out, you literally had… I mean, Democrats… Lanny Davis, James Carville, the entire Clinton defense team on TV was trashing Ken Starr as a sex pervert for months during the investigation. They were characterizing him as a lurid voyeur who didn’t care about anything but sexual details.
He was a pervert in his own right and it was Starr that should be investigated. So it comes out, and they said, “No more! Never, ever again are special counsel reports gonna be revealed in their entirety. We’re not gonna allow it.” So the Democrats gave us this law, and now they’re hemmed in by it, and they want everybody to ignore it. They want the full ball of wax report here, and Barr is saying, “I can’t. The law says I can’t, and you’re not gonna get me to break it.”
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So I just checked the email during the break. You people are very sweet. You’re very nice. A couple emails in there say, “Rush, enough sound bites. We want to hear you.” Well, I understand that, but these are good, and these are really useful today to help people keep everything in focus and, more importantly, to reinforce the vacancy of the Democrat position on all of this.
‘Cause, remember, folks — and we spent a lot of time on this yesterday so I’m not gonna be spending too much on it ’cause I don’t like being redundant, but this whole thing, none of this is an investigation, none of this was warranted, none of this was called for by anything that actually happened. This whole thing, this whole effort to get rid of Donald Trump, to deny Trump the nomination, deny Trump the presidency, screw up the transition, sabotage this presidency, all of this is made up out of whole cloth.
This whole thing is a plot and an effort, essentially a coup hatched by a bunch of unelected people. And it is one of the greatest political scandals in the history of the country. And it’s still not being treated that way. This is still being heralded as some kind of investigation and Mueller is being validated even by Barr. What Mueller did is being validated.
Mueller’s activities cannot be validated. I don’t care what his results were. People say, “Rush, we’re really, really fortunate that Mueller was honest here, said there wasn’t any collusion.” Well, I understand that in one sense. But it shouldn’t have even gotten to this point.
You know, when we get to the point where we are grateful that public servants are being honest, when we are grateful and thankful that public servants are being truthful, we’re already in a dangerous position. That ought to be the expectation every day. There ought not be applause associated with it. And there ought not be gratitude. It’s to be expected.
But this has been so far outside the bounds of civility and normalcy that I want to continue to call attention to it because to even characterize this as an investigation gives it a legitimacy that it does not deserve. None of this is legitimate. None of this should have ever, ever happened.
There should have been at any point from the origins of this, there should have been — and there wasn’t — one person to stand up and say, “Stop this. This is a violation of law. This is a violation of our ethics. This is a violation of our representative republic. This is a violation of every American ideal we hold dear.” There wasn’t one person, that we know of that stood up and said, “Stop it.” Everybody involved in it promoted it, acted in it, sponsored it, promoted it, amplified it, egged it on.
At every stage of this there should have been one Gary Cooper somewhere. There should have been a John Wayne somewhere that just stood up and said, “Stop this.” Somebody with the moral authority that when they said “stop” it would stop. But nobody did. At least we don’t know if anybody did.
It continued and it continued with the approval and the support, both financial and moral, of high officials in the Obama administration and in the U.K. intelligence agencies. We were so close. Folks, I need to point out again, we had an international effort to find even a speck of dirt to disqualify Donald Trump, and nobody could. We inadvertently, the American people, we inadvertently elected the cleanest and purest citizen we’ve got.
Who else in American politics could have survived an international effort to find a speck of dirt to disqualify something? They couldn’t find a single thing, even implanting spies. Now, none of us knew this. In fact, most of us voting for Trump thought we had to hold our nose about a couple things, when in fact we’ve got the cleanest and purest international citizen that we could have elected. But we came so close. So that’s why I continue to focus on this.
Here’s Jerry Nadler. Jerry Nadler heard what Barr said today. Jerry Nadler is chairman of the house — ah, these committees, I get ’em confused. Intelligence or judicial, I’m not sure which. It doesn’t matter. He’s now ticked off. He heard Barr today. He heard Barr say he’s not turning over the report. He’s not gonna turn over anything that’s redacted.
He’s not gonna let anybody see the whole thing because of grand jury material. The D.C. Circuit says that Rule 6(e) is a ruling from the D.C. Circuit which maintains grand jury material must remain private and thus redacted in reports like this, and Nadler, he is fit to be tied about it.
NADLER: The timing isn’t the question. I mean if he, if he releases it Friday as opposed to next Tuesday, I don’t care. What is the question is what we receive. Do we receive a full copy of the Mueller report and the documentation underneath it, do we receive most of it with a little redactions, or do they completely expurgate it?
RUSH: Expurgate it? Anyway, he’s not gonna see the whole thing. He’s not entitled to see the whole thing, but he believes that is because they remain convinced now that Mueller and Mueller’s pro-Hillary team and Barr are hiding that speck of evidence, that speck, that little speck of dirt that will get rid of Donald Trump. And if that doesn’t work then they get to continue the narrative “they’re hiding stuff from us,” and they continue to spin if fake news conspiracy to keep their deranged voters at bay.
So now back to Barr. This was a question from Representative Robert Aderholt, Alabama. “Is the Justice Department investigating how it came to be? That your agency used a salacious and unverified dossier as a predicate for a FISA order on a U.S. citizen?” In other words, are we gonna look into how the hell this happened, a fake, phony piece of opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign gets a FISA warrant? Is your office looking into that?
BARR: The office of the Inspector General has a pending investigation of the FISA process in the Russian investigation. And I expect that that will be complete in probably in May or June, I’m told. So hopefully, we’ll have some answers from Inspector General Horowitz on the issue of the FISA warrants. I am reviewing the conduct of the investigation and trying to get my arms around all the aspects of the counterintelligence investigation that was conducted during the summer of 2016. I haven’t seen the referrals yet from Congressman Nunes, but obviously if there’s a predicate for an investigation, it’ll be conducted.
RUSH: Well, Congressman Nunes will come up later on the program. He was on Sean Hannity’s television show last night, and he was boldly claiming if nobody else is gonna do it, he’s going to, and he’s going after McClatchy news. He wants a retraction, he wants an apology.
They have lied openly about him and this entire Russian investigation along with the rest of the media. They have knowingly pushed every phony bit of information, every made-up bit, every Drive-By Media outlet, pushed it knowing full well now especially that it was never true.
But Nunes is gonna go after them in the form of a major lawsuit, and he has made eight criminal referrals to the Department of Justice demanding that these eight areas be formally investigated. And that’s what Barr was referring to there.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: To the phones we go. Roland in Houston. You’re first today, and it’s great to have you here with us. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. How are you doing? Just wanted to bring everyone’s attention, if they can remember just a few months back when the Republicans were in charge of the House, and we were requesting information from the DOJ, the FBI, everything else. And these guys were basically ignoring the requests and dragging their feet and completely ignoring the authority that Congress has. Fast-forward a few months; now we got the Democrats in charge. Now these guys are demanding that Barr not only turns over the report unredacted, but he turns it over within a week. You know what? We should do exactly to them what they did to us and just go and tell ’em to pound sand, because it just peeves me off. These guys continue to get away with anything, and we just take it.
RUSH: Well, I understand the sentiment. Everybody wants them to get a daily dose of their own medicine. I’ll give you another illustration of this. He’s right. You know, for two years the Republicans in the House, they’re demanding that Rosenstein — Trump’s people, Trump’s DOJ — turn over this document, that document. Rosenstein basically frosts ’em. Stonewalls ’em. Says, “No way. Screw you!”
We got nothing. We still don’t have a lot of these declassified. I told you why I think that is yesterday. Now they’re saying, “What do you mean? It’s a three- or four-hundred-page report and Barr can write a four-page summary in 48 hours? That’s not possible! He had to have his mind made up. That isn’t possible. He might be making it up.” Now, it seems to me that in October of 2016 the eminence himself, James Comey, reopened the Hillary email case because they found hundreds of thousands of emails on the computer of the porn voyeur, Carlos Danger, Anthony Weiner.
They said they needed to go through those hundreds of thousands of emails to find out if any of Hillary’s emails had ended up on Weiner’s computer, and two days later the eminence, James Comey, announced that after two days of exhaustive investigation, they didn’t find a single thing wrong in hundreds of thousands of emails. And nobody said a word. Except we did. “Wait a minute. A hundred thousand or more emails in two days?”
“Yep. Yep. And there’s nothing there.”
Democrats said, “That’s fine. Makes perfect sense to us.” Now they can’t believe that Mueller could have his report summarized in 48 hours, four pages by Barr, even though Barr said, “Look, we knew what was coming before we got it. We’re on the same page here. Mueller told us there wasn’t anything.” Democrats just can’t deal with reality anymore because they are so far from it. Darrell in Seattle. You’re next. Great to have you on the program. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you doing?
RUSH: Fine and dandy.
CALLER: I want to talk about the Mueller report, but I got another thing too. The Mueller report should not be released at all. The investigation’s incomplete. Until they investigate the other side, then the full picture of what happened in 2016 and after is nothing.
RUSH: Well, that’s a good point. There’s another reason why it actually shouldn’t be released, and that is because Trump ended up not being indicted, even though the guidelines of the Justice Department say a sitting president can’t be, it doesn’t matter. Prosecutors… As a matter of law, ethics, morality, respect, prosecutors do not reveal any aspect of an investigation that leads to no charges. No charges means no criminal activity they think they can prove. So the guidelines are, “We’re not gonna sully citizens.
“We’re not gonna impugn their integrity by listing things we thought they did but didn’t do,” even though Comey did do that with Hillary. So you could say that this report has no business being made public because it didn’t find anything and it was conducted by a prosecutor, a special counsel. But there’s another reason why: The law. Again, following the Starr Report, Democrats — some of these same Democrats — signed that law. Some of these same people demanding it, signed the law back in 1999 or 2000 (whenever it was when the Starr Report came out), demanding that no special counsel report’s ever being made public again.
