Impeachment Will Be Different for Trump Than It Was for Clinton

RUSH: There is an ongoing — supposedly, supposedly in the Drive-By Media, the Democrats are being walked back on their desire to impeach Trump by Pelosi. Pelosi is saying (paraphrasing), “I don’t think you got it yet. Keep digging. But we’re not there yet.” Meanwhile, all these other Democrats, Swalwell and all these other people are out there, “Oh, no, we’re gonna impeach, we’re gonna remove Trump.” Swalwell is predicting that Trump is gonna be removed from office.

Now, one of the prevailing theories on this is that if they impeach Trump, they go through the motions. And impeachment is a political thing and it’s two phases. The impeachment is the House of Representatives bringing up charges, the charges of high crimes and misdemeanors, the impeachable offenses. Those are called articles of impeachment, and the House of Representatives creates those, and each different article has a manager or a lawyer that will present that case, however many articles there are, to the Senate, which is where the trial takes place.

So just because the House impeaches doesn’t mean anything. It’s not good. I mean, you don’t want that. It happened to Clinton. But then you have to go to the Senate, you have to get conviction on some or all of the charges. And you have to be convicted of impeachment, and then you’re thrown out of office.

So the prevailing theory is — and even from the Trump White House — let ’em go ahead. It’s gonna tick off the American people, and it’s gonna backfire on ’em, the American people want to move on, there’s no collusion, the Mueller report’s out and all that. I have a different take on this. Everybody cites Clinton. And, in fact, Senator Grahamnesty was on Hannity last night, and he made the point that look what happened to Bill Clinton.

His popularity shot up to the seventies when Bill Clinton was being impeached. The American people don’t want this. They don’t want the president they elected thrown out of office by the opposition party. Well, what do you think has been the effort going on here for two and a half years?

But I think there are some stark differences between the impeachment of Clinton and how it was handled and what this would be. In other words, I don’t think that we should conclude that it’s an automatic slam dunk that the impeachment process would necessarily redound positively to Trump.

Are you of the frame of mind, point of view that if they try this, Trump benefits because the American people are worn out? All right. Well, let me present to you my theorems here, and then you tell me what you think of this. ‘Cause it’s true. Mr. Snerdley is very typical here. A lot of people on our side — I just quoted Lindsey Grahamnesty 2.0 — are saying, “Go ahead. Go ahead, House Democrats, impeach Trump. You’ll just end up reelecting him, just like impeaching Bill Clinton reelected him.”

Well, let’s go back to the Clinton impeachment. Number one, and something everybody is either forgetting or ignoring, and it’s a very gigantic difference between the two situations. Throughout the Clinton impeachment, the Drive-By Media defended Bill Clinton every day on every charge, every step of the way.

Not only did the Drive-By Media defend Bill Clinton, they hid the actual charges in the articles of impeachment. The Drive-By Media hid the evidence against Clinton. They buried the fact, by not talking about it, that Clinton’s crimes were perjury and suborning perjury and witness tampering.

Bill Clinton lied under oath. Bill Clinton asked other people to lie under oath. He tampered with witnesses in that process. Those are real instances of obstruction of justice. Trump is nothing compared to what Bill Clinton did. Donald Trump has not obstructed justice in any way, shape, manner, or form, except in their dreams. But Bill Clinton did.

When you lie under oath to the grand jury, when you suborn perjury of other witnesses and tamper with them, those are separate crimes. One is obstructing justice and, of course, the separate crimes of perjury and suborning perjury and witness tampering. Instead, the Drive-By Media told us all the time that it was just about sex. They said that Bill Clinton was being impeached for Lewinsky, that Clinton was being impeached for all of the women that he had had extramarital affairs with under the watchful eye of Hillary Rodham Clinton — and make no mistake, she knew about all of them.

I mean, there was Gennifer Flowers. So while the Clinton impeachment is ongoing and the trial is ongoing, the media’s not talking about it. You have to discern this for yourself. The media is castigating the Republicans. The media is beating the Republicans every day, shaming ’em. “You’re trying to throw somebody out of office for sex! You’re trying to impeach somebody for sex. It’s none of yourself business! It didn’t affect the way he did his job. Sex should be out of limits,” and so forth.

They never talked about the fact that Clinton was actually being impeached for perjury, real obstruction of justice. Now, it ain’t gonna be that way with Trump, folks. The news media’s gonna do the exact opposite. If these people on the Democrat side go ahead with impeachment, instead of hiding Trump’s alleged crimes… Remember, Trump hasn’t committed a crime here. He has not committed a crime. He has not obstructed justice. There is no way a case could be made. But they’re gonna impeach him, and who knows what the charges will be.

But whatever the charges are, the media will amplify them. The media will promote them. The media will support the impeachment. The media will be, as it is today, an extension of the impeachment process in the House of Representatives. Whatever crimes, questionable conduct that they dredge up, they… In fact, they will help the House of Representatives dredge up additional crimes and bad behavior.

And if they have to make stuff up (which they will have to do), they will do it, and the media will be right there helping them. And the media will present everything they and the Democrats come up with as indisputable fact. And we will be told that it is impossible to let Trump remain in office having committed so many ethical lapses, so many crimes — whatever it is they come up with — and it will be as relentless as the first two years of reporting on Russian collusion will be.

This is just the next phase of the coup, folks. The media hid Clinton’s crimes. They chastised the Republicans. Let’s not forget, Lindsey Graham version 1.0 was a conservative in the House of Representatives, and he was one of the House managers that tried one of the charges against Clinton in the Senate. The Senate didn’t want it. The Senate didn’t want to deal with this trial. They didn’t want the House to do what it did. But the House did it.

The House managers, many of them, were so humiliated by what the media did to them that they immediately abandoned conservatism for a while. They hid. They wanted no part of it. Everybody involved on the Republican side acted embarrassed, acted ashamed simply because of how the media treated it. So when the impeachment effort, when the trial failed, there was this gigantic party and celebration at the White House — and, of course, the media was there. All of this that I just described is gonna play out during the presidential campaign.

It will be the presidential campaign. If they follow through on this impeachment business, it will be the presidential campaign. The only reason — not the only, but the primary reason that Bill Clinton survived impeachment is because the media went out and destroyed Republicans in the House, particularly the House managers, and lied to the American people about why Bill Clinton was being impeached.

You go out and run a test. Find some people that were alive back then and old enough to be paying attention and ask ’em what they think Clinton was impeached over, and they’ll tell you Paula Jones or Monica Lewinsky. That’s what they’ll tell you, right? And that’s not what it was at all. Well, he wasn’t impeached over that. He was impeached for perjury, suborning perjury, lying under oath, tampering with witnesses. But they all cast it aside as, “A bunch of Puritan, no-fun, stuffed-shirt Republicans don’t want anybody having sex, just jealous that Clinton got so much, and that’s why they’re out there impeaching him.”

That what it was, and a lot of people ended up believing it. So Clinton’s approval ratings did, at one point in all this, reach the seventies. Think that’ll happen with Trump? So, Mr. Snerdley, now that I have run through what the… (interruption) Well, he encouraged Lewinsky to file a false affidavit. He encouraged Monica Lewinsky to file a false affidavit and give false testimony if and when she was called to testify. He told her to conceal gifts that he had given to Lewinsky that had to be subpoenaed, attempting to secure a job for Lewinsky to influence her testimony.

Suborning perjury, witness tampering, trying to get Lewinsky to tell lies or not tell the truth. But that’s not what Clinton was impeached over! So I… Look, I’m sitting here. I don’t know how an impeachment process would play out terms of public opinion, but I can tell you I just described for you what it’s gonna be. I want to go back, folks. I want to take you back to January 23, 2017. Do you know when that is? That is three days after President Trump was inaugurated. Three days after he was inaugurated, I warned everybody.

RUSH: [T]he entire Washington establishment is opposed to him. The media is trying to undermine him. The Democrat Party’s trying to undermine him as they set up what will no doubt be impeachment proceedings when they think it’s time to do it. That will happen. Trump has nothing but the people that voted for him, and if the media can soften some of their verve — if the media can succeed in separating some Trump supporters from him — then their theory is he will be weakened even further and exposed even more as fraudulently and illegitimately elected and illegitimately serving. …

This election is not over. This election is not cemented. It is not validated. It isn’t real, because Trump is illegitimate, and the only thing Trump has — and it’s important, it’s the most important thing — the only thing he’s got are his supporters. And therefore his supporters have got to stay as energetic and as front and center and as supportive as they were during the campaign. … [I]t is really important that the people that voted for him maintain their support and be publicly willing to demonstrate it.

RUSH: Three days after Trump’s inaugurated. See, that’s a classic example of how people who listen to this program are on the cutting edge.

Three days after he’s elected, I warned everybody what was going to happen, and people come to me asking, “How did you know?” That’s not the question. The question is, “How did you not know? What is there that you…?” It’s plain as day to see if you know Democrats, if you know liberals, if you know how they operate. If you’ve paid attention the last five years, you can’t possibly have missed it — and if you just watched the way they behaved during the transition, it’s impossible to have missed what they were gonna do.

RUSH: I’ve got a couple calls on the board about my little mini-monologue there on impeachment, the differences between the way Clinton’s impeachment was handled and the way a Trump impeachment would be. And rather than have these people on hold while I get on to other things, I’m gonna take the calls now so that their calls are close to the actual time I discussed what it is they’re reacting to.

Our first call is Robert in Houston, and it says here that you disagree with my take on this. That’s good. What do you think?

CALLER: Well, Mr. Limbaugh, God bless you, sir. It’s been the second time I got to talk to you in my lifetime. It’s as good as Tiger winning the Masters again. I agree with what you said about the difference between the effort to impeach Clinton and the present day concerning the media. I just want to understand, do you think the media has that kind of influence still today, which I totally disagree with. I think they were one of the losers in the 2016 election.

I believe they’ve been showing themselves losers in popular opinion ever since then. And, frankly, I don’t think many people in the country except the absolute extreme loyalists care what they think anymore. And everybody’s gonna know it’s a sham. They’re gonna have their hard nuts wanting to do anything they can to Trump. But I don’t see that kind of influence —

RUSH: Well, there is evidence to support your claim. And I don’t deny it. The ratings for CNN — folks, I mean, last week the bottom fell out for them. I mean, I think their top was 300-and-some-odd-thousand people, 12 plus. In the demo they were I think barely over a hundred thousand. It was really horrible. And they’ve been shedding viewers for quite a long time. The same thing happened at MSNBC. Although their numbers are not as bad, they have lost significant audience.

The New York Times and so forth, I mean, they’re actually rallying a bit with their subscription business. I don’t know how the actual newspaper copy, the hard copy sales are doing. And so if you want to use that as an indication that their sphere of influence is way down, I wouldn’t dispute that, but I don’t think you can write it off. I don’t think you can just assume that everybody has written the media off, no longer believes them.

I know they finished dead last in a survey of various industries people say they respect or disrespect. The media’s down there near the Congress and so forth. But Congress is always down there. It’s not newsworthy anymore that Congress doesn’t have a lot of high respect. I think it’s more Will Rogers than anything.

But the fact remains that they are going to do, if there is an impeachment procedure, they are going to deal with it the way I just described. Now, you could look and say it’s exactly what they’ve done the last two years, and they were unable to bring it off. They were unable to drive Trump’s numbers down. They were unable to get them down to the thirties and twenties to force him out of office, and they gave it everything they’ve got. And there is that.

They gave it everything. Everything they have used to successfully drive Republicans from office they’ve used and used again. They’ve invented some new ones. It all failed. But it doesn’t deter them. They just double down and continue on with it. And they’re gonna do it if there is an impeachment procedure.

I’m not suggesting, by the way, that Trump’s supporters are gonna fade away. I didn’t mean to convey that by playing the sound bite of me three days after Trump was inaugurated. I only played that to show you that I knew what was coming, and I knew what wasn’t going away, that they were gonna impeach or whatever they could and had to do to try to get rid of him. They’ve failed to this point.

And I’m not saying that their impeachment would succeed. I’m just telling you if you think the impeachment of Trump is gonna be equal to the impeachment of Clinton and make Trump that much more popular, maybe, but it’s gonna have to happen a different way because it was the media — you go back to — when this happened with Clinton, folks, Fox News had barely gotten started. There wasn’t anything in conservative media.

Fox News Channel had just barely gotten started during all that. There wasn’t any conservative Web apparatus to speak of. And so the Drive-By Media back then still carried considerable influence. They were starting to lose it. Their monopoly had been busted what with the arrival of this program.

It’s a tough call because they’re gonna be out there, and they’re gonna be doing everything that they’ve been doing the last two years and running interference for the Democrats. I do agree that their audience has fallen, and that does mean that their sphere of influence is down, but where it isn’t is with Millennials.

Millennials are buying hook, line, and sinker into what the Drive-By Media reports because they stream media, and that’s how they get their news these days, Yahoo News or Facebook news feed or what have you. And we all know what social media has done to conservative influence. But Robert, good thoughts, and I appreciate your call.

Here’s Jim in Danville, Virginia, wants to weigh in on it. How you doing, sir?

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thank you for taking my call. And I just wanted to reiterate your previous caller. I agree with your statements about what the media’s gonna do. Though unlike your previous caller, I don’t think it’s gonna have an effect. And to give an example, my wife and I did not vote for President Trump because we didn’t trust him. We voted third party. We didn’t think he was conservative enough.

But because of his actions since he’s been elected, not only will I and my wife vote for him, but my 18-year-old daughter is also voting for Trump. And most of her friends of the same age are also Trump supporters. There are too many forms of media out there today to be able to get accurate media to not have to rely on the lamestream news anymore. They’re a nonfactor, as far as I’m concerned.

RUSH: Well, there’s another thing, since you say that, there’s another thing to add. The media is — let’s be honest about something. The media is wearing people out here, folks. Why is CNN losing audience? They lied to their audience just like the FBI and the CIA lied to the media, although I don’t know if that’s actually true. The media was in on it.

I think these people are all in the same club, so to speak. I don’t think there is any reporting going on. There were just various people on the left, in the political movement of the left have their jobs. Journalists job is to act like they’re journalists. The FBI guys act like their FBI, but they’re all left-wing hacks. And they gave it everything they’ve got, and they took their shot at the king, and they weren’t able to connect.

So, any impeachment of Trump, it isn’t gonna feature anything new. There isn’t any bombshell out there. It’s just gonna have to be all of this other stuff recycled and repackaged. And it’s all gonna be oriented about obstruction of justice and what a reprobate Trump is. And, frankly, that’s been litigated, and it isn’t gonna have any impact because it hasn’t up ’til now.

Now, this whole business of obstruction of justice, there’s a key line from the attorney general on why there isn’t any, why there wasn’t any obstruction by the president. I don’t care about this Don McGahn story. Supposedly the president called Don McGahn, said, “You fire Mueller, I hate Mueller, you get rid of him.”

And McGahn said, “I will refuse, I will resign first, I am an honorable guy.” And so Mueller wasn’t fired. Trump is now saying, “I don’t ask people to fire people. If I want to fire people, I’ll do it.” Mueller did not get fired. Barr said the president took no act that in fact deprived the special counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation.

Intending to fire Mueller is not obstruction of justice. Even if it were true, it didn’t happen! So the media can do nothing but recycle everything that’s already bombed out. There’s a part of me — well, I can’t tell you what I really think — I just better shut up. They can’t come up with anything new. If they do they’re gonna have to make it up, which they’re entirely capable of doing, by the way.

“The president took no act that in fact deprived the special counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation.” See, there it is again, this word “investigation.” You know how that drives me nuts. There was no investigation here. But I’m not gonna go down that road today. You know the drill.

it was just about sex.
= = =

Hmmmm

Just a thought, but maybe the ‘sex’ was not really very good.

Why are we even still talking about this? There’s no collusion and no crime and no obstruction.

This is a coup attempt to thwart democracy and if Hillary and the Dems want a civil war we will provide it and they won’t like the outcome.

The two situations wouldn’t be remotely similar because of media bias. With Clinton, the MSM screamed all day every day how unfair it all was and how Americans just wanted to move on. With Trump, they will scream all day every day how guilty he is.

It’s simple: If they remove President Trump from office, it’s Civil War. But I really believe the Uniparty is willing to risk that - because to be blunt they are all about their own power.

It will end badly for everyone, but more badly for them.

We still talk about it because the dems control the House. They can and probably will impeach Trump. The senate probably won’t go along with it. But I don’t trust them either. But yes, it was a coup attempt. And still is imo.

I pretty much have gotten to the point of not listening to Rush much anymore nor paying attention to a lot of what he says. He may have great once but I don’t so much anymore and I question whether he is that Conservative either.

Don’t forget Limbaugh was a Never Trumper for quite awhile before he finally decided to support him much like Mark Levin was. So my trust of both is very low.

Bubba was actually guilty of crimes.

Democrats did not care about that at all. Neither did most of the Republicans. Lying about sex? Politicians lying about anything? In that group (Congress) there were too many people living in glass houses to be throwing stones at their neighbors houses. They threw pebbles.

Of course Clinton was acquitted. The whole thing was merely theatrics to get various concessions from Clinton Inc.

President Trump has committed the "crime" of not being a Democrat and upsetting the established order of corruption. He might very well be impeached for that.

After President Trump leaves office, either in 2020 or 2024, the civil war will crank up a few more notches.

Trump learned at the feet of Roy Cohn.

He has been gathering info (leverage) on all these people while partying and schmoozing in their midst for 40 years.

He has held this leverage for a long time, he has had a private security team made up of former FBI, CIA...whatever.

Trump ALWAYS gets even, ten fold.

They do not know what is coming for them.

Did you ever meet a man that later you thought to yourself "I never should have phuked with him" Trump is that man.

Limbaugh is using his mind! Impeachment didn’t help Clinton get reelected because he was already in his second term when he was impeached in 1998.

Dream on in your wildest. Majority people don’t care as much as we do
There will never be a civil war here country is too kooky now

I’ve been saying the same thing lately. A second civil war would basically consist of 50 year old white dudes beating the crap out of old grey haired lesbians.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.