On his radio show Thursday, “The Big Voice on the Right” Rush Limbaugh addressed the increasing controversy swirling around the whistleblower, whose alleged identity has been widely circulated, though the mainstream media is still choosing to protect it. One thing we know for sure about the whistleblower is who is representing him, Mark S. Zaid. And one thing we know for sure about Zaid is that back in 2017, he publicly declared his enthusiasm over the prospect of a “coup” leading to President Trump’s impeachment.
“And 45 years from now we might be recalling stories regarding the impeachment of [President Trump]. I’ll be old, but will be worth the wait,” Zaid wrote in a January 2017 tweet that has come back to haunt him in recent days. “Coup has started. First of many steps. #rebellion. #impeachment will follow ultimately,” he tweeted in response to news that Trump had fired Attorney General Sally Yates after she refused to carry out an executive order. “Coup has started. As one falls, two more will take their place. #rebellion #impeachment,” he wrote in another tweet. “I predict [CNN] will play a key role in [President Trump] not finishing out his full term as president,” he wrote in yet another impeachment-cheering post. “We will get rid of him, and this country’s strong enough to survive even him and his supporters,” Zaid exclaimed in July 2017.
“Man, oh, man, the surreal nature of all this is mind-boggling. We got this leaker, this whistleblower’s attorney giving up the game! He even used the word ‘coup’ back in 2017. He even said that CNN was gonna be utilized to run this coup to get rid of Donald Trump,” said Limbaugh. Zaid’s admission that there’s a “coup” to remove Trump, said Rush, should result in this whole whistleblower-based impeachment campaign being “canceled.”
“Mark Zaid has been a Never Trumper, a Trump-hating guy since 2016, the lawyer for the so-called whistleblower,” Rush said. “Now, the way to look at this, imagine if we would have known this at the beginning. If at the very beginning of this we would have known what Mark Zaid said about this being a coup, that he was starting it, that it was going to involve CNN. He has described exactly what is happening and what has happened in the House of Representatives. Imagine if this had leaked and we had become aware of it two years ago, where would we be today? We certainly wouldn’t be where we are.”
Zaid has since issued a statement meant to downplay the significance of his past comments. “Those tweets were reflective and repeated the sentiments of millions of people,” Zaid said this week. “I was referring to a completely lawful process of what President Trump would likely face as a result of stepping over the line, and that particularly whatever would happen would come about as a result of lawyers. The coup comment referred to those working inside the Administration who were already, just a week into office, standing up to him to enforce recognized rules of law.”
“Wait a minute,” said Rush. “You say that this is no big deal; this is just the result of people in the White House who one week in recognized what an abomination Trump was? Mr. Zaid, Trump had not made the phone call to Ukraine yet. That didn’t happen until 2019. That happened two years later, 2-1/2 years later… Even in his statement, he’s giving up the game that there were people in the Trump administration one week in — Obama holdovers — who were beginning to try to undermine the Trump presidency, and he’s writing this as though he deserves credit for it.”
The tweets by Zaid, said Limbaugh, are “smoking guns.” Zaid “lays it all out what we’ve been saying for three years,” he explained. “This means that the whistleblower … and Lieutenant Colonel Vindman are no longer useful. They went from bombshells to now they are embarrassments, and they will not testify. They have been dropped. I doubt we will ever see or hear about them again except from hopeful media people.”
“This thing ought to be shut down is what ought to happen,” Limbaugh stressed. “It ought to be for the sake of preventing embarrassment on the part of all these people, this needs to be shut down. And I’m gonna tell you, folks, if things break right over the next week or so, then Pencil Neck is gonna melt away. As we talked about yesterday, the quid pro quo is disappearing. There never was a quid pro quo … [so it’s being] replaced now by obstruction.”
Limbaugh’s response to Zaid’s tweets was similar to that of Trump campaign communication director Tim Murtaugh, who told Fox News this week: “The whistleblower’s lawyer gave away the game. It was always the Democrats’ plan to stage a coup and impeach President Trump and all they ever needed was the right scheme. They whiffed on Mueller so now they’ve settled on the perfectly fine Ukraine phone call. This proves this was orchestrated from the beginning.”