Good morning!
Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff!
Today's newsletter includes:
- Bible Verse Of The Day
- Post-election update from Georgia and Wisconsin
- Then-VP Biden met with Hunter's foreign business pals
- Must-read
- $6 Trillion
- A Reader Writes Back...
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Psalms 23:4 KJV
Post-election update from Georgia and Wisconsin
By Mike Huckabee
If the 2020 election taught us anything, it’s that we have to be able to trust the system, with complete transparency and a fully auditable outcome. But officials in Georgia, as in Arizona, are acting as if they hadn’t learned that lesson –- or else as if they knew something they were desperate to hide.
In breaking news Thursday, a meeting scheduled for Friday at a ballot storage warehouse as part of a ballot integrity case in Fulton County, Georgia, was canceled after officials filed what was described as a “flurry” of motions. The Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections and the county clerk of Superior and Magistrate Courts filed these motions, and Henry County Superior Court Judge Brian Amero said they must be heard before plaintiffs may gain access to the ballots, and he has proposed the new date of June 21, though it still hasn’t been scheduled. So the county is able to delay a few more weeks. Delay, delay, delay.
At least the lead petitioner in the case, Garland Favorito, sees a silver lining. “It seems like a desperation move,” he told THE EPOCH TIMES, adding that they now have time to perfect the changes they were having to make in their inspection plan, though he didn’t say what those are. Also, Judge Amero said during the hearing that since there had been no motion to dismiss, petitioners could obtain some discovery. Some finer points of their legal wrangling are contained in ET’s premium story.
Lawyers for the county –- and almost certainly there are other outside attorneys involved in this fight –- were urging the judge to refuse the plaintiffs access to the ballots. Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts, a Democrat, said in a statement, “It is outrageous that Fulton County continues to be a target of those who cannot accept the results from last year’s election.” Gosh, he sounds just like the Democrat on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors who ranted about people upset that “their guy” didn’t win.
These people just don’t understand: IT’S NOT THAT. They are misrepresenting what this fight is about. You don’t protect democracy by slamming the door shut on the process that selects the winner. If Republicans had presided over the kinds of wild irregularities we saw last November, Democrats would never stop screaming about it. Nor should they.
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin the election isn’t escaping scrutiny, either. State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, says he’s hiring a team of three retired police officers, highly skilled investigators, to probe some aspects of the election that received “thousands” of complaints. In an interview with the WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL, he said he believes Biden won but that there were “irregularities” in how the vote was conducted that need to be checked out. The officers will review all allegations and focus on the most credible ones.
Recall that Wisconsin was one of the states that got millions of dollars from a group called the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which is funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The five largest cities in Wisconsin got a total of $6.3 million in grants, and it apparently came with some strings attached. Much of the money funded unmanned dropboxes that were reportedly placed where CTCL specified they should go. About 200 municipalities across the state got CTCL money.
According to the story at the link, a judge found that there was nothing in the law to prohibit the use of that money. But I think this is something that really warrants a closer look. Much as they might want millions of dollars in outside grant money, state legislatures need to think seriously about passing laws against it. States don’t need these outside groups coming in and giving them money with strings attached, telling them how to conduct their elections, especially when the changes they demand make it easier to cheat. Simply put, there's just something wrong about this.
Then-VP Biden met with Hunter's foreign business pals
By Mike Huckabee
Miranda Devine of the NEW YORK POST is working on a new book about the Hunter Biden story called (get ready)...LAPTOP FROM HELL. It’s scheduled to be out in September.
In the meantime, she’s breaking big news about Hunter’s business dealings that very much implicates his father Joe Biden when Joe was Vice President. Of course, most everyone in the media will get a bad case of whiplash from quickly looking the other way. But as we go through this, I hope you’ll stop periodically to think, “What would the reaction to this be if it involved Donald Trump and any of his kids?”
The laptop is a MacBook that Hunter Biden apparently has forgotten taking to a Delaware repair shop in April of 2019. But evidence exists that he did, and we’re safe in saying that it’s his, all right, and that claims of this story being “Russian disinformation” are very obviously not true. Records on the abandoned laptop show clearly that Hunter arranged a dinner between his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and business associates of Hunter’s from Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Russia at a tony restaurant in Washington, DC.
https://nypost.com/2021/05/26/hunter-biden-arranged-secret-dinner-with-business-partners-and-vp-joe/
On April 16, 2015, the group met in the private “Garden Room” at Cafe Milano, a restaurant that goes by the catchphrase, “Where the world’s most powerful people go.”
https://www.cafemilano.com/about/
The guest list was prepared by Hunter three weeks before the event. One of the guests was Vadim Pozharskiy, an executive at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which was paying Hunter over $83,000 a month to be on its board. Recall that this company was being investigated in its home country for corruption; it was the prosecutor investigating Burisma whom VP Biden got fired by threatening to withhold $1 billion in aid to Ukraine. We KNOW this happened; Biden is on video publicly bragging about getting the prosecutor fired and telling the story of exactly how he did it. His live audience seemed to think this was very cool.
There seems to have been an underlying purpose to the meeting that the emails don’t disclose, but we all know the meaning of the word “ostensibly.” As in: “Ok --- the reason for the dinner is ostensibly to discuss food security.” That’s what Hunter wrote to one of the guests, Michael Karloutsos, son of the then-head of the Greek Orthodox Church. “Dad will be there but keep that between us for now. Thanks.”
Since Hunter was also on the board of World Food Program USA, the American fundraising arm of a U.N.-affiliated nonprofit, he could easily use “food security” as cover. They were gathering at this fine restaurant where all the power brokers go to talk about food security for the poor. Ostensibly.
Obviously, the Vice President was there. The day after the dinner, Pozharskiy emailed Hunter to say, “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure.”
Also included on the guest list were Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and her husband, the former mayor of Moscow Yury Luzhkov, who by all accounts we have seen was known to be corrupt. He has since passed away, but Baturina is the woman from Moscow who on February 14, 2014 (a little over a year before this dinner) wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC, a Delaware-based investment firm co-founded by Hunter and Devon Archer, a former adviser to then-Secretary of State John Kerry.
Last year, during an inquiry into Hunter’s business dealings by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, that wire transfer was flagged in a report sent to them by the Treasury Department.
Other guests on the list included a Mexican ambassador and three officials from Kazakhstan, including the then-chairman of the former Soviet republic’s largest bank. Three seats were reserved for representatives of World Food Program USA, and the founder of that group emailed an enthusiastic note of thanks for their “fantastic and productive evening” to Hunter later that night. So they must have had at least some conversation about food security.
A total of 14 were invited, though it’s not clear if everyone attended. Archer emailed Hunter before the dinner to say that Baturina didn’t want to come but that her husband would be there. “Yelena doesn’t want to steal Yuri’s thunder,” Archer wrote. “...That was just her thoughts. We could insist.” Why would anyone need thunder about food security?
The NY POST report has more details about related communications and get-togethers. It’s all very chummy and involves at least one other wire transfer noted in the Senate report, this one from an associate of the prime minister of Kazakhstan to Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC. The money, $142,300, was sent on April 22, 2014, and was “for a car.” Nice car; the price must have included the undercoating.
President Biden has said more than once that he knew nothing about his son’s foreign business dealings and that they never talked about them at all.
Again, imagine if this had been, say, Don Jr., glad-handing with Russians, Ukrainians and Kazakhstanians, scoring millions of foreign (and likely dirty) dollars and bringing in his father for a private dinner with them, “ostensibly” about food security. And imagine President Trump lying and saying he knew nothing about his son’s foreign business affairs and had never even talked to him about them. Can you say “special counsel”? Can you say “Impeachment #3”?
And that time, he would have actually deserved it.
Oh, and there’s one more item of interest. That $83,333 a month that Hunter Biden was getting paid to sit on Burisma’s board? Just two months after Joe Biden left the Vice Presidency, Hunter’s salary was cut by half, to $41,500 a month. As Devine reported, “No reason is given for the change in salary. The only change in circumstance appears to be that Hunter’s father was no longer in office.”
“We are very much interested in working closely together,” said the email from Pozharskyi, “and the remuneration is still the highest in the company and higher than the standard director’s monthly fees. I am sure you will find it both fair and reasonable.”
Must-read
By Mike Huckabee
Even after the ceasefire in Gaza, the disgusting assaults on Jews are continuing across the country, with one of the latest being vile anti-Semitic graffiti on the Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.
It’s a testament to how little people know about the real situation that we’re hearing so much condemnation of Israel for defending itself from hundreds of rockets shot at its civilians by the terrorists of Hamas. I keep seeing celebrities and other cocooned leftists who’ve never been to Israel and obviously know nothing about it retweeting the “Pray for Palestine” hashtag, when they’ve long made it clear that they don’t even believe in prayer.
Here’s a perfect example of the outrage of the willfully ignorant, courtesy of the “Students for Justice in Palestine at Rutgers,” who are furious at their chancellor just for condemning anti-Semitic violence in the US.
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/452625/
That brings us to today’s MUST-READ. Not just for my readers, but especially for all the outspoken celebrities, leftist politicians and sheltered college radicals who are crying for Hamas and condemning Israel without knowing the first thing about the history of that region. It details the incredible lengths to which Israel has gone to try to make peace, help the Palestinians and not harm innocents, only to be attacked over and over again by people who care about nothing else but wiping Israel off the map and killing every Jew on Earth.
This is a great article by Blake Ezra in the Times of Israel. He used to be a smug young liberal himself who laughed off an elderly relative who told him, “If the Arabs put their weapons down tomorrow, there would be no war. If Israel put their weapons down tomorrow, there would be no Israel.” But after living there, seeing it with his own eyes, and narrowly escaping death by two terrorist bombings within minutes of each other, he’s fed up.
You must read this to learn the history that nobody in the West ever hears, of the incredible compromises Israel has already made that did nothing but make them less safe, and to understand the true depths of ignorance of the leftist celebrities who condemn Israel’s defense of its people from within their safe gated communities, while siding with terrorists who not only want to slaughter every Jew but who also hate democracy, murder women for asserting their rights and throw gays off the roofs of tall buildings.
Read his long list of lies and distortions he’s fed up with, and you’ll understand why he quotes Ricky Gervais’ warning to actors at the Golden Globe Awards: “Don’t use this as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world.”
$6 Trillion
By Mike Huckabee
The Biden Administration has waited longer than any other in modern history to present a first-year budget proposal, but it’s reportedly coming soon, and Republicans are already bracing to fight it. Word is that Biden will put forth a whopping $6 trillion budget for 2022. To give you an idea of how deep a deficit that will represent, projected federal revenues for 2021 are only $3.5 trillion. Our deficit is already the biggest, relative to the size of the economy, since World War II. That level of spending also hasn’t been seen since World War II, when we were actually, you know, fighting World War II.
Republicans are concerned not only about the explosion in spending and government expansion, but also the fact that little of the increase is going to national security at a time when Biden’s policies are emboldening our enemies and opening our borders. They can’t complain too much about the deficits because, to their shame, those continued to rise even when Republicans were in power. But now, Biden is putting the spending on hyperdrive, and there are worries it will lead to hyperinflation.
Another concern is that all the massive deficit spending will force tax hikes. Biden’s promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 is starting to look even more like a sucker’s bet, since Democrats are already talking about letting the Trump tax cut for low and middle income Americans expire in 2025, which will mean…Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?...That’s right: a tax increase on the poor and middle class.
As for complaints that Biden’s massive spending on separate bills is already causing inflation, and his expanded unemployment benefits are making it hard for businesses to find workers, Biden claimed that’s “a feature, not a bug” in his plan. He said employers should be competing with each other to land workers.
Spoken like a man who spent 47 years in government and never ran a business. Under Trump, wages were rising organically because the booming economy created a demand for labor. Biden is artificially incentivizing unemployment to force businesses to pay more than they can afford for labor. That leads to fewer jobs now, and less capital for expansion so fewer jobs later.
It’s also creating inflation, which alone breaks his promise not to tax the poor and middle class. Inflation makes everything you buy more expensive, just like adding a sales tax to the price of all goods. Artificially increasing wages does no good if it causes prices to go up so your wages don’t go as far as they did to begin with.
What we’re watching here is a group of people who came into power without ever learning from any business experience, and who also failed to learn from their own history. We lived through stagflation with Jimmy Carter, and now Biden seems to be bent on bringing it back, bigger and worser than ever.
The infuriating part is that many of us who lived through those days (and trust me, Biden did) saw this the first time around, we know to prevent it, and never want it repeated. Younger people who have never experienced it were bamboozled into blindly voting for it to make a comeback. But we who remember the ‘70s can see it coming: it’s like having your car stalled on the railroad tracks and watching the train moving ever closer, with no hope that the engineer will have enough sense to hit the brakes.
A Reader Writes Back...
Mike,
I really like your newsletter. I know that when I read it the truth is what I receive. Thanks for keeping us informed and standing for truth, justice, and the American way. God's blessings to you in the coming days.
Permalink: https://www.mikehuckabee.com/2021/5/morning-edition-may-29
Leave a Comment
Note: Fields marked with an * are required.