By Mike Huckabee
January 25, 2023
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BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee staff! Thank you for subscribing and I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter.
Mike
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
That men may know that thou, whose name alone is Jehovah, art the most high over all the earth.
Psalms 83:18
1. A Classified Documents Plot Twist
By Mike Huckabee
The classified documents brouhaha took another surprise turn Tuesday when former Vice President Mike Pence reported that his attorneys had found a small number of documents marked “classified” at his home in Indiana.
This once again reshuffled the deck by turning over the table. Pence is under fire not only for having the documents but for criticizing Trump for possessing classified documents (he called it “improper”) and previously denying he had any (to be accurate, he said, “No, not to my knowledge,” which is not a firm denial.)
The most common reactions were relief from the Democrats and their media butlers that Pence’s black swan event took the focus off of Biden’s growing documents scandal, and anger at Pence from Republicans who accused him of announcing this to throw a lifeline to Biden. They’re also angry at Lindsay Graham for similarly defending Biden.
On the other hand…is it really good for the Democrats if Biden wiggles out of a scandal that could have made him give up running for reelection? Biden will be 82 in 2024, and he’s about as popular as a warm kale salad with castor oil dressing. I’m sure a lot of frustrated Democrats who want Biden to make way for a more electable candidate are looking at Pence and Graham and echoing Oliver Hardy’s plea: “Stop trying to HELP me!”
Pence’s behavior also draws a sharp contrast to the Biden White House. He reportedly asked his attorneys to do a search “out of an abundance of caution,” and when a few documents were found, immediately reported them to the National Archives – unlike the Biden people who sat on the story until after the election and have given us one excuse after another as the situation got worse and worse. Even Donald Trump, who has had his differences with Pence to say the least, wrote on Truth Social, “Mike Pence is an innocent man. He never did anything knowingly dishonest in his life. Leave him alone!!!”
The Pence papers also further undermine the DOJ’s attempts to paint Trump as an unprecedented criminal for having such documents. Just as Democrats were sure that Trump did his own taxes so they must be filled with criminality, they also seem to think he packed up all his own files when he left the White House. Between the delegating of that job, the chaos of transitions (especially that transition), and the government’s tendency to over-classify everything, it’s not much of a surprise that Pence might have had a couple of documents inadvertently packed in boxes that he shouldn’t have had but didn’t know about.
What concerns me isn’t so much that former high officials might have unknowingly had some documents marked “classified” due to staff error, it’s whether certain documents were taken for a reason, how they were handled and stored, who else might have seen them, and was there a cover-up to keep it hidden? How about investigating that instead of trying to gin up a federal prosecution of a former President for something that’s apparently disturbingly common in DC?
Otherwise, as classified information leaker Edward Snowden pointed out, if they’re going to strictly and fairly enforce the law, then all of these people are “unindicted criminals.” Except, ironically, the only one who had the power to declassify the documents he took: Trump.
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2. Hopeful Sign
At long last, the Biden DOJ has taken time out of its busy schedule of arresting Trump supporters and pro-life grandparents who pray outside abortion clinics and has actually arrested two suspects in attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers in Florida.
Click the link to see what we’re dealing with. I’ll bet you won’t be surprised by how they look or by the fact that these two alleged members of the “pro-choice” group Jane’s Revenge also have a history of writing threatening social media posts that link them to Antifa, the violent radical anarchist group that, according to this Administration, is totally NOT a domestic terrorist organization.
3. Life In A Democrat Dystopia
Four illegal migrants (sorry..."Dreamers") who were bused to New York City from the border were arrested for allegedly stealing about $12,500 worth of merchandise from Macy’s. At least two of them were almost immediately released without bail by New York’s liberal D.A.
And I heard them exclaim, as they high-fived down the street, “What a country!!”
4. A Big Salute To Speaker McCarthy
By Mike Huckabee
A big salute to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who is so far proving his critics wrong by sticking to his guns (sorry if I triggered anyone by saying “guns”…or “trigger”) and keeping his promises to conservatives. Latest example: he slapped down Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ attempt to reestablish the rules that Democrats changed when they were in power by renominating Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell to the House Intelligence Committee.
McCarthy wrote a letter to Jeffries rejecting the nominations and saying that while he appreciates Jeffries’ loyalty, he can’t put party loyalty above national security, and “integrity matters more.” There's an idea I haven't heard out of Congress since Pelosi took over!
McCarthy has previously said that "if you got the briefing I got from the FBI, you wouldn't have Swalwell on any committee.” He said Swelwell couldn’t even get a private sector security clearance. And Schiff spent years peddling lies about having evidence of Russian collusion to undermine the Trump Administration, leaking to the press, and falsifying evidence.
Schiff took to Twitter in a snit (he should be on Snitter), accusing McCarthy of “petty, political payback” (something he should know about) and self-righteously declaring, “I will always defend our democracy.” That link contains some of the best responses to him, which include such colorful phrases as “lying, leaking clown” and “You should resign in disgrace.”
Extra Points For McCarthy: When liberal reporters tried to harangue Speaker McCarthy for kicking Schiff off the Intelligence Committee, he sent them scurrying back to their safe spaces with an epic verbal beatdown on exactly why Schiff was booted. It’s fun to have GOP leaders with spines.
5. Huck Award For Best Acronym
By Mike Huckabee
This week’s Huck Award for Best Acronym goes to Sen. Josh Hawley, who is introducing a bill to ban Congress members from buying and trading individual stocks, to end the practice of them getting rich off of insider info. Polls show this idea is popular with voters, and even a majority of Congress members support it (or say they do.) But when a bipartisan coalition of 75 co-sponsors tried to pass a similar bill in 2021 called the TRUST Act (Transparent Representation Upholding Service and Trust), it was never brought to the floor for a vote. Nancy Pelosi opposed it, saying that “we’re a free market economy” and Congress members should have the right to trade stocks.
But sentiment has shifted and support has grown, so maybe Hawley’s bill will have a chance of passing. If so, Nancy might wish she had let the “TRUST Act” pass since Hawley’s ban on insider stock trading is called the “Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments Act” or “The PELOSI Act.”
6. Who is indicted former FBI agent "Charlie" McGonigal?
Yesterday’s commentary on the FBI and classified documents scandal closed with the story that NEW YORK POST investigative reporter Miranda Devine had unearthed a particularly striking email sent by Hunter to then-business partner Devon Archer dated April 13, 2014, a week before Vice President Biden flew to Ukraine to meet with the prime minister, holding the promise of millions of dollars in aid for the Ukrainian energy industry.
This piece of correspondence, she said, bears no resemblance to Hunter’s other emails --- and she had plenty for comparison, as they span a period of nine years. In it, Hunter refers to “my guys upcoming travels.” (Heck, we’re leaving his crackheaded typos in.) The email stands apart from all his others because it’s long and highly detailed, not at all the sort of slapdash note the drug-addled Hunter usually wrote, and has, in Devine’s words, “the distinct flavor of of an official briefing, perhaps even a classified one.”
Hunter includes a great deal of information about the political and strategic situation in Ukraine. It’s easy to tell this content was pulled from somewhere else, maybe the State Department, as the official-looking part doesn’t have Hunter’s dumb typos. It also has official-looking abbreviations, such as “RU” for “Russia.” He did not write this. Much of it was probably cut-and-pasted.
Still, he had some presence of mind. That same email also instructs Archer to buy a ‘burner phone,’ presumably to keep their conversations private. “Buy a cell phone from a 7/11 or CVS tmrw and ill do the same.” (See? You can tell Hunter wrote that part.)
Since then, Devine has been examining that email, comparing it to others, and concludes that it almost certainly is from some classified brief. And how else would Hunter come in contact with that except through his father? Hunter’s email was sent a month before he joined the Burisma board of directors, no doubt to impress them with what he could produce on issues critical to them.
Tucker Carlson reported on this Tuesday evening, pointing out that the DOJ “has had this for years, because the FBI seized Hunter Biden’s laptop before the last presidential election in 2020.” We know the contents cover the period when Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Victor Slokin, was investigating Burisma, the corrupt energy company that had hired Hunter to be on its board. Joe Biden, then VP, got Slokin fired by threatening to withhold millions of dollars in aid to Ukraine. (No need to go back over all that; you’ve seen the video in which Biden bragged on-camera about it.)
Jim Hoft at GATEWAY PUNDIT wrote about this email as well. Can’t say for sure, of course, but the information really does look straight out of a classified briefing.
Moving on to perhaps the most significant development right now, we have the indictment on Monday of former FBI agent Charles McGonigal for allegedly working surreptitiously for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and others. The irony is that as an agent, he investigated Trump for having ties to Russia, when he, not Trump, was the one who had those ties. Here are the basics…
Do you remember the cryptic mention of the name “Charlie” in messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page regarding who was to go to the White House to spy on Trump in the Oval Office? The speculation when those messages came to light was that this might have been a reference to Eric Ciaramella (“Charlie?”), who became the fake “whistleblower” for Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, but...was “Charlie” really Charles McGonigal?
Dan Bongino spoke about this yesterday, noting that Andrew Weissmann, Robert Mueller’s ‘pit bull,’ immediately spun the arrest of McGonigal to connect him with Trump, saying he’d been working for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, for whom Paul Manafort, Trump’s one-time campaign manager, had also worked. No word from him about any of Deripaska’s other clients or connections.
As John Solomon writes in his latest report, “Before the Russia collusion allegations were dispelled, some Democrats had speculated that Deripaska could be the secret link connecting Trump and Putin because of his prior relationship with Manafort, who eventually rose to be Trump’s campaign manager.” Apparently, Weissmann is still trying to make that nonexistent connection.
Actually, it appears more likely that McGonigal has ties to the Bidens, not to Trump. His kids and Hunter’s reportedly played on the same soccer team. The DC world is so incestuous.
As Bongino pointed out, Weissmann conveniently left out all the intersections McGonigal had with the Russia Hoax. For example, Deripaska knew Christopher Steele, who was the middle man for a meeting he had with the FBI in 2015. Bruce Ohr was also at that meeting; Steele had been contracted by Fusion GPS, the company that had hired Bruce’s wife Nellie Ohr as a researcher, to create the “dossier” used against Trump in 2016.
Deripaska also had ties to the ranking member of the Senate Intel Committee, Mark Warner. In fact, Warner went through Deripaska’s office to try to get in touch with Steele (!). I know this all seems very much ‘in the weeds,’ but it shows how cozy these red-flag relationships were. It seems everybody knew everybody. Conspiracy theory? Not if it turns out to be true.
In 2016, Charles McGonigal was named by FBI Director Jim Comey as the special agent in charge of the Counterintelligence Division for the New York Office, which, according to Bongino, was “knee-deep in the Spygate thing.” Then, just days before the Democrats went out and started talking about the so-called DNC “hack,” McGonigal publicly lamented Trump’s firing of Comey. One person on stage with him then was FBI/CIA counterintelligence executive Bill Evanina, who according to Bongino has been working with social media companies to suppress information.
Bongino wants to know “who exactly was involved in the operation to spy on Donald Trump and to squash Hunter Biden information from getting out before the election?” He thinks it was McGonigal and cohort Evanina. His hypothesis: that the Democrats focused on Trump to cover up their OWN connections with Russia. More recently, he believes, the larger “classified documents” investigation was triggered when some witness in the four-years-long McGonigal probe apparently flipped and spilled something that had to do with the Bidens.
What does Charles McDonigal have to do with Hunter Biden? To make the connection, Bongino reads through McDonigal’s charging documents. A summary:
In October 2017, outside a restaurant, McDonigal received $80,000 in cash from “Person A” (an FBI confidential human source, or “CHS”). Soon after, at “Person A’s” New Jersey home, he received cash in the amounts of $80,000 and $65,000 from “Person A.” McDonigal had indicated to “Person A” that the money would be paid back. (We don’t know from this if it was.)
McDonigal flew to Albania, where he’d said he had a relationship with the Albanian prime minister. From there, he traveled by car to Kosovo with “Person A.”
In February 2018, the FBI opened a criminal case against the U.S. citizen whom the Albanian prime minister had wanted investigated.
So, according to this indictment, our former FBI guy, now in the private sector, took cash payments and pushed his contacts at the DOJ to investigate a rival of the Albanian prime minister, And in doing so, he acted as a foreign agent, unknowingly interacting with an FBI source who has incriminated him.
THE HUNTER TIE-IN: This indictment also mentions a “Person B,” described as “a friend of ‘Person A” and an Albanian national employed by “a Chinese energy conglomerate” (CEFC?) and “an informal adviser to the prime minister of Albania.”
This is consistent with a NEW YORK TIMES story from 2018 about China looking for influence in Europe “one business deal at a time,” and one of these places was Albania. American authorities had just arrested top CEFC executive Patrick Ho --- who'd been doing business with Hunter and had given him a $1 million retainer --- and charged Ho with attempted bribery of officials on Uganda and Chad in exchange for oil rights. The WASHINGTON POST, in March 2022, tied in Hunter’s business interactions with CEFC.
“Joe Biden is a foreign agent,” Bongino concludes. “His son is knee-deep in this operation...They’re international influence-peddlers who are using Hunter Biden as a conduit to Joe Biden, who is now the President of the United States..”
“This arrest yesterday ties the whole thing together.”
……………...
RELATED STORY: According to the WASHINGTON EXAMINER, Albania is a huge narcotics trafficking state, working with the Sinaloa cartel, which is the organization most responsible for the flow of drugs into the U.S. Biden’s response to this influx of drugs through Mexico has been essentially nonexistent, and that raises questions. Here’s the story, which might explain a lot…
https://www.
RECOMMENDED READING: If you're wondering what China might have received for its $50 million-plus endowment to the University of Pennsylvania, take a look at the kind of events they were holding at the Penn Biden Center. Here's just one, a "boot camp" held last June for congressional staffers to promote "closer ties with China." By the way, Biden's classified documents would have been there, and they engaged no security guards for the event.
FINALLY: Recall that yesterday, we questioned Alan Dershowitz' assertion that it was necessary to prove intent to convict on possession of classified documents. (And, yes, Hillary SHOULD have been prosecuted!). Edward Snowden has weighed in on the subject, and he agrees with us that intent does not matter, only possession. Somehow, James Comey got to rewrite the statute. Bonchie at REDSTATE writes about it...
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