By Mike Huckabee
April 27, 2021
|
|
Good morning!
Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff!
Today's newsletter includes:
- Bible Verse Of The Day
- Ashli Babbitt's family filing suit against Capitol Police
- Why The Founders Barred The District Of Columbia From Becoming A State
- Terrifying Words
- Biden Changes Law Enforcement For Some
- Harvard-Educated, Democrat Lawmaker: There Are Six Sexes
- RIP, Bay City Rollers Leader Les McKeown
- Laugh Of The Day!
- A Reader Writes Back...
- Inspirational Americans
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
BIBLE VERSE OF THE DAY
That men may know that thou, whose name alone is Jehovah, art the most high over all the earth.
Psalms 83:18 KJV
Ashli Babbitt's family filing suit against Capitol Police
By Mike Huckabee
Terry Roberts, the attorney for Ashli Babbitt’s family, has announced their plan to file civil charges in her death.
He revealed this Monday on NEWSMAX; you can watch his interview on the new, uncensored platform RUMBLE.
Since Babbitt’s death during the January 6 breach of the Capitol Building, her family has wanted transparency about the circumstances, but it seems they’ve determined that a lawsuit is the only way to get that. “The family and I were disappointed in the Department of Justice’s decision on this," Roberts said, "but my role is really to bring a civil action and in that way vindicate her rights."
Family members “strongly disagree” with the DOJ’s decision not to release the identity of the Capitol Hill police officer who wielded the gun. “We think the evidence is ample and would support criminal charges against the officer,” he said. There was the “required willfulness” on the officer’s part, he said, and the officer could see that Ashli was not armed and presented “no immediate threat to him.”
“There was no legal justification for shooting her.”
According to Roberts, there is “ample evidence” that the officer gave no verbal warning before shooting. His team has talked to “many of the people on Ashli’s side of the door,” and, apparently, no one they talked to had heard a warning.
“I don’t believe she even knew the officer was on the other side of the room,” he said.
The officer was “kind of concealing himself in a room,” according to Roberts, “off to the side of her field of vision.” He easily could have just arrested her; there was no need to use deadly force. It was “an egregious act of excessive force,” the attorney said. “He should have been charged.”
Regarding the relatively quiet aftermath of this shooting, the lack of public outcry, Roberts lamented “the double standard at work here.” With different circumstances, a different location, a different political climate, “it’s a certainty that there would be charges.”
When asked if the family believes this is because Ashli was a Trump supporter, Roberts said, “Clearly, that has everything to do with it. Unfortunately, it shouldn’t.”
As reported in THE EPOCH TIMES, Babbitt, a U.S. Air Force veteran, was trying to climb through a broken-out window in one of the inside doors in the Capitol Building when she was shot. As her family’s attorney said, she was clearly unarmed.
In addition to identifying and speaking to multiple witnesses, the family's legal team has been working for weeks to collect open-source photographs and videos in an effort to reconstruct what happened before Ashli was hit.
Mark Schamel, an attorney for the officer --- who remains unidentified --- told RealClear Investigations that the officer did issue warnings, several of them. “He was acting within his training,” Schamel said. “Lethal force is appropriate if the situation puts you or others in fear of imminent bodily harm.”
RealClear Investigations linked to this article from April 14, the day the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia announced their decision not to prosecute the officer who shot and killed Ashli Babbitt.
Their press release stated that DOJ officials, along with the Metropolitan Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division, “conducted a thorough investigation of Ms. Babbitt’s shooting.” This, they said, included reviewing video, taking statements from officers and other witnesses, gathering physical evidence, and viewing the results of Ashli’s autopsy.
Note that in its description of what happened, the DOJ press release says nothing about any verbal warning given to Ashli or any other effort made to subdue her before the use of deadly force. But it does say that “the investigation revealed no evidence that, at the time the officer fired a single shot at Ms. Babbitt, the officer did not reasonably believe that it was necessary to do so in self-defense or in defense of the members of Congress and others evacuating the House Chamber.”
The three basic elements for a criminal prosecution are that the defendant was 1) acting under color of law and 2) acting WILLFULLY to 3) deprive the victim of a federally protected right. I emphasize the term “willfully” because this appears to be the point on which the case would turn.
That’s because the rest of the case seems easy to make. The officer was certainly acting under color of law, and he did deprive the victim of her federally protected rights –- the right to LIFE, among others. And clearly, this was excessive force. An unarmed woman trying to climb through a window could be subdued quickly without the use of a gun. She wasn’t using a bat, breaking windows, etc., as others were. It makes little sense, at least given what we know, that she was targeted.
Notice that the Babbitt attorney used “willfully” to describe the officer’s excessive force; his use of that word was no accident.
In their press release, the DOJ said, “Prosecutors would have to prove not only that the officer used force that was constitutionally unreasonable, but that the officer did so ‘willfully,’ which the Supreme Court has interpreted to mean that the officer acted with a bad purpose to disregard the law. As this requirement has been interpreted by the courts, evidence that an officer acted out of fear, mistake, panic, misperception, negligence, or even poor judgment cannot establish the high level of intent required...”
Tell that to the other cops who HAVE been identified and prosecuted for behavior that might be considered mistake, negligence or poor judgment but still criminal. Derek Chauvin was convicted on three counts of murder and manslaughter; do we have proof he was intentionally disregarding the law? Or did he think he was acting as he had been trained? I’m not defending Chauvin, just pointing out the double standard.
The DOJ has previously argued, before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, that to establish “willfulness,” the jury was required to find that the defendant “intended to use more force than was reasonable under the circumstances –- i.e., force that violated [the victim’s] well established due rights...” So, what’s the different between that case and this one?
Again, unless there’s something we don’t know, the officer almost certainly could have subdued Ms. Babbitt without shooting her. He clearly intended to shoot her; we’ve seen the video of him aiming directly at her and pulling the trigger.
But the DOJ holds that there is no evidence that the officer didn’t “reasonably believe” that it was necessary to shoot this woman in defense of himself and/or others. “Acknowledging the tragic loss of life and offering condolences to Ms. Babbitt’s family,” their press release concludes, “the U.S. Attorney’s Office and U.S. Department of Justice have therefore closed the investigation into this matter.”
Well, it’s not over.
Why The Founders Barred The District Of Columbia From Becoming A State
By Mike Huckabee
Rob Natalson at the Epoch Times has an excellent column on the history of why the Founders specifically barred the District of Columbia from becoming a state in the US Constitution (Read it sometime, Speaker Pelosi.)
“Many participants in the debate over the Constitution expressed concern that residents of the capital district, who would consist largely of government employees and their families, would reflect solely the interests of the government upon which they were dependent. They did not want dependents of the federal government unduly influencing state or national elections.
The Founders also recognized that denying the vote to residents of the capital district would not leave them without influence. On the contrary, prior history showed that those residents would have an outsize influence—partly by reason of their proximity to federal institutions and partly because many would be government officials or employees. Allowing them to participate in national elections would unfairly magnify their power further.”
So making DC a state is fine, if you think that the people currently running the government need to be given even more power than they already have. Our wise Founders not only anticipated that, they could see what a terrible idea it would be from over two centuries in advance and headed it off at the pass.
Terrifying Words
By Mike Huckabee
Ronald Reagan famously observed that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” We may need to create a new version of that just for black business owners: “We are from BLM and we’re here to help.
Biden Changes Law Enforcement For Some
By Mike Huckabee
Making official the “Biden Administration’s change in direction” of immigration law “enforcement,” the Department of Homeland Security announced that illegal aliens who fail to depart the US will no longer face fines, and ICE will work with the Treasury Department to cancel the existing debts of those who have already been assessed fines.
Meanwhile, as Democrats around the nation are decriminalizing everything from illegal border crossing to rioting, shoplifting, drug-dealing and prostitution, a woman in Oklahoma discovered she was a wanted on a felony rap for failing to return a rented VHS tape to a video store in 1999.
Caron McBride was getting married and when she went to change her name on her drivers’ license, she discovered there was a complaint against her for felony embezzlement filed in 2000 by The Movie Place in Norman, Oklahoma, for failing to return a VHS copy of “Sebrina, The Teenage Witch.” She says she never even watched that show and suspects her then-boyfriend’s daughters rented it in her name. But she now thinks she knows why she was let go from several jobs: they ran a background check and found she was accused of felony embezzlement.
The county DA’s office agreed to drop the charges, but that doesn’t make her problems magically disappear. She’s already suffered financial hardships, and now she has to sue the state to clear her record. If it’s any consolation, The Movie Place went out of business in 2008, and “A History of Violence” was the last major movie released on VHS in 2006. So she's long outlived both the store and the video format.
Nebraska: A Second Amendment Sanctuary State
By Mike Huckabee
Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts signed a proclamation declaring Nebraska a Second Amendment Sanctuary State. It declares that Nebraska will stand up against federal overreach and any attempts to regulate gun ownership that infringe on Second Amendment rights.
This is a great example of using the left’s own playbook against them. If they howl that states don’t have the right to refuse to comply with federal authorities after declaring all those sanctuary cities and states for illegal immigrants, they will sound almost as laughably hypocritical as Rachel “Russian Collusion is REAL, People!” Maddow does when she accuses anyone who’s skeptical of the 2020 election results of being a crazy conspiracy theorist.
Harvard-Educated, Democrat Lawmaker: There Are Six Sexes
By Mike Huckabee
As the Texas House was debating a bill to bar biological males from girls’ sports, a Harvard-educated Democratic member declared that “modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes. In fact, there are six.”
So first, there were 56 genders, and now, there are six different biological sexes. I wish my investments grew as fast as the number of sexes and genders in Liberal Land.
For those of you who didn’t have the benefit of going to Harvard and being taught very expensive nonsense, he was talking about four other extremely rare chromosome variations that can cause certain medical conditions, but are not separate sexes and have nothing to do with whether someone is “transgender” or not.
In a related story, Alabama just became the fifth state to pass a law limiting single-sex school sports to those who were born that particular sex. Whichever one of the six sexes it is.
RIP, Bay City Rollers Leader Les McKeown
By “Huckabee” pop culture guru Pat Reeder (http://www.hollywoodhifi.com)
If you were a teenybopper in the 1970s (or Scottish), I have very bad news for you: Les McKeown, the lead singer of the Bay City Rollers, died at home last week at 65.
The Rollers were a UK phenomenon that went worldwide (Nick Lowe released a perfect parody of them called “Bay City Rollers, We Love You” under the name “Tartan Horde” in hopes it would be bad enough to get him out of his record contract, but the plot backfired when it was a hit in Japan.) The real Bay City Rollers had a string of UK hits and were sold to a skeptical US as the second coming of the Beatles. Of course, they couldn’t live up to that hype, but they did score one US #1 with the earworm “Saturday Night,” and a few reasonably successful follow-ups, like their cover of “I Only Want To Be With You.”
They might not have been the next Beatles, but with their cute looks, marketable image and bubblegum pop tunes, they did help set the mold for countless boy bands yet to come. If you’d like to know more, McKeown wrote a memoir in 2019 called “Shang-a-Lang: My Life With the Bay City Rollers.”
Their heyday in the US lasted only a year or two, but they continued reuniting and performing in various configurations over the years as they fought a legal battle for their unpaid royalties (finally settled in 2016.) McKeown has been described as a very nice guy to the end, even volunteering to deliver prescriptions to COVID shut-ins until his own diabetes forced him to be sequestered. Our sympathies to his family and his many fans who suddenly feel 13 again whenever “Saturday Night” comes on the oldies station.
Finally, since you depend on me to share the weird trivia nobody else mentions, you might remember that the Bay City Rollers hosted a Saturday morning kids’ show produced by puppet show creators Sid and Marty Krofft. They shot 13 episodes that were rerun repeatedly.
At these two links, TV writer/blogger Mark Evanier recalls what it was like to write that show and work with the next Beatles. Or the Five Pufnstuf’s.
Laugh Of The Day!
By Mike Huckabee
The Babylon Bee perfectly summarizes the Academy Awards…
One quibble: all the homeless people were forcibly removed before the caring and compassionate consciences of America even showed up in their limousines.
A Reader Writes Back...
Yes, I agree term limits would solve a lot of problems! Those politicians get too comfortable with fat checks and become power hungry! Drain the swamp!
Inspirational Americans
America's history is full of inspirational people. Our "Inspirational Americans" series will profile 32 of them. Today's inspirational American is Billy Graham.
“Jesus was not a white man; He was not a black man. He came from that part of the world that touches Africa and Asia and Europe. Christianity is not a white man’s religion, and don’t let anybody ever tell you that it’s white or black. Christ belongs to all people; He belongs to the whole world.”
“When my decision for Christ was made…the direction of my life was changed. I’m not going to Heaven because I’ve read the Bible, nor because I’ve preached to a lot of people, I’m going to Heaven because of what Christ did.”
- Billy Graham
To learn more about Billy Graham, go here>>>
Permalink: https://www.mikehuckabee.com/2021/4/morning-edition-april-27
Leave a Comment
Note: Fields marked with an * are required.