By Mike Huckabee
April 27, 2022
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Good morning! Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff!
Today's newsletter includes:
- Russia-Ukraine War Update
- Durham snares Clinton people in legal trap
- Daily Mail: President Biden has "unexplained" $5.2 million
- And much more.
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
1. DAILY BIBLE VERSE
Whom have I in heaven but You?
And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You.
26 My flesh and my heart fail;
But God is the [a]strength of my heart and my portion forever.
Psalm 73:25-26
If you have a favorite Bible Verse you want to see in one of our newsletters, please email [email protected].
2. Russia-Ukraine War Update
Here’s today’s Fox News feed of continually-updated Russia-Ukraine news:
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-putin-zelenskyy-live
The top stories: Marine veteran Trevor Reed, who was being held in jail in Moscow, is back home after the White House worked out a prisoner swap for him in exchange for a Russian drug trafficker. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy called for global controls to be imposed on the Kremlin’s nuclear capabilities because of their “completely irresponsible actions” such as firing missiles around nuclear power plants. And the head of the EU accused Russia of blackmail after it cut gas access to Poland and Bulgaria for refusing to pay in rubles.
Oh, if only there were some other country that could produce more oil and gas and undercut Russia’s power to blackmail other nations. But sadly, there’s not. At least, there won’t be until at least 2024.
https://news.yahoo.com/biden-administration-shrinks-area-eligible-224231066.html
3. "Federal Fumbles"
Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford has released his 6th annual “Federal Fumbles” report on "wasteful, ineffective, or duplicative" government spending. This year’s report lists over $10.5 trillion in wasteful spending at a time when the national debt has topped $30 trillion, and President Biden and the Democrats are pushing to spend trillions more.
https://www.lankford.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Federal_Fumbles_Vol_6.pdf
Among the ways your tax money is being flushed down the toilet:
$2 billion given to contractors NOT to finish building the border wall…
A $29 billion slush fund for the EPA…
$2.5 billion to plant trees to increase “tree equity”…
And a plethora of pork projects, including $47 million to promote travel in the US; $765,000 to Maine to study the future of the lobster industry; $2 million for indigenous coffee producers in Columbia; $500,000 to revamp a state-owned ski jump in New Hampshire; $2 million to renovate an RV park in Oregon; an unspecified “bucket” of money to expand Internet access for felons in prison; a $1.2 million NIH grant to develop “sun safety programs” for people with tattoos; $120,000 to two authors to write a book about Russian art; $606,000 to China’s CDC to research “the global risk of noble infections throughout China” (don’t we already know that?); and a number of arts grants, such as $15,000 for a puppet opera called “Monkey: A Kung Fu Parable” and $16,000 to produce “Fat Pig,” an opera that “tells the story of a plus-sized woman who falls in love with a man who has a ‘normal’ body.” I assume that opera is over when the fat lady sings.
Here’s some commentary from Jesse Watters’ Fox News show by the colorful Sen. John Kennedy on what he calls this “spending porn,” and how it’s not just Democrats who are protecting it. He says that Republicans have also resisted ending even the most outrageous wastes of money, including sending checks to dead people. And they're Democrat voters.
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6305209381001#sp=show-clips
4. Durham snares Clinton people in legal trap
Just a brief update on the Durham investigation and the Michael Sussmann case today, with links to some fun reading material.
Recall that there are problems with the argument for attorney-client privilege being made by Hillary For America and the DNC. Sussmann is on trial for lying to the FBI when he denied being there as their attorney, and they want to keep their communications with him secret largely because of him...being their attorney? With an argument like that, Sussmann ought to just plead guilty and be done with it.
And now, as legal analyst Margot Cleveland explains, there’s even more of a problem with that claim of privilege. After the flurry of motions back and forth on this question was made public, the Coolidge Reagan Foundation wrote a three-page letter to Special Counsel John Durham and Assistant Special Counsel Jonathan Algor, alerting them to key facts concerning the FEC fine levied against Hillary For America and the DNC for hiding the purpose of the over-$1 million they paid for the Steele “dossier.” The CRF should know –- they’re the group that filed the original complaint.
Getting to the meat of it, the letter says that Hillary For America and the DNC are “asserting materials generated by Fusion GPS and provided to Perkins Coie are protected by attorney-client privilege and work-product doctrine” when they also have an agreement with the FEC to “not further contest the Commission’s finding of probable cause to believe” that the political organizations “had falsely reported their payments through Perkins Coie to Fusion GPS as being for legal services.”
In other words, Hillary wants to have it both ways. When she needs to say Fusion GPS is providing legal services, she says it is. When she needs to say it isn’t, she says it isn’t.
“The government should not permit HFA and the DNC to adopt conflicting positions in different proceedings, depending on the federal agency against which they are litigating,” the letter concludes.
This situation is complicated by the fact that Durham has subpoenaed both the Clinton campaign and the DNC to have representatives testify at Sussmann’s trial. Of course, Sussmann’s attorneys are trying to stop that.
The irony, Cleveland says, “is that the more Sussmann, the Clinton campaign, and the DNC hide behind claims of attorney-client privilege, the more it appears that, yes, Sussmann pushed the Alfa Bank hoax, including during his meeting with FBI General Counsel James Baker, on behalf of the Clinton campaign. The FEC’s conclusion that probable cause existed to support the finding that the Clinton campaign and DNC had falsely reported fees paid to Fusion GPS as legal fees only further supports that conclusion.”
The head of the Coolidge Reagan Foundation told The Federalist that this is a case of the Democrats wanting to have their cake and eat it, too. For decades, Hillary’s been accustomed to arrangements like that, but this is one time when it looks as though the cake might crumble.
Bonchie at RedState commented on Cleveland’s analysis, and it makes enjoyable reading. He sees this is a trap set by Durham, to get Hillary's people under oath and make them reveal the contradiction. He’s painted them into a corner, and it's so delightful. “Either they are lying to the FEC in their prior agreement, or they are lying in the Sussmann case,” he says.
5. Daily Mail: President Biden has "unexplained" $5.2 million
Have you wondered what Elon Musk might have to say about social media’s censorship of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story just ahead of the 2020 election? You know, the story that polls show might have swung the election to Donald Trump if voters had known about it?
Wonder no more.
On Tuesday, Musk tweeted what I’d still call a bit of an understatement, but on target: “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.”
Twitter’s excuse to the FEC had been that U.S. intel officials had shared “rumors” that this story came from hacked material. I think we all should know by now that it’s a bad idea to automatically believe U.S. intel officials about anything. And there was never any evidence that information in the NY Post’s reporting came from a hack. That apparently didn’t matter at the time to the twits at Twitter.
Last year, though, then-CEO Jack Dorsey –- who has just come out in favor of Musk’s anti-censorship strategy –- told the House Energy and Commerce Committee that censoring the story through their “quick interpretation” had been a “mistake.” And maybe he does regret this, now that the damage has been done. Still, it’s inexcusable that social media prevented people from sharing that story, even privately. How dare they do that.
On Tuesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland was questioned before the Senate Committee on Appropriations about the federal investigation into Hunter’s finances. He said “there will not be interference” but declined to say whether or not he had been briefed on the investigation. He gave the standard answer that he wouldn’t be commenting on an ongoing investigation. Here’s the link to The Epoch Times’ “premium” story, but I’ll comment below.
Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagarty asked Garland how the public could be confident that there would be no interference “of any political or improper kind” in the investigation. The attorney general answered, “Because we put a Trump appointee in charge of the investigation. And because you have me as attorney general, who’s committed to the independence of the DOJ from any influence from the White House.”
I suppose time will tell on that last part. (However, we know this wasn't the case concerning parents who were targeted by the DOJ as "domestic terrorists.") It’s true that U.S. Attorney David Weiss was appointed by Trump -- even if he's still there only because he was already in charge of the investigation when Biden took office and Biden couldn't ask for his resignation, as is customary for U.S. attorneys when a new President comes in. If the U.S. attorney tasked with examining the younger Biden’s financial wrongdoings had been appointed by the elder Biden, one hopes THAT, at least, would be an unassailable reason for appointing a special counsel.
But that's not the case, and when Sen. Hagarty asked Garland about whether or not he might appoint a special counsel, Garland was noncommittal, saying, “It depends on the circumstances.” At another point in the questioning, in an answer to Indiana Senator Mike Braun, Garland said, “The question is an internal DOJ matter. I don’t want to make judgments, but I’m comfortable with the Attorney from Delaware continuing.”
“I think our internal deliberations have to stay within the Department,” he said. And that’s really all the information the committee got out of Garland.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/garland-question-hunter-biden-investigation-special-counsel
Meanwhile, the U.K. Daily Mail has done some blockbuster reporting on Hunter Biden’s finances. Their analysis of the President’s financial records show that he has $5.2 million in income that is “unexplained.” According to their report, the missing millions, combined with messages on Hunter’s laptop, suggest that Joe Biden would indeed have had a 10 percent share in Hunter’s deal with a Chinese energy company.
In fact, emails reveal that Joe –- who was then between gigs as Vice President and President –- agreed to pay Hunter’s hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills “in the short term.” This was to be “as Hunter transitions in his career.” The list of items to be covered included $28,382 in legal fees for the “restructuring” of Hunter’s joint venture with the CCP-controlled Bank of China. The total amount spent on “restructuring” this deal was apparently $68,933.41, beginning in September 2016.
Would Joe Biden have agreed to pay these legal bills for Hunter without even knowing what they were for? How does that square with his repeated claim that he knew nothing about his son’s foreign business dealings?
As the Daily Mail points out, no conclusive evidence has yet emerged that Joe Biden profited from any of Hunter’s business deals. The federal investigation in Delaware is sorting all that out. But what they’ve seen raises “troubling questions” about where an “unexplained” $5,180,071 came from. The rest of "dad's" income appears to have some from speaking fees and a book deal for his memoir, PROMISE ME, DAD.
A report by Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson shows that $5 million in wire transfers from Hunter’s Chinese partners was sent to a company controlled by Hunter. An additional $1 million was sent by Patrick Ho, an executive with Chinese energy company CEFC, as a retainer for Hunter to represent him in a DOJ bribery case. As The Epoch Times reports, there’s an audio recording in which Hunter refers to Ho as “the f***ing spy chief of China.”
Here’s what The Right Scoop had to say…
Tying all of this together is a great opinion piece from Jordan Boyd at The Federalist, condemning the media for helping Joe Biden maintain his now-obvious lie about not knowing anything about Hunter’s overseas business deals.
Finally, the propagandist “encyclopedia” Wikipedia has deleted the entire entry for Rosemont Seneca Partners, Hunter Biden’s investment firm. As George Orwell would say, it was dropped right down the memory hole. Fortunately, some people who care about the truth still have long memories. (It’s hard to forget that Hunter’s business partner Eric Schwerin visited the White House 19 times, and later, as we’ve just learned, at least 8 additional times.) In the words of NY Post reporter Miranda Devine, the author of LAPTOP FROM HELL who broke the story right before the 2020 election but was shut down by the leftwing media, “This is unsustainable for the White House.”
6. Republicans in the House prepare for impeachment of a Cabinet official
House Republicans are reportedly preparing for only the second impeachment of a Cabinet official (the first was in 1876.) Unlike the Trump impeachments, this would be for actual reasons. This time, it’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
133 House members sent Mayorkas a letter accusing him of violating his oath of office, undermining American sovereignty and the rule of law, and endangering American citizens by his continuing refusal to do his job, which legally requires him to maintain operational control of the border and detain illegal aliens.
Mayorkas is set to testify for the first time before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday. I’ll be eager to see if he will try to refute those accusations, or just put them on his resume.
7. Inside Twitter during the takeover
No wonder the leftist Twitter mobs are so twitterpated over the idea of allowing conservative journalists like James O’Keefe of Project Veritas to have freedom of speech: O'Keefe obtained a recording of the “all-hands” meeting at Twitter to discuss Elon Musk buying the company, and he released it.
It reveals that the current CEO (I stress the adjective “current”) seems to think he can “moderate” Musk’s promise to bring back freedom of speech. They also spoke in soothing tones to the melting down employees, as if trying to calm a toddler during a thunderstorm (and that’s a remarkably apt analogy.)
Twitter’s top lawyer, one of the instigators behind booting President Trump from the platform and censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, broke down crying.
See what interesting things you learn when journalists aren’t prevented from reporting the truth?
Incidentally, Elon Musk’s latest response to Twitter’s laptop censorship also bodes well for Twitter’s future, but not for that lawyer’s future with Twitter.
8. Food shortages
Between the supply chain crisis that the Biden Administration still appears to be doing very little about (can you imagine Trump letting this problem fester for 15 months without rallying a massive government-private sector response to fix it?) and the Russia-Ukraine war and sanctions, experts are warning to brace for serious food shortages. And of course, the “Green” movement is fighting efforts to mitigate it, like temporarily cultivating farmland that was being returned to the wild.
There are already a lot of empty shelves in American grocery stores, which was unthinkable just a couple of years ago, but as a great man once said, “Never underestimate Joe (Biden’s) ability to (bleep) things up.” However, Instapundit blogmaster Prof. Glenn Reynolds warns that those random semi-empty shelves may just be the tip of the iceberg.
https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/looming-food-shortages-is-worlds-next-slow-moving-disaster/
The shortages are already impacting food pantries, which serve those “most vulnerable among us” that leftists claim to care so much about.
And a reminder: it’s not just human food that could be in short supply. We also have to feed livestock and pets. I’m told by friends who own cats that they’ve recently had to go to several stores to find any canned cat food on the pet aisles. Trader Joe’s, which carries its own house brands, announced that due to shortages, it’s discontinuing four types of cat food and two types of dog food.
I recently reported that polls showed the only demographic group that's actually increased its support of President Biden is single, college-educated, Democratic women. If those women go to Trader Joe’s and find no food for their 14 cats, it’s over for Biden.
I Just Wanted to Say
Thank you for reading my newsletter.
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