By Mike Huckabee
May 27, 2022
|
|
|
|
Blessings on you and your family and from all the Huckabee staff! Today's newsletter includes:
- Sussmann trial, Day 9: "Here come da judge!!"
- Uvalde
- And much more...
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
1. DAILY BIBLE VERSE
At the same time,” says the Lord, “I will be the God of all the families of Israel, and they shall be My people.”
Jeremiah 31:1
If you have a favorite Bible Verse you want to see in one of our newsletters, please email [email protected].
2. Sussmann trial, Day 9: "Here come da judge!!"
Before we get started on the Sussmann trial update, there’s one piece of business that needs to be addressed. Yesterday, I wondered how much the high-powered Perkins Coie attorney Michael Sussmann was charging Hillary For America for his consequential little FBI visit. Those fancy DC lawyers cost a pretty penny --- I was thinking $500-600 an hour. That kind of money adds up fast, into the millions, and it’s why Michael Flynn had to sell his house to defend himself against limitless malicious prosecution.
But I have to admit, we were wrong. A top DC lawyer is apparently even pricier. As Miranda Devine at the NEW YORK POST put it, “[Sussmann] is hoisted by his own petard because he couldn’t help but charge the Clinton campaign $800 per hour...to perpetrate this dirty-tricks campaign against Donald Trump on behalf of Hillary Clinton.”
That’s right, folks, $800 per hour. But, hey, Sussmann billed just 3.3 hours for the day, and given the events he set in motion with his visit to FBI general counsel James Baker, Hillary must have thought it was money well spent! As Devine said on “FOX & Friends” Thursday morning, “She sanctioned, she approved this attempt to dirty-up Donald Trump and paint him as an agent of the Kremlin. The ramifications of that dirty trick went on, crippled the Trump presidency, did great damage to this country, [and were the] source of a lot of the rancor and division that we see now.” What a bargain!
And it was a drop in the bucket, considering the millions Perkins Coie was already receiving to fund Fusion GPS and, through them, the Steele “dossier.” Fusion GPS only paid Christopher Steele $168,000.
Devine summarized: “It may seem that the charge [against Sussmann] is small, but actually, the ramifications and the report that will come from John Durham are momentous. And we should all pay very close attention to it.”
Now, let’s catch up on Day 9 of the trial. First, we learned that closing arguments will begin Friday morning because Sussmann is not taking the stand in his own defense. (Too bad, but did anyone seriously think he would?) On Thursday morning, he declined to testify, and the defense rested.
Also, Durham has just been handed a potentially serious problem. In a couple of rulings Thursday, the Obama-appointed and heavily conflicted judge in this case, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, erected some huge obstacles for the special counsel. As legal analyst Andrew C. McCarthy wrote for FOX News, they are a “predictable but damaging blow to the prosecution” that make his case against Sussmann much harder to prove to the jury.
First, even though the text Sussmann sent to Baker is THE smoking gun –- ironclad proof that he lied to Baker –- Judge Cooper ruled that prosecutors must rely not on that text but on evidence that he actually told the lie the following day, while meeting with Baker, in Baker’s office at the FBI. That’s the insane degree of hairsplitting that is going on.
It stems from a legal technicality. McCarthy explains it in detail, but in a nutshell, it’s because at the time of Sussmann’s indictment, prosecutors didn’t have the text, so he wasn’t charged for THAT lie. Why, then, didn’t Durham create a superseding indictment that included both lies as separate counts? The problem is that the five-year statue of limitations was about to kick in when Durham charged Sussmann with lying in Baker’s office. The text to Baker didn’t come to Durham’s attention for another six months –- when Baker says he found it and turned it over –- and by then the statute of limitations had lapsed. Even just altering the original charging document to include anything about that text would invite legal objections. So Durham was stuck.
But, as McCarthy explains, the text isn’t out of the trial completely. It’s been presented in court, and Judge Cooper is permitting prosecutors to say it’s strong evidence that Baker’s memory is correct when he says Sussmann told him in his office that he wasn’t there on behalf of clients. What prosecutors can’t do is tell the jury that the Sussman’s text alone provides the proof he was lying (EVEN THOUGH IT DOES). Got that?
https://www.foxnews.com/
Unlike the text, Sussmann’s verbal lie is one man’s word against another’s. It was said with no witnesses and no notes taken. Baker said under oath that he’s 100 percent sure Sussmann said it, but other statements have been inconsistent, and Sussmann has pleaded ‘not guilty.” If it’s just a matter of who’s more believable, this jury is filled with DC Democrats who want to believe Sussmann. After all, he was just trying to save us from Trump!
Nick Arama at RedState.com had a similar take on what the judge did, even linking to McCarthy’s analysis. This judge has taken a case that should be simple and cut-and-dried, with the proof RIGHT THERE, and made it as hard to convict as he can. He wouldn’t even allow the tweets from Hillary that show how she capitalized with lightning speed on the Alfa Bank hoax. Judge Cooper was wrong not to recuse himself from this case; we’ve addressed his conflicts before and they are staggering.
Then there’s the jury. As Jonathan Turley has noted, “I mean, he [Durham] is facing a jury that has three Clinton donors, an AOC donor, and a woman whose daughter is on the same sports team as Sussmann’s daughter. With the exception of randomly selecting people out of the DNC headquarters, you could not come up with a worse jury.”
Between this judge and this jury, one might be reminded of the O.J. Simpson trial, except with Judge Ito replaced by Al Cowlings.
The media no doubt sense that this jury will acquit Sussmann no matter how strong the case against him, and that’s why they’re laying low right now. If he’s acquitted –- and the verdict might come as early as today –- they’ll spring into action and use the verdict to trash the whole Durham investigation, never mind what it has found.
And Durham continues to find a lot. Testimony from Wednesday revealed that Rodney Joffe was actually the same source for two separate “tips” that falsely connected Trump and Alfa Bank. So he needed Sussmann to lie and say he wasn’t approaching Baker on behalf of clients, so he, Joffe, could still hand off his phony evidence to other people in the FBI. Joffe himself was apparently (surprise) an FBI confidential human source. This is one more reason for Sussmann to lie.
Finally, while we wait for the verdict, here’s an excellent review of the Sussmann trial thus far. It calls the trial “part of a three-ring circus, showcasing sleazy political enablers, malfeasance by public officials and biased reporting.” We have to “walk behind the elephants with a huge shovel.”
3. Uvalde
This is the link to Fox News’ continually-updated feed of the latest news on the horrific Uvalde, Texas, school shooting.
https://www.foxnews.com/live-
One of the fourth graders who was in the classroom but managed to hide from the shooter and survive gave a heartbreaking firsthand account of what happened. Rather than edit or try to summarize, I will link to the story so you can read it in his own words.
https://www.westernjournal.
We’re also learning more about what happened before the shooting and outside the school. It’s both stunning and an irrefutable argument for schools having a single locked entrance and a school safety officer on premises.
The shooter got out of his truck carrying a rifle and a bag of ammo, shot at some people across the street and at the school, and was outside the building for about 12 minutes before he went in. Contrary to earlier reports, there was no armed ISD officer in the school to stop him.
Parents are criticizing the school for its lack of security, and are furious at law enforcement for staying outside the building for a reported 40 minutes instead of going in to confront the shooter. The cops are also being accused of barricading the shooter in with his victims and encouraging the kids to yell for help before they had him subdued, which led to him shooting a little girl who gave away her hiding place.
Some parents are also accusing police of getting their own kids out while blocking parents from going in to rescue their kids. This story has yet to be confirmed but definitely deserves investigation.
But police tell a different story. They say it was a complex situation. They were going in and taking fire and negotiating with the shooter to stall for time while they got tactical equipment, marksmen and other necessities rounded up and brought to the scene.
At least the kids were prepared, as one little girl who survived said she immediately turned off the lights in the classroom as she’d learned during active shooter drills. The very fact that she would have to know that is a sad comment on modern society.
And here’s another story of quiet heroism: Off-duty Border Patrol agent Jacob Albarado was getting a haircut when he got a text for help from his wife, who’s a teacher at the school, which their daughter attends. Borrowing a shotgun from his barber, Albarado rushed to the school, coordinated with officers on the scene, and with two others covering him, he went in and helped get a number of students, including his own daughter, to safety.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/
4. Stop politicizing this
Whenever there’s a terrible mass shooting, there’s no shortage of people who will irresponsibly rush to the nearest camera, microphone or social media account and start spouting stuff that’s unsubstantiated, blatantly false or just made up out of thin air. That’s why I try to be careful and wait to report some things until they’ve been confirmed, or if they're not yet confirmed, I tell you so.
With that out of the way, a lot of things were widely broadcast but untrue. In addition to the fictitious school safety officer, the shooter was described by some on the right as a trans, leftist, illegal alien. He’s actually from North Dakota, so far little is known about his political views if any, and the trans claim was due to mistaken identity for someone else.
Those trying to politicize the tragedy on the left are also spewing a lot of claims that would be called “disinformation” if they were coming from Republicans. For instance, the Washington Post ran an article claiming that the AR-15 rifle was “invented for Nazi infantrymen.” It was actually developed by the Armalite company in the 1950s, and there’s no evidence that its creator got the idea from the Nazis’ machine guns. Also, the Nazis weren’t the inventors of the machine gun; Chicago gangsters had them in the 1920s.
And in an article that’s unfortunately subscriber only, Chris Queen at PJ Media debunks a long list of popular leftist claims about guns, such as that America is the only advanced nation where mass shootings occur, that we have the highest murder rate in the world, and that we lead the world in mass shootings (which would be obvious if they only happened here.) In fact, researcher John Lott reports that from 1998 to 2015, there were 97 countries where mass public shootings took place, and the US ranked 65th in per capita murder rate and 64th in per capita frequency. And despite the left’s attempts to blame all mass shootings on Republicans, they are far more likely to happen in areas run by Democrats. Here’s a link to Lott’s original study.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3289010
Of course, none of this politicizing of the issue explains why we have something as unthinkable as mass shootings of innocent school children happening repeatedly. If that’s the fault of guns, then why is it that when I was a kid, every boy had a rifle rack in his pickup, but nobody ever even thought of pointing his rifle at his classmates? The guns have always been here, so what changed in society over the past 50 or so years that would result in such amoral disregard for the sanctity of innocent life? That’s where the answers to solving this really lie, and that’s why the left is so quick to blame the guns.
5. Parkland Dad: Nothing was learned
Andrew Pollack, who lost a child in the 2018 Parkland, Florida, school shooting, said that the focus on nothing but more gun control laws is the reason the Uvalde school shooting happened. He said the school still had no secure entrance, no on-campus security officer and all the shooter’s mental red flags were ignored, which proves that, “Evidently, they didn’t learn anything.”
But if you are going to ignore the real problems and focus on more gun control laws based on false narratives, who better to put in charge than Susan Rice?
And while we’re on the subject of false narratives, I’m fed up with hearing that Republicans don’t care about children’s lives, especially when I’ve just spent the past three weeks hearing from the same people about the fundamental right to abort babies right up until the moment of birth. I and everyone I know are heartsick over this senseless massacre of innocent children. We never want it to happen again.
And that’s why we are opposed to wasting time, work and law enforcement efforts on more laws that are proven not to work (nations that ban guns entirely still have mass shootings) while, as Mr. Pollack said, we ignore the things that we know do work. It’s precisely because we never want this to happen again that we should concentrate on things that will actually accomplish that, not pushing a preconceived political agenda that punishes the law-abiding while doing nothing to solve the problem.
By all means, if you have some new gun law that is enforceable, constitutional and will actually do any good, then I'm eager to hear it. But if not, then why don’t the politicians and celebrities who claim they care about protecting kids’ lives think that all our kids deserve the same basic level of security in schools that they enjoy at their jobs?
I Just Wanted to Say
Thank you for reading my newsletter.
For more news, visit my website here.
Permalink: https://www.mikehuckabee.com/2022/5/morning-edition-may-27
Leave a Comment
Note: Fields marked with an * are required.