By Mike Huckabee
February 24, 2022
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Good afternoon! Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff!
Today's newsletter includes:
- Invasion for Real
- Trudeau Backs Down
- "Russia hoaxer" Joffe knew and visited Obama
- And much more
Thank you again for subscribing.
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
I have set the Lord always before me;
Because He is at my right hand I shall not be moved.
Psalm 16:8 NKJV
If you have a favorite Bible Verse you want to see in one of our newsletters, please email [email protected].
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2. Invasion for Real
As you surely know by now, last night, Vladimir Putin made good on his threat to invade Ukraine. There’s no hair-splitting about it, it’s a full-on military invasion, including tanks and troops crossing the border and the shelling of the capital city of Kyiv, the largest military attack in Europe since World War II.
Before I get into the details, the most important thing I can do is ask you to join me in praying for the safety of the Ukrainian people, for the return of peace, and although this may sound like too much of a miracle to ask, for Vladimir Putin to realize the evil of his actions and change his heart and mind.
I’m not going to attempt to update you on what's happening, because events are moving too fast. For the latest, here’s a link to a Fox News feed of continually-updated bulletins:
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/russia-ukraine-us-allies-sanctions
As of this writing (early Thursday morning), there are reports of dozens of people dead. The leader of a Ukrainian emergency response organization said that it appeared Russia was targeting military locations and not civilians, although there is a crush of panicking civilians trying to evacuate. He said so far, Putin was doing exactly what he said he would do. His best case scenario was that he would just attack the military, install a Russian puppet government and pull back without targeting civilians.
Putin threatened that any countries that interfered in his invasion of Ukraine would face “the greatest consequences in history,” not making clear whether he meant cyber warfare, nuclear attack or something else. He also claimed he was reversing the “Nazification” of Ukraine, a bizarre claim considering Ukraine has a Jewish President and a large Jewish population. I wonder where he could have gotten the idea that an autocratic communist could justify crushing his political opponents simply by branding them as “Nazis” first.
Some who watched his TV appearance said he didn’t seem like the same Putin who’s smoothly played the media and attended summit meetings in recent years. No, he seemed like what he has always been: a former KGB thug and Stalin admirer who wants to reassemble the Soviet Union police state. That shouldn’t be a surprise, but too few people these days know real history. Is it only a coincidence that Putin waited to strike until February 23rd, the anniversary of the first mass protests of 1917 that kicked off Russia’s communist revolution?
Just as Russian media misleads the Russian people into thinking that NATO is a threat to Russian sovereignty (it’s actually a purely defensive force against Russian aggression; believe me, nobody wants to take over Russia, certainly not in February), many young people in America have been misled by their teachers into thinking that communism is just “people sharing” and the real evil in the world is the United States.
Well, kids, those Russian tanks and missiles are your rude awakening to reality. You finally get to see the real face of communism that the rest of us grew up with. It’s a tough way to learn what “violence” and “imperialism” really are, and it's not someone building a Chick-Fil-A on your campus.
Putin will do whatever he wants without regard for any threats from the US or NATO. He’s seen weakness, he’s waited for the perfect moment to strike, and after seeing us leave Afghanistan, he’s decided that this is it. And he’s not the only one. Yesterday, China defended Ukraine as an independent nation only so they could warn the world not to confuse Taiwan with one of those because it’s part of China. They went on to make a not-so-veiled threat that implies Beijing has also been emboldened by our weak dealings with Afghanistan and is watching closely to see what Biden does about Ukraine.
At this moment, we’re still waiting to hear what Biden plans to do, although last night, he did reimpose the sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 oil pipeline that he inexplicably lifted less than a year ago.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/biden-sanctions-nord-stream-2-pipeline-russia-germany
Maybe that will help bring down the estimated extra $1 billion a day that’s been flowing into Putin’s war chest thanks to high oil and gas prices brought about by targeting America’s fossil fuel industry.
The White House warned that due to the Ukraine crisis and coming sanctions, Americans might be seeing even higher prices at the gas pumps. Gosh, if only there were some way that America could produce its own oil and gas so we wouldn’t be reliant on imports from places like Russia.
There’s a lot more that I could say, but there’s an old tradition in America that’s been ripped up in recent years, but I think it deserves preservation: when America is facing a serious crisis abroad, Americans shouldn’t attack their own President. I think we all know why we, and the world, are in this situation now, so I don’t have to belabor it.
Let’s just say for now that I, and I hope all Americans, stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine and behind all those who stand up against this barbaric action by Vladimir Putin. And please, pray for Ukraine.
3. Trudeau backs down
While Vladimir Putin is giving the world an example of what happens when an autocrat encounters weakness, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau showed us what happens when the public stands up to dictators. On Wednesday, before the Senate had even finished debating whether to give him his 30-day extension of “emergency” powers, Trudeau announced that the emergency was over, the trucker blockade had been cleared, and he was revoking the Emergencies Act.
Trudeau was under fierce criticism and ridicule both in Canada and around the world for essentially imposing martial law and revoking basic human rights to deal with a peaceful protest by truckers simply asking for their freedom back.
The man who took a knee in solidarity with BLM rioters refused even to meet with the truckers, instead using the Ottawa police as an enforcement arm to attack and arrest nonviolent protesters. As Conservative Party leader Candice Bergin pointed out, there was never any reason to impose emergency powers in the first place, and “nothing has changed between Monday and today other than a flood of concerns from Canadian citizens, bad press, and international ridicule.”
Trudeau may have backed down, but the memories of officers roughing up a small elderly man just for honking his horn, of an elderly woman in a mobility scooter being trampled by a police horse, of leaked audio of cops bragging about the protesters hearing their “jackboots,” of people having their bank accounts frozen just for donating a few dollars to the protesters weeks earlier and more will live on in infamy and make it that much harder for Canada’s government to regain any respect or trust.
Frankly, I hope that’s impossible. Trudeau and his supporters don’t deserve to regain the public’s respect or trust, they deserve to be removed from office as quickly as possible.
I don’t have enough time or space to list all the bad choices he made, but just to cite a few: treating the people as if they were his servants rather than vice versa; trying to criminalize disagreement with his policies; and slandering people as racists, Nazis, homophobes and white supremacists when those issues had nothing to do with the protest. When you attack peaceful protesters as violent extremists, you remove their incentive to remain peaceful. He made matters worse by inflaming them: people figured if they were going to be hounded and arrested just for donating a little money or honking their horns, then they might as well take to the streets.
And he’s still making destructive mistakes, like claiming that prosecutions of people arrested during that brief window of having their rights revoked will continue. No, the charges should be dropped, apologies offered, restitution made and resignations tendered.
Perhaps the most important factor in his hasty retreat was that by freezing people’s bank accounts, he signaled that Canada’s banks couldn’t be trusted, launching a run on people withdrawing their money and both domestic and foreign-based businesses canceling their accounts. That’s more damage that will take a long time to repair.
But since it appears that many financial institutions have been working with the government to target conservatives and help institute a Western version of China’s “social credit system,” it can only be a good thing if Trudeau’s ham-handed bungling scares non-leftists into setting up new, independent financial services. That may go down in history as Trudeau’s one great contribution to Western society.
4. Romney was right about Russia
Say what you will about Sen. Mitt Romney, but he was right when he warned during the 2012 presidential campaign that Russia would be America’s biggest security threat. The media laughed, and Obama mockingly said that “the ‘80s called, and they want their foreign policy back.” Well, Romney just responded to the Ukraine invasion by saying, “The ‘80s called, and we didn’t answer.”
He also rightly pointed out how predictable this was because Putin pulled similar assaults against Georgia and Crimea while Obama was in office, not that the media spent much time telling you about that.
Oh, but wait: Mitt just couldn’t get through his statement without taking a slam at Trump and trying to blame Putin’s aggression on Trump’s policy of putting “America First.” So close, Mitt…
5. "Russia hoaxer" Joffe knew and visited Obama
A reader asks:
if AG Garland was to interfere with the Durham report, then wouldn't it protect Hillary Clinton instead of old Joe?
– MJ McCauley
Thanks, MJ, for your question. Although the Russia Hoax appears to have originated with Hillary and her close associates, Garland is well aware that the Durham investigation potentially implicates two U.S. Presidents, not just one scheming, pantsuited wanna-be. This will require some set-up.
As we’ve discussed, and as Charlie Martin analyzes in a new VIP report for PJ Media (“Quick and Dirty Durham Explainer”), one huge question is how Rodney Joffe’s company, Neustar, got its “sensitive arrangement” to “access and maintain” the servers of the Executive Office of the President (EOP). This access began under Obama during the campaign and continued during the transition after Trump’s unexpected win and, somehow, even into Trump’s term of office. So, we have to ask: how did Joffe win the contract to do this?
And what information was gathered? Durham’s motion just mentions DNS (Domain Name Service) lookups. These are what look up the interminably long internet addresses we’re really calling when we use the shorter, easier-to-remember-and-type domain names. As Martin explains this, it’s like an automatic Directory Assistance.
Joffe would retrieve these DNS lookups from the White House and send them to Team Nerd (that’s what I call them) at Georgia Tech, where they already had an existing project to look at large amounts of internet data and where they were trying to win a Pentagon contract –- that they later got. Their assignment: to develop a narrative tying Trump to Russia, to give to the “VIPs” Durham identifies as people at Perkins Coie and the Clinton campaign.
This kind of internet traffic is usually “anonymized,” which means people’s identities are concealed. But with his intelligence background, Martin says he’d “bet money” that anonymization can be reversed.
One fake narrative that ended up in the hands of the FBI and CIA was that Trump and his associates were using special “rare” Russian cell phones in the vicinity of the White House. Durham’s motion says the special counsel has no found no evidence for this allegation, but, of course, it didn’t have to be real to be weaponized against Trump at the time.
The rest of Martin’s article deals with details that we’ve already examined and will be familiar to you. He says Durham’s recent motion shows he “is laying out a case that Perkins Coie, through Sussmann and with the active participation of Marc Elias, purposefully MANUFACTURED EVIDENCE against Trump that factored into the four-year investigation into ‘Russian collusion.’” He wraps up with questions: “How many crimes is this? I honestly don’t know,” he says. “Perjury? Mail fraud? How many ways does it hit the Espionage Act? For mere mortals, it would be a long time in prison.”
Yes, prison. Martin’s background is intelligence, but he talked to “several lawyer friends” who told him this looks as though MANY laws were broken --- “too many to list.” The consensus was that there’s enough to “send mere politically unconnected mortals to Leavenworth for the rest of their lives.”
https://pjmedia.com/columns/charlie-martin/2022/02/23/quick-and-dirty-durham-explainer-n1561262
As mentioned, that report is “VIP.” But we also found an interesting piece –- more great reporting by Paul Sperry –- about Rodney Joffe that touches on his relationship with (yes) President Obama. The tech executive managed to have a “sensitive arrangement” with Obama’s White House despite being involved in a mail-order scam that sparked federal and state investigations.
As Sperry points out, to get such a contract, Joffe had to pass a personal background check and obtain the government’s highest security clearances. The FBI has denied comment, but one factor could be that the scam was decades ago, and Joffe “reinvented himself” as a cybersecurity expert during the 1990s.
Still, he got involved with a company called PlasmaNet Inc. that has had to pay millions of dollars in fines for deceptive advertising concerning an online lotto scam. He’s even still listed on their board of directors. In spite of this, he was able to move to Washington DC and land “lucrative, security-related contracts with the FBI and Pentagon requiring top secret clearance.”
In 2006, he joined Neustar, which secures and maintains internet servers for federal agencies, including the White House. His position gave him access to the above-mentioned DNS logs, though these are proprietary. And he started advising White House officials, including President Obama, on cybersecurity matters. So now we’re starting to see how Joffe was acquainted with the President, how he might have landed a “sensitive” contract like this and how Obama might possibly have had knowledge of what he was doing to defeat Trump.
“By 2016,” Sperry writes, “[Joffe’s] access to proprietary internet logs became of interest to operatives for the Hillary Clinton campaign, who appear to have offered him a plum job in a Clinton presidency for help on an opposition-research project on Donald Trump.” (Recall that Joffe also mined data from Trump Tower and Trump’s Central Park West apartment building.)
Sperry does not speculate here about how Clinton’s “operatives” learned of his access to these proprietary logs.
Durham apparently has an August 2016 email from Joffe to Team Nerd privately confessing that he knows those “pings” between Trump Tower and Alfa Bank were “legitimate” and “just part of the marketing world.” He also has an email from Joffe’s lead researcher that says, “the only thing that drives us is that we just don’t like [Trump].” This researcher made it clear that he believed even the most salacious stories in the Steele “dossier.”
Sperry’s report lays out numerous criminal statutes that could be invoked. Really, it’s a must-read, as it has details we’re seeing for the first time about Durham’s focus on Joffe’s businesses, contracts and employees. It appears that Neustar as a company had “a level of involvement...that has not been explained.”
A career Justice Department official advised Sperry that Joffe “has friends in high places.” Not only did he personally advise President Obama, but he also was friendly with then-FBI Director James Comey and had done projects for him going back some 15 years. Logs show he visited Obama’s White House several times.
He’s admitted to a surprising lack of technical knowledge, saying he mostly just connects clients with resources they need. Durham apparently is looking at all those connections ---WHOEVER they might be. Given the ones we already know, plus the briefings Obama got from the FBI and CIA, it’s hard to believe that he and his Vice President were not aware on some level of what was going on. It’s up to Durham to get the evidence.
Of course, we've long known that both Obama and Biden were in the Oval Office on January 5, 2017 –- with Comey, Brennan, James Clapper, Susan Rice and Sally Yates –- for a briefing on the “Russia” narrative and the Mike Flynn case. (Recall that Yates was surprised to learn Obama already knew Flynn's calls had been intercepted.) This piece by Mollie Hemingway from May 2020 takes on enormous new significance today.
Oh, yes, Durham’s scope has to include Obama and Biden, and this is one prosecutor whom Biden had better not try to get fired.
6. I Just Wanted to Say:
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