Good morning!

Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff! 

Today's newsletter includes:

• Bible Verse Of The Day
• CDC releases state-by-state COVID scorecard
• Democrat leaders are misleading the public
• Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings dies
• California: America’s petri dish of insane ideas
• Standards equally applied
• Confirmation: "Crossfire Hurricane" was COMPLETELY BOGUS
• A Reader Writes Back...
• America The Beautiful

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

BIBLE VERSE OF THE DAY 

CDC releases state-by-state COVID scorecard

By Mike Huckabee

Tuesday, the CDC released its latest state-by-state scorecard of COVID-19 cases. Despite the constant drumbeat from Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) that red states loosening strict lockdown and facemask mandates were going to set off a tsunami of cases and deaths, that isn’t happening. In fact, nine of the top ten states with the most cases per 100,000 residents were run by Democrats.

At #1 was Michigan, which Gov. Gretchen Whitmer practically put into a deep freeze. Over the past seven days, they had 471 cases per 100,000. New Jersey had 335 and New York 248.7. By contrast, Arkansas, which lifted its mask mandate on March 30th, had the fewest cases at 36.1 (the national average is 133.8.)

President Biden accused Texas Gov. Greg Abbott of “Neanderthal thinking” for lifting his state mask mandate and allowing businesses to resume at 100% capacity over a month ago. Yet cases in Texas have continued to drop. Over the past seven days, there were only 62.3 cases per 100,000 residents. In Biden’s home state of Delaware, there 230.4.

Dr. Anthony Fauci predicted a disastrous spike in cases in Texas, and now admits he’s flummoxed as to why it hasn’t happened. He’s the same expert who praised the COVID response in New York.

My writer Pat Reeder, who lives near Dallas, has a theory: “There’s no giant surge because most people here are still wearing masks where appropriate and still following safety guidelines. We’ve been doing it for a year, and it’s not that complicated. And a lot of us are getting vaccinated, or in my case, already had the disease. We Texans aren’t idiot children or wards of the state, and we have enough sense to take precautions for ourselves without needing Big Daddy in Austin or Washington to tell us what to strap over our faces under threat of arrest.”

Democrat leaders are misleading the public

By Mike Huckabee

I was watching a news program last night and was disturbed to see that in interviews with people on the street, they were repeating the false claim from President Biden, the media and other Democrat activists that the Georgia voting laws were “Jim Crow on steroids.” They’re not even Jim Crow on blood thinners.

It was a depressing example of how partisan leaders and media figures who are willing to lie about an issue can mislead the public. Georgia’s new election laws are no more restrictive than those in most other states. In many ways, they make voting easier, for instance, by expanding early voting. The voter ID aspects are favored by large majorities of Americans, even blacks (to vote, just show the same ID you use to pick up baseball tickets, get onto a Delta flight, enter a Coke shareholders’ meeting or tour the Biden White House.) Even those that tighten some laws only tighten the illegal loosening that made so many people distrust the 2020 election, but they’re still looser than they were in 2018.

The claim that these laws are anything like what blacks had to endure under Jim Crow is not only provably false, it’s insulting to people who lived through that time and actually suffered under those (Democrat) laws. At the link, Valerie Richardson of the Washington Times talks to some of those people and reminds us of what Jim Crow voting laws really meant: poll taxes, “literacy tests,” requirements to own property and more, backed up by threats of violence.

You’ll see why one associate political science professor at a historically Black college said the comparison of Georgia’s laws to Jim Crow “passes through ‘nonsensical’ into offensiveness.”

Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings dies

By Mike Huckabee

Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings died Tuesday at 84 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Hastings was a fierce liberal partisan, but he was a defender of Israel, a stance that’s becoming all too rare among Democrats these days. Putting politics and scandals aside, he was a strong advocate for civil rights and faced his battle with cancer with courage and determination. We offer our prayers and sympathies to his family.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will have to fill the vacant seat. Hastings’ district is heavily Democratic, but until someone else is chosen, the Democrats’ reed-thin majority in the House will be sliced even thinner to 218-211.

California: America’s petri dish of insane ideas

By Mike Huckabee

Since California, America’s petri dish of insane ideas, passed a law allowing male prison inmates to declare themselves “transgender” and request transfer to women’s prisons, 261 of them have and none have been denied. What could possibly go wrong?

The L.A. Times reports that some female prisoners have voiced concern that male inmates are claiming to identify as female just so they will be transferred to a women’s prison. They’re worried that having males in prison with them will take away their right to safety, they fear sexual violence, and that they’ll have to install nurseries for all the babies that will be born.

Why, that’s crazy talk! That’s the kind of nonsense you hear from people who believe that biology is real and not simply a social construct. Those female prisoners should listen to the trans activists who tut-tut that “misinformation spread by prison staffers is stirring up transphobia and that more must be done to educate inmates.”

Yes, those female inmates need to be taught that convicted criminals wouldn’t possibly lie so they could get transferred from a tough male prison to a female prison full of women they could prey on. Why, that’s inconceivable!

Or it will be until the first baby is conceived. Maybe the trans activists should educate themselves by visiting a few prisons and finding out that the people who live there aren’t necessarily the most trustworthy folks on Earth.

Standards equally applied

By Mike Huckabee

The Washington Free Beacon pointed out that under the same standards “60 Minutes” applied to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, several Democrat Governors and other Democrat leaders were engaged in vaccine favoritism schemes because they took huge donations from CVS, then partnered with CVS to distribute the vaccine. This article is labeled “satire,” but the only thing satirical about it is the “60 Minutes” spin they put on the actual numbers.

Confirmation: "Crossfire Hurricane" was COMPLETELY BOGUS

By Mike Huckabee

I have no idea where special counsel John Durham is in his investigation of “Crossfire Hurricane,” but at this point one wonders if others who’ve been on the case might be way ahead of him. Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations has been following it all along, and he can now show, without a doubt, that there was never anything to it at all. I mean, NOTHING. At all.

And the FBI knew it.

Have a conversation about the Steele “dossier” with a Democrat even today, and that individual will likely say something like, “Oh, sure, there were some things that they never absolutely verified, like that wild prostitute story, but there were other allegations in it that were corroborated. So the rest of it is probably real, too.”

No. Nothing in the “dossier” was corroborated.

Sperry has seen the recently declassified documents with secret testimony by the FBI investigator who was in charge of corroborating it. Though the name of that person is still redacted, Sperry was able to find out through congressional sources that it is FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten.

Last October –- when the Senate was still run by Republicans –- Auten testified behind closed doors before staff investigators for the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he said under oath that neither he nor his team of half a dozen analysts could confirm a single one of Christopher Steele’s allegations, including those they included in FISA applications to use longterm electronic surveillance on several associates of Trump’s campaign.

Auten told the committee under oath that “the actual allegations and the actions described in those reports could not be corroborated.”

He and his team worked hard to find out if any of it was true. Auten is a leading specialist on Russia and was familiar with names and places mentioned in the dossier. They chased down every lead they could, even traveling overseas to interview Steele and others. All they could confirm were publicly available names, entities and positions of some people mentioned in the documents. They also found lots of obvious mistakes. There was nothing to warrant an investigation.

They easily debunked some parts of the dossier, such as the major claim that Michael Cohen went to Prague in the summer of 2016 as part of the Trump campaign to to work with Kremlin agents on hacking the election. As it turned out, when Cohen said, “I’ve never BEEN to Prague,” he was telling the truth. Yet Democrats kept the phony “Russian hacking” story going...and going.

I find it interesting that the media could spread a made-up story about Russians hacking the 2016 election for Trump, but if anyone even suggests today that Democrats and/or foreign influences might have done some hacking of their own four years later, they’re thrown off social media immediately and the curtain comes down.

As Sperry reports, “[Auten’s] testimony, kept secret for several months, is eye-opening because it’s the first time anybody from the FBI has acknowledged headquarters failed to verify any of the dossier evidence supporting the wiretaps as true and correct.”

It gets worse. Not only did they not corroborate any part of the dossier, but they also failed to inform the court of this. They were duty-bound to inform the FISA Court that they had nothing, but instead they reverently referred to their steaming pile of poo as “Crown material” (Steele's a Brit) and used it for all four warrants to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. According to testimony from former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, without the dossier, the warrants could not have been obtained. (I would note that a previous warrant application that didn't use the dossier had been rejected, so this is true.)

The warrant applications against Page, an American citizen, refer to him as a “Russian agent.” Recall that in January of this year, Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty to one count of falsifying evidence for altering a government document that had originally said Page had worked for the CIA as a confidential source. Clinesmith changed it to say that Page had NOT worked for the CIA. That’s the one criminal conviction that Durham has obtained so far.

Page, who after a year of being spied on was never charged with anything, is now suing the FBI, as well as Auten personally and some others who were involved. We wish him well in that endeavor. Sperry’s report doesn’t go into this, but since Hillary’s campaign funded the creation of the dossier through law firm Perkins Coie, I wonder if he might name any of them in the lawsuit as well. Marc Elias of Perkins Coie is still very active in engineering election outcomes; why, just last year, he traveled around the country pushing for unconstitutional changes in many states that made it easier to cheat. I’m not a lawyer and don’t know if it makes sense from a legal standpoint, but, gosh, it would be such fun to see him and Perkins Coie and even Hillary on a list of defendants. They’ve caused a lot of damage; Carter Page is just one example.

Anyway, Auten and his team put together a “spreadsheet” of information that appeared at first glance to be corroboration, but as it turned out, this was all in the form of media reports. They even included reports that had used Steele himself as the source --- Steele verifying Steele. No real evidence.

Sperry’s article –- highly recommended reading –- gives a lot more detail about what Auten was doing with the dossier and the cavalier way he spoke of its deficiencies in testimony and with colleagues.

Sperry quotes FBI Special Agent Michael Biasello as saying Auten should be “held accountable” for his role in what he described as FBI headquarters’ blatant disregard for the diligent process FISA warrants demand. “A FISA warrant must be fully corroborated,” Biasello said. “Every statement, phrase, paragraph must be verified in order for the affiant to attest before a judge that the contents are true and correct.” He said he’d seen agents and analysts “obsessed” with the accuracy of these documents.

"To think the Crossfire team signed off on those FISA affidavits knowing the contents were uncorroborated is unconscionable, immoral and also illegal,” Biasello told Sperry. “All of them must be prosecuted for perjury, fraud and other federal crimes.”

According to the IG report prepared by Michael Horowitz, Auten said he wasn’t concerned by Steele’s animus towards Trump and also that it was “immaterial” that the dossier was paid for by Hillary’s campaign. (I am not kidding --- he really did.) He said the team was “justified” in opening cases against Page, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and George Papadopoulos –- even though they were concerned enough about what they were doing at the time to discuss taking out professional liability insurance.

So, where is Brian Auten today? To the surprise of no one, he’s still working in his job as a supervisory intelligence analyst at the FBI, under Director Christopher Wray.

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A Reader Writes Back...

I loved the story about the Polish preacher in Canada and his response when cops showed up to harass him and his followers. I don't blame him one bit for calling them Nazis and Communists. I got a good laugh from that story. I think it is time that Americans begin pushing back more.

America The Beautiful

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