By Mike Huckabee
January 22, 2023
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Here are the top stories from this week that I think you will want to read.
And after you read my Sunday Standard, please leave me a comment.
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
California Crazy
By Mike Huckabee
This story was originally published on January 17, 2023.
Someone needs to remind the YMCA in Santee, California (San Diego), that the “C” stands for “Christian.” It sounds as if the people running it no longer identify as Christian.
This story blew up after 17-year-old Rebecca Phillips complained to the City Council that she was shocked and frightened when a naked man walked through the YMCA women’s locker facilities while she was showering, exposing his male genitalia. She said when she reported this to YMCA staffers, they shamed her as a transphobic bigot because the naked man in the showers with teenage girls “identified” as female, or claimed to, which is all that the state of California requires under state law (granted, they do have some justification for claiming that they couldn’t do anything about it because…California.)
Other blue states have gone equally insane, like Washington, where the Port Townsend YMCA banned an 80-year-old woman for complaining that a biological male was showering next to her.
The Santee YMCA insisted that it was following all the laws and the guidance of “experts.” Correction: people who “identify” as experts. Personally, I think if you can’t tell the difference between a woman and a naked man, and can’t see anything wrong with letting naked men invade women’s bathrooms and locker rooms where underage girls are showering, then you aren’t an expert in anything other than possibly brain damage.
Biden's classified docs; the DOJ has "made a mess of things"
By Mike Huckabee
This story was originally published on January 16, 2023.
No U.S. President has ever been prosecuted for obstruction related to the Presidential Records Act, which wouldn’t be a criminal violation, anyway, or the Espionage Act, which was not intended to be used against a President. Now that the ‘Justice’ Department has overreached like crazy in the matter of Trump’s marked-as-classified documents at Mar-A-Lago --- probably in their zeal to find anything usable against Trump by the January 6 Kangaroo Kommittee --- we have to determine the appropriate reaction to President Biden doing what is arguably much worse, considering Biden didn’t even have the authority to declassify documents.
“They’ve made a mess of things,” said Mark Levin Sunday night. “They’re a disgrace.”
Kentucky Rep. James Comer, who now heads the House Oversight Committee, told Levin last Sunday that they’d be looking into the standards of the National Archives and how they were differently applied. Comer is convinced that the raid on Mar-A-Lago was “triggered by the January 6 Committee, just doing a fishing expedition to see if they could find anything...they could use against Donald Trump.” Every request they’ve made to the National Archives, he said, has been answered with the recommendation that they talk with Attorney General Merrick Garland. But he'll demand answers, he said, adding that they have evidence that other Presidents, “in both parties,” took documents, “and nothing like that had ever happened.”
The first leak about classified documents at Penn Biden Center (which actually had been found several days before the midterm elections) happened last Monday evening, the day after that interview. Levin is convinced the timing of the leak had to do with the interview, because Comer had said his committee would be looking at the National Archives and how they’ve treated past Presidents and VPs, and also the relationship between the DOJ and the J6 Committee. Levin believes this leak was an attempt to get ahead of what would inevitably come out.
So, the National Archives is maintaining the classified records from Obama’s presidency? How could that be, when Biden had some of them at his office at the Penn Biden Center, in his garage next to his Corvette, in his home library, and who knows where else? NARA did NOT have this under control at all.
On November 2, Biden’s attorneys found the first batch of classified documents at Biden’s office. We still don’t know why the search was started in the first place.
On November 4 (a few days before the election), NARA contacted a DOJ prosecutor to inform him.
On November 9 (right after the election), the FBI “began an assessment.” On November 14, Garland assigned U.S. Attorney John Lausch to perform an initial investigation. This was all secret. Four days later, Garland appointed special counsel Jack Smith...not to investigate Biden, but to investigate TRUMP.
On December 20, Biden’s personal attorney informed Lausch that additional classified documents had been found in Biden’s garage. The FBI took possession.
On January 5, Lausch briefed Garland on the investigation and recommended a special counsel.
The Biden classified documents story was kept secret for yet another week. The leak to CBS NEWS about the first batch of documents --- again, probably by the Biden administration, to get in front of the story --- was on January 9.
On January 12, Biden’s attorneys called Lausch and said they’d found an additional document. By then, documents had been found in three different locations.
Our thought has been that whatever led up to the Biden attorneys doing these searches, they were the ones doing it because they had attorney-client privilege with the President. By the third "discovery," though, and after the way the Trump matter had been handled, you’d think these same attorneys would’ve at least received subpoenas to search all of Biden’s homes and offices. All the information the DOJ is receiving has been straight from Biden’s own lawyers, and they seem fine with that. In contrast, the ‘Justice’ Department had no patience with Trump’s lawyers during negotiations over the papers at Mar-A-Lago.
Levin sees the same inconsistency --- hard to believe anyone wouldn’t --- and believes it was out of their eagerness to charge Trump with obstruction. Congress needed this because they hadn’t proved anything against Trump involving January 6. But with Biden, “it seems they’re not in a hurry,” he said. They “don’t see the urgency.” This is after Biden had had the documents who-knows-where for six years. And you know he had to be aware of the laws concerning classified documents after half a century in government.
James Trusty, former DOJ prosecutor and Trump’s current attorney on the document matter, said on the show, “In the history of this country, these ‘overdue library book’ disputes, for lack of a better way to phrase it...those were not the stuff of criminal enforcement.” In fact, the Presidential Records Act specifically excludes that; Trusty said that’s why they trotted out the Espionage Act. An unresolved dispute over these records would normally result in a civil suit, not criminal charges.
He noted, as many have, that the warrant to search Mar-A-Lago was so broad that it really was a general warrant, a kind of “blank check” that violates the Fourth Amendment.
The attorney general, he said, “needs to do what’s right and stop this stain on the Department of Justice and the FBI.” If only. It would be wildly out of character for Garland to do that, and, besides, there’s already a stain on the DOJ and FBI that wouldn’t come out if they used Bon Ami.
…………...
RELATED: Now that we know Biden’s Delaware home had classified documents within easy reach, the House Oversight Committee is trying to get the visitor logs from there for the past two years. Good luck with that; do the Bidens even keep a log of visitors?
On Joe Biden’s 2017 tax return, he listed a mere $19,800 in “rents received.” In 2018, that figure was zero. More details here...
https://nypost.com/2023/01/13/
…….
There’s a must-read story in THE INTERCEPT about an incident from Biden’s past, dating from the Carter administration and having to do with the confirmation process for Carter’s nominee for CIA director. Ted Sorensen had been a speechwriter for JFK and a Kennedy lawyer during Chappaquiddick, but really had no foreign policy experience. Republicans opposed him and apparently Biden was privately unenthusiastic as well. But Biden made Sorensen believe he supported him. Then, at the confirmation hearing, Biden blindsided him, tearing into him for once admitting in an affidavit that he and others --- get ready --- took classified documents home to read. Biden even suggested that Sorensen could be indicted under espionage statutes.
Sorensen agreed to have his nomination withdrawn, later saying Biden should be awarded the “prize for political hypocrisy in a town noted for political hypocrisy.” The irony is rich when reading this story today. We wondered what Sorensen might say about this, but he died in 2010. Too bad he can't be here now to see that what goes around comes around, sometimes.
Leave me a comment, I read them.
Special counsel appointed; are Dems poised to get rid of Biden?
By Mike Huckabee
This was originally published on January 13, 2023.
Wow, it’s been just 24 hours or so since our last big laugh-out-loud installment, and the story has developed so quickly.
I didn’t even have to mention what story it was, and you knew immediately which one I was talking about.
President Biden is now known to have been in possession of numerous marked-classified documents: in his private office at the Chinese-financed-and-
On Thursday, attorney general and generally-recognized political hack Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to look into this matter. He had kept it secret long enough to, as Tucker Carlson put it Thursday night, “keep other Democrats out of the blast zone.”
When asked about the documents, Biden stressed, while stumbling through a written response, that they, like his Corvette, had been kept in a locked garage. That response elicited a withering comment tweeted by legal expert Jonathan Turley.
https://twitter.com/
Andrew C. McCarthy brought up the Hillary Clinton email scandal, saying, “The Biden Team knows that Clinton committed willful misconduct in the email scandal and got away with it.” Hillary's conduct was so egregious that they probably believe Biden won’t be charged, either, even though, as McCarthy said, he’s essentially admitted his misconduct.
On the other hand, if Hillary wasn’t charged --- McCarthy believes she should have been --- and Biden isn’t charged, how is Garland going to charge Trump? And you KNOW he wants to charge Trump.
New House Speaker Kevin McCarthy sliced-and-diced the argument that Biden’s possession of classified material was somehow less serious than Trump’s (since, again, Trump, as President, had the authority to declassify) and spoke passionately about equal standards of justice.
https://nypost.com/2023/01/12/
BREITBART NEWS noted that Biden’s story has changed, from the claim of being “surprised” about the discovery of classified documents to the defense that he had kept them in a locked garage.
Our musings that the Democrat Party is trying to damage President Biden ahead of his announcement to run in ‘24 have since been echoed by a number of observers. As we said, Biden’s made it quite clear in recent days that he’s eager to run again, oblivious to polls showing most people, even most Democrats, don’t want him to. His own party is surely sensing disaster ahead if he does. Carlson noted, “If you’re still wondering whether there’s an organized effort within the White House to hurt Joe Biden, all you need to know is this: his staff keeps putting him out there in public to talk, which, of course, he can’t do; he can barely read the prepared statement.” They hid him when he campaigned for President the first time, but now they’re putting him on display. There has to be a reason.
Bob Hoge at REDSTATE shares this view and quotes others such as Lisa Boothe, who simply tweeted “They are trying to get rid of Biden.” One big winner in this, Hoge says, would be Team Obama. “All they wanted was for Biden to beat Donald Trump,” he observes, “then put back on his invisibility cloak and go back to hiding in his basement, leaving White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain and other Obama acolytes to actually run the country. Joe was supposed to just not screw things up and then sail into the sunset after one term.”
So, they've decided it's time to get him off the stage. As they used to say in vaudeville (which Biden probably remembers), "Get the hook!"
“The White House doesn’t have enough hazmat suits to clean up this mess,” said the colorful Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy on FOX NEWS.
For many months, we’ve theorized that the Obama machine has been positioning to keep the Executive Branch under his control and plans to rid itself of both Biden and Harris. Biden, obviously, had to go, as voters would not support someone of his age and obvious cognitive decline. Harris’s ascension to the top spot might have been one way to keep the machine in place, but she simply proved too unpopular and incompetent.
It’s amusing to see some Democrats actually accusing Republicans of planting documents with Biden to manufacture this scandal, when it’s really Democrats who have the bigger stake in incriminating him.
The documents that were discovered at the Penn Center and next to Biden’s Corvette had been out of the White House since January 2017, and no one can say where they’ve been. In contrast, Trump took documents he says he himself declassified --- remember, the VP has no power to declassify --- to Mar-A-Lago, where they remained from that time forward. The National Archives were aware Trump had these documents and even personally visited there, instructing him to put an extra padlock on the door to the storage room. He did that. Negotiations were continuing when his home was raided.
We don’t need to go back over all that. But one thing we’d like to know now is why attorneys and aides were going through Biden’s papers in those various locations. They haven’t said. They waited until two months after the midterms to tell us anything at all, and then, when it suited their purpose, they broke the story, or as much of it as they cared to tell.
So, as of yesterday, there’s a special prosecutor, Robert Hur, who was neck-deep in the Russia Hoax. Victoria Taft at PJ MEDIA has concluded that he’s dumb as a post. We hypothesize that the brain cells he must have had to get through law school were later killed off by Trump Derangement Syndrome, which as you know is a brain-eating disease. AG Garland could hardly have found anyone with deeper or more partisan DOJ/FBI connections than this prosecutor. This is one to read...
BREITBART NEWS has more details on Hur’s background. You’ll see all the familiar swampy names: Christopher Wray (Hur was Wray’s top assistant for a time), Rod Rosenstein, and Robert Mueller. He apparently was all-in on even the most salacious stories in the Steele dossier.
https://www.breitbart.com/
RELATED: Speaking of the DOJ/FBI and the Obama political machine, investigative reporter Lee Smith has a spectacular article about their involvement with Twitter. “How the FBI Hacked Twitter” is quite long and detailed (maybe weekend reading). Smith makes the case that their intel operation is a “public-private consortium made up of U.S. intelligence agencies, Big Tech companies, civil society institutions and major media organizations that has become the world’s most powerful spy service --- one that was powerful enough to disappear the former President of the United States from public life, and that is now powerful enough to do the same or worse to anyone else it chooses.”
This is a fascinating must-read. And let me just say, former attorney general Bill Barr does not come off well.
https://www.tabletmag.com/
Leave me a comment, I read them.
The Biden document and money trail: a wild coincidence
By Mike Huckabee
This story was originally published on January 18, 2023
This has got to be the greatest coincidence EVER.
Yesterday, we told you that Hunter Biden had filled out a background check to rent a property in California and listed his address as Joe Biden's Delaware house and his current rent as just under $50,000 a month. And, no, that was not a typo.
The exact amount he wrote on the form was $49,910. Come to find out, this is exactly the same amount that was paid as a rental deposit to "House of Sweden," an office complex in Washington DC, on the space the Bidens were planning to share with Chinese company CEFC.
The amount appears in an October 13, 2017, memo from the general manager of the complex, another document found by the NEW YORK POST's Miranda Devine on Hunter's "laptop from hell." Hunter had inquired about terminating the lease after the deal with CEFC was no more, and he was told, "Please note that there is a security deposit paid by you of $49,910 which will be returned to you within 15 days after the termination of the lease (after inspection of normal wear and tear."
It's hard to know what to make of this, except that it's too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence. No wonder the House Oversight Committee is so eager to follow the money.
If Hunter was actually paying his father $49,910 a month in rent --- or, "rent" --- this was not reflected in Joe's tax returns. We also reported yesterday that Joe Biden's tax returns for 2016, 2017, and 2018, covering the period above, had been removed from the website where Biden had posted all his returns. If you went to that site and clicked to see any of those three years, you would be directed to a Democrat fundraising site.
According to the WASHINGTON EXAMINER, those links went down in July 2022 and, as of Tuesday, are back up. A spokesman for the DNC said that "a couple of links to previous tax returns were broken." The writer at CRANKERS makes websites for a living and says this could NOT have been an accident. "The DNC just spoonfed people a tablespoon of horse manure on that one," he said.
https://crankers.com/text/biden-tax-returns-removed/
As attention is being focused more specifically on the Biden money trail, this 2010 email from Hunter's laptop seems especially pertinent. It's to Hunter from Rosemont Seneca executive Dick Schwerin, recommending that Hunter talk to his dad, who "could use some positive news about his future earnings potential!" Much more detail about their wealth-building plans here...
Recall that Jonathan Turley has criticized the DOJ's decision to let Biden's own attorneys --- and at least one White House attorney --- comb through documents at the various locations where classified material has been found, explaining that these attorneys are working on behalf of their client's interest, not the public interest. According to a new story in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, the DOJ did consider having FBI agents supervise the searching.
But, stunningly, the DOJ decided against that, opting to leave the attorneys on their own. They say this was "to avoid complicating the later stages of the investigation" and also because the attorneys have been cooperating. (Hey, it only took them six years.)
Question: If they're not monitoring what is being done, how do they know the attorneys have been cooperating? Again, as Prof. Turley said, they are operating in their client's interest. And none of them, except the White House counsel who is participating, even have security clearances. Turley said that "...use of private counsel without clearances following the first discovery on November 2 could itself be viewed as reckless and gross mishandling."
Turley noted on Sean Hannity's Tuesday show that the Biden attorney who found the first classified document at the Penn Biden Center was interviewed by the FBI, but the usual "302" notes were not taken.
It looks to me as though Biden and his team are getting just the kind of kid-glove treatment that Hillary and her team received. The 'Justice' Department is just taking the word of Biden's attorneys. When Mar-A-Lago was searched --- by FBI agents --- Trump's attorneys weren't even allowed to WATCH.
Leave me a comment, I read them.
Rough week for CNN
By Mike Huckabee
This story was originally published on January 20, 2023.
It’s been a rough week for CNN. They’re closing their iconic CNN Center in Atlanta (get your selfies with that famous logo while you can.)
And if you want to know why they’re cost-cutting, this might provide a clue. According to last week’s cable news ratings, Fox News now has the top 17 highest-rated shows. MSNBC finally shows up at #18 with Chris Hayes. And CNN doesn’t appear until Jake Tapper’s show pops up at #28.
How far has CNN’s viewership fallen? The #1 show on the list, Fox News’ “The Five,” which airs at 5 pm, has an audience larger than all seven of CNN’s prime time shows combined!
I think someone should investigate to see if maybe someone at CNN caused the recent airline cancellation fiasco in a desperate attempt to boost ratings by stranding people at airports.
Leave me a comment, I read them.
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