By Mike Huckabee
December 12, 2022
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THE EVENING EDITION
BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Blessings on you and your family and from all the Huckabee staff! Thank you for subscribing and I hope you enjoy my newsletter.
And in case you missed it, this is the top story on my website today: A terrible day for Republicans, Trump and America - Latest Stories - Mike Huckabee
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High
Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress;
My God, in Him I will trust.”
Psalms 91:1-2 NKJV
1. Sinema Update
By Mike Huckabee
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is just one of three (so far) prominent Democrats to announce in the past few days that they’re leaving the Party. One of them, New York City Councilman Ari Kagan, channeled Ronald Reagan in saying that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party, it left him by lurching so far to the left so fast.
Looking at Party leaders’ and the liberal media’s reaction to Sinema’s decision to go Independent (they’re trying to depict it as just a cynical move to protect her from a primary challenge), it’s obvious that they refuse to learn anything from all these defections. Bonchie at Redstate.com has the evidence:
Even when their own political figures are fleeing the crazy woke direction of the Party, they act like woke Twitter mobs themselves, calling them names and impugning their motives instead of thinking that maybe they had good reason to flee. It reminds me of the joke about Taylor Swift’s string of hit songs about all the rotten guys who dumped her, and how she finally recorded one called “Maybe It’s Me.”
Ironically, if you listen to what Sen. Sinema has been saying about the priorities she wants to concentrate on, it’s obvious that she’s a solidly liberal Democrat. It’s all the typical hot button issues, from abortion to climate change.
Yet just for also supporting such once-noncontroversial ideas as border security and the Senate filibuster, she is threatened, slandered and even hounded in a public bathroom by the raving leftist nutjobs that are now the Party’s base. If they succeed in driving everyone out of the Party who is as “conservative” as Kyrsten Sinema, then they should just rent that public bathroom because they’ll be able to hold the 2024 Democratic Convention in it.
1. Sinema Update
By Mike Huckabee
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is just one of three (so far) prominent Democrats to announce in the past few days that they’re leaving the Party. One of them, New York City Councilman Ari Kagan, channeled Ronald Reagan in saying that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party, it left him by lurching so far to the left so fast.
Looking at Party leaders’ and the liberal media’s reaction to Sinema’s decision to go Independent (they’re trying to depict it as just a cynical move to protect her from a primary challenge), it’s obvious that they refuse to learn anything from all these defections. Bonchie at Redstate.com has the evidence:
Even when their own political figures are fleeing the crazy woke direction of the Party, they act like woke Twitter mobs themselves, calling them names and impugning their motives instead of thinking that maybe they had good reason to flee. It reminds me of the joke about Taylor Swift’s string of hit songs about all the rotten guys who dumped her, and how she finally recorded one called “Maybe It’s Me.”
Ironically, if you listen to what Sen. Sinema has been saying about the priorities she wants to concentrate on, it’s obvious that she’s a solidly liberal Democrat. It’s all the typical hot button issues, from abortion to climate change.
Yet just for also supporting such once-noncontroversial ideas as border security and the Senate filibuster, she is threatened, slandered and even hounded in a public bathroom by the raving leftist nutjobs that are now the Party’s base. If they succeed in driving everyone out of the Party who is as “conservative” as Kyrsten Sinema, then they should just rent that public bathroom because they’ll be able to hold the 2024 Democratic Convention in it.
2. There's still more to implicate both Twitter and FBI
By Mike Huckabee
That quote from Shakespeare's THE MERCHANT OF VENICE --- "The truth will out" ---seems particularly apt now, as new Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s fourth installment of the “Twitter Files” was released over the weekend by newly-involved assistant Michael Shellenberger. There’s so much here at this point that it’s hard to keep it from becoming information overload, which would help no one except the leftists who want you to throw up your hands in frustration. Perhaps it’s best to start by following up a question I posed a few days ago.
We’d learned through internal communications that high-level Twitter officials were having weekly meetings with personnel from the FBI, DHS and Office of the Director of National Intelligence. I observed that during the Trump years, the DNI was John Ratcliffe, whose office certainly would not have been a part of Twitter’s censorship activities. (James Clapper, who was pre-Ratcliffe, and Avril Haines, who followed Ratcliffe when Biden was inaugurated, are a different story.) Fortunately, Ratcliffe appeared with Maria Bartiromo on FOX NEWS’ “Sunday Morning Futures” and addressed Maria’s question about these “weekly meetings,” among other issues related to the censored Biden story.
“The Office of the Director of National Intelligence would’ve only been authorized to participate in Trump National Security Council-approved and coordinated processes for election security briefings to GROUPS of private companies. So it would have included companies like Twitter, but many other companies: YouTube, Microsoft, as well as state election officials, to talk about threats. None of those meetings…would’ve had anything to do with ‘content moderation,’ much less anything to do specifically with the Biden laptop as Russian disinformation. So there never would’ve been any authority or reason for anyone within the intelligence community to be saying anything otherwise.”
Ratcliffe said he hoped the one reference to the DNI’s participation in a “weekly meeting” was part of that approved process for election security briefings. If it was just a meeting with Twitter, though, it apparently was not, and this is something we still need to know. If there was an unapproved meeting while Ratcliffe was DNI, he seems not to have known about it. Anyone who participated in such an effort, he said, was involved in election interference and “a disinformation campaign to mislead the American voting electorate.”
The whole interview is a must-watch. We’re not surprised to hear him say that James Baker’s hiring at Twitter could not have been a coincidence or fluke. “He was at the FBI when the FBI obtained Hunter Biden’s laptop –- he would’ve known that the FBI [knew] that this was not Russian disinformation,” Ratcliffe said. “...I don’t think that Twitter just happened to find his resume on Monster.com.” Big question: “What was [Baker's] relationship with Twitter before he got to Twitter?”
https://www.foxnews.com/video/
Miranda Devine, the columnist for the NEW YORK POST who broke the Twitter-banned Hunter Biden story and wrote LAPTOP FROM HELL, appeared on Sunday evening’s LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN. She clarified that she didn’t time her story as an “October surprise”; it was just when she happened to get the hard-drive information from Rudy Giuliani after Giuliani had had trouble getting it into the media. Giuliani’s lawyer had told him to “try Miranda.” (Of course, you know that the FBI had been spying on Giuliani and his contacts, including computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac.)
She said that before her story was banned, she never heard anything from Twitter, Facebook or any of those 51 former intel officials who said the laptop had the “classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation. She called their letter “scurrilous,” saying, “This was election inference. The disinformation was coming from the FBI, the CIA. It was coming from Twitter and Facebook. It was coming from Adam Schiff. It was coming from Democratic operatives who fanned out in a very deliberate operation basically to decry our story, to discredit the laptop, to discredit the stories that were about Joe Biden.”
Three weeks before the election, she said, it was an extremely damaging story, because it showed that then-candidate Joe Biden was absolutely involved in his son’s foreign business dealings and that he’d straight-out lied about it to the American people. They were determined “by hook or by crook,” she said, that they would kill that story.
Christopher Wray had to have known what Hunter was up to and that the laptop was real, she said, because the FBI was “keeping tabs on him” while he was in China and “on a crack bender,” because this was a threat to national security.
Devine is reserving judgment on Musk regarding his commitment to free speech and transparency because, she says, “as yet, we haven’t seen a lot.” She wants to make sure he’s released everything, because the first installment "held a lot back." (She was referring to the delay that was later tentatively explained by the lingering presence of Fox-Guarding-Henhouse Twitter official James Baker, the Russia Hoaxer formerly with the FBI.) I have to say, though, after seeing the revelations to date, that we HAVE seen a lot, and I’m ready to give Musk a medal for this.
Levin followed up the Devine interview with one from Peter Schweizer, who has long been following the Biden money trail. Schweizer reiterated the fact that this is really a story about JOE Biden, not Hunter –- the two were “joined at the hip” –- and that there’s been a monstrous cover-up.
Schweizer pointed out that information on the laptop confirmed the foreign deals he’d already written about, noting that the four Chinese businessmen named in the deals that netted the Biden family $31 million “all have links to the Ministry of State Security.” This story is about compromise in the area of national security. The Chinese, he explained, have a term they call “elite capture,” meaning to “forge financial ties with leaders in other countries, and you capture them.” Look at the posture Biden has adopted, he said, and you’ll see he talks tough but won’t “lower the boom” when it comes to issues they’re really concerned about. (My thought: this would explain his repeal of the China Initiative, which had been intended as a crackdown on China’s pilfering of American intellectual property.)
Schweizer says that records the FBI has held for a long time are highly incriminating and also consistent with what’s on the laptop. They easily could have verified the laptop but FBI leadership CHOSE not to. And now, what the ‘Justice’ Department is trying to do is run out the clock.
…………………………….
So now let’s look at some of the revelations from the latest installments of “Twitter Files,” as offered by Elon Musk through author Michael Shellenberger and independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.
First, it seems that of all Twitter employees, only one junior staffer expressed any hesitation about banning President Trump. “This now appears to be a fiat by an online platform CEO with a global presence that can gatekeep speech for the entire world –- which seems unsustainable,” this person wrote. (Apparently while Yoel Roth and Vijaya Gadde were making the decision to ban Trump, then-CEO Jack Dorsey was conveniently vacationing in French Polynesia.) Far be it from me to advise Elon Musk on hiring decisions, but if I were in his shoes, I’d fire everyone at Twitter except maybe that one junior staffer.
https://dailycaller.com/2022/
Now look at the double standard that was applied to tweets that were about the vulnerability of mail-in balloting. Pro-Biden tweets that warned about Trump “trying to steal the election” were...okay!
DAILY CALLER has a take on that as well. It was fine for Democrats to use Twitter to spread conspiracy theories about Trump’s administration tampering with Postal Service collection boxes to suppress votes.
https://dailycaller.com/2022/
KYLE BECKER has a must-read piece about Twitter’s propensity for hiring former intel people from the FBI and CIA.
The challenge will be to identify them and get them out, because they’re apparently busy scrubbing their LinkedIn accounts.
Yoel Roth, who appears to have been the most ruthless of all the censors at Twitter, followed his successful ban of Trump by also pushing for a permanent ban of Matt Gaetz, though Gaetz hadn’t violated any rules.
So, should Jack Dorsey be charged with lying to Congress? Law professor Jonathan Turley says that “Dorsey and others should clearly retain counsel in light of the contradictions in these files.” But he points out that Dorsey might have an ace; namely, the fact that partisan hack (our words) Merrick Garland runs the ‘Justice’ Department and has that discretion.
Finally, when criticized for getting political, Elon Musk had an answer we should all get behind.
RELATED NEWS: SPEAKING OF THE FBI, WE HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN THIS
As you know, Seth Rich was the DNC staffer who was gunned down while walking home on a DC street in the early morning hours of July 16, 2016. This case was never solved but was dubbed a likely robbery-gone-wrong, though Rich was shot twice from behind and nothing of value was taken. Julian Assange gave reason for many to strongly suspect that Rich, a Bernie Sanders supporter, was the source of the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks, though the (ahem) “preferred” narrative from the start was that this was a Russian hack. That set the stage for the whole “Russia Russia Russia!” Hoax.
Now, come to find out, the FBI has plenty more information about the Seth Rich case than it’s let on, including his laptop computer and “a three (3) page forensic report detailing the actions performed by an outside entity to image the work computer.” Other materials include a third-party letter that accompanied the work computer and two FBI chain-of-custody forms.
These items had not been included in an electronic file created for Rich’s case. They were not indexed to Rich inside the FBI’s central records system. The forensic report doesn’t mention Rich’s name; neither do the custody forms. Gosh, it’s as if someone didn’t want them to be easily found, and it’s amazing they ever were; the article linked to below has details. Needless to say, the FBI is maneuvering to keep Rich’s computers and forensic imaging hidden.
If speculation about Rich’s death is “conspiracy theory” –- an umbrella term that describes so many things that turn out to be true –- the FBI should put it to rest by releasing whatever they have. It’s too bad Elon Musk can’t just buy the FBI, too; at least then we’d get some transparency.
3. A thorough review of Kari Lake’s Lawsuit
If you’re not an attorney and are having a hard time getting through all 70 pages of Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s lawsuit to overturn last month’s election and hold a revote, Emerald Robinson’s Substack page has done you a solid by going through it and picking out the nine most important revelations/accusations.
https://emeralddb3.substack.
They include the claim that Maricopa County alone added 25,000 ballots, or 8,000 more than Katie Hobb’s margin of victory, after Election Day, when the legal deadline for accepting ballots had closed. The Gateway Pundit has a lot more details on this particular issue.
Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that the ballots were fraudulently cast. But the 25,000-ballot discrepancy between what was first reported and what was later reported suggests that there was a serious problem that might have violated state law on issues like chain of custody and rendered those ballots invalid, which in itself is a pretty good argument for a do-over. And that's just one of nine points.
3. A thorough review of Kari Lake’s Lawsuit
If you’re not an attorney and are having a hard time getting through all 70 pages of Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s lawsuit to overturn last month’s election and hold a revote, Emerald Robinson’s Substack page has done you a solid by going through it and picking out the nine most important revelations/accusations.
https://emeralddb3.substack.
They include the claim that Maricopa County alone added 25,000 ballots, or 8,000 more than Katie Hobb’s margin of victory, after Election Day, when the legal deadline for accepting ballots had closed. The Gateway Pundit has a lot more details on this particular issue.
Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that the ballots were fraudulently cast. But the 25,000-ballot discrepancy between what was first reported and what was later reported suggests that there was a serious problem that might have violated state law on issues like chain of custody and rendered those ballots invalid, which in itself is a pretty good argument for a do-over. And that's just one of nine points.
4. IRS expansion
By Mike Huckabee
Is this why the Democrats voted to hire 87,000 new IRS agents? Under the so-called “American Rescue Plan” that no Republicans voted for, starting in 2023, cash apps like PayPal and Venmo will be required to send IRS 1099-K income reporting forms to anyone who makes over $600 in a single transaction. The threshold used to be $20,000 or 200 transactions in a year.
The concern is that this will harm small businesses and discourage people from engaging in the gig economy. It will also hurt people who are trying to cope with skyrocketing inflation by making a little money on the side, whether they’re doing contract work or selling their belongings to pay the grocery bill.
When Democrats like Joe Biden told you that they were only going to make the rich pay their “fair share,” what they really meant is that they want to kill the gig economy, force everyone to join a union that supports Democrats, and have the IRS shake you down for as much money as possible, even if it’s money you got by selling your couch to pay your heating bill.
Please, in the next election, remember this before voting for Democrats who tell you they’re the compassionate party that really cares about you. Also remember that whenever they tell you they’re going to soak the rich, you’re the rich.
Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have reportedly made a breakthrough in the long-sought creation of nuclear fusion, the energy that powers the sun. It's claimed that they achieved a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time.
While fusion energy is still at least decades away, such a breakthrough could mean that one day, a small cup of hydrogen fuel could power a home for hundreds of years with no CO2 emissions or radioactive waste.
While we all should be celebrating this news and praying for further fusion breakthroughs, I suspect that the green movement is already thinking up ways to protest and kill it. You’d think that having an endless source of clean energy for everyone on Earth would be a godsend, but the true aim of the radical environmental movement is not boundless clean energy, it’s control.
If they really cared about the environment, they’d demand that we build more safe, modern, non-CO2-emitting nuclear plants instead of blighting the Earth with bird-killing wind turbines and solar panels that create huge amounts of pollution in their manufacture. Instead, they’re shutting nuclear plants down. Their true goal is fewer people, and for those who remain to live small, stunted lives with no freedoms, like being able to travel or improve their living conditions, all enforced by themselves, of course. Boundless clean energy would mean more freedom and opportunity for every human being. That’s the last thing the radical green movement wants.
5. Here's argument #5,273 for why you should be homeschooling your kids
By Mike Huckabee
6. Bad idea
By Mike Huckabee
In Las Vegas, a would-be carjacker chose the wrong victim, and the wrong car, and it cost him his life.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/
7. How the Griner - Merchant of Death Swap Could Be GOOD
By Mike Huckbee
President Biden announced the release of American basketball player Brittney Griner from a Russian prison where she’d been sentenced on drug charges earlier this year. The price for her release was substantial. We traded notorious Russian illegal arms dealer Victor Bout (Boot) for Griner. Bout is known as the “Merchant of Death” and was convicted of not only selling arms to terrorists and rogue nations, but for selling arms that were intended to kill Americans. I’m sure Putin will welcome him home and put him right back in the gun business. It’s a real irony that a President who recently denounced law-abiding citizens who legally owned firearms and who claims to hate the private ownership of guns would let a vicious and violent gun dealer out of prison. Who didn’t get out of a Russian prison is US Marine Paul Whelan. Just like in Afghanistan, this administration DOES leave people behind.
I’m glad Griner will get out of the Russian prison and come back to America, but I do hope that time in a Russian lockup gave her some somber moments to reflect upon her country. Maybe she’ll return a bit more grateful for the United States. She famously refused to stand for the National Anthem, and made clear her lack of love or appreciation for the United States even though she was willing to make a good living off of the capitalistic world of professional sports. Will her 10 months in a Russian prison make her a bit more tolerant of the America she thinks is so rotten? Let’s hope so.
There is reason to fear that giving up a basketball player locked up for illegal drug possession in exchange for a villainous gun runner will only encourage other evil empires to charge and imprison other Americans just for the sake of demanding release of murderers, terrorists, and war lords. And what kind of message does it send to our military that we appear to value athletes who openly hate America over Marines who served with honor?
I say again—yes, I’m glad Brittney Griner is free. Her sentence was ridiculously long for the crime charged, but that’s the way they do business in Putin’s Russia. If Brittney does a mea culpa tour and admits that she was wrong about America and that it’s a pretty great nation after all, then there will be value to her release beyond just to her. If she comes back spewing more anti-American hate speech and still refuses to show pride and patriotism when the National Anthem is played, I’ll feel like we really got hosed even more in this deal. And I doubt Joe Biden would do it, but at that point he ought to admit HE made a mistake and ask Putin if he could trade her back to him for the Marine Paul Whelan.
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