By Mike Huckabee
November 14, 2021
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By Mike Huckabee
Good morning! Here are some stories from me that I think you will want to read. Topics include:
- Durham Indictments
- Project Veritas Raid
- Rittenhouse Trial Update
- Durham Investigation Commentary
- Biden's Poll Numbers
THE LATEST
1. SOLOMON: DURHAM'S INDICTMENTS SHOW HILLARY "WAS IN UP TO HER NECK":
Tuesday was a good day for Republicans, America, parents and the Atlanta Braves. It was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day for Democrats, President Biden, arrogant educrats, pushers of racist Critical Race Theory, leftist celebrities, Major League Baseball virtue signalers, and the anchors of MSNBC, whose on-air meltdowns attracted so many gleeful conservative viewers that it probably gave them their first ratings boost since Trump left office. Jonah Goldberg tweeted that it was “pretty wild” seeing them try to claim that all these Virginia voters who voted for Biden by ten points a year ago are now “idiots, racists and/or dupes.” I look forward to the inevitable YouTube compilation videos.
At this writing, Terry McAuliffe has finally conceded to Republican Glenn Youngkin in the Virginia Governor’s race (guess Marc Elias won’t have to “find” a truckload of “mail-in ballots”) in a state that Biden won by 10 points last year. In an even bigger shocker that nobody saw coming, New Jersey Republican Jack Ciatarrelli is one-tenth of a point ahead of incumbent Democrat Gov. Phil “I’ll hit you with the vaccine mandates after I’m reelected” Murphy, whom the polls had leading by 11 points. Of course, that race could change as the count continues, or if someone pops open a car trunk, rolls a body aside and pulls out a few ballot boxes.
But while those races are still nailbiters, there was good news up and down ballots at all levels and across the nation. It’s such good news that political analyst Larry Sabato ruefully described it as a “blood bath” for Democrats.
For instance, Virginia will now have its first black female Lieutenant Governor in Marine veteran Winsome Sears (a Republican), who’s also the first black woman ever to be elected statewide in Virginia – although she says this isn’t about race, it’s about the American Dream. You have to read about her victory speech and see her photo at the link. I think you’ll fall in love.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/winsome-sears-victory-speech-usa-chant-virginia
The state will also have its first Hispanic Attorney General in Jason Miyares, who is Cuban-American and also a Republican. So if it’s true, as Democrats claimed, that the Republicans were running solely to promote racism, then they must be as bad at white supremacy as the Democrats are at everything else.
Ben Shapiro had the best tweet on that: “Condolences to VA on becoming radically racist again, according to the media...by electing a black female lieutenant governor and a Cuban-American attorney general, rejecting racial essentialism in schools, and replacing a Dem governor who wore an actual KKK outfit.”
https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/1455712734700527617
Republicans also retained Ohio’s 15th Congressional District seat, when Trump-endorsed Mike Carey defeated Biden-endorsed Allison Russo in a landslide. But the Democrats retained the heavily-blue 11th District seat, so this won’t change the balance in Congress.
In another shocker, the media retracted its victory calls for three entrenched Democrat Assembly members in New Jersey after deciding it was too close to call between them and their underfunded challengers: an EMT, a Realtor and a truck driver. And by “underfunded,” I mean truck driver Edward Durr may unseat the state Senate president with a campaign that cost him less than $200.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2021/11/03/nj-3rd-district-n2598490
One of the lowest-level races produced one of the most satisfying results. In Braintree, Massachusetts, Matthew Lynch was forced to resign from his job as a school teacher after what he calls a “digital lynch mob” posted photos of him at the Capitol on January 6th and smeared him as a domestic terrorist. It even resulted in a visit from the FBI. Tuesday, the military veteran and former teacher was elected to the Braintree school board.
The anti-Biden/Democrat overreach/CRT groundswell is good news for all America because of the potential chilling effect it could put on the “progressives’” mad march to try to shove through “fundamentally transformative” legislation with a tiny House majority and a tie Senate. Even former Obama adviser David Axelrod admitted that seeing such a massive grassroots rejection of the leftist agenda, including in blue states, could be making Democrats who are up for reelection 2022 in swing districts rethink their votes on Biden’s big government spending bill.
Some of the victories in Tuesday’s elections weren’t wins for Republicans, since there are so few of them in certain places, but at least wins for sanity. For instance, in Minneapolis, 57% of voters rejected an Ilhan Omar-backed move to dismantle the police department and replace it with a vague “Public Safety Department” that would be under the control of the same mayor and city council responsible for the precipitous decline in public safety. George Soros’ laughably-named “Open Policy Center” (should be called “Open Borders and Jails Center”) pumped $650,000 into pushing that measure, and I can’t think of anyone whose money I’d rather see wasted.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/minneapolis-police-ballot-measure
All the votes have yet to be counted in Seattle, but more moderate, pro-business and pro-police candidates have what appear to be massive, insurmountable leads over far-left, “defund the police” candidates. They include Mayoral candidate Bruce Harrell, who at this writing has a 30-point lead over “progressive” council president Lorena Gonzalez. So cutting the police and allowing your city to be burned and looted, crime to skyrocket, and Antifa radicals to take over a large piece of the city while you describe that as a “summer of love” wasn’t popular with voters? Who could’ve predicted that?
And in Buffalo, New York, Democrat Mayor Byron Brown lost to AOC-backed socialist India Walton in the Democratic primary, but he refused to give in and waged a successful write-in campaign. With 97% of precincts reporting, 41% of the vote was for Walton while 59% were write-in votes. Brown declared victory, but the write-in votes still have to be checked to make sure they’re for him (Who else? Trump?) But of course, Walton is still refusing to concede. As a good socialist, she assumes his write-in votes belong to her.
By the way, have you noticed that when Republicans question an election, it’s an assault on democracy; but when Democrats refuse to accept an election result, they’re protecting the right of every voter to have a voice?
It’s good to see Democrats finally getting “woke” to how the far left has hijacked their primary process, and starting to fight back. These often Soros-backed candidates target safe blue districts and run stealth campaigns in primaries in which most voters assume the incumbent is a shoo-in, so they don’t bother to vote. This is how cities end up with DA’s who refuse to prosecute criminals, and it’s how we got AOC in Congress (even though he could’ve run and won, the incumbent refused to challenge her for “the good of the party,” but it doesn’t seem to have done his party or America much good, has it?)
I’m a Republican, but if we have to have some Democrats in office, let’s at least get back to electing reasonable ones, not America-hating, socialist nutjobs.
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DAILY BIBLE VERSE
MORE NEWS
2. RAID ON PROJECT VERITAS "IS A SCANDAL OF EPIC PROPORTIONS":
When the story broke about Project Veritas employees and founder James O’Keefe being raided by the FBI Saturday morning in a purported search for Ashley Biden’s diary, our first question was, “Did they take the electronics?”
Sure enough, the diary search seems to have been a pretext, at least in part, to take the electronics.
The FBI found privileged communications between Project Veritas and their attorney from several years ago, with PV asking for legal opinions regarding their journalistic activities. It seems the Bureau leaked these to THE NEW YORK TIMES, which apparently is illegal –- yes, even when the FBI does it, but since when have they cared? –- and the NYT reported on it, which as far as we know also is illegal.
Oh, and it gets shadier. The NYT happens to be in litigation with Project Veritas or a story they did in 2020 about a PV video alleging voter fraud in Minnesota. Wonder if they saw any attorney-client communications about that?
Adam Goldman and Mark Mazzetti wrote a piece for Thursday’s NYT called “Project Veritas and the Line Between Journalism and Political Spying,” which they say shows “how the conservative group worked with lawyers to gauge how far its deceptive reporting practices could go before running afoul of federal laws.”
So, let me get this straight. Reporters discuss with their attorneys on how to get information for their stories without breaking the law. Stop the presses!!
Ironically, the one who might have run afoul of the law is THE NEW YORK TIMES, as it has written about communications covered by attorney-client privilege. The materials are a series of memos written several years ago by Project Veritas attorney Benjamin Barr about how to do things such as mask identity and infiltrate groups without breaking federal law. This is actually the style of undercover reporting that investigative journalists used to do all the time; you know this if you watched 60 MINUTES and other prime time news shows in their long-ago heyday.
“The documents give new insight into the workings of the group,” the NYT story says, “at a time when it faces potential legal peril in the diary investigation –- and has signaled that its defense will rely in part on casting itself as a journalistic organization protected by the First Amendment.”
Note to the NYT: Project Veritas is a journalistic organization protected by the First Amendment.
And being a journalistic organization, they chose not to do a story on Ashley Biden’s diary because they couldn’t confirm it was hers. NATIONAL FILE published 112 pages of it, in October 2020, but Project Veritas left it alone.
“Most news organizations consult regularly with lawyers,” the NYT story says, “but some of Project Veritas’ questions for its legal team demonstrate an interest in using tactics that test the boundaries of legality and are outside of mainstream reporting techniques.”
So, whatever they thought they might need to do to get a story, they were running by their attorneys first to make sure it was LEGAL and didn’t interfere with national security. Hey, NYT (and FBI), there is nothing wrong with “demonstrating an interest.” And according to James O’Keefe and his lawyer Paul Calli, who appeared in an interview with Sean Hannity, they DID nothing wrong. This would imply denial of one of the allegations in the search warrant, transporting stolen goods [the diary] across state lines.
“Mr. O’Keefe likes to describe himself as a crusading journalist exposing wrongdoing, targeting liberal groups and Democrat politicians,” says the NYT.
Note to the NYT: That’s exactly what O'Keefe is. And thank God for that, as the mainstream media aren’t interested in doing the job. They show a remarkable lack of curiosity, especially when it comes to wrongdoings within their own party.
In their story, Goldman and Mazzetti admit that they passed along some of these Project Veritas memos to Bill Grueskin, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, formerly with the WALL STREET JOURNAL and BLOOMBERG NEWS. He said that these memos provided “pretty good advice” but that “the undercover nature of Project Veritas’ work was more problematic.”
Did this expert think it might be “problematic” that he was reading privileged attorney-client legal advice?
“Every newsroom I’ve ever worked in has basically said undercover journalism was unacceptable,” Grueskin said. On the contrary, we used to see a lot of this type of sting, with shaky undercover cameras inside purses and such. That was long before cameras were virtually everywhere, as they are now. Why do I get the feeling that the real objection to Project Veritas is not their tactics but their targets?
Project Veritas issued a statement saying it “stands behind these legal memos and is proud of the exhaustive work it does to ensure each of its journalism investigations complies with all applicable laws” and that their work “reflects Project Veritas’ dedication to the First Amendment, which protects the right to gather information, including about those in power.”
James O’Keefe got himself an outstanding attorney, Harmeet Dhillon, and she appeared on Tucker Carlson’s FOX NEWS show Thursday evening with a shocking story about how the FBI conducted their raid. She said they showed up at his door with “a battering ram,” “threw him out into the hallway,” put him “in handcuffs” and “took his phones.”
She said he had a lot of privileged information on his phones, including communication with “by my count, four dozen different lawyers over the years.” She can’t say with certainty how these NYT reporters got the information, but “can say that they got it in a way that is illegal and unethical.
She described this as a situation in which either the U.S. Attorney’s office or the FBI was tipping off the NYT to each of the raids on Project Veritas’ current and former employees. “We know that because minutes after these raids occurred, we got calls from THE NEW YORK TIMES,” she said. She described the story they ran as “a hit piece.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything this low from THE NEW YORK TIMES before, to publish people’s private legal communications,” she said. She then said what we'd concluded independently: “All it proves is that Project Veritas is an honest and thoughtful journalistic organization that sought legal advice” before running with their stories. We would add that perhaps THE NEW YORK TIMES could do a better job of that.
Finally, the FBI may have found a treasure trove of private stuff on those phones besides the attorney-client material. Dhillon said there was confidential source information, “including sources in the Biden administration and in corporate America.” There was also donor information, which is protected by the First Amendment. So why did the FBI take those phones? Still think all they were after was that diary?
On Thursday, Project Veritas was able to get a federal judge to order the FBI and the Southern District of New York to stop looking at the phones. But that sure sounds like locking the barn door after the horse is gone.
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3. RITTENHOUSE TRIAL UPDATE:
If the jury in Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder trial doesn’t vote to acquit, he’ll likely have excellent grounds for appeal on jury intimidation. A man claiming to be a friend or relative of George Floyd released a video that went viral, claiming activists were taking photos of jurors in the courtroom so they could retaliate if they didn’t vote to convict.
(Incidentally, the George Floyd/racism aspect of this case is a bit bizarre, considering Rittenhouse and the three men he shot are all white.)
Even if that video is nothing but Internet bluster, the very idea of such a threat might be enough to scare jurors out of being impartial, and that should be obvious grounds for an appeal.
However, despite the local bias against Rittenhouse (two-thirds of potential jurors said they’d already decided he was guilty), if the jurors are impartial, I don’t see how they vote any way other than acquittal on self-defense. The prosecution’s case has blown up in their faces so many times, you’d think the D.A. was Wile E. Coyote. Their “star witness” contradicted their narrative of Rittenhouse chasing the men down (they chased him down.) FBI surveillance video also contradicted it. Another witness testified that one of the men shot was acting aggressive and threatened to kill him and Rittenhouse.
On Monday, the prosecution called to the stand the only agitator shot by Rittenhouse who survived. He claimed he was running toward Rittenhouse to save him from the other two who were attacking him, and that he yelled at one to stop hitting Rittenhouse with a skateboard. But the defense attorney forced him to admit, “with the benefit of hindsight,” that that wasn’t true. He also got him to admit that he was advancing on Rittenhouse and pointing a pistol at him when Rittenhouse shot him. The state’s case imploded so thoroughly, a prosecutor was caught on camera face-palming (burying his face in his hand in frustration.)
https://www.westernjournal.com/game-changer-witness-admits-pointed-gun-rittenhouse-moved-shot/
The defense also pointed out that that guy is suing the city for $10 million in damages, but he didn’t mention in his filings that he was carrying and pointing a gun at the time he was shot.
The jurors might fear riots if they don’t vote guilty, but Nick Arama at Redstate.com offered an alternative: the defense could ask the judge for a directed verdict.
That means the judge could rule that no jury could possibly be convinced of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and throw out some or all of the charges. The mainstream media aren’t covering the terrible job the prosecutors are doing, but if there are riots, their bias could be a contributing factor. Anyone who riots over Rittenhouse being acquitted definitely wasn’t informed about what's going on in that courtroom.
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4. MCCARTHY: DURHAM "HAS SIGHTS SET ON THE CLINTON CAMPAIGN":
On Thursday, Special Counsel John Durham made news by issuing his third indictment in his Trump-Russia Hoax investigation, that of Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source, Igor Danchenko. (The first two were FBI document-falsifier Kevin Clinesmith and Clinton attorney Michael Sussmann.) He’s charged with five counts of making false statements to the FBI. It was also revealed that Danchenko’s source for the more fantastic tales in the anti-Trump “dossier” was Charles Dolan, who could hardly be more closely tied with the Clintons. Dolan’s attorney, apparently seeing the writing on the wall, just came out and said that, yes, his client is the source referred to in the Danchenko indictment.So, once again, the lies and corruption can be traced back to the Clintons.
On Friday, legal analyst Andrew C. McCarthy weighed in for the NEW YORK POST on the significance of Durham’s moves, saying they indicate he “has his sights set on the Clinton campaign.” McCarthy literally wrote the book on the Russia Hoax; it’s called “BALL OF COLLUSION: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency” and is highly recommended reading in light of these new indictments.
Danchenko, as we reported yesterday, worked for five years at the Brookings Institution, a Washington “think-tank” with close ties to the Clintons. McCarthy reports that Brookings’ former president Strobe Talbott is an F.O.B. (“friend of Bill”) dating back to their college days, and he also worked in Hillary’s State Department.
It was at Brookings that Danchenko met Fiona Hill, a witness in Trump Impeachment #1 and the person who introduced Danchenko to Christopher Steele a decade ago.
In fact, it was Strobe Talbott who showed her the “dossier.” Hill testified she thought at the time that it was “a rabbit hole.” She saw in 2016 that Steele was “obviously out there soliciting information” and that she saw him as a target for Russia, for whom this was “a great opportunity to...present him with information that he’s looking for that can be couched in some truth and some disinformation.”
But now it's clear: it wasn’t Russia that supplied him with disinformation. IT WAS THE CLINTON POLITICAL MACHINE.
Hill even stated that “I don’t think it’s appropriate for him to have been hired to do this.”
If I were George Stephanolpouos –- hard to imagine, I know, but go with me –- having just done an interview trying to rehabilitate the image of Steele and his fake “dossier,” I would be feeling really stupid right now.
Interestingly, Strobe Talbott is the brother-in-law of Cody Shearer, who wrote his own “dossier” about Trump and Russia in 2016. The phony dossiers were apparently just flying around Washington DC that summer.
Danchenko defended his work at Brookings to the WASHINGTON EXAMINER, saying that a review of his file would show “a lot of groundbreaking research and analysis.” Really? It doesn’t seem that his standards for verifying research are very high, considering the “research” (lies and gossip) he passed along to Steele only breaks new ground for salaciousness.
According to Durham’s indictment, Danchenko made up a story that the president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce –- not identified in the indictment, but his name is Sergey Millian –- told him that Trump had been involved in a “conspiracy of cooperation” with Vladimir Putin’s government. Millian has denied being a source for the “dossier,” which he called “fake news created by sick minds.”
If only it could have been dismissed in the beginning as exactly that.
As McCarthy reports, Danchenko is also alleged to have concealed the fact that one of his sources for the “dossier” is longtime Clinton crony Charles (“Chuck”) Dolan (“PR Executive - 1” in the indictment).
For a deeper dive into the details of the indictment and the fabrications of Dolan and Danchenko, here’s a very clear account.
https://technofog.substack.com/p/the-igor-danchenko-indictment
The FBI used the “dossier” in October 2016 to get a FISA court order to spy on Trump campaign associate Carter Page. But they didn’t attempt to verify the information in it by talking to Danchenko until January of 2017. By then, they had already gotten a 90-day extension on their Carter Page warrant.
According to McCarthy, “It appears that Durham theorizes that the Trump-Russia collusion narrative was a political attack manufactured by the Clinton campaign.” Ya think? We’ve waited five years for this --- the REAL narrative --- to come out in any official way.
It’s been so obvious for so long. Steele was paid to create the “dossier” by Glenn Simpson of opposition research company Fusion GPS, which was hired by the law firm Perkins Coie, which was run by attorneys Marc Elias and Michael Sussmann, whose clients were the Hillary campaign and the DNC. There it is. And now we know that Dolan supplied the lies and Danchenko was used as the intermediary.
By the way, it turns out that even Fiona Hill, who seemed so concerned in 2016-2017 about Russian disinformation, does not now believe the Russians stole the 2016 election for Trump. “The voters who had swung the ballot for Donald Trump in critical counties in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan were swayed by consideration of their own personal, family and communal circumstances, not by the fake internet personas derived by Russian intelligence services.”
So very true. Now, somebody tell that to MSNBC.
Gregg Jarrett of FOX NEWS has a must-read commentary on the Clinton machine and their outrageously phony scheme that is appropriately scathing.
Finally, now that Dolan has been identified and his political connections made clear, it’s helpful to get in our time machine and go back to October of last year, when Jarrett –- in another must-read –- outlined other evidence, declassified by then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and presumably now in the hands of the special counsel, that the plot to tar Trump with false allegations of “colluding” with Russia came, ultimately, from…
...Hillary Clinton herself. As Jarrett said, “Her malevolence knows no bounds.”
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/russia-hoax-lie-hillary-clinton-gregg-jarrett
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5. BIDEN IS IN DENIAL:
Joe Biden may be President of the United States, but judging from his response when he was asked about his dismal poll numbers, he must be running for Queen of Denial.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-brushes-off-lagging-poll-numbers-talks-supply-issues
While the latest USA Today/Suffolk poll shows him at a historically low 38% approval, he insisted his polls were on par with Clinton’s and Obama’s and that he just saw a poll that had him at 48%. I assume he means the latest CNN poll (of course), but even that one shows 58% of respondents say he’s not paying enough attention to the most important problems. I checked the Real Clear Politics roundup of the latest 13 polls. Even including the Democrat-friendly ones, his average approval rating is 42.8%.
Still, Biden brushed off the question, saying, "But look, the point is I didn't run because of the polls." Darn good thing!
But that was only the tip of the denial iceberg. He also blamed his low ratings on Americans being anxious about COVID. He said, "Even though we've created almost six million jobs since I came into office, we're in a situation where people don't, I mean they don't feel it right now. They don't feel it." (Note: allowing businesses that were artificially shut down by the government to reopen and people to go back to work is not “creating” jobs.)
He went on, “Gas prices are up, exceedingly high…That's why I have the Attorney General taking a look at whether or not these gas companies are gouging people." Yeah, that’s the reason why gas is so expensive! Those same gas companies that were charging $1.89 a year ago suddenly realized they could gouge customers after he coincidentally declared war on the domestic fuel industry.
Supply chain problems? That’s all just COVID, man. But don’t worry, because with the passage of the $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill (about $110 billion of which goes to actual infrastructure), widespread infrastructure projects will begin in "the matter of weeks."
I’m old enough to recall the last time Congress voted to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on “shovel-ready jobs.” Several years later, even Obama later had to admit there were no “shovel-ready jobs.” Because of all the green regulations and red tape that Biden wants to make even worse, no major infrastructure projects could launch without a decade’s worth of environmental studies first.
I’m sure he’ll find a way to ignore this poll, too: USA Today asked people what was the one thing they wanted to see President Biden do in the next year. The top answer was “Resign/retire/quit.”
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