By Mike Huckabee
July 3, 2022
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Good morning! Here are the top stories from this week that I think you will want to read:
- Megyn Kelly: "I know a sham trial when I see one."
- "Emergency" January 6 hearing is an absurdity
- "Sham trial," part 2: Cassidy Hutchinson's backstory
- Our arrogant complacency
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
1. DAILY BIBLE VERSE
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
Matthew 28:19 NIV
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Megyn Kelly: "I know a sham trial when I see one."
This was originally published on June 30.
Enough about COVID-19. Ever since Nancy Pelosi’s phony January 6 committee premiered its made-for-TV hearings, we’ve known that a much more serious health risk is posed by Trump Derangement Syndrome. We now have scientific proof that TDS is a brain-eating disease.
How do we know? Well, it turns out that when enough brain cells have been consumed by the fiery hatred of Donald Trump, it’s impossible to tell actual evidence from essentially worthless, uncorroborated hearsay and even outright lying. To the patient with this advanced level of brain damage, the only thing that gives such “evidence” value is its ability to put Trump in a bad light and damage his political viability as we careen towards 2024.
The testimony of a former aide to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about events she said took place on January 6 is perhaps the ultimate example of this. We’ve learned that this “emergency” meeting to quickly make public some fast-breaking testimony was nothing of the sort. It was a lie to create a sense of urgency around the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson. Why, it was so important, this kangaroo court had to change its plan for a two-week hiatus and hop to it! But by then, they’d already completed four video interviews with her.
So they’d had plenty of time to corroborate her hearsay testimony with the Secret Service but had never reached out. They still could’ve done it during their so-called hiatus. But perhaps they sensed it might spoil a good thing. Wouldn’t want to get in the way of a great anti-Trump story! (Like that fake “pee tape” yarn --- how long were they able to keep THAT going?)
The fact that the committee failed to reach out to the Secret Service has been reported by POLITICO, not exactly a bastion of support for Trump.
https://www.politico.com/news/
The leadership behind the J6 committee consists mostly of people with fancy law degrees and lots of experience with hearings and rules of evidence. The hypothesis that they’ve lost billions of brain cells due to TDS explains why they didn’t realize how quickly Hutchinson’s testimony would be demolished by people with firsthand knowledge, and how much that would discredit their entire operation.
https://www.
As POLITICO reported, attorneys for Hutchinson said Wednesday she stands by “all of the testimony.” But the Secret Service said it would have been a simple matter for committee members to access any documents or witnesses they’d thought might be relevant. They just didn’t do it.
One especially puzzling part of Hutchinson’s testimony is that she claimed to have written a particular note herself, when White House attorney Eric Herschmann says he wrote it. POLITICO and other news outlets are downplaying the significance of this apparent lie, saying it doesn’t matter who wrote the note, as the important thing is that it shows Trump was being advised to immediately instruct supporters to leave the Capitol. They’re failing to ask why the committee chose to call Hutchinson as a witness and not Herschmann. None of the committee’s choices are accidental; there must be some reason why they wanted the note in evidence but not Herschmann as a witness. They preferred Hutchinson on-camera, even if she had to misrepresent the note as hers. We’d like to know why.
Also, Mark Meadows, Hutchinson’s boss at the time, denies that he requested a pardon from Trump over the events of January 6, as Hutchinson testified he did. Here’s an excellent take:
Megyn Kelly, no fan of Trump, thinks Trump “embarrassed himself” with his reaction to the outcome of the election, but even so, she says a “first-year law student” could drive a truck through the holes in Hutchinson’s testimony. Actually, we think any reasoned person should be able to do it, no law school necessary.
That touch of TDS Kelly experienced –- presumably when he made a less-than-gentlemanly remark about her during his presidential campaign –- was perhaps just enough to inoculate her against the more serious and incapacitating form. So even though she still has doubts about Trump’s “temperament,” she’s able to think coherently and objectively about the workings of this committee.
Her video is a must-watch, and reiterates quite bluntly what we’ve been saying. “This committee has one goal and only one goal,” she says. “Stop Donald Trump from running again in 2024. They’re worried he could win. They absolutely loathe him. And they will do what it takes to stop his political resurrection.”
She debunks these hearings in short order, particularly the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson. She notes all the paraphrases of stories Hutchinson heard secondhand and even features a montage of her using the frequent qualifier “something to the effect of.”
This deficiency obviously didn’t matter to the committee. It “cloaks itself in sanctimony,” Kelly said, “purporting to be a fair-minded, down-the-middle finder of fact, just looking to get to the truth of January 6. IT’S A LIE. And they prove every time they get together that it’s a lie.”
Note: Kelly personally has a view different from mine on Trump’s feelings about the violence at the Capitol; her take-away is that he approved of it. Perhaps some residual mild TDS infection is still lurking in some of her cells, as after chickenpox. She’s to be commended for functioning so well in spite of this.
Kelly also does not mention the denial from Tony Ornato that he had the conversation with Hutchinson described by her in testimony, about Trump attacking Secret Service agents and grabbing the steering wheel. That might have been reported after she made this video, but she doesn’t need it to debunk the hearing.
What she demonstrates in this video is how the testimony might have gone if there'd been any cross-examination. And let me tell you, Megyn would have been a great one to do it. She has got skills.
“I actually think I’m in a unique spot on this front,” she concludes. “I feel no need to defend Trump or his character, as this audience knows. But I know a sham trial when I see one. And this is not justice, it is not fair, and it is not to be trusted.”
Further reading:
https://dailycaller.com/2022/
Andrew C. McCarthy sees this as less of a problem with the witness’s hearsay testimony than it is with the committee’s failure to question and cross-examine.
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"Emergency" January 6 hearing is an absurdity
This article was originally published on June 29th.
“This committee has engaged in widespread manipulation of evidence. They’re refusing to provide the testimony of people who dispute the narrative that they’re trying to construct. They are running roughshod over our American ideals of what should happen when you accuse people of crimes, and whether there should be the ability to make a defense or have a cross-examination.”
That was Mollie Hemingway, speaking Tuesday night with Laura Ingraham on FOX News. “I mean,” she said, “those rights are enshrined in the Constitution, and our congressional committees are supposed to honor that in the way they conduct their hearings. That has not been the case since Day 1, and today, this was just absurd.”
“ABSURD” is the word. Hemingway was referring to the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Even before it was refuted --- and it quickly was --- it should’ve been seen as the wild hearsay it was, something that would never be allowed in a courtroom, for good reason.
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This happened during Tuesday’s “emergency” hearing of the January 6 committee, which they called because they thought they had game-changing testimony that would rock the political world! It mostly showed they have rocks in their heads. Hutchinson testified she’d been told that President Trump was so upset and ready to wage insurrection at the Capitol that he assaulted two Secret Service agents in his car and tried to grab the steering wheel.
Very quickly, Peter Alexander of NBC News --- not a news outlet known for its defense of Trump --- refuted this story, tweeting, “A source close to the Secret Service tells me both Bobby Engel, the lead agent, and the presidential limousine/SUV driver are prepared to testify under oath that neither man was assaulted and that Mr. Trump never lunged for the steering wheel.”
As Bonchie at REDSTATE reports (and I can attest), President Trump was known for the respect he always gave Secret Service agents. Of course they’d speak up right away to set the record straight. “The only thing I can take from this is that the January 6 committee is full of idiots,” he writes. “They actually thought they could have an aide spin fanciful, third-hand tales and that there’d be no pushback…We are supposed to believe that Trump fought his way into the front seat of the presidential limo (or a suburban depending on who you ask) as a 74-year-old, overweight man, overtaking two Secret Service agents to ‘grab the wheel’? I mean, if he wanted to go to the Capitol, he was the president. All he had to do was say, ‘Take me to the Capitol.’”
“Honestly, I can’t stop laughing,” he says. “I find this entire episode absolutely hilarious.”
Take it from someone who’s personally ridden in “The Beast” with the President –- there is NO WAY he could get to the driver. However, a picture of Trump leaving the rally shows that he was in the SUV. Either way, if this committee cared about the truth, they would’ve checked out this story out and traced it to whoever apparently made it up or grossly exaggerated it. (She testified that she'd heard it from then-White House deputy chief of operations Tony Ornato, who is denying that this happened or that he'd told her it happened.) This is why hearsay testimony is not allowed in courtrooms. It’s just embarrassing, or would be, if the committee had any sense of shame.
FOX News reports that he January 6 committee and the Secret Service are “in discussions” as to whether the two agents will testify on camera. My sense is that this won't be happening.
Here’s another take on the story, complete with Trump’s posts on Truth Social about Hutchinson’s claim, which he called “sick and fraudulent, very much like the Unselect Committee itself.”
http://www.
“Wouldn’t even have been possible to do such a ridiculous thing,” he continued. (See?) He went on to deny another of her claims, that he was throwing food. “And why would SHE have to clean it up, I hardly knew who she was?”
Chris Menahan at INFORMATION LIBERATION said, “Hutchinson’s story actually made Trump sound pretty awesome and I must say I’m rather disappointed to learn that it never happened.”
THE PALMIERI REPORT offers a bit more about Hutchinson herself. Their previous report revealed that she’d wanted to work for Trump in Florida after he left the White House but was turned down for the job.
Let’s move on from this absurdity to something we really should be concerned about. Andrew C. McCarthy has brought up something odd about the FBI’s heavy-handed raids on Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman: agents were working not on behalf of a U.S. district attorney’s office but for the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG). The warrant on Eastman didn’t even mention any specific crime for which the evidence sought by the warrant might be relevant.
As my readers will know, the OIG has jurisdiction only with current federal government employees. They do not investigate crimes. They investigate “to detect and deter waste, fraud, abuse and misconduct involving DOJ programs and personnel, and promote economy and efficiency in DOJ operations.”
McCarthy points out that John Eastman was not a government employee in 2020, much less a DOJ employee (and he certainly isn’t one now). He was Donald Trump’s private legal counsel. So how does the OIG have legitimate cause to be investigating him? Liz Cheney is trying to tie him to Jeffrey Clark, who was acting head of the DOJ Criminal Division in 2020 but has not worked at the DOJ for over a year. And if they’re alleging that Clark was part of a conspiracy to subvert the democratic process after the 2020 election, the OIG doesn’t have jurisdiction there, either. As McCarthy says, “It’s not the IG’s mission to investigate --- much less obtain search warrants to probe --- such felony federal violations as obstruction of Congress and seditious conspiracy.”
So what’s going on? McCarthy thinks Biden’s DOJ is doing it this way to hide the fact that they’re really conducting a criminal investigation of Trump. They’re PRETENDING to investigate only whether Clark engaged in waste, fraud or abuse of DOJ programs. He suspects they went “covertly” to federal judges –- and they’d be able to judge-shop for this –- to obtain warrants that enabled federal agents to “rifle through the belongings of these Trump associates, only after subjecting them to the humiliation of temporary arrest and frisk, without notifying their lawyers.” The prize: all those electronics they’re confiscating --- especially Eastman's, I would think --- with their thousands and thousands of messages to pick through, just to find something, anything, to use against Donald Trump.
https://www.nationalreview.
…………………..
In related news, Michael Stenger, the former Senate sergeant-at-arms who oversaw security during the January 6 rally, died Monday at his home in Falls Church, Virginia. He was 71, a Marine Corps veteran who spent 35 years with the Secret Service before joining the Senate sergeant-at-arms team in 2011, reaching the top post in 2018. He resigned the day after the January 6 security breach, after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell requested his resignation.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/
According to a Senate Rules Committee report, he’d had some “informal conversations” with Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund (who also resigned, along with the House sergeant-at-arms) about the level of need for National Guard troops on that day. Perhaps we’ll find out more about Mr. Stenger’s views at the time concerning that need.
Here he is, from February 2021, offering a brief prepared statement about January 6, as posted by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
https://twitter.com/RepMTG/
We have no additional detail about his death at this point, and no reason to think it was related to the current investigation. Please pray for his grieving family and loved ones, who surely don't wish for the media attention they're going to get.
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Our arrogant complacency
By Colonel Kenneth Allard
This article was published on June 30th.
Amidst all the insufferable virtue-claiming of the last week - including the ongoing morality play of the January 6th hearings - I've been pre-occupied by one thought: The Hullabaloo sounds awfully arrogant for a country with 60 million infant deaths on its much-abused conscience. Particularly nauseating examples of the self-deception orgy include the circumlocution of "reproductive freedom" and "women's health-care" to obscure the definitive act of the new Democratic sacrament: the surgical dismemberment of a live baby snatched from its mother 's womb.
How can a country with such a track record be so complacent, especially when our adversaries have directly threatened us over the last fortnight with nuclear war? Although such concerns are seldom raised in polite company, my military career included studying under Professor William Kaufman of MIT. He was the genius who authored, for SECDEF Robert McNamara, the Single Integrated Operations Plan by which American nuclear forces would attack the Soviet Union. The applied mathematics had a seductive logic: numbers of delivery vehicles and warheads, effective mega-tonnage, targets lists arrayed by Overall Probability of Kill (requiring two warheads per target). We tried to ignore the implications of over a thousand attacks by both Blue and Red forces. "We destroyed everything on our target list but would the world survive?" Sorry, but that was well beyond the scope of our classroom problem. Even more worrying, the Soviets engaged in similar war-games but with a critical difference. While Americans typically asked, "How much is enough?" our Soviet counter-parts had an entirely different approach: "How much is demonstrably too much?"
So why would today's Russian and Chinese adversaries be deterred from attacking the US to achieve those interests they consider vital - from Ukraine to Taiwan? Is there something in Joe Biden's halting demeanor that might make them hesitate? Or in the fearsome war-fighting mien of General Mark Milley, best known for suggesting that our armed forces should be imbued with an in-depth knowledge of critical race theory? National security practitioners in both Russia and China routinely point out that the United States is so far the only world power to use nuclear weapons in combat, relatively modest demonstration shots (by modern standards) in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why should old white men in their dotage be the only ones to enjoy such a useful operational monopoly?
Naturally, those are inconvenient questions to pose with the virtue-claimants still in full cry. For me, one of the most appalling was a Supreme Court demonstrator carrying a hand-lettered sign: JEWS FOR ABORTION RIGHTS. Excuse me? Perhaps those rights were granted sometime after the conflicts in which Ancient Israel was specifically warned against tolerating Canaanite worship of their baby-killing god Molech. https://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/4372130/jewish/The-Tragic-History-of-Molech-Child-Sacrifice.htm. And how to reconcile abortion with King David's eloquent words in Psalm 139: "You made all the delicate parts of my body and knit me together in my mother's womb...You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.." (Ps 139, 15-16 NIV).
Instead of defiling the Supreme Court, those pro-abortion demonstrators might have considered our history, when Americans were forcibly confronted by the manifold evils of slavery, our long-running foundational sin. On the north wall of the Lincoln Memorial are engraved the immortal words of his Second Inaugural, delivered just 41 days prior to his assassination. "Fondly do we hope ~ fervently do we pray ~ that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' "
I keep wondering if that same calculus could be applied again - this time to atone for the 60 million infants sacrificed on the unholy altar of Roe v Wade. Would it include prompt mega-deaths from a nuclear strike or the lingering effects of radiation spread downwind from the smoking remnants of America’s great cities? Should we fall to our knees to pray for grace and forgiveness or just shrug and carry on as before, hoping that Lincoln was exaggerating when he declared that the Lord's judgments are "true and righteous altogether?"
Colonel Kenneth Allard, United States Army (Ret.) is a Vietnam-era draftee who became a West Point professor and Dean of the National War College. He is also the author of Command, Control and the Common Defense, winner of the 1991 National Security Book Award. After leaving active duty, he served for nearly a decade as an on-air military analyst for the networks of NBC News.
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God's creation is all around us. To learn more about Haleakala National Park, visit its website here.
"Sham trial," part 2: Cassidy Hutchinson's backstory
This article was published on July 1st.
Let’s see...where were we?
Megyn Kelly, in a video I hope you watched, had explained what’s wrong with the January 6 show trial: “This is not justice, it is not fair, and it is not to be trusted,” she said.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: Megyn Kelly: "I know a sham trial when I see one."
We’d also discussed Trump Derangement Syndrome as a voracious brain-eating disease and examined what happens to the prefrontal cortex during “long TDS.” By coincidence, John Daniel Davidson has an article at THE FEDERALIST titled “The Jan. 6 Committee is Causing Never-Trumpers to Lose Their Minds.” By “never-Trumpers,” he’s talking not about mainstream media but the more right-of-center outlets.
We expect CNN, NEWSWEEK, THE NEW YORK TIMES, the WASHINGTON POST and many others on the left to run attacks on President Trump at every opportunity, but, sadly, Davidson is talking about NATIONAL REVIEW and WASHINGTON EXAMINER running what he rightly calls “delusional op-eds” about the hearings this week. The EXAMINER said Trump had been “proven unfit for power again,” because of the testimony given by (yes) Cassidy Hutchinson. They apparently took her unverified testimony at face value --- never mind that it has been contradicted by multiple firsthand witnesses and was never subject to any challenge whatsoever
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/trump-proven-unfit-for-power-again
These editorial writers were completely suckered. “Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s Tuesday testimony ought to ring the death knell for former President Donald Trump’s political career,” they intoned. “Trump is unfit to be anywhere near power ever again.”
You and I know that Hutchinson was put on the stand precisely to “ring the death knell” for Trump, and even though her testimony has been discredited, it apparently worked on these useful media idiots. To quote Davidson: “You have to wonder what’s wrong with these editors that they would publish such garbage. Do they not realize that one of the propaganda goals of the Jan. 6 committee is to elicit [this] kind of editorial? Mission accomplished, Liz Cheney!”
Read the whole EXAMINER editorial, look at the reasons they give for believing Hutchinson, and you’ll likely agree these board members are the ones who are unfit, to be anywhere near journalism. They went right along with the rest of corporate media. If they can’t be more discerning than this, with even a little ability to sniff out fake news, maybe they should move to MSNBC or CNN.
It seems Trump Derangement Syndrome has infected even them. Their brains have certainly been stripped of any analytical skills they might have had earlier in their careers. They appear to have gone right out of their heads.
They believe Hutchinson in part because she used to be a “conservative true believer” in Trump. At 25, she'd “already worked at the highest level of conservative Republican politics,” they say. And they speak of how precise she was with her choice of words, though I took that as a sign she’d been carefully coached. (Of course, viewers didn’t get to hear about that, because there was no cross-examination.)
These board members even took Hutchinson at her word about Trump attacking the Secret Service agents and grabbing the steering wheel to try to get to the Capitol, despite the fact that it has been strongly refuted by the people named in her stories.
It must not have occurred to them that there might be more backstory to Hutchinson’s apparent change of heart about Trump. We wanted to wait before speculating personally about someone we don’t know, but former Florida attorney general and very credible source Pam Bondi, in an interview with Sean Hannity on Wednesday, offered some insight.
Bondi said she’d had two conversations with Hutchinson, who (in the first conversation) “loved President Trump” but (in the later conversation) was “very upset” she’d been turned down for a job with him in Florida.
She’d apparently been turned down because some of her colleagues had told Trump she couldn’t be trusted. “She was a leaker when she was in the White House,” they said to him, according to Bondi.
“The woman I saw yesterday on the stand was not the same woman,” Bondi said. “Now I understand. She was well-rehearsed. And in a court of law she would have been cross-examined –- were you promised something for your testimony? Money? Did you receive immunity for getting on the witness stand?”
Bondi’s revelation that Trump had been told Hutchinson was a leaker is consistent with the statement he released after her testimony. His full statement is at the link above. He also did an exclusive interview for NEWSMAX that aired Thursday morning. “The woman is living in fantasy land,” he said. “She’s a total disaster, she’s a train wreck, but think of it. Nobody to cross-examine.”
Indeed, Hutchinson’s backstory with Trump and the Florida job would surely have been elicited during cross-examination in a REAL hearing. But outside the hearing, Hutchinson has been discredited as a witness and her testimony is essentially worthless. The Secret Service agents who were actually there will correct her lies for the record. But in the meantime, the January 6 committee can chalk up plenty of scathing anti-Trump editorials based on their deception.
Also, Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert is asking the committee to release the full transcript of Hutchinson’s testimony. He flatly denies he asked Trump for a presidential pardon for himself, saying that he only made pardon requests for several U.S. service members whom he said had been wrongly convicted of crimes while deployed in war zones. He says either Hutchinson was mistaken, or else the committee had deceptively edited the video they played of her testimony.
“Not only have I never asked for a pardon for myself,” he said, I have not done anything for which I need a pardon.”
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jun/27/louie-gohmert-calls-jan-6-committee-release-full-d/
Finally, yet another piece of Hutchinson’s testimony has fallen apart. She claimed that on the morning of January 6, White House counsel Pat Cipollone had told her to tell her boss, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, that Trump should not go to the Capitol. She testified he’d told her, “We’re going to be charged with every crime imaginable” if he did that.
Cipollone has not agreed to testify before this committee, but according to HUMAN EVENTS Senior Editor Jack Posobiec, he was not even at the White House the morning of the 6th. Posobiec has heard this from “multiple sources,” he said. The January 6 committee is “aware of this discrepancy,” he tweeted, and “are ignoring media inquiries about it.”
Now that, I can believe.
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