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To become a paid subscriber of my politics newsletter it is $5 monthly or $36 annually. I email daily and my politics newsletters usually take 10-15 minutes to read. I cover the news of the day and the liberal media. I write about the upcoming elections and dive deep on the Biden scandals. I will also share my opinion of the Trump indictment. I don’t think you will regret reading my newsletter regularly as a paid subscriber, so please consider subscribing today.

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Mike Huckabee

Trump’s response about NY AG is worth reading

If you want to know why all these liberal prosecutors and judges are so desperate to put gag orders on Donald Trump, just read what he posted online about the New York Attorney General and the judge who are trying to force his daughter Ivanka to testify against him even though an appeals court dismissed her as a defendant and she doesn’t even live in New York. Warning, this might scorch your monitor.

https://conservativebrief.com/trump-after-3-77666/

Dumpster Dive

How hard is the liberal media having to work to try to dig up dirt on new House Speaker Mike Johnson? Try this shocking scoop from the Atlantic magazine: Johnson’s great-great-great-grandfather was a Confederate soldier!

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2023/10/29/comedy-gold-liberal-media-attempt-to-push-dirt-on-mike-johnson-n2165656

If you’ve recovered from your fainting spell, brace yourself: he also questioned the validity of a presidential election…just like countless Democrats do for every presidential election they lose, and for far less reason.

At the link, Nick Arama describes the people pushing these stories as “pond scum.” I don’t think I can do better than that.

The New York Times reports actual news

Congratulations to the New York Times for reporting some actual true news. Amid all the criticism and pressure on Israel for cutting off food, fuel and water to Gaza, the Times reported that Hamas (which is supposedly the government of Gaza) has stockpiled huge supplies of fuel, ammunition, explosives, food, water and medicine. But they’re hoarding it for their war on Israel and not sharing any of it with the Palestinian people.

https://www.westernjournal.com/nyt-admits-hamas-supplies-civilians-desperately-need-squad-now/

The Times quoted Samir Gattas, “an Egyptian strategic analyst who closely monitors Gaza,” as saying, “The Hamas movement cares only about the Hamas movement. The public of Gaza mean absolutely nothing for Hamas.”

That article also quotes Commentary magazine editor Seth Mandel, who notes that Gaza gets its water from a desalination plant that could be running if Hamas would share its gas for the generators, but they don’t. They’d rather save it to attack Israel and kill Jews than save their own people. As Mandel points out, this is yet another humanitarian crisis caused by Hamas, not Israel.

The FBI Foreign Influence Task Force and how it covered for the Bidens

Last week, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, who chairs the Senate committee protecting whistleblowers, wrote to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray, advising them that the House Committees have found that they disregarded evidence from at least 40 confidential human sources about Biden family corruption, dating from when Joe Biden was Vice President.

This week, legal analyst Margot Cleveland at THE FEDERALIST examines the role played in this by the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which was to falsely label this evidence “foreign disinformation.”

Thanks to Sen. Grassley, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, congressional testimony from IRS and FBI whistleblowers, and the subpoenaing of financial records by the House Committees, we know now that the FBI and DOJ’s “Biden-family protection program” involved numerous players in various positions in offices from coast to coast.  “But it’s the involvement of the Foreign Influence Task Force that demands an immediate response by the House,” Cleveland says, “namely the launching of an impeachment inquiry of FBI Director Christopher Wray, under whose watch this task force abused its power --- and interfered in a presidential election.”

Again, it can’t be said more clearly:  THIS WAS ELECTION INTERFERENCE BY OUR OWN GOVERNMENT.  Shutting down the investigation of the Hunter Biden laptop and the information it held about Biden family corruption effectively kept Joe Biden and his Democrat regime in the running for 2020.  (And this was just one way in which they’ve interfered; we’re not even talking about the “Trump-Russia” Hoax that was started before the 2016 election.)  And now, with the passage of four years, we’re seeing the same intel community interfering in yet another presidential election, this time focusing mostly on relentless lawfare against Trump and his supporters. 

But you knew all that was going on.  What we’ve now learned from the House committees is specifically how the Biden investigation got shut down.  As Grassley wrote last week, “the basis for shutting the investigative activity down was an August 2020 assessment created by FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten,” which an FBI headquarters team used “to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused the investigative activity to cease.”

Auten had no evidence that this information was coming from Russian sources, but that didn’t matter.  And it was Auten’s phony assessment of the case that led the Foreign Influence Task Force to seek out confidential human source (CHS) materials at FBI field offices and “falsely discredit them as foreign disinformation.”

As Cleveland points out, Auten wrote his assessment one month AFTER a CHS told the FBI that Burisma founder Mykola Zolochevsky had said he’d paid $5 million to one Biden and $5 million to another Biden.  That interview, from June 30, 2020, had come about only after Western Pennsylvania U.S. Attorney Scott Brady had asked the FBI to search for documents relating to Ukraine; that search had turned up earlier “1023” interview notes from March 2017 from the same CHS that referred to Hunter being on Burisma’s board.

We can thank Scott Brady for requesting the follow-up interview with that CHS that turned up the Zolochevsky comment on Biden bribery.  As Cleveland tells it, the FBI fought his request for that follow-up interview for a month.

She says it “cannot be a coincidence” that just one month after that interview was done, Auten did an assessment that the Foreign Influence Task Force then used, in Grassley’s words, “to seek out CHS holdings at FBI Field Offices across the country relating to the Biden family and falsely discredit them as foreign disinformation.”

Brady did some independent vetting of the CHS’s interview to corroborate some of the details, and he also coordinated with the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York to assess for themselves whether or not this was foreign disinformation.  They “found no hits to known sources of Russian information.”  Auten had apparently made it up.

We don’t know how many of the confidential human sources (there were at least 40 in all) or how many of their reports were categorized and dismissed as foreign disinformation by the Foreign Influence Task Force in the wake of Auten’s fake assessment, but according to whistleblower testimony, the improper branding of them as disinformation “caused investigative activity to cease.”

Brady had planned to brief the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office --- that’s David Weiss, who has since been appointed special counsel --- on this “1023” and the need for further investigation, but the Foreign Influence Task Force got out ahead of him and on September 14, 2020, communicated with the CHS’s handling agent and, according to the whistleblower, “attempted to shut down” the CHS’s reporting “by falsely saying it was subject to foreign disinformation.”

As Grassley said in his letter, “It should be emphasized that the basis for trying to shut down the Biden family 1023 has been described to my office as highly suspect and is contradicted by other documents my office has been told exist within the Foreign Influence Task Force, FBI Seattle Field Office, FBI Baltimore Field Office, and FBI HQ [headquarters] holdings.”

And in case Brady, from his Pittsburgh office, might have been getting anywhere with his independent checking, Delaware Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf, who was overseeing the Hunter Biden investigation, had, according to IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, “already written off any evidence coming out of Pittsburgh as disinformation.”    

Cleveland also reviewed the transcribed interview by the House Judiciary Committee, taken two weeks ago, of Tim Thibault, former FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Washington field office.  According to Thibault, the FBI headquarters’ Public Corruption Unit chief called him out of the blue to discuss this CHS and set up a meeting between him and the Foreign Influence Task Force to discuss their “concerns” about him.  Thibault subsequently closed the association with that CHS.

Grassley is moving forward, with a list of about 25 DOJ and FBI personnel who need to be interviewed.  But, as Cleveland says, that is not enough.  Because FBI Director Wray “cannot control his swamp creatures,” the House must open a “long-overdue” impeachment inquiry into Wray.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/26/fbi-and-its-foreign-influence-task-force-purged-sources-who-were-onto-biden-corruption/

Wray certainly should be responsible for what the Foreign Influence Task Force is doing, having personally set it up in the fall of 2017.  Here’s the FBI’s webpage that tells what they’re supposed to be doing to target foreign influence operations.  We read through it very carefully, and nowhere does it say anything about protecting a corrupt presidential candidate and his family by falsely labeling a laptop and a CHS’s interview as “foreign disinformation.”  Funny how they ended up getting involved in that anyway.

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/the-fbi-launches-a-combating-foreign-influence-webpage

Here’s more information at the FBI website about how they handle foreign threats.  Much of this has to do with “election security” (we’ll pause while you laugh helplessly).  Their way of dealing with foreign influence takes a “three-pronged approach.”  Watch out for #3, “Private Sector Partnerships:  The FBI considers strategic engagement with U.S. technology companies, including threat indicator sharing, to be important in combatting foreign influence actors.”

Ah, that must be why they went to Twitter and Facebook and falsely alerted them to “foreign disinformation” about Hunter Biden before the laptop story broke.  Just doing their job.  You know, to safeguard our election.

RELATED READING:  For when you have time, this piece should raise alarm bells.  Last May, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Director of National Intelligence and Obama Holdover Avril Haines first mentioned the FBI’s next step, the creation of the Foreign Malign Influence Center, or FMIC.  It had actually been created the previous fall.  According to THE INTERCEPT, it was formed “in response to concerns about the impact of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.”  Oh, no.

The article reads, “The FMIC is authorized to counter foreign disinformation targeting not just U.S. elections, but also ‘the public opinion within the United States’ generally (!!!), according to the law.”

Here’s something else in the article to send a chill up your back:  The Pentagon has very quietly opened something called their “Influence and Perception Management Office” (!!!).  No details are given on this Orwellian-named office, because none whatsoever have been released.  “As is often the case,” the article reads, “no press release accompanied the office’s creation or any reference by the administration aside from this year’s budget request, which appears to be the only publicly available U.S. government reference to the office.”

https://theintercept.com/2023/05/05/foreign-malign-influence-center-disinformation/

RIP Matthew Perry and Richard Roundtree

By “Huckabee” pop culture guru, Pat Reeder (http://www.hollywoodhifi.com)

I am truly sad to have to report that on Saturday, “Friends” star Matthew Perry was found dead at his home in Los Angeles at 54. Police said there were no illegal drugs on the scene (although there are reports that he had prescription medications), and foul play is not suspected. It was initially reported that he had drowned in his hot tub; but it was later learned that he had earlier played pickleball for two hours, and many commenters mentioned that for someone with his serious health issues, strenuous exercise followed by the high heat of a hot tub can lead to heart failure. FYI, here’s more information on that:

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/hot-tubs-can-land-your-heart-in-hot-water/

The coroner deferred releasing a cause of death pending further tests, but said Perry’s body was “ready for release,” with “other significant conditions” contributing to his death. In short, he had been lucky to still be alive, which he was well aware of.

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/matthew-perry-cause-death-deferred-coroner

Perry recently opened up in a best-selling memoir about his years of substance abuse and the toll it took on his body, with doctors at one point giving him only a 2% chance of survival. It started with alcohol, then a skiing accident led to a painkiller addiction. He was also a heavy smoker. You can see the effects on reruns of “Friends,” where at one point, he was taking 55 Vicodin a day and weighed only 128 pounds at six feet tall.

https://www.aol.com/entertainment/matthew-perry-opened-near-death-222555994.html

Having finally conquered his addictions and miraculously survived, Perry said, "The best thing about me, bar none, is if somebody comes up to me and says, 'I can't stop drinking. Can you help me?' I can say yes and follow up and do it. And I've said this for a long time: when I die, I don't want ‘Friends’ to be the first thing that's mentioned — I want that to be the first thing that's mentioned. And I'm going to live the rest of my life proving that." Perry then stressed that he hopes what people say about him after his death is that “his paramount thing is that he wants to help people. That's what I want."

At this writing, Perry’s closest castmates on “Friends” were reportedly in “total shock” and had yet to say anything. But there’s an outpouring of grief from countless celebrities who worked with Perry and who all describe him as incredibly sweet, kind and funny, despite the terrible addictions he fought for so many years. RIP, Matt.

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/hollywood-mourns-death-matthew-perry

Also, while we were away last week in Nashville, actor Richard Roundtree died at home on October 24^th after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 81. He had previously survived a double mastectomy and become a spokesperson to inform people that breast cancer could also strike men.

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/shaft-star-richard-roundtree-shaft-star-dead-81

Roundtree played many roles, from the landmark miniseries “Roots” to Burt Reynolds’ partner in “City Heat,” and his favorite, "Once Upon A Time… When We Were Colored” (1996), which he said was his first film that his father didn’t refuse to watch. But he will forever be remembered as the first black action hero, detective John Shaft in 1971’s “Shaft.” “Shaft” spawned several sequels (“Shaft’s Big Score,” “Shaft in Africa” and a 1973 TV series) and two reboots with Samuel L. Jackson taking over as Shaft’s nephew.

As the co-author of “Hollywood Hi-Fi,” I’m known as an expert on celebrity singers, so I’d also like to mention that aside from Isaac Hayes’ classic “Shaft” soundtrack album, Roundtree released an LP called “The Man From Shaft” in 1972 and a few singles that showed off his pretty good R&B crooning skills.

Here’s the funky LP title track…

https://youtu.be/LKbn-Dz4xqY?si=1Q7ayMJg97JlVNYy

And a ballad, “Goodnight My Love,” arranged by Sinatra arranger Don Costa!

https://youtu.be/sS-J9GcK_P4?si=MGX7boEBslMOQ3DD

And something I’ll bet nobody else will mention: his singing was good enough to allow him to star in 1976 as Sky Masterson in a national tour of an all-black production of “Guys and Dolls,” with Leslie Uggams as Sister Sarah Brown. RIP.

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