By Mike Huckabee
January 4, 2024
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Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
Daily Bible Verse
9 If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
Romans 10:9 NIV
Newsletter Notes
8 stories
3,117 words
Reading time: About 15 minutes
The two-tiered justice system
In our never-ending series of stories about the two-tiered justice system, in which Republicans have the whole bookmobile thrown at them while Democrats are never held accountable for anything, the good news that Claudine Gay finally is resigning as president of Harvard has been undercut by word that she will remain on the faculty at an annual salary of nearly $900,000. So in case you’re wondering why Harvard tuition is so high, it’s because they have to keep paying over 12 times the median US household income to leftists who promote racial divisiveness, cover for anti-Semitism and commit blatant plagiarism, rather than firing them.
And here’s a good round-up from Instapundit of how the liberal media is attempting to couch Gay’s resignation as a racist conservative plot, rather than the justified consequences of her own words and actions.
https://instapundit.com/624752/
As Brandon Morse at Redstate.com notes, the Associated Press apparently thinks that none of the stuff Gay did was wrong, even though it violates their own stated rules -- but pointing it out is.
Cherry on top: Even her resignation letter was flagged for containing plagiarism.
https://twitchy.com/samj/2024/01/02/claudine-gays-resignation-letter-n2391325
Never ending
Meanwhile, here’s yet another sobering example of how the legal persecution of conservatives never, never ends…
More double standards:
While Republican George Santos was removed from the House over charges that haven’t come to trial yet, and Trump is being removed from the ballot for a crime for which he’s never even been charged, Democrat Sen. Bob Menendez remains in the Senate. And the jaw-dropping charges against him (accepting cash and gold bars to shill for Egypt’s government) just got worse. New charges have been added of accepting bribes and gifts to benefit Qatar.
Worth reading just for Menendez’s attorney’s full-throated defense of his innocent, unfairly maligned client. Come on, man! We all have gold bars lying around our houses, don’t we?!
Sometimes, You’ve Just Gotta Laugh:
Elaini Kounalakis, the Democrat Lt. Governor of California, wrote to the Democrat Secretary of State, urging her to “explore every legal option” to remove Trump from the Republican primary ballot. She claimed this anti-democracy move was to protect “the fundamental pillars of our democracy," but that’s not even the funny part. She went on to declare that the Constitution "is clear": A presidential candidate must "not be an insurrectionist," and "must be 40 years old."
https://www.theblaze.com/news/eleni-kounalakis-letter-trump-ballot
Uh, excuse me? Those of us who’ve actually read the Constitution thought it said candidates had to be 35 years old.
Well, I guess that like her grasp of the 14th Amendment and the definition of “insurrection,” that’s “close enough for government work!”
The Epstein list
Despite legal attempts to delay its release, documents were released Wednesday from a 2015 civil lawsuit, revealing the names of some prominent people who had contact with the late billionaire financier/Democrat donor/sex criminal, Jeffrey Epstein.
https://www.westernjournal.com/breaking-court-releases-first-names-epstein-list/
So far, the names released haven’t included any big surprises. We’ve heard most of them before, including Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Donald Trump, the late John Glenn and law professor Alan Dershowitz. The biggest takeaway from the story involves Bill Clinton, identified repeatedly in the redacted documents as “John Doe #36.” The documents include testimony from one witness that Epstein once told her that Clinton “likes them young, referring to girls.” But she said she had no recollection of ever seeing Clinton on Epstein’s notorious island.
https://www.westernjournal.com/epstein-documents-clinton-likes-young/
Here are some more names, including a new famous one: magician David Copperfield. Copperfield was once accused of sexually assaulting a teen model, but he’s just described in these documents as having performed some magic tricks at dinner.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/jeffrey-epstein-list-court-unseals-names-ghislaine-maxwell-lawsuit
As for the references to Dershowitz having contact with Epstein, a number of those came from when he was acting as his attorney. As he reminded Sean Hannity, a woman who damaged his reputation by accusing him of having illicit relations with Epstein’s girls recanted and admitted she may have misidentified that person after he presented proof that he couldn’t have been in those places at the times she described.
Dershowitz also rightly pointed out that many people had professional dealings with Epstein for years before news of his sick sexual activities became public, so just being seen with him in public isn’t proof of wrongdoing.
As for Trump, despite the left’s efforts to connect him to Epstein’s perverted activities, the testimony revealed that a witness denied ever seeing Trump in Epstein’s homes, office or island. Their only known interaction was when Epstein reportedly acted creepy toward the teenage daughter of a Mar-A-Lago member at a public event, and Trump had him thrown out and permanently barred from his resort. Which seems to prove that Trump figured out what Epstein was and did something about it long before anyone else, while prominent Democrats just kept sucking up to him.
Stay tuned, this is a breaking story, and more documents will be released soon…
You could see this coming up Sixth Avenue:
President Biden plans to spend January 6th making speeches about how Trump is a threat to “our democracy” and that America is facing an existential threat, not from the millions of unvetted Third World illegal aliens pouring across our border thanks to him and bringing drugs and exotic diseases with them, but from “white supremacy.”
It shows how desperate Biden is, with polls showing that even the most loyal Democrat voting blocs, like blacks and Hispanics, are abandoning him and his failed policies. The Democrats have built up this second-string riot (not nearly as destructive as the ones they approved of in 2019) as worse than Pearl Harbor and 9/11 put together. Now, they shake it like a voodoo doll to try to scare voters into reelecting them so they can keep imposing their toxic policies. Why, if January 6th never happened, they would’ve had to instigate it themselves! Nah, that’s crazy talk...
Here are a few pieces of friendly advice for Biden or whoever actually loads the speech onto his Teleprompter:
This time, as you call Trump “Hitler” and demonize half the population as threats to the state, try not to do it while waving your arms in front of a blood red backdrop festooned with military symbols. Also, stop saying you’re “protecting democracy” by pulling every underhanded, unconstitutional trick in the book to block Americans from voting for whomever they want. And finally, while I know this is likely beyond your abilities to comprehend, if you’re going to act like the leader of one-third of the federal government, at least please learn that we’re a republic, not a democracy.
If you force yourself to watch this clown show, please ponder the immortal words of H.L. Mencken as you do: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Related Must-Read: Vivek Ramaswamy dropped a ten-megaton truth bomb on a Washington Post reporter who was trying to push the Democrats’ “white supremacy” line on him. Because, naturally, nobody is whiter than Vivek Ramaswamy.
Trump appeals to SCOTUS on Colorado ballots; decision needed today!
On Wednesday, President Trump appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court a ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court that found him ineligible to be on the primary ballot in that state. Those justices, 4-3, claimed he engaged in and incited an “insurrection” on January 6, 2021, and is thus prevented by the 14th Amendment from running for any office.
It asks SCOTUS this question: “Did the Colorado Supreme Court err in ordering President Trump excluded from the 2024 presidential primary ballot?”
This appeal is no surprise to anyone who knows President Trump, and in case anyone misread him, his attorneys announced their intention shortly after the Colorado ruling. And on December 27, the Colorado GOP, joined by six voters and the secretary of state’s office, also filed a petition for immediate review by the Supreme Court.
The significance: President Trump remains on the ballot unless SCOTUS were to reject the petition by January 4 or otherwise rules against Trump.
January 4 --- that’s today!
Why so soon? In that state, it’s the day before certification of the ballots for the primary. January 5 is the deadline for the Colorado secretary of state to certify all those ballots, and it cannot be changed. Once they’re certified, no challenge is allowed. As they say, it is what it is.
Catherine Yang at THE EPOCH TIMES has an informative report on the President’s legal argument. They say that over the past few months, more than 60 (!) lawsuits and administrative challenges have been filed against him to keep him off the ballot. All of these are based on allegations that Trump engaged in insurrection and is therefore disqualified from holding office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
“First, the events of January 6, 2021, were not ‘insurrection’ as that term is used in Section 3,” Trump’s petition reads. The amendment was passed after the Civil War, and insurrection was understood to mean “the taking up of arms and waging war upon the United States,” they argued. More than 600,000 died in the war, and “focus on war-making” in the text was the “logical result.”
(As you certainly know, this amendment was ratified after the Civil War, to prevent those who had picked up their guns and literally waged war against the United States from serving in public office. And even they could be permitted that privilege again with a two-thirds vote of Congress.)
“By contrast, the United States has a long history of political protests that have turned violent. In the summer of 2020 alone, violent protestors targeted the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, for over 50 days, repeatedly assaulted federal officers and set fire to the courthouse, all in support of a purported political agenda opposed to the authority of the United States.”
They also argue that the courts don’t have jurisdiction on this question: “Indeed, every federal court that addressed this issue with regard to the eligibility of President Barack Obama, Senator John McCain, and Senator Ted Cruz held that the issue was for Congress and not the federal courts.”
Of course, you know that Maine Secretary of State Shanna Bellows singlehandedly decided that Trump couldn’t be on the GOP primary ballot up there. (And, gosh, something tells me she’s not even in the GOP!) Surely knowing how far over the line she had gone, she did at least put her dastardly plan on hold: “I will suspend the effect of my decision until the Supreme Court rules on any appeal or the time to appeal has expired.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/trump-takes-ballot-disqualification-battle-to-supreme-court
For when you have time, the NEW YORK POST has a more detailed story that we highly recommend…
Attorney General Bill Barr has made it clear he does not want Trump to get the GOP nomination, but said this week that “the efforts to knock him off the ballot are legally untenable, politically counterproductive, and, most ominously, destructive of our political order.” I wonder if he’s considered, though, that for the left, being “destructive of our political order” is not a bug; it’s a feature!
They also could backfire and help Trump, a scenario that, knowing Barr, likely motivates his words as well.
“As a legal matter,” he said, “states do not have the power to enforce the disqualification provision of the Fourteenth Amendment by using their own ad hoc procedures to find that an individual has engaged in an insurrection.” It’s Congress --- not the individual states ---who has the authority to do that, he said.
Our whole election system could “collapse in chaos,” he warned, if each state uses its own definition of insurrection and its own procedural standards to block candidates.
He had additional words of criticism, specifically for the left: “[This effort] is much like the left’s previous schemes to sidetrack or defeat Trump politically through legal ploys that stretched the law beyond its proper bounds...Nothing is more destructive to democracy than for one faction to try to win in the political arena by disenfranchising its adversaries.”
As you know, Special Counsel Jack Smith did not specifically charge Trump with insurrection, and he certainly would’ve done that if he thought it would stick. Instead, he charged him with four other felonies:
--- conspiracy to defraud the United States
--- “conspiracy against rights”
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/241
(If you read the description at the link, you’ll find it sounds very much like what Jack Smith is trying to do!)
--- conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding
--- “obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding”
The Supreme Court is going to be ruling on two of these charges soon, in the case United States v. (Joseph) Fischer (one of the OTHER J6 defendants)… As legal analyst Margot Cleveland says, ”It is likely a majority of the Supreme Court will rule that the ‘crimes’ the special counsel charged are not crimes at all.”
If you’d like to get into the weeds on statutory interpretation and how it relates to Trump’s J6 case, we recommend taking time with her article. Cleveland says a reasonable prosecutor would put the brakes on Trump’s criminal trial until the issues about these charges can be resolved by the Supreme Court, but that the special counsel and the district court “have both proven themselves anything but reasonable and have revealed their real goal is to obtain a conviction against Trump before the 2024 election, which is now less than a year away.” Smith may be trying Trump on charges that don’t even exist, she says, lamenting that half the country doesn’t seem to care.
An Open Letter to Prospective Harvard Students: “Don’t Even Think of Coming Here!”
By Kenneth Allard
If today you are thinking of attending Harvard in the fall of 2024 as a four-year undergraduate, a three-year law student or even a two-year year graduate student in one of the university’s pricey professional schools, can I ask you something? Before expending the time, money and effort needed to move your stuff to the Cambridge (MA) 02138 area code, let me briefly relate one of my first “lessons learned” as a grad student there nearly a half-century ago.
Walking into the austere elegance of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, I was greeted a small sign prominently displayed next to the only parking space for miles around: DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING HERE! That silent scream was effective. On these august grounds the newcomer had the immediate impression not only of academic rank (maybe the Dean Himself?) but also of larger political portents (Senator Edward Kennedy was even then preparing to run for Camelot II). Novices better watch your step, sample the ambience and see where you had landed. Hey, wasn’t that former Governor Mike Dukakis leading a class?
I eventually took a course with the affable former Governor, years before he went on to become a Democratic presidential candidate: But the Harvard of that day was an elite institution in every possible way. Truly distinguished scholars were everywhere. My foreign policy class was team-taught by Graham Allison (founding Dean) and Ambassador Joseph Nye. Professors Earnest May, Richard Neustadt and Thomas Schelling taught Presidential Politics; each having written definitive volumes on that subject. The unstated message to every student: Enjoy your access to these great and near-great scholars but in return give us your best. Like a prequel to The Paper Chase, Harvard demanded critical thinking on every paper and in every class. Fortunately, I had been honing these classic skills as an intelligence officer; my term paper for Allison and Nye even predicted the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan weeks before it happened.
The real tests, however, would come much later, while teaching cadets at West Point, advising the Army’s senior leadership, and serving as Dean of the National War College. When confronted by those complex realities, judgment is not contained in the briefing books prepared for a hearing or the painstaking position papers prepared by high-priced lawyers. Just one month ago, nothing that Claudine Gay relied on when congressional leaders called her to accountability would have been more effective than an honest answer, stripped bare of any self-serving platitudes. Of all people, shouldn’t a black woman have sympathized with the fears of a persecuted religious minority – and on the campus where she reigned supreme? After her egregious plagiarism finally caught up with her this week, any remaining questions about Ms. Gay were resolved by her resignation statement, which should have been entitled, “It’s All About Me.” (I stopped reading after her first paragraph, which used the I-word four times.)
But here is the crunch-point for anyone thinking about attending Harvard. How much institutional damage has Claudine Gay done – or is much of the iceberg still lurking beneath the surface? Even as the legacy media ruminated about “conservative entrapment,” Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square capital and a prominent Harvard donor, suddenly went public with a 4,000-word jeremiad on Twitter/X. After a blistering tutorial on DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), “a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard but the educational system at large,” Ackman charged that this ideology had corrupted Gay’s selection as president.
“The Corporation board…selected the wrong president and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership roles at the University since 2015…The Board failed to create a discrimination-free environment on campus exposing the University to tremendous reputational damage, to large legal and financial liabilities, Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the potential loss of Federal funding, all while damaging the learning environment for all students.”
He concluded, “It is time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment…”
https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1742441534627184760
Final point: While Bill Ackman deserves high praise for candor and courage, you may want to wait before booking that return cabin on the Titanic!
COL (Ret.) Ken Allard is a former West Point faculty member, Dean of the National War College and NBC News military analyst.
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