By Mike Huckabee
September 28, 2022
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BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee staff! Thank you for subscribing and I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter.
With gratitude,
Mike
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.
Psalm 42:11
If you have a favorite Bible Verse you want to see in one of our newsletters, please email [email protected].
Hurricane Ian
At this writing (early Wednesday morning), Hurricane Ian has strengthened almost to category 5 level and is about 40 miles from slamming into western Florida sooner than expected, bringing torrential rains, winds of over 150 mph, high storm surges and potential tornadoes. It’s likely to make landfall near Tampa. Gov. DeSantis said this morning that anyone who had not yet evacuated has waited too long and needs to shelter in place, in the safest indoor space available.
About 100,000 Floridians are already without power at this time, but DeSantis said there are 30,000 linemen standing by to get the electricity back on as soon as the storm has passed. He said many of them are from out of state, and 26 states are joining in the effort as well as FEMA, so it’s a massive national response.
Here’s a link to Fox News’ continually-updated news on the hurricane.
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/hurricane-ian-tracker-2022-news-path-weather-09-28-2022
I hope you will join me in praying for those in the path of the storm, and for those who have evacuated but may be coming back to find devastating losses to their homes. Remember that a donation to Samaritan’s Purse will help bring swift aide to those who are hardest hit:
http://www.samaritanspurse.org
Despite the inspiring news of so many Americans coming together to help Florida, I could also comment on some of the stories that were circulating earlier about those who are cynically attempting to make political hay from a catastrophic hurricane. There was every take from blaming a hurricane forming in Hurricane Alley on “climate change” to President Biden calling local mayors but not Gov. DeSantis, to liberals openly hoping for lots of damage they could blame on DeSantis. But frankly, they all disgust me too much even to want to talk about them.
If you see a deadly storm bearing down on large numbers of your fellow Americans and the first thing you think about is how it might advantage or disadvantage you politically, then you need to shelter in place for a while, and think and pray long and hard on what a horrible human being you have become.
Impeachment book: Nadler admitted it was unconstitutional
Well, here’s the latest addition to the category of “Headlines I Never Thought I’d See”…
Not that Trump’s first sham impeachment trial wasn’t unconstitutional; we know it was, and so do they. But did Jerry Nadler actually admit this? The headline says “reportedly” --- could the report be wrong? News reports are often wrong, but not the ones from PJ MEDIA.
Who could forget Trump’s first impeachment, based on a phony-baloney “whistleblower” complaint about a phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy? The complaint completely mischaracterized the call –- fortunately, Trump released the transcript –- fraudulently making it seem as though Trump were pressuring Zelenskyy into investigating Joe Biden, his potential rival in the 2020 election.
Trump had not done that, and even if he had, it likely would have paled in comparison to what the Biden administration routinely does now to damage Trump, Biden’s potential rival in the 2024 election. It’s all incredibly egregious Third-World stuff that we don’t have to go into again right now.
Anyway, a report on a forthcoming book by Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian, of POLITICO and the WASHINGTON POST, respectively, reveals that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler was decidedly not on board with the way House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Select Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff planned to handle the impeachment. Keep in mind that you can’t judge a book by its cover --- more on that below --- but the title of this one is a winner: UNCHECKED: THE UNTOLD STORY BEHIND CONGRESS’S BOTCHED IMPEACHMENTS OF DONALD TRUMP.
According to this book, Nadler took issue with Schiff about how they were planning to proceed with impeachment without due process for Trump. (Now, there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.)
According to the book, Nadler confronted Schiff and said that “it’s unfair, it’s unprecedented, and it’s unconstitutional.” It says that Nadler had many concerns.
The book says that Schiff responded, “I don’t appreciate your tone...I worry you’re putting us in a box for our investigation.” If only there really had been a big box for Schiff and Pelosi, secured with a strong padlock. Oh, we’d leave a few air holes. On second thought, maybe just one little hole, so they’d have to share.
It seems from this account that Nadler actually put up a good fight. It says that “Nadler went out of his way to prove that in previous impeachments, the Presidents who were accused at least had the chance, through their attorneys, to face their accusers and mount a defense in front of the Judiciary Committee.”
Yet recall that when Nadler went before the cameras, he gave no hint of any of these behind-the-scenes conflicts. One thing about Democrats: party always comes first! Remember this next time Nadler goes before cameras again to say anything at all.
Side note: Adam Schiff really does not come off well here. But then, he never does.
The full story is a must-read. It’s easy now to understand how Pelosi could’ve gone as far as she has to undermine due process in her January 6 Kangaroo Kourt. Crushing her political enemies in any way possible is second nature to her, like breathing, and the two impeachments of President Trump were just a warm-up for this.
FOX NEWS has more, with the specifics of some of those conversations.
By the way, in case you were wondering how writers from POLITICO and the WASHINGTON POST could have written a book that acknowledges injustices done to Trump, I think the following promotional blurb will clear that up: “A revealing, behind-the-scenes examination of how Congress twice fumbled its best chance to hold accountable a President many considered one of the most dangerous in American history.”
Seems as though their real concern isn’t that Trump faced injustices –- only that those injustices got in the way of holding Trump “accountable.” Accountable for what?
Speaking of the J6 Kangaroo Kommittee, they'd planned to have a hearing today (Wednesday), but it’s been postponed. The reason given is that Hurricane Ian is bearing down on Florida today. But apparently, it’s not the unseemliness of holding this political event during a national emergency that made them change it. It’s more the concern that news coverage of the hurricane would pull focus away from their sham “investigation.”
Maybe it’s also because they knew we’d be speculating on which event produced the most wind.
Over 1 million Americans switched political parties
Ronald Reagan once famously said that he used to be a Democrat, and he didn’t leave the party, it left him. In recent years, the Democratic Party has taken such a large, sudden lurch to the far-left lunatic fringe that a lot of longtime Democrats are finding themselves in the same situation as Reagan.
The New York Post reports on some of these new, possibly slightly reluctant, Republicans and how many there are. According to the A.P., over 1 million voters across 43 states have switched from Democrat to Republican, while both major parties now account for just over a quarter of voters each and nearly half say they’re Independents.
https://nypost.com/2022/09/24/some-registered-democrats-sick-of-the-left-are-switching-sides/
One of the big problems for many people, especially young people, with today’s Democrats is that they’ve become the party of censorship, using wokeness as a weapon to silence anyone who says anything that might “trigger” their ultra-sensitive feelings. They’re also fed up with constantly being told that they have to adopt ridiculous new words, like “Latinx,” that nobody likes, especially not Latinos.
Speaking of that absurd term, even the loony leftists at Salon.com can apparently read the Spanish writing on the wall and are abandoning it.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/salon-commentary-cancels-term-latinx-inclusive-enough
Naturally, they still can’t admit that it offends many Hispanics and, as Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego complained, is a “performative” term created “to appease white rich progressives who think that is the term we use. It is a vicious circle of confirmation bias." Read the article to hear how some so-called “progressives” (including AOC, of course) continue to cluelessly defend “Latinx” as a “gender-fluid” “middle finger to the patriarchy,” and “a word that demands inclusion.”
Sorry, you tried including it – actually, you tried forcing it on everyone -- and Latinos excluded it. So get over it and stop being idioxes.
Durham: you MUST reverse course to save our country
Margot Cleveland, a legal analyst we greatly respect and have quoted here many times, is offering a strong caution after seeing a court filing made Friday by special counsel John Durham in the Igor Danchenko criminal case. It suggests to her that he’s ignoring the FBI’s malfeasance in targeting President Trump in “Crossfire Hurricane,” allowing the partisan deep state to go unpunished. Not only does this approach jeopardize his case against Danchenko, she says, but it encourages the further weaponization of the ‘justice’ system. (Could it get even worse? Oh, yes.)
It was then-Attorney General Bill Barr who, waaaay back in May of 2019 B.C. (Before Covid), appointed Durham, then U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to be the special counsel. Three prosecutions have resulted: 1) Michael Sussmann, who was SHOWN in court to be guilty of lying to the FBI about not representing any client –- in fact, he billed Hillary’s campaign –- in coming to them with the fake Alfa Bank story but, to no one’s surprise, was acquitted anyway by a DC jury; 2) Igor Danchenko, the main source for the fake Steele “dossier” who awaits trial next month on charges of lying to the FBI; and, 3) Kevin Clinesmith, the former FBI attorney who falsified part of an email used in the warrant application to spy on Trump associate Carter Page.
That should have been a BIG DEAL, indicative of the rock-bottom standards this whole group of low-life prosecutors had in (yes) framing Trump. But for his enormously impactful dishonesty, Clinesmith took a plea agreement that gave him 12 months’ probation and 400 hours of community service, probably teaching legal ethics. Okay, we made that last part up. But it really was just a slap on the wrist.
On October 24, Danchenko goes to trial on five counts of lying to the FBI about his role as Christopher Steele’s “primary sub-source.” But Danchenko, in a motion to dismiss filed this month, is arguing his lies were not “material” to the case, saying that Crossfire Hurricane agents never intended to drop their investigation of Donald Trump, and therefore any lies he told the FBI did not affect their decision-making.”
He surely has a point about the FBI’s decision-making, as they were set on getting Trump no matter what he told them, but as Cleveland explains, a lie, to be “material,” does not have to influence the agency’s decision-making process. It only has to be “capable” of doing so: “The question is whether the lie was capable of influencing how a hypothetically ‘objective’ government official would have acted had they known the truth.”
(Aside: We truly are working with hypotheticals here, as these government officials have shown themselves to be anything but objective.)
According to Cleveland, Durham isn’t likely to convince a jury that Danchenko’s alleged lies were capable of influencing decisions made by objective FBI agents –- UNLESS he makes it clear to them that the reason these agents wouldn’t have been influenced is because they were NOT objective and were ALREADY OUT TO GET TRUMP. That is the truth, and we all know it, but the jury has to understand it or else Danchenko’s argument against “materiality” will stand. Cleveland says other pre-trial filings from the past 10 days show that Durham has no intention of taking that tack.
Two words for Durham: Why not??
Cleveland speculates, pointing out that both Barr and Durham have avoided opportunities to prosecute others who likely engaged in criminal activity. To cite just one example, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was not prosecuted for lying about a leak to the media and is now lying regularly on MSNBC. In turn, MSNBC lies about him. Why, he and former Director James Comey are victims...
Cleveland doesn’t think, however, that Barr’s motivation is to cover up wrongdoing. But she does see his rationalization for letting people skate as something that doesn’t work any longer.
We’ve been scratching our heads about what is going on with Barr lately, and I encourage you to read Cleveland’s theory. Pulling from some of his writings, she believes he considers “the pathology of our age” to be the belief hat “simply because circumstances suggest wrongdoing, some set of people should go to prison for a crime.” Barr said in his memoir that “not all censurable conduct is criminal,” adding that “the current tendency to conflate the foolish with the legally culpable causes more harm than good.”
He promised that ‘justice’ would not be “a tit-for-tat exercise.” He did not want to see the criminal ‘justice’ system used for partisan political ends. “The only way to stop this vicious cycle,” he wrote, “the only way to break away from a dual system of justice, is to make sure we scrupulously apply the single and proper standard of justice for everybody.”
Cleveland presumes that since Durham was appointed by Barr, he shares Barr’s opinion on that. But it turned out to be wrong. They're both WRONG.
Prosecutorial discretion is not the same as a cover-up, Cleveland says. These trials are exposing many significant details relating to the Russia Hoax, and we know there’s more to come, especially with the news that Danchenko’s FBI handler will be testifying at his trial. “Durham’s speaking indictments in the Sussmann and Danchenko cases establish that the special counsel will expose the malfeasance of the DOJ and FBI and their complicity with the Clinton campaign and other politically motivated actors.” Look for everything to be in the final report.
The problem, though, is that “Barr and Durham’s high-minded approach did not stop the vicious cycle,” she says. Instead, their “tepid” approach “emboldened” the deep state to target more political enemies. As Cleveland puts it, since Biden’s been in office, they’ve “gone nuclear” with their targeting. (We’d add that January 6 is now their convenient pretext.) Some of their more recent activities make Crossfire Hurricane look like child’s play she says. The DOJ has not learned by Barr’s example to apply a single standard of justice to all. No, they’ve gotten worse! (We’d add that this observation jibes with the earlier point that the idea of an objective ‘justice’ system is now of necessity hypothetical.)
Cleveland points out that the weaponization of the DOJ/FBI goes far beyond Trump, including his family, others in his immediate orbit, his friends and supporters, and expanding to include “election deniers,” “domestic terrorist” parents at school board meetings and members of nonprofits who have unapproved opinions about abortion, transgender surgery, etc. The circle gets wider and wider.
So, the Barr-Durham approach backfired. If there was any question before, now the Democrats think they own the DOJ and FBI and are acting on that assumption. And the agents and attorneys that get outed by whistleblowers –- Tim Thibault, Brian Auten, etc. –- remain unscathed.
Cleveland says that “what seemed judicious three-and-a-half years ago proves foolhardy today because Barr and Durham’s discretion taught the left only one lesson: There will be no consequences to those who abuse the system to attack conservatives."
Is it too late? Cleveland says that to save our country, the special counsel needs to reverse course and file every possible charge against everyone complicit in the Russia Hoax and its investigation.
I JUST WANTED TO SAY:
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