By Mike Huckabee
December 19, 2023
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BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team!
Read my newsletter online here:
Mike Huckabee
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
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I started this newsletter back in the fall of 2016 just ahead of President Trump's election over Hillary Clinton. Since then, I have chronicled his presidency, a nation grappling with COVID, woke ideology, elections, more elections, Congress and finally Joe Biden's presidency.
My team and I like to say that we read the news, so you don't have to. We spend late nights and early mornings, finding news we think is important for you to read, and then we add our two cents and sometimes three cents to help frame things.
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Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
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Here’s today’s link to continually-updated news on the war in Israel from Fox News…
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/december-19-israel-hamas-war
Among today’s top stories:
Israel reports that a strike in Gaza has killed Subhi Ferwana, a prominent financier who funneled tens of millions of dollars through his business to Hamas to support its terrorist activities.
Israel is being pressured by the UN to stop its raids of hospitals, but the IDF says Hamas is using hospitals as hiding places and ammo storage facilities and has tunnels underneath them to use them as shields.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with Israeli officials Monday and reaffirmed U.S. support for Israel, saying he was "not here to dictate timelines of terms."
The US has begun an operation with a number of other nations to secure shipping in the Red Sea against attacks by Houthi militants in Yemen.
While Israel is facing demands for an immediate ceasefire, an IDF paratrooper named Shahar appeared on Fox News’ "America's Newsroom" Monday to explain why that is "not an option." He said:
"If we cease fire, it means that Israel ceases fire. Hamas is just going to regroup and do October 7 again and again and again until someone in the world or Israel can ensure that this never happens again and ensures that the education system, the radical jihadist education system that keeps growing up more and more terrorists, is eradicated."
If you haven’t seen it, Bill Maher made some leftist heads explode over the weekend with a segment on his TV show explaining why the students chanting “From the river to the sea” are “useful idiots,” and why many previous attempts to negotiate a peaceful two-state solution failed. It was because the Palestinian leaders refused. Maher explained in blunt terms that you can’t negotiate with someone whose unshakeable position is “You all die and disappear.”
I just arrived in Israel for a quick trip to visit with Israeli officials and survivors of the Oct 7 massacre and families of the hostages. It’s hard to describe the savage brutality inflicted by Hamas terrorists. We will let these dear friends in Israel know that they do not stand alone!
Message to the GOP: Turn out every vote
I always warn people not to listen to polls, especially polls taken a year in advance of an election. Right now, polls show Trump pulling ahead of Biden in key swing states, but there are two factors they don’t take into account:
1. Biden may not be the nominee, particularly not if his approval ratings keep sinking to new record lows, with 53% of Americans now saying his policies have harmed them personally. Of course, the media will not tell voters that any replacement of Biden will just double down on the same failed leftist policies…
2. In certain swing states controlled by Democrats, there has been a long process of institutionalizing vote fraud and destroying any attorneys who dare bring cases challenging elections. Here’s a story about a key swing state that Trump may already have lost, and it’s still 11 months until anyone even votes.
I don’t tell you these things to bum you out, just to warn you not to let polls make you complacent. There is no way Democrats are going to give up power, especially to Trump, without fighting like rabid badgers and pulling out every dirty trick imaginable. Republicans had better be working like mad to turn out every vote and be prepared for any contingency.
Hunter pledges to leave the country if Trump is elected
The latest semi-celebrity to claim he will leave the country if Donald Trump is elected is Hunter Biden. Problem: When you’re under indictment, fleeing the country is a felony. Authorities might want to take that “flight risk” aspect into account when deciding whether he should be running around loose.
https://www.westernjournal.com/hunter-biden-may-commit-crime-trump-gets-re-elected-2024-report/
On the other hand, if he’s like most famous Democrats, his threats to leave the country if Trump is elected are likely meaningless. Cher claimed she was going to move to Jupiter if Trump became President, but she’s still in California, which admittedly is as close to another planet as you can get.
There are some hopeful signs that the Bill of Rights is at least still clinging to life support in the court system:
After a six-year court battle, the liberal city of East Lansing, Michigan, has been ordered by a federal judge to pay $1.1 million in damages and legal fees for violating the First Amendment rights of Christian farmer Stephen Tennes by banning him from the city farmers’ market because he declined to host same-sex weddings on his family farm, Country Mill Farms.
Former US Navy Chief Gary Formhals was a volunteer and part-time employee with the Washington State Park system for over 10 years until one park visitor complained that she was outraged that his car had two Trump bumper stickers, which she described as “insurrectionalist.” The American Center for Law and Justice sued to protect his First Amendment rights. The parks department folded and agreed to rewrite its policies to protect volunteers’ free speech rights.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/12/victory-park-volunteer-fired-trump-bumper-stickers/
And the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously reinstated a lawsuit thrown out by a lower court in which four Connecticut female high school athletes sued the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference for letting males who “identify” as females compete against them. The Court found that the female athletes did plausibly state “an injury in fact” by having their records, trophies and scholarships taken away by physically superior males.
https://www.wnd.com/2023/12/scarred-court-restores-girls-claims-injury-boys-athletics/
The Court also ruled "that the alleged injury is plausibly redressable by monetary and injunctive relief." I hope it’s big monetary relief, enough to shock the CIAC and related organizations into waking up out of their woke coma and recognizing biological reality.
Fleeing DC
The latest businesses to flee the disastrous governance of Democrats are the Washington Wizards basketball team and the Washington Capitals hockey team, both of which announced plans to move from downtown DC to a new sports venue in Virginia as soon as 2028. As this story makes clear, it wasn’t just due to financial inducements. Nobody wants to come to downtown DC anymore because thanks to leftwing city leaders, it’s like a crime-ridden war zone.
The move is expected to cost surrounding businesses $25 million a year in lost revenue, but I’d bet they’re already losing far more than that just to shoplifting.
Connecticut reverses course
The Democrat Governor of Connecticut is abandoning his plan to follow California’s lead in mandating that all passenger vehicles sold be electric by 2035. Aside from the fact that “following California’s lead” is right up there with “If Billy jumped off the Empire State Building, would YOU jump off the Empire State Building?” in sheer stupidity, there’s also this inherent logic problem:
You can mandate all day long that only electric cars will be sold, but you can’t mandate that people buy them. California already tried that years ago and had to back off when they realized the public wasn’t buying, but now they’re trying it again. It’s the foundational principle of leftist politics: “If at first a policy doesn’t succeed, try and fail and try and fail and try and fail again.”
The Decline of American Strength:
From “Don’t Tread On Me” to the Biden White House warning North Korea that nuking America would be “unacceptable.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-warns-north-korea-that-nuking-america-is-unacceptable/
Not going away anytime soon
The UN Climate Conference in Dubai is over. And despite all the high-flown rhetoric about ending fossil fuels and flying on battery-powered airplanes charged by windmills and unicorn flatulence, activists who keep gluing themselves to things will be disappointed to learn that even the attendees at this conference eventually had to bow to the reality that fossil fuels are not going away anytime soon.
Must-Read Column:
To nobody’s surprise, Harvard’s (Should-be-fired-but-won’t-be) President Claudine Gay and her defenders have resorted to blaming racism for criticism of her being a blatant plagiarist and public apologist for violent anti-Semites. Never mind that the white Presidents of UPenn and MIT faced the same calls for their firings after their joint House testimony, and the only one that’s already gone is the president of UPenn. And she's not even a plagiarist (that we know of.)
Derek Hunter at Townhall.com has noticed, as have millions of Americans, the way elitist minority Democrats have learned to blame racism for any criticism and to tell other minority members that they can’t get ahead because America is irredeemably, fundamentally, systemically racist – even as they personally amass huge amounts of power, money and prestige in a system allegedly designed to “keep them down.”
Gay is hardly the only example of this staggering hypocrisy he cites, and not even the only one who has prospered hugely by denouncing all white people as oppressors while also being married to a white spouse. Let’s hope that Hunter is correct when he suggests that the number of people who fall for rich racist hypocrites claiming to be victims of racism “is getting smaller and smaller every year.”
Related: Excellent article by Andrew Sullivan on his hopes that the shocking House testimony by the three elite university presidents who couldn’t bring themselves to condemn violent anti-Semitism could finally be “the day the empress’ clothes fall off” and everyone finally sees clearly what these elite schools have become.
For all those who are shocked by these liberal schools where “words are violence” if they’re words leftists disagree with, but violence is free speech if it’s aimed at conservatives or Jews, Sullivan explains that it’s not a double standard. Thanks to the mind virus of “DEI,” he says, “There is a single standard: It is fine to malign, abuse and denigrate ‘oppressors’ and forbidden to do so against the ‘oppressed.’” By declaring the Jews to be oppressors and Palestinians to be the oppressed, they’ve just cut-and-pasted their anti-white template to use it against Israel.
Biden’s decency
The Senate staffer who videotaped himself having sex with his gay partner in a Senate hearing room has lost his job, and of course, blames it on homophobes condemning him for “who he loves,” rather than where he loves him. Like Hunter Biden blaming all his alleged crimes on Republicans, he’s just the latest Democrat to play the victim card and act as if laws don’t apply to him. But here are some laws that just might apply to him.
A salute to Kevin Downey Jr. at PJ Media for reminding us that Joe Biden, whose Administration and Party have brought us homemade gay porn in the Senate, professional gay porn in schools, drag queens twerking in small children’s faces, “trans” women flashing their fake breasts at a White House event and biological males parading around naked in high school girls’ locker rooms, ran for President in 2020 on a promise to “bring back decency.” If this is “decency,” I’d hate to see indecency.
Tear down is temporarily blocked
UPDATE: Yesterday, I reported that the Biden Defense Department was about to start tearing down the Reconciliation Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery because it honored Confederate soldiers. But at the last minute, Trump-appointed Judge Rossie Alston Jr. issued a temporary stay and ordered the demolition halted at least until Wednesday so that historic organizations that are suing to protect it can make their case.
Grayson Bakich at PJ Media not only has more details but some great, must-read observations, including the fact that this isn’t a monument to the Confederacy. It was erected by Woodrow Wilson in 1914 to commemorate national reconciliation and the healing of divisions after the Civil War (you can see why the Biden people would want to destroy that; stoking divisions is how they attain political power.)
He also notes that to show how far America really has progressed since the Civil War (despite Democrats’ claims to the contrary), Judge Alston is black, and he preserved the monument. Meanwhile, it was the Democrats who started the Confederacy and the Civil War and fought Abe Lincoln and the Republicans to maintain slavery, yet they now pretend that it was the Republicans who not only backed the Confederacy but still support slavery. And one commenter makes the great point that for the Democrats, attempting to erase all traces of the Confederacy isn’t so much historical revisionism as an attempt to destroy the evidence.
HUGE: “missing binder” may expose underlying reason for Mar-A-Lago raid
Longtime newsletter readers will recall that when the Mar-A-Lago raid took place --- August 8, 2022, a date which shall live in infamy --- we speculated about what the FBI might REALLY have been looking for with their armed invasion of the former President’s home over air, land and sea. After all, if a President has the power to declassify documents (and he does), what’s the big deal about having them in a secure location while details are being worked out with the National Archives regarding their ultimate location? The raid seemed like an outrageous overreaction. Could it have been, at least in part, a cover operation to try to retrieve something in particular?
Some observers suggested at the time that Trump, for his own protection, might have taken documents that showed in greater detail what the deep state --- yes, we use that term without hesitation --- had been up to with “Crossfire Hurricane” to frame him as a Russian agent. After all, if this had been done to you and you were on your way out the White House door, wouldn’t you want to leave with whatever documentation you could get your hands on?
On Friday, CNN ran a story that certainly brought back less-than-fond memories of the Mar-A-Lago raid and our speculations at the time. Dan Bongino brought up the story on his Monday podcast and radio show, saying it tells him that the White House, by leaking this to some of the intel community’s most cooperative scribes such as Natasha Bertrand, is “really trying to get out ahead of something” that’s about to break. Their piece is called “The Mystery of the Missing Binder.”
The subhead: “How a collection of raw intelligence disappeared under Trump.”
As CNN reported, “A binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.”
They went on to say that the loss of this top secret binder was so concerning that intel officials briefed Senate Intelligence Committee leaders about it last year. These members of Congress and their aides with top-secret clearance were able to review copies of its contents only at CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia.
So what on earth was supposed to be inside this 10-inch-thick binder? According to CNN, “The binder contained raw intelligence the U.S. and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the US government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election, sources tell CNN.”
Ah-ha. Here we go with Trump/Russia, all over again! Dictated by an “official source” to one of their most dependable media outlets.
CNN reported that the binder was last seen at the White House “during Trump’s final days in office,” under the care of White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Trump had wanted to declassify a number of documents “related to the FBI’s Russia investigation.” But Trump administration officials, they said, had repeatedly tried to block him from doing it, due to the ultra-sensitive nature of the raw intelligence on Russia.
As CNN tells it, things got contentious about this declassification on Trump’s chaotic last day in office. Trump issued an order (editorial aside: as was his right as President), and instructed that multiple copies be made and distributed to DC Republicans and right-wing journalists, but White House attorneys scrambled to have them gathered up again for additional redactions (!). Just before Biden was inaugurated, Meadows took a redacted version to the “Justice” Department for one last review, but that copy has still not seen the light of day. “Additional copies with varying levels of redactions ended up at the National Archives,” according to CNN.
BUT...there’s reportedly an unredacted version, supposedly containing all that super-sensitive raw intelligence on Russia, that went missing that day. “The circumstances regarding its disappearance remain shrouded in mystery,” CNN said.
Their anonymous source --- “a U.S. official familiar with the matter” --- told them the binder was not found at Mar-A-Lago when the FBI raided it. And for what it’s worth (exactly nothing), this person also said that when they applied for the search warrant, the FBI was not specifically looking for information regarding Russia.
Of course, we know the FBI would never lie in a warrant application.
“Despite fierce opposition from his own national security officials,” CNN reported, “Trump spent years trying to declassify material that he said would prove his claims the FBI’s Russia probe into his campaign was a hoax.” What CNN fails to mention is that we now have plenty of evidence proving just that.
In June, the “Justice” Department sought to dismiss a lawsuit by John Solomon by saying they’d already posted “most of the binder” on the FBI’s FOIA website. But Solomon claimed the FBI had released only a small and highly-redacted portion of the binder’s contents. In July, Meadows said in an interview with Solomon that he had turned over the documents he had --- which he made clear had been DECLASSIFIED BY TRUMP --- to the DOJ with the expectation that they would be disseminated. They still haven’t been.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-russia-intelligence-trump-dg/
Other news (“news”) outlets such as THE NEW YORK TIMES have run with this story, with NEWSWEEK even reporting that estranged niece Mary Trump says President Trump may have “sold” the binder to Russia. This is how low “journalism” has sunk, folks. “There’s no evidence showing Trump sold anything to Russia,” the NEWSWEEK STORY does finally get around to saying. Apparently, the headline writer didn’t read down that far.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-may-have-sold-classified-binder-russiamary-trump-1853058
Bongino says he’s got some insider information, which we personally would trust much more than an allegation from Mary Trump. Some say that portions of the binder are “largely just some regurgitated kind of stuff you could’ve found in press releases,” but other sources have hinted to him that the binder may contain “damning information.” Not about Russian interference to help Trump, though.
His sources tell him it was Russian interference to help HILLARY. To help the FBI GET Trump. Just the opposite of what we were told for years.
Bongino says he can almost guarantee that part of that binder is “fake Russian intelligence that the FBI fell for.” The FBI was then tasked with “getting Hillary clean” before the election so then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch could let the case against her go.
This would help explain the unexplainable --- then-FBI Director James Comey’s bizarre press conference on July 5, 2016, in which he got out in front of Hillary’s various wrongdoings (mishandling thousands of classified emails, destroying evidence, etc.) and then short-circuited the case against her by saying “no reasonable prosecutor” would take the case. She was no longer blackmail-able, and her campaign was good to go.
“The FBI does not want you to see this,” Bongino said, “and someone on the Trump team may have it.”
Why did they leak this story to CNN? They’re seeing the polls and realizing with desperation that Trump may actually get back to the White House. So even though he declassified the binder, they now want to accuse him of “stealing” it. Plus, with Jack Smith and all the lawfare, they’re doing all they can to keep him off the ticket.
We’ve included the link to Bongino’s podcast; he starts talking about this at 37:00. There’s just one question it would be great for him to answer: If Trump has the binder, why hasn’t he gone ahead and released it? He’s had it three years. Is it his ace? Why does he need to be back in the White House to play that card?
https://bongino.com/ep-2152-they-just-said-the-quiet-part-out-loud
Still, our theory at the time of the Mar-A-Lago raid --- that the FBI was trying to get back some exculpatory “Russia” material that Trump had declassified and kept for his own protection --- is very likely the case. More to come.
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