By Mike Huckabee
September 7, 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
Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.
Romans 12:12
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More cover-up by the FBI of the Biden family business
Even though just-retired FBI agent Timothy Thibault’s attorneys have said he had no involvement with the Hunter Biden case, he apparently was “point man” on it and deep-sixed the information provided by Hunter’s business associate Tony Bobulinski, according to the NEW YORK POST’s Miranda Devine, who broke the original laptop story shortly before the 2020 election.
Devine has learned that days after her story broke, Bobulinski, a decorated naval officer and very credible witness with a top-secret security clearance, was actually interviewed by four FBI agents for five-and-a-half hours about then-candidate Joe Biden’s knowledge of his son’s business dealings. He gave them “chapter and verse,” she says. This was the day after Bobulinski gave his press conference saying the elder Biden was “the Big Guy” who was to receive 10 percent of the proceeds from a deal with Chinese energy company CEFC. An email to that effect had been found on the laptop, and Bobulinski told the FBI he personally had met with the former Vice President twice about the CEFC deal.
Bobulinski also turned over to the FBI three cellphones with encrypted messages among Hunter Biden and his business associates, plus emails and financial documents for what we like to call “Biden, Inc.” He and his attorney were given Thibault’s cellphone number and were told he would be their “point man” at the FBI. They never heard from Thibault again.
Everything Bobulinski gave them appears to have gone down a black hole. There supposedly is an investigation going on into Hunter Biden’s financial dealings at the FBI field office in Baltimore and the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware, but, unbelievably, Bobulinski has never been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury that was convened in Delaware last year.
Miranda Devine has more details of Bobulinski’s FBI interview.
The big take-aways from Judge Cannon's "special master"
In our coverage yesterday about Judge Aileen Cannon’s order for a presumably neutral “special master” to examine the documents seized from Mar-A-Lago, we mentioned a few of her turns of phrase that have since been discussed by top legal analysts. First on the list is that President Biden is a big pants-on-fire liar (our words) for saying he hadn’t been briefed and knew nothing.
As Margot Cleveland explains, “Monday’s order highlighted a key sentence” from the letter that had been sent by the acting head of the National Archives, Debra Steidel Wall, to Trump’s attorneys “that went less noticed by the press.” In that letter, Steidel Wall stated that Biden had decided to defer to the archivist’s “determination, in consultation with the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, regarding whether or not [she, the archivist] should uphold the former President’s purported “protective assertion of executive privilege.” She said she’d decided not to honor Trump’s claim of privilege.
We see from this letter that Biden had to have been briefed about this, since, at least according to the acting archivist, he made the decision to defer to her. Indeed –- and this is what we pointed out yesterday –- Judge Cannon’s order included this revelation from Steidel Wall: “NARA will provide the FBI access to the records in question, AS REQUESTED BY THE INCUMBENT PRESIDENT [emphasis ours], beginning as early as May 12, 2022.”
Again, Biden = huge, monumental liar. But we already knew that.
Cleveland puts it less bluntly, focusing on Biden’s direct role rather than the White House’s reeking dishonesty about it: “This language indicates that Biden did not merely defer to the NARA but asked the NARA to give the documents to the FBI. Of course, deferring to the NARA’s judgment equated to Biden authorizing the hand-off to the FBI, but this passage suggests a more direct connection between Biden and the investigation into Trump.”
Another revelation comes through the timeline provided in Judge Cannon’s order, From 2022:
May 10 – acting archivist writes the above letter to Trump’s attorneys
May 11 – DOJ obtains grand jury subpoena for ALL Trump documents marked classified
May 12 – the start date for the FBI to provide investigators with documents (those first 15 boxes)
Cleveland asks the question, WHY would the DOJ subpoena “any and all” of Trump’s documents before even seeing the boxes he was about to turn over? Also, since Biden had already requested that the archivist provide Trump’s documents to the FBI, was it Biden who directed the DOJ to get the grand jury subpoena for everything? We don’t know, but that would certainly explain this timeline.
Cleveland also notes that the judge’s order reflects her thinking that the denial by Biden of Trump’s right to executive privilege is not so cut-and-dried as the DOJ would like us to assume. Judge Cannon wrote that the Biden administration’s position “arguably overstates the law,” noting that the Supreme Court has not ruled out “the possibility of a former President overcoming an incumbent President on executive privilege matters.” (And let’s hope they allow for that, or else no former President is safe from the wrath of an incumbent from the other political party.)
As Cleveland notes, this observation paves the way for Trump to assert executive privilege, prompting a legal showdown with the Biden administration.
Up next, something else we’ve been harping on here: members of the DOJ’s investigative team have already seen confidential attorney-client documents. The raid was a month ago, and since then we’ve been imagining Lisa Monaco, Avril Haines and their minions rummaging through every bit of material carted from Trump’s house, their eager eyes scanning every line of communication to or from Trump’s attorneys. The Mother Lode! One of the reasons they’d opposed the appointment of a “special master” was that they’d had their own in-house “Privilege Review Team” going through the documents first and didn’t need what they called “another round of screening.” Sure they don’t. We’ve already discussed the problems with these “taint teams,” which are made up of the investigators’ colleagues.
Judge Cannon cited a couple of examples wherein the review from this team was faulty and “potentially privileged” material was seen by two investigators, who should have been “walled off” from the investigation at that point but, as far as anyone had told the judge, were not. That’s not something the “special master” can address, she said, but that person can at least determine if OTHER documents were privileged. “If so,” she writes, “the DOJ will have bigger problems.”
It looks to us as though the motto of this investigation should be “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.” And they don’t seem to care much about forgiveness, either.
Next, Cleveland points out that Judge Cannon’s order makes clear the staggering amount of Trump’s personal material seized by the Biden administration. Some was “readily identified as personal property” and was “without evidentiary value.” A search warrant is supposed to be specific; this was a fishing expedition that swept up three passports, clothing, medical records (!), and accounting and tax documents.
Our next take-away comes not from the judge’s order but from government filings referenced in it. One of these reveals that the special agent in charge of NARA’s Office of the Inspector General had made a criminal referral on Trump to the DOJ (!) over a document returned to NARA that had been torn up at some point. To the nimble legal mind of Margot Cleveland, this screams “witch hunt,” and she notes that the reference to torn-up documents wasn’t even included in the affidavit for the warrant, at least the part left unredacted. And there’s no justification for redacting that, considering that information was included in another briefing. In Cleveland’s words, “...maybe the DOJ realized that using torn documents as a pretext to search the home of a former President would paint the raid as political –- because it sure does make the special agent in charge’s referral look political.”
Finally, in explaining her decision to appoint a “special master,” Judge Cannon cited the incredible amount of leaking that has gone in with this case. She noted that a government attorney had acknowledged the existence of these “unfortunate” leaks (!) but stated he “had no knowledge” of any leaks stemming from his team. (As if they could have come from anywhere else.) As Cleveland points out, these “unfortunate” leaks point to how politicized this investigation is, for the Mar-A-Lago raid has sprung more leaks just in the past three weeks than than have escaped from John Durham’s special counsel team in three years.
"Take the Gen. Hayden Challenge": an update
Not long ago, I ran a commentary called “Take the Gen. Hayden Challenge” after former CIA head Gen. Michael Hayden had re-tweeted a post from British ‘journalist’ Edward Luce saying, “I’ve covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world over my career. Have never come across a political force more nihilistic, dangerous and contemptible than today’s Republicans. Nothing close.”
Gen. Hayden, when he re-tweeted, added this: “I agree. And I was the CIA Director.
Gen. Hayden had previously re-tweeted a picture of convicted-and-executed Russian spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg with the caption, “Sounds about right,” apparently meaning execution for Trump as a traitor.
We made scathing fun of Gen. Hayden --- which he well deserved --- calling this gasbag “Exhibit A for what has gone wrong with our out-of-control intel community.” “He’s delusional, suffering from ‘long TDS,’” we said, “and needs to quarantine himself until he gets over it, if he ever does. He also should lock away his phone, as President Trump isn’t the only one who invites criticism for his mean tweets.”
Then we urged all who feel this way to take the Gen. Hayden Challenge. Here is that excerpt, again:
“Let's say we set up two rooms. Room #1 contains five people selected at random from the studio audience of my TBN weekend show, HUCKABEE. These almost certainly will be the conservative "today's Republicans" you loathe, who will probably want to greet you, tell you about their families, hear some of your stories and share homemade pie. (They might also say "bless your heart" and give you an earful about the CIA, but you need to hear it.) Room #2 contains five of the terrorists who hacked off journalist Daniel Pearl’s head with a dull, rusty blade.”
https://www.outlookindia.com/
“Which room will you enter?
“If you choose Room #2, well, at least you had the courage of your convictions. It was nice knowing you, and we hope you didn't suffer too much, though you probably did. If you choose Room #1, then you have to admit you were full of horse manure, apologize to all Republicans (a special apology to President Trump) for your crass stupidity, and refrain from tweeting forever.”
With that refresher, here’s the update: On Tuesday, a self-described liberal and California native named Samuel Donner went on “FOX & Friends” with Peter Doocy to say he’d forced himself to go to a Trump rally in Tennessee to see if he could find some common ground and actually make friends. He didn’t expect to be able to, but he did. “I was absolutely baffled,” he said, “that people wanted to talk to me and would actually be friends with me.”
He had seen this as a kind of test for himself, to go into what he believed was the most hostile environment he could find. He described being scared to death to be around Trump supporters, with a knot in the pit of his stomach! “Going in, I was expecting aggression,” he said, “but I actually experienced a lot of kindness.”
In an interaction reminiscent of the way I characterized my studio audience in the original “Gen. Hayden Challenge” above, Donner was asked by one rally attendee to join her Bible study, which he and a friend of his did, and where they experienced “incredible kindness.” He didn’t specifically mention homemade pie, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they had it.
So, again, in light of this, I invite all those who believe Trump supporters are racists and violent extremists and far more "nihilistic, dangerous and contemptible" than anything else in the world, to take the Gen. Hayden Challenge. Two rooms, one with five members of my studio audience of conservative Republicans, the other with five of the terrorists who hacked off Daniel Pearl’s head with a dull blade. Unless you choose the room with the beheaders, then just please stop tweeting your idiocy. Of course, if you do choose the beheaders, you’ll be stopped soon enough.
Always entertaining
The always entertaining Kurt Schlichter, who was a military man as well as a columnist and attorney, has a new column schooling President Biden on the stupidity of his arrogant claim that citizens armed with rifles are no match for a government with F-15 jets.
You’d think Biden might have considered some of this, since he made that snarky comment on the one-year anniversary of him surrendering Afghanistan to a bunch of guys with rifles.
A bad investment
Twenty-six grassroots chapters of Black Lives Matter are suing BLM national co-founder Shalomyah Bowers, claiming he defrauded them by siphoning off $10 million in donations that he used as his “personal piggy bank.”
Wait, you’re saying that trying to ease your white guilt by showering money on an organization you know nothing about turned out to be a bad investment? Who could’ve predicted that?!
Good news you might have missed
A federal court blocked the Biden Administration’s plans to force doctors to perform abortions and gender-transition procedures that violate their conscience or medical judgement.
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