By Mike Huckabee
April 28, 2022
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Good morning! Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff!
Today's newsletter includes:
- Big question about White House/Rosemont Seneca
- Judge excludes Hillary tweet about Alfa Bank
- “Disinformation Governance Board”
- And much more.
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
1. DAILY BIBLE VERSE
Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time, 7 casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.
1 Peter 5:6-7
If you have a favorite Bible Verse you want to see in one of our newsletters, please email [email protected].
2. Big question about White House/Rosemont Seneca
Yesterday, we mentioned that Hunter Biden business partner Eric Schwerin didn’t just visit the White House 19 times; he had another 8 confabs for a total of 27. But what we didn’t know then about those later visits is perhaps even more significant.
According to visitor logs obtained by FOX News, two of the other eight visits –- all in 2016, the last year of the Obama administration –- were with the then-Vice President’s chief of staff, Steve Ricchetti, who went on to be President Biden’s White House counsel and assistant to the President.
But if Breitbart News is correct, Ricchetti also happens to be...(drum roll, please)...a former president of Rosemont Seneca Partners, Hunter and Schwerin's firm.
What??
We’ve tried to verify this amazing statement but have found no mention of it anywhere else. Of course, for all we know, it’s been expunged, as when Wikipedia recently took down its entry for Rosemont Seneca entirely. (Someone at Wikipedia actually told the Post that “keeping it around” ran the risk of the page becoming “a magnet for conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.” I’m serious.) The Post managed to resurrect the brief entry, which mentions Hunter, Devon Archer and Chris Heinz but does not include Ricchetti.
Wikipedia does have an entry for Ricchetti, which lays out his extensive career in lobbying and in the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations. We found out that before joining VP Biden in 2012, he was on the board of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress and that he'd had his own pricey lobbying firm, Ricchetti Inc. This entry doesn’t mention Rosemont Seneca, either, but, unfortunately, in this day when information can just be dropped down the memory hole, we never know when we’re being lied to by omission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ricchetti
We did more digging and found a worthwhile Politico article about Ricchetti, “The Man Plotting Biden in 2016,” from the days when Biden was contemplating getting into the presidential race against Hillary. (It was written in September of 2015, long before then-FBI Director Comey let Hillary skate in his July 5, 2016, “no reasonable prosecutor” speech.) Lots of history on Ricchetti, but no mention of Hunter or Rosemont Seneca.
The NY Post speaks of Schwerin as the president of Rosemont Seneca, at least in 2010. But Breitbart describes Ricchetti as “the president of the investment firm Schwerin and Hunter managed, Rosemont Seneca Partners.
So, we’d like to know how closely, if at all, Ricchetti was involved in Rosemont Seneca. It’s already absurd for the President to maintain he knew nothing about his son’s business dealings. How much more ridiculous will that be if it turns out that even his long-long-longtime top aide and counsel had been the president of his son’s business? Under those circumstances, if Biden still didn’t know anything about Hunter’s exploits, he had to be even more out to lunch than he is today, and that hardly seems possible.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/04/26/hunter-biden-business-partner-visited-white-house/
We’ll leave that question for now. The Daily Mail story has an intriguing timeline for Schwerin’s visits between 2009 and 2015. On November 17, 2010, he had an in-person meeting with VP Biden himself. Read on, and the article also offers a good refresher on the whole laptop story.
We do know for sure about another Rosemont Seneca connection in the White House. According to the Daily Mail, Schwerin met with another assistant in Biden’s office, Anne Marie Person, who had previously worked at there.
When asked about Schwerin’s trips to the White House, press secretary Jen Psaki dismissed them as “visits from more than 10 years ago.” She's not very good at math, as the last ones were in 2016, and most voters are not so dismissive. As Breitbart News reports, a Harris poll taken Monday says that:
58 percent believe Joe Biden played a role in his family’s business
60 percent say Hunter was selling “influence and access” to his father
67 percent say President Biden should be impeached if he “secretly participated and facilitated” in the family’s business
It was great to hear from Elon Musk that Twitter’s deep-six-ing of the laptop story before the 2016 election was “inappropriate,” but polls such as this one show that it was way beyond that –- nothing less than election interference.
“Look, nobody on the left is going to admit that you now have a corrupt family with a lying President, even though it’s patently obvious,” said Newt Gingrich Wednesday night on INGRAHAM ANGLE. Joe Biden did not put $800,000 into paying his son’s legal bills with no knowledge. There weren’t 27 different occasions where business associates of Hunter Biden were in the Obama White House. This isn’t just Joe Biden --- it’s also Barack Obama.” He doesn’t believe that there were 27 of these visits and “Obama didn’t notice it was on the schedule.”
Gingrich brought up another scandal: the “millions and millions” of dollars given by the CCP to the University of Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden had established “a little school” (the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which opened in February 2018). This apparently has been under wraps, and the university has denied soliciting or receiving foreign money, though the Post reports that “records show” they’ve received millions in anonymous Chinese gifts. This story in the New York Post is a must-read, as it opens up a whole new area of shade in Biden family finances.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/09/54m-in-chinese-gifts-donated-to-upenn-home-of-biden-center/
The Bidens were vacuuming up money from China, Russia and Ukraine. ‘It’s amazing to look at the footprints around the world,” Gingrich said, “as the Biden family business –- and that’s really what it was...it’s not just about Hunter Biden, but it’s about the current President of the United States, who I think clearly has lied to the country over and over and over about this issue.”
It’s preposterous to think that father and son didn’t talk about business when Hunter was along on Air Force Two, headed to China. “They want to tell us that on a 14- or 16-hour flight, Joe never said, ‘Gee, Hunter, what are you doing over here? How’s the business going?’
“They think we are SO STUPID, and they are so confident that they’ll be protected by the elite media and...by the Justice Department,” he said. I would add that for a long time, that’s exactly what happened. Even Bill Barr kept quiet when he knew Biden had lied about the laptop during the debates.
“It’s amazing to me,” Gingrich said, “that you could have this blatant level of, literally, taking foreign money in an illegal way, by the Vice President of the United States and his family, who are running a family business...It’s clearly the exploitation of his public office in order to enrich the family.”
He called this “a study in corruption.” It was the Clintons, by the way, who showed how this can done. Gingrich theorizes that the Bidens saw Bill and Hillary enriching themselves through their Clinton Family Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative, and thought, “Why not us?”
3. Judge excludes Hillary tweet about Alfa Bank
Look for a detailed update tomorrow on John Durham’s special counsel investigation and the Michael Sussmann trial. In the meantime, here’s a piece of not entirely unexpected news: The presiding judge, Christopher Cooper, has ruled Hillary’s tweet, which says that “Donald Trump has a secret server...it was set up to communicate privately with a Putin-tied Russian bank.,” and a follow-up tweet linking to a four-paragraph missive from her campaign, are inadmissible as evidence.
The judge excluded this as “hearsay” and said it’s “likely duplicative of other evidence” related to demonstrating the attorney-client relationship. Recall that Sussmann faces one charge of lying to the FBI about that attorney-client relationship; specifically, whether or not it was the reason for his visit.
As Jerry Dunleavy at the Washington Examiner explains, “The special counsel argued the tweet is not inadmissible hearsay “because it is not being offered for its truth ---emphasizing that the prosecutors actually believe its claims were false.” In other words, if they were actually trying to prove the Alfa Bank scheme was true, Hillary’s tweet about that would be inadmissible hearsay. But they want to use the tweet to help prove something else: the attorney-client relationship between Hillary For America and Michael Sussmann.
But the defense still claimed that the tweet “plainly is being offered for the truth” by prosecutors. As I’ve reminded my readers many times, I’m not a lawyer, but for the life of me, I can’t see how that makes sense. Durham knows the tweet is false, and do we all at this point.
Oh, and pardon our cynicism, but we laughed out loud at the transparent attempt to protect Hillary that was made by Sussmann’s team: “There is a real danger that if the tweet were admitted, the jury would believe that Hillary Clinton herself was part of the Special Counsel’s uncharged conspiracy and that she had a direct interest or involvement in Mr. Sussmann’s efforts. Drawing the candidate herself into this matter in this way would be unfair to Mr. Sussmann.”
Get my smelling salts! Lawd, lawd, we wouldn’t want anyone having the impression that HILLARY was involved. Still, the judge, an Obama appointee with a stack of rather shocking Democrat connections and conflicts of interest, bought the defense’s “hearsay” argument.
But now, for the good stuff. I’ll have more at length about it later, but for now, read the account at ZeroHedge of what has just been revealed in this case by the sight of some documents that didn’t quite remain under seal when they got attached to another legal filing of Durham’s. While much of the material pertaining to this case has been seen in heavily redacted form, this story includes links to some unredacted communications that show how extensively Fusion GPS co-founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Frietsch peddled the Trump Russia hoax. They coordinated with multiple journalists, producers and media outlets to get that story out. They were on a mission to spread what they knew to be fake anti-Trump garbage far and wide, and now we have a better idea of their phenomenal dedication.
TechnoFog examines some of these communications and shows how they blow a hole in the defense’s attorney-client privilege argument, as they have nothing to do with obtaining legal advice. Even if they did, or if lawyers were copied (they weren’t), this little army of hoaxers lost their “privilege” when these messages went out to the media.
https://technofog.substack.com/p/durhams-latest-he-has-hundreds-of?s=w
Tomorrow we’ll have a report on Wednesday’s federal court appearance by Durham’s team and Sussmann’s defense team. The trial is scheduled to start May 16.
4. Russia-Ukraine War Update
Here’s today’s link to Fox News’ continually updated Russia-Ukraine news:
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-putin-zelenskyy-live
The latest: The Kremlin claimed there have been acts of “terrorism” in Moldova, which was taken as an excuse for Putin to expand his invasion beyond Ukraine. Putin warned the West that any outside interference would lead to "lightning"-fast retaliatory strikes, and Ukrainian officials said Russia is increasing the pace of its offensive operations. But despite Putin’s threats, the head of NATO said Finland and Sweden will be warmly and quickly welcomed into NATO if they decide to join.
5. “Disinformation Governance Board”
During his testimony before the House Wednesday, Homeland Security Director Alejandro Mayorkas revealed that the DHS is creating a “Disinformation Governance Board” to police “disinformation” and “misinformation” before the 2022 elections.
If Republicans weren’t already laying the groundwork for impeaching Mayorkas for numerous other reasons, this would be enough. In fact, if President Biden doesn’t kill this idea immediately, I would argue that it is grounds for impeaching him for gross violation of his oath of office to defend the Constitution. I have never endorsed treating impeachment lightly or using it as a political weapon. But I agree with Tucker Carlson, who called this “one of the most brazen assaults on the First Amendment in over a century.”
This unconstitutional and Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” will be headed by so-called “disinformation expert” Nina Jankowicz. You can tell she’s an expert on disinformation because last year on Twitter, she personally shared some disinformation that caused extensive real world harm when she promoted the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation. I guess Mayorkas figured it takes one to know one.
Jankowicz also falsely claimed in 2017 that the now-discredited Trump “Russian dossier” was funded by Republicans. So we can tell just how "objective" she'll be in assessing what is "disinformation."
https://dailycaller.com/2022/04/27/biden-official-nina-jankowicz-hunter-biden-laptop/
She’s even entering into this new job by spewing more disinformation, claiming that “one of the key reasons the Board was established is to maintain the Dept.’s commitment to protecting free speech, privacy, civil rights and civil liberties.” Well, naturally, why else would you create a government office to monitor and police speech if not to protect free speech?
Incidentally, as recently as April 16th, Jankowicz said this to NPR about Elon Musk buying Twitter: “I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities all around the world.” I feel as if I'm now part of a "marginalized community" because I believe in protecting the First Amendment.
Bear in mind that the DHS is the same federal department that’s mischaracterized parents who object to radical race and gender politics in schools, and citizens who question the government’s pandemic policies or voice concerns about vote fraud, as domestic terrorist threats.
I hope that some conservative legal foundation will immediately file a lawsuit to block this shockingly unconstitutional assault on freedom of speech and get an emergency ruling from the Supreme Court killing it before it takes root and becomes harder to get rid of than the Left-Handed Screw Thread Commission. Killing the Speech Police Agency before it gets started is the only example of abortion that I would wholeheartedly endorse.
6. Shrinkage
This morning, the Commerce Department reported that the US economy shrank by an annualized rate of 1.4% in the first quarter of the year, from January through March. Economists had predicted it would grow by 1.1%. But weighed down by record high inflation, the supply chain crisis and labor shortages, the economy notched its worst quarter since the spring of 2020, when the COVID lockdowns were in full swing.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/us-economic-growth-gdp-first-quarter
GDP also declined by 0.3% from the last quarter. I hope I’m wrong, but needless to say, this is how recessions start.
In a story that I believe is related, Democrats seem stunned to discover that voters have bigger things to worry about and don’t really care about a 90-minute riot that happened in the Capitol 15 months ago.
7. Biden accomplishment: No border
Democrats looking for some actual Biden accomplishment that they can tout before the election could try this: in a letter to the Senate, front line border state sheriffs report that due to Biden’s policies eliminating all efforts to keep illegal immigrants out of the US, “We simply have no border left in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, or Southern California.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-secrets/sheriffs-shocker-no-border-left
You must admit, that’s something that no other President ever has – or would ever want to – accomplish.
8. Another Fauci flip-flop
Dr. Fauci has become famous for flip-flopping, but he might have set a new land speed record this week. He declared that the pandemic phase of COVID is over, then less than 24 hours later, claimed that the pandemic isn’t over. His excuse is that the key word is “phase”: just because the “pandemic phase” is over doesn’t mean the pandemic is over.
https://hotair.com/allahpundit/2022/04/27/fauci-reverses-by-no-means-is-this-pandemic-over-n465423
Some suspect that the real “science” behind this is political science, and that he probably got a call from the White House telling him that it wasn’t convenient for their narratives to admit that the pandemic is over, hence the double-quick hair-splitting.
That linked article also talks about the mixed messages of Biden wanting to keep forcing everyone to wear masks while he plans to attend this weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which some are betting will be another super-spreader event like the Gridiron Dinner, where all the Democrats caught COVID but none of them seemed to get sick. If he really wants us to believe that he still considers COVID to be an existential threat, then it’s probably not a good idea to imply that it’s worth the risk of dying to hear Trevor Noah’s jokes.
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