Good morning!

Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff! 

Today's newsletter includes:

• Bible Verse Of The Day
• Manchin holds the line on Senate filibuster
• Gun control executive orders today
• Biden administration: Delete the Evidence
• Zeldin announces run for Governor
• Report: MLB Execs were blinded by All-Star game decision
• Confirmation: "Crossfire Hurricane" was COMPLETELY BOGUS
• A Reader Writes Back...
• America The Beautiful

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Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

BIBLE VERSE OF THE DAY 

Manchin holds the line on Senate filibuster

By Mike Huckabee

It’s good to see that West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin is finally putting a little starch in his suits. Manchin is under intense pressure from his party and the media to go along with all the radical, transformative, budget-busting bills the Democrats can ram down our throats with just 50 votes plus Kamala Harris, but he’s also from a state that Trump won by nearly 39 points, so he knows what his own constituents would think about that.

This is why Manchin’s every statement about which way he’s bending on one bill or another makes headline news, and any signs of wavering can be very frustrating to those who see him as the only thing standing between the radical left’s destructive agenda and our nation and Constitution.

On one issue, at least, Manchin has decided to make it clear that he will not waver, and that’s the left’s dream of doing away with the Senate filibuster so they can pass every last one of their awful ideas with no Republican support whatsoever. Manchin wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post to declare that “there is no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster.”

He said we can’t solve America’s problems with only partisan solutions and reconciliation bills that shortcut the legislative process and “the time has come to end these political games, and to usher a new era of bipartisanship where we find common ground on the major policy debates facing our nation." He called the filibuster a “critical tool to protecting that input and our democratic form of government.”

Let’s all hope and pray he means it and has the fortitude to stand up to the vitriol that will be coming his way for having principles.

Speaking of radical, transformative, one-party legislation, House Democrats have scheduled a vote on a DC statehood bill for the week of April 21st. They passed the same bill in the last session, but it was stopped by the GOP Senate. Only the preservation of the filibuster could keep it from passing the Senate now on a 50-50 tie vote.

Well, there’s also the minor sticking point that making DC a state is specifically prohibited by the Constitution, but when have today’s Democrats ever let that detail stand in their way?

Gun control executive orders today

By Mike Huckabee

As expected, President Biden will issue half a dozen executive orders related to gun control today. Here’s the AP write-up of that story.

And here’s a list of the six measures from a preview released by the White House.

Since these arrived just before our press time, I haven’t had time to research them in detail yet. Suffice to say that they probably will enrage both Second Amendment supporters and gun control zealots. The latter will probably complain that they don’t go far enough. For instance, two of them are to issue “proposed rules” involving “ghost guns” and stabilizer stocks, which will likely be challenged in court if they’re put into effect. One orders the DOJ to publish “model ‘red flag’ legislation” for states, but Biden can’t order states to adopt it. One orders the DOJ to issue an annual report on firearms trafficking (big whoop.) One says the Administration will “invest in evidence-based community violence interventions” (if they wanted to do that, they’d reverse all the defunding of police.)

Finally, Biden will nominate David Chipman as Director of the BATF. That’s not even an executive order, it was just a to-be-expected nomination of an anti-gun activist who was previously involved in the Branch Davidian trial, following the botched government raid of a religious compound in Waco that left 76 people dead.

Biden, like Obama before him, has proven that he will issue executive orders that illegally make or change laws, but these seem fairly timid considering some of his previous EOs. Maybe he knows that the opposition is fierce and well-funded, and will immediately get a judge to halt any orders that violate the Second Amendment. Any real gun control law changes will not only have to pass muster with the courts, they’ll also have to pass Congress.

These orders strike me as a little red meat tossed out to the gun-grabber lobby of the party, full of sound and fury but not signifying all that much, because they really can’t. But don’t expect their target audience (if I’m still allowed to use the word “target”) to be satisfied with them.

Biden Administration: Delete the Evidence

By Mike Huckabee

Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming claims that the Biden administration told him and his colleagues to delete the photos and video they took during a visit to the Southern border, as if reality wouldn't exist without pictures. That includes the dangerously overcrowded facilities for unaccompanied minors, where Barasso said detainees are “crammed in like sardines.” As for the demand that they delete their videos, Barrasso added, “No one did.”

Click the link to see what the Biden White House wants to keep hidden.

Zeldin announces run for Governor

By Mike Huckabee

Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin announced this morning that he will run for Governor of New York in 2022, to save the Empire State from the current Governor who’s “abused his power and trust,” and the one-party Democrat rule in Albany and New York City that’s driving people to move out to escape the “weight of crushing taxes, lost jobs, suffocating regulations and rising crime.” He called his campaign a “last stand to save our state” and to bring it “back from the brink and return it to glory.”

I wish him good luck. That’s not a personal endorsement of any specific candidate, just an endorsement of everything he said about New York and the desperate need for its government to be back in the hands of competent adults.

Report: MLB Execs were blinded by All-Star game decision

By Mike Huckabee

Charles Garparino reports that Major League Baseball executives were blindsided by commissioner Rob Manfred’s decision to cave to the woke mob and move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta. He claims they also fear major fan backlash because of the loss of 100 million tourist dollars that will harm black residents and businesses after they moved the game to the much-whiter city of Denver. They’re reportedly trying to come up with some solution to help mitigate the damage they’re caused (they could just admit they were misled by the President’s lies about the law being a return to Jim Crow instead of very standard election laws similar to those in many other states and keep the game in Atlanta, but that would require guts.)

Another interesting twist: Gasparino claims Manfred’s decision to move the game came after he spoke to Democrat anti-vote law crusader Stacey Abrams. Abrams’ people claim she was trying to talk him out of moving it, but she did previously partner with an anti-election law group that supported moving the game. Abrams wants to run for Governor again, and she doesn’t need voters blaming her for the game being moved. Although how they can’t blame her for all the other economic boycotts after she’s led the charge to misrepresent the new laws as virulently racist is beyond me.

If Ms. Abrams has flipped-flopped on her stance, it wouldn’t be surprising. After all, she has built a power base for herself by proclaiming that vote fraud is nonexistent, while continuing to insist that she was really the winner of the last Georgia gubernatorial election but got cheated. I guess it’s only insurrection to question an election if you’re a Republican.

"Crossfire Hurricane" BOGUS: A follow-up

By Mike Huckabee

Of the letters we received in response to our commentary on "Crossfire Hurricane" being proven a total fraud, this is one we especially wanted to answer, to put the FBI's unconscionable political spying into historical perspective. They've done it before.

From Todd:

Having worked for the FBI in the early and mid ‘70s, and actually having met Director Hoover, I find the Special Agent's actions and attitudes involved with trying to corroborate allegations made in the dossier to be reprehensible. I'm certain had Mr. Hoover been in charge of the Bureau when all this garbage was alleged that it would have been crushed early on.

I know one thing for sure...if FBI agents knocked on my front door and wanted to speak with me, I'd order them off my front porch. I wouldn't talk to anyone from the Bureau ever. And that hurts me, but it's a fact!

From the Gov:

Thanks so much for writing. I’ve long spoken with pride about our rank-and-file FBI, no matter who was calling the shots from the top. I would imagine that most current and former FBI agents are as embarrassed and disgusted by the reprehensible conduct of McCabe, Comey, Strzok, Brian Auten and that group as you are.

Sadly, your advice not to talk with anyone from the FBI is on the mark. After what they did to set up and ambush Mike Flynn, deceiving him into thinking he was just having a casual meeting and didn’t need a lawyer, the trust is gone. It would be extremely ill-advised to speak to someone from the FBI without a lawyer present, even if you can’t imagine that you’ve done anything wrong.

It must have been quite a moment to meet someone with the stature of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, a powerful legend who served eight Presidents, running the Bureau for decades. Still, Hoover’s long tenure was also controversial, especially as it related to violations against the civil liberties of Americans. In other words, there was a whole lotta spyin’ goin’ on, and we didn’t really start learning the extent of it until the 1970s. I’d like to think Hoover would have refused to work against Trump by spying on innocent Americans associated with his campaign, but given his history, that’s very hard to say.

My writer/researcher Laura Ainsworth wrote about this a couple of years ago in her commentary, “The FBI’s Long, Proud History of Political Spying.”

“In an interview in 1971,” Ainsworth wrote, “J. Edgar Hoover revealed that he had bugged [Republican presidential nominee Barry] Goldwater’s plane on orders from the Oval Office. Why? ‘You do what the President of the United States orders you to do,’ he said. Hoover’s second-in-command, William C. Sullivan, also confirmed the spying operation.”

Ainsworth turned up an archival story from THE NEW YORK TIMES in December of 1975 that “details acts carried out ‘for political purposes’ by the FBI at the behest of all six Presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon.”

Aside from the breaking-and-entering of Democrat Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, which was carried out by Nixon’s re-election campaign, the most famous bugging episode, which was outlined in a 16-page report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is no doubt the FBI’s bugging of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s hotel rooms. This was done by Hoover’s FBI on three different occasions, on order from President Lyndon Johnson in the mid-’60s.

We’ve turned up something else of interest, a website called TODAY IN CIVIL LIBERTIES HISTORY. Here’s a page that describes an event from August 24, 1936, “FDR Authorizes FBI To Resume Political Spying.”

It includes a number of links to more information.

“Given a green light by FDR,” the piece reads, “Hoover went on to conduct the greatest violations of civil liberties by any single person in American history.”

It should be acknowledged that, then as now, the country faced serious threats. In the 1950s, it was Communism, of course, threatening America from within, and today, it’s –- wouldn’t you know? –- Communism, once again threatening America from within (and, at the moment, succeeding). Surveillance has necessarily been a part of the FBI’s activities. The problem is when that spying is done on American citizens for political purposes, and J. Edgar Hoover, on order from several U.S. presidents, crossed that line numerous times.

Apparently, Todd, at the time you met Director Hoover, the extent of these violations was not well known. Much of this came out during Sen. Frank Church’s congressional investigation in 1975-76. That, in turn, resulted from the exposure of documents taken during the break-in of a small FBI office in 1971. A book came out about this in 2014, “THE BURGLARY: THE DISCOVERY OF J. EDGAR HOOVER’S SECRET FBI, by Betty Medsger.

It’s important to note that Hoover was following orders that came from the very top, directy from the President in office at the time. So far, we don't have hard proof that FBI Director Jim Comey was acting under direct orders from President Obama to spy on the Trump campaign, but under Obama's tenure, not only did Comey’s FBI cross that same line and conduct political spying on Americans, but they also obtained warrants with uncorroborated and even falsified evidence. That’s taking it yet another step. And, as we reported, the agent in charge of "corroborating" the fictional evidence for "Crossfire Hurricane" still has his job with the Bureau.

It’s going to take a concerted effort --- by the next Republican President, please! --- to clean house at the Justice Department, State Department and FBI and to make sure laws are followed. The dedicated rank-and-file deserve to be working for agencies they can be proud of once again.

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A Reader Writes Back...

Governor Huckabee, I look forward to your newsletters every day. With all the hype, hysteria & misinformation swirling around, I know that I can count on you to examine all sides of an issue & to be truthful. You are a calming influence & keep me focused on what is really important. I thank you & may God continue to bless you & your efforts.

America The Beautiful

God's creation is all around us. To learn more about Indiana Dunes National Park, visit its website here.