By Mike Huckabee
October 13, 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
But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.
James 1:6
More dossier testimony, and do intel agents ever admit mistakes?
So, why are we paying rapt attention to Special Counsel John Durham’s prosecution of “dossier” source Igor Danchenko this week, when most media partners-in-crime are barely mentioning it? In the words of George Neumayr at THE SPECTATOR, “...to Americans who don’t want to live under left-wing tyranny and ceaseless gaslighting, this trial is a window on a ruling class that is utterly corrupt.” And what a sight it is –- as dirty as those mythical sheets on that mythical bed in that Moscow hotel presidential suite. Be glad Durham is opening the curtains, because sunlight is the best disinfectant.
That’s not to say Danchenko or his FBI benefactors will be held accountable. DNC attorney Michael Sussmann wasn’t, and he must’ve been confident that his DC jury would let him skate.
https://spectator.org/the-
One thing we hope to hear all about during this trial is the part played by Charles Dolan, the Clinton/Brookings Institution associate who apparently gave Christopher Steele the most salacious dossier story, the one about Trump and prostitutes at a Moscow hotel. That nasty story –- completely unbelievable to anyone who actually knows Trump –- was the media “hook” they needed. As reported in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, Dolan toured the Moscow Ritz-Carlton in 2016 and supposedly heard some variation of the tale from a hotel staffer. But a colleague who was there with Dolan told the FBI that the staff never said anything about Trump and prostitutes.
“That the FBI treated the juvenile partisan nonsense lacing Steele’s dossier seriously is beyond disgraceful,” writes Neumayr. “Then-Director James Comey’s politicized dolts turned Danchenko into an FBI collaborator and offered Steele gobs of taxpayer money to nail Trump. As a consequence, the ‘apolitical’ FBI became a partner in the greatest political dirty trick in American history and a conduit of Russian disinformation at the very moment Comey claimed to be fighting it.”
Also this: “The obsession over ‘Russia, Russia, Russia,’ as a totally victimized Trump correctly claims, came from Democrats long in bed with it and a Clinton campaign that gleefully spread its smears, all while innocently pretending that it was merely responding to ‘news’ that it had planted in the press. Next to these weasels, Trump looks like a choir boy.”
When Steele used that Moscow hotel story, he’d already been told by Danchenko that it was said “in jest.” The FBI and the media presented Steele as a top British intelligence professional, when what he actually was comes closer to, in Neumayr’s words, “just a left-wing hack who made stuff up out of seething hatred for Trump.”
A month ago, the SPECTATOR lamented the lack of real journalism in 2020s America, with the example of their almost total lack of interest in the story that Danchenko had been put on the FBI payroll after they knew he had lied to them. In case you didn’t see this article the first time around, here it is.
https://spectator.org/what-
Brian Auten was on the stand Wednesday for his second day of testimony. Recall that Tuesday, Auten testified that the FBI, in a meeting with Steele overseas, had offered him $1 million is exchange for corroboration of the dossier’s claims. Needless to say, Steele was unable to do this. Also needless to say, the FBI ran with the dossier anyway.
Durham pressed Auten Wednesday, asking him why he took information from an unverified dossier and included it in the application for the warrant to surveil Carter Page. “As an analyst, I’m not writing the application,” Auten said, in a seeming attempt to deflect blame onto other members of his team. He and Durham went round and round on that, as detailed here.
As Durham has made clear, the Steele dossier was commissioned by Fusion GPS and paid for by Hillary’s 2016 campaign and the DNC, with the money funneled through Michael Sussmann’s law firm Perkins Coie. It was used as a basis for getting a warrant and three renewals to spy on Page, and also to disperse to their friends in the media to make Trump look vulgar and Russia-connected.
Democrats, especially Adam Schiff, used to argue that the FISA warrants to spy on Page had met “rigorous” standards for probable cause. That was before a DOJ summary report, declassified in 2020, said they lacked probable cause when the FBI’s “misinformation” was removed. They didn’t meet the legal threshold and should never have been issued. (We would add that Carter Page’s lawsuit should never have been dismissed.)
………..
Speaking of going round and round during questioning, have you seen the interview FOX NEWS’ Bret Baier did on Tuesday’s “Special Report” with ex-CIA agent and current LAWFARE blogger David Priess? If not, then get thee to this story right away and watch an interview that illustrates a particular mindset thriving in our “intelligence” community.
Here’s just the YouTube video if you’d like to share that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
The Steele dossier was disinformation dressed up and presented by intelligence agents as the real thing. The Hunter Biden laptop story was the opposite: the real thing, presented by intelligence agents as disinformation. David Priess is one of those 51 former intel officials who signed the now-infamous letter saying Hunter’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation and that, in their expert opinion, they very strongly suspected it was. Predictably, this was reported as, “Experts say laptop is Russian disinformation.” Biden claimed this, too, in a debate with Trump.
Priess was there to offer his analysis of the Russia-Ukraine war, but Baier, to his credit, went on to ask THE QUESTION: “You signed on to this open letter that was published by Politico --- why did you sign on to that?”
Watch, amazed, at how easily he compartmentalizes his actions to deny responsibility. If you don’t understand that “having all the classic earmarks” of something is not the same as BEING that something, well, it’s your own fault for not understanding nuance. Never mind that the letter is not really very nuanced, professing the very strong suspicions of these disinformation experts. But buried inside it, like a line in those fine-print phone app agreements that nobody reads, is their ‘out-clause,’ saying they didn’t know for sure.
When Baier asked him if he’d considered whether this letter might have affected the race, Priess showed not one whit of concern. “I don’t know if it affected anything,” he said flatly. “We don’t analyze American political environments.” And, “It’s not my fault if people don’t look up definitions.”
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ADDENDUM, by Laura Ainsworth, staff writer/researcher
After watching David Priess being interviewed by Bret Baier, I tried to imagine what it would be like to have a relationship with someone like Priess. Here’s how our imaginary dinner conversation went:
HIM: That’s not what I said. I said most fashion experts would conclude you didn’t.
ME: Well, that’s not the way it came across to me--
HIM: Your problem is you just don’t understand nuance. Or at least you have all the classic earmarks of someone who doesn’t. I can’t be responsible for how someone interprets what I say or what happens after that. If you don’t know what I’m saying, get a dictionary. Everything I say is demonstrably true and correct, and therefore I am incapable of ever regretting it.
ME: (pause) Seriously??
HIM: I would absolutely love it if everyone would appreciate nuance instead of just going with their impression as they tend to do. That’s not helpful, and in fact it leads to a lot of problems that I’m not responsible for in any way. But it’s not my job to analyze how to fix this. It’s all on you.
SCOTUS vacates a lower court ruling
Tuesday, the Supreme Court vacated a ruling by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals allowing mail-in ballots that lacked the legally-mandated date on the envelope to be counted. The case was brought by Republican David Ritter, who lost his judge’s race to his Democrat rival by five votes after the Appeals Court allowed 257 undated mail-in ballots to be counted.
Unfortunately for Ritter, his loss was allowed to stand. The SCOTUS had previously rejected his appeal, but he refiled, arguing that the ruling would have an impact on races statewide. This new ruling means the case can’t be used as a precedent in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey, the three states covered by the 3rd Circuit Court. So it is a victory for those who are fighting attempts to loosen election integrity laws and make it easier to count invalid or suspicious ballots. I suspect that will prove important, particularly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
White House panics over OPEC refusal to increase production
I told you there were inside reports that White House staffers were panicking over OPEC spurning Biden’s pleas to increase oil production and instead slashing it by two million barrels. Now we know it’s not so much because the White House was concerned about the prices Americans have to pay at the pump (they’ve already proven they think the higher the better, to force us into electric cars.) It’s because OPEC messed up their nakedly political machinations.
According to the Wall Street Journal, people familiar with the talks claim that Biden’s people were lobbying Saudi Arabia to pressure OPEC just to delay the cuts until November, so the rising gas prices wouldn’t hurt Democrats in the midterm elections. After that, who cares?
Reportedly, it was a full-court press, with even Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in on the pitch. They even threatened to view it as the Saudis siding with Russia if they didn’t play ball (that makes sense: they accuse everyone who hinders their political ambitions of colluding with Russia.)
But the Saudis said no, telling the Biden team that they weren’t trying to ease the oil situation, they were trying to influence the US election. And if this is true, then they were. They don’t care if you have to take out a second mortgage to fill your SUV, as long as you could be hoodwinked into voting for a Democrat before the prices went up.
But here are the cold hard facts: If it were not for this Administration, with its reality-defying green agenda and its war on America’s fuel industry, there would be no skyrocketing gas prices or any need to beg or threaten OPEC to turn on the pumps. We have pumps, Biden shut them off, and everything since then has been a double-shuffle to try to deflect blame for the damage he caused. For them to attempt to deceive the public just long enough to win an election and then reveal their true face is nothing new. This is just the most blatant example so far.
Biden wants California's AB-5 bill to be applied nationwide
California’s AB-5 bill that classified contract workers as employees devastated the gig economy for everyone from Uber drivers to musicians. It forced small businesses to provide employee benefits to contract workers, which would be so expensive that either the employers would go out of business or the workers would be let go. It was such an epic disaster that, of course, the Biden Administration wants to impose it nationwide in the form of a Labor Department rule rather than what it obviously is: a massive, transformative law to enrich and empower Democrat-backing labor unions that should have to be debated (and voted down) by the people’s representatives in Congress.
The Labor Department invited contract workers to weigh in on it, and many did, condemning it as a catastrophe. Their objections were dismissed, and Biden’s White House endorsed the rule. It wouldn’t go into effect until next year, and let’s hope that by then, a GOP Congress and multiple federal lawsuits will kill it.
Naturally, the acting head of the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division, Jessica Looman, reassured reporters that the rule is unlikely to result in large worker classification changes. She said, "What we anticipate is that this will really help provide guidance to both avoid and prevent misclassification. But this is a framework that has been used and has been well recognized and understood."
Sorry, but I’ve heard those sorts of reassurances before from this crowd. I think Ronald Reagan summed them up best when he said that the ten most frightening words in the English language were “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you.”
A few election cylce stories from around the nation
Even NBC had to admit that Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman is still suffering worrying aftereffects from his stroke. He sat down for a softball MSNBC interview and wasn’t able to comprehend the interviewer’s questions unless someone typed them out on a prompter for him to read. That wouldn’t be so concerning if being able to communicate with people weren’t a basic requirement for being a Senator.
If you’re an Arizona gun owner and even thinking of voting for Democrat Katie Hobbs for Governor, then you need to see the new Project Veritas undercover video. They caught her head political consultant admitting that, sure, she’d back an “assault weapons ban” if she could; but “this state is crazy about their guns, so we’re not gonna take the beating for it before she can do anything about it.” In short, she’s lying about not taking your guns until after she can hoodwink the voters into electing her. Don’t let yourself get taken.
Bonus hypocrisy points: The video also reveals that Hobbs is protected by guards with AR-15s. Or as Democrats call those, “weapons of war” (which they aren’t.)
The “October Surprise” personal attacks on Georgia GOP Senate candidate Hershel Walker don’t seem to have destroyed him the way liberals hoped. His poll numbers are holding, and the attacks actually increased donations. Possibly because voters realize that his opponent, Sen. Raphael Warnock, has the same kind of personal flaws Walker is being accused of, but also comes with far-left policies and a seat to keep the Dems in control of the Senate.
Walker also displayed some deft political trolling skills. After Warnock’s church was accused of trying to evict tenants from an apartment building they own for being as little as $28.55 behind in their rents (the total of past due rents is only $4900), Walker announced that he would pay those peoples’ past due rent himself to keep Warnock from evicting them.
Finally, CBS tried to attack Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin as an insurrectionist supporter because he said there “weren’t thousands of armed insurrectionists” on January 6th. CBS accused him of “doubling down on a false claim.”
Spoiler alert: Even if you grant that the rioters were actually “insurrectionists” staging the dumbest plan ever for overthrowing the US government, and even if you agree to count swinging a flagpole as being “armed,” no, there were not “thousands” of them. As noted at the link, court documents showed that several had firearms and “dozens more wielded knives, bats and other real and makeshift weapons.”
Not to defend those who turned violent, but just for the sake of basic math, “dozens” is not “thousands.”
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