By Mike Huckabee
May 18, 2023
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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
2 My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.
John 14:2-3
DURHAM REPORT COVERAGE
Does Durham's Expose of FBI Political Hacks Cover the DNC "Hack"?
Yesterday, a Substack reader asked if the newly released Durham Report says anything about the supposed “Russian hack” of the DNC servers in 2016, the event that appears to have kicked off the whole “Russia Russia Russia” Hoax.
One would think that an investigation into how “Crossfire Hurricane” originated and was conducted within the FBI would certainly look at that.
But one would be wrong. There’s nothing in the report about who might have breached the security of the DNC servers with the so-called “DNC hack.” And that apparently is by design, as Bill Barr, in appointing John Durham in October 2020 and specifying the areas to be investigated, did not include it. In the appointment order, Durham was given authorization to investigate the intelligence and law enforcement “directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns, individuals associated with those campaigns, and individuals associated with the administration of Donald J. Trump, including but not limited to Crossfire Hurricane and the investigation of Special Counsel Robert H. Mueller III.”
By “campaigns,” plural, one would assume Barr meant both the Trump and Clinton campaigns, and any look at Hillary’s campaign would, it would seem, include the DNC “hack.” But Durham’s report doesn’t get into it.
TechnoFog speculates that this is because Durham interpreted Barr’s instructions to mean he was supposed to look at just the campaigns, and the “hack” of the DNC servers could fall outside that scope. This rationale is hard to understand, though, because the “hack” uncovered emails that were viewed as harmful to Hillary’s campaign. Still, that’s where he drew the line.
It seems like a huge failing not to take the opportunity to look into something so closely tied to the Russia Hoax.
As TechnoFog said, “This was a remarkable omission and an unfortunate mistake by Barr, who rightly viewed Crossfire Hurricane and the Trump/Russia investigation with skepticism but didn’t think to extend that skepticism to other matters involving many of the same players.”
His full analysis is a must-read. It goes on to provide an excellent summary of what Durham’s investigation did find. The relentless push to investigate Trump’s campaign was top-down at the FBI, with Director James Comey quite insistent that Carter Page be surveilled.
https://radiopatriot.net/2023/
As for their investigation of Hillary’s campaign, one FBI agent told Durham’s team that “they were pretty much ‘tippy-toeing’ around HRC because there was a chance she would be the next President.” (It seems they never imagined Trump would be.) Example: FBI headquarters waited four months after hearing that candidate-to-be Hillary was willingly accepting an illegal donation of $2,700 from a foreign source, through an intermediary who was a confidential human source (CHS). The CHS turns out to have been Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne, later to become known for his look into alleged 2020 election fraud. He later tipped the FBI to another foreign government looking to give Hillary’s campaign an illegal donation.
The FBI let all this fall through the cracks and did not obtain any documentation of the illegal payment. And Byrne’s FBI handler told him to “stay away from all events relating to the Clinton campaign.”
“Do not attend any more campaign events, set up meetings, or anything else related to Clinton’s campaign,” the handler told him. “We need to keep you completely away from that situation. I don’t know all the details, but it’s for your own protection.”
The FBI was also supposedly looking into the Clinton Foundation, but Durham found that DOJ and FBI leadership essentially “sabotaged” that investigation and was even “hostile” to presentations from the FBI field offices. At one point, Andrew McCabe ordered that the cases be closed.
Durham’s report indicates that one of the Clinton campaign’s foreign policy advisers admitted “it was possible that she [Hillary] had proposed ideas” on Trump/Russia topics “to the campaign’s leadership, who may have approved those ideas.” They also admitted that it was “possible” someone [Hillary?] proposed linking Trump to Russia to distract from Clinton’s private email server. These discussions were followed by public statements from Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook which said “the Russian government had carried out the DNC hack to “assist Trump’s electoral chances.”
So Durham does at least mention the Clinton campaign’s claim about a DNC “hack” by Russians. That he didn’t or couldn’t follow that up with an independent look at whether or not the claim was true is, well, infuriating.
ASIDE: To quote another particularly infuriating part, “...Durham didn’t have the evidence to charge anyone from the Clinton Campaign with intentionally providing false information to the government. While it was the Clinton Campaign who came up with the general Trump-Russia plan, they were insulated from the planning and execution --- and thus consequences --- by their Perkins Coie lawyers, who used Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele (among others) to feed rumors and innuendo to the FBI.” (Note: they haven’t faced consequences, either!)
ASIDE #2: If you’ve heard criticism that Durham “never interviewed” a number of top FBI officials, TechnoFog explains that they simply declined. “Durham could have compelled their testimony before a grand jury, but that would’ve involved 1) immunity to the witnesses, 2) grand jury secrecy, and 3) answers like ‘I don’t recall.’ Other witnesses who might have lied to the FBI invoked their Fifth Amendment privileges.”
“These are FBI officials and agents,” TechnoFog says, “who know the law and are adept at deceiving...while avoiding prosecution.”
His chilling conclusion is that “the FBI didn’t just abuse its authority and undertake an illegal spying campaign. It influenced elections. It permanently tarnished the reputations of good men like Carter Page. It created the Trump/Russia media frenzy that lasted for years. And it ruined the lives and otherwise bankrupted a significant number of targets and witnesses. All because the FBI objected to the choice of the voters.”
But what about that “DNC hack”? Durham must have assumed it was accomplished by Russian hackers, because his scope of inquiry originally did include “individuals associated with [the] campaigns” and he never bothered to examine their possible involvement in it. How ironic it would’ve been to find that the event that kicked off the whole “Russia” hysteria hadn’t been done by Russians at all.
Even at this late date, no one has seen evidence that Russia hacked the DNC computers. As we’ve reported all along, the servers were given to a company called CrowdStrike, which has never turned over the hard drives to the FBI for forensic analysis. (That’s another incidence of the FBI dropping the ball, or more like spiking it.) And later, the president of CrowdStrike admitted under oath that they’d never seen evidence of a Russian hack.
So the “Russia hacked the DNC servers” story could be just as phony as all the rest of the lies that came out of Hillary’s campaign. But if Russia didn’t hack those emails, someone had to get them. Which brings us to another story, that of a young DNC staffer, a Bernie supporter, who was shot twice from behind early one morning in the summer of 2016 while walking home to his DC apartment, in a robbery attempt during which nothing was taken. The lid was swiftly clamped shut on any inquiry, but someday we’ll find out if this was an isolated incident or part of something bigger, just as we found out about the contamination at the FBI. In the meantime, it’s not conspiracy theory just to wonder about this. Heck, all the other so-called conspiracy theories we’ve ever seriously pondered have turned out to be true.
FURTHER READING
If you have a VIP membership at PJ MEDIA, Matt Margolis has a piece on just how horrific the Durham Report really is and the crying need to win the House, Senate and White House.
We reported yesterday that both Biden and Obama were briefed on Hillary’s role in the Russia Hoax. Here’s more on that.
FBI whistleblowers Steve Friend and Kyle Seraphin appeared on Laura Ingraham’s FOX NEWS show Wednesday night to say the Durham Report “should be the final death knell for the FBI.” A must-read.
Here’s another good summary of the problems cited by Durham. It tells how this group of “Keystone Cops” got away with “one of the dirtiest and most unethical political tricks in our nation’s history.”
Nick Arama at REDSTATE zeroes in on Hillary’s role. Top-level officials knew about it but appear to have kept rank-and-file investigators in the dark.
For all the liberal media outlets who are insisting that there’s nothing to the Durham Report, the Federalist offers a list of “6 Freshly-Documented Instances of Systemic Pro-Democrat FBI Corruption.” To which I would reply, “Only six?”
Finally, can we now say Hillary is “a loathsome mistress of subterfuge and machination, mendacity and rapaciousness, wrapped in an instinct for self-preservation driven by a cold-blooded...hunt for power?” Yes, we can.
A growing chorus to remove Adam Schiff
As Adam Schiff continues to brazen it out and insist that the Durham Report means nothing and the Trump Russian collusion yarn was real (without ever showing us that “ample evidence” he claimed to have), there’s a growing movement demanding that he not merely be removed from the Intelligence Committee for being a liar and leaker (Done!), but that he be expelled from the House altogether. Schiff, of course, thinks he deserves a promotion to the Senate. I guess he thinks Jedi Master-level lying skills are a qualification.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna has submitted a resolution to expel Schiff. She tweeted, “Knowingly using your position on House Intel to push a lie that ripped apart our country, cost taxpayers millions of dollars, and authorized spying on a US President and then proceeding to double down on the lie within days of the Durham report coming out makes you unfit for office. Ethics should investigate.”
Normally, I’d comment here, but I think she’s said it all.
IN OTHER NEWS
Democrats get a taste of their own medicine
In New York City, where half the hotel rooms are reportedly now housing illegal immigrants at taxpayer expense, New York Democrats who voted in droves for Joe “Open Borders” Biden are finally starting to taste their own medicine, and it’s bitter stuff, indeed.
Now, parents in far-left Brooklyn are starting to sound like red staters as they protest plans to use their kids’ school gymnasiums to house hundreds of illegal migrants who haven’t been vetted for either exotic diseases or criminal records. It was okay to expose someone else's kids in Texas or Arizona to those dangers, but these are THEIR precious children!
Liberals can complain all they like about how “cruel and inhumane” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is to bus some of the onslaught of illegal entrants to their far-away blue enclaves, but I see no reason why states that rejected Biden should have to bear the entire brunt of his awful policies while the ones that elected him get off scot-free. The illegal aliens filling their kids' schools are just like the violent crime waves and homelessness making blue cities unlivable: if you don’t like it, all you have to do is stop voting for more of it.
Nashville shooting update
I’ve heard a lot of excuses for not releasing the “manifesto” written by the “trans” mass shooter who murdered six people at the Covenant Christian School in Nashville. But this is the first one that actually makes a valid point.
The school and the church that runs it filed a motion to block the manifesto's release because it’s said to contain information compiled by the killer on the school’s facilities and employees that might impair the school’s ability to protect its interests or its employees’ privacy if it’s made public.
What should be the focus of the investigation is the mindset of the murderer, not exposing the victims to any more harm. So mark me down as being okay with redacting any info that might endanger the school or its workers or students if some other violent lunatic accessed it.
Latest dispatches from our two-tiered justice system
Here are this morning’s latest dispatches from our politicized, two-tiered “justice” system:
This is a link to a livestream video of today’s hearing by the House Judiciary Committee and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government into the politicization and corruption of the FBI. If it’s over by the time you link in, you should be able to watch it on replay.
Those committees released a report Thursday morning, revealing that several current and former FBI employees claim they suffered retaliation for whistleblowing.
These employees said the FBI has been infected with “politicized rot,” and they had witnessed “egregious abuse, misallocation of law enforcement resources and misconduct with the leadership ranks of the FBI." Two said they’d had their security clearances revoked and one was suspended without pay.
In response, the FBI sent a letter to the Committee, outlining what it claims are just causes for the punishments that are unconnected to their whistleblowing. I won’t recap the whole thing here since you can read it at the link. But I will note that one of them is accused of using his FBI email account to warn fellow agents to exercise extreme caution and discretion in investigating January 6th suspects, and including links to a website “that stated, among other things, ‘By now it’s clear that federal law enforcement had some degree of infiltration among the crowds gathered at the Capitol on January 6,’ to which (he) commented, ‘brings up serious concerns about USG participation.’"
Well, I can see why he’d deserve to be suspended for that! That’s crazy talk!
And more proof that we now live in a world where Lady Justice’s blindfold covers only one eye (the left one):
Massachusetts US Attorney Rachael Rollins announced Tuesday that she will resign amid growing controversy about her alleged ethics lapses. Rollins, a Democrat who’s only been in office since January 2022, was confirmed because Kamala Harris broke a tie vote, and she’s reportedly connected with Jill Biden and was praised highly by Senate Democrats.
But she’s since been accused of illegally leaking sensitive information to the Boston Herald to influence an ally’s primary election, soliciting gifts in violation of DOJ regulations, and lying under oath to the Inspector General to cover it up. Inspector General Michael Horowitz laid out all the alleged corruption in a report that was referred to Attorney General Merrick Garland for possible prosecution.
Now, see if you can guess what Garland decided to do. Or I should say, “not do.” Here’s a hint: did I mention she’s a Democrat with connections to the Biden White House?
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Labor Department: Jobless claims drop
The Labor Department reported Thursday that initial jobless claims dropped to 242,000 in the week ending May 6, down by 22,000 from the previous week. Experts had predicted the number would be 255,000.
Normally, that would be good news. But the government has bungled things so much by fueling inflation with unsustainable debt that what’s good news is now bad news. It’s feared that low unemployment is a sign that the Fed’s interest rate hikes to cool the economy and curb inflation aren’t working, so they may need to keep hiking interest rates even more until they kill job creation enough to tame inflation. So Americans will not only have inflation to deal with, but also higher costs of sustaining the debts they’re running up because their paychecks don’t cover their costs due to all the inflation. And good luck finding a second or third job to pay those bills.
And all this comes amidst Democrats in DC telling us that the world will end if they have to hold down their spending to a draconian 1% more than last year.
I know some people whom I wish were filing for unemployment benefits right about now.
An astounding story
MUST-READ, both for illumination and derisive laughter value.
This is an astounding story that rips down the curtain covering the leftist campaign to smear Justice Clarence Thomas on ethics charges because he’s vacationed with a wealthy lifelong friend on the friend’s yacht (the friend has never had any case before the SCOTUS.) If you think you’ve seen leftist hypocrisy, then hang on to your hat because this one sets a new low.
One of the major forces driving the attacks on Thomas is an allegedly grassroots watchdog group called “Fix The Court.” In researching the group, Washington Examiner reporter Gabe Kaminsky discovered that it had failed to file the required IRS form 990, instead filing a form 990N for nonprofits raising less than $50,000 (It had raised a lot more than that.)
When he contacted the group’s executive director Gabriel Roth to learn why, it set off a spiraling comedy of errors that involved Roth inadvertently revealing the group’s donors. It also revealed that far from being a grassroots, people-supported group, there were only a handful of leftist foundations providing five- and six-figure grants, much of which Roth was paying to himself in salary.
So not only is the group that’s accusing Thomas of ethical lapses a dumpster fire of greed, pocket-lining and tax violations, but you must click on the link and read the frantic, pathetic messages Roth sent to Kaminsky, begging him not to share this information, whining that “I’m not a good CPA. I’m a klutz” who “screwed-up,” and he just really doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Again, I remind you: this is the wizard behind the curtain, thundering that Clarence Thomas should lose his job for not being so ethical that he follows ethics rules that don’t even exist when this clown apparently can’t even follow laws that actually do exist.
It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over:
Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s challenge to Democrat Katie Hobbs’ razor-thin 17,000-vote “win” is back in court, where a lot of powerful people fought like rabid badgers to keep it from being heard.
One of her attorneys’ most astonishing claims is that there were 334,000 mail-in ballots in Maricopa County that couldn’t possibly have had the signatures on them verified. They say that according to the county’s own voter logs, just 11 election workers reviewed more than 264,000 ballots for matching signatures in less than 3 seconds each, while another 70,000 ballots were reviewed at a rate of less than 2 seconds each. Their conclusion is that the reviewers were so overwhelmed, they didn’t even look at the signatures.
They also entered into evidence a video showing two election workers side by side, one of them methodically verifying the signatures at a reasonable pace while the other approves them as fast as he can click the “Enter” key. They say that the second worker alone was responsible for “verifying” 27,000 ballots, or 10,000 more than Hobbs’ winning margin. Lake called the signature verification process “a complete joke.”
I don’t want to leap to any conclusions, so I eagerly await the Democrats' simple explanation for this. I have a feeling it will be a claim that those super-fast election workers are actually AI-powered robots, which will be good enough for CNN.
This is a disturbing op-ed by Israeli Defense Force special forces reservist Ben Kerido, citing documents leaked from the Pentagon last month that were largely ignored by the media.
Read it and see if you agree that Biden is not only depleting America’s military equipment and weaponry by sending it to an endless war in Ukraine just as the threat from China is growing, he’s also depleting US weaponry that protects Israel just as Iran is on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons, thanks to him and Obama.
NBC News’ motto
NBC News’ motto used to be “The More You Know…” Now, it should be “The more you watch us, the less you know.” Case in point: the network ran a puff piece about an Illinois teacher facing a police report for sharing a book with middle school students. NBC painted her as a model teacher and the book as an “entertaining and informative ‘instruction manual’ for anyone coming out as lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans.” As Bonchie at Redstate points out, nowhere did they describe what it actually contains.
Unfortunately for NBC News, the new version of Twitter has “community notes” that allow others to add missing context. In this case, they pointed out that NBC’s thumbnail showed the wrong book jacket, and they posted pages from the real book in question, which is filled with graphic gay sex terms and pornographic illustrations. Warning: Bonchie has reproduced only the mildest page, and it’s still pretty rough, but there’s a link to the full thing if you’re in the mood to be disgusted and offended.
This is what NBC News thinks should be shown to kids in middle school, but as we’ve already seen, if you tried to read it out loud at a school board meeting in front of the same adults who approved it for children, they’d order you to stop or face arrest.
And this is the real reason why liberals hate the new “free speech” Twitter so much.
A clear-eyed look at drug legalization
For a while there, it seemed as if the drug legalization boom was unstoppable. That’s understandable when you consider that every time a new proposal to legalize drugs came up, there were even more people on drugs to vote for it. It started with legalizing pot, then grew to the point where Oregon even decriminalized possessing “personal amounts” of drugs like heroin, meth and fentanyl. But now, it appears that at long last, even people in blue states are finally coming out of their purple haze and realizing what a bad idea that was.
DHM Research in Portland surveyed Oregonians and found that 63% favor reinstating criminal punishments for drug possession. Majorities of every demographic want drugs banned again. To the surprise of nobody who isn’t on drugs, decriminalizing hard drugs didn’t make life better, it increased drug addiction, homelessness and crime.
One Portland-based attorney told Fox News, "I think we didn't realize that what we were signing up for was the deterioration of civilized norms and the public spaces being ceded to people in late-stage drug addiction and engaged in all sorts of criminal activity to keep that addiction going." She added, "Oregon has turned into an international spectacle and I think we looked at each other and realized that we made an enormous mistake."
Let’s hope that this new clear-headedness trend keeps going until they realize they get the exact same results with their addiction to voting for Democrats.
Walgreens settles
Speaking of “progressive” places that are mysteriously plagued with crime, homelessness and drug addiction, Walgreens has agreed to pay $230 million to San Francisco to settle the city’s lawsuit blaming the pharmacy chain for the city’s opioid crisis. Just what Walgreens needs: one more reason to pack up and get out of San Francisco.
I would try to explain the rationale for this lawsuit, but it would make my head hurt so much I might need an opioid painkiller, so I’ll just let you read it at the link.
Walgreens agreed to pay to end the suit but admitted no wrongdoing. I assume $230 million seemed like peanuts to them, compared to how much they’ve lost to shoplifting in San Francisco.
New far-left Mayor gets blasted
The Chicago Tribune blasted the city’s new far-left mayor, Brandon Johnson, for spending his very first day on the job kowtowing to unions and signing radical executive orders that will increase crime and drive more businesses out, with one of the orders in particular being a “disaster” for the city’s fiscal stability.
In response, Johnson’s defenders accused the newspaper of printing something that should hardly qualify as news.
How to Slant a News Story 101
This is an actual headline from the New York Times: “Texas Legislature Bans Transgender Medical Care for Children.”
Here’s a more accurate way to phrase that: “Texas Legislature Bars Giving Dangerous Chemicals and Hormones to Healthy Minors.”
https://www.breitbart.com/
Moral Rot Update
In a shocking poll by Canada’s National Post, 28% of Canadians said they think assisted suicide should be offered as a cure for homeless people who are tired of their lives.
Or maybe you could offer them help to get off of the streets and the drugs, get homes and improve their lives. Nah, it’s easier just to help them kill themselves. How foolish people were to suggest that allowing unfettered abortion and assisted suicide for seniors would create a slippery slope that devalued life in general.
You know, it would make my life easier if I approved of assisted suicide as a cure for being a liberal, but the difference between me and 28% of Canada’s so-called liberals is that I would never do that.
Israel celebrates 75 years of existence, but still gets blamed for a death in 661 A.D.
Israel recently celebrated its 75th anniversary as an independent nation. In that time, it has racked up an astonishing number of achievements. But I didn’t know that inventing a time machine was one of them. Apparently so, considering an Iraqi cleric just blamed Israel for the killing of a Muslim cleric in the year 661 A.D.
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