Mike Huckabee

11 years ago on Feb 2, true American hero Chris Kyle was murdered by a troubled vet Chris was trying to help. Chris's widow Taya and son Colton keep the legacy alive. I'm proud to wear t-shirt honoring Chris Kyle.

https://americansniper.com

Mike Huckabee

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

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Daily Bible Verse

Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come follow me.”

Matthew 19:21

Newsletter Notes

9 stories

3,584 words

Reading time: About 17 minutes

Rewarding terrorism?

Yesterday, I linked to a report that the UK government was considering rewarding terrorism by recognizing Palestine as a sovereign state. It disgusts me to have to report that the Biden State Department is reportedly considering the same betrayal of Israel.

https://www.westernjournal.com/biden-administration-considering-ultimate-betrayal-israel-report/

If Biden’s crew recognizes a Palestinian state or lifts its veto to allow the UN Security Council to admit Palestine as a “full UN member state,” then as one astute commenter on Twitter (X) put it, Hamas and Iran will have gotten everything they wanted out of the October 7^th terrorist attack on Israel.

I’m used to Biden folding like a cheap card table before our enemies, but this would be like a cheap card table with all the screws loose. Let us pray that they don’t make this dangerously stupid move, and that by the next election, liberal Jewish voters will have realized that “mean tweets” are preferable to empowering anti-Semites who want to commit genocide.

Here’s how bad the Democrats’ internal polls for Joe Biden must be:

A full year after the train derailment and toxic chemical spill that devastated East Palestine, Ohio, it was announced that Biden will finally visit the town. For reference, Trump wasn’t even President anymore, and he visited there two weeks after it happened and donated a truckload of bottled water (Fun fact: leftists on social media attacked him for visiting, blamed the train derailment on him, and falsely claimed that the water was 13 years old. Imagine what they would have said about him if he didn't show up at all, then only came because it was an election year.)

https://www.westernjournal.com/trump-sees-right-bidens-ploy-east-palestine-visit-finally-announced-year-train-disaster/

After a solid year of the White House ignoring pleas for help from the people of East Palestine (Biden seems more concerned about the people of Middle Eastern Palestine), this sudden about-face isn’t going over too well with locals who are blasting Biden’s cynical, Johnny-come-lately visit online.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/31/biden-east-finally-going-to-east-palestine-n2169444

The mayor cordially welcomed the visit, but pointedly said that the best time for Biden to visit (other than right after the catastrophe actually happened) would be in 2025, “when he's on his book tour.”

https://rumble.com/v4aomvc-east-palestine-mayor-says-the-best-time-for-biden-to-visit-would-be-2025-wh.html

When asked if Biden will drink the water in East Palestine (the safety of that was a major concern), White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dodged the question, declaring, "This is about this President being a president for everyone and showing up for this community. I'm not going to get into some political stunts about drinking water."

Besides, if he’s thirsty, they can hand him a bottle of that Trump-branded water. That would be a great photo-op. And incidentally, as someone who was Governor of Arkansas for 10 years and who had to deal with my share of calamities, like tornadoes, I can confirm that “showing up for the community” is an important part of the job. But when it takes you a year, is that really “showing up?”

Absolutely astonishing:

Georgia state Senator Colton Moore captured video of groups of illegal aliens from all over the world who were dropped off from ICE detention at the Atlanta Airport. Moore said they were being kept in a packed room at the airport with the door guarded by an Army soldier who told Moore he wasn’t allowed to video it and tried to take away his phone.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2024/01/31/a-ga-state-senator-appears-to-show-groups-of-illegal-immigrants-in-a-room-at-atl-airport-n2634457

Moore said, “It was a scrimmage between he and I in order to get the phone back. And then he proceeded to tell me to get out of there and just made a real big scene out of it.”

Well, it’s gratifying to hear that there’s still one person in the government who’s trying to enforce security rules at airports. Too bad it’s the rule against Senators making cell phone videos and not the rule about not letting a lot of unvetted, illegal foreign nationals into our airports.

UPDATE:

Michael Roman, the Trump co-defendant in the ridiculous Georgia RICO prosecution who exposed the alleged improper romantic and financial relationship between Fulton County DA Fani Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade, just took it up a notch. His attorneys have slapped Willis and Wade with subpoenas ordering them to testify in an evidentiary hearing into their alleged corruption that could determine whether they’ll be disqualified from prosecuting the case.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/miacathell/2024/02/01/fani-willis-subpoenaed-feb-15-hearing-n2634437

Well, I’ve got to give this to Ms. Willis. She claimed that this case would expose shocking corruption among government officials, and it has.

Self-Deterring & Underwhelming

By Kenneth Allard

Even if you’re a blue-dog Democrat who considers Joe Biden a national security guru, do you really think our adversaries are deterred whenever they hear him, his Vice President or his secretaries of state and defense collectively mouthing the word: “Don’t”? No, I don’t think so either and not just because the Persian ancestors of today’s Iranian mullahs are often credited with inventing chess. You see, chess is a game of great subtlety where outcomes depend on discerning an opponent’s strategy, sensing when he is constructing a trap, planning a daring gambit – or simply bluffing because the game is already well past his depth. Nor would a chess master have to be particularly astute to discern the especially uneven track record that Messrs. Biden, Blinken and Austin have blundered into - from Afghanistan and Ukraine to the Chinese spy balloon and now the Israeli-Hamas war. In fact, you can make a far better counter-argument that our global adversaries have profited by consistently acting against whatever transient interest happened to be the American policy du jour. 

The odds against us are so dire that today you have to wonder if our president has any remaining “street-creds” with either our allies or our enemies. You might remember a similar situation depicted in the 1987 movie, “The Untouchables,” a fictionalized account of how Al Capone’s empire was crushed during the Prohibition era. In one of its most memorable scenes, Sean Connery plays a tough-as-nails street-cop who instructs District Attorney Elliot Ness on how deterrence is measured in Chicago’s gangland.  Their no-nonsense dialogue went something like this: “He comes at you with a knife, you answer with a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send two of his to the morgue. So what are you prepared to do, Mr. Ness?”

So what are you really prepared to do now, Mr. Biden? Can you please begin by not trembling every time you mumble that the US wants no wider war with Iran! The only message those repeated aversions produce in Teheran is the certainty that they are on a winning path, that their strategy of fighting to the last Houthi is succeeding brilliantly. Being chess masters, the Iranians understand indirection, the art of moving pawns across the board in a way that sews confusion and distress in the Nirvana of official Washington. From Foggy Bottom to the Pentagon’s five-sided puzzle palace, they endlessly plan on having plans and success is even more relative than with their Kissin’ Cousins in West Virginia. Can you possibly understand that our adversaries around the world have watched gleefully over the last three years as every quasi-threat issued by your administration has proven hollow? Sadly, that is true even here in Texas, which never needed a foreign policy until you and Mr. Mayorkas reversed Federal law and all common sense, opening our borders to the worst subversion in our collective history!

Forgive my candor but your disastrous record at home and abroad has produced the polar opposite of deterrence, ill-considered threats that lately shed the blood of our best and brightest. As you stand at Dover tomorrow to provide a dignified reception for their remains, please comfort their families and the nation which sent them by at least attempting to perform the role of their Commander-in-Chief. Understand that the whole world will be watching, wondering if the America which rode to their rescue so many times in history has become so fatally divided that its own survival is now in question.

So how are you now prepared to answer them, Mr. Biden, particularly as your spokes-persons assure us that your threats finally have real meaning? Will you be able to discern that critical dividing line between Target Destroyed and What Have We Done? Whatever your decision, will you keep faith with those brave, long-suffering soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines sent to do your bidding? Finally, try to remember that your primary duty as a wartime leader is to provide a sticking point for the nation’s will to prevail against its adversaries, no matter how unprepared you may feel for that role. And as you take those first measured steps toward conflict, have you considered doing what FDR did on D-Day and leading the nation in prayer?

Colonel (Ret.) Kenneth Allard is a former West Point faculty member, Dean of the National War College and NBC News military analyst.

Replaced by Another Political Hack

Since John Kerry is stepping down as Biden’s “climate czar” to go back into politics and try to help Biden get reelected President (is he actually considered an expert at that?), I guess it’s only appropriate that he will be replaced as “climate czar” by yet another Democrat political hack: John Podesta.

https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2024/02/01/white-house-taps-john-podesta-to-succeed-john-kerry-as-u-s-climate-envoy/

Podesta’s climate science experience includes helping negotiate Obama’s Paris Climate Accord and overseeing spending on “green energy” in Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act.” In short, blowing enormous amounts of borrowed money and making deals that harm America while enriching other nations like China that pollute far worse than we do.

Yep, he’s the perfect replacement for John Kerry, all right!

Babylon Bee: Biden has a new press secretary

No wonder President Biden can’t close the border or reduce inflation or make any headway in the Middle East or with Russia/Ukraine. He’s too busy communicating with much more important people. Well, not people, exactly. Muppets…

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2024/01/31/joe-bidens-response-to-elmos-viral-online-wellness-check-backfires-as-americans-fault-him-for-their-depression/

The Babylon Bee is already on the story…

https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-names-elmo-new-press-secretary

I have to admit, that would be an immense improvement.

And as long as we’re checking in with the Babylon Bee, here are a few more much-needed laughs from stories that aren’t really that much faker than anything on MSNBC.

https://babylonbee.com/news/mike-lindell-arrives-in-texas-to-build-a-mypillow-border-wall

https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-cleverly-distracts-from-civil-war-by-starting-world-war

https://babylonbee.com/news/california-becomes-first-state-to-ban-heterosexual-marriage

https://babylonbee.com/news/mayorkas-says-hes-not-sure-how-he-can-be-impeached-when-he-doesnt-even-do-anything

O’Keefe gets on-camera admission of Biden’s mental decline, Kamala’s unpopularity

James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas and now O’Keefe Media Group (OMG) and the Citizen Journalism Foundation, has done it again, using a disguise and hidden cameras to dig past the messages you and I are told and get to the truth we otherwise might never hear.

O’Keefe’s face is well known in Washington DC, so he colored his hair and wore fake glasses to go to a restaurant on January 21, 2024, for a “first date” with someone who works in the Executive Office of the President.  This individual is Cybersecurity Policy Analyst Charlie Kraiger, who does the usual first-date thing of impressing his companion with “inside” information relating to what he does for a living.  No doubt it does impress first dates when you tell them you work “for the White House.”

That’s why it’s so hilarious when he tells O’Keefe at one point, “I’m good at keeping secrets.”  What he’s good at is singing like a canary.

He says he manages cybersecurity for two federal agencies, the State Department and USAID.  (Side note:  That’s the United States Agency for International Development, which is headed by Obama’s UN ambassador Samantha Power, remembered in part for her name being on many, many surveillance requests.  President Biden nominated her to run USAID in January 2021.  She’s yet another Obama holdover.)

https://www.usaid.gov

Kraiger’s job, he tells O’Keefe, is “oversight management.”  He helps oversee “responses to cyber incidents and cybersecurity problems.”  He protects “the networks of the federal agencies” that “you give all your information to.”  He says also that “we’re the President’s voice when we go into meetings, in terms of discussing and promoting the President’s priorities.”  (Aside:  well, this President does have trouble being his own voice.)  “I have recurring meetings with them where we talk about goals and we talk about the President’s priorities, and, like, how they are coming on certain executive order deliverables and all of this kind of stuff.”

Then the conversation gets gossipy, with Kraiger exclaiming at one point, “I’m just telling you what I’ve heard!”  O’Keefe leads the conversation by telling him he “loves all of Biden’s policies” but is concerned about the President’s mental fitness, saying, “Just witnessing --- it’s a bad look.  He stumbles to talk.”  Kraiger answers lightly, “Yes, he’s no Barack Obama.”

When O’Keefe flat-out asks him if Biden is going to be the nominee, he immediately answers, “Yes.”  O’Keefe shakes his head slightly, giving Kraiger a nonverbal cue that it’s okay to freely admit their concerns about this.

So, do his colleagues at the White House realize Biden has this problem?  Kreiger answers slowly, “I think that they probably do, but no one in modern history has ever said, like we’re not gonna renominate the President for a second term.  That just hasn’t happened.”

“And she [Kamala] will be the Vice President nominee,” Kraiger continues.  “There was a debate about removing her from the ticket, but, sadly, they didn’t.”

Kraiger brings up one of the weirder problems with Kamala, that she “can’t keep black staff.”  They “quit en masse.”  Even THE NEW YORK TIMES did a story about this, he says.  “People sent it around the office; everyone was like, ‘Oh (bleep).’”

When O’Keefe brings up the concern that Biden has “got dementia,” Kraiger says he hasn’t been diagnosed, but “he’s definitely slowing down.”  When asked if his colleagues at the White House realize this, he says, “I think so,” and also mentions the bad polling.  His colleagues talk privately of their concerns, he says, but they can’t speak publicly --- “no, no, no” --- about either Biden’s cognitive dysfunction or Kamala’s unpopularity.  “They have to toe the line.”

Note that he’s spilling this to his “date,” whom he has just met.

“They know it.  Of course they do.  But it’s the optics and, like, the scandal I think they feel wouldn’t be worth it...Does it make sense?  No, but that’s what I’ve heard.”

“You can’t remove the first black lady to be Vice President from the (bleep) presidential ticket.”  Because of the message it would give to black voters, “how would you spin that?”

“Like, she’s a woman, and she’s multiracial...I think they’re really concerned about that.”

“I think they need to get rid of him or get rid of her.  But I don’t think they’re gonna do that.”

(Another aside: Note that nowhere in this conversation was the topic raised about how dangerous it might be to America to retain a President who’s clearly in mental decline. The first and only consideration is protecting the Democratic Party and staying in power. If the guy they’re protecting leads the entire nations over a cliff, destroys national security and the economy, and gets us into World War III, that’s just a risk they’re willing to take.)

Of course, bringing in Michelle Obama to save the day would solve the Democrats’ race-and-gender problem, and this does seem likelier (to us) every day, but Kraiger tells O’Keefe he doesn’t think it will happen.  Still, he’s basing that prediction on a remark he heard her make years ago in a meeting, when he was just an intern.  When asked then if she would ever run for office, she’d said no, he told O’Keefe.  Paraphrasing her, he said Michelle had told them she’d seen all this (bleep) her husband had had to go through and it didn’t interest her.

Finally, O’Keefe decides to end the conversation.  “So you work in cybersecurity for the White House,” he says as he removes his glasses, “and my question is, what are you doing in a meeting with James O’Keefe?  And how do you think it looks to the American people that working in the Office of Cybersecurity, you’re sitting across the table from James O’Keefe?”

“...What type of cybersecurity operation are you guys running over there?...Did you not do your research?”  O’Keefe suggests they were running “a clown show.”

Sounds like it, but this is a serious concern.  (Note:  we do expect O’Keefe to supply an unedited video of the complete conversation.)  What if a spy for China or another adversary had pulled the same “dating” ploy to get information about the most pressing concerns at the White House?  Maybe start a relationship with someone there --- it apparently isn’t hard --- just to have an ongoing source of information?  How many would-be Eric Swalwells are working in such proximity to power?

Since this meeting, Charlie Kraiger’s social media has been scrubbed.  (Just as well; it said he likes “long walks on the beach” and “diplomatic negotiations.” Ick.)  And today, O’Keefe will release a follow-up video to let us know what else has happened since the ambush of this Chatty Kathy.

https://thelibertydaily.com/james-okeefe-gets-top-white-house-cyber-official/

UPDATE on January 6 “pipe bomber” story

We’d thought Dan Bongino might have had FBI agent-turned-whistleblower Kyle Seraphin on his Wednesday show to talk about the latest revelations about the J6 pipe bomber “investigation,” but it was not to be.  (His guest instead was Peter Navarro, still great.)  Perhaps Seraphin will be on today, but in the meantime, Bongino did have much more to say about it himself on his podcast.

He said he’d been 99 percent sure that the pipe bombs were a set-up designed to stop any congressional discussion of mail-in ballot security prior to certification of the election, but that now he has no doubt whatsoever, not even that 1 percent.  Now he says there is no other possible explanation, and he’s absolutely sure it was an “op.”  If they’d needed it, he explained, they would’ve had an attempted assassination of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to blame on Trump and “MAGA Republicans.”

Recall that Seraphin has said the FBI had identified the person who appeared to have placed the bombs late on January 5 (though we’ve never seen video of him placing them) by using security-cam video to trace his walk to the Metro and also the card he used to take the train.  Video also caught him getting into a car at his destination, and both the license number of the car and the Metro card were linked to the same name.  The FBI found out where this “person of interest” lived and had Seraphin and his team stake it out for a period of days, but blocked them when they asked to conduct an interview.  The entire team was taken off this lead and put on low-level J6 cases.

The man they wanted to talk to happens to be a former Air Force chief master sergeant who retains his security clearance and is now working as a contractor.  Whoa.

Bongino isn’t sure, but he also speculates that the plainclothes Capitol Police officer who walked by and apparently found the bomb by the bench in front of the DNC wasn’t supposed to find it, and that this messed up their plan.  Or else he was unknowingly sent there to find it and wasn’t in on the full operation --- until later, when he would’ve realized this and is now having to keep his mouth shut.

That might explain why we also haven’t been told this person’s identity.  Really, it’s so odd that we haven’t, because, gosh, he found the pipe bomb that could have blown up the Vice President-elect!  He foiled a domestic terrorist plot!  He’s a hero!  Why don’t we even know his name?

I know this story sounds increasingly like something out of a spy thriller, but Bongino worked in the Secret Service himself for a decade and is quite familiar with the way these ops work.  What sounds like wild conspiracy theory to someone else might sound to Bongino like “Thursday.”

Bongino starts talking about the pipe bomber case at 14 minutes in.  He expresses frustration that so few are talking about it; I wonder if he’s aware we’re among the “handful” (his word) who are.

https://bongino.com/ep-2177-the-j6-bomber-case-just-got-even-stranger

“We’re getting to the point now of no return,” he concludes, “when the government and the FBI has become so accustomed to lying to us and setting up fake narratives to benefit themselves...that government insiders in the National Security Council and the FBI and elsewhere have been so used to giving you all the middle finger that even the idea of doing the right thing right now is like a foreign concept.  And once that psychology sets in that they can (bleep) us over, it’s all gone, folks.”

If you’d like a thorough recap of what we know so far about the pipe bomber case, REVOLVER NEWS has a detailed one, here.  They’ve been doing some amazing reporting on this --- with help from Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who is on it --- and they share Bongino’s opinion that, in their words, “the January 6 pipe bombs are 100 percent a hoax and 100 percent a cover-up.”

https://revolver.news/2024/01/the-plot-thickens-damning-new-details-emerge-in-jan-6-pipe-bomb-cover-up/

I Just Wanted to Say

Thank you for reading my newsletter.

Mike Huckabee

We’d thought Dan Bongino might have had FBI agent-turned-whistleblower Kyle Seraphin on his Wednesday show to talk about the latest revelations about the J6 pipe bomber “investigation,” but it was not to be.  (His guest instead was Peter Navarro, still great.)  Perhaps Seraphin will be on today, but in the meantime, Bongino did have much more to say about it himself on his podcast.

He said he’d been 99 percent sure that the pipe bombs were a set-up designed to stop any congressional discussion of mail-in ballot security prior to certification of the election, but that now he has no doubt whatsoever, not even that 1 percent.  Now he says there is no other possible explanation, and he’s absolutely sure it was an “op.”  If they’d needed it, he explained, they would’ve had an attempted assassination of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to blame on Trump and “MAGA Republicans.”

Recall that Seraphin has said the FBI had identified the person who appeared to have placed the bombs late on January 5 (though we’ve never seen video of him placing them) by using security-cam video to trace his walk to the Metro and also the card he used to take the train.  Video also caught him getting into a car at his destination, and both the license number of the car and the Metro card were linked to the same name.  The FBI found out where this “person of interest” lived and had Seraphin and his team stake it out for a period of days, but blocked them when they asked to conduct an interview.  The entire team was taken off this lead and put on low-level J6 cases.

The man they wanted to talk to happens to be a former Air Force chief master sergeant who retains his security clearance and is now working as a contractor.  Whoa.

Bongino isn’t sure, but he also speculates that the plainclothes Capitol Police officer who walked by and apparently found the bomb by the bench in front of the DNC wasn’t supposed to find it, and that this messed up their plan.  Or else he was unknowingly sent there to find it and wasn’t in on the full operation --- until later, when he would’ve realized this and is now having to keep his mouth shut.

That might explain why we also haven’t been told this person’s identity.  Really, it’s so odd that we haven’t, because, gosh, he found the pipe bomb that could have blown up the Vice President-elect!  He foiled a domestic terrorist plot!  He’s a hero!  Why don’t we even know his name?

I know this story sounds increasingly like something out of a spy thriller, but Bongino worked in the Secret Service himself for a decade and is quite familiar with the way these ops work.  What sounds like wild conspiracy theory to someone else might sound to Bongino like “Thursday.”

Bongino starts talking about the pipe bomber case at 14 minutes in.  He expresses frustration that so few are talking about it; I wonder if he’s aware we’re among the “handful” (his word) who are.

https://bongino.com/ep-2177-the-j6-bomber-case-just-got-even-stranger

“We’re getting to the point now of no return,” he concludes, “when the government and the FBI has become so accustomed to lying to us and setting up fake narratives to benefit themselves...that government insiders in the National Security Council and the FBI and elsewhere have been so used to giving you all the middle finger that even the idea of doing the right thing right now is like a foreign concept.  And once that psychology sets in that they can (bleep) us over, it’s all gone, folks.”

If you’d like a thorough recap of what we know so far about the pipe bomber case, REVOLVER NEWS has a detailed one, here.  They’ve been doing some amazing reporting on this --- with help from Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who is on it --- and they share Bongino’s opinion that, in their words, “the January 6 pipe bombs are 100 percent a hoax and 100 percent a cover-up.”

https://revolver.news/2024/01/the-plot-thickens-damning-new-details-emerge-in-jan-6-pipe-bomb-cover-up/

Kenneth Allard

Even if you’re a blue-dog Democrat who considers Joe Biden a national security guru, do you really think our adversaries are deterred whenever they hear him, his Vice President or his secretaries of state and defense collectively mouthing the word: “Don’t”? No, I don’t think so either and not just because the Persian ancestors of today’s Iranian mullahs are often credited with inventing chess. You see, chess is a game of great subtlety where outcomes depend on discerning an opponent’s strategy, sensing when he is constructing a trap, planning a daring gambit – or simply bluffing because the game is already well past his depth. Nor would a chess master have to be particularly astute to discern the especially uneven track record that Messrs. Biden, Blinken and Austin have blundered into - from Afghanistan and Ukraine to the Chinese spy balloon and now the Israeli-Hamas war. In fact, you can make a far better counter-argument that our global adversaries have profited by consistently acting against whatever transient interest happened to be the American policy du jour. 

The odds against us are so dire that today you have to wonder if our president has any remaining “street-creds” with either our allies or our enemies. You might remember a similar situation depicted in the 1987 movie, “The Untouchables,” a fictionalized account of how Al Capone’s empire was crushed during the Prohibition era. In one of its most memorable scenes, Sean Connery plays a tough-as-nails street-cop who instructs District Attorney Elliot Ness on how deterrence is measured in Chicago’s gangland.  Their no-nonsense dialogue went something like this: “He comes at you with a knife, you answer with a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send two of his to the morgue. So what are you prepared to do, Mr. Ness?”

So what are you really prepared to do now, Mr. Biden? Can you please begin by not trembling every time you mumble that the US wants no wider war with Iran! The only message those repeated aversions produce in Teheran is the certainty that they are on a winning path, that their strategy of fighting to the last Houthi is succeeding brilliantly. Being chess masters, the Iranians understand indirection, the art of moving pawns across the board in a way that sews confusion and distress in the Nirvana of official Washington. From Foggy Bottom to the Pentagon’s five-sided puzzle palace, they endlessly plan on having plans and success is even more relative than with their Kissin’ Cousins in West Virginia. Can you possibly understand that our adversaries around the world have watched gleefully over the last three years as every quasi-threat issued by your administration has proven hollow? Sadly, that is true even here in Texas, which never needed a foreign policy until you and Mr. Mayorkas reversed Federal law and all common sense, opening our borders to the worst subversion in our collective history!

Forgive my candor but your disastrous record at home and abroad has produced the polar opposite of deterrence, ill-considered threats that lately shed the blood of our best and brightest. As you stand at Dover tomorrow to provide a dignified reception for their remains, please comfort their families and the nation which sent them by at least attempting to perform the role of their Commander-in-Chief. Understand that the whole world will be watching, wondering if the America which rode to their rescue so many times in history has become so fatally divided that its own survival is now in question.

So how are you now prepared to answer them, Mr. Biden, particularly as your spokes-persons assure us that your threats finally have real meaning? Will you be able to discern that critical dividing line between Target Destroyed and What Have We Done? Whatever your decision, will you keep faith with those brave, long-suffering soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines sent to do your bidding? Finally, try to remember that your primary duty as a wartime leader is to provide a sticking point for the nation’s will to prevail against its adversaries, no matter how unprepared you may feel for that role. And as you take those first measured steps toward conflict, have you considered doing what FDR did on D-Day and leading the nation in prayer?

 

 

Colonel (Ret.) Kenneth Allard is a former West Point faculty member, Dean of the National War College and NBC News military analyst.

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

One hint that Joe Biden won’t be the presidential candidate this year is that a left-leaning news outlet like POLITICO has just run an article about Hunter Biden and his long history of trading on the Biden name.

The piece is by Jasper Craven, whose work has appeared in such publications as THE NEW YORK TIMES, MOTHER JONES, THE INTERCEPT, THE ATLANTIC and THE NEW REPUBLIC.  We’re talking far left.

“Hunter Biden snagged a cushy bank job after law school,” says the headline.  “He’s been trading on the Biden name ever since.”  Subhead:  “When Hunter decided to be in the Biden business.”  Actually, the decision seems to have been made for him.

The article details how Hunter’s life changed just as he was graduating from Yale Law School.  He was already married with a baby daughter, apparently a happy guy with his whole professional life ahead, and he and wife Kathleen were ready for the next phase of their relationship, planning a move to Chicago, where her family was, and for him to take a couple of well-paying internships and an “attractive” full-time offer from one of those firms.  (Note:  much of this information comes straight from Kathleen’s book, IF WE BREAK:  A MEMOIR OF MARRIAGE, ADDICTION AND HEALING.)  But something happened to derail those adventurous early-marriage plans.

One day Hunter went back home to Wilmington to talk with someone “to get career advice,” as Kathleen put it.  Another source has said this person was Charles Cawley, CEO of MBNA bank and a close political ally of father Joe Biden.  Apparently, this was the proverbial offer Hunter couldn’t refuse; it was, in Kathleen’s words, “a dollar amount greater than anything I’d ever imagined someone our age earning.”

Have you ever read the John Grisham novel or seen the movie THE FIRM?  In it, the lead character, played in the film by Tom Cruise, has just graduated from law school and is offered a mind-boggling amount of money, with all sorts of perks, to join a small law firm.  In the fictional story, he’s recruited from his graduating class for this unbelievably lucrative job not because his father is a senator but because he’s naive and swayed by the trappings of success.  The trappings end up “trapping”...him.

In the real-life story, the Biden story, it happens because his father is a senator.

(Note:  the movie “firm” is corrupt, catering to a corrupt mob-based client.  That’s certainly not a parallel we’re drawing with MBNA; they had different reasons for bringing Hunter on.  We’re just illustrating how an unimaginably huge monetary offer can sway someone right out of school who might have had other plans for his life.)

And just as in the movie this decision caused marital strife, so it did in Hunter’s young household.  Kathleen didn’t want to live in Wilmington; she felt as if she didn’t fit.  But Hunter took the job at MBNA anyway.  “In doing so,” Craven writes, “he settled into a pattern that would last the rest of his life, taking opportunities and putting himself in positions marked by good money and terrible political optics.”  It might be said that Hunter became a professional Biden at that point.

The article goes into detail about the close relationship between MBNA and Sen. Biden.  “Over the course of his senatorial career,” it says, “MBNA executives showered him with more than $200,000 in campaign donations, the largest amount in his war chest tied to any one company.  Sen. Biden was friendly with MBNA officials, including Cawley, and a reliable ally for all their issues.”

“The move to MBNA thrust Hunter into a small, chummy world where it would prove impossible to escape his father’s shadow.”

As long ago as 1998, Byron York investigated these ties and called Joe Biden “the senator from MBNA.”  He also referred to Hunter’s “mystery job” within that corporation, where Hunter advanced to the position of senior vice president.

Joe Crouse, a lobbyist for MBNA, told Craven that “nobody was really surprised” when Hunter was brought in.  “He was a Biden, and we were in Delaware.”

As far as we know, Hunter’s work at MBNA was totally above-board.  But it just shows how things work in the world of politics when you’re the son of a powerful senator.  And it primed Hunter for what was to come later, internationally, trading on his father’s name.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/26/hunter-biden-first-nepotism-job-00137308

In other Hunter Biden news, Jonathan Turley wrote a column detailing a threat he received from the attorney for “sugar brother” Kevin Morris.  “The letter warns,” Turley says, “that I could face a defamation action if I do not retract (or if I repeat) my criticism of Morris’ representational relationship with Hunter.”

Needless to say, Turley did not issue a retraction.  Instead, he refused to be intimidated and published another column (good for him) repeating his objections to what he calls “Morris’ blurry representational claims.”  We’ve asked similar questions:  Is Kevin Morris acting as Hunter’s attorney, business partner, friend, film producer, financial institution/source of funds, art buyer?  He seems to be whichever is convenient at the moment.  When Morris was deposed, he asserted attorney-client privilege an astounding 17 times.

https://nypost.com/2024/01/25/opinion/hunter-bidens-sugar-brother-kevin-morris-avoids-questions-as-lawyer/

Morris seeks “sweeping privilege claims despite the layers of different relationships, from loaner to donor to lawyer to producer.”  But as Turley notes, “when you are ‘everything’ to a client, you may end up with nothing when it comes to confidentiality.”

Mike Miller at REDSTATE wrote about this as well, saying that Turley made Morris “look like a fool.”  Turley had pointed out the ethics rule that lawyers “are not supposed to pay the bills of their clients.”  Morris, while claiming to be Hunter’s attorney, has “loaned” (ha) him millions.

America First Legal has filed a complaint with the State Bar of California against Morris for this.  Great letter...

https://media.aflegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/16202026/CA-Bar-Complaint-Against-Kevin-Morris-01162024.pdf

Good for Turley, and for AFL.  As Miller wrote, when Morris and his attorney went after Jonathan Turley, they threatened the wrong guy.

https://redstate.com/mike_miller/2024/01/26/kevin-morris-threatens-jonathan-turley-with-defamation-lawsuit-turley-promptly-humiliates-him-n2169253

Mike Huckabee

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.

Sincerely,

Mike HuckabP.S. The Morning Edition delivers Monday-Saturday.

Daily Bible Verse

You will be secure under a government that is just and fair. Your enemies will stay far away. You will live in peace and terror will not come near.

Isaiah 54:14 NLT

Newsletter Notes

15 stories

5,152 words

Reading time: About 24 minutes

Escalation

I warned that by siding 5-4 against Texas and with a lawless President who refuses to do his constitutional duty to secure the border, the Supreme Court might be foolishly laying the groundwork for a soft (best case scenario) civil war. The SCOTUS ruled that Biden had the power to order Texas to remove the razor wire barrier the state National Guard put up to hold back the massive invasion of illegal aliens that Biden caused (As one satirical site put it, “SCOTUS rules that the National Guard has no right to guard nation.” Another said, “SCOTUS rules Biden has sovereign power to destroy America’s sovereignty.”)

I also reported that Texas responded to the SCOTUS by putting up more razor wire. Since then, the crisis has rapidly escalated.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/24/texas-greg-abbott-border-fence-supreme-court

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said, “The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States” by refusing to do its constitutional duty to protect the states and enforce immigration laws. For the benefit of any SCOTUS Justices who aren’t that familiar with the Constitution (hey, one of them doesn't even know what a "woman" is), Abbott cited Article IV Section 4 which says the federal government “shall protect each [State] against invasion” and Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 which says the states have a “sovereign interest in protecting their borders.”

Abbott went on: “The failure of the Biden Administration to fulfill the duties imposed by Article IV, § 4 has triggered Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which reserves to this State the right of self-defense. For these reasons, I have already declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself. That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary. The Texas National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other Texas personnel are acting on that authority, as well as state law, to secure the Texas border.”

So what happens next? Will Biden try to enforce his open border by threatening Texas with F-16s? (FYI: The Texas Air National Guard has those, too.)

Matt Vespa at Townhall.com nominated as the “most insane” response that of Texas Democrat Rep. Joaquin Castro, who urged Biden to federalize the Texas National Guard and order them to do his bidding (in doing so, he also repeated the lie that Texas was responsible for the recent drownings of three illegal migrants, which we thoroughly debunked here.)

https://www.westernjournal.com/want-civil-war-dems-congress-call-biden-seize-control-texas-national-guard/

Several Congressional Democrats are echoing his call, which would only escalate things further. Besides, it’s no certainty that Texans would side with Biden against their own state. And officials from other states who are sick of Biden’s willful dereliction of duty are voicing solidarity with Texas.

https://twitchy.com/samj/2024/01/25/youngkin-va-stands-with-texas-n2392151

I asked one of my staffers who is a born/raised/dyed-in-the-wool Texan what he thinks of Castro’s suggestion. His response: “I never could stand this arrogant leftist jerk, and the idea that he ‘represents’ the great Lone Star State sickens me. If he’d been at the Alamo, he not only would’ve leapt at the offer to run away, he would’ve run straight to Santa Anna to rat on the Texicans. He should be kicked out of office and the state of Texas with a pointy-toed boot, along with anyone who’d vote to reelect his traitorous rear end.”

Okay, I think that sums up the attitude in Texas pretty well. Just as I predicted, some are already creating history-inspired flags with a razor wire fence and the taunt, “Come and Take It!” And peaceful rallies supporting Texas’ right to defend itself from invasion are already gearing up.

https://www.toddstarnes.com/values/convoy-of-truckers-heading-toward-texas-border/

I suspect that if anyone is going to climb down and cool off this rapidly-rising confrontation, it will have to be the Biden White House. Unless they really want to risk dividing the nation, starting a second civil war or even attacking American citizens, all in the name of defending Biden’s right not to do his sworn duty of securing America's border during an election year in which illegal immigration is the #1 concern of voters.

Two more reasons why I’m so proud of my daughter, Sarah:

She really knows how to handle hostile liberal reporters and she knows a dead-end job when she sees one.

https://www.westernjournal.com/sarah-huckabee-sanders-shuts-possibility-trumps-vp-sounds-like-no/

Complaint filed

The watchdog group The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust has filed an ethics complaint against 10 far-left Democrat Congress members.

https://www.westernjournal.com/pelosi-aoc-house-dems-hit-ethics-complaint-accused-repeatedly-misusing-funds/

They are accused of misusing taxpayer-paid resources for partisan political gain, such as using official House photos and videos, or websites and social media accounts created by government employees, for campaign purposes, in violation of House rules. The complaint includes 91 pages of examples. The members named include such leading lights of the left as Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Ted Lieu, Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman. Ayanna Presley isn’t named, but examples of transgressions by her are included in the list.

I can already imagine the excuses the media will make for them. Like, “It’s okay for them to do this because it’s so important to reelect them so that they can keep doing good, and how can they do good for others if they don’t do good for themselves first?...”

Yet another higher cost that we can thank the Biden Administration for:

Due to the Houthi militant attacks on ships in the Red Sea, global shipping rates are skyrocketing.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/global-shipping-rates-skyrocket-red-sea-crisis-deepens

This wouldn’t be happening if they had any fear of our President doing anything about it. But on the bright side, maybe prices will moderate if the Houthis will just “decide to stop their attacks.”

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2024/01/20/pentagon-its-up-to-the-houthis-when-they-decide-to-stop-striking/

Think again

If you think the government trying to force everyone into electric vehicles was a monumentally stupid overreach of power…well, you’re right. But it was hardly the first time. Democrats have been trying to forcibly impose their half-baked ideas on us for years (some might say, “like dictators”), with similarly disastrous results. Check out the story of how New Jersey’s ban on plastic grocery bags “to save the Earth” has backfired spectacularly and only made the problem worse.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/blue-states-bag-ban-meant-protect-environment-backfires-staggering-rate-study

By the way, this doesn’t even mention the fact that it’s probably a good thing nobody’s reusing those “reusable” grocery bags because that would give them two options: repeatedly carry food in a bag that might have salmonella and other dangerous bacteria on it from leaking meat packages, or regularly wash the bags, using hot water, electricity, gas and detergents, harming the environment far more than just using a throw-away plastic bag.

It's almost like the left never thinks any of their grand ideas through…

CVS closes DC store

https://www.foxbusiness.com/retail/cvs-store-close-dc-thieves-ransack-location-months-leaving-shelves-bare

Sadly, I think the commenters on the story probably nailed it when they said this is just part of a never-ending cycle: Democrats let thieves run wild, stores shut down, locals complain about being in a food or pharmacy desert, then vote to reelect Democrats, decade after decade. It will never change until they make the intellectual connection between the way they vote and the way their lives stink.

The real contender

While in Virginia to pander to pro-abortion voters, President Biden said, “Hello, Virginia, and the real Governor, Terry McAuliffe.”

https://redstate.com/sister-toldjah/2024/01/23/glenn-youngkin-responds-accordingly-to-joe-bidens-bizarre-virginia-gubernatorial-election-denialism-n2169124

This prompted the actual real Governor, Republican Glenn Youngkin, to tweet back, “Mr. President, I’m right here.” Youngkin defeated McAuliffe in 2021 by 50.6 to 48.7%. He also has an approval rating in Virginia of 54% while Biden’s is at 37%.

I think the best comment came from Chris Barron of Right Turn Strategies, who tweeted, “Sounds like Biden should be removed from the Virginia ballot. Subverting democracy, denying elections, basically insurrection.”

The Top Contender

It would be hard to name the most incompetent do-nothing in the Biden Administration (you’d have to start with Biden and work down), but “Secretary of Transportation” Pete Buttigieg has to be at the top of the contender list. While he’s occupied his time with battling “racist roads,” pushing DEI policies, taking unannounced paternity leaves and celebrating his birthday, the supply chain crisis worsened, trains were derailing, thousands of flights were being canceled, and now, passenger jets are literally falling apart in mid-air due to issues like missing screws. Jazz Shaw at Hotair.com has more on this alarming trend.

https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2024/01/22/um-why-is-our-planes-wing-missing-all-those-screws-n606666

This is part of a larger discussion that’s brewing about how society may be getting more dangerous because of DEI, and the awarding of important jobs to people who are not the most competent.

In a discussion with Ben Shapiro, Elon Musk zeroed in on the problem of bowing to people just because they claim to be part of some oppressed group. He warned that we need to return to the concept of merit, where it “doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman, what race you are, what beliefs you have; what matters is how good are you at your job." He added, “That's the least racist [or] sexist you can be.”

https://www.theblaze.com/shows/the-rubin-report/elon-musk-2667069385?

It’s also what America once stood for, before the proponents of the new racism started claiming that not judging people by their skin color was racist.

Hard-Wired for Disaster

By Kenneth Allard

On January 22^nd, the Supreme Court of the United States, by a 5-4 vote and while acting on an emergency petition by the Biden administration, decided that the State of Texas may no longer use razor wire to deter immigrants from crossing the banks of the Rio Grande along their well-traveled northern routes. Although this ruling from the Supremes was unaccompanied by any explanation, it was consistent with a recent finding by Federal District Judge David Ezra. Back in September, with the immigrant flood at its height, Judge Ezra criticized Texas Governor Greg Abbott for installing a thousand-foot, floating river-barrier opposite the border town of Eagle Pass; even worse, Governor Abbott acted without obtaining Federal permission! “Unfortunately for Texas, permission is exactly what federal law requires before installing obstructions in the nation’s navigable waters." the judge added in his final harrumph. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/06/texas-border-floating-barrier-buoys-federal-judge-ruling/

Having spent a professional lifetime defending the very Constitution honored these days mostly in the breach, may I offer a word of advice to those black-robed military illiterates temporarily occupying the benches of the nation’s highest courts? Since Judge Davis’ court is located in Austin, he is closest to the ongoing scourge known as our southern border. Although estimates vary greatly, our Border Patrol believes something like 6.3 million people illegally crossed into Texas over the last three years, not including got-aways, human traffickers and potential terrorists who wish to remain anonymous. 

It is doubtful that Judge Davis has ever escaped Austin’s tony environs long enough to confer with the ranchers, farmers and sheriffs doggedly trying to cope with these human waves of misery. You rarely see this grim news covered by the major networks but practically anyone from The Valley could have told the judge about those 28,000 Chinese immigrants – mostly male and of military age – who suddenly appeared on our doorsteps. Do you think those extraordinary numbers might somehow be related to our current tensions with the PRC? None of your law books likely even mentioned the Chinese way of war, their mastery of striking ruthlessly at lucrative targets inexplicably left unguarded. You have probably never heard of Mao or Sun Tzu but instead obsessed over obtaining Federal permission slips before bolstering our defenses?

Apart from such local lunacies, the idiocy that today passes for American jurisprudence is best displayed inside the lawless environs of the nation’s capital, currently obsessed by the Anti-Trump Lawfare Campaign. But have you noticed that every indictment, each new media-manipulated specification, seems only to achieve a strange harmonic that somehow spawns new sympathy for Mr. Trump? In a weird way, the border debacle and the lawfare campaign seem to be merging, the scourge of fentanyl punctuating the desperation ordinary Americans feel for political and legal systems that no longer reflect their needs. Did the Biden White House ever imagine that their well-orchestrated campaign to saddle Donald Trump with 91 Federal indictments would only underline his point about the Swamp striking back at him and every ordinary American?

Upon hearing about the Supreme Court’s decision on razor-wire, my first reaction was to deplore the widening distance between our military and the society it defends. To the uninitiated, razor-wire seems too much a weapon of war to have any conceivable role in border control: If, however, you are not dealing with docile waves of immigrants but with an invasion, your perspective changes instantly. Wonder of wonders, our Constitution also recognizes this critical distinction, Article 4, Section 4 declaring, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against invasion…” By any reasonable calculus, the United States does not face an immigration problem but a foreign invasion that means to occupy our country and fundamentally transform our society.  

To close that border and to reverse the priorities of the last three years means recognizing that half-measures and bureaucratic gamesmanship will no longer suffice, even if we can somehow avoid a terrorist attack to penalize our negligence. As a separate and co-equal branch of government, the Supreme Court ironically finds itself able to do the right thing. By reversing its recent ruling while declaring that the nation faces an invasion under the classic definition of Article 4, the Court can send a historic signal that reinforcing our borders has now become a matter of national survival.

Colonel (Ret.) Ken Allard is a former West Point faculty member, Dean of the National War College and NBC News military analyst.

Huck PAC makes a new round of endorsements

Today, Huck PAC is pleased to announce the financial support of these pro-life Republicans. To date we have given over $600,000 to 100+ candidates:

Nathaniel Moran for U.S. House (TX-1) $5,000

Keith Self for U.S. House (TX-3) $5,000

Pat Fallon for U.S. House (TX-4) $5,000

Lance Gooden for U.S. House (TX-5) $5,000

Jake Ellzey for U.S. House (TX-6) $5,000

Greg Murphy for U.S. House (NC-3) $5,000

Virginia Foxx for U.S. House (NC-5) $5,000

David Rouzer for U.S. House (NC-7) $5,000

Richard Hudson for U.S. House (NC-9) $5,000

Chuck Edwards for U.S. House (NC-11) $5,000

Dean Phillips challenges Joe Biden

Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, the one Democrat who dared to challenge Biden for the Presidency (and pulled over 20% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary), is running against him from the left on some issues and the right on others. And in one case, he’s just challenging Biden from the standpoint of common sense and basic human decency.

https://www.westernjournal.com/dem-congressman-calls-party-completely-delusional-live-cnn-experienced-trump-rally/

Having zero positive accomplishments to run on, Biden has made his entire reelection campaign about demonizing Trump and his supporters, painting about 72 million Trump voters as racist, extremist, terrorist, fascist enemies of “democracy.” But Phillips, I’m sure, shocked Biden’s sycophants on CNN by telling them, “My party is completely delusional right now.”

Phillips did something that none of Trump’s critics will do: he actually attended a Trump rally and met some MAGA voters.

Phillips said, “I saw the line of people waiting in the cold for hours. And I thought, ‘What the heck?'” He watched Trump greet about 50 people in line, “every single one of them thoughtful, hospitable, friendly — all of them so frustrated that they feel nobody’s listening to them but Donald Trump.” As for the “white nationalist” smear, he said it was a diverse crowd, including people who’d never been to a Trump event before.

Phillips believes his party would do a lot better if it listened to the concerns of working Americans and showed them some respect instead of demonizing them. But good luck with that. They not only won’t attend a Trump rally, their housepet media outlets won’t even air his speeches. They really think that if they cover their eyes and ears (sadly, they never cover their mouths), they can make reality go away. It’s a basic tenet of leftism. They’ve now reached the “hermetically sealed echo chamber” stage. 

I hope that in November, Trump’s victory will leave them as shocked and traumatized as it did in 2016, when they also never saw it coming because they absolutely refused to look.

Feel Good Story of the Day!

The New York Post reports that the Democratic Socialists of America (i.e., “socialists”) are so deep in the red (you’d think they’d like that) that they have to slash $500,000 from their staff-related expenses. They’ll first ask for volunteers to take a severance package (Wait, I thought they worked for free? Aren’t fat salaries and severance packages for filthy capitalists?!) And “If necessary, we will then explore initiating lay-offs according to the DSA union’s contract.” Wait, they plan to lay off union workers like capitalist running dog oppressors of the people?!

https://nypost.com/2024/01/21/news/democratic-socialists-face-seven-figure-crisis-amid-palestinian-support-that-may-force-dreaded-layoffs-of-staff/

What makes this even more schadenfreude-ilicious is that their revenue has tumbled because Jewish “progressive” donors who had long overlooked the DSA’s attacks on Israel drew the line at their support of clearly anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas mobs threatening Jews as they block streets. I would call this “The Great Awakening.”

As for the socialists having to lay off the workers to boost cash flow, to quote humorist A. Whitney Brown on the fall of the Soviet Union: “Who would’ve guessed that the fatal flaw of communism would be that there’s just no money in it?”

Oscar Postscript And Razzie Nominations

By “Huckabee” pop culture guru, Pat Reeder (http://www.hollywoodhifi.com)

Yesterday, I complained that what I thought was the best movie of 2024, “Godzilla Minus One,” was snubbed by the Oscars (and I mean that sincerely: the script, characters and actors are so compelling that I would have loved it even if Godzilla weren’t in it. He’s just the big, fire-breathing icing on the cake.) Turns out I was wrong: it did get one nomination for Best Visual Effects. While it deserved much more, at least it got a nod for its superlative effects on a reported budget of $15 million, which was probably less than the catering bill on such Hollywood CGI dung heaps as “The Marvels,” “Antman & The Wasp: Quadrophenia” and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Dysentery” (Hat tip to Doomcock for that one), none of which got SFX nominations.

But you will see those movies (except, bafflingly, “The Marvels”) on the nominations list for the Razzies, or the Golden Raspberry Awards for the worst in cinema for 2024. I don’t envy them having to winnow down that list.

https://variety.com/2024/film/news/razzie-nominations-2024-chris-evans-jennifer-lopez-1235879949/

Bongino:  Fake J6 pipe bomb is “biggest political scandal in politics”

The January 6 pipe bomb story continues to develop, like a photo in the darkroom that is slowly coming into full view.  Reporters at REVOLVER NEWS continue to sniff out problems with the narrative like bloodhounds, Julie Kelly contributes her own considerable January 6 knowledge, and Dan Bongino, with his background in the Secret Service and current law enforcement contacts, fills in some of the gaps.  We’ve been among the handful of media outlets that have (so far) been talking about it.  And today, there’s more.

By way of someone he describes as “my buddy...a law enforcement contact,”  someone who “operated at the highest levels of law enforcement” and an expert in video security, Bongino has gained an understanding of how particular types of security cameras are used.  Recall that the wide shot of the “man with the backpack” informing the Capitol Police and Secret Service of the pipe bomb in front of the DNC headquarters suddenly pans and zooms in on the park bench where the pipe bomb is.  Bongino’s camera expert verifies that this means someone in the Secret Service or DC Metro has called the Joint Operations Center and alerted them to the location of the newly-discovered “device.”  The camera starts looking for it; this tells Bongino’s friend that this camera is a PTZ, short for “Pan-Tilt-Zoom.”  The significance:  Those cameras are installed only when they’re going to be manned 24 hours.

In other words, there always would’ve been someone training a camera on the area where the bomb was.  Someone would’ve seen the bomber walk into the area and place the bomb the night before the rally, if that’s what really happened.  And it would’ve been recorded for posterity on high-quality video.  Where IS that?

An additional guarantee would’ve been the fixed cameras that are always used in combination with the PTZ, to ensure they still get a wide shot even when the PTZ operator is panning and zooming.  The placement of that bomb would’ve been lovingly captured on video.  So why did the FBI show us a grainy, glitchy, old-fashioned (and apparently doctored) security camera tape that showed neither the act of placing the bomb nor the identity of the so-called bomber?

It seems likely that the two bombs weren’t placed when the FBI says they were.  The one in front of the DNC, especially, was in a spot where it could hardly avoid being noticed, if not by a passer-by then certainly by Secret Service agents who swept the area prior to Kamala’s arrival.  Agents would be fired if they missed a bomb during a sweep, so Bongino would “bet anything” that the bomb, which appears to have been a dummy, was placed after the sweep.  (As we’ve asked, if it was so obviously a dummy that agents let children walk right by it, why did police bring in the bomb-defusing robot?  Was that just for show?)

The other thing we can’t get past is the fact that Kamala Harris was at the DNC building that day instead of at the Capitol building, right at the time when she was scheduled to be certified as the first woman --- the first black woman, in fact --- to be Vice President of the United States.  One would think she’d have been surrounded with fawning media attention and glory that day, that cameras would’ve been following her the entire day, documenting the historic event.  But no, she suddenly just left at 11:25, before the riot started, to go to the DNC for some nonspecific meeting.  It makes no sense.

And the way this was ignored in the weeks and months afterwards makes no sense, either.  To recap, the new administration, even Kamala herself, hid the fact that the Vice President-elect had been at the DNC when the pipe bomb was found and had thus experienced a brush with death concocted by mysterious domestic terrorists.  Bongino played an interview clip of Kamala speaking of her whereabouts vaguely:  “I was at the Capitol that morning, and then I was, um, in a meeting, and I was told that I should leave, and then I was taken to a secure location.”

So, there was NO PARTICULAR REASON why she should leave?  Kamala completely left out the part about the pipe bomb and how close she happened to be to it at the time.  By omission, she implied that she was at the Capitol during the riot.

This is bizarre, too:  Even in a Tweet sent out by Kamala on January 6, just a few hours after this experience, she said nothing about it.  She mentioned only “the assault on the Capitol.”

Can you think of a legitimate explanation for the Democrats passing up an opportunity to tell the story of Kamala almost getting blown to smithereens by a pipe bomb no doubt left by a Trump-supporting domestic terrorist on January 6, perhaps in an assassination attempt?  We can’t, either.  Normally, they would go wild with that story.

Bongino discussed the outstanding Julie Kelly piece we linked to a couple of days ago about Kamala being MIA at the Capitol at the very time her election as Vice President was to be certified.  In case you didn’t see that, here it is…

Anyway, the pipe bomb story is just not holding up.  Here’s how this looks to Bongino:  “I think this was a plot.  Whose plot, I don’t know --- obviously someone who hates Donald Trump.  I think they were so afraid that some of the malfeasance in the election was going to be exposed by the January 6 certification process, in front of the entire country, that they needed a distraction, even if they had to create the distraction themselves.”

Knowing the Secret Service as he does, he sees no chance that they were in on this.  “Someone was trying to frame MAGA people to make it look like they were assassinating the Vice President,” he said.  “That has to be the reason she was there.  Nothing else makes sense.”

He believes what we’ve also suggested, that this was a back-up plan to interrupt the certification process in case the riot didn’t materialize (and they had ways of helping that along).  Once they had the riot they wanted --- again, we call ‘em as we see ‘em --- this other story could go away.  But the certification process had to be derailed somehow because concerns about the security of mass mail-in voting --- concerns that everyone knew were legitimate --- were going to be brought up to challenge the 2020 outcome.

He asks media people who are skeptical of this to “go debunk it” by asking Kamala what she was doing at the DNC that day.  (No one ever has!)  And ask the DC Metro Police about the PTZ camera that was obviously used and would have captured the bomber.

Bongino has “exactly zero doubts” that the pipe bomber deception is the biggest scandal in politics.  “I’ll bet you my career on it,” he said.  “I’ll bet you my entire livelihood on it...that they were trying to set someone up, and it broke bad.  It broke really bad.  And now they’re covering it up.”

Worse, he thinks they’re already working on a similar “Plan A-Plan B” strategy to mess with this year’s election, probably something violent they can blame “MAGA” for.  As we always say, don’t take the bait!

Here’s the full podcast, very powerful stuff.  His shredding of the pipe bomb story starts 16 minutes in.

https://bongino.com/ep-2172-heres-what-nikki-haley-should-do-now

And if you’re inclined to dismiss this because it’s not from an “official” source, Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who deserves thanks for getting the “pan-and-scan” pipe bomb video released, is all over this, too.

https://twitchy.com/dougp/2024/01/24/rep-thomas-massies-thread-on-the-unsolved-j6-pipe-bombs-mystery-n2392106

Hunter investigation still perking along as part of impeachment inquiry

We’ll have a detailed update on the investigation into the Biden financial scandal soon, but here are few new developments:

It’s been so long since former Hunter business partner Devon Archer was convicted of defrauding a Native American tribe of $60 million in a bond insurance scheme that it’s easy to forget he’s supposed to go to prison, eventually.  Appeal followed appeal, but now, finally, the Supreme Court has, for a second time, rejected it.  That’s all he gets.  Archer is going to prison for a year and a day.

Hunter himself is scheduled to be deposed in a closed-door setting --- clearly not what his attorneys had wanted --- on February 28.  Before then, a number of his business associates are scheduled to testify.  All of this is part of Congress’s impeachment inquiry into the President.

The DAILY CALLER has a recap on Archer’s association with Hunter during those heady Burisma days and his subsequent testimony before congressional committees.  Plus, for when you have time, there’s an hour-long video interview of him with Tucker Carlson.  Archer seems very happy and jocular in it; perhaps at the time he made it, he was still thinking then he might avoid prison time.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/22/supreme-court-reject-devon-archer-appeal-criminal-conviction/

One of the other Hunter associates scheduled to testify before Congress is Rob Walker, who was deeply involved in the Bidens’ business with Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC, as well as with a Romanian oligarch who sent payments totaling about $3 million.  Walker goes before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees this Friday.

We love to make up questions for Congress to ask witnesses, but the DAILY CALLER has already put together five great ones to ask Walker, with some background on each.  A couple of them deal directly with Joe Biden’s involvement.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/23/five-questions-need-answers-rob-walker-hunter-biden-china

Finally, legal expert Margot Cleveland offers an analysis of Hunter’s lucrative career as a fine artist.  As you know, the gallery owner representing him, George Berges, has testified he was never told of any “ethics” safeguards to keep Hunter in the dark about who bought his “art.”  The two people who spent the most on his “art” were, coincidentally, both big Democrat donors.  The biggest spender, of course, was big donor and Hunter “sugar brother” Kevin Morris.

Morris testified before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees last Wednesday.

“...When studied in its entirety,” Cleveland writes, “the gallery owner’s testimony paints a picture of an attempt to launch a new enterprise to provide cover for a continuation of the Biden family’s pay-to-play scheme.”  Morris’ testimony adds “further definition,” she adds.

Cleveland asks an interesting question:  Why would Biden’s friend and benefactor Morris go through the gallerist at all to buy Hunter’s work?  (We know that in an unusual arrangement, Morris was also paying Berges’ 40 percent commission.)  Morris had previously bought two pieces directly from Hunter; why didn’t he just keep doing that?  Cleveland has some ideas…

https://thefederalist.com/2024/01/19/hunters-painting-foray-had-all-the-classic-earmarks-of-a-biden-family-influence-peddling-operation/

Law professor Jonathan Turley also has an insightful column on Morris, whom he calls “the man of many faces.”  Is Morris a donor, a friend, a lawyer?  A documentary filmmaker?  A shaper of public opinion?  The way he’s handed out “loans” to Hunter, he seems to be largely a bank.

https://jonathanturley.org/2024/01/22/the-many-faces-of-kevin-morris-who-is-the-real-me/#more-214487

I Just Wanted to Say

Thank you for reading my newsletter.

Mike Huckabee

It would be hard to name the most incompetent do-nothing in the Biden Administration (you’d have to start with Biden and work down), but “Secretary of Transportation” Pete Buttigieg has to be at the top of the contender list. While he’s occupied his time with battling “racist roads,” pushing DEI policies, taking unannounced paternity leaves and celebrating his birthday, the supply chain crisis worsened, trains were derailing, thousands of flights were being canceled, and now, passenger jets are literally falling apart in mid-air due to issues like missing screws. Jazz Shaw at Hotair.com has more on this alarming trend.

https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2024/01/22/um-why-is-our-planes-wing-missing-all-those-screws-n606666

This is part of a larger discussion that’s brewing about how society may be getting more dangerous because of DEI, and the awarding of important jobs to people who are not the most competent.

In a discussion with Ben Shapiro, Elon Musk zeroed in on the problem of bowing to people just because they claim to be part of some oppressed group. He warned that we need to return to the concept of merit, where it “doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman, what race you are, what beliefs you have; what matters is how good are you at your job." He added, “That's the least racist [or] sexist you can be.”

https://www.theblaze.com/shows/the-rubin-report/elon-musk-2667069385?

It’s also what America once stood for, before the proponents of the new racism started claiming that not judging people by their skin color was racist.

Mike Huckabee

The January 6 pipe bomb story continues to develop, like a photo in the darkroom that is slowly coming into full view.  Reporters at REVOLVER NEWS continue to sniff out problems with the narrative like bloodhounds, Julie Kelly contributes her own considerable January 6 knowledge, and Dan Bongino, with his background in the Secret Service and current law enforcement contacts, fills in some of the gaps.  We’ve been among the handful of media outlets that have (so far) been talking about it.  And today, there’s more. 

By way of someone he describes as “my buddy...a law enforcement contact,”  someone who “operated at the highest levels of law enforcement” and an expert in video security, Bongino has gained an understanding of how particular types of security cameras are used.  Recall that the wide shot of the “man with the backpack” informing the Capitol Police and Secret Service of the pipe bomb in front of the DNC headquarters suddenly pans and zooms in on the park bench where the pipe bomb is.  Bongino’s camera expert verifies that this means someone in the Secret Service or DC Metro has called the Joint Operations Center and alerted them to the location of the newly-discovered “device.”  The camera starts looking for it; this tells Bongino’s friend that this camera is a PTZ, short for “Pan-Tilt-Zoom.”  The significance:  Those cameras are installed only when they’re going to be manned 24 hours.

In other words, there always would’ve been someone training a camera on the area where the bomb was.  Someone would’ve seen the bomber walk into the area and place the bomb the night before the rally, if that’s what really happened.  And it would’ve been recorded for posterity on high-quality video.  Where IS that?

An additional guarantee would’ve been the fixed cameras that are always used in combination with the PTZ, to ensure they still get a wide shot even when the PTZ operator is panning and zooming.  The placement of that bomb would’ve been lovingly captured on video.  So why did the FBI show us a grainy, glitchy, old-fashioned (and apparently doctored) security camera tape that showed neither the act of placing the bomb nor the identity of the so-called bomber?

It seems likely that the two bombs weren’t placed when the FBI says they were.  The one in front of the DNC, especially, was in a spot where it could hardly avoid being noticed, if not by a passer-by then certainly by Secret Service agents who swept the area prior to Kamala’s arrival.  Agents would be fired if they missed a bomb during a sweep, so Bongino would “bet anything” that the bomb, which appears to have been a dummy, was placed after the sweep.  (As we’ve asked, if it was so obviously a dummy that agents let children walk right by it, why did police bring in the bomb-defusing robot?  Was that just for show?)

The other thing we can’t get past is the fact that Kamala Harris was at the DNC building that day instead of at the Capitol building, right at the time when she was scheduled to be certified as the first woman --- the first black woman, in fact --- to be Vice President of the United States.  One would think she’d have been surrounded with fawning media attention and glory that day, that cameras would’ve been following her the entire day, documenting the historic event.  But no, she suddenly just left at 11:25, before the riot started, to go to the DNC for some nonspecific meeting.  It makes no sense.

And the way this was ignored in the weeks and months afterwards makes no sense, either.  To recap, the new administration, even Kamala herself, hid the fact that the Vice President-elect had been at the DNC when the pipe bomb was found and had thus experienced a brush with death concocted by mysterious domestic terrorists.  Bongino played an interview clip of Kamala speaking of her whereabouts vaguely:  “I was at the Capitol that morning, and then I was, um, in a meeting, and I was told that I should leave, and then I was taken to a secure location.”

So, there was NO PARTICULAR REASON why she should leave?  Kamala completely left out the part about the pipe bomb and how close she happened to be to it at the time.  By omission, she implied that she was at the Capitol during the riot.

This is bizarre, too:  Even in a Tweet sent out by Kamala on January 6, just a few hours after this experience, she said nothing about it.  She mentioned only “the assault on the Capitol.”

Can you think of a legitimate explanation for the Democrats passing up an opportunity to tell the story of Kamala almost getting blown to smithereens by a pipe bomb no doubt left by a Trump-supporting domestic terrorist on January 6, perhaps in an assassination attempt?  We can’t, either.  Normally, they would go wild with that story.

Bongino discussed the outstanding Julie Kelly piece we linked to a couple of days ago about Kamala being MIA at the Capitol at the very time her election as Vice President was to be certified.  In case you didn’t see that, here it is…

https://www.declassified.live/p/kamala-harris-still-unexplained-presence

Anyway, the pipe bomb story is just not holding up.  Here’s how this looks to Bongino:  “I think this was a plot.  Whose plot, I don’t know --- obviously someone who hates Donald Trump.  I think they were so afraid that some of the malfeasance in the election was going to be exposed by the January 6 certification process, in front of the entire country, that they needed a distraction, even if they had to create the distraction themselves.”

Knowing the Secret Service as he does, he sees no chance that they were in on this.  “Someone was trying to frame MAGA people to make it look like they were assassinating the Vice President,” he said.  “That has to be the reason she was there.  Nothing else makes sense.”

He believes what we’ve also suggested, that this was a back-up plan to interrupt the certification process in case the riot didn’t materialize (and they had ways of helping that along).  Once they had the riot they wanted --- again, we call ‘em as we see ‘em --- this other story could go away.  But the certification process had to be derailed somehow because concerns about the security of mass mail-in voting --- concerns that everyone knew were legitimate --- were going to be brought up to challenge the 2020 outcome.

He asks media people who are skeptical of this to “go debunk it” by asking Kamala what she was doing at the DNC that day.  (No one ever has!)  And ask the DC Metro Police about the PTZ camera that was obviously used and would have captured the bomber.

Bongino has “exactly zero doubts” that the pipe bomber deception is the biggest scandal in politics.  “I’ll bet you my career on it,” he said.  “I’ll bet you my entire livelihood on it...that they were trying to set someone up, and it broke bad.  It broke really bad.  And now they’re covering it up.”

Worse, he thinks they’re already working on a similar “Plan A-Plan B” strategy to mess with this year’s election, probably something violent they can blame “MAGA” for.  As we always say, don’t take the bait!

Here’s the full podcast, very powerful stuff.  His shredding of the pipe bomb story starts 16 minutes in.

https://bongino.com/ep-2172-heres-what-nikki-haley-should-do-now

And if you’re inclined to dismiss this because it’s not from an “official” source, Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who deserves thanks for getting the “pan-and-scan” pipe bomb video released, is all over this, too.

https://twitchy.com/dougp/2024/01/24/rep-thomas-massies-thread-on-the-unsolved-j6-pipe-bombs-mystery-n2392106

 

Mike Huckabee

Not all leftists have hopped aboard the censorship train --- some actually are quite fond of the first Amendment and actively promote the free expression of diverse views.  The far left has gone so crazy trying to squelch whatever they choose to call “misinformation” that the term “civil libertarian” or “classical liberal” might be a better way to classify these (former?) leftists.  Glenn Greenwald, who co-founded THE INTERCEPT but resigned in 2020 after they censored one of his stories critical of Biden, is one of these.  He has no problem shredding the Democrat Party whenever he sees this as appropriate.

Matt Vespa (most definitely not a leftist) at TOWNHALL has a piece about Greenwald’s appearance January 7 on a ZEROHEDGE panel discussing January 6.  There were a variety of viewpoints represented, even Alex Jones’, and Vespa has to give credit to Greenwald for “not being afraid to discuss any issue with anyone.”

“Kanekoa the Great” and others posted on X a series of clips, entertainingly edited to turn them into a Three Stooges-style slap down, in which Greenwald deftly deconstructs the narrative that January 6 was a coup or “insurrection” and that nonviolent people deserved to be detained as “conspirators.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/01/23/watch-a-progressive-reporter-shred-a-bunch-of-leftists-over-january-6-n2634049

Speaking of J6 protesters getting treatment they did not deserve, one incident that’s receiving attention with the release of more video was the severe facial injury caused by a rubber bullet being shot from a 40-millimeter grenade launcher right into a man’s face.

This violates Metro Police general orders.  According to veteran SWAT team supervisor and expert on excessive force Steven Hill, this equipment is designed to strike and incapacitate armed or violent individuals who are outside the range of officers.  Officers trained in its use learn that an impact to someone’s head, neck, central chest or spine can cause serious bodily injury or death.  In this case the bullet tore the man’s lip off, disfiguring him, and reportedly took some teeth with it as well.

This man was identified as 30-year-old Michael Dickinson of Philadelphia.  After he was hit, not one officer, including the shooter, intervened with any kind of medical aid, though people in the crowd were pleading that he was seriously hurt, bleeding and needed help.      

But exactly nine months later, on October 6, Dickinson did finally get the attention of law enforcement, when he was apprehended by the FBI in a pre-dawn raid and charged with multiple offenses:  "Assaulting, Resisting or Impeding Certain Officers, Civil Disorder, Entering and Remaining in a Restricted Building or Grounds, Disorderly and Disruptive Conduct in a Restricted Building or Grounds, Engaging in Physical Violence in a Restricted Building or Grounds, Disorderly Conduct in a Capitol Building, Act of Physical Violence in the Capitol Grounds or Buildings."

https://www.wnd.com/2024/01/police-shot-j6-demonstrator-face-refused-aid/

He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months’ incarceration, plus 3 years of probation and a $2,000 fine.  Yes, he HAD gotten rowdy and absolutely should not have done that, but considering he was “armed” only with a bucket of water and a paper cup, he was wildly outmatched by the cop with the grenade launcher.

https://www.wnd.com/2024/01/police-shot-j6-demonstrator-face-refused-aid/

LAW & CRIME’s write-up from the day after his arrest glosses over his injury, simply mentioning in passing that he had “sustained facial injuries from a rubber bullet.”  It also said the FBI had obtained his hospital records from January 6 and 7.  The news that he had been shot in the face with a grenade launcher by a Metro Police officer came later.

https://lawandcrime.com/u-s-capitol-breach/philadelphia-man-threw-what-appears-to-be-a-coffee-tumbler-at-police-on-jan-6-feds-say/

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

As our “Justice” Department doubles down on arresting Trump supporters simply for exercising their Constitutional rights of free speech and peaceful assembly, it’s increasingly clear that the full story behind the riot on January 6 is being kept under wraps.  The DOJ has even targeted one of the journalists trying to expose it.

Attorneys representing BLAZE NEWS reporter Steve Baker say the DOJ may be embarking on a “retaliation” against him for his reporting on January 6.  We reported about a month ago that these attorneys had received a call from the DOJ saying Baker would be arrested on unspecified charges and needed to surrender himself.

According to Baker, they magnanimously moved the original surrender date of December 19 to allow him to spend Christmas with his family.  Wasn’t that nice?  Now he’s just waiting to hear.  Based on the timing, he can’t help but make the connection between their targeting of him and the January 6 stories he’s currently working on.

Baker’s attorneys concluded their press release about this with a message for the DOJ:  “If you are so convinced in the strength of your case against Steve Baker that you file charges against him in the [DC District Court], we invite you to join in a stipulation with the defense to have Steve’s case tried in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina or the Northern District of Texas.”  In other words, don’t railroad our client in a DC court, the way you’re doing with other people.

As we reported just a few days ago, it was Baker who discovered that the oddly nonchalant “man with the backpack” seen on video informing Capitol Police and Secret Service about the pipe bomb in front of DNC headquarters was himself a plainclothes Capitol Police officer.  He also found video that suggested Capitol Police Special Agent David Lazarus, who testified against Oath Keepers who’ve since been sentenced to decades in prison, couldn’t possibly have been where he said he was to witness what he supposedly saw.

Baker’s video examination also blew up Capitol Hill Police officer Harry Dunn’s allegations of racism directed at him by Trump supporters that day.

BLAZE MEDIA Editor-in-Chief Matthew Peterson said last month, “I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that Baker learned of his coming indictment the very same day he met with a pair of Capitol Police whistleblowers.  Nor do I believe that the Justice Department decided to press ahead as Baker has spent more than a week viewing hundreds of hours of Capitol closed-circuit TV video and unearthing previously undisclosed details about the events of January 6.”

Baker has said he’s been under federal investigation for the better part of two years following his independent reporting on January 6, which began before he started working for BLAZE NEWS.  But now, with his new report on the “man with the backpack” where the DNC pipe bomb was discovered on January 6, the DNC seems to be ramping up again.

Baker says he won’t be intimidated.  “I will continue to report the findings of my investigation into the evidence being made available to me to review.  I have followed and reported on dozens of trials of January 6 defendants, and the more I investigate, the greater is my unease at what is being done in the name of ‘justice.’”

https://www.theblaze.com/news/justice-dept-may-be-orchestrating-retaliation-against-blaze-news-steve-baker-for-his-jan-6-reporting-bakers-attorneys

Besides journalists such as Baker, another investigator who deserves our thanks is Georgia Rep. Barry Loudermilk, chairman of the House Administration Committee’s Oversight Subcommittee, which is investigating the security failures that day as well as the subsequent activities of Pelosi’s “select” J6 Committee (now thankfully disbanded).

Loudermilk told FOX NEWS Digital last week that his investigation has entered a “new phase” with renewed support from Speaker Mike Johnson, whom he says has committed “additional resources.”

Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chaired the J6 Committee, and “GOP” co-chair Liz Cheney were required under House rules to archive all their digital files with the Clerk of the House so they could be available to Loudermilk’s committee but complied only about halfway.  (Par for the course --- this committee operated as though no rules applied to it at all.)  Loudermilk found that those sneaks had deleted more than 100 encrypted files from their records just a few days before the GOP took over as the majority in the House in January 2023.

So Loudermilk’s committee hired a forensics team to “scrape” hard drives to determine what they’d deleted.  The team found that 117 files had been deleted and also encrypted, under password protection.  The deleted files apparently were recoverable, so now Loudermilk is demanding the passwords. 

And he’s not done.  He also wrote letters to the general counsels for both the White House and DHS, requesting “unedited and unredacted transcripts” of their testimony to the J6 Committee.  Deadline:  this Wednesday, January 24.  Loudermilk has vowed to get to the truth of what the committee members were up to, and we get the impression he won’t rest until he does, perhaps just in time during this election year.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/house-committee-jan-6-deleted-encrypted-117-files-was-required-share-house-gop-sources

If you saw Dan Bongino’s Friday podcast (we linked to it on Saturday), you know one of the many odd things about the discovery of a pipe bomb outside of DNC headquarters on January 6 was that Kamala Harris was actually there, inside the building.  Why would she have been there instead of at the Capitol building when she was about to make history as the first woman of color --- first woman, period --- to be officially chosen Vice President of the United States?  And why, after her seeming brush with death, was her presence there downplayed afterwards, when the Biden administration could’ve made huge political hay with it?  Bongino can’t figure it out, we can’t figure it out, and Julie Kelly, who literally wrote the book on January 6, can’t, either.

Here are the mystifying details we know so far.  Did you know that even in the CHARGING DOCUMENTS against January 6 defendants, Kamala was wrongly said to have been at the Capitol building, rather than at DNC headquarters?  She herself has never referred to this at all.  Amazingly, not a single reporter is on record asking her about it.  (Of course, if someone dared to bring it up, she’d probably just burst into a torrent of uncomfortable laughter.)

https://www.declassified.live/p/kamala-harris-still-unexplained-presence

Incidentally, those currently being detained on January 6-related charges have been suffering during the freezing weather.  As Jim Hoft at GATEWAY PUNDIT reports, these political prisoners (we call ‘em as we see ‘em) didn’t have heat or hot water for days.  No word yet on whether these conditions have improved.  The corrections officers reportedly have been wearing heavy winter jackets and hats inside the facility, but detainees reportedly were not even given an extra blanket.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/01/confirmed-more-torture-reported-heating-system-shut-down/

 

Mike Huckabee

The 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a block on a new Texas law requiring publishers to designate books as having either sexually relevant or sexually explicit content before they can be sold to public schools. Publishers sued to overturn the law, claiming it’s “unduly burdensome, logistically unattainable, and risked pushing some businesses out of the public school market” (Heaven forbid anyone should be pushed out of the business of exposing minors to porn.) The Appeals panel sided with them, claiming that it violates the publishers’ First Amendment rights.

That seems a bit bewildering, considering it doesn’t ban the sale of books, it just requires the labeling of their contents before they can be sold to schools and seen by children. Does this mean that the Hollywood movie rating label system that restricts audiences under 13 or 17 from seeing certain films is also unconstitutional? Here are more details on the case…

https://dallasexpress.com/state/block-of-txs-sexually-explicit-book-law-upheld/

The law’s creator, state Rep. Jared Patterson, said a number of attorneys worked on the bill and reviewed Supreme Court cases in writing it, and they will appeal. He said the law isn’t about censoring characters or stories, but “content that is just radically vulgar and obscene.” He gave an example from a book found in Dallas school libraries that was described as “inappropriately crude and even pornographic,” but I’m not going to repeat it here. You can click the link and read it yourself if you’re over 17.

I wonder what the Founders would say if they knew that one day, a major political party in power in America would interpret the First Amendment to mean that you could censor and jail people for criticizing the government, but giving pornography to school children is free speech?

Mike Huckabee

There are times when it’s hard to write about the statements coming out of the Biden White House because the sheer gall of their transparent lies is so infuriating. Like (with a straight face) blaming the Republicans for the illegal immigration crisis that Biden deliberately caused from his very first moments in office when he started reversing all of Trump’s border policies.

Or this week, when they had the audacity to try to blame Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the Texas National Guard for the drowning deaths of three would-be illegal immigrants in the Rio Grande because Abbott removed the purposely ineffective US Border Patrol from that area and replaced them with the state Guard.

This false narrative was started by Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cueller and amplified by the Biden White House, which falsely claimed that the Texas Guard physically blocked the Border Patrol from providing aid to the drowning migrants. The DHS said Abbott’s policies were "cruel, dangerous, and inhumane, and Texas’s blatant disregard for federal authority over immigration poses grave risks." That was in a (false) filing to the Supreme Court, as part of their appeal to stop Texas from doing the feds' duty that they refuse to do. Naturally, this story got big play in liberal media outlets.

https://redstate.com/videos/2024/01/18/media-gobble-up-white-house-lie-about-dead-illegal-immigrants-n2168891

If there’s still anyone in the media or the Democratic Party (but I repeat myself) who cares about facts, here are a few inconvenient ones:

https://redstate.com/mdempsey/2024/01/16/once-again-biden-admin-and-fellow-dems-push-false-narratives-to-discredit-any-border-enforcement-by-texas-n2168794

1. Patrolling that side of the river is Mexico’s responsibility. Nevertheless, on that night, the Border Patrol alerted the Texas Military Department to a possible migrant distress situation. The TMD sent a boat to investigate and found nothing. They later saw Mexican authorities responding to an incident on their side of the river, but were told they needed no assistance.

2. Nobody on our side of the border was even notified of these tragic drownings until at least an hour after they happened. Even if the feds had still been in that area, it would have made no difference.

3. The TMD has water rescue equipment and provides medical aid to migrants when needed.

4. The Border Patrol union approved of Abbott taking control of that area, calling it a “force multiplier” that allowed them to concentrate on other areas of the border. A spokesman said, "Governor Abbott is not harming Border Patrol operations, he is enhancing them." Translation: “Thank God someone in charge is finally doing something to secure the border.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2024/01/12/border-patrol-union-abbott-eagle-pass-n2633551

5. In light of all this, the Biden DHS was forced to retract its slander against Abbott and Texas, which I seriously doubt will get the same coverage as the initial false accusation. Indeed, I expect Biden to add this to the repertoire of debunked lies he keeps repeating, like the “very fine people” hoax.

6. Since Biden took office, over 1,000 illegal immigrants have died trying to enter the US, not to mention all the women who’ve been raped and the children who’ve been trafficked. This White House has shown precious little concern for any of them until it found three deaths that it could exploit to falsely smear its political enemies.

https://redstate.com/mdempsey/2024/01/16/once-again-biden-admin-and-fellow-dems-push-false-narratives-to-discredit-any-border-enforcement-by-texas-n2168794

If Biden and his minions want to see who is really responsible for the deaths of those three people who thought they could cross the river and easily enter the US, I assume that with all the egomania in politics, there must be plenty of mirrors in DC that they can gaze into.

Which leads me to this final, highly related fact:

7.  All 18 Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee voted unanimously to impeach DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for creating an unprecedented illegal immigration crisis by “consistently, willfully and systemically” refusing to follow the laws, abusing his authority, breaching the trust of Congress and the American people, and failing to fulfill his oath of office. They called it “a crisis that has cost the lives of thousands of Secretary Mayorkas’ fellow Americans,” thanks to the criminals and drugs that have poured in. 

https://redstate.com/jeffc/2024/01/18/house-homeland-committee-republicans-unanimously-vote-to-impeach-border-crisis-king-mayorkas-n2168901

I suppose you can also add those to the list of deaths that the Biden Administration doesn’t care about because they’re just not politically useful.

Mike Huckabee

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Mike Huckabee

Let’s establish at the outset that our purpose here is not to further any so-called “conspiracy theory.”  That’s not what we do by simply asking questions about a bizarre incident that still has few answers.  After the “Justice” Department has spent three years abusing the constitutional rights of thousands of rally participants to ensnare them in their J6 net, one would think they’d have revealed the identity of the pipe bomber, locked him up and thrown away the key.  Why they haven’t done this is mystifying.

We’re duty-bound to keep asking questions --- and so far, we have a perfect record of being proven right in our skepticism of official narratives.  But, in the words of REVOLVER NEWS, “That the regime has invested so much in the ‘insurrection’ story of January 6^th helps explain its commensurate hostility to anyone who challenges that narrative.”  (Of course, that’s one reason we’re exclusively on Substack now!)  Any reporting that might dare to point towards government involvement is immediately dismissed as conspiracy theory.  One FBI agent-turned-whistleblower, Marcus Allen, who shared --- without even endorsing --- a REVOLVER story with his colleagues ended up having his security clearance revoked and his loyalty to the United States questioned.  Here’s that story:

https://revolver.news/2023/05/bombshell-fbi-agent-security-clearance-revoked-for-sharing-revolver-news-article-on-january-6th-questioned-allegiance-to-the-united-states/

Today, newly-released Capitol Hill surveillance video examined by REVOLVER NEWS --- where they actually have real journalists trying to get the real story of the J6 pipe bomber --- shows more odd and downright inexplicable behavior surrounding the discovery of the pipe bomb at the entrance to the DNC, where Vice President Kamala Harris happened to be spending time that day.  REVOLVER’s latest story gets deep into the weeds on this new video, which was finally released thanks in part to the efforts of Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, but we encourage you to take the time to review their whole report.  We’ve summarized the most important points here.

The biggest new take-away --- and the strangest part of the story --- is that from what we see on this video, there’s no sense of urgency whatsoever when the “man with the backpack” walks over to Metro Police and Secret Service cars to tell them about the pipe bomb he has noticed by a bench near the entrance to the DNC.  Until now, the “official” narrative has been that when officers were informed of this, about 15 minutes after the other bomb had been discovered at the RNC, there was an urgent scramble to find this possibly explosive device, but, curiously, that’s not what happened at all.

They were so nonchalant, they even let children walk right past the area.  Wouldn’t they have blocked it off if they were concerned there might be a live explosive device near the sidewalk?

By the way, the man in the backpack, who has never been publicly identified by investigators but simply referred to as a “passerby,” has been confirmed by THE BLAZE’s Steve Baker to be a plainclothes officer working for the Capitol Police.  Coincidentally (or not), multiple sources have told REVOLVER NEWS that the first responder to the RNC pipe bomb was a Capitol Hill security officer who had previously worked for the Capitol Police.  What are the odds? 

Baker’s story elaborates on the law enforcement officers’ stunning lack of concern after being told about the pipe bomb, saying the video shows that they took a couple more minutes and “finished their lunch” before attending to the situation.   Not that they would’ve gotten any sense of urgency from the man in the backpack.  This unhurried individual had sauntered up to the driver’s side of the Metro PD patrol van, conversed, then casually walked around to the passenger side and chatted a few more seconds.  Then he’d sauntered over to the adjacent black Secret Service SUV (there to protect Kamala Harris) and spoken to the driver, and then ambled off the same way he came.

Tell me, would you behave as cavalierly as the man in the backpack if you’d just spotted a pipe bomb?  And if you were in one of those two cars and cared at all about doing your job --- or even just surviving yourself --- wouldn’t you immediately jump out of your car and get everyone the (bleep) away if you thought a bomb could go off at any moment?

After the man walks away, the video camera pans to the park benches and zooms in to where the pipe bomb had been found, so apparently some communication was made to whoever was manning that camera.  But then, things get even stranger, as several Secret Service agents come into frame, standing casually very close to the pipe bomb.  A lively group of children cross the street and walk directly in front of the benches where this WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION is still sitting.  As REVOLVER NEWS reports, “The Secret Service agents don’t think to warn these children at all, but instead themselves walk right by the bench as well, without a care in the world!  You have to see it to believe it.”

After the children pass by with no warning given, the Secret Service officers stand around for about a minute longer until a Capitol Police officer walks up close to the pipe bomb and takes a picture of it.  He then gives a thumbs-up sign to the Metro and Secret Service agents a little way down the sidewalk.  About the only way to explain this bizarre behavior is to say they all knew the bomb was inert and wouldn’t go off, but how would they possibly know that?  And if they did know that, why did they call in a bomb-safe robot to “defuse” it just a few minutes later?  It makes no sense.

And what do we say, class, when something makes no sense?  It means there’s a piece of information we don’t have.

The timing of the discoveries of the two pipe bombs was weird as well.  From REVOLVER:  “...If the discovery of the DNC pipe bomb was not related to some special urgency to look for an explosive device at the DNC in the immediate aftermath of the first [so-called] ‘RNC’ pipe bomb [NOTE:  it was closer to the nextdoor Capitol Hill Club] being reported, we are faced with a nearly impossible coincidence. This would require us to accept not only that the DNC pipe bomb somehow lay out in the open for over 17 hours undiscovered (by motorists, pedestrians, the DNC security guard, and Secret Service), but that the man in the backpack just happened to discover the DNC bomb (that had been laying undiscovered for 17 hours) barely 15 minutes after the first pipe bomb was reported. This is a very strange and remarkable coincidence indeed, and it underscores the critical need to identify and question the man in the backpack to learn more about the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the DNC pipe bomb.”

The detailed REVOLVER piece also goes back over the finding of the “RNC” pipe bomb and the unlikelihood that the events surrounding the discovery of both bombs would fall together as they did.  It also examines officials’ bewildering year-long lie about Kamala being at the Capitol building when she was really at the DNC office, supposedly with her life at risk.  Worth the time.

https://revolver.news/2024/01/secret-service-foreknowledge-or-criminal-negligence-damning-new-evidence-surfaces-fbi-january-6-pipe-bomb-story/

Also, Darren Beattie at REVOLVER NEWS has just done an interview with Tucker Carlson, and in the first 20 minutes that you can see without a subscription, he discusses the strange new video and talks us through the craziness we see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-jbrLo81Bs

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Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

I wrote about this last week, but it’s an urgent enough threat and hasn’t gotten enough attention that I’ll link to this article about it as well.

https://redstate.com/jenniferoo/2024/01/15/californias-ab5-goes-national-with-the-independent-contractor-rule-why-you-need-to-pay-attention-n2168737

It’s about the new Labor Department rule set to take effect in March that will obliterate contract and gig workers, likely costing millions of people their jobs. It’s based on California’s horrible AB5 law that has decimated gig workers in that state. No surprise: the architect of AB5, Julie Su, was put into the DOL as acting Labor Secretary by Biden to do just this, in yet another example of Democrats never being held accountable and always failing upward.

Su claims it will protect contract and gig workers (“I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you!”), but it will actually destroy their jobs, especially harming small businesses, entrepreneurs and people who need flexible hours, including single moms, younger workers and the disabled. Who will it help? The labor unions who own the Democratic Party, who will get more members when some workers are forced to become employees, and the many more who are left unemployed will be eliminated as competition.

The article is a must-read not only for what it tells you about this looming new threat, but how to take action to stop it. You’ll also be interested to learn that for all the propaganda about how its opponents are greedy rightwingers who hate the workers, there are a number of quotes from leftwing sources, including Andrew Cuomo, the Daily Kos, Willie Brown and the California NAACP, all denouncing the original AB5 law as terrible, asinine, shameful, a disaster and a catastrophe. So of course, Joe Biden wants to take it nationwide.

Related: Here’s more on how the Democrats’ alleged attempts to “help” the workers, like the AB5 law and steep increases in the minimum wage, are hastening the move toward automation and robotics replacing human workers. “Congratulations, you got a raise! The bad news: you’re fired. No need to thank us!”

https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2024/01/16/careful-what-you-wish-for-democrats-n2633659

Mike Huckabee

The media reacted to Trump’s crushing Iowa victory exactly the way you’d expect: by having a full-scale tantrum worthy of a two-year-old in the Walmart candy aisle.

Trump’s victory speech was actually rather moderate and mature. He called for unity, praised his rivals for their efforts, and talked about how he planned to begin making America great again by ending the rising threats abroad, fixing the economy and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. He even said he wasn’t going to go too hard on Joe Biden, although he then referred to him as the worst President in history. But by Trump’s standards (and considering the evidence), I’d say that IS going easy on him.

https://redstate.com/smoosieq/2024/01/15/donald-trump-addresses-supporters-following-iowa-caucus-win-n2168778

But if you were trying to watch the speech on CNN or MSNBC (and why would anyone do that?), you couldn’t, because they cut away from it. Instead, they filled the time with their far-left talking heads ranting against Trump and his supporters. Like Joy Reid complaining that there are too many white Christians in Iowa. Or CNN’s Jake Tapper, who claimed that Iowans “believed the lie” (what, that CNN is a news channel?) and that Trump was spouting “anti-immigrant rhetoric” when he said he would start deporting the millions of illegal aliens Biden has allowed to cross our open border.

This is a good example of how liberals only win arguments by changing the definitions of words. An illegal alien is not an “immigrant.” Immigrants respect America’s laws and follow the system to become US citizens, and are among our best and most patriotic citizens. Literally anybody can cross an open border illegally, which is the problem. By the way, polls show that a majority of Americans agree with those Trump policies they’re demonizing, including securing the border and deporting illegal aliens.

Even more hilariously, MSNBC’s tiny viewing pool was treated to Rachel Maddow piously intoning about how they made the painful decision not to show Trump’s speech because they’re so devoted to airing the truth. She then went into a weird diatribe about how Trump is a dangerous fascist but his supporters are even worse. You might recall that fascism is a political doctrine in which the government dictates which views are allowed to be expressed. You might also recall Ms. Maddow as the professional fabulist who misled her viewers for years, feeding them ever-wilder “Russian collusion” conspiracy theories that all turned out to be horse manure.

So why is this lying hypocrite still employed by MSNBC? I like my writers, but if they’d tainted my reputation by pushing a lot of patent rubbish for two years, I would have fired them. Whenever I see Maddow now, it’s like seeing a flashing neon sign reminding me not to believe a word I hear on MSNBC.

As laughable as these histrionics are, they do offer a serious lesson in how this campaign is going to play out, and it shows that Trump and the GOP will have to be clever and diligent in cutting through the attempts to silence and censor their message. These people are terrified, but not that Trump will be a fascist dictator (he was already President for four years, and I notice none of them ended up in a gulag.)

They’re terrified that if Americans see Trump unfiltered by them, it will undo three years’ worth of their efforts at creating a straw man and standing between him and the public to keep people from seeing who he really is: a man who was once the most popular celebrity on NBC before he announced for President as a Republican, and overnight, magically transformed into a racist, Nazi monster. They’ll also use the “We can’t let Hitler speak!” dodge as an excuse for Biden not to “lower himself” to debate Trump, as if he possibly could.

To quote Newt Gingrich: “Get over it!”

To save you (and me) the annoyance of having to watch this bilge, Nick Arama at Redstate.com did it for us and recapped it, and he has my eternal gratitude. He also makes the correct observation that despite all the claims that the Republicans are “extremists,” there are only a handful of extremists on the fringe of the rightwing, while they are the animating force of the modern Democratic Party.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/16/cnn-and-msnbc-flip-their-lids-after-trump-wins-censor-trumps-victory-speech-n2168783

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MESSAGE FROM MIKE HUCKABEE

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Mike Huckabee

“This may be the most significant instance of the United States government turning against its own citizens that we’ve encountered in our lifetime.”

That’s the conclusion of a must-read new piece in REVOLVER NEWS that brings together an array of details showing what the administration, some members of Congress, and the law enforcement bureaucracy have done (and continue to do) to American citizens in furtherance of their own political agenda.  “What’s emerging,” they say, “is a chilling image of a rogue and desperate regime willing to go to any lengths, including imprisoning innocent Americans, to keep its grip on power and punish its political enemies.”

Anyone who thinks that’s hyperbole needs to take a look at what they’ve put together over long months through the magnificent reporting of Julie Kelly and Darren Beattie.  For when you have time, here’s “The Essential REVOLVER NEWS January 6 Reading List” that they assembled two years ago.  Most of this background information should be familiar to longtime newsletter readers, as we’ve covered it in detail.  But what a great compendium to share with family, friends and acquaintances who might not be as well-versed in what really happened.  (Also highly recommended: Kelly’s eye-opening book, titled “JANUARY 6:  How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right.”)

https://revolver.news/2022/01/the-essential-revolver-news-january-6-reading-list/

This administration’s mad power-lust, fueled as it was by TDS, was even turned on a former President of the United States, especially during the past two years, when they decided it was permissible to commit a shocking armed raid on Mar-A-Lago a few months before the 2022 election.  We would add that the blatant targeting of Trump is one big reason why so many Republicans so strongly back him today, as seen in last night’s Iowa caucuses.  He’s seen as THE leader who can and will get in there and fix this unholy and most decidedly un-American mess.

On Monday, Kelly and Beattie appeared on Sebastian Gorka’s podcast, stunning Gorka with some of their latest details.  Kelly delves into the matter of DC U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves and his leftist political agenda.  Recall that Graves is also one of two Biden-appointed prosecutors who refused to allow Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss to prosecute Hunter Biden in their districts.  Graves is supervising ALL the J6 cases.

It should be noted that before and after her book came out, Kelly personally attended the trials of the various J6 defendants and read all the court filings and legal judgments, so she has a good idea of the mindset of the actors involved, particularly Judge Tanya Chutkan.  Reading her orders, one can see the twisted “logic” behind punishing people innocent of any violent or even provocative act.  In her mind, she had already convicted anyone who was there as being part of the “insurrection,” just for being at the rally at all.  It was essentially a blanket condemnation.

Gorka started his interview by observing the government is “upping the ante” as the January 6 narrative is crumbling, with Graves announcing in a big presentation just days ago that “you’re committing a felony even if you didn’t go into Congress.”  As we’ve discussed, in his zeal to double the number of his J6 indictments and keep the stack of cases growing, this prosecutor is fine with putting someone in prison just for standing in the wrong spot outside the building.  But Kelly said this legal strategy is really not new (note the aforementioned Judge Chutkan), citing the conviction of Enrique Tarrio, who was charged with obstruction of an official proceeding and trespassing (!) even though he wasn’t anywhere near the Capitol building on January 6.  The man was in a Baltimore hotel.  He got 22 years in prison.

“But what Matthew Graves did last week was really egregious,” Kelly said.  “...This is the centerpiece of Joe Biden’s presidential re-election campaign, and Matthew Graves, another partisan disguised as a prosecutor, did his part with that egregious hour-long presentation.”

Now view that in light of something else that happened this week, the sentencing of Ray Epps, who is clearly seen on video yelling at the top of his lungs multiple times the day before the rally for the crowd to “go INTO the Capitol!!!”  (The crowd didn’t go for it; sensing a trap, they started chanting, “Fed!  Fed!  Fed!”)  Unbelievably, Epps got a suspended sentence of less than a year --- no jail time at all --- when others have received astonishing sentences of 20-plus years in prison.

Gorka also brought up something new this week that we haven’t addressed yet:  the insistence by a Pentagon source that Gen. Mark Milley was the “architect” of the events of that day, as he’s the one who obstructed the deployment of National Guard troops that had been green-lighted by President Trump.  Col. Earl G. Matthews, a former Guardsman now serving in the Army Reserve, called Milley “the Don Barzini of the Deep State.”

As senior military advisor to the President, Gen. Milley had no legal role in the chain of command, according to Matthews.  But he managed to exploit relationships and run it as “his own feudal possession.”  Read what Matthews said about the role played by Army leadership on J6 --- not wanting to appear as if they were cooperating with President Trump in any way --- and you’ll see another chunk of the government’s narrative fall to the ground.

https://redstate.com/mccabe/2024/01/10/army-colonel-j6-witness-milley-is-the-don-barzini-of-the-deep-state-n2168511

Even with all this, Beattie --- who deserves credit for coining the term “fed-surrection” --- informed Gorka that “the cracks in the official narrative are far more severe even than what you’ve described,” though he didn’t have time in that brief podcast to get into it in detail.  He said that with Ray Epps’ slap on the wrist, “they’re trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube, tie up loose ends” and that Epps “would have been Central Casting for their fake insurrection narrative,” a hulking 6’3” former Marine in camo and a Trump hat.  On the day of the rally, Epps skipped Trump’s speech in favor of directing people to the Capitol building.  And at just the right moment, Epps found himself “magically pre-positioned right at that initial breach point, whereupon he whispers in a man’s ear and two seconds later, the initial breach occurs [with the barriers being moved].”

After this was accomplished, Epps texted his nephew to say he’d “orchestrated” it.  Epps had been the head of the Arizona chapter of the Oath Keepers and on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, but he was dropped from that and ended up doing softball interviews with THE NEW YORK TIMES and 60 MINUTES while other J6-ers were held without bail.  Beattie, wording it as nicely as possible, concluded that Epps is “not an authentic actor.”

https://revolver.news/2024/01/powerhouse-j6-reporters-stun-seb-gorka-with-insider-deets-on-two-major-players/

The REVOLVER NEWS piece brings up yet another example of the crumbling J6 narrative.  Remember former Capitol Police Lt. Tarik Johnson, the official that Pelosi’s committee made sure it did NOT talk to?  And Special Agent David Lazarus, whose testimony helped put Oath Keepers in prison but who appears to have perjured himself after newly-released J6 video shows he couldn’t have been in the right place to witness what he testified about?

Johnson (a hero in our book) posted an “EMERGENCY UPDATE!!!” on X with the news that Capitol Hill Police Chief Thomas Manger --- whom he called “arguably the most corrupt politician in the country,” which is saying something --- has decided to do no internal investigation of Lazarus’ allegedly false testimony.  The rug is getting pretty lumpy with all that stuff swept under it.

https://twitter.com/elleonceotk/status/1746638838112420258?s=51&t=J4D-_h2kFjBAjWxykloF4w

Mike Huckabee

As expected, Donald Trump won a record victory in the Iowa Caucuses. He took 51% of the vote, smashing George Bush’s previous record of 41%. And his 29.8% margin of victory over second placer Ron DeSantis obliterated Bob Dole’s record winning margin of 12.8%. Nikki Haley came in third at 19.1% (she declared that this is now a “two-person race,” but it’s unclear who that second person is that she's referring to.) Vivek Ramaswamy was fourth with 7.7%, and as I predicted, he started the post-Iowa field-thinning by dropping out and endorsing Trump.

https://www.westernjournal.com/ap-republican-caucuses-live-updates-trump-wins-iowas-leadoff-voting-contest/

Interestingly, Texas pastor and little-known candidate Ryan Binkley won 774 votes for 0.7%. That's four times more support than the 191 votes and 0.2% taken by Asa Hutchinson.

There was some controversy early on that drew complaints from the DeSantis campaign after the AP called the race for Trump with less than 1% of the vote in and people still caucusing. They’re right to complain about that, but it didn’t seem to make much difference in the long run.

DeSantis and Haley say they’re moving on to New Hampshire and South Carolina, although Haley announced that she won’t participate in any more GOP debates.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2024/01/16/haley-wont-participate-in-next-debates-n2633686

But Newt Gingrich says it’s already time to stick a fork in it. He told Fox News that despite all the lawfare, slander and censorship thrown at Trump, "He's the nominee. Get over it – He is the nominee. He's going to win the nomination. The news media doesn't want to say that because they need to somehow hype ‘please watch us while we go through this charade’."

He said there is no viable path for a second-place candidate to come from behind and win: "[Y]ou get to be the leading ‘irrelevant’ or the second ‘irrelevant’ or the third ‘irrelevant’, but nobody is going to be number two because he is going to dominate totally if you look at the country at-large."

https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-stuns-pundits-defying-political-gravity-iowa-win-nominee-get-over-it

Despite claims that Trump will alienate women voters, an AP poll found that he actually got more support from GOP women in Iowa (54%) than from men (53%.) One red flag that the campaign will need to address is that his support was much higher among rural women than suburban women (59% to 40%), who are an important factor in the November vote. He’ll need to work hard to dispel the phony Boogey-man image that the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have created, and convince suburban women that it’s not in their best interests to keep voting for high crime, open borders, endless wars, eroded Constitutional rights and a terrible economy.

The media reacted to Trump’s crushing victory exactly the way you’d expect: by having a full-scale tantrum worthy of a two-year-old in the Walmart candy aisle.

Trump’s victory speech was actually rather moderate and mature. He called for unity, praised his rivals for their efforts, and talked about how he planned to begin making America great again by ending the rising threats abroad, fixing the economy and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. He even said he wasn’t going to go too hard on Joe Biden, although he then referred to him as the worst President in history. But by Trump’s standards (and considering the evidence), I’d say that IS going easy on him.

https://redstate.com/smoosieq/2024/01/15/donald-trump-addresses-supporters-following-iowa-caucus-win-n2168778

But if you were trying to watch the speech on CNN or MSNBC (and why would anyone do that?), you couldn’t, because they cut away from it. Instead, they filled the time with their far-left talking heads ranting against Trump and his supporters. Like Joy Reid complaining that there are too many white Christians in Iowa. Or CNN’s Jake Tapper, who claimed that Iowans “believed the lie” (what, that CNN is a news channel?) and that Trump was spouting “anti-immigrant rhetoric” when he said he would start deporting the millions of illegal aliens Biden has allowed to cross our open border.

This is a good example of how liberals only win arguments by changing the definitions of words. An illegal alien is not an “immigrant.” Immigrants respect America’s laws and follow the system to become US citizens, and are among our best and most patriotic citizens. Literally anybody can cross an open border illegally, which is the problem. By the way, polls show that a majority of Americans agree with those Trump policies they’re demonizing, including securing the border and deporting illegal aliens.

Even more hilariously, MSNBC’s tiny viewing pool was treated to Rachel Maddow piously intoning about how they made the painful decision not to show Trump’s speech because they’re so devoted to airing the truth. She then went into a weird diatribe about how Trump is a dangerous fascist but his supporters are even worse. You might recall that fascism is a political doctrine in which the government dictates which views are allowed to be expressed. You might also recall Ms. Maddow as the professional fabulist who misled her viewers for years, feeding them ever-wilder “Russian collusion” conspiracy theories that all turned out to be horse manure.

So why is this lying hypocrite still employed by MSNBC? I like my writers, but if they’d tainted my reputation by pushing a lot of patent rubbish for two years, I would have fired them. Whenever I see Maddow now, it’s like seeing a flashing neon sign reminding me not to believe a word I hear on MSNBC.

As laughable as these histrionics are, they do offer a serious lesson in how this campaign is going to play out, and it shows that Trump and the GOP will have to be clever and diligent in cutting through the attempts to silence and censor their message. These people are terrified, but not that Trump will be a fascist dictator (he was already President for four years, and I notice none of them ended up in a gulag.)

They’re terrified that if Americans see Trump unfiltered by them, it will undo three years’ worth of their efforts at creating a straw man and standing between him and the public to keep people from seeing who he really is: a man who was once the most popular celebrity on NBC before he announced for President as a Republican, and overnight, magically transformed into a racist, Nazi monster. They’ll also use the “We can’t let Hitler speak!” dodge as an excuse for Biden not to “lower himself” to debate Trump, as if he possibly could.

To quote Newt Gingrich: “Get over it!”

To save you (and me) the annoyance of having to watch this bilge, Nick Arama at Redstate.com did it for us and recapped it, and he has my eternal gratitude. He also makes the correct observation that despite all the claims that the Republicans are “extremists,” there are only a handful of extremists on the fringe of the rightwing, while they are the animating force of the modern Democratic Party.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/16/cnn-and-msnbc-flip-their-lids-after-trump-wins-censor-trumps-victory-speech-n2168783

---

MESSAGE FROM MIKE HUCKABEE

Help me fight back against Big Tech censorship. If you would like to subscribe to the daily, advertisement-free version of my newsletter for $5 monthly or $36 annually, on Substack, go here.

Mike Huckabee

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

P.S. Just a reminder: The Morning Edition, delivers Monday-Saturday

Daily Bible Verse

⁵ My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him.

⁶ He only is my rock and my salvation: he is my defence; I shall not be moved.

Psalm 62:5-6 KJV

Newsletter Notes

12 stories

4,348 words

Reading time: About 20 minutes

Trump wins Iowa

As expected last night, Donald Trump won a record victory in the Iowa Caucuses. He took 51% of the vote, smashing George Bush’s previous record of 41%. And his 29.8% margin of victory over second placer Ron DeSantis obliterated Bob Dole’s record winning margin of 12.8%. Nikki Haley came in third at 19.1% (she declared that this is now a “two-person race,” but it’s unclear who that second person is that she's referring to.) Vivek Ramaswamy was fourth with 7.7%, and as I predicted, he started the post-Iowa field-thinning by dropping out and endorsing Trump.

https://www.westernjournal.com/ap-republican-caucuses-live-updates-trump-wins-iowas-leadoff-voting-contest/

Interestingly, Texas pastor and little-known candidate Ryan Binkley won 774 votes for 0.7%. That's four times more support than the 191 votes and 0.2% taken by Asa Hutchinson.

There was some controversy early on that drew complaints from the DeSantis campaign after the AP called the race for Trump with less than 1% of the vote in and people still caucusing. They’re right to complain about that, but it didn’t seem to make much difference in the long run.

DeSantis and Haley say they’re moving on to New Hampshire and South Carolina, although Haley announced that she won’t participate in any more GOP debates.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2024/01/16/haley-wont-participate-in-next-debates-n2633686

But Newt Gingrich says it’s already time to stick a fork in it. He told Fox News that despite all the lawfare, slander and censorship thrown at Trump, "He's the nominee. Get over it – He is the nominee. He's going to win the nomination. The news media doesn't want to say that because they need to somehow hype ‘please watch us while we go through this charade’."

He said there is no viable path for a second-place candidate to come from behind and win: "[Y]ou get to be the leading ‘irrelevant’ or the second ‘irrelevant’ or the third ‘irrelevant’, but nobody is going to be number two because he is going to dominate totally if you look at the country at-large."

https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-stuns-pundits-defying-political-gravity-iowa-win-nominee-get-over-it

Despite claims that Trump will alienate women voters, an AP poll found that he actually got more support from GOP women in Iowa (54%) than from men (53%.) One red flag that the campaign will need to address is that his support was much higher among rural women than suburban women (59% to 40%), who are an important factor in the November vote. He’ll need to work hard to dispel the phony Boogey-man image that the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have created, and convince suburban women that it’s not in their best interests to keep voting for high crime, open borders, endless wars, eroded Constitutional rights and a terrible economy.

The Media reacts

The media reacted to Trump’s crushing victory exactly the way you’d expect: by having a full-scale tantrum worthy of a two-year-old in the Walmart candy aisle.

Trump’s victory speech was actually rather moderate and mature. He called for unity, praised his rivals for their efforts, and talked about how he planned to begin making America great again by ending the rising threats abroad, fixing the economy and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. He even said he wasn’t going to go too hard on Joe Biden, although he then referred to him as the worst President in history. But by Trump’s standards (and considering the evidence), I’d say that IS going easy on him.

https://redstate.com/smoosieq/2024/01/15/donald-trump-addresses-supporters-following-iowa-caucus-win-n2168778

But if you were trying to watch the speech on CNN or MSNBC (and why would anyone do that?), you couldn’t, because they cut away from it. Instead, they filled the time with their far-left talking heads ranting against Trump and his supporters. Like Joy Reid complaining that there are too many white Christians in Iowa. Or CNN’s Jake Tapper, who claimed that Iowans “believed the lie” (what, that CNN is a news channel?) and that Trump was spouting “anti-immigrant rhetoric” when he said he would start deporting the millions of illegal aliens Biden has allowed to cross our open border.

This is a good example of how liberals only win arguments by changing the definitions of words. An illegal alien is not an “immigrant.” Immigrants respect America’s laws and follow the system to become US citizens, and are among our best and most patriotic citizens. Literally anybody can cross an open border illegally, which is the problem. By the way, polls show that a majority of Americans agree with those Trump policies they’re demonizing, including securing the border and deporting illegal aliens.

Even more hilariously, MSNBC’s tiny viewing pool was treated to Rachel Maddow piously intoning about how they made the painful decision not to show Trump’s speech because they’re so devoted to airing the truth. She then went into a weird diatribe about how Trump is a dangerous fascist but his supporters are even worse. You might recall that fascism is a political doctrine in which the government dictates which views are allowed to be expressed. You might also recall Ms. Maddow as the professional fabulist who misled her viewers for years, feeding them ever-wilder “Russian collusion” conspiracy theories that all turned out to be horse manure.

So why is this lying hypocrite still employed by MSNBC? I like my writers, but if they’d tainted my reputation by pushing a lot of patent rubbish for two years, I would have fired them. Whenever I see Maddow now, it’s like seeing a flashing neon sign reminding me not to believe a word I hear on MSNBC.

As laughable as these histrionics are, they do offer a serious lesson in how this campaign is going to play out, and it shows that Trump and the GOP will have to be clever and diligent in cutting through the attempts to silence and censor their message. These people are terrified, but not that Trump will be a fascist dictator (he was already President for four years, and I notice none of them ended up in a gulag.)

They’re terrified that if Americans see Trump unfiltered by them, it will undo three years’ worth of their efforts at creating a straw man and standing between him and the public to keep people from seeing who he really is: a man who was once the most popular celebrity on NBC before he announced for President as a Republican, and overnight, magically transformed into a racist, Nazi monster. They’ll also use the “We can’t let Hitler speak!” dodge as an excuse for Biden not to “lower himself” to debate Trump, as if he possibly could.

To quote Newt Gingrich: “Get over it!”

To save you (and me) the annoyance of having to watch this bilge, Nick Arama at Redstate.com did it for us and recapped it, and he has my eternal gratitude. He also makes the correct observation that despite all the claims that the Republicans are “extremists,” there are only a handful of extremists on the fringe of the rightwing, while they are the animating force of the modern Democratic Party.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/16/cnn-and-msnbc-flip-their-lids-after-trump-wins-censor-trumps-victory-speech-n2168783

A postscript on Martin Luther King Jr. Day:

The FBI put out a tweet honoring MLK, and was immediately eviscerated by Twitter (X) users and Community Notes, which reminded us that “The FBI engaged in surveillance of King, attempted to discredit him, and used manipulation tactics to influence him to stop organizing. King’s family believe the FBI was responsible for his death.”

Kudos to Mark Hemingway for reminding us that “the man in LBJ's (White House) responsible for monitoring King and disseminating the illegal recordings to humiliate him was none other than beloved progressive PBS icon Bill Moyers.”

https://instapundit.com/626873/

Related: I find that most leftist attacks on Trump tell you far more about the attacker than about Trump. For instance, on Monday, Trump’s campaign put out a simple cartoon on social media, showing Iowans how to vote in the Caucuses.

https://www.westernjournal.com/weirdos-mediaite-lose-minds-harmless-video-trump-posted-caucus/

The leftist website Mediaite managed to twist this into both an accusation of ignorance and disrespect about Martin Luther King Jr. Day (apparently, you’re not supposed to tweet about anything else on that day, and/or it’s horrific not to include the “Jr.,” which prompts me to ask, if that’s so necessary, why is it frequently abbreviated as “MLK Day” rather than “MLKJ Day”?) and a weird sexual controversy because the cartoon character didn’t have genitalia.

What kind of sick cartoons did these people’s parents let them watch as kids, and is that why they turned out the sad way they did?

100 days

Guy Benson at Townhall.com has a round-up of the disgusting pro-Hamas, anti-Israel rallies around the US, marking 100 days since the horrifying October 7^th attack on Jews in Israel.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2024/01/15/disgusting-pro-terrorism-rallies-in-new-york-dc-london-celebrate-100-days-since-hamas-massacre-n2633614

As these protesters have become more emboldened by authorities’ refusal to make them obey the law, their disruptions hit a new low on Saturday night when a mob of them gathered outside the White House. They waved Palestinian flags while chanting, “Ceasefire Now," "Free, Free Palestine," and "Yemen, Yemen make us proud / Turn another ship around," showing their support for attacks on ships by Iran-backed Houthi militants.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/white-house-staff-relocated-pro-palestinian-rioters-damage-exterior-fencing-hurl-objects-cops

The situation escalated when the protesters damaged the fence around the White House, and staffers and journalists inside were relocated to ensure their safety. As many pundits noted, if they’d been wearing red MAGA caps, they would have been arrested, branded as “insurrectionists” and imprisoned for years, but chances are they will face zero consequences for their open support of terrorists, threats and vandalism of the White House, and interfering with government business.

Maybe they were extra mad because on Friday, Biden admitted that the Houthis are terrorists. The Trump Administration had designated them as terrorists, but Biden revoked that designation. Apparently, he mindlessly revoked everything Trump did without any regard for why it was done, under the theory that “Trump BAD!,” which explains a lot of the disasters we’re dealing with today.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/15/biden-admits-houthis-are-terrorists-after-reversing-trumps-foreign-terrorist-organization-designation/

Related: Hamas released footage of three hostages that confirms they were alive, but it’s not clear when they were filmed. The terrorists added ominously, “Tomorrow we will inform you of their Fate.”

https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2024/01/14/sick-hamas-releases-propaganda-video-of-hostages-tomorrow-we-will-inform-you-of-their-fate-n2168720

These are just three of over 130 hostages who are still being held by Hamas. As Bob Hoge rightly says at the link, if these pro-Hamas protesters really cared about ending the war, they’d be demanding that Hamas release its hostages, not that Israel surrender.

Also related: These pro-terrorist leftists might think they can get away with being public menaces with no consequences, but they’re learning quickly that they’d better not mess with Texas.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/14/anti-israel-protester-finds-its-not-good-to-mess-with-texans-when-he-disrupts-abbott-event-n2168717

Kerry steps down

It was announced that John Kerry is stepping down as President Biden’s “climate czar” and will instead work on Biden’s reelection campaign. Ironically, his no longer taking private jets to climate conferences all over the world may represent the biggest reduction in CO2 emissions that this Administration has yet achieved.

https://www.westernjournal.com/ap-john-kerry-us-climate-envoy-leave-biden-administration/

I wish Kerry just as much success with Biden’s presidential campaign as he brought to his own.

Willis responds

Fulton County DA Fani Willis has finally responded – sort of – to allegations that she enriched herself with tax money by paying big bucks to her unqualified, married boyfriend Nathan Wade to act as Trump special prosecutor, and he, in turn, spent some of the money on lavish trips with her.

She didn’t respond in legal fashion, nor did she deny the allegations. But she did go in front of a friendly crowd at a black church and play the race card like crazy.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/14/fani-willis-comments-on-scandal-n2168718

Willis insinuated that the accusations are racially motivated because the other two special prosecutors are white and only she and Wade, who are black, are accused of wrongdoing. Yes, but maybe that’s because the other two prosecutors had nothing to do with all that corruption mentioned in the first paragraph.

Defying any bolts of lightning from above, Willis declared in church, "You cannot expect black women to be perfect and save the world. The Lord is completing us, we are not perfect. We need your prayers, we need to be allowed to stumble. We need grace. We are all flawed, sinners, unworthy, imperfect, damaged."

Much of that is true. However, these allegations aren’t just about personal sins and shortcomings, they’re also about public corruption and illegality. What is flawed, unworthy, imperfect and damaged is her case. As for personal sins, you can’t expect forgiveness for them while refusing to admit you committed them.

Chris Queen at PJ Media also has some good comments on this transparently self-serving speech and how disgusting it was that it came in a church during what was supposed to be a day honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who stood up to real racism.

https://pjmedia.com/chris-queen/2024/01/15/whatchu-talkin-bout-willis-fani-goes-to-church-to-grandstand-n4925485

A “grave injustice” in Florida

A 19-year-old illegal alien in St. Johns County, Florida, is accused of causing the death of a sheriff’s officer who was trying to detain him and is facing charges of resisting an officer with violence and manslaughter. But while he hasn’t been in the US for long, either he’s already learned a lot about our system (possibly from listening to Fani Willis), or his lawyer certainly has. 

His attorney is threatening a lawsuit over this “grave injustice” against his client, whom he claims “was a victim of police brutality. He was a victim of racial profiling. He was a victim of violation of his fourth, fifth, and sixth amendment constitutional rights. Those who are responsible for this abuse will be held accountable.”

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/14/illegal-alien-accused-killing-sgt-michael-kunovich-rights-violated/

The officer remains dead, but at least we can be comforted in knowing that the illegal alien accused of causing his death enjoys all those Constitutional rights guaranteed to US citizens. And since we’re holding people other than him accountable for this, how about Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas?

Hmm

As part of its “diversity and inclusion” initiative, the Federal Aviation Commission is actively seeking to hire people with “targeted disabilities,” including “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism." 

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/01/15/the-faa-wants-people-with-severe-intellectual-disabilities-to-work-for-them-n2633625

I’m sure nervous flyers will be comforted to know that the agency in charge of airline safety will be staffed by people with psychiatric problems and severe intellectual disabilities. If it’s good enough for the White House, it’s good enough for the FAA.

Reporting the news

Back in November, we reported on the shooting and wounding of three Palestinian students in Burlington, Vermont. I said then that if they were targeted for being Muslim, that was a deplorable hate crime and should be condemned and prosecuted, but we didn’t know. That didn’t stop a number of media talking heads and politicians, including President Biden, from charging ahead and framing it as an Islamophobic hate crime and the shooter as a deranged MAGA type.

Well, we finally know the real story, and surprise! It doesn’t fit the preferred media narrative. The accused shooter is reportedly a mentally-unstable leftist and Hamas sympathizer who likely had an episode, ran outside in a rage and shot the young men as they were passing his house without even knowing who they were.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/01/14/the-supposed-anti-muslim-vermont-shooter-supported-hamas-n2633629

Again, this is why we don’t report news until we know what happened. Other people ought to try that sometime.

Rand: Proof Fauci needs to go to prison

After last week’s House testimony in which Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted that pandemic-era social distancing regulations were based on zero science, and that the lab leak hypothesis was not a “conspiracy theory,” in between claiming not to recall salient facts over a hundred times, Sen. Rand Paul is citing the testimony as vindication for his long-standing argument that Fauci should go to prison.

https://www.westernjournal.com/rand-paul-fires-off-really-thinks-fauci-deserves-frankly-go-prison/

Sen. Paul said that for making one of the worst public health decisions “in the entire history of the world,” Fauci “should just be pilloried.” But trying to silence discussion of the lab leak theory and denying knowing anything about it to Congress while privately admitting his concerns is a different story. He said, “For his dishonesty, frankly, he should go to prison. If you lie to Congress, and you’re dishonest, and you won’t accept responsibility.”

He’s right, but unfortunately, we’ve seen in recent years that if you are among a certain favored political circle, you can lie all you want to Congress and face no consequences. That’s our new pandemic.

RIP JOYCE “TRIXIE NORTON” RANDOLPH

By Pat Reeder

We've just lost another familiar TV face that generations of us have grown up watching. Joyce Randolph, who played Trixie, the wife of Ed Norton (Art Carney) on the original classic sitcom “The Honeymooners,” died Saturday in her New York apartment at 99.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/joyce-randolph-dead-honeymooners-trixie-1235787487/

You are forgiven if you were surprised to hear she was still alive, since her co-stars Jackie Gleason, Art Carney and Audrey Meadows all passed away quite a while ago, the most recent being Carney in 2003. Although she had worked before in summer stock with Meadows, Gleason hired her after seeing her on a Clorets commercial. Of the four main characters, she had the least to do, once joking that her favorite episodes were any “in which I had more than six or seven lines.”

Although she never played Trixie with Gleason again after the original “Golden 39” episodes, she did revive the role along with Meadows as Alice Kramden for a cameo on the 1991 sitcom, “Hi, Honey, I’m Home.”

Her TV resume may not be extensive, but if you’re going to be known for one role in a show that lasted only one season, you couldn’t do better than being part of the main cast on what many consider the greatest sitcom of all time. RIP.

The J6 case against the GOVERNMENT grows as official narrative falls apart

“This may be the most significant instance of the United States government turning against its own citizens that we’ve encountered in our lifetime.”

That’s the conclusion of a must-read new piece in REVOLVER NEWS that brings together an array of details showing what the administration, some members of Congress, and the law enforcement bureaucracy have done (and continue to do) to American citizens in furtherance of their own political agenda.  “What’s emerging,” they say, “is a chilling image of a rogue and desperate regime willing to go to any lengths, including imprisoning innocent Americans, to keep its grip on power and punish its political enemies.”

Anyone who thinks that’s hyperbole needs to take a look at what they’ve put together over long months through the magnificent reporting of Julie Kelly and Darren Beattie.  For when you have time, here’s “The Essential REVOLVER NEWS January 6 Reading List” that they assembled two years ago.  Most of this background information should be familiar to longtime newsletter readers, as we’ve covered it in detail.  But what a great compendium to share with family, friends and acquaintances who might not be as well-versed in what really happened.  (Also highly recommended: Kelly’s eye-opening book, titled “JANUARY 6:  How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right.”)

https://revolver.news/2022/01/the-essential-revolver-news-january-6-reading-list/

This administration’s mad power-lust, fueled as it was by TDS, was even turned on a former President of the United States, especially during the past two years, when they decided it was permissible to commit a shocking armed raid on Mar-A-Lago a few months before the 2022 election.  We would add that the blatant targeting of Trump is one big reason why so many Republicans so strongly back him today, as seen in last night’s Iowa caucuses.  He’s seen as THE leader who can and will get in there and fix this unholy and most decidedly un-American mess.

On Monday, Kelly and Beattie appeared on Sebastian Gorka’s podcast, stunning Gorka with some of their latest details.  Kelly delves into the matter of DC U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves and his leftist political agenda.  Recall that Graves is also one of two Biden-appointed prosecutors who refused to allow Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss to prosecute Hunter Biden in their districts.  Graves is supervising ALL the J6 cases.

It should be noted that before and after her book came out, Kelly personally attended the trials of the various J6 defendants and read all the court filings and legal judgments, so she has a good idea of the mindset of the actors involved, particularly Judge Tanya Chutkan.  Reading her orders, one can see the twisted “logic” behind punishing people innocent of any violent or even provocative act.  In her mind, she had already convicted anyone who was there as being part of the “insurrection,” just for being at the rally at all.  It was essentially a blanket condemnation.

Gorka started his interview by observing the government is “upping the ante” as the January 6 narrative is crumbling, with Graves announcing in a big presentation just days ago that “you’re committing a felony even if you didn’t go into Congress.”  As we’ve discussed, in his zeal to double the number of his J6 indictments and keep the stack of cases growing, this prosecutor is fine with putting someone in prison just for standing in the wrong spot outside the building.  But Kelly said this legal strategy is really not new (note the aforementioned Judge Chutkan), citing the conviction of Enrique Tarrio, who was charged with obstruction of an official proceeding and trespassing (!) even though he wasn’t anywhere near the Capitol building on January 6.  The man was in a Baltimore hotel.  He got 22 years in prison.

“But what Matthew Graves did last week was really egregious,” Kelly said.  “...This is the centerpiece of Joe Biden’s presidential re-election campaign, and Matthew Graves, another partisan disguised as a prosecutor, did his part with that egregious hour-long presentation.”

Now view that in light of something else that happened this week, the sentencing of Ray Epps, who is clearly seen on video yelling at the top of his lungs multiple times the day before the rally for the crowd to “go INTO the Capitol!!!”  (The crowd didn’t go for it; sensing a trap, they started chanting, “Fed!  Fed!  Fed!”)  Unbelievably, Epps got a suspended sentence of less than a year --- no jail time at all --- when others have received astonishing sentences of 20-plus years in prison.

Gorka also brought up something new this week that we haven’t addressed yet:  the insistence by a Pentagon source that Gen. Mark Milley was the “architect” of the events of that day, as he’s the one who obstructed the deployment of National Guard troops that had been green-lighted by President Trump.  Col. Earl G. Matthews, a former Guardsman now serving in the Army Reserve, called Milley “the Don Barzini of the Deep State.”

As senior military advisor to the President, Gen. Milley had no legal role in the chain of command, according to Matthews.  But he managed to exploit relationships and run it as “his own feudal possession.”  Read what Matthews said about the role played by Army leadership on J6 --- not wanting to appear as if they were cooperating with President Trump in any way --- and you’ll see another chunk of the government’s narrative fall to the ground.

https://redstate.com/mccabe/2024/01/10/army-colonel-j6-witness-milley-is-the-don-barzini-of-the-deep-state-n2168511

Even with all this, Beattie --- who deserves credit for coining the term “fed-surrection” --- informed Gorka that “the cracks in the official narrative are far more severe even than what you’ve described,” though he didn’t have time in that brief podcast to get into it in detail.  He said that with Ray Epps’ slap on the wrist, “they’re trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube, tie up loose ends” and that Epps “would have been Central Casting for their fake insurrection narrative,” a hulking 6’3” former Marine in camo and a Trump hat.  On the day of the rally, Epps skipped Trump’s speech in favor of directing people to the Capitol building.  And at just the right moment, Epps found himself “magically pre-positioned right at that initial breach point, whereupon he whispers in a man’s ear and two seconds later, the initial breach occurs [with the barriers being moved].”

After this was accomplished, Epps texted his nephew to say he’d “orchestrated” it.  Epps had been the head of the Arizona chapter of the Oath Keepers and on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, but he was dropped from that and ended up doing softball interviews with THE NEW YORK TIMES and 60 MINUTES while other J6-ers were held without bail.  Beattie, wording it as nicely as possible, concluded that Epps is “not an authentic actor.”

https://revolver.news/2024/01/powerhouse-j6-reporters-stun-seb-gorka-with-insider-deets-on-two-major-players/

The REVOLVER NEWS piece brings up yet another example of the crumbling J6 narrative.  Remember former Capitol Police Lt. Tarik Johnson, the official that Pelosi’s committee made sure it did NOT talk to?  And Special Agent David Lazarus, whose testimony helped put Oath Keepers in prison but who appears to have perjured himself after newly-released J6 video shows he couldn’t have been in the right place to witness what he testified about?

Johnson (a hero in our book) posted an “EMERGENCY UPDATE!!!” on X with the news that Capitol Hill Police Chief Thomas Manger --- whom he called “arguably the most corrupt politician in the country,” which is saying something --- has decided to do no internal investigation of Lazarus’ allegedly false testimony.  The rug is getting pretty lumpy with all that stuff swept under it.

https://twitter.com/elleonceotk/status/1746638838112420258?s=51&t=J4D-_h2kFjBAjWxykloF4w

I Just Wanted to Say

Thank you for reading my newsletter.

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

---

Daily Bible Verse

¹¹ Shall thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in destruction?

Psalms 11:88 KJV

Newsletter Notes

14 stories

4,589 words

Reading time: About 21 minutes

Monologue: The Iowa Caucuses

We are just hours away from the Iowa Caucuses which will be the first real test of the 2024 Presidential Election.  Having won the caucuses in 2008, I do understand some things about them and their importance.  You will hear some of the know-it-all news commentators talk about how irrelevant the caucuses are and how that the winner of the caucuses don’t often end up being the nominee.  That may be, but the Iowa caucuses do a couple of things that the know-it-alls forget:  First, it’s not that the caucuses always pick the winner.  It’s that the caucuses eliminate some of the candidates that the media had picked to be the winners.  It’s not as much about winning them as it is about not LOSING.  In 2008, my victory there was the undoing of Mitt Romney, Rudy Guiliani, and Fred Thompson.  In 2012, when Rick Santorum had a surprise victory, it was the beginning of the end for Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and Michelle Bachman.  In 2016, it was the night that put Ted Cruz and Donald Trump in virtually a 2 man race and forecast the demise of Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Rand Paul, and me.

So yes, it will be important to see who comes out of Iowa with momentum, but the real story will be who crashes against the rocks and will never seriously sail again.  Perhaps some will limp forward to New Hampshire or South Carolina, but the race will become populated with fewer candidates soon after Iowa.

And the caucuses are not like any election process.  There is no early voting.  No machine tabulations.  No late night boxes suddenly discovered.  On what is often one of the coldest nights of the winter, people have to leave their homes and assemble in public places like a school, church, city hall, community center, or gymnasium.  Once there, candidates or their representatives make final pitches for the votes.  People are asked to physically indicate who they support by going to a section of the facility.  They will vote on a ballot, but the numbers are known and reported immediately.  There is none of the drama of waiting 2 weeks after the election to determine who won.

And because the first in the nation primary in New Hampshire is just a week and a day later, most of the candidates who believe they still have a shot will get on airplanes that very night and arrive in New Hampshire in the early morning hours of the next day.  In 2008, when I won the caucuses, we enjoyed a wild celebration of our supporters by shocking the world with the victory and then around midnight boarded a chartered plane filled with our campaign workers, press (many of whom hadn’t bothered to pay attention to me before) and supporters like Chuck Norris and his wife who campaigned with me for several months in the race.  People asked me where Chuck sat on the plane and I told them, “Wherever he wanted to.”  We arrived in New Hampshire around 4am, went to a hotel to freshen up, and then I started nonstop back to back press interviews with media from all over the world that lasted for almost 4 straight uninterrupted hours.  There is no “day off” or resting.  If you are still in the hunt, you continue the grueling pace of a campaign.  Our team went months without eating a meal at a table with silverware or ordering from menus.  We ate every meal from a paper sack in a car or bus while traveling to the next event.  The best way to describe a campaign is to live off cold pizza and hot Cokes.  If there is glamour in it, most of us never experienced it.

But this insane process is how we start the process to pick the leader of the free world.  It’s messy, at times disgusting, and beyond exhausting for most of us who engage in it.  But it’s better than having a gunfight or a military coup d’état to pick a President.

Hey, if you’re a political junkie, or even if you’re not, pay attention to the events of the next 10 days.  You might not yet know who will be President, but you will probably know some folks who most certainly will NOT be President.  And that’s the part of this that the know-it-alls in the media mob never really understand.

Martin Luther King Day

Today is Martin Luther King Day, the federal holiday honoring his birth on January 15, 1929. While some of the activities planned for today may be postponed due to inclement weather, we shouldn’t let that stop us from honoring his memory and accomplishments today.

As a boy growing up in the South in the 1960s, I saw the pernicious effects of racism firsthand, and was inspired by the Rev. King’s faith, courage and eloquence, his message of brotherhood and his dream of a colorblind society where Americans weren’t separated by race and where people were judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. 

He was not a “social justice activist” in the current sense, nor just an eloquent speaker. He was a preacher, one of the greatest ever. He didn't give political speeches, he gave sermons. And like all great sermons, they relied on the teachings of the Gospel to inspire his listeners to renounce the grievous sin of racism and follow, as Lincoln put it, “the better angels of our nature.”  He taught us that as God created us all in His image, hating someone for the way they look is a sin against God. 

Today, when we celebrate the man who did so much to achieve the goal of recognizing and repudiating that sin, it’s more important than ever to remember what he said, because in recent years, his legacy has been under intense assault. A movement has arisen that’s tearing America apart by yanking from the ash heap of history such terrible ideas as judging people solely by skin color, bringing back segregated spaces and blaming children for the sins of their fathers. This racial separatist poison is the opposite of the Rev. King’s message, and any attempts to co-opt his name to promote it are detestable.

I’m sure that today will bring many speeches that will try to use the Rev. King’s name to cynically promote divisive political and racial agendas. Instead of listening to them, go to the source. Listen to his original “I Have A Dream” speech, and see if it sounds anything like the anti-American nightmare these charlatans are promoting.

https://youtu.be/vP4iY1TtS3s?si=u5p6FJ5EIJUBmG5l

I have no doubt, as well, that if Dr. King were alive today, many on the left would be seething over his support of Israel. Rep. John Lewis quoted King as saying, "When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism." Lewis said King also said in 1968 that "peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality."

Here's more on that subject from John Solomon at Just The News. I wonder if anyone at the liberal media outlets will quote those prophetic words today?

https://justthenews.com/government/security/monafter-hamas-atrocities-mlks-embrace-israel-and-disdain-antisemitism

And here are some comments from a woman I’m honored to call my friend, the Rev. King’s niece, Alveda King. This was written last year, but it’s just as timely today.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/uncle-martin-luther-king-jr-believed-deeply-promise-american-dream-make-happen

Last bit of Caucus news

There was little in the news over the weekend other than coverage of the Iowa Caucuses and who’s going to win, what it will mean and will Democrats try to skew the results by crashing the GOP caucuses, since they apparently have no choice for President in their Party.

That presents a dilemma for us, since, unlike major media outlets, we have an archaic policy that we don’t comment on news that hasn’t happened yet, and the Caucuses start later today. They might even be delayed by dangerous frigid weather (wags are calling the caucuses “The North Poll”), although I’ve never known that to keep Iowans from showing up.

Frankly, I see no point in obsessing over polls that might or might be accurate when the vote is going to be taken within 24 hours. So I’ll just pass along this story, which actually already happened. The winter weather forced Donald Trump to cancel two planned rallies in Iowa Saturday, so he held a virtual rally. You can watch that here if you like:

https://www.breitbart.com/2024-election/2024/01/13/watch-live-donald-trump-holds-virtual-rally/

If you don’t have time to watch it, here’s a post that Trump put on Truth Social about all the wars that Biden is getting us involved in.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/14/trump-we-have-wars-ukraine-israel-yemen-not-southern-border/

This weekend on “Huckabee” on TBN, my monologue was about what the media know-it-alls always get wrong about the Iowa Caucuses. Here it is, and this is from someone who’s been through two of them as a candidate, and won one of them.

https://www.huckabee.tv/this-week

By the way, that link is to the entire show, so if you missed it, or want to see it again (it was a great one!), just keep watching.

Another Hunter theory

After pulling some baffling grandstanding in Congress, Hunter Biden must’ve gotten the riot act read to him by his dad’s reelection campaign. That’s the only explanation I can think of for how quickly he did a 180 and agreed to comply with a House subpoena and testify after arrogantly defying it. Although Bonchie at Redstate.com has another theory: Hunter really is so stupid and arrogant that he thought he could get away with bullying Congress and face no consequences.

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2024/01/12/hunter-biden-just-surrendered-in-contempt-battle-against-republicans-n2168626

His attorney Abbe Lowell tried to finesse the turnabout by blaming Congress and claiming that the original subpoena was invalid on a technicality, but if they give Hunter his umpteenth mulligan by forgetting all this unpleasantness and issuing a new subpoena, he’ll comply with that one. Law professor Jonathan Turley calls this the “Say it nicer” dodge.

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/4406548-say-it-nicer-hunter-makes-a-familiar-last-minute-offer-to-congress/

This is why Lowell is such a top Democrat attorney: he finds loopholes the way mice find holes in your house’s siding. Unfortunately for Hunter, unlike his dad, House Republicans aren’t in the business of handing out endless mulligans. They’re pressing forward with contempt charges.

https://redstate.com/wardclark/2024/01/12/hunter-biden-agrees-to-testify-house-republicans-still-pursuing-contempt-charges-n2168648

Taking heat

Nikki Haley is taking heat (pun intended, as always) over comments she made that seemed to give credence to the idea that the overwhelming illegal immigration to the US is due to people fleeing the effects of “climate change.” As noted at the link, there is scant evidence of that, with the Center for Immigration Studies reporting in 2019 that crop yields in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala actually increased in recent years, even tripling and quadrupling in some places. In areas where they declined, it had nothing to do with the climate.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/12/nikki-haley-parroted-leftist-talking-point-suggesting-climate-change-to-blame-for-mass-immigration/

To be fair, Haley’s comments weren’t new but came in 2017 when she was being confirmed by the Senate as Trump’s UN ambassador and was asked about that subject. She replied, “If confirmed, the role that climate change plays in refugee flows is an issue I look forward to assessing, and assisting refugees is a U.S. policy in which I look forward to engaging.” In short, she didn’t say she bought it, she just said she’d look into it.

As to whether she believes it now, that’s unclear, although she did recently confirm that she thinks “climate change” is not a hoax. So I’d say that to find out whether she really believes that all those hordes of people flowing over our border from all over the world are here because it’s too hot where they came from, someone should just try asking her now.

NeverNikki from Rand

Speaking of Nikki Haley, Sen. Rand Paul hasn’t endorsed any presidential  candidate, but he made headlines by posting a looong thread on Twitter (X) this week about the one Republican he would absolutely NEVER support and why. If you guessed Trump, guess again.

https://www.westernjournal.com/rand-paul-reveals-anti-endorsement-says-still-undecided-2024/

Here’s a link to the full original Twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/RandPaul/status/1745793256779092327

He even launched a website called NeverNikki.net, which gives you an idea of how committed he is to this position.

3 terms

China has been doing a lot of threatening and saber-rattling at Taiwan recently, but I’m happy to report that Taiwanese voters told them where to put it. William Lai was just elected President of Taiwan, winning an unprecedented third term for the pro-Taiwan Democratic Progressive Party and defeating the candidate of the pro-China party by over 7 points.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/taiwan-election-ruling-party-candidate-wins-tightly-contested-presidential-race-upsetting-chinas-ambitions

While this likely signals more threats from China, China expert Gordon Chang told Fox News Digital, "The results are in, and Taiwan’s voters stood up to China and all its war talk of recent weeks. Free people, living just a hundred miles from the menacing Chinese state, refused to be intimidated." Good for them, and I was very glad to see that they didn’t fall for this attempt to undermine Taiwan from within by electing a candidate who was more concerned with China’s best interests than his own nation’s.

Let’s hope American voters go back to doing that in our next election.

Disturbing new poll

A new ABC News poll claims that a slight majority of Americans wants the Supreme Court to ban Donald Trump from being on the ballot or to let the state bans stand. This is disturbing, considering that Trump has not only not been convicted of any disqualifying crime, he hasn’t even been indicted for one. And if today’s leftist prosecutors could possibly make that case, they would have by now. So we’re being told that a majority of Americans believe people should be barred from running for office just because their political opponents’ level groundless charges at them. Yikes!

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/12/nolte-poll-shows-slight-majority-support-states-banning-trump-from-ballot/

Then again, this is an ABC News poll of “adults” with a sample of 25% each of Democrats and Republicans and 41% Independents, so I wouldn’t give it much credence. Still, the fact that any American would go along with something so un-American is disturbing. The Founders knew that in a pure, majority-rule democracy, it’s easy for demagogues to inflame the passions of the majority into trampling the rights of the minority. So ironically, this story is a good example of why the Founders deliberately did NOT give us a “democracy.”

Judge dismisses Trump lawsuit

A federal judge dismissed Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the New York Times and three of its reporters and ordered him to pay their nearly $400,000 in legal fees. This is over a story that exposed his confidential tax records, bank statements and other private information provided to the Times by his Trump-hating, MSNBC-appearing niece, Mary Trump. The suit alleges that reporters gave Mary a burner phone and convinced her to smuggle Trump’s private and confidential financial records out of an attorney’s office and hand them over to them.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/trump-ordered-pay-new-york-times-400k-failed-lawsuit

The case shows how hard it is for a public figure to sue a media organization, and how hard it is for Trump to win any court case in New York. But it’s not entirely over yet. Trump’s case against his niece Mary was not dismissed. He’s pressing on with that. His attorney Alina Habba said they’re pleased that the court has affirmed "the strength of our claims against Mary and is denying her attempt to avoid accountability."

A big pinata full of corruption

Fulton County, Georgia, DA Fani Willis’ absurd RICO case against Trump and his associates is starting to resemble a big pinata full of corruption that just keeps spilling more sleaze onto the floor every time someone taps it.

I’ve already reported on how she allegedly hired her unqualified, married paramour Nathan Wade as special prosecutor for the Trump case and signed off on paying him an exorbitant amount of taxpayer money that he turned around and spent on luxury trips and cruises with her. And that his estranged wife has subpoenaed Willis to testify in their divorce trial. And that they appear to have colluded with the Biden White House and the January 6^th Kangaroo Kommittee in crafting their charges. Now, here are the latest droppings from the sleaze pinata:

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan has launched an investigation into Willis and Wade for politically-motivated probes and potential misuse of federal funds (the Fulton County DA’s office gets millions in federal grants and he wants to know if that money benefitted Willis via Wade.)

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/12/jim-jordan-launches-investigation-fani-willis-corruption/

And documents from Wade’s divorce case show that his wife Jocelyn claims she’s unemployed and in dire financial need after 26 years as a stay-at-home mom. She also says Wade didn’t tell her he pocketed over $650,000 from this case that he was spending on Willis, even as he kept withdrawing funds for himself from their joint account, leaving it overdrawn and his wife with no money or financial support. Sounds like a great guy.

https://nypost.com/2024/01/10/news/nathan-wade-left-ex-wife-to-struggle-financially-while-he-allegedly-splurged-on-lavish-trips-with-fani-willis-court-docs/

Again, I’ll say it: I hope he didn’t spend all that money on trips for him and Fani because I have a feeling he’s going to owe his ex-wife an awful lot of it.

Prediction: Biden’s basement strategy to return

I’m not going to try recapping everything that happened when President Biden was sent out amongst the people in an attempt to shore up his reelection campaign. I’ll just send you to this summary by Nick Arama at Redstate.com and predict that we will very soon see a return to the 2020 campaign strategy of hiding him in the basement.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/12/biden-comments-on-iran-houthis-n2168642

Irony of Ironies:

Meet the flour company that’s so woke, it hates whiteness.

https://redstate.com/alexparker/2024/01/13/flour-company-bans-caucasians-from-cooking-contest-to-fight-bakings-white-supremacy-n2168658

About those “pro-Palestinian” protesters here in the US…

We keep being told that they’re not anti-Semites, Jew-haters, anti-American or terrorist supporters. No, perish the thought! They’re just humanitarians who CARE about the suffering of the Palestinian people.

So how did a mob of them in New York react to the strikes on Houthi militants who have been launching unprovoked missile and drone attacks on ships in the Red Sea? Surprise! They sided with the attackers and chanted, “US and UK, go to Hell!”

https://twitchy.com/amy-curtis/2024/01/12/nuc-anti-israel-protestors-mad-about-yemen-n2391678

Please remember this the next time someone gives you a song and dance about their true motives. And remember that when someone tells you exactly what they are and what they stand for, believe them.

The left thought they could put one over on us.  WRONG.

With every week leading up to the 2024 election, we find out more about how the left --- with the help, of course, of some so-called “moderates” --- are trying to pull the strings leading up to it.  Those full-of-themselves Ivy League grads ensconced in the halls of power really do assume Trump supporters are dimwitted, undereducated, unsophisticated rubes who can barely use a knife and fork in public and have no clue that the super-genius Ruling Elite are using lawfare against Trump to rig the election right in front of us and save us all from the imaginary Hitler they’ve created.  They hardly try to hide what they’re doing.  (Those of us who dare to write about this and let them see we have a clue --- many, many clues ---are dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.”)

And yet, as they tell it, we’re the “threat to democracy.”

It’s increasingly clear that Trump would not be facing the variety of courtroom hit-jobs he is now if he weren’t running for President and also polling spectacularly against Biden.  And the most chilling part of all is the emerging hard evidence that both the Biden White House and Pelosi’s House “Select” J6 Committee have been involved in the coordination of these attacks, including Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis’ sprawling RICO case.  This cannot be allowed to stand; if it does, our so-called “Republic” is over, killed by the power-mad left.

In the words of Victor Davis Hanson, writing for AMERICAN GREATNESS, “We should dispense with the tired narrative that four conscientious state and federal prosecutors—independently and without contact with the Biden White House or the radical Democrats in Congress—all came to the same disinterested conclusions that Donald Trump should be indicted for various crimes and put on trial during the campaign season of 2024.”

On the bright side, VDH says the left are in a “doom loop,” in that the more unwarranted grief they give Trump, the more he rises in the polls.  Trump’s benefiting from it because WE’RE ON TO THEM, and we also know that Trump, of all the candidates, will be in the best position to do something about it once he’s in the White House.  We see his actions not in the context of vengeance or retribution, as Democrats like to say, but of justice and reform.

VDH goes into the stunning revelations of Fani Willis’ corruption and machinations in the Fulton County case --- you’re probably up to speed on all that, but his column is a good refresher --- and predicts it will end with Willis’ resignation and indictment of both her and her boyfriend.  “Both have made a mockery of their indictment of an ex-president,” he said, “and if the allegations are true, will be disbarred and prosecuted.”  Let it be so.

The other three indictments are even weaker, he says.  We’ve seen in Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Trump and the Trump Organization --- eagerly attended daily by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who campaigned on “getting Trump” and who must not have any other crime to deal with in her state --- that Trump did exactly what virtually every other big-city real estate developer does in obtaining financing.  Nothing unusual about it at all.  And no financial institution dealing with him had made any complaint about this, ever.

As for Special Counsel Jack Smith’s raid and prosecution of Trump over so-called “classified” documents being retained at Mar-A-Lago, VHS points out that “Trump was the first ex-president in history to be indicted for a dispute with archivists over the status and security of removed classified files.”  Bill Clinton did it (classified tapes in a sock drawer); Obama did it (with no one challenging him, naturally); Biden did it (a whole lot, in a variety of non-secure places, and he didn’t even have presidential declassification power.)  “Such disagreements,” VDH says, “were historically adjudicated bureaucratically rather than criminally, and certainly not with performance-art FBI swat raids into an ex-presidential residence.”

As for the other Jack Smith prosecution, the January 6 case, VDH sums it up thusly: “...True insurrectionists do not instruct protestors to assemble peacefully and patriotically. Insurrectionists themselves do not try to overthrow governments while unarmed and accompanied by bare-chested buffoons with cow horns and slow-moving septuagenarians draped in American flags.”  He points out that there were perhaps 150-200 FBI plants getting in on the action, and that in some cases, security guards were acting as doormen, waving nonviolent rally attendees right in.  You’ve followed these cases well enough to know that most of them are travesties.

Ultimately, it’s those on the left, not Trump, who are destroying the precedents and traditions of our system of government.  It’s their “endless miscarriages of justice,” VDH says, that are “the real threat to constitutional government.”  And the less effective they are at taking him down, the more desperate they become.  We would add that this is true even though the Trump they despise is mostly a creation of their own fevered minds that bears little resemblance to the actual person.

The column is a must-read.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/14/lawfare-against-trump-is-running-out-of-gas/

Speaking of Democrats, as opposed to President Trump, being the real threat, NBC News has a report on how some leftist groups are planning a “quasi-military” coup if Trump is elected.  The plan is 1) to hamstring him legally (nothing new there) to keep him from fulfilling his agenda, and 2) to convince military officials not to comply with Trumps’ orders.  One of the people involved in this plan is reportedly Mary McCord, whose name you’ll recall from the Obama administration but who is now executive director of the Institution for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law.

“We are preparing for litigation and preparing to use every tool in the toolbox that our democracy provides to provide the American people an ability to fight back,” said Skye Perryman, president of a participating organization called Democracy Forward.  Since he’s presumably talking about doing this after Trump has been duly elected President, what exactly are “the American people” needing to fight back for?  After all, they ELECTED HIM.

Tell us again, who is the real threat to our system of government?   Hint:  It’s not Trump.

Here’s more about the Deep State showing their hand from Nick Arama at Redstate.com…

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/14/what-was-that-about-a-deep-state-check-out-these-plans-to-deal-with-trump-if-he-wins-n2168713

Trump’s primary opponents will likely glom on to this story and use it to warn voters away from such a “divisive” and “chaotic” figure.  But choosing a different nominee will not stop this.  Guaranteed, the left will use these same tactics against any conservative running on the GOP ticket.  That person will be painted as “Trump’s proxy” or even “worse than Trump.”

https://therightscoop.com/breaking-report-democrats-already-planning-military-coup-of-sorts-if-trump-wins-again-in-november/

RELATED READING:

Speaking of the J6 committee, Newt Gingrich has a great commentary about Liz Cheney’s involvement with the testimony of star witness Cassidy Hutchinson --- remember our recent report on her highly unusual “errata” sheet changing her testimony?  Newt spares no words.

https://realclearwire.com/articles/2024/01/11/liz_cheney_vs_stefan_passantino_the_jan_6_committee_fraud_1004191.html

Things may get rocky for members of that committee.  For when you have time to digest it, this is a must-read article about coordination among the Trump prosecutors and J6 committee members as well as the White House.  From the timeline, it appears Biden has had his hands in all four prosecutions.  Oh, and Mary McCord’s name turns up again.

https://revolver.news/2024/01/new-bombshell-incoming-kinzinger-cheney-and-j6-committee-better-preserve-all-their-records/

Here’s a piece offering rebuttals on major Trump hoaxes.  If you know people who still believe garbage like the “fine people” hoax, the “Russia collusion” hoax, the “Muslim ban” hoax, and the “mocking-a-reporter’s-disability” hoax, this would be good for them to see.

https://www.politicstruth2020.com/trump-hoaxes

Finally, here’s some historical perspective on Jack Smith’s prosecution team and their political slant.  One of his prosecutors, Ray Hulser, is the same staffer who in 2014 “declined prosecution” of the Clinton Foundation even though a well-placed confidential source said two foreign governments had attempted to buy influence with Hillary ahead of her 2016 run for President.  He shut down investigations that were already going on in three FBI field offices.  Nothing to see, folks!

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/05/prosecutor-on-special-counsel-jack-smiths-team-shut-down-fbi-investigation-into-the-clinton-foundation-in-2016

RELATED WATCHING:

Be sure and watch Mark Levin’s remarkable opening monologues from both Saturday and Sunday if you missed them.  They both concern all the lawfare and relentless election interference we’re seeing.  At the time of this writing, Sunday’s hadn’t been posted yet on the FOX NEWS site, but here’s the link to Saturday’s.  Very powerful stuff; no additional comment necessary.

https://www.foxnews.com/video/6344861874112

I Just Wanted to Say

Thank you for reading my newsletter.

Mike Huckabee

A good clue that Hunter Biden had no intention of actually staying and answering questions for the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday during the meeting he and his buddies crashed was that he needed to high-tail it right back to Los Angeles, to enter a plea in his tax case out there.

Hunter pleaded not guilty to nine federal tax charges, three of them felonies, on Thursday, and will go to trial starting June 20.  This will be right in the middle of President Biden’s re-election campaign (such as it is).  Of course, there’s always the possibility that a plea deal is forthcoming, but that really does look doubtful.  As we’ve seen, Hunter and his legal team are very much into grandstanding, and Hunter may think a trial is just the thing.  (We have to wonder, though, if the Biden campaign, not to mention Joe’s legal team, isn’t about ready to wring his neck.)  A trial will also add more meat to the documentary about Hunter being produced by “sugar daddy” Kevin Morris.

The next hearing in the case is set for March 27.  The verdict in the case will probably hit just a couple of months before the DNC Convention in August (which, for the record, we don’t think is going to nominate President Biden, anyway, for a number of reasons).

Hunter is charged with failure to pay $1.4 million in income taxes, despite being awash in money that he spent shall-we-say frivolously.  It was paid back, not by him but by big-time Democrat donor Morris during Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign for President, not long after the two met at a donor event.  (Note:  are congressional committees continuing to look into potential FEC violations connected to this payoff?  It sure looks like a campaign contribution, as it was obviously done as a “clean-up on Aisle 5” to help pave the way for Joe to run.)

Hunter met with the federal judge in Los Angeles for about 30 minutes and was described as “somewhat stoic” and “relatively relaxed.”  Abbe Lowell is still trying to proceed as if that earlier, now-dead plea deal involving Special Counsel David Weiss in Delaware is still operative: “We have a resolution that things happened.  It’s an unusual situation when the government says you don’t have a contract, and we say we do.”

No, Mr. Lowell, you don’t.  (And give us a break.  That comment is as inane as the one saying Hunter wants a public hearing because he’s all about “transparency.”)  As an attorney on Weiss’s team said in the courtroom, “Pleas fall through all the time.”

You know how hard it is to scrape up money that the federal government is mostly going to shovel down various ratholes.  That’s especially true if you are self-employed or a small business owner and have to write that check yourself.  Hunter Biden is accused of paying NOT his taxes but (according to the Department of “Justice”)…

-- $1.6 million+ in ATM withdrawals

-- $683,000+ for “payments to various women”

-- $397,000+ for clothing and accessories

-- $188,000+ on adult entertainment

-- $237,000+ on health, beauty and pharmacy products

And this isn’t for all the years Hunter didn’t pay taxes --- just the years that the statute of limitations hasn’t run out on.  The really big years when Biden was raking it in from being on the Burisma board aren’t included.

Hunter’s also being charged with federal firearms violations in Delaware after lying about drug use on his official application to buy a gun.

Last night on FOX NEWS, Trace Gallagher spoke with former deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, who’s now a Berkeley law professor, about Hunter going to trial in a California court.  His answer isn’t what you might have expected.

“I think it’s actually crazy for Hunter and his lawyer to go to trial,” he said.  “This is a disaster for his father and his family.  Every day that this trial goes on, every day this story continues, it’s painting a story of somebody who didn’t pay their taxes --- $1.4 million?  Over several years?  As we’ve seen in early reports, people go to jail.  Regular Americans who engage in this same kind of defiance of federal tax law go to jail.  Sometimes they go to jail for years.  Is Hunter Biden really going to try to beat the Justice Department on a claim that he’s been singled out, Yoo asked, when he’s really getting special treatment because his name is Biden?

As for Hunter’s surprise appearance at Wednesday’s contempt hearing in DC, Gallagher asked Yoo about what appears to have been a mistake by Hunter --- his tacit acknowledgement in answer to a question that his father had spoken on Speakerphone with his business associates at dinner.  When President Biden was asked earlier by FOX NEWS’ Peter Doocy if he’d done this, Biden told him the accusation was “not true” and that Doocy had asked “a lousy question.”

Yoo sees this as another example of Hunter’s “terrible judgment.”

“I’m sure he thinks he’s being aggressive with Congress and the courts --- he’s just compounding all the problems he’s created for his father’s political and legal situation.  Here he’s saying things which are drawing his father into hot water, are contradicting things that his father is saying, but also, more importantly, raising the specter that his dad IS involved in influence-peddling, that his dad might have received corrupt money, and now is even trying to --- maybe --- have [Hunter] not prosecuted for contempt of Congress, or not have his dad’s Justice Department do so, which will only feed the fires of the impeachment investigation that’s been going on in Congress.”

…..

As for charging Hunter with contempt of Congress for his refusal to comply with a subpoena for a closed-door session like everybody else, Jonathan Turley suggests that Democrats might want to “reconsider the costs” of voting against that resolution.  It’s a little late now, because Wednesday the full House voted to hold Hunter in contempt with (surprise!) every Democrat opposing the motion.

“Once again,” he says,” the party is short selling an institutional asset that they are likely to need in the near future if they retake the House.  (Editorial aside:  this scenario is hypothetical, of course.  If the Democrats actually do retake the House, this country is likely done for, whether Democrats “short sell” or not.)

By refusing to hold Hunter in contempt, Turley argues, Democrats establish “that in the future, when Democrats are in control, witnesses will be able to unilaterally refuse to appear for depositions with committee staff and to dictate the conditions under which they will appear for testimony.”  In other words, they’re diluting their own power.

Turley reminds his readers of other times the Democrats have done this, such as with their expedient rule change to allow most presidential nominees to be confirmed by a simple majority vote.  They finally extended this even to Supreme Court nominees, and lived to regret it when they didn’t have the filibuster to block Trump nominees Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett.

Turley offers a host of other examples in this highly recommended column.

https://jonathanturley.org/2024/01/11/a-party-of-short-sellers-why-democrats-need-to-re-think-hunters-contempt

William McGurn made similar observations in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (by subscription, but you can and MUST read it at the link), and went on to talk about something called “inherent contempt,” which doesn’t require cooperation from the ‘Justice’ Department.  It hasn’t been exercised since 1934, he said, but either chamber of Congress has the power to bring Hunter to the floor and try him there.  If he’s found guilty, they can detain him under their own authority.  How about that?

This authority was established in 1821 by the Supreme Court in Anderson v. Dunn, in which the justices held that it was essential to Congress’ ability to function as a legislative and deliberative body.  Without this power, they ruled, Congress would be “exposed to every indignity and interruption that rudeness, caprice, or even conspiracy, may meditate against it.”  That’s amazing --- how did these justices see 2024 in their crystal ball?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-contempt-of-hunter-biden/ar-AA1mEIU8

Mike Huckabee

Yesterday, the Labor Department reported that the year-to-year consumer price index rose by 3.4% in December. It was 3.1% in November, and economists had predicted 3.2%.

https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2024/01/11/inflation-surged-more-than-expected-in-december/

This resurgence of inflation has experts worried that the Fed won’t start reducing interest rates, as hoped. It’s also more bad news for the Biden reelection campaign, since he’s hilariously running on the claim that Bidenomics has fixed the inflation problem.

Even 3.1% inflation is higher than the Fed’s target of 2%, and higher than inflation under Trump. This is also another 3.4% price hike on top of the double-digit price hikes that have already been baked in during the first two years of Biden’s term. When the liberal talking heads claim to be mystified by why Americans aren’t giving Biden credit for the great economy, they should consider that people’s grocery bills are twice what they were three years ago while Biden is bragging about bringing inflation down to 3 percent.

Related: South Carolina Democrat Rep. James Clyburn bemoaned to MSNBC that Americans are listening to “disinformation” and just can’t “grasp” how great a job Biden has done as President.

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2024/01/11/clyburn-nobody-can-grasp-how-good-biden-is-theres-disinformation-and-tweeting-thats-not-good-for-america/

Also related: Chris Matthews on MSNBC urged urban liberals to vote so they can save democracy by outvoting rural Americans, whom he compared to crazy cult members and terrorists and accused of exhibiting “rural rage.” Gee, I wonder why this guy doesn’t have his own show anymore?

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2024/01/11/clyburn-nobody-can-grasp-how-good-biden-is-theres-disinformation-and-tweeting-thats-not-good-for-america/

Actually, the only real “rage” I see these days is coming from the left. Maybe they’re just upset at having to live in the cesspools that the Democrats they keep voting for have turned their cities into.

Also also related: Here’s an example of the kind of Matthews-approved liberal elite brain trusts that are running our cities. San Francisco’s city council voted 8-3 to demand that Israel call a ceasefire in Gaza.

https://twitchy.com/grateful-calvin/2024/01/10/they-did-it-peace-declared-across-middle-east-after-san-francisco-calls-for-ceasefire-n2391589

My favorite Twitter comment on this was “Israel just voted to demand that San Francisco clean up all the drug needles and human feces.”

It’s really a tragedy what our cities have become under leftist misrule. The YouTube movie critic The Critical Drinker recently said something about LucasFilm and Disney that could apply to every blue city in America, but especially San Francisco: they’re organizations founded by geniuses and inherited by morons.

Mike Huckabee

The 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals just knocked down the Biden Department of Energy’s efforts to force us to replace our washing machines and dishwashers with more expensive “green” appliances.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/09/5th-circuit-delivers-delicious-smackdown-of-biden-doe-n2168470

Eleven states sued over the regulations, and the court agreed with them that it was "unclear how or why DOE thinks it has any statutory authority to regulate 'water use' in dishwashers and washing machines," and even if they had the authority, their rule was "arbitrary and capricious" since their standards are causing Americans to use more energy and water as they have to wash things multiple times to get them clean.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who led the lawsuit, said, "There is no fourth branch of government sanctioned in the United States Constitution. Federal bureaucrats can't just tell you what kind of appliances you have to use." Let’s hope this encourages more legal pushback on the other unconstitutional micro-management efforts by unelected bureaucrats, from taking away our gas stoves and heaters to trying to outlaw gas-powered cars.

Andrew Bailey is one of the true champions fighting against federal assaults on individual rights, including the case that exposed Deep State collusion with social media to silence conservative speech. My interview with him on last weekend’s episode of “Huckabee” on TBN is a must-see:

https://www.huckabee.tv/guests/andrew-bailey

Mike Huckabee

President Biden had a busy Monday, between demonizing Trump and Republicans, eulogizing the late Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, pandering to black voters, dealing with pro-Palestinian protesters from his own party who have zero respect for others or their surroundings, and stabbing Israel in the back – sometimes, all at once. Nick Arama at Redstate.com has a good round-up…

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/08/anti-israel-activists-try-to-storm-tarmac-at-dallas-love-field-as-biden-lands-n2168464

Two details worthy of special notice: Arama points out that Biden tried to blame the racist shooting at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston on Trump even though it happened in 2015 when Trump wasn’t President, but Biden was Vice President.

Also, when these pro-Palestinian nutjobs tried to block the street entrance to Love Field Airport in Dallas where Biden was landing, the Dallas Police quickly removed them and arrested some of them. Take notes, other cities. And a word of advice to these protesters: Don’t try blocking any highways in Texas unless you want to find out how it feels to be an armadillo.

Mike Huckabee

The more hysterical the Democrats get with their claims about the mortal dangers of Donald Trump, the less impressive their evidence is. One of the latest assaults came from Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, who released a report that claims Trump is compromised by taking money from foreign governments (yes, this is the party of Joe and Hunter Biden, but we’ll put that irony aside for now.)

https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/05/left-wing-trump-foreign-influence-money/

The report claims that Trump’s businesses raked in $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments during the first two years of his term. Ooh, sounds incriminating! But hold on, the Daily Caller looked at the details:

Turns out the majority of that money came from one Chinese bank that had been renting office space in Trump Tower since 2008, years before Trump even ran for President. And we know how tough Trump was on China, so that didn’t buy any favors. Nine of the countries paid less than $10,000 to Trump businesses, with one, Cyprus, paying just $590, or about five hours’ pay for Hunter Biden from that Ukrainian energy company.

Committee member and notorious blowhard Jamie Raskin called these numbers evidence of “the Trump family’s staggering corruption.” But the director of the Government Accountability Institute replied, “The difference between Trump’s foreign income and Biden’s foreign income is that Trump had legitimate goods and services to sell and was tough on China while the Bidens did not have any legitimate business and Joe has been weak on China.”

And of course, the minor detail that Trump donated all of his companies’ profits from foreign businesses to the US Treasury, just like he donated his entire presidential salary back to the government. Biden isn’t doing that, but he should. In fact, he should be paying us for having to endure his presidency and all the rubbish from his supporters, like this.

Mike Huckabee

On Tuesday, I appeared on NEWSMAX to say that Fulton County, Georgia, DA Fani Willis should be disbarred and all the charges against Trump dropped in his election interference case.

At that time, news had broken that a co-defendant in the case, Michael Roman, alleges that Willis should be disqualified from the case because she had been having an improper relationship with a (married) special prosecutor, private attorney Nathan Wade, whom she had named to assist in securing the Georgia grand jury indictment against Trump.  According to the motion, she did this despite having attorneys in her office who were perfectly capable of prosecuting the case.  Wade, on the other hand, had never prosecuted a felony RICO case before. He seems to have been hired for...other reasons.

As reported in NEWSMAX, “The motion argues that Willis’ failure to disclose her alleged relationship with the special prosecutor while paying him for his work on the Trump case with funds he allegedly used to go on extravagant vacations with the DA could amount to honest services fraud, as well as ‘a predicate act which could result in a RICO charge against both the district attorney and the special prosecutor.’”

So, how ironic would it be if, after working to make this huge, ludicrous RICO case against Trump and an array of his associates, Willis herself got charged with a legitimate RICO violation?  They just keep accusing Trump of the things they’re doing themselves.  Here’s what I had to say about it yesterday…

Huckabee: Fani Willis scandal huge in Trump Georgia case - Read Mike's News Analysis - Mike Huckabee

But as it turns out, the grift and marital hanky-panky were just the tip of the iceberg that is about to wham into Willis’ whole operation and likely sink it.  What they’ve been doing is much, much worse.  Can someone this corrupt be disbarred twice?

By now, you probably know that Willis is accused of using tax money to take exotic trips to the Caribbean, Florida and Napa Valley and even go on two cruises together with Wade.  According to Roman’s motion, “Since being appointed as special prosecutor, the special prosecutor has been paid an estimated almost $1,000,000.00 in legal fees...The district attorney’s yearly salary, including state and county supplements, is $198,266.66.”

A big question is how specifically Willis herself is benefitting financially from the money being paid to her very “special” special prosecutor.

President Trump, in DC on Tuesday for an important hearing on presidential immunity, responded to the news, saying the Georgia case is now “totally compromised.”

Alina Habba appeared on HANNITY Tuesday night to say that if the allegations against Willis are true, “that is so disturbing on so many levels.”  Taxpayer dollars in Georgia are being used to subsidize Willis’ boyfriend, “who is now teamed up with her to persecute and prosecute Trump.”

“...When I thought we couldn’t get any lower, when I thought we really couldn’t attack him any more, with literally no self-respect and dignity, we have this.  We have a woman who’s now bringing in somebody who’s her boyfriend, paying him quadruple, ten times what she’s making...and [they] vacation on taxpayer dollars, and then in their spare time talking about going after Trump.”

“If this is true,” Habbas said, “if she really was using taxpayer dollars to funnel [to] vacations, and then go after Trump, completely disregarding ethics...[committing] selective prosecution, going after someone as a target and then teaming up with your friends, the only RICO I see is the RICO with the DAs and AGs that is happening.  The conspiracy is not a conspiracy at all.  We have Soros-backed, and other funders that we’ve seen that are backing these individuals, and they are coordinating, they are profiting, and they are becoming famous politically; their agenda is all the same:  Get Trump.  That is the only RICO case I see here.”  

“...Donald Trump has done nothing wrong, and they have intentionally done this in order to interfere with an election because they can’t beat him in the polls.”

If something about the romantic angle sounds familiar, perhaps you’re reminded of the FBI’s Peter Strzok and paramour Lisa Page getting all steamy at the thought of taking down Trump during the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation, pushing the Russia Hoax “insurance policy.”  For people who hate Trump, this effort is apparently a powerful aphrodisiac.

I digress.

Anyway, Athena Thorne at PJ MEDIA wrote about the story broken by the ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION.  Fulton County records show that DA Willis approved payments of $654,000 in legal fees to alleged boyfriend Wade since January 2022, and he did receive the money.

It gets shadier.  Willis hired Wade to help her “get Trump” on November 1, 2021.  On November 2, he filed for divorce.  Apparently, their affair had predated his hiring and has continued throughout their work on the case.

"The district attorney and the special prosecutor…suffer from irreparable conflicts of interest, and have violated their oaths of office under the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct and should be disqualified from prosecuting this matter," declares the court filing.

But in THE MOST corrupt part of this --- yes, it gets worse --- the motion alleges improper coordination between the DA’s office and Biden’ s White House.  We can be sure of this because the “special” special prosecutor, who apparently is not the brightest bulb in the box, filed for reimbursement and documented a meeting with the White House counsel (!!!) about the case.

Willis hasn’t denied the allegations in this motion but through a spokesperson said she would address the situation “through appropriate court findings.”  So, she suddenly cares about being “appropriate”?

https://pjmedia.com/athena-thorne/2024/01/09/oh-la-la-court-filing-accuses-fulton-county-da-fani-willis-of-sleeping-with-the-help-n4925326

Victoria Taft, also at PJ MEDIA, has dug deeper on the issue of Willis’ team conspiring with the White House to prosecute Trump and says that “White House fingerprints couldn’t be more clear when one starts connecting these dots.”

Biden has denied that the White House is involved in this in any way, but that denial has to be right up there with the one about never speaking to Hunter’s business associates or knowing anything about the family business.  Any denial from Biden now, about anything, is laughable.  So now we have a President of the United States conspiring with his own “Justice” Department and regional law enforcement to take down the one political opponent whom polls show would beat him handily this coming November.  As one pundit posted on X, “Banana republic if you can keep it.”

Constitutional law expert Mike Davis, founder of the Article III Project, cites “clear, obvious coordination” between Biden’s White House and the DOJ to bring charges against Trump.  He’s called for immediate hearings of the House Judiciary Committee to look into the connections between Biden’s White House and all four of the cases, under three prosecutors, that have been brought against Trump, not just Willis’ case.  He appears to have evidence on White House coordination with Alvin Bragg’s New York “fraud” case as well.

According to Davis, Wade sent a bill for one White House counsel meeting and also for two other meetings at the White House --- one of these BEFORE the RICO indictment of Trump was sought.

Be sure to read Taft’s piece, as this is where you’ll see the documentation of Wade’s activities.  Can it get any lower than this?  Stay tuned.

https://pjmedia.com/victoria-taft/2024/01/09/biden-white-house-counsel-is-running-all-the-lawsuits-against-trump-n4925341

Mike Huckabee

You probably saw the story in yesterday’s newsletter about President Obama taking a lunch with President Biden before the holidays to express concern with how the Biden campaign was going and to advise him to surround himself with different people.  Obama reportedly expressed anxiety about a possible Trump return to power.

But what we didn’t get into yesterday was the question of why that story would appear now.  It first appeared in the WASHINGTON POST, in a piece by Tyler Pager, and so would have been leaked there, perhaps by someone in the White House, perhaps by someone allied with the Obamas (though I may repeat myself).

WAPO reported that Obama “suggested to Biden’s advisers that the campaign needs more top-level decision-makers at its headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, or else must empower the people already in place.  Obama hasn’t recommended specific individuals but did mention David Plouffe, who managed Obama’s 2008 race, as the type of senior strategist needed at the Biden campaign.

“During the lunch,” the report said, “Obama noted the success of his re-election structure in 2012, when some of his top presidential aides, including David Axelrod and Jim Messina, left the White House to take charge of the re-election operation in Chicago.”

So, here we go.  Putting an Obama-style campaign in place.  Will it eventually be moved to Chicago to work for...someone else?

“Obama also recommended that Biden seek counsel from Obama’s own former campaign aides,” WAPO reported, “which Biden officials say they have done…”  In conversations with Biden’s associates, Obama has been even more explicit about the need to be more “agile.”

Matt Margolis in PJ MEDIA made the point that Biden’s problem isn’t his campaign --- it’s his record of utter failure.  But he doesn’t tie Biden’s catastrophes to this insidious involvement of the Obamas in his presidential race.  We hypothesize a direct connection.

Biden’s gonna be out, you know.  And stories about the Obamas’ involvement in the ‘24 race appear to be very strategically timed.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/01/06/barack-obama-hits-panic-button-on-biden-campaign-n4925271#google_vignette

AXIOS wrote about the WAPO story, mentioning that “Biden and his allies will spend over $1 billion this year telling voters Trump is terrible.”  It occurs to me that if Trump really had been so terrible as President, they wouldn’t HAVE to spend a billion dollars to convince voters of that!  We’d all just know.  They’re spending that much money because the situation is the opposite:  we know that Trump was right about so many things and made some great decisions as President.

According to their report, top Democrats who’d been thinking the Biden campaign was being too complacent were relieved at Biden’s speech, because they liked the horrid thing.  They called the speech the campaign’s “we get it” moment.  So expect to see a lot more darkness and lying about Trump and January 6.

AXIOS likes to answer for its readers the question of “why it matters?”  In this case, they say it reflects a need by “someone” to “light a fire” under Biden’s campaign people.  But we don’t think that quite captures it.  The “someone” is most likely Obama, and the fact that this story was leaked to WAPO at this particular time reflects the Obamas’ strategy for their own comeback.

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/07/obama-biden-trump-2024-election

Adding to the picture of the Obamas’ growing involvement, Sean Hannity reported Monday night that Michelle Obama appeared in a recent wide-ranging interview on what is billed as “the Number One health and wellness podcast” to express her own Trump-fear, which she said keeps her up at night.

“I am terrified about what could possibly happen [in the next election],” she said on the Jay Shetty “On Purpose” podcast, “because our leaders matter.  Who we select, who speaks for us, who holds that bully pulpit, it affects us in ways that I --- sometimes I think people take for granted.  You know, the fact that people think that government, you know, doesn’t even do anything.  And I’m like, ‘Oh, my God!  Does government do EVERYTHING for us.  And we cannot take this democracy for granted.  And sometimes I worry that we do.  And those are the things that keep me up.”

Never mind her disturbing observation that government does everything for us.  Michelle, without mentioning Trump by name, launched into problems with the tone of messages, and we know exactly who she’s talking about: “The tone and tenor of the message matters.  We just can’t say...the first thing that comes into our minds.  That is not authenticity to me.  That’s childish, and we see childish leadership right before us --- what that looks like and how that feels, where someone is just base, and vulgar and cynical in a leadership position.  It doesn’t trickle down well.  You know, that just begets more of that.”

It’s as we’ve said for a long time: that if Michelle were running against Trump, she would be offered up as the nation’s “healer,” the strong but gentle antidote for the rawness that is Trump.  She reinforced that image during this interview.

“I think we are obligated to model,” she said, “for those of us that have a platform, because it resonates.  And I want to resonate good.  I want to resonate reason and compassion and empathy.  And that’s more important than my feelings. ‘Cause my feelings, I can take care of those.”

“That’s a master class in communication,” Shetty responded with an admiring chuckle.  Michelle’s combination of empathy and energy “is so empowering for everyone who’s listening and watching.”  Tellingly, she said she learned this perspective “on the campaign trail.”

Michelle also made it clear that after living so closely with the leader of the free world, she knew a LOT.  Some of it she didn’t want to know, and it kept her up at night.

She did a skillful cleanup job on remarks she’d made years ago about “not loving my country.”  “People will distort you whenever they can,” she said, obviously not thinking about how relentlessly the Democrats distort Trump.  She said people tried to “other-ize” her and her husband, as “the first black people,” accusing her husband of “being a terrorist” (what, not a Russian agent?), labeling her as “an angry black woman,” etc.  It was “to make people afraid of us,” which is “a strategy that gets played again and again and again.”  (What, like calling someone a dictator and a threat to democracy?)

She oh-so-pleasantly dropped a nasty dig at Trump at the end: “I mean, the bars [levels of expectation] are different for people in life.  That I’ve learned.  This is the thing about being an ‘other’ [as in, being black].  You learn how to be excellent all the time, because you can’t be ‘less than.’  Other people can.  Other people can be indicted a bunch of times and still run for office.  Black men can’t.” This teaches you to be good, she said, and you end up benefiting from that “extra resilience.”

“But it’s still not fair.” 

By the way, if Michelle would like to see a list of black men who were indicted and went on to run for office (and win), we’ll see what we can do.  For now, two words:  Marion Barry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Barry

Certainly, the Obamas aren’t getting involved in this campaign for Biden’s sake.  The Obamas famously can’t stand the Bidens.  Besides, President Biden has his own problems with “tone” these days, most recently in his dark, divisive, foreboding speech at Valley Forge.  Michelle didn’t mention THAT, of course, but we all know it’s true.

The opening to Michelle’s podcast interview, which runs a little more than an hour, looks like a brief promotional piece for her.  Watch about the last ten minutes and tell me she’s not running for President, and essentially a socialist one.  Low-information voters who know little about Obama-style leadership and the REAL “threat to democracy” currently residing in DC thanks in large part to him will be mightily impressed.  Don’t say you weren’t warned.

https://news.yahoo.com/michelle-obama-am-terrified-could-154821087.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

 

 

Related: I didn’t want to say much more about Biden’s kick-off speech last Friday for his 2024 Scaremongering Tour, but this blog post from John A. Lucas that analyses Biden’s Kim Jong Un-like propaganda tactics, expose some of the outrageous lies Biden spouted, and sums it up as the “worst presidential speech ever,” is well worth reading.

https://johnalucas6.substack.com/p/worst-presidential-speach-ever

Mike Huckabee

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

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Daily Bible Verse

⁶ For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

Isaiah 9:6 KJV

Newsletter Notes

9 stories

3,499 words

Reading time: About 16 minutes

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We aren’t lying about the border

Monday, “Homeland Security Secretary” Alejandro Mayorkas held a press conference near the US-Mexico border, where he accused his critics of lying about him and insisted that “Some have accused DHS of not enforcing our nation’s laws. This could not be further from the truth.” I haven’t been so convinced since Joe Biden declared Trump to be the enemy of democracy as he tried to have him imprisoned and banned from ballots.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/08/dhs-chief-mayorkas-border-fix-bus-more-migrants-u-s/

In the midst of record illegal immigration with millions of border crossers swarming into the US, Mayorkas blamed Congress for not funding Biden’s plan to deal with illegal immigrants, which would have spent even more taxpayer money on apprehending and processing illegal entrants, then releasing them inside the US and giving them bus fare to wherever they want to go to await their court date that they likely won’t show up for nearly a decade from now.

Meanwhile, the President of Mexico made heavy demands for help in curbing illegal immigration, including $20 billion and work permits for 10 million Hispanics. Funny, Trump was able to make them cooperate using the immense leverage we have over their economy. I guess they know a pushover when they see one.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mexican-president-demands-20-billion-work-permits-10-million-hispanics-exchange-immigration-help

This is a plan that House Speaker Johnson should declare dead-on-arrival. I’m hopeful that he will, judging by how he responded on Tuesday morning to the Biden Administration’s attempts to blame the border catastrophe on Republicans.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/speaker-johnson-fires-back-white-house-border-policy-standoff-national-security-catastrophe

Johnson told Fox News Digital, “Since his first day in office, President Biden and his administration have worked to systematically undermine America’s border security.” He listed more than 60 Biden actions, from halting border wall construction to expanding catch-and-release inside the US, that “manipulated the federal bureaucracy to open our borders to illegal immigrants, human trafficking, fentanyl, and potential terrorists. The result is a humanitarian and national security catastrophe."

Johnson said, "The President must use his executive authority to repair what he has broken. I am calling on him to do so." Fat chance of that, but at least it sounds as if he won’t fall for passing Biden’s latest effort to fund even more illegal immigration under the guise of fighting illegal immigration.

Related: Because sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying, the Babylon Bee perfectly sums up the Biden Administration’s efforts to prevent Texas from doing the job on the border that they’re supposed to be doing but won’t.

https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-sues-texas-saying-its-against-the-law-to-pass-a-law-to-enforce-the-law

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I didn’t see this coming

Well, here’s something I never expected to see: an accusation of actual, scandalous wrongdoing coming out of the ridiculous Trump RICO trial in Georgia. Except it doesn’t involve Trump or his associates.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/08/trump-co-defendant-alleges-fulton-county-da-fani-willis-in-corrupt-romantic-relationship/

Former Trump campaign official Michael Roman has filed a motion for charges against him to be dropped and for political hatchet woman/county DA Fani Willis, special prosecutor Nathan Wade and the entire DA’s office to be disqualified from further prosecution of the case.

Roman’s motion accuses Willis and Wade of having an improper, clandestine romantic relationship that began before the case started and included taking vacations and cruises together; and that she had no legal authority to appoint him as special prosecutor. He further claims that they have profited significantly from this case at the expense of taxpayers, and that they “have violated laws regulating the use of public monies, suffer from irreparable conflicts of interest, and have violated their oaths of office under the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct.”

I can’t verify the truth of those charges, and at this time, we’re still waiting for Willis to respond. But I just hope I’m not drinking coffee in front of my computer when she claims it’s an outrage to take innocent behavior and try to twist it into a crime.

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Notice 703

If you’re on Social Security, you’ve likely received or will soon receive a Notice 703. That’s a letter from the Social Security Administration, warning that your Social Security benefits may be taxable and providing a worksheet to help you figure out how much of your SS checks for 2023 that they’re going to demand you give back in April.

Many recent retirees may be in for a shock at tax time, since they naturally figured that their Social Security wouldn’t be counted as new taxable income. After all, it’s NOT. It’s your own money that you already paid taxes on years or even decades ago. The government took it on the promise that they’d give it back to you with interest when you retired. But thanks to a tax reform bill in the ‘80s, it started being considered taxable income if you continue working and earning other pay.

So to be clear: The politicians spent like drunken sailors on shore leave (apologies to drunken sailors for comparing them to politicians), driving inflation through the roof and forcing Americans to continue working into their 70s and beyond because Social Security doesn’t cover basic living expenses. Now, they punish the elderly for continuing to work to survive by claiming that the pay they earn makes them wealthy plutocrats who don’t need to keep all of their Social Security, so they tax a big chunk of it back.

And how much do you have to earn to reach that plutocrat level? A whopping $25,000 if you’re single and $32,000 if you’re married and filing jointly. FYI: that’s not adjusted gross income. That’s TOTAL income before any deductions. It also includes any pension payments, dividends or other savings or investment income.

FYI: Here’s why retirees have to keep working until they die. The Blaze reports that since Biden took office, retirement accounts have lost 25% of their value (an estimated $1 trillion net loss.) In the third quarter of 2023 alone, pension plans lost $3.3 trillion. And due to Bidenflation, the average American family has lost the equivalent of about $7300 in annual income.

For years, there have been moves in Congress either to eliminate this unconscionable soaking of seniors or at least to greatly raise the outdated income threshold to reflect the huge inflation of recent years. Thus far, nothing has come of them. We should all let our representatives know that it’s long past time to end this monstrous double taxation of Social Security payments and stop forcing struggling seniors to pay for the government’s spendaholism.

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Ohio News

UPDATE: After inexplicably vetoing a bill to ban “gender-affirming” (actually the opposite) mutilations of children and bar men from women’s sports, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Friday signed an executive order that pretty much repeats the first part of that ban. Of course, executive orders can be reversed much easier than laws.

https://pjmedia.com/paula-bolyard/2024/01/05/out-of-left-field-ohio-gov-mike-dewine-has-lost-his-mind-on-transing-children-n4925257

This also makes little sense if he really believes, as he said, that such a ban inserts the government between children and their parents making the best medical decisions for them. Never mind that permanently mutilating a child with unnecessary elective surgery and chemicals is NEVER in the child’s best interests, or that certain medical facilities that provide “trans” procedures to minors have become notorious for deliberately misleading parents on the consequences or cutting them out of these decisions entirely.

Paula Bolyard has more at the link, and let’s hope the Ohio legislature clears up the confusion by overriding his veto.

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Positive Court Decision Round-up:

For people who accuse their opponents of being authoritarian dictators, the Democrats sure don’t have much respect for Constitutional rights, the rule of law or the court system. Fortunately, we do still have a court system that occasionally defends those things.

For example, on Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge by the Biden Administration to Idaho’s new law banning abortion except to save the life of the mother, but they allowed the law to go into effect. This puts on hold the Biden White House’s attempt to force Idaho ER doctors to perform abortions, even if it violates their religious or ethical beliefs. And FYI, despite hyperbolic claims from the pro-abortion lobby, the Idaho law does not consider removing miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies as abortions.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/06/supreme-court-blocks-biden-admins-attempt-to-force-idaho-er-doctors-to-perform-abortions/

Also, a three-judge panel of the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals dissolved a hold placed on a new California law, banning the carrying of firearms in most public places. A lower court allowed the law to go into effect on January 1^st, despite the fact that it is in direct violation of the Supreme Court's 2022 Bruen ruling that the right to carry a gun in public places for self-defense is protected by the Second Amendment. The judge who originally stayed the law called it unconstitutional, “sweeping, repugnant to the Second Amendment, and openly defiant of the Supreme Court.”

The case will be heard in April. Let’s hope the full appeals court throws out this law and saves the SCOTUS the trouble.

https://www.worldtribune.com/2nd-amendment-victory-appeals-court-restores-right-to-carry-in-california/

When the law was allowed to go into effect, an attorney for the plaintiffs said, “The right to carry in California was unconstitutionally eliminated for almost a week.” Meanwhile, California officials began declaring just about every public place as a “gun-free zone,” meaning that nobody but criminals could carry guns in them.

The liberals in California defied the SCOTUS and the Constitution and imposed this clearly unconstitutional law anyway in the name of “safety.” It would be nice if they were at all concerned for the safety of law-abiding citizens who need guns to protect themselves from all the criminals they’ve let run wild.

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Least Surprising News Of The Day:

New data shows that illegal aliens have less than a 5% chance of being deported under Biden.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/07/data-illegals-have-less-than-5-percent-chance-of-being-deported-under-biden/

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Huck’s Hero Final Salute:

Let’s all pause to give a final salute to one of the true heroes of World War II, who passed away last week at 104.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/25253608/mike-sadler-dead-aged-103-sas-hero/

During his extraordinary service with the British military, Major Mike Sadler was a gunner and anti-tank specialist, he parachuted into France after the D-Day landings, worked with the UK intelligence service MI6, was captured by the Nazis and escaped, and had part of Antarctica named after him. But most impressive, he was the last surviving member of the original SAS (Special Air Service.)  In that capacity, he taught himself to navigate by the stars and became chief navigator to SAS founder David Stirling. He became known for his “superhuman” ability to lead long-range missions through the deserts of North Africa, once leading a 100-mile trek through the shifting sands with no maps and no water.

Go to the link to read his astonishing life story and see the photos of him in his youth. This is what a real hero looks like.

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Silly Woke Nonsense of the Day!

The British Film Institute sparked a mocking backlash by announcing that it would start putting “trigger warnings” on 1960s James Bond movies, because they “reflect views prevalent in its time, but will cause offence today (as they did then).”

https://pjmedia.com/chris-queen/2024/01/05/when-will-we-stop-worrying-about-whether-old-entertainment-will-offend-people-n4925233

As Chris Queen points out, “It's long past time for the ruining of our cultural classics to come to an end.” He asks, who was offended by 007 in the 1960s? “Grubby Communist henchmen? Megalomaniac billionaires’ intent on taking over the world? SMERSH? SPECTRE? (Someone should tell the BFI that both of those organizations are fictional) …Sexy Japanese secret agents, rifle-toting henchmen on skis, mute Korean butlers with razor-brimmed hats…?”

I’m old enough to remember when Sean Connery as 007 was called “the man every woman wanted and every man wanted to be.”  I guess liberals today think that every woman wants a woke feminist man, and every man wants to be a woman.

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Campaign 24: Here come the Obamas!

You probably saw the story in yesterday’s newsletter about President Obama taking a lunch with President Biden before the holidays to express concern with how the Biden campaign was going and to advise him to surround himself with different people.  Obama reportedly expressed anxiety about a possible Trump return to power.

But what we didn’t get into yesterday was the question of why that story would appear now.  It first appeared in the WASHINGTON POST, in a piece by Tyler Pager, and so would have been leaked there, perhaps by someone in the White House, perhaps by someone allied with the Obamas (though I may repeat myself).

WAPO reported that Obama “suggested to Biden’s advisers that the campaign needs more top-level decision-makers at its headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, or else must empower the people already in place.  Obama hasn’t recommended specific individuals but did mention David Plouffe, who managed Obama’s 2008 race, as the type of senior strategist needed at the Biden campaign.

“During the lunch,” the report said, “Obama noted the success of his re-election structure in 2012, when some of his top presidential aides, including David Axelrod and Jim Messina, left the White House to take charge of the re-election operation in Chicago.”

So, here we go.  Putting an Obama-style campaign in place.  Will it eventually be moved to Chicago to work for...someone else?

“Obama also recommended that Biden seek counsel from Obama’s own former campaign aides,” WAPO reported, “which Biden officials say they have done…”  In conversations with Biden’s associates, Obama has been even more explicit about the need to be more “agile.”

Matt Margolis in PJ MEDIA made the point that Biden’s problem isn’t his campaign --- it’s his record of utter failure.  But he doesn’t tie Biden’s catastrophes to this insidious involvement of the Obamas in his presidential race.  We hypothesize a direct connection.

Biden’s gonna be out, you know.  And stories about the Obamas’ involvement in the ‘24 race appear to be very strategically timed.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/01/06/barack-obama-hits-panic-button-on-biden-campaign-n4925271#google_vignette

AXIOS wrote about the WAPO story, mentioning that “Biden and his allies will spend over $1 billion this year telling voters Trump is terrible.”  It occurs to me that if Trump really had been so terrible as President, they wouldn’t HAVE to spend a billion dollars to convince voters of that!  We’d all just know.  They’re spending that much money because the situation is the opposite:  we know that Trump was right about so many things and made some great decisions as President.

According to their report, top Democrats who’d been thinking the Biden campaign was being too complacent were relieved at Biden’s speech, because they liked the horrid thing.  They called the speech the campaign’s “we get it” moment.  So expect to see a lot more darkness and lying about Trump and January 6.

AXIOS likes to answer for its readers the question of “why it matters?”  In this case, they say it reflects a need by “someone” to “light a fire” under Biden’s campaign people.  But we don’t think that quite captures it.  The “someone” is most likely Obama, and the fact that this story was leaked to WAPO at this particular time reflects the Obamas’ strategy for their own comeback.

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/07/obama-biden-trump-2024-election

Adding to the picture of the Obamas’ growing involvement, Sean Hannity reported Monday night that Michelle Obama appeared in a recent wide-ranging interview on what is billed as “the Number One health and wellness podcast” to express her own Trump-fear, which she said keeps her up at night.

“I am terrified about what could possibly happen [in the next election],” she said on the Jay Shetty “On Purpose” podcast, “because our leaders matter.  Who we select, who speaks for us, who holds that bully pulpit, it affects us in ways that I --- sometimes I think people take for granted.  You know, the fact that people think that government, you know, doesn’t even do anything.  And I’m like, ‘Oh, my God!  Does government do EVERYTHING for us.  And we cannot take this democracy for granted.  And sometimes I worry that we do.  And those are the things that keep me up.”

Never mind her disturbing observation that government does everything for us.  Michelle, without mentioning Trump by name, launched into problems with the tone of messages, and we know exactly who she’s talking about: “The tone and tenor of the message matters.  We just can’t say...the first thing that comes into our minds.  That is not authenticity to me.  That’s childish, and we see childish leadership right before us --- what that looks like and how that feels, where someone is just base, and vulgar and cynical in a leadership position.  It doesn’t trickle down well.  You know, that just begets more of that.”

It’s as we’ve said for a long time: that if Michelle were running against Trump, she would be offered up as the nation’s “healer,” the strong but gentle antidote for the rawness that is Trump.  She reinforced that image during this interview.

“I think we are obligated to model,” she said, “for those of us that have a platform, because it resonates.  And I want to resonate good.  I want to resonate reason and compassion and empathy.  And that’s more important than my feelings. ‘Cause my feelings, I can take care of those.”

“That’s a master class in communication,” Shetty responded with an admiring chuckle.  Michelle’s combination of empathy and energy “is so empowering for everyone who’s listening and watching.”  Tellingly, she said she learned this perspective “on the campaign trail.”

Michelle also made it clear that after living so closely with the leader of the free world, she knew a LOT.  Some of it she didn’t want to know, and it kept her up at night.

She did a skillful cleanup job on remarks she’d made years ago about “not loving my country.”  “People will distort you whenever they can,” she said, obviously not thinking about how relentlessly the Democrats distort Trump.  She said people tried to “other-ize” her and her husband, as “the first black people,” accusing her husband of “being a terrorist” (what, not a Russian agent?), labeling her as “an angry black woman,” etc.  It was “to make people afraid of us,” which is “a strategy that gets played again and again and again.”  (What, like calling someone a dictator and a threat to democracy?)

She oh-so-pleasantly dropped a nasty dig at Trump at the end: “I mean, the bars [levels of expectation] are different for people in life.  That I’ve learned.  This is the thing about being an ‘other’ [as in, being black].  You learn how to be excellent all the time, because you can’t be ‘less than.’  Other people can.  Other people can be indicted a bunch of times and still run for office.  Black men can’t.” This teaches you to be good, she said, and you end up benefiting from that “extra resilience.”

“But it’s still not fair.” 

By the way, if Michelle would like to see a list of black men who were indicted and went on to run for office (and win), we’ll see what we can do.  For now, two words:  Marion Barry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Barry

Certainly, the Obamas aren’t getting involved in this campaign for Biden’s sake.  The Obamas famously can’t stand the Bidens.  Besides, President Biden has his own problems with “tone” these days, most recently in his dark, divisive, foreboding speech at Valley Forge.  Michelle didn’t mention THAT, of course, but we all know it’s true.

The opening to Michelle’s podcast interview, which runs a little more than an hour, looks like a brief promotional piece for her.  Watch about the last ten minutes and tell me she’s not running for President, and essentially a socialist one.  Low-information voters who know little about Obama-style leadership and the REAL “threat to democracy” currently residing in DC thanks in large part to him will be mightily impressed.  Don’t say you weren’t warned.

https://news.yahoo.com/michelle-obama-am-terrified-could-154821087.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

Related: I didn’t want to say much more about Biden’s kick-off speech last Friday for his 2024 Scaremongering Tour, but this blog post from John A. Lucas that analyses Biden’s Kim Jong Un-like propaganda tactics, expose some of the outrageous lies Biden spouted, and sums it up as the “worst presidential speech ever,” is well worth reading.

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I Just Wanted to Say

Thank you for reading my newsletter.

Mike Huckabee

After President Biden’s shameful, lie-filled speech at Valley Forge, we considered running a full transcript and going into detail picking apart all the huge whoppers in it, but, frankly, it seemed as though such a bad speech from such a bad President just didn’t warrant all that stinking work.  Really, aren’t you just sick of the “insurrection” lie at this point?  We KNOW it’s not true. A recent poll found that nearly half of Americans have woken up to the realization that it’s not true. We know that this has shifted into a fake campaign strategy for the Democrats, built on sand.  (Will it stand upright just long enough to get Trump off the ballot, in the name of “democracy”?)

But that campaign has to stretch through most of this year.  So the “insurrection” lie has to keep growing, to keep Trump-phobia going!  And the DOJ is ready to provide more manure to grow it in, in the form of new charges for “thousands” more January 6 protesters, coming courtesy of DC U.S. Attorney Michael Graves.  As Julie Kelly reports, Graves warned last week that he’d be coming after anyone else who “stood on government property.”  She adds, though, that “recent court activity could shut down his latest crusade of terror.”

Graves is the prosecutor overseeing the government’s “unprecedented and ongoing criminal investigation into the four-hour disturbance that has so far resulted in the arrest of 1,200 Americans,” Kelly reports.  All those cases.  And this could not have been more political.  Last week, on January 4, the same day Biden launched his first J6-themed campaign ad, Graves --- whom you might recall worked for Biden’s 2020 campaign and is himself a Biden appointee --- gave an hour-long press briefing to a handful of reporters.

His remarks were in the same inflammatory tone of Biden’s J6 speech, with some of the same whoppers included.  Points for keeping the narrative consistent, even though it’s by lying.

“On January 6, 2021, the United States lost control of the grounds around the Capitol and most of the Capitol itself,” he said from his office.  “In scenes reminiscent of a medieval battle, officers engaged in hand-to-hand combat with members of the invading force.”

“Invading force” --- get it?  Not Americans exercising their First Amendment rights in a massive protest that some took too far?  Graves was lying.

He claimed that this was the “largest single day mass assault on law enforcement in our nation’s history.”  That, too, was a lie.

And did you know that DC juries have not acquitted EVEN ONE J6 defendant?  They’re all found guilty as charged, sometimes even up-charged!  Graves bragged about this, and unfortunately, this part of his briefing was true.

To enlarge his net even wider, Graves warned that he’s targeting thousands more people who didn’t even go inside the Capitol that day.  Apparently, they only need to have been standing in the wrong spot, under 18 U.S. Code 1752, which criminalizes knowingly entering or remaining on restricted buildings or grounds.  According to Kelly, almost all the J6 defendants so far have been hit with misdemeanor charges related to this.

To make these charges stick, the government is “stuck” with the argument that the grounds around the Capitol were automatically restricted because Vice President Mike Pence was supposedly there.  But defense attorneys have been prohibited from interviewing Pence’s Secret Service detail to find out exactly where he was, especially after he was reportedly evacuated at 2:20 PM.  The charges rise or fall with Pence’s location, so...why??

The government maintains Pence was on a loading dock on Capitol property, but why not let Biden’s security detail say so under oath?  Might they be trying to maintain a lie about Pence’s location so that all those people can be charged with entering a restricted area?  There’s nothing wrong with skepticism about their story and demanding it be cleared up, given that the DOJ lied in charging documents (!) for nearly a year about VP-elect Kamala Harris’ location that afternoon.  They maintained all that time that she was in the Capitol building when it turned out that, curiously, she was at Democratic National Committee headquarters --- you know, where one of two pipe bombs had been placed by...well, some mystery person they still haven’t identified (!), at least publicly.

Think of it, they’re jetting all around the country to raid people’s houses and arrest them by the thousands for merely standing near the Capitol building on that day, yet the government still can’t tell us who planted those pipe bombs.  They could at least feign a little interest in doing that.

Kelly points out what should be obvious to all:  that people being expected to know Pence was in or at the building and that therefore the Capitol LAWN was “restricted” is absurd.  But our current government traffics in absurdity.

And that appears to be why DC judges and juries have gone right ahead and convicted J6 defendants on this trespassing offense.  They DON’T CARE if their argument is absurd --- they figure they’ve already won on jury selection.  These convictions include defendants who got there after the initial barriers and signage had been removed, which happened early on, shortly after 1 PM.  So for all the rest of the afternoon, protesters had no clue they were in a restricted area.

But it’s on appeal that these prosecutions based on Pence’s location start developing some cracks.  Kelly discusses a couple of cases in which appeals are showing the government hasn’t met its burden of proof.  It might be that to make this charge stick on appeal, prosecutors will have to prove that each defendant, individually, somehow had divined that Pence was there.  I hope you’ll read her article for the encouraging details.

https://www.declassified.live/p/doj-threatens-to-charge-thousands

Of course, as she points out, Jack Smith is still accomplishing his main goal, which is entirely political.  His mission, she says, is “accelerating the government’s campaign of fear related to January 6 and its relentless criminalization of political activity.”

Which brings us back to Biden’s cringe-inducing Valley Forge speech.  No, we didn’t go through the nasty thing line by line and highlight all the lies you can already catch.  Instead, let’s go to law professor Jonathan Turley’s must-read column for THE HILL, in which he says this speech proves conclusively that Biden is “no George Washington. 

However, I’d go much further than that bit of understatement and say Joe’s the opposite of George Washington.  Washington famously cared nothing for his own power and glory.  And, seriously, do you think anyone would ever think to create a story about Joe Biden as a boy, the point of which was that he “cannot tell a lie”?

Millions of voters have been pondering this narrative and are now rejecting the “insurrection” schtick.   To Democrats’ dismay, it’s seeming more in hindsight like a “protest that got out of hand for some people.”  And isn’t Biden laying on the Hitler/dictator comparisons a little thick, considering it’s his administration that’s arresting and detaining thousands of political prisoners, weaponizing the government to silence opposing speech, and trying to take his #1 opponent off the ballot, by imprisonment if necessary?  One quote that’s been going around since the speech is, “January 6, 2021…a day that will live in hyperbole.”

As Turley points out, “The speech is a masterpiece of contradiction.  Biden started by denouncing how Donald Trump’s campaign is ‘only about him’ [reminds us of what they kept repeating about him at the DNC convention in 2016], and ‘obsessed with the past.’  He then spent virtually all of the speech obsessing about Trump and January 6, 2021.”

All Biden has to run on is what can only be called Trumped-up fear.  Evil Trump will destroy democracy!  And Trump isn’t really even running against Biden himself --- he’s running against... democracy!  In Turley’s words, it takes an act of “willful blindness” to mentally remove Biden’s name from the ballot and put in “Democracy.”

As for Biden’s ridiculous claim to be the defender of free speech, Turley notes that you have to go all the way back to John Adams to find a President who was as anti-free speech as Biden is.  Could be, but WWI-era Democrat Woodrow Wilson offers stiff competition...

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/sedition-act-becomes-federal-law

“For Biden to run on free speech is about as convincing as Bill Clinton running on abstinence,” he says.

See, the best way we can deal with this nonsense is to mock it mercilessly.   Thanks, Prof. Turley; we love a great line.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4392480-joe-biden-is-no-george-washington-and-valley-forge-proved-it/

Speaking of mocking Biden’s Valley Forge speech that proved he has nothing to run on but fear itself, that seems to be reaction it’s getting much to the shock of the Democrats and their media lapdogs.

Here’s a round-up of some scathingly entertaining commentary on it, first from Roger Kimball at American Greatness, who reports that Biden’s histrionic speech is being rightly “laughed at, guyed, ridiculed, and satirized” by Americans who are starting to view J6 more as a hoax than an insurrection. He quotes the J6 defendant who moved Nancy Pelosi’s lectern. Calling himself “Lectern Leader” on Twitter (X), he tweeted a photo of the incident with the comment, “Throwback to the time I brought America to its knees by moving furniture tens of feet and became king.”  

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/07/from-insurrection-to-satire-bidens-valley-forge-speech-fails-to-cement-the-trump-dictator-narrative/

Robert Spencer at PJ Media also has a terrific skewering of Biden’s “Scare voters stupid so they’ll reelect me” speech.

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2024/01/07/biden-trump-speaks-the-same-exact-language-used-in-nazi-germany-n4925285 

He notes that Biden claimed Trump is speaking “the same exact language used in Nazi Germany.” Kimball replies, “What? Trump speaks German now?” He calls that slam “as ineptly stated as it is inaccurate.” He also shares this tweet from Donald Trump Jr.: “Happy Fake Insurrection Day!!! The first ever insurrection with armed tour guides and unarmed participants!”

PS – When even former Attorney General and thorn-in-Trump’s side Bill Barr is blasting Biden’s DOJ for unconscionably overcharging people over January 6^th, you know you’ve lost a large part of the nation.

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/bill-barr-says-justice-department-went-too-far-prosecuting-jan-6-capitol-riot

Mike Huckabee

First, the story of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s secret weeklong hospitalization following unrevealed elective surgery grew into a bigger scandal over the weekend when it became known that not only was the public not informed, even the Biden White House and the White House National Security Council were kept in the dark. For the past week, with wars and terrorist threats raging around the world, we effectively had no Defense Secretary on the job and nobody in the White House even knew it.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/01/06/defense-secretary-austin-scandal-is-even-worse-than-we-thought-n4925274

To be fair, considering how badly both Austin and Biden do their jobs, for the military to have no leadership at all was probably preferable to being led by either one of them. Still, when it comes to leadership, the United States military and the American people deserve better than nothing.

Derek Hunter at Townhall.com writes that this, among other recent stories, shows that not even Democrats respect Biden or trust his competence.

https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2024/01/08/even-democrats-dont-respect-joe-biden-n2633295

He notes that there are only a couple of reasons why this info would be kept from the President. One is that the Pentagon thinks Biden is such a nonentity that they didn’t feel the need to inform him. Another is that they wanted to keep him out of the loop so he wouldn’t step in and make things even worse. Neither speaks highly of Biden or what those close to him think of his abilities.

Meanwhile, Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media reminds us of what a useless disaster Austin has been as Defense Secretary, putting more emphasis on infesting the military with wokeness and trans activism than on winning wars. As for his mysterious surgery, Kruiser suggests, “Maybe he was having a procedure to have his pronouns changed.”

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2024/01/08/the-morning-briefing-theres-useless-then-theres-lloyd-austin-useless-n4925280

Another area in which Democrats are struggling mightily to keep Loopy Joe out of the loop is his own reelection campaign. Not only are people mocking his attempts to scare us into thinking January 6th was the worst attack in history and Trump is Hitler reincarnated, but his own campaign volunteers are un-volunteering in droves.

https://www.westernjournal.com/alls-not-bidenland-volunteers-quitting-droves-anonymous-staffers-claim/

It seems that they are appalled that Biden doesn’t share their “values,” which apparently include siding with the murderous terrorists of Hamas against Israel.

As Matt Margolis at PJ Media notes, even Barack Obama is reportedly “extremely concerned” about the fecklessness of Joe’s reelection campaign (he shouldn’t be surprised; everything Joe touches loses all its feck.) Obama is reportedly “working behind the scenes with Biden’s aides and allies” to arrange for campaign officials “to have the authority to make decisions independently, without the need for approval from the White House.”

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/01/06/barack-obama-hits-panic-button-on-biden-campaign-n4925271

So his own campaign staff wants us to reelect a President who’s not even consulted on decisions about his own campaign because he’d just screw things up? Well, there’s a vote of confidence!

Mike Huckabee

The “experts” predicted that once the large field of GOP presidential contenders started winnowing down, they’d stop splitting the anti-Trump vote and Trump’s wide lead would dwindle to his hardcore MAGA base of 35%. Well, the field is now down to only three serious contenders (Trump, Haley and DeSantis – Christie should drop out; I’d say his audition for a job at CNN is already accomplished. And Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media says the perfect job for Vivek Ramaswamy would be Trump’s press secretary, based on how deftly he filets biased reporters…

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2024/01/05/the-morning-briefing-ok-ive-got-the-perfect-gig-for-vivek-ramaswamy-n4925210)

…And here he is, doing it again…)

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/05/watch-vivek-does-it-again-flips-script-on-nbc-reporter-as-she-has-meltdown-n2168319

Yet according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls, with the vote mostly now split in just three ways, Trump is currently at nearly 63%.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/republican-presidential-field-shrinking-not-trump-lead

Of course, I always warn people not to put too much faith in polls, particularly not those that are taken before a single primary vote has been cast. But it seems clear that the Democrat lawfare effort to destroy Trump with bogus felony charges and frivolous lawsuits has backfired bigly, enraging fair-minded Americans and rallying them to Trump. Anyone who might disapprove of porn in schools, wide open borders or abortion up to the age of weaning must look at the legal persecution of Trump by these leftist zealots and think, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

It might also be a factor in black voters turning away from Biden (the idea that the criminal justice system is always fair and unbiased against system outsiders doesn’t play very well with that demographic.) But of course, that could just be due to the fact that Biden is a horrible, horrible President.

Related: This news will have Democrats rushing to squeeze some Play-Doh. A new survey by the Daily Mail finds that Biden’s support among young women aged 18-29 has plummeted by 18 points since last June, from 60% to 42%.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12919689/female-voters-Biden-poll-collapse-young-support.html

This is the “Life of Julia” demographic, the young women that Democrats condescendingly view as dependent on Big Daddy government. They’re the main reason the expected 2022 red wave was blunted. The Dems think they’re single-issue voters (abortion), so I guess they think they’ll forever overlook issues like inflation, crushing interest rates, rampant crime and having their rights systematically stripped away from them in order to appease the trans cult.

We can expect the Dems to react to this news with panic, and by turning up to 11 the shrill accusations that Trump will take away abortion rights (he’s actually pretty moderate on that issue, while it’s the Dems who’ve become extremists and back unlimited abortion far beyond any laws in Europe) or that he’s a Hitler-like dictator. I would hope that any women who are old enough to remember when he was President for four years might remember that it was a time of widespread peace and prosperity, law and order, dismantling of government power, restoration of individual rights and the first Administration in years that started no new wars.

Still, as the article predicts, the left hopes that young women will come around to voting for Biden as “the lesser of two evils.” I hope I am never in the same room with anything that could be described as a greater evil than this presidency.

Mike Huckabee

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

Daily Bible Verse

14 “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. ² In my father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?

John 14:1-2 ESV

Newsletter Notes

12 stories

3,216 words

Reading time: About 15 minutes

SCOTUS agrees to review the Colorado Supreme Court’s ballot decision

Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to review the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision removing Donald Trump from the state ballot. It’s on an expedited schedule for a February 8^th hearing, and questions were not limited, which I hope means they will address the entire range of nonsense claims about insurrection and the 14^th Amendment, and throw all of this garbage lawfare on the ash heap of history where it belongs. Then we can get back to letting Americans decide for themselves who to vote for. That is, if the guardians of “our democracy” in the Democratic Party don’t come up with some other harebrained scheme to interfere with their right to vote.

https://reason.com/volokh/2024/01/05/supreme-court-will-consider-trump-section-3-disqualification-case/

Related: A judge in Wyoming just threw out an attempt to block Trump from the ballot over the 14^th Amendment ban on “insurrectionists.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/judge-shuts-newest-attempt-remove-trump-ballot/

Well, it’s that most sacred of days on the Democrat’s holy calendar:

January 6^th, a darker date than Pearl Harbor Day and 9/11 combined, when Democrats would be flying their American flags at half-staff if any of them still flew the American flag.

Expect to hear endless dark and divisive speeches from President Biden on down to the lowest bowels of Congress (that would be the Squad) and the media (MSNBC), about how a group of unarmed Trump supporters, many of whom were milling around taking selfies, were engaged in an “insurrection” to overthrow the United States government. And of course, how only voting for Democrats can save “our democracy.” The hype grows bigger every year. By this time next year, I expect DC to have a January 6^th Day Parade, with giant balloons of Liz Cheney and Adam Schiff, which like the real things will be filled with hot gas.

But is all this balloon juice and wailing and gnashing of teeth over January 6^th actually working to convince the public that the GOP is the party of riots and undermining elections? It appears that all the government and media efforts to dominate the news and shut down opposition speech have only raised more questions and suspicions. To paraphrase one of those old dead, white guys who supposedly has nothing to teach us, “Methinks they dost protest too much.”

After three years of endless caterwauling over the January 6^th “insurrection” and Trump’s “false, unsubstantiated claims” of a rigged election, a new Suffolk University/USA Today survey found that Americans’ skepticism about J6 and the 2020 election is actually rising.

https://www.wnd.com/2024/01/poll-stunner-nearly-40-say-jan-6-protesters-point/

The percentage who think the J6 protesters were criminals has dropped from 70% shortly after it happened to only 48% today. One-third say the DOJ’s legal actions against them should be reversed. Most surprising, the number who say they “went too far, but had a point” has risen from 24% to 37%. The poll also found that a rising number of Americans are concerned that ballots won’t be accurately cast and counted this November. You can find all the numbers at the link above.

For the record, I’ve said from the beginning that anyone who actually committed rioting or acts of violence in the Capitol should face the full legal consequences. But that doesn’t mean that every aunt and uncle in a MAGA cap who walked past the Capitol that day should be hounded into prison by politicized prosecutors who are more jealous than Inspector Javert in “Les Miserables.”

January 6^th Legal News:

This anniversary weekend also brought some welcome news in the fight back against the politicization of the justice system. First, Judicial Watch has filed a $30 million wrongful death lawsuit against the government on behalf of the husband and estate of Ashli Babbett, the protester shot at point black range and killed by Capitol police officer Lt. Michael Byrd. Babbitt was unarmed, surrounded by cops, and her empty hands were in the air. She was posing no threat to Byrd before he shot her dead.

Yet he was not only not charged, the entire case was whitewashed. The Capitol Police cleared him of any wrongdoing, and he was treated like a hero in liberal media circles, despite his record of unsafe handling of firearms.

https://www.westernjournal.com/federal-govt-sued-30m-wrongful-death-jan-6-protester-ashli-babbitt/

Judicial Watch has dug up some shocking info on Byrd’s history of mishandling guns that had yet to be revealed, such as that he’d had his police powers revoked on more than one occasion for failing to meet or complete semi-annual firearms qualifications requirements. Also, his police powers were once revoked after he shot at his car while off-duty as some teenagers were stealing it, and stray bullets hit the sides of houses.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/01/30-million-wrongful-death-suit-jan-6-protester/

Despite Biden’s repeated false claims of multiple deaths of police officers on January 6^th, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said, “The only homicide on January 6 was the unlawful shooting death of Ashli Babbitt. Her homicide by Lt. Byrd is a scandal beyond belief.”

Let’s hope the civil court system will finally bring some justice that the Biden “Department of Justice” refused to pursue.

And in another J6 lawsuit, a defendant is seeking to overturn the charges on the basis of selective prosecution. He says the DOJ gave the mysterious figure Ray Epps a sweetheart deal, charging Epps with a single misdemeanor, while they charged him with eight felonies and ignored the same mitigating factors.

https://revolver.news/2024/01/j6-political-victim-files-suit-mocking-biden-regime-for-blessing-ray-epps-with-sweetheart-deal/

That second case is a good example of our two-tiered justice system, where the same party that turned a blind eye to hundreds of violent BLM and Antifa riots across America continues to treat anyone who was even in the general vicinity of the Capitol that day like John Dillinger. The intelligence agencies that were too distracted to see the October 7^th Hamas attack coming have devoted three years to tracking down and charging over a thousand people, throwing not just the book but the entire law library at them, in what is now the largest investigative and prosecutorial campaign in US history. It would be nice if they went after the drug cartels with that much drive.

Here’s an example of one of those violent insurrectionists, whose convictions for doing things that video showed he clearly didn’t do was just upheld by totally impartial Judge Tanya Chutkan, who’s also overseeing one of Jack Smith’s cases against Trump.

https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/appeals-court-upholds-jan-6-defendant-conviction-for-disorderly-conduct-despite-his-passive-quiet-and-nonviolent-conduct/

By the way, Trump’s attorneys have formally requested that Smith be cited for contempt of court for continuing to press discovery demands even though the case has been halted pending appeal, a clear violation. Anyone want to bet that she’ll actually hold Smith accountable?

https://www.westernjournal.com/trump-makes-powerhouse-move-hold-jack-smith-contempt-court/

FYI, Smith is also continuing to use propaganda to try to poison public opinion and taint the jury pool, you know, like non-contemptuous prosecutors do.

https://instapundit.com/625328/

Well, I think that’s enough about January 6^th for now. But if the Democrats insist on running on that all through 2024 (because that and unfettered abortion are literally all they’ve got to run on), this should give them an idea of how it’s going over.

National Bird Day

By “Huckabee” pop culture guru Pat Reeder (http://www.hollywoodhifi.com)

This weekend marks one of the most important dates of the year. I refer, of course, to January 5^th, which was National Bird Day.

It’s a day established to appreciate the beauty that birds bring to the world, and to call attention to the cruelty of the international bird smuggling trade and bird breeding mills, and the plight of pet birds that are kept in captivity without proper care. Parrots especially are likely to fall victim: people buy them because they're colorful or they (might) talk. They don’t realize they aren’t décor; they’re as intelligent as a four-year-old child and need a great deal of attention and interaction. But they can be great pets and even become part of the family. Plus, having bird cages can actually make the New York Times useful again.

This day is a big deal to my wife/co-writer Laura Ainsworth and I because we’re bird lovers who share our home with a dozen rescued parrots and cockatoos, and we support a number of parrot rescues, including the Oasis Sanctuary, Wings of Love, Ricki's Rescue, Mango's Haven and more. We'd like to remind you that pet rescue is not just for dogs and cats: there are many pet bird shelters that desperately need support. Parrots can live up to 70 years and are often shuffled from owner to owner. Their vet bills and other expenses are very high (as we know well.)

Also, if you want a parrot because you think it would be funny to teach it to curse, please DON’T! These birds often need to be rehomed. If you teach a parrot to curse, you greatly diminish its odds of finding a future loving home. Some people even punish the bird by locking it away when it doesn’t even know what it’s done wrong. Teaching a parrot to curse is straight-up animal cruelty.

If you've ever thought of adopting a parrot, please check out these shelters online. There are many sweet, beautiful, intelligent birds who have been through heartbreaking experiences at the hands of people, but they can blossom into fantastic, trusting friends with a little love and attention.

And that includes the special needs ones, like those taken in by Ricki’s Rescue in Florida. Here's an essay I wrote about a little disabled cockatiel named Rosey who was the light of our lives.

https://www.lauraainsworth.com/news/rosey.htm

Finally, if you're sick of hearing about Taylor Swift, here's another singer that we believe is much better:

“Free and Fair Elections”

A reminder that President “Free and Fair Elections” is not only using every tactic to keep his Republican opponent off the ballot, he’s also trying to keep his Democratic challengers off the primary ballot.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/04/democrat-eliminate-biden-primary-challenges-florida-north-carolina/

The Democrats view both voter choice and “a woman’s right to choose” the same way that Henry Ford viewed customer choice for the Model T: “It comes in any color you want, as long as it’s black.”

Epstein update

As the Jeffrey Epstein documents continue to be released, the first batch showed that, despite the hopes and false narratives of Democrats, the testimony exonerated Trump, with witnesses saying they’d never seen him at Epstein’s homes or on his island, nor had one of them ever given him a massage. Bill Clinton, however, didn’t come out so well, with one recounting that Epstein had once said that Bill “likes them young.”

Juanita Broaddrick had a comment on that disclosure, and since I’m sure that many liberal media outlets that claim to be champions of women who’ve been victimized (but are really just party mouthpieces) will not report what she said, I will:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/04/juanita-broaddrick-reacts-to-epstein-document-release-there-are-good-menand-then-theres-bill-clinton/

A new jobs report

The Labor Department reported this morning that 216,000 jobs were added in December, which is higher than expected.

https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2024/01/05/america-created-216000-jobs-in-december/

Of course, due to years of fiscal mismanagement and profligate spending by the government, we now have a no-win situation where strong hiring means the Fed might have to keep interest rates painfully high to tamp down the economy and prevent another inflation surge. Considering 52,000 of those new hires are government jobs, I seriously doubt that anyone’s learned any lessons.

The Experts Speak!

The “experts” predicted that once the large field of GOP presidential contenders started winnowing down, they’d stop splitting the anti-Trump vote and Trump’s wide lead would dwindle to his hardcore MAGA base of 35%. Well, the field is now down to only three serious contenders (Trump, Haley and DeSantis – Christie should drop out; I’d say his audition for a job at CNN is already accomplished. And Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media says the perfect job for Vivek Ramaswamy would be Trump’s press secretary, based on how deftly he filets biased reporters…

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2024/01/05/the-morning-briefing-ok-ive-got-the-perfect-gig-for-vivek-ramaswamy-n4925210)

…And here he is, doing it again…)

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/05/watch-vivek-does-it-again-flips-script-on-nbc-reporter-as-she-has-meltdown-n2168319

Yet according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls, with the vote mostly now split in just three ways, Trump is currently at nearly 63%.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/republican-presidential-field-shrinking-not-trump-lead

Of course, I always warn people not to put too much faith in polls, particularly not those that are taken before a single primary vote has been cast. But it seems clear that the Democrat lawfare effort to destroy Trump with bogus felony charges and frivolous lawsuits has backfired bigly, enraging fair-minded Americans and rallying them to Trump. Anyone who might disapprove of porn in schools, wide open borders or abortion up to the age of weaning must look at the legal persecution of Trump by these leftist zealots and think, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

It might also be a factor in black voters turning away from Biden (the idea that the criminal justice system is always fair and unbiased against system outsiders doesn’t play very well with that demographic.) But of course, that could just be due to the fact that Biden is a horrible, horrible President.

Related: This news will have Democrats rushing to squeeze some Play-Doh. A new survey by the Daily Mail finds that Biden’s support among young women aged 18-29 has plummeted by 18 points since last June, from 60% to 42%.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12919689/female-voters-Biden-poll-collapse-young-support.html

This is the “Life of Julia” demographic, the young women that Democrats condescendingly view as dependent on Big Daddy government. They’re the main reason the expected 2022 red wave was blunted. The Dems think they’re single-issue voters (abortion), so I guess they think they’ll forever overlook issues like inflation, crushing interest rates, rampant crime and having their rights systematically stripped away from them in order to appease the trans cult.

We can expect the Dems to react to this news with panic, and by turning up to 11 the shrill accusations that Trump will take away abortion rights (he’s actually pretty moderate on that issue, while it’s the Dems who’ve become extremists and back unlimited abortion far beyond any laws in Europe) or that he’s a Hitler-like dictator. I would hope that any women who are old enough to remember when he was President for four years might remember that it was a time of widespread peace and prosperity, law and order, dismantling of government power, restoration of individual rights and the first Administration in years that started no new wars.

Still, as the article predicts, the left hopes that young women will come around to voting for Biden as “the lesser of two evils.” I hope I am never in the same room with anything that could be described as a greater evil than this presidency.

A small court Trump victory

In a small court Trump victory, a California judge dismissed “with prejudice” (meaning it can’t be brought into court again) an attempt to keep Trump off the state ballot. It was based on a plaintiff’s novel complaint that watching the January 6^th riot on TV caused him such trauma that Trump was guilty of “negligent infliction of emotional distress.” The judge said that law has a two-year statute of limitations. But what if it took the plaintiff three years to work up the courage to come out of his safe space?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/donald-trump-victory-as-judge-dismisses-case-to-keep-him-off-ballot/ar-AA1msqLF

Blaming someone else

In the Democratic Party’s never-ending effort to blame the Biden-created border crisis on anyone other than Biden (and even some liberal media outlets are finally starting to see through that), New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced that he will sue the bus companies that transport illegal aliens from Texas to New York. He wants them to pay $700 million for the costs of providing hotel rooms, food, etc. to their passengers.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2024/01/05/nyc-sues-bus-companies-bringing-illegal-immigrants-n2633203

Legal analysts call it a ridiculous and frivolous lawsuit that will just waste more taxpayer money in legal fees. The bus companies are doing nothing wrong. It was Biden who decided that these people should be allowed to enter the US and go anywhere they want; transporting them there is the bus companies’ job. Adams should sue Biden, but that would be placing the blame where it belongs.

I will be watching this lawsuit carefully, though. If the courts rule that bus companies have to pay the hotel and meal bills for their passengers after they get off, I’ll be doing all my traveling by Greyhound from now on!

“Huckabee” Preview

Join me tonight for a news making episode of “Huckabee” on TBN. I’ll have a report on my recent trip to Israel where I visited with victims of the October 7^th attack with Yael Eckstein of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, and we even had to take shelter from a rocket attack ourselves at one point. I’ll also talk to Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who’s leading a landmark social media censorship case against the Biden Administration. You’ll also meet a Huck’s Hero with a great idea for all dads (moms, too.) And we’ll have terrific entertainment from comic Jeff “Big Daddy” Wayne and country star Niko Moon.

Be there tonight at 8 and 11 EST, 7 and 10 CST, or Sunday at 9 EST/8 CST on TBN. To find out how to watch TBN, from local cable and broadcast channels to streaming, visit https://www.huckabee.tv and click on “Channel Finder” on the top menu. You can stream previous episodes, highlights and online-only “Digital Exclusives,” including extended interviews, “In Case You Missed It” and “Facts of the Matter” segments, plus extra performances by our great musical and comedy guests and links to all their sites, at https://www.huckabee.tv. You can also find past shows, highlights and digital exclusives on YouTube and my Facebook page.

David Soul RIP

By “Huckabee” pop culture guru Pat Reeder

As we were going to press yesterday, word came that actor David Soul died late Thursday night at 80.

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/starsky-hutch-actor-david-soul-dead-80

Soul was best known for playing Detective Kenneth "Hutch" Hutchinson on the buddy cop series “Starsky & Hutch” (Starsky was Paul Michael Glaser) from 1975 to 1979. He had previously played one of the Bolt brothers on the series, “Here Come The Brides,” and he appeared in the Dirty Harry movie, “Magnum Force” and the TV horror film, “Salem’s Lot.” He continued as a working actor for years, forging a new career as a stage star in London’s West End, including the hit musical “Blood Brothers.”

A bit of trivia other obits likely won’t mention: In 1983, Soul starred in an NBC series that lasted only five episodes. It was called “Casablanca,” and he played Rick Blaine, the role Humphrey Bogart played in the classic movie ("Play it again, Huggy Bear.")  It was one for the Bad Idea Hall of Fame.

Since I’m the co-author of “Hollywood Hi-Fi” (http://www.hollywoodhifi.com), a book about singing celebrities, I must also mention that he parlayed his “Starsky & Hutch” fame into teen idol success, landing a #1 hit in the US in 1976 with “Don’t Give Up On Us.” He also scored five hit singles in the UK and eventually released five albums. RIP.

(By the way, since this news will probably make you curious, both Glaser and Antonio Fargas, who played “Huggy Bear,” are still alive.)

I Just Wanted to Say

Thank you for reading my newsletter.

Mike Huckabee

January 6th, or "Democrat Christmas." It's when President Biden will launch into his January 6th “Scare people so senseless that maybe they'll vote for me again” tour. But we already got a preview in the form of his first campaign ad.

Not surprisingly, it doesn’t tout a single positive accomplishment of Biden’s tenure, since I guess they couldn’t think of one, either. It’s yet another dark, scary, divisive piece of fiction designed to demonize Trump and anyone who supports him as “insurrectionists” and threats to “our democracy.” This is an actual quote from Biden in the ad: “I’ve made the preservation of American democracy the central issue of my presidency. I believe in free and fair elections and the right to vote fairly and have your vote counted.”

So says the guy who is trying to jail his political opponent and block him from the ballot even as a write-in candidate, so that Americans aren’t allowed to vote for the candidate of their choice and have it counted. Got any mirrors around the White House, Joe?

I would go into more detail on this reprehensible piece of propaganda that’s further beneath a President than the White House sub-basement, but fortunately, Robert Spencer at PJ Media already did a great job of eviscerating it. Here’s his op-ed on the ad that he calls “as dishonest and embarrassing as you’d expect.”

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2024/01/04/biden-drops-first-campaign-ad-and-its-as-dishonest-and-embarrassing-as-youd-expect-n4925231

With tomorrow’s anniversary of the “worse than Pearl Harbor and 9/11 put together” January 6th “insurrection” looming, nobody seems to have noticed that there was an “insurrection” staged in the California state Capitol in Sacramento this week. A mob of radicals occupied the Capitol, shut down the first day of the session, blocked official business from taking place, forced lawmakers to flee, and refused to leave even after the lights were turned out.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/05/blue-state-blues-insurrection-is-ok-as-long-as-its-by-the-left/

But it turns out that they were leftist, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian protesters, so they were allowed to leave peacefully with no arrests made. This was one of the “good” insurrections. Never mind!

Mike Huckabee

The election integrity group True The Vote won a landmark court case against Stacey Abrams’ laughably-named group “Fair Fight,” which sued them for challenging the eligibility of voters in the 2021 Georgia Senate runoff election. The judge ruled that their actions did not violate the Voting Rights Act. Well, of course not: imagine being dumb enough to think that legally challenging a George election is some kind of crime!

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2024/01/03/true-the-vote-legal-win-n2633112

True The Vote called the lawsuit an attempt to use lawfare and intimidation to bully Americans into giving up their rights to free speech, to actively participate in the electoral process and to lawfully petition their government “in support of election integrity without fear of persecution or prosecution.” The victory comes after three long years of litigation.

I don’t know if Abrams will try to appeal, but I’ve never known her to admit that she’s lost, so we’ll see.

Mike Huckabee

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

Daily Bible Verse

12 Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,

Hebrews 12:1 KJV

Newsletter Notes:

13 stories

3,503 words

Reading time: About 16 minutes

Tomorrow is the big day:

January 6th, or "Democrat Christmas." It's when President Biden will launch into his January 6^th “Scare people so senseless that maybe they'll vote for me again” tour. But we already got a preview in the form of his first campaign ad.

Not surprisingly, it doesn’t tout a single positive accomplishment of Biden’s tenure, since I guess they couldn’t think of one, either. It’s yet another dark, scary, divisive piece of fiction designed to demonize Trump and anyone who supports him as “insurrectionists” and threats to “our democracy.” This is an actual quote from Biden in the ad: “I’ve made the preservation of American democracy the central issue of my presidency. I believe in free and fair elections and the right to vote fairly and have your vote counted.”

So says the guy who is trying to jail his political opponent and block him from the ballot even as a write-in candidate, so that Americans aren’t allowed to vote for the candidate of their choice and have it counted. Got any mirrors around the White House, Joe?

I would go into more detail on this reprehensible piece of propaganda that’s further beneath a President than the White House sub-basement, but fortunately, Robert Spencer at PJ Media already did a great job of eviscerating it. Here’s his op-ed on the ad that he calls “as dishonest and embarrassing as you’d expect.”

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2024/01/04/biden-drops-first-campaign-ad-and-its-as-dishonest-and-embarrassing-as-youd-expect-n4925231

California insurrection

With tomorrow’s anniversary of the “worse than Pearl Harbor and 9/11 put together” January 6^th “insurrection” looming, nobody seems to have noticed that there was an “insurrection” staged in the California state Capitol in Sacramento this week. A mob of radicals occupied the Capitol, shut down the first day of the session, blocked official business from taking place, forced lawmakers to flee, and refused to leave even after the lights were turned out.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/05/blue-state-blues-insurrection-is-ok-as-long-as-its-by-the-left/

But it turns out that they were leftist, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian protesters, so they were allowed to leave peacefully with no arrests made. This was one of the “good” insurrections. Never mind!

A tragic Iowa shooting

In our continuing series of stories on facts refusing to conform with liberal narratives, news came Thursday of a tragic school shooting in the Des Moines suburb of Perry, Iowa. The 17-year-old shooter killed a sixth-grader and wounded five people including the principal before killing himself. I hope you will join me in praying for the victims and their families. As is usually the case in such situations, activists were chomping at the bit to blame the NRA and Republicans and exploit the tragedy for political purposes.

https://www.westernjournal.com/iowa-school-shooting-suspect-identified-social-media-accounts-reportedly-containing-lgbt-messages-scrubbed/

The inconvenient truth: The shooter was reportedly an LGBTQ student who identified on social media with “he/they” pronouns and the term “gender fluid,” and used a female avatar. He reportedly had been bullied and posted disturbing social media posts that should’ve been taken as a red flag, but weren’t. They’ve since been scrubbed from the Internet. Conservative commentators are predicting that now that we know the shooter was LBGTQ and possibly on drugs that affect your physical and emotional states, all questions will end and news reporting will quietly disappear.

The Mexican cartels are making money

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green reports that the Mexican cartels are making up to $32 million a week in only one of nine sectors of the border, just from trafficking humans into the US. That doesn’t even count their profits from all the fentanyl that’s killing Americans.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2024/01/04/border-patrol-cartels-n2633165

Extremely Related: The House Homeland Security Committee is formally moving ahead with impeachment proceedings against DHS Secretary Alejandro “The Border Is Secure” Mayorkas.

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2024/01/03/new-house-moves-to-impeach-alejandro-mayorkas-for-border-crisis-misdeeds-n2168236

Shocking video

Shocking video hit the Internet Wednesday of Clark County, Nevada, felony battery defendant Deobra Delone Redden attacking Judge Mary Kay Holthus after she denied him parole.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/04/video-nevada-judge-attacked-by-defendant-in-las-vegas-courtroom/

Moments before the attack, Redden asked for leniency, saying, “I’m not a rebellious person.” But when the judge made it clear she wasn’t going to let him go, the hulking Redden suddenly came flying over the bench and smashed Holthus into a wall. It took several male court personnel to punch and wrestle him into submission. Holthus was injured but declined hospitalization. Redden is now facing more felony charges.

A court spokesperson said they are reviewing all their safety protocols. Maybe start with having armed court officers on duty, just as every court should when dealing with violent criminals. 

I can’t help wondering if Redden is just the latest of many violent criminals who have been taught by lenient leftist DAs that they have a right to keep attacking people and being freed countless times, and that no matter what they do, they will never face accountability. He may be shocked to learn that in blue cities, criminals are only allowed to repeatedly attack private citizens, not members of the legal system that keeps freeing them.

A surprise ending

Speaking of the public’s exhausted patience with coddling criminals, a story out of Texas has reached a surprise ending. We reported a year ago on the case in Houston where a robber entered a taqueria brandishing a pistol and demanding everyone’s money. As he was leaving, a customer pulled his own gun and shot him – nine times. The robber’s gun turned out to be a toy, but the customer didn’t know that. The customer left, but later turned himself in to authorities.

Liberal Houston has one of those Soros-funded DAs, so everyone expected the customer to be charged with murder for continuing to fire after the threat had been eliminated (it’s astounding how these prosecutors are always able to cooly determine the exact moment when a threat has been eliminated so much more accurately than the person who was actually facing the threat in real time.) But to prevent complaints of political retribution, the DA turned the case over to the Harris County grand jury, which is composed of randomly-selected citizens. They just reached a decision:

https://redstate.com/streiff/2024/01/03/good-guy-with-a-gun-escapes-the-claws-of-a-soros-funded-prosecutor-n2168269

They found that shooting the armed robber nine times was not outside the permissible area for use of force and “no-billed” the shooter. He will not be charged. Welcome to Texas.

As the writer Streiff at Redstate.com observes, “Rather than indict, you get the feeling that the grand jury would have carried the shooter down to the bar and bought him drinks all night.”

While it’s tragic that anyone had to die for such a stupid reason, let this be a message to leftist DAs and to all Democrat office holders in general: decent, law-abiding Americans have had enough of their garbage and have reached their Popeye stage: “That’s all I can stands, and I can’t stands no more!!”

Good Legal News

The election integrity group True The Vote won a landmark court case against Stacey Abrams’ laughably-named group “Fair Fight,” which sued them for challenging the eligibility of voters in the 2021 Georgia Senate runoff election. The judge ruled that their actions did not violate the Voting Rights Act. Well, of course not: imagine being dumb enough to think that legally challenging a George election is some kind of crime!

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2024/01/03/true-the-vote-legal-win-n2633112

True The Vote called the lawsuit an attempt to use lawfare and intimidation to bully Americans into giving up their rights to free speech, to actively participate in the electoral process and to lawfully petition their government “in support of election integrity without fear of persecution or prosecution.” The victory comes after three long years of litigation.

I don’t know if Abrams will try to appeal, but I’ve never known her to admit that she’s lost, so we’ll see.

The perfect definitions of “DEI” and ESG.”

The late Beatle John Lennon had a habit of saying things that ticked off people. Sometimes, he was off-base; other times, he said what needed to be said but nobody else dared say it.

I dare say that if he were alive today, he would be very proud of his son, Sean Ono Lennon, who just stuck a finger in the eye of the wokesters by giving us the perfect definitions of “DEI” and ESG.”

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2024/01/04/john-lennons-son-rebrands-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-as-dumb-evil-idiots/

More Dumb Evil Idiots:

How the Biden Administration used Americans’ tax dollars to help Lebanon create a safe haven for Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to train for and plan the October 7^th attack without Israeli intelligence finding out about it. Throw yet another item on the mountain of foreign policy issues that Biden has been wrong about.

https://redstate.com/streiff/2024/01/03/your-tax-dollars-helped-hamas-hide-their-october-7-planning-from-israels-intelligence-services-n2168267

Mass Migration from Blue States to Red States

I have long believed (I might be wrong, though it seldom happens) that my radio show was the first to use the cost of renting a U-Haul to gauge whether people were moving in or fleeing a particular place (if people are fleeing, the cost to rent a truck to move there is much lower, since U-Haul will subsidize you just to get some of its trucks back in stock.) This is why it costs so much more to rent a moving truck from L.A. to Dallas than to rent the same truck from Dallas to L.A. Nobody's going in the latter direction.

Now, here’s confirmation that that informal rule works: U-Haul announced that, for the fourth year in a row, California has topped its Growth Index list for having the largest net number of outbound residents (well, at least Gavin Newsom can claim he’s #1 in growth for something.) For the third straight year, U-Haul reports that Texas had the highest number of people moving in, and that doesn’t even count the millions streaming across the border since 2021.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/california-beats-every-state-residents-moving-away-fourth-year-row-uhaul-list

This isn’t just a simple popularity contest. It’s an important finding from the “laboratory of states,” proving that people are voting with their feet to reject leftist policies and embrace conservative policies. Census data shows that California lost a net 75,000 residents in 2023 alone.

Michael Barone at Townhall.com sifted through Census numbers for the three years since the pandemic and found more interesting trends:

https://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbarone/2023/12/29/startling-surprises-in-latest-census-numbers-n2632952

The West Coast is shrinking: Since April 2020, California has lost 573,000 people (previously, it had gained population every year since the 1849 Gold Rush, proving that leftist policies can turn even gold into manure.) Washington has gained just 108,000 people, Alaska only 32 (!), and Oregon and Hawaii have lost residents.

The biggest population losses came in blue states with the densest metro areas, including California, New York, Illinois and DC. To be fair, these places also have the densest leadership.

Meanwhile, almost all the population growth has been in the Southern states, which added over 3.8 million people fleeing from high taxes, woke regulators and COVID tyranny.

This mass migration from blue to red states could have far-reaching political consequences, particularly if the escapees resist voting for the same bad ideas that drove them to flee. Blue states may be losing their clout in DC as they lose population, and thus House seats, to red states. The bad news: blue states are turning bluer, with the remaining Republicans having little hope of ever turning around their decline. This is another reason why Democrats want to wave in millions of illegal immigrants, then demand to count them in the Census when apportioning Representatives.

A 2023 Bright Spot

2023 was a disastrous year for Hollywood, but there were a few hits and bright spots, and one of them just came in 2024: “Sound of Freedom” just made it into the top 10 biggest box office hits of the year, edging out the Taylor Swift concert movie, which received a ringing endorsement from the Chinese state-run media outlet, Global Times.

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2024/01/03/sound-of-freedom-vanquishes-taylor-swift-to-land-in-top-ten-at-domestic-box-office-for-2023/

What happens today?  Supposed to be Colorado ballot certification.

Today, January 5, is supposed to be the day the Colorado secretary of state certifies the ballots.  So it looks as though the ballots will have to be certified with Trump’s name on them.  Even so, unless/until the U.S. Supreme Court weighs in, we don’t know if they’ll be able to get away with not counting Trump votes, as the Colorado Supreme Court has determined they don’t have to count legally-cast votes, at least the write-in ones.  And if they don’t have to count write-in votes, why should they necessarily have to count Trump votes at all?  (We’re not attorneys but find the question intriguing.)

By the way, in shocking-but-not-surprising breaking news, the totally objective and nonpartisan Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who publicly supported taking Trump off the ballot, attended a private fundraiser for Biden in November.  The state attorney general was apparently there, too.  Here you go.  This is what we’re up against...

https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/04/colorado-secretary-state-jena-griswold-support-remove-trump-ballot-biden-campaign-fundraiser

While awaiting a ruling from SCOTUS on the decision to remove Trump from their state primary ballot, Trump released a looooong analysis on “X” including all the documented ballot hanky-panky surrounding the ‘20 election.  The implication:  any sane person in his position would think the election had been stolen from him.  If it wasn’t, they sure were working feverishly for nothing.

And surely that will be part of Trump’s defense if it comes to that.  Special Counsel Jack Smith is alleging that Trump willfully committed fraud when he said the election was stolen and made moves to have the allegations looked into.  By putting all this out, Trump is saying he truly believes the election WAS stolen from him, and that once you go through all this, you’ll likely think so, too.

The problem, of course, is that those who already believe Trump is guilty will find some way to discredit (in their minds) all of this evidence.  But as Kanekoa the Great, who posted all this, says, “I look forward to fact-checkers debunking this, citing sources from the corporate media that spent four years claiming Trump was a Russian agent and dismissing Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation.”

And, voila, there’s already one such post, from “Grok,” and it’s particularly amusing.  Why, he informs us that Trump’s allegations have been debunked by none other than “PolitiFact, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning website,” and also (hold your breath) the BBC.  And the results were certified by Congress in 2021.  And multiple recounts in swing states such as Arizona and Georgia (recounts of the same ballots that were counted before), “have confirmed Biden’s win.”  Well, that’s good enough for me!

https://twitter.com/RomanValentinus/status/1742702839657316729

/photo/1

This reaction was inevitable.  Kanekoa simply says, “I encourage you to review the numerous citations in this report and reach your own conclusions.”

Here are summaries of just a few examples:

Wisconsin was called by 20,682 votes.  The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled dropboxes illegal under Wisconsin law, and they had plenty of them in pre-determined locations, funded by outside groups.  It was election commissioner Meagan Wolfe who unilaterally declared dropboxes could be used, but the commission never voted to establish this.  You’ll want to read the decision by Justice Rebecca Bradley, as well as about the other ways they apparently “faked the vote” in Wisconsin.

https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1742670652472205596

Then scroll down and you’ll see Pennsylvania, which was called by a margin of just 80,555 votes.  Later it was determined that there were 121,240 more votes cast than there were voters.

Then there are Arizona and Georgia; what a mess.  We can’t have another election that’s as much of a mess as this one was.  It’s too bad that Trump released this at the same time the Epstein “names” were dropped, as the media can now conveniently ignore it all.

https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1742670652472205596

(Side Note: I’ve long said that you don’t even need claims of hacked voting machines or trucks full of fake ballots to be suspicious of the 2020 election. The way the media and the government colluded to silence conservative voices and suppress negative news about Democrats to tilt the table, while Democrats across America waged legal warfare to illegally change voting laws without legislative approval so deeply undermined public trust that it was inevitable that many people would refuse to believe the results before they were even announced. One of the pillars of American society that keeps so many people of widely diverse views united is faith in the honesty of our elections, and the Democrats have been swinging a wrecking ball at it for years.)

Speaking of Georgia, as we previously mentioned, True the Vote just won a decisive legal victory there, in their legal battle against Stacy Abrams' Fair Fight, legal teams led by Marc Elias, and the Biden Department of “Justice.” As announced in their press release, “a federal court in the Northern District of Georgia today affirmed that citizens have the right to lawfully petition their government in support of election integrity without fear of persecution or prosecution.”

Their release is a must-read, and it includes a link to their video, “The Georgia Story Through the Eyes of True the Vote.”  Their president is Catherine Engelbrecht, a dear friend.

https://wethepeopleconvention.org/articles/True-the-Vote-wins-Important-GA-Case

Dr. John Gentry, a Georgetown University professor who was a CIA analyst for 12 years, is worried about the “significant problem” of politicization of the intel community and confident that those agencies will try to interfere with the 2024 election in ways similar to their efforts in 2020.

He’s researched this topic, past and present, for his new book, “NEUTERING THE CIA:  Why US Intelligence vs. Trump Has Long-Term Consequences.”  That sounds like one for the top of the reading list.  As he said to FOX NEWS Digital, “My guess is that the proverbial deep state within the intelligence community will re-emerge because presumably a Republican candidate will again be seen as a threat to the internal policies that many intelligence people like.”  Downplaying the Hunter Biden laptop was “clearly political,” he said, as a highly placed source told him “in no uncertain terms” that it was done “explicitly” with “intent to help the Biden campaign.”

He’s been reading the tea leaves in recent weeks and says former intel officials are likely to resume their political activity against Trump “or whomever the Republican presidential candidate is next year...The activities of the ‘formers’ have resumed already, a bit earlier than expected.” (This is consistent with what we’ve been saying about trying to set aside the conflict by choosing someone else.  How foolish --- they’ll do this regardless of our choice. In fact, they’re already trying to remove other Republicans who questioned the 2020 election from the ballot using the “insurrection” canard, and never mind that Democrats have also questioned every election they’ve lost for decades.)

Gentry blamed DEI culture for the politicization of the CIA by shifting their attention away from day-to-day operations to “woke” policies.  (He must be familiar with those CIA recruiting films, too!)   We can thank President Obama for a huge step in that direction, Gentry said, courtesy of an executive order that pushed it.  Two other top-level activists were former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

We want to see what he says in his book about “soft totalitarianism,” which he says they were actually starting to talk about (in those actual words) during the Obama administration.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ex-cia-analyst-says-intel-agencies-politically-active-again-2024-election-significant-problem

The interview with Gentry doesn’t get into solutions, as is so often the case.  Let’s hope his book does.  In the meantime, we’ll offer a few starting tactics going into this year...

DON’T BELIEVE THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY ABOUT ANYTHING.

DON’T BELIEVE LEAKS TO MAJOR MEDIA THAT PROBABLY CAME FROM THEM.

IF THEY ACCUSE THE RIGHT OF SOMETHING, TRUST THAT THEY’RE DOING IT THEMSELVES AND BE DULY WARNED.

INTEL WHISTLEBLOWERS – CULTIVATE YOUR COMMUNITY AND SPEAK UP RIGHT AWAY.

ANTICIPATE SOME “BLACK SWAN” EVENT THAT HAS PROBABLY ALREADY BEEN PLANNED.

Finally, as of this writing, we still haven’t heard from the U.S. Supreme Court about Colorado.  Jonathan Turley said on Wednesday that if the Court doesn’t come back with some answer, the Colorado court could seek to “moot” (temporarily) the appeal and avoid review.

This is a must-read column.  You’ll detect the deep note of sadness as Turley watches our country going through so much lawfare in so many states.

https://jonathanturley.org/2024/01/03/a-sad-day-how-the-colorado-disqualification-decision-is-bringing-back-some-bad-memories-for-the-supreme-court/#more-213662

See you in Iowa?

Sarah (the fine new Gov of Arkansas) & I are headed to Iowa Monday to campaign for Donald Trump ahead of caucuses. I hope you can make it to one of these events:

Team Trump Iowa Faith Event featuring Governor Sarah Sanders and Governor Mike Huckabee (donaldjtrump.com) in Ottumwa, Iowa

Team Trump Iowa Faith Event featuring Governor Sarah Sanders and Governor Mike Huckabee in Des Moines, Iowa (donaldjtrump.com)

I Just Wanted to Say

Thank you for reading my newsletter.

Pat Reeder, Staff writer

Mike Huckabee

As expected, Donald Trump’s lawyers appealed the unilateral move to try to keep him off of Maine’s ballot by unelected Democrat Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, which automatically stayed her order for at least a couple of weeks.

https://www.bizpacreview.com/2024/01/03/trump-appeals-maine-secretary-of-states-rabidly-partisan-move-1424515/

A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed three of five counts against Trump and two January 6^th rioters in a civil lawsuit by the girlfriend of late Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick. She’s trying to hold Trump responsible for his death, which was ruled by the medical examiner to be from “natural causes” due to a stroke suffered the day after the January 6^th violence, although he did claim the events “played a role in his condition.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/judge-dismisses-three-civil-counts-against-trump-others-over-death-of-jan-6-officer-brian-sicknick/ar-AA1mnbCq

I can maybe see stretching that vague finding far enough to sue the others who actually pepper-sprayed Sicknick. But no rubber band has ever been invented that could stretch from that tenuous connection to blaming his death on Trump for telling people to “protest peacefully and patriotically.” Still, the judge allowed two of the counts for conspiracy to violate civil rights to move forward instead of throwing them out, too.

That’s been one of the great frustrations for me of all this anti-Trump lawfare: no matter how patently ridiculous the charges may be (like that Georgia case accusing people of “racketeering” for doing their job of scheduling a phone call between the President and the Governor), we’ve yet to see one judge have the integrity and spine to say what should have been said to all of these prosecutors from day one: “I’m dismissing this garbage case, which is clearly just election interference, and fining you for abusing your powers and wasting this court’s time with it.”

Former President Trump and former (thank goodness!) Representative Liz Cheney got into a spitting match on Twitter (X) this week. I assume Ms. Cheney must’ve been grateful for any publicity, since hating Trump is now the only reason anyone wants to talk to her anymore.

Trump unleashed a long screed, accusing Cheney of illegally deleting and destroying much of the evidence from the January 6^th hearings that he needs to defend himself against the Jack Smith indictments…

https://www.westernjournal.com/trump-says-liz-cheneys-act-extreme-sabotage-made-impossible-attorneys-fight-jack-smiths-prosecution/

Cheney responded that Trump was lying, and that his lawyers had all the J6 Kommittee (my spelling) evidence and testimony plus the full Kommittee report. That conveniently glosses over several facts, such as: the Kommittee was stacked and called only witnesses hostile to Trump who were not even allowed to be cross-examined; vast amounts of video testimony, witness transcripts and Secret Service texts somehow got “deleted;” and the Kommittee’s final report was a garbage-in/garbage-out political document, not an objective finding from a legitimately-formed House Committee. If Pelosi had followed the rules, Cheney wouldn’t have even been on the Kommittee; she rejected the Republicans chosen by the GOP Leader as required, replacing them with anti-Trump ringers Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. 

If you’d like to see some enjoyable replies from X users to Cheney’s lies about Trump lying, Twitchy.com rounded up a few.

https://twitchy.com/samj/2024/01/02/liz-cheney-claims-trump-has-had-the-j6-footage-n2391310

Mike Huckabee

As is so often the case, the facts keep refusing to comply with liberal media narratives. For instance, there was a shooting by a man at the Colorado Supreme Court. Obvious liberal narrative: Crazy MAGA Republican attacked the Justices for ordering Trump off the ballot!

Inconvenient truth: An armed man fleeing a car crash where he pulled a gun on the other driver shot his way into a building that happens to house the state SCOTUS and other agencies. It happened in the middle of the night when nobody was there. No apparent connection to the Trump ruling has been found.

https://www.westernjournal.com/co-supreme-court-shooting-facts-seriously-bad-news-trump-haters/

Example #2: US Capitol Police detained a man who was caught carrying a brick, a butcher’s knife and a machete at the Capitol. Hopeful liberal narrative: Another MAGA insurrection! 

Inconvenient truth: He was an illegal alien from Venezuela who was already detained by the Border Patrol in 2022 and (of course) released. He was arrested at the Capitol before his court hearing date even rolled around. He was turned over to immigration authorities where he’s facing removal proceedings. But I would wager you’d need a machete just to hack through all the roadblocks the Biden White House has put up to keep from sending him back.

Mike Huckabee

President Biden plans to spend January 6th making speeches about how Trump is a threat to “our democracy” and that America is facing an existential threat, not from the millions of unvetted Third World illegal aliens pouring across our border thanks to him and bringing drugs and exotic diseases with them, but from “white supremacy.”

https://pjmedia.com/lincolnbrown/2024/01/03/biden-to-commemorate-j6-with-speech-on-white-supremacy-n4925187

It shows how desperate Biden is, with polls showing that even the most loyal Democrat voting blocs, like blacks and Hispanics, are abandoning him and his failed policies. The Democrats have built up this second-string riot (not nearly as destructive as the ones they approved of in 2019) as worse than Pearl Harbor and 9/11 put together. Now, they shake it like a voodoo doll to try to scare voters into reelecting them so they can keep imposing their toxic policies. Why, if January 6th never happened, they would’ve had to instigate it themselves! Nah, that’s crazy talk...

Here are a few pieces of friendly advice for Biden or whoever actually loads the speech onto his Teleprompter:

This time, as you call Trump “Hitler” and demonize half the population as threats to the state, try not to do it while waving your arms in front of a blood red backdrop festooned with military symbols. Also, stop saying you’re “protecting democracy” by pulling every underhanded, unconstitutional trick in the book to block Americans from voting for whomever they want. And finally, while I know this is likely beyond your abilities to comprehend, if you’re going to act like the leader of one-third of the federal government, at least please learn that we’re a republic, not a democracy.

If you force yourself to watch this clown show, please ponder the immortal words of H.L. Mencken as you do: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Related Must-Read: Vivek Ramaswamy dropped a ten-megaton truth bomb on a Washington Post reporter who was trying to push the Democrats’ “white supremacy” line on him. Because, naturally, nobody is whiter than Vivek Ramaswamy.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/03/watch-vivek-lets-loose-on-reporter-who-asks-him-if-he-condemns-white-supremacy-n2168255

Mike Huckabee

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.

This is the first of two newsletter parts from me today.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

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Daily Bible Verse

⁵ One Lord, one faith, one baptism,

⁶ One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.

Ephesians 4:5-6

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Harvard prez resigns

Following even more accusations of plagiarism, not to mention students passing on acceptance to Harvard for schools with better reputations like Florida State, Claudine Gay announced that she will resign as president of Harvard University. Naturally, she blamed racism, which she blames for everything. That skill seemed to be her only qualification for getting hired as president of Harvard in the first place.  

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/01/02/claudine-gay-resigns-as-harvard-president-n4925160

A reminder: She was one of three college presidents who were blasted for their refusal to condemn anti-Semitism during House testimony. The other two were white, there were calls for all of them to resign, and the first one to go was the white president of UPenn, who quit weeks ago. That leaves only the president of MIT, who is white and also facing strong calls to resign. Racism in 2023 is very confusing.

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Food For Thought:

Michael Walsh offers a series of “self-evident” truths for 2024, some of which will set leftists’ heads ablaze.

https://the-pipeline.org/the-column-enough/

I particularly like these three:

“Most sane people already have a religion and do not need tyrannical Leftism as a substitute for lack of faith.”

“The more they talk about ‘our democracy,’ the faster they mean to get to mob rule, whose end result is always dictatorship.”

“The major American universities are hotbeds of fraudulence. They should be dissolved, their teaching ranks purged, their administrators blacklisted, their tuition refunded and their endowments confiscated to pay off student loans.”

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Polio returns

Democrats always claim that it’s Republicans who want to “turn back the clock.” So why is it that Democrat policies are threatening to bring back polio…

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/doctor-issues-warning-on-risk-of-polio-in-new-york/ar-AA1mfoRD

And introducing other long-eradicated, Third World-style diseases into the 21^st century US?

https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/portland-facing-shigella-outbreak-generally-found-in-third-world-countries/

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Let’s hope this is a good omen for more similar stories to come in 2024:

A federal appeals court just threw out a conviction by the Biden DOJ of former Republican Rep. Jeff Fortenberry for lying to the FBI (FYI: apparently, it’s not illegal when they lie to us.) The judge wrote:

“Fortenberry’s trial took place in a state where no charged crime was committed, and before a jury drawn from the vicinage of the federal agencies that investigated the defendant. The Constitution does not permit this. Fortenberry’s convictions are reversed so that he may be retried, if at all, in a proper venue.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/republicans-conviction-overturned-doj-humiliated-major-reversal/

So they destroyed a Republican’s career and reputation by unconstitutionally charging him with a process crime in front of a rigged jury of biased DC liberals? Why, that doesn’t sound like the Biden DOJ that Merrick Garland is always describing. More details at the link, including the interesting tidbit that the three judges deciding this were appointed by Obama and Biden.

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“Thanks, Gavin!”

In February, a new California law takes effect mandating a raise in the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 an hour. And it’s already showing results: Pizza Hut announced that it’s laying off 1200 delivery drivers because they can’t afford to pay that much.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/1-200-california-pizza-hut-delivery-drivers-to-lose-their-jobs/ar-AA1m6TIt

This is expected to be just the first in a wave of layoffs of drivers from other chains, not to mention a major incentive for replacing in-store workers with robots and automated ordering kiosks. As one conservative commentator noted, it’s a reminder that the real minimum wage is zero. It’s also a reminder of what Ronald Reagan famously said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

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Some good news for the new year:

You’ll finally be getting a pay raise to catch up to all the inflation caused by federal spending.

Oops, sorry, my bad:

That only applies if you’re a federal government employee. The rest of you will just have to work harder to pay for food, energy and the higher taxes you’ll need to pay to cover the raises for all those federal employees.

https://www.westernjournal.com/biden-gives-fed-workers-largest-pay-raise-40-years-average-americans-struggle-financially/

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Brace yourself

Unlike most media outlets, we have a policy of not commenting on stories that haven’t happened yet. But just so you’ll be braced against the potential shock, there’s a report going around that when documents related to the late billionaire sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein are released this week, the “John Doe 36” who’s mentioned over 50 times will be revealed to be Bill Clinton.

https://www.breitbart.com/crime/2024/01/01/report-bill-clinton-unmasked-court-documents-linked-pedophile-jeffrey-epstein/

I know: Shocking, right?

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Message to Red State Governors: Get Ready

Now that 2024 is here, a number of new laws passed in the last year will be taking effect, and that means that red states should brace themselves for an even bigger onslaught of refugees fleeing blue states.

Like Illinois, where porn is being mandated in schools and public libraries…

https://redstate.com/jeffc/2024/01/01/illinois-law-mandating-sexually-inappropriate-material-in-libraries-is-now-in-effect-n2168181

…California, where court rulings upholding the Second Amendment apparently mean nothing…

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/12/31/insane-california-gun-ban-n2633019

And a number of states where various pro- and con- laws will be taking effect on the chemical and surgical mutilation of children in the name of the “trans” movement.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2023/12/30/2024-trans-laws-n2632905

Of course, being in a red state doesn’t necessarily mean your kids are safe from that. As that last linked story details, a new law in Iowa to ban sexually-explicit gender propaganda from elementary schools was blocked by a federal judge (apparently, gay porn in third grade is now a constitutional right), as was an Idaho law banning irreversible, experimental “gender” procedures on minors.

Disappointingly, citizens in Ohio didn’t even need a federal judge to swoop in and stop them from protecting children, since Republican Gov. Mike DeWine did that himself. He vetoed a bill that would have banned transgender treatments and procedures on minors and banned males from competing in girls’ school sports.

DeWine attempted to put a conservative justification on it, saying, “Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows better what is medically best for a child than the two people who love that child the most, the parents.” But that doesn’t apply here. Not even parents are allowed to expose their children to dangerous quackery. There are all sorts of laws protecting children from bad decisions by parents, even allowing states to take away custody.

I think you can tell how the Governor has been misled by trans radicals and medical activists by the fact that he called this butchery by their garbage term, “gender-affirming care.” Actual gender-affirming care would mean giving confused prepubescent kids the counseling they need to help them accept their natural genders, not convincing them God made a mistake and put them in the wrong bodies, but with enough chemicals and surgery, Dr. Frankenstein can fix that for them.

There’s an effort underway to override that veto, and more power to it. Meanwhile, here's more on that subject from Bonchie at Redstate.com.

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2023/12/30/mike-dewines-excuse-for-vetoing-ban-on-gender-affirming-care-for-minors-is-hot-garbage-n2168099

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Surprise, Surprise!

Andrea Campbell, the Democratic Attorney General of Massachusetts, has decided that the Democratic Mayor of Boston violated no racial discrimination laws in holding an official city party that excluded white officials.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/boston-mayor-s-party-that-excluded-white-officials-didn-t-violate-law-ag/ar-AA1mlndf

Here’s law professor Jonathan Turley on Campbell’s unique interpretation of anti-discrimination laws, that it’s okay for officials to racially discriminate as long as the public isn’t invited.

https://redstate.com/sister-toldjah/2024/01/02/jonathan-turley-skewers-michelle-wu-after-state-ag-makes-decision-on-electeds-of-color-party-complaints-n2168190

Campbell, who is black, may be interested to know that her reasoning was also part of the notorious Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, which ruled that “separate but equal” accommodations for the races are constitutional because “some people simply find the ‘commingling’ of races to be ‘unsatisfactory.’”

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“Duh” Headline of the Day:

“Yale Junior Says Grade Inflation a Good Thing.”

https://www.thecollegefix.com/yale-junior-says-grade-inflation-a-good-thing/

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I Just Wanted to Say

Thank you for reading my newsletter.

Mike Huckabee

When last we saw the news about Special Counsel Jack Smith --- and I hope you didn’t spend much of your Christmas week thinking about HIM --- Santa had disappointed him badly by giving him an order from the Supreme Court declining to rule on Trump’s presidential immunity without letting the DC Circuit Court rule first, as they would normally do for any other person besides you-know-who. 

In his all-out effort to railroad President Trump before the ‘24 election, Smith thought it was fine to cut out a step in the process.  In the interest of time, you know.  And besides, this is Trump, who doesn’t deserve the rights of...well, any other American citizen you can point to.  We’ve got to stop Trump from becoming President again because he’s the reincarnation of HITLER!  Why, if he became President again, he would literally declare himself dictator, the way he did last time.  Oh, wait, he did nothing like that.  Still, he might try to get other candidates’ names taken off the ballot!  No, come to think of it, that’s the Democrats.  Never mind.

“Is this [Supreme Court ruling] going to upset the plans of Jack Smith?” law professor Jonathan Turley asked earlier this month.  “Yeah!”

So let’s see how Smith is doing, coming into the New Year.  Well, in his zeal, he appears not to have taken any time away from his work saving “our democracy.”  In the hours before 2023 became 2024, he made an appellate filing saying that Trump is “a danger to the American republic.” As reported in the NEW YORK SUN, “The special counsel reckons that the ‘Founders did not intend and would never have countenanced’ the expansive vision of presidential immunity propounded by Mr. Trump.’

“Rising to high rhetorical dudgeon, Mr. Smith declares that Mr. Trump’s invocation of the protections of the office he once held ‘threatens the democratic and constitutional foundation of our Republic.’” (At least a Democrat finally remembered we’re a republic, not a democracy.)

Smith’s brief reprises his core allegation that Mr. Trump “conspired to use knowingly false claims of election fraud with the goal of overturning the legitimate results” of the last election and “disenfranchising millions of voters.” 

While Mr. Smith allows that presidents are shielded from civil liability for their official conduct, he maintains that “any burdens of post Presidency criminal liability have minimal impact on the functions of an incumbent and are outweighed by the paramount public interest in upholding the rule of law through federal prosecution.” 

He also argues that the double jeopardy argument doesn’t apply simply because Trump was acquitted of insurrection in his impeachment, saying Trump can still be prosecuted for the underlying acts.  (Curiously, Smith didn’t charge Trump with insurrection while charging him with CONSPIRACY to commit insurrection.)

Smith brought up a point made by one of President Clinton’s attorneys, Nicole Seligman, during Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial, who argued that if the Senate acquitted the President (they did, of course), he could still be prosecuted in criminal court, like any other citizen, after his presidency was over.

Smith cited the “rigorous standards to prove criminal offenses and evidentiary limitations that would come into play” with the prosecution of a President.  Now, that’s one of those statements that should come with its own laugh track.  By now we’ve all seen the “rigorous standards” this special counsel holds himself to.

Here’s the full story at the NEW YORK SUN…

https://www.nysun.com/article/jack-smith-rings-in-new-year-by-asserting-that-trump-threatens-the-constitutional-foundations-of-our-republic

Now let’s move to the current status of state-by-state efforts to simply have President Trump dropped from primary ballots. Judge Andrew Napolitano, speaking on NEWSMAX on New Year’s morning, said the Supreme Court should strike down “unanimously” these states’ attempts to block him in this way.  A party-line vote will be seen as --- what else? --- political, and Chief Justice Roberts can’t let the court be seen as acting on this out of partisanship.

“There’s a lot of people who criticized the Chief Justice John Roberts,” he said, “but one thing you cannot criticize him for is his ability to amass a majority on the Court.  He said that what’s going on inside Roberts’ head right now is this: “How can this be resolved with unanimity because the Court cannot be made to look political.”

He fears that a split decision could be so divisive that it could cause one of those “black swan” events, similar in power to COVID and the BLM riots, for disrupting the ‘24 election. “The Court can’t take sides in a political dispute,” he said.  The Court has the final word on what the Constitution means, and that final word needs to be articulated with unanimity, not an easy task when you have six conservatives and three liberals.”  He’s hoping the liberals can rule with the majority, that they will see the dangers of taking the right to vote out of Americans’ hands under the guise of a so-called “insurrection” that wasn’t one. 

Napolitano is hopeful, saying that “something happens when you have a lifetime job, something divorces you from the political process and causes you to focus on just the meaning and values and history of what you’re interpreting, in this case the 14^th Amendment.”  Well, let’s pray he’s right, as university professors have lifetime tenure and it doesn’t seem to be helping there.

You can imagine what Napolitano had to say about Shenna Bellows, the Democrat secretary of state in Maine who singlehandedly took Trump off the ballot in that state.  “She’s in the process of printing ballots almost literally as we speak,” he said, sometime in the next few weeks.  She may very well have thought that she could catch the Republicans flatfooted and print the ballots without his name on [them] before there’s even time for an appeal.  That would be a gross abuse of her office.”

The Supreme Court has to weigh in in Maine, he said, because the “Constitution has to mean the same thing in all states of the Union,” not 51 different things. 

“It’s a crazy situation that they have in Maine,” he said, “whereby a single unelected official can decide who gets on the ballot and who doesn’t --- without charges, without a trial, without a jury, without any conviction, without any finding of fault on the part of Donald Trump.”

All in the name of protecting “our democracy.”

https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/andrew-napolitano-supreme-court-donald-trump/2024/01/01   

Here’s some background on Bellows.  Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung sums it up well:  “The Maine secretary of state is a former ACLU attorney” (correction: director of the state ACLU, but not an attorney), “a virulent leftist and a hyper-partisan Biden-supporting Democrat who has decided to interfere in the presidential election on behalf of Crooked Joe Biden.  We are witnessing, in real time, the attempted theft of an election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter.”

https://dailycaller.com/2023/12/29/shenna-bellows-donald-trump-maine-ballot-aclu-2024-primary

HUMOR BREAK!  Here’s the BABYLON BEE’s take on the above observation.  Democrats are NOT stealing the election in secret!  They’e doing it right out in the open, so there!

https://babylonbee.com/news/democrats-disprove-claims-they-will-covertly-rig-election-by-rigging-it-in-plain-sight

Even the legal analyst at CNN, Elie Honig, cast shade on Bellows’ decision to take Trump’s name off the primary ballot in Maine. Sure, the Constitution is clear that if you “engage in insurrection, and you’re out,” he said.  The complicated part is “who gets to decide, and by what process.”

He explained that “if you look at the hearing, and she details this in the ruling, they heard from one fact witness, a law professor. She based her ruling on a lot of documents, but also YouTube clips, news reports, things that would never pass the bar in normal court. She’s not a lawyer, by the way. It’s a smartly written decision, clearly consulted with lawyers, but this is an unelected– she’s chosen by the state legislature. Chosen, elected by the legislature, but not democratically elected.”

“Clearly consulted with lawyers.”  Wouldn’t it be fun to know if she consulted with congressional attorneys for the J6 Kangaroo Kommittee?  After all, that’s the kind of “evidence” they were using in their staged and scripted “hearings.”

https://bongino.com/cnn-legal-analyst-maine-secretary-of-state-isnt-a-lawyer-and-partially-based-trump-ballot-removal-decision-on-youtube-videos

Last week on Sean Hannity’s show, former Hawaii congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard had similar words for Bellows, sounding the alarm about Democrats who “will stop at nothing” to maintain power.  And she’s right --- when have they ever backed down?

And, importantly, it’s not just Democrats.  (Please heed this warning when considering other GOP candidates.)  Gabbard noted that “efforts to sideline Trump extend beyond the Democratic Party, with some Republicans ‘threatened by’ his departure from ‘their establishment ways.’”  She didn’t name names, but I’m sure you can think of a few.  Some of them are running for President. 

From her interview with Pete Hegseth:

https://dailycaller.com/2023/12/28/they-will-stop-at-nothing-tulsi-gabbard-slams-maines-dangerous-removal-of-trump-from-ballot/

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

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Mike Huckabee

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Psalms 118:8 KJV

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