By Mike Huckabee
January 29, 2023
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Here are the top stories from this week that I think you will want to read.
And after you read my Sunday Standard, please leave me a comment.
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
More insanity at the FBI: "There is no way this is possible"
By Mike Huckabee
This story was originally published on January 24, 2023.
“If they put this in a movie, you’d turn it off immediately, saying, ‘There is no way this is possible; this is just --- this is comedy, not drama…”
That was Mike Pompeo, speaking to Jesse Watters Monday evening about the revelation that Charles McGonigal, the FBI agent alleged to be a Russian asset, was also the one put in charge of the investigation into the DNC “hack.” (We’ll have more on that connection soon.) McGonigal had also been tasked with investigating Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska but had secretly gone to work FOR him to help get sanctions lifted against him. He and court interpreter Sergey Shestakov, a U.S. citizen, were charged in the Southern District of New York; details of the charges here…
https://dailycaller.com/2023/01/23/ex-fbi-agent-charged-working-russian-oligarch-oleg-deripaska/
Pompeo said he’d personally suffered for two years under all this, with the FBI’s Russia Hoax. “It’s hard to know where to begin,” he said, “because it is so outlandish…Director Comey has a lot of questions to answer about how he picked this guy, why he picked this guy, and did he not know…”
Once again, not a good look for the FBI. As Jack Posobiec tweeted: “I’m just going to repeat this for the people in the back. An FBI official who investigated Trump for illegal ties to Russia but found none has just been arrested for his illegal ties to Russia. Internalize this.”
Legal analyst Alan Dershowitz has said for a couple of weeks that the Trump and Biden classified documents scandals would cancel each other out and that neither man would be prosecuted. He said that again to Sean Hannity on Monday night. Different issues are at play: for Trump, he was the President and arguably had the authority to declassify any document at will, and for Biden, his possession of the documents would have to be proved intentional, and Biden would just say he didn’t know.
Where did this new standard of “intention” come from? Our understanding was that it was the mere possession of classified materials that was illegal. Then-FBI Director James Comey pulled the same argument --- the difficulty of proving intent --- when saying “no reasonable prosecutor” would take Hillary’s email case. And even if prosecutors DID have to prove intent, Hillary’s mishandling of classified emails and her destruction of evidence looked to us about as intentional as it gets.
(Aside: Dershowitz --- bafflingly --- has always maintained that Hillary, as egregious as her actions were, should not have been criminally prosecuted and said so again yesterday. He seems to be playing the part of her defense attorney and simply will not go there. Hannity pressed him on that, with Dershowitz still saying she claimed those were “personal” emails and she was not destroying anything classified. He also said it wasn’t necessarily deliberate. With all respect, Mr. Dershowitz, this willful blindness where Hillary is concerned is making it harder to rely on you as an expert.)
Anyway, Dershowitz foresees no criminal prosecution of either Trump or Biden for having classified documents. But the larger issue is the massive corruption within the Biden family, Joe included, and what the documents he squirreled away in multiple locations might have to do with that. Dershowitz did call for “complete transparency” regarding the documents, noting that Biden, as the current President, has the power to declassify it all right now.
Gregg Jarrett reiterated that, yes, the President does have the authority to declassify. “It’s an exclusive power contained in the Constitution through the Commander-In-Chief clause. The Vice President doesn’t have that right, or Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.” Unlike Dershowitz, he believes that the evidence against Hillary was “overwhelming” and it was “a terrible injustice” not to bring a case against her. He said that “every prosecutor in America would love to have brought such an easy case.”
He agreed with Dershowitz that “this will be a wash” but disagreed, as we do, that knowledge and intent/willfulness is the only standard. “If you examine Sec. F of 18 USC 793, that also provides for gross negligence or carelessness.” The growing number of locations where Biden’s classified materials are being found “renders ‘inadvertence’ implausible, and instead seems to be the definition of recklessness, gross negligence under the statutes. So I think that legally, it would be a fairly strong case.”
Jarrett sounded much like Jonathan Turley when he called Biden’s “whack-a-mole” rebuttals/excuses/alibis to these ongoing discoveries --- the infamous “Corvette defense” included --- “more and more preposterous.” And for Biden to say he had no regrets was just arrogance, he said. Biden has to know that taking those documents was gravely wrong, plus (and most importantly for his party) it’s interfering with the goal of prosecuting Trump. You know he cares about that.
It should be noted that advisers such as “crisis PR adviser” Anita Dunn, who is married to Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer, no doubt came up with or at least reviewed those responses. During the unfortunate “no regrets” remarks, he was reading off a piece of paper in a notebook, and the effect was just as lame as when Karine Jean-Pierre does that. He appeared to be just looking at the paper without even engaging his brain, which would be par for the course for him.
The narrative that Biden was being “cooperative” likely came straight from Dunn. Andrew C. McCarthy, writing in NATIONAL REVIEW, explains why that’s a crock. “The truth of the matter,” he says, “is that, like most criminal suspects as to whom there is already strong evidence of felony offenses, Biden consented to a search knowing that, if he did not, newly-appointed special counsel Robert Hur would apply for a judicial warrant from a federal judge.” That might lead to a chain of legal disasters. Better to play the “dedicated public servant” who has nothing to hide. He’s just doing what’s in his best legal interests.
So don’t fall for it, he says.
https://www.nationalreview.
I still can’t get over Biden’s treatment of Carter nominee for CIA director Ted Sorenson during his early days in the Senate. He ambushed Sorenson during his confirmation hearing, savaged him for taking classified documents home and insinuated that he (Sorenson) could be criminally prosecuted for that. We know now that Biden did it himself when he was a senator. This blast from Biden’s past shows his blatant hypocrisy, and also that he had to know what he did was wrong. In case you missed the story…
https://www.foxnews.com/
Former deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, in an interview on FOX NEWS, said Hillary went far beyond either Trump or Biden and that Congress should look at the handling of all three cases. “Let’s get the facts and then the Justice Department will have to be sure that they’re treating all the cases fairly,” he said. But I’m not so sure it’s as simple as ‘compare and contrast,’ when this ‘Justice’ Department doesn’t even seem to care about the perception of fairness.
Judicial Watch is still trying to get to Biden’s U.S. Senate papers being held by the University of Delaware. They’ve filed an appeal brief, also on behalf of the DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION, with the Delaware Supreme Court asking for limited discovery to depose a University representative about this issue. A lower court blocked their access to records about the papers.
https://www.judicialwatch.org/
Finally, Miranda Devine at the NEW YORK POST has a good overview of the classified records scandal up to this point. She speculates that administrative aide Kathy Chung was named publicly so the Biden administration can “throw her under the bus” (we need a new, less clichéd expression for this) to deflect scrutiny from the President. Devine also describes a striking email sent by Hunter to then-partner Devon Archer a week before VP Biden went to Ukraine to meet with the then-prime minister. Hunter refers to “my guy’s upcoming travels.” This email is highly detailed, not at all the sort of thing Hunter usually wrote, and has “the distinct flavor of an official briefing, perhaps even a classified one.”
It also instructs Archer to buy a ‘burner phone,’ presumably to keep their conversations private. “Buy a cell phone from a 7/11 or CVS tmrw and ill do the same.”
There’s no hiding Biden’s fright over classified document scandal
More Chinese intrigue surrounding Biden documents
By Mike Huckabee
This was originally published on January 24, 2023.
Obama-era top-secret documents taken by then-outgoing VP Joe Biden are known to have been sent to an interim location --- reportedly in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington DC --- before being moved to Biden's office at the Penn Biden Center. The PBC, as you know, was funded by the University of Pennsylvania, which in turn had received about $50 million from the Chinese.
As reported by Maria Bartiromo on SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES, the move of secret files and boxes in 2017 was overseen by Cathy Chung, an aide to Vice President Biden who’d been recommended for the job by Hunter Biden (!!!). So far, it seems no one has even found of picture her.
The U.K. DAILY MAIL describes her as “a behind the scenes operative who previously worked for Democratic senators and is now deputy director of protocol for Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin...She turned up in the news on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop, after she cc’d him [Hunter] at his Rosemont Seneca Partners firm on an email containing phone numbers for the Clintons, senators and most of the Obama cabinet.” Mike Flynn and Mollie Hemingway were raising questions about her in 2020. Here’s the story at AMERICAN THINKER.
The House Oversight Committee chairman, Kentucky Rep. James Comer, said, “I think most Americans would be shocked if they saw how many connections the Biden family has to people directly affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party.” He can no longer accept what the President said about this misplacement of documents being “inadvertent.”
“It’s gone from being just simply irresponsible to downright scary,” Comer said. “And with the involvement of Biden’s personal attorneys, it seems to be not only an influence-peddling scheme but a cover-up,” and a risk to national security. Even though the White House is not cooperating, he said, and the DOJ has used a newly-appointed special counsel to clamp the lid on information, “there are plenty of other sources,” he said, including the 150 bank records flagged as suspicious. (We’ve pointed out the huge problems with this special counsel.) And they’re formally requesting the Secret Service to give them “any type of correspondence” that would help them determine who might have had access to those documents.
According to Comer, they already have records showing Hunter was doing “consulting work” for others who were getting “million-dollar payments directly from the CCP into THEIR accounts.”
This is easy to track, he said. “Investigating Hunter --- the Biden family --- is about like tracking a bleeding bear through a snowstorm.” Evidence abounds that they’ve been peddling influence for decades.
Biden documents were sent to another university as well. “There are are 1,850 BOXES and several hundred electronic documents that Biden transferred to the University of DELAWARE, "according to Newt Gingrich. "I don’t know that anybody has begun to look through those boxes, which were theoretically sealed, but you need to look at them to find out, are there any classified documents [there]? No one knows who’s given money to the University of Delaware, how much money they’ve given; they have a Biden Center just like the University of Pennsylvania.”
“I really do believe these are ‘the Sopranos,’” Gingrich said. “I think part of the reason Chairman Comer is gonna have a really hard time is they have no interest in cooperating.” And they’re aided and abetted by the Justice Department and FBI, who have, he said, “a level of corruption unprecedented in American history at the most senior levels...The corruption’s there, it’s been there at least since the middle of the George W. Bush administration...They have total contempt for the rule of law...”
If you were the White House chief of staff, wouldn’t this seem like a great time to step down? But Ron Klain maintains that the timing of his exit has nothing to do with the Biden classified documents scandal. We wouldn’t be surprised, though, if he knew what was going on behind the scenes within the Democrat Party and the media (but I repeat myself) to take Biden down and were just getting out of the way. At this writing, it’s being reported that Jeff Zients --- head of Biden’s COVID response team; oh, no --- is Klain’s replacement, but another aide said to be on the “short list” was Anita Dunn, the White House’s “crisis PR specialist.” She also happens to be married to Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer, and the two of them were in on discussions from the start on how to handle the classified documents matter. (How convenient: he's got attorney-client privilege, and what he tells her is hearsay.)
If you wonder how the media get their specific verbiage to parrot, such as “Trump was HOARDING documents,” “Biden’s possession of documents was INADVERTENT,” and the Biden team is COOPERATING,” they likely come from Anita Dunn. She apparently helped come up with the phrase “ultra-MAGA.” Maybe she should’ve advised Biden not to repeat it so much that it became a joke.
This article at HOT AIR is a must-read look at what went into the Biden advisers’ decision to handle the documents scandal as they did, keeping a lid on it. According to THE NEW YORK TIMES, “Dunn was adamant that the White House should keep the public information flow to a trickle and focus instead on how different Mr. Biden’s case was from the broader investigation into his predecessor.” This approach is unusual among PR professionals, who usually like to get out in front of a story. Also, Dunn put out the message that Biden was to be viewed as cooperative while Trump was seen as defiant. Never mind that this was a distortion.
Dunn “kept it out of the news for a couple of months,” HOT AIR observes, “but it still got out and when it did, the White House winds up looking very shifty in keeping it quiet for so long.”
Of course, you can’t keep a story like this quiet unless you have the cooperation of the DOJ, which, of course, they had.
Documents keep turning up, though, including six more from Biden’s residence on Friday, some of which date from his time as a senator. They must have carbon-dated them. I always assumed Biden’s early documents from the Senate were cave pictures.
https://dailycaller.com/2023/01/21/doj-discovers-six-more-biden-classified-documents
So now Bob Bauer is having to admit Biden took classified documents home even when he was a senator.
Jonathan Turley’s new column illustrates WHY most PR professionals to try to stay ahead of the story. Turley makes it clear that Biden should not have started out using the word “inadvertent,” as it’s becoming impossible to make that case.
Yet another document, this one discovered not on paper but in Hunter’s laptop, provides “smoking gun” evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in one of Hunter’s deals with the Chinese company CEFC, this one involving $25 million. Attorney Bob Fenet emailed Hunter and Joe’s brother Jim to say he’d set up “a call from Joe Biden and Hunter Biden on Monday morning to discuss the purchase of the 5 million tons of gas.”
Wow, 5 million tons of gas. That’s almost as much gas as we’ve heard in the past two weeks from the Biden White House.
One likely quid pro quo was Biden's abrupt shutdown of the China Initiative, which had been intended to investigate Chinese espionage and their theft of American intellectual property. POLITICO reported this in February 2022, but it’s shocking when seen in light of what we know today about the Bidens and the Chinese.
Finally, this commentary from Wayne Allyn Root reads a lot like what we might say ourselves. Just read the headline and you will see why.
https://rootforamerica.com/biden-is-finished/
………………..
RELATED STORY: Speaking of a ‘Justice’ Department that prefers to hide important details, here’s an update on a story that’s never left our minds. They’ve just admitted that when Robert Mueller said Seth Rich hadn’t been involved in the Russia Collusion email scandal, the FBI hadn’t even looked at Rich’s work laptop.
This news was released Friday night in the typical “document dump” designed to discourage media attention. (Not that most media would have given it any.) They admit that CrowdStrike performed the only review of Seth Rich’s laptop and that the FBI never examined the contents. Apparently, they relied strictly on the three-page report from CrowdStrike and never investigated it themselves. What?
Leave me a comment, I read them.
The Biden document and money trail: a wild coincidence
By Mike Huckabee
This story was originally published on January 24, 2023
This has got to be the greatest coincidence EVER.
Yesterday, we told you that Hunter Biden had filled out a background check to rent a property in California and listed his address as Joe Biden's Delaware house and his current rent as just under $50,000 a month. And, no, that was not a typo.
The exact amount he wrote on the form was $49,910. Come to find out, this is exactly the same amount that was paid as a rental deposit to "House of Sweden," an office complex in Washington DC, on the space the Bidens were planning to share with Chinese company CEFC.
The amount appears in an October 13, 2017, memo from the general manager of the complex, another document found by the NEW YORK POST's Miranda Devine on Hunter's "laptop from hell." Hunter had inquired about terminating the lease after the deal with CEFC was no more, and he was told, "Please note that there is a security deposit paid by you of $49,910 which will be returned to you within 15 days after the termination of the lease (after inspection of normal wear and tear."
It's hard to know what to make of this, except that it's too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence. No wonder the House Oversight Committee is so eager to follow the money.
If Hunter was actually paying his father $49,910 a month in rent --- or, "rent" --- this was not reflected in Joe's tax returns. We also reported yesterday that Joe Biden's tax returns for 2016, 2017, and 2018, covering the period above, had been removed from the website where Biden had posted all his returns. If you went to that site and clicked to see any of those three years, you would be directed to a Democrat fundraising site.
According to the WASHINGTON EXAMINER, those links went down in July 2022 and, as of Tuesday, are back up. A spokesman for the DNC said that "a couple of links to previous tax returns were broken." The writer at CRANKERS makes websites for a living and says this could NOT have been an accident. "The DNC just spoonfed people a tablespoon of horse manure on that one," he said.
https://crankers.com/text/biden-tax-returns-removed/
As attention is being focused more specifically on the Biden money trail, this 2010 email from Hunter's laptop seems especially pertinent. It's to Hunter from Rosemont Seneca executive Dick Schwerin, recommending that Hunter talk to his dad, who "could use some positive news about his future earnings potential!" Much more detail about their wealth-building plans here...
Recall that Jonathan Turley has criticized the DOJ's decision to let Biden's own attorneys --- and at least one White House attorney --- comb through documents at the various locations where classified material has been found, explaining that these attorneys are working on behalf of their client's interest, not the public interest. According to a new story in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, the DOJ did consider having FBI agents supervise the searching.
But, stunningly, the DOJ decided against that, opting to leave the attorneys on their own. They say this was "to avoid complicating the later stages of the investigation" and also because the attorneys have been cooperating. (Hey, it only took them six years.)
Question: If they're not monitoring what is being done, how do they know the attorneys have been cooperating? Again, as Prof. Turley said, they are operating in their client's interest. And none of them, except the White House counsel who is participating, even have security clearances. Turley said that "...use of private counsel without clearances following the first discovery on November 2 could itself be viewed as reckless and gross mishandling."
Turley noted on Sean Hannity's Tuesday show that the Biden attorney who found the first classified document at the Penn Biden Center was interviewed by the FBI, but the usual "302" notes were not taken.
It looks to me as though Biden and his team are getting just the kind of kid-glove treatment that Hillary and her team received. The 'Justice' Department is just taking the word of Biden's attorneys. When Mar-A-Lago was searched --- by FBI agents --- Trump's attorneys weren't even allowed to WATCH.
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