Advertisement

Election 2024

Trump Wins Iowa

January 17, 2024

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.

The Iowa Caucuses

January 15, 2024

Mike Huckabee

 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.

Campaign 24: Here come the Obamas!

January 9, 2024

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

The Experts Speak!

January 8, 2024

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.

UPDATED: Iowa Trip Cancelled Due To Weather

January 7, 2024

Mike Huckabee

Due to bad weather in both Iowa & Little Rock tomorrow, the plane we were to use to get there & back for the @realDonaldTrump

events is unable to go & we have to cancel. I hope IA caucus goers turn out next week and send a MAGA message by voting for @realDonaldTrump

------------------

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)

What happens today? Supposed to be Colorado ballot certification.

January 5, 2024

Mike Huckabee

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

Trump appeals to SCOTUS on Colorado ballots; decision needed today!

January 4, 2024

Mike Huckabee

On Wednesday, President Trump appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court a ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court that found him ineligible to be on the primary ballot in that state.  Those justices, 4-3, claimed he engaged in and incited an “insurrection” on January 6, 2021, and is thus prevented by the 14th Amendment from running for any office.

It asks SCOTUS this question:  “Did the Colorado Supreme Court err in ordering President Trump excluded from the 2024 presidential primary ballot?”

This appeal is no surprise to anyone who knows President Trump, and in case anyone misread him, his attorneys announced their intention shortly after the Colorado ruling.  And on December 27, the Colorado GOP, joined by six voters and the secretary of state’s office, also filed a petition for immediate review by the Supreme Court.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/colorado-secretary-of-state-urges-supreme-court-to-expedite-trump-ballot-challenge

The significance:  President Trump remains on the ballot unless SCOTUS were to reject the petition by January 4 or otherwise rules against Trump.

January 4 --- that’s today!

Why so soon?  In that state, it’s the day before certification of the ballots for the primary.  January 5 is the deadline for the Colorado secretary of state to certify all those ballots, and it cannot be changed.  Once they’re certified, no challenge is allowed.  As they say, it is what it is.

Catherine Yang at THE EPOCH TIMES has an informative report on the President’s legal argument.  They say that over the past few months, more than 60 (!) lawsuits and administrative challenges have been filed against him to keep him off the ballot.  All of these are based on allegations that Trump engaged in insurrection and is therefore disqualified from holding office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

“First, the events of January 6, 2021, were not ‘insurrection’ as that term is used in Section 3,” Trump’s petition reads. The amendment was passed after the Civil War, and insurrection was understood to mean “the taking up of arms and waging war upon the United States,” they argued. More than 600,000 died in the war, and “focus on war-making” in the text was the “logical result. 

(As you certainly know, this amendment was ratified after the Civil War, to prevent those who had picked up their guns and literally waged war against the United States from serving in public office.  And even they could be permitted that privilege again with a two-thirds vote of Congress.)

“By contrast, the United States has a long history of political protests that have turned violent. In the summer of 2020 alone, violent protestors targeted the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, for over 50 days, repeatedly assaulted federal officers and set fire to the courthouse, all in support of a purported political agenda opposed to the authority of the United States.”

They also argue that the courts don’t have jurisdiction on this question: “Indeed, every federal court that addressed this issue with regard to the eligibility of President Barack Obama, Senator John McCain, and Senator Ted Cruz held that the issue was for Congress and not the federal courts.”

Of course, you know that Maine Secretary of State Shanna Bellows singlehandedly decided that Trump couldn’t be on the GOP primary ballot up there.  (And, gosh, something tells me she’s not even in the GOP!)  Surely knowing how far over the line she had gone, she did at least put her dastardly plan on hold: “I will suspend the effect of my decision until the Supreme Court rules on any appeal or the time to appeal has expired.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/trump-takes-ballot-disqualification-battle-to-supreme-court

For when you have time, the NEW YORK POST has a more detailed story that we highly recommend…

https://nypost.com/2024/01/03/news/trump-attorneys-appeal-colorado-ballot-ruling-to-supreme-court/?&utm_campaign=nypevening

Attorney General Bill Barr has made it clear he does not want Trump to get the GOP nomination, but said this week that “the efforts to knock him off the ballot are legally untenable, politically counterproductive, and, most ominously, destructive of our political order.”  I wonder if he’s considered, though, that for the left, being “destructive of our political order” is not a bug; it’s a feature!

They also could backfire and help Trump, a scenario that, knowing Barr, likely motivates his words as well.

“As a legal matter,” he said, “states do not have the power to enforce the disqualification provision of the Fourteenth Amendment by using their own ad hoc procedures to find that an individual has engaged in an insurrection.”  It’s Congress --- not the individual states ---who has the authority to do that, he said.

Our whole election system could “collapse in chaos,” he warned, if each state uses its own definition of insurrection and its own procedural standards to block candidates.

He had additional words of criticism, specifically for the left: “[This effort] is much like the left’s previous schemes to sidetrack or defeat Trump politically through legal ploys that stretched the law beyond its proper bounds...Nothing is more destructive to democracy than for one faction to try to win in the political arena by disenfranchising its adversaries.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/bill-barr-efforts-to-remove-trump-from-ballot-are-destructive-of-our-political-order

As you know, Special Counsel Jack Smith did not specifically charge Trump with insurrection, and he certainly would’ve done that if he thought it would stick.  Instead, he charged him with four other felonies:

--- conspiracy to defraud the United States

--- “conspiracy against rights”

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/241 

(If you read the description at the link, you’ll find it sounds very much like what Jack Smith is trying to do!)

--- conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding

--- “obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding”

The Supreme Court is going to be ruling on two of these charges soon, in the case United States v. (Joseph) Fischer (one of the OTHER J6 defendants)…  As legal analyst Margot Cleveland says, ”It is likely a majority of the Supreme Court will rule that the ‘crimes’ the special counsel charged are not crimes at all.”

If you’d like to get into the weeds on statutory interpretation and how it relates to Trump’s J6 case, we recommend taking time with her article.  Cleveland says a reasonable prosecutor would put the brakes on Trump’s criminal trial until the issues about these charges can be resolved by the Supreme Court, but that the special counsel and the district court “have both proven themselves anything but reasonable and have revealed their real goal is to obtain a conviction against Trump before the 2024 election, which is now less than a year away.”  Smith may be trying Trump on charges that don’t even exist, she says, lamenting that half the country doesn’t seem to care.

https://thefederalist.com/2024/01/02/why-scotus-will-likely-smack-down-two-of-jack-smiths-get-trump-charges-as-non-crimes/

« First < Prev Next > Last »