By Mike Huckabee
February 2, 2022
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Good morning!
Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff!
Today's newsletter includes:
- Bible Verse of the Day - Matthew 10:23
- Durham vs. Horowitz involves more than cellphones
- Tweet Of The Day
- And much more...
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Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
1. DAILY BIBLE VERSE
But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another: for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come.
Matthew 10:23
If you have a favorite Bible Verse you want to see in one of our newsletters, please email [email protected].
MORNING NEWS:
2. Bad News:
Sorry to start your day with bad news, but the groundhog came out, looked around, got scared and rushed back into his den, which means three more years of Joe Biden.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/groundhog-day-2022-punxsutawney-phil-makes-his-prediction
3. Durham vs. Horowitz involves more than cellphones:
Over the past couple of weeks, a story has been developing about a ‘rift” between Special Counsel John Durham and Inspector General Michael Horowitz concerning some evidence that Durham had not received from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG). Just how important is this evidence, and why is Durham only now finding out about it? What does it mean to the Special Counsel investigation? Thanks to some outstanding reporting, this story is starting to gel, but some questions are unanswered.
The Epoch Times has a detailed new piece by Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke; it’s “premium,” so we’ve boiled it down and tried to make a complicated legal morass –- which can certainly happen with two investigations going on at the same time –- a little clearer.
Recall that Horowitz’s report was critical of the FBI but ultimately determined –- to the dismay of many, including me –- that the FBI had actually opened “Crossfire Hurricane” in good faith, with adequate “predication” (justification). Keep in mind that the OIG report was internal, dealing only with employees of the Justice (“Justice”) Department, while Durham’s has broad subpoena power and can bring criminal charges.
In a court filing dated January 25, Durham said Horowitz had failed to turn over to his office a couple of cellphones used by FBI General Counsel James Baker. This evidence was needed in connection with two investigations: the prosecution of Clinton attorney Michael Sussmann and the criminal leak investigation of Baker himself.
According to Durham’s updated filing on January 28, Horowitz’s office then told Durham that “the cellphones likely were discussed” in a conference call that took place almost four years ago, on February 12, 2018. But Durham said he doesn’t recall this discussion. He knew nothing about Horowitz’s possession of Baker’s cellphone until he was briefed by a separate FBI investigative team just a few weeks ago, on January 6.
It doesn’t seem likely the phones were discussed during that conference call, because Horowitz didn’t even get them until February 15, three days after the call, and there’s no record he informed Durham about receiving them. And Horowitz doesn’t remember for sure if he mentioned them, even though Durham was investigating Baker at the time for making “unauthorized disclosures to the media," meaning criminally leaking. One would assume those phones would be pretty important.
It sure looks as though Durham didn’t know about the existence of those phones until Jan. 5, because on that day, he was seeking Baker’s “call log data” from the FBI’s Inspection Division. If he’d known about the phones, would he have needed the logs?
But there’s more of even greater interest in Durham’s January 25 filing. Amazingly, Horowitz also failed to disclose that he and his general counsel had met personally with Sussmann (!) regarding a “cyber matter” in March 2017. He also failed to disclose the identity of a Hillary-connected individual who provided the data to Sussmann that led to that meeting. And this is a big deal --- a huge part of Durham’s case against Sussmann.
Worse, Durham didn’t find this out from Horowitz, but from other sources, including Sussmann’s attorneys, who are entitled to discovery and apparently told him in their discovery meeting on January 20, “Hey, wait a minute, there’s nothing here about our client’s meeting with the OIG.” That material was missing even though Durham’s office had formally requested the OIG provide “all documents, records and information” in their possession regarding Sussmann.
The OIG did turn over some “relevant transcripts of interviews” about Crossfire Hurricane and, on December 17, 2021, a forensic report on the “cyber matter” that Sussmann had reported to the OIG. The “cyber matter” was that one of Sussmann’s clients (apparently “Tech Executive – 1” Rodney Jaffe) “had observed that a specific OIG employee’s computer was ‘seen publicly’ in ‘Internet traffic’ and was connected to a VPN (Virtual Private Network) in a foreign country.”
Horowitz told the Special Counsel that this was all he had. Durham provided it to Sussmann’s defense team on December 23, 2021.
Recall that Rodney Jaffe was coordinating with agents of the Clinton campaign to create the outlandish and quickly discredited story about Trump Tower communicating with Alfa Bank, to make it seem as if Trump had been signaling to the Kremlin. Jaffe was working with computer researchers at Georgia Tech to access private information, after which Georgia Tech got a $17 million Pentagon contract to research cybersecurity.
So, big question: who is this mysterious OIG employee? Why was Sussmann briefing Horowitz on this person’s activities? We want to know why Sussmann, who was a private attorney and not with the DOJ, would have been meeting with Horowitz, an internal affairs investigator, in early 2017. This was just a few weeks after pushing derogatory (and false) information about Trump to the CIA. It was also just a couple of months after Horowitz announced he was looking into the FBI’s handling of Crossfire Hurricane.
Regarding those phones of Baker’s, Durham asked the OIG on January 10 to conduct an “additional forensic examination.” On January 26, the day after Durham’s legal filing on the withheld evidence, the OIG finally responded with the forensic reports. But then, in his filing of January 28, Durham disclosed that Horowitz’s office had still MORE phones relating to the criminal leak investigation of Baker. Durham seems to have just found out about these in the past few days.
If you wonder why investigations take so ridiculously long, this one episode should give you some idea. But what a strange turn of events for defense attorneys to be providing the prosecutor with information that surprised him.
In case you missed Aaron Mate’s very detailed analysis of Durham vs. Horowitz from January 20 and have some time to catch up, here’s the link. The editors at RealClear Investigations sum it up this way: “As he exposes the role of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in false allegations about Trump-Russia collusion, Special Counsel John Durham is sharply challenging FBI apologists who claim dubious vindication from an inspector general’s finding that the Bureau’s probe was launched in good faith, Aaron Mate reports...”
Here’s another helpful refresher on Durham’s investigation from a few months ago. You might recognize the byline…
https://stream.org/special-counsel-update-durhams-investigation-is-expansive/
4. Tweet of the Day:
From conservative writer/editor Joel Pollak, in response to Sen. Lindsay Graham saying it would be inappropriate for Trump to pardon Jan. 6 protesters:
“I want to hear him explain why the guy in the buffalo horns got four years while an FBI lawyer who doctored an email to deceive a FISA court in the Russia collusion probe got community service.”
https://twitter.com/joelpollak/status/1487876335116554240
Thanks to “Dilbert” creator and bestselling author Scott Adams for pointing it out. Check out his podcast Episode 1640 for his comments on the media’s way of dismissing claims of election fraud and on “seeing the machinery” of how they operate. It starts to cook at about 20 minutes in. (Note: he includes the disclaimer that he personally has seen no evidence of widespread voter fraud –- which, technically, is true –- to keep YouTube from suspending his account, which tells you something about the world we live in. His main beef about elections is their lack of transparency, saying that any system that CAN be rigged WILL be rigged, at least eventually.)
https://scottadams.locals.com/upost/1624209/episode-1640-scott-adams
If stupidity were against the law, then, yes, “the guy in the buffalo horns” would deserve some prison time for doing something monumentally stupid. But it’s not, so unless he forced his way inside the building or committed vandalism or violence, he doesn’t deserve four years in prison. At the same time, doctoring evidence to deceive a FISA court and get a warrant to spy is a very serious crime, at least unless your ultimate target is Donald Trump. If it is, then the DOJ will go lightly on you.
5. BLM Week of Action:
This week, schools across the country are launching a “BLM Week of Action.” According to a “starter kit” on BLM’s website, this includes indoctrinating children as young as five with lots of radical left brainwashing. That includes four BLM “demands,” including “counselors, not cops” (because removing cops has made our big cities SO much safer for children, especially children in minority neighborhoods) and 13 BLM “guiding principles,” which include “black villages” and “globalism” (translation: racial segregation and communism.) Also, the "disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics." I imagine that means preventing parents from having any say over what their children are “taught.”
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/schools-across-america-blm-week-action-nuclear-family
Judging from BLM’s actions, I assumed their guiding principles were more along the lines of shaking down white liberal corporate leaders for huge amounts of money which they spend on mansions instead of sharing it with the black communities that have been devastated by the riots and crime waves they encouraged.
I love the quote in that story about one of BLM’s founders who resigned after spending millions on fancy homes, that she was criticized “for her perceived opulence while claiming to be a Marxist.” But that’s why the only people who love communist governments are the people who run them: that’s where all the money is.
I’m baffled as to why BLM should even have so much influence in schools, considering that Americans’ approval of the group, which soared after the George Floyd killing, soon began plummeting, as this story from last August reminds us.
https://www.westernjournal.com/blm-approval-craters-just-2-dropped-whopping-92-since-2020-peak/
Isn’t it bizarre that when parents protest racist, leftist Critical Race Theory being taught in schools, they’re told they’re crazy, there’s no CRT in schools. And then when schools openly push that divisive, racist propaganda, we’re told we’re domestic terrorists if we want it removed.
I know your kids have already missed a lot of school due to the pandemic, but if their school is observing “BLM Action Week,” it might not be a bad idea to homeschool them for just one more week, and spend that time finding a better school.
6. Hunter Biden in the news:
Does anyone remember the first Trump impeachment, the one over his phone call to the President of Ukraine? That was the one where we found out that Democrats think that a Republican President asking a foreign leader if he’s investigating corruption involving a former Democrat Vice President’s son is an impeachable offense, but that former Vice President being involved in said corruption isn’t in any way a disqualification for being President.
Well, a stunning new piece of evidence has surfaced, five years late. John Solomon at JustTheNews.com has obtained an email written on November 22, 2016, by George Kent, a former US Embassy official in Ukraine. Classified “Confidential,” it’s been kept from public view until now.
The email to Kent’s superiors in the State Department said that someone in Washington “needed to engage VP Biden quietly and say that his son Hunter's presence on the Burisma board undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we were advancing in Ukraine." Solomon writes:
“Kent's email described an intense pressure campaign by advocates for Burisma — including a former U.S. ambassador — to rehabilitate the Ukrainian company's corrupt reputation and to get Ukraine prosecutors to drop their criminal investigations of the company.
Kent even relayed to higher-ups that he had confirmed with Ukrainian prosecutors that Burisma officials had paid a $7 million ‘bribe’ to make one of the cases against the company disappear. The bribe was allegedly paid at a time when Hunter Biden was serving on the Burisma board, a job that landed his firm more than $3 million from the Ukrainian energy company.”
In short, Kent was aware of the shadiness of Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine and how they were undermining efforts to fight corruption, the exact thing Trump was legitimately inquiring about. Yet somehow, even though Kent was one of the Democrats’ star impeachment witnesses, this email and the things he said in it never came up. How curious!
Congressional Republicans and some legal experts were outraged at this revelation. Trump was hit with a ridiculous impeachment charge and wasn’t allowed to have counsel at the depositions, and now we find that there was exculpatory evidence that was hidden from the President and the public.
All I can say is that I hope, and expect, that Joe Biden’s impeachment trial will be much fairer than this.
8. I Just Wanted to Say:
Thank you for reading the Morning Edition.
For more news, visit my website here.
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