By Mike Huckabee
August 24, 2023
|
|
|
|
BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! This morning's newsletter does not include my debate coverage. That copy is so hot, I am waiting for it to cool down. Look for it in your inbox soon!
With gratitude,
Mike Huckabee
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
7 Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:
Matthew 7:7
Could there BE a more biased judge in Trump’s J6 trial?
It’s generally acknowledged that U.S. District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, the judge who, apparently by luck of the draw, was handed President Trump’s J6 case, is not inclined to be lenient towards anyone she perceives to be associated in any way with the events of January 6, 2021. In fact, some of her sentences in those cases have exceeded even those asked for by the prosecutors. But did you know just how biased she is?
Judging by her own statements in the context of other J6 cases over which she presided, this 2013 Obama appointee is wildly, completely, undeniably, outrageously biased. She has made it clear that she cannot wait to see Trump behind bars. And yet, unless she’s recused from the case, an event unlikely to happen, she’ll be presiding at Trump’s trial --- before a DC jury, no less. Talk about going through the motions of justice.
“Although judges often make comments from the bench,” investigative reporter Julie Kelly says, “Chutkan’s strident language raises questions about her impartiality in handling the case against the presumptive GOP nominee for president in 2024.” Quite an understatement.
Kelly has a new piece at REALCLEAR INVESTIGATIONS that examines the politically charged rulings and incendiary statements Judge Chutkan has made in these cases. If you’ve read her book, “JANUARY 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right,” some of this information will be familiar to you, as Kelly used some of Judge Chutkan’s remarks to show the circular reasoning being employed to justify denying detainees bail and other basic rights.
For example --- this is cited in both the new article and the book --- Judge Chutkan, who herself believes that suspicions about election fraud are wild conspiracy theories --- said of defendant Donna Bissel, “As noted in the government’s sentencing memo, the defendant appears to be susceptible to believing outlandish and absurd conspiracy theories. To protect the public, it’s important to make sure that she does not fall victim to another lie or conspiracy and act out in a way that again jeopardizes public safety. It’s one thing to believe in conspiracy theories in your basement, and it’s another thing act out on them and, for instance, to travel from Indiana to DC to storm the Capitol to overturn an election.”
It should be noted that Ms. Bissel’s crime was the huge threat to public safety known as “parading.”
But this is the judge Trump got. Kelly has quote after quote showing that if anyone is being incendiary about January 6, it is Judge Chutkan. She’s very emotional about it. Sample quote, from the trial of Matthew Caspel in December 2022: “[Every] single time I watch the videos and look at the photographs of what was going on that day, I am struck anew by how horrible this was, by how violent and terrifying, and how outnumbered and vastly unequipped law enforcement officers were feeling that day as they were basically struggling for their lives and wondering if they were going to make it home to their kids. I don’t know if we’ll ever recover from that.”
You know, if she’s still so concerned about “how outnumbered and vastly unequipped law enforcement officers were feeling that day,” she might want to know why President Trump’s approval of up to 20,000 National Guard troops was rejected by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The presence of the National Guard would have kept the entire event under control. She appears to be blaming the one person whose action, if it had been heeded, could have prevented the whole awful thing.
It seems this has never occurred to her.
This judge also apparently subscribes to the “Trump cult” idea --- that those who supported him did so because of the force of his personality and not because of legitimate concerns about our country. In October 2022, she referred to this as “a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.” (Implication: but my courtroom will take care of that!!) It’s hard to imagine any deeper bias.
In October 2021, at the sentencing of Matthew Mazzocco --- who spent only 12 minutes inside the Capitol and committed no violence --- she said, “He went there to support one man who he viewed had the election taken from him. In total disregard of a lawfully conducted election, he went to the Capitol in support of one man, not in support of our country or in support of democracy.”
This is another defendant found guilty of “parading.” He was sentenced to 45 days in jail. This judge simply doesn’t understand: Trump supporters who attended the rally and participated nonviolently were there BECAUSE they supported democracy and thought it likely had been subverted. Millions more still doubt the outcome and are nonviolently making our voices heard. But Judge Chutkan’s remarks give the impression that she’d prefer to see all of us in jail --- you know, in the interest of public safety.
Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz recently filed a resolution to condemn and censure Judge Chutkan for exhibiting “open bias and partisanship in the conduct of her official duties as a judge.” It’s fine to have at least a symbolic protest like this, but there are no teeth to it. A judge will typically be removed for bias only if it is seen outside a judge’s work as a judge, and as far as we know, Judge Chutkan has kept her bias within the confines of her courtroom (where it’s okay??) One would hope that for a trial this high-profile and a judge this incredibly biased, Trump’s case could be an exception.
RELATED: You have to see what Trump legal adviser John Eastman had to say when he was arraigned in Fulton County, Georgia, on Wednesday. Eastman is an eminent legal scholar and law professor who has been smeared with ridiculous racketeering charges by a biased local DA, and he took a moment before his arraignment to deliver via reporters a law lecture to Fani Willis, since she obviously didn’t pay attention to those at Emory University.
Eastman eviscerated Willis for her outrageous conduct and lack of understanding of the law. He said she is attempting to criminalize people exercising their rights and lawyers doing their job, and that her destructive actions are already having “profound consequences for our system of justice.” Victoria Taft’s piece at PJ MEDIA is a must-read.
NOTES ON THE “COUNTER-PROGRAMMING”: Tucker’s interview with President Trump
Warning: about halfway through Tucker Carlson’s interview with President Trump --- maybe sooner --- you’re really, really going to start missing him. It’s going to hurt a little. How refreshing to hear from someone who actually knew what he was doing, both domestically and on the world stage. This is the Donald Trump that Trump-haters won’t allow themselves to acknowledge, as it would create such cognitive dissonance for them that they would just melt down. Here are some highlights...
Tucker noted that in former Attorney General Bill Barr’s book, he “clearly lies” about Jeffrey Epstein’s death and says Epstein killed himself. (Tucker made it clear he thought Epstein was murdered.) Trump said he didn’t know what Barr had said about Epstein’s death and that he himself didn’t know one way or the other. But “a case could be made either way.” BUT...
“Bill Barr didn’t do an investigation, [of Epstein’s death] or of the election fraud, either. He said he did, and he pretended he did, but he didn’t. McSwain, the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, said Barr just wouldn’t let him do it; it was crazy.” He said that Barr was terrified of being impeached by the left.
As Tucker observed, the trajectory of Trump’s candidacy in 2015 and later presidency was marked first by massive, organized anti-Trump protests, then by two (count ‘em) impeachments, and now a series of indictments. “The next stage,” he said, “is violence. Are you worried that they might try and kill you?”
He didn’t address that directly but did characterize them as “savage animals.” There are great people in the Democrat Party, he said, and he represented everybody, but “I’ve seen what they do, I’ve seen the lengths that they go to,” invoking the Russia Hoax.
“Barr should’ve gone after them [Russia Hoaxers], and other people should’ve gone after them.” They did, “very late,” and the result was the Durham Report, which he characterized as “fairly good,” in that “it explained how corrupt it was.”
On the other hand, Trump praised Inspector General Michael Horowitz for doing “a phenomenal job” on Comey, McCabe and “some of the others.”
Trump said the policies of the Democrats, such as open borders, reflect a hatred of our country.
As for cheating in 2020, Trump said, “We have so much on it,” referring to the use of COVID as an excuse to change the standards and cheat. “Judges didn’t want to look; people didn’t want to get involved.”
But, of 2023, “I have never seen spirit like there is right now,” he said. “...And the reason is because Crooked Joe Biden is so bad. He’s the worst President in the history of our country.”
“He’s so corrupt that I took the name off Hillary. You know, I don’t do two people at one time.” He retired “Crooked Hillary” so he could apply it to Biden. “I’ll bet she was very happy,” he said.
There were some great laughs. “They love pictures of him [Biden] on the beach. I think he looked terrible on the beach.”
“Plus, the beach doesn’t represent what a President’s supposed to be doing.” He mentioned a variety of things the President could be doing instead, but of course the first thing that comes to mind, because of the timing, is helping the people of Hawaii.
Trump said that if Biden dropped out, there might be a “free-for-all.” As for Kamala Harris, “her moments are almost as bad as his.” He thinks “they probably have some kind of a primary and other people will get involved...could be [California Gov. Gavin Newsom], could be somebody else.”
The mention of Newsom led him to say that people used to care if you had a bad record but today it “doesn’t really mean anything.” That’s hard to hear, but it would explain a lot.
He said that Kim Jong-Un now has “massive nuclear power” and that he kept us from having nuclear war with North Korea. Kim Jong-Un was “expecting” to go into a nuclear war.
When asked if foreign leaders look at Biden and speculate that others are running the government, Trump said, “Well, somebody else has to be.”
Trump lamented the decaying state of Democrat-run cities, saying, “You know, Republican-run cities are doing very nicely, because they arrest people when you have crimes.”
Looking at the double standard of justice as applied to him and Biden, “I think the people of our country don’t get enough credit for how smart they are,” he said. And he believes Biden is compromised “because China knows so much about him... [Biden] in many ways is a Manchurian Candidate…and he’s afraid to tell Russia to get out of Cuba. He’s afraid to tell China [who is building military installations in Cuba] to get out of Cuba.”
‘If I’m President, they’ll get out.”
He noted that Chinese incursion goes far beyond Cuba and is “all over South America.” China also controls the Panama Canal, which, under President Carter, we sold to Panama for one dollar, after we’d lost 35,000 American canal construction workers to malaria.
He said that “radical left lunatics” are destroying America with electric cars and “the windmills all over the place” --- “which by the way don’t work, and...for the most part, they’re made in China.” THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP.
As for elections, he said the only reason not to want Voter ID is to make it easier to cheat. He also said “we should go back to all-paper ballots,” noting that France did that after an ill-fated attempt to have electronic voting. “Any time you have mail-in ballots, you’re gonna have massive cheating,” he said.
Their policies are so bad, he said, that they have to cheat. Nobody wants the policies they’re trying to force on the American people. And he knows they’ll go after any candidate, even if it’s not him. “If somebody else got in,” he said quietly, “other than me, they’ll go at him, just as viciously as they did me. These people are sick.”
“I do get credit for holding up quite well, I must tell you.”
Fun topics include Chris Wallace vs. Mike Wallace, the joy (not necessarily) of driving an electric car, Mitch McConnell (not flattering), the “laptop from hell” and the “classic earmarks” letter, and the FBI’s “insurance policy” against his win in 2016. “When I fired Comey, it was like throwing a rock into a hornets’ nest,” he said. All in all, this interview was much more entertaining, thoughtful and un-focus-grouped than the “official” GOP presidential primary debate. Don’t miss it!
https://twitter.com/
Gaffe-tastic
President Biden’s gaffe-tastic visit to Hawaii to view the tragic Maui wildfire aftermath and allegedly offer comfort to the victims has so offended and enraged locals that one commentator said Hawaii might have just turned Republican. (John Nolte at Breitbart.com conveniently listed his nine cruelest bungles.)
https://www.breitbart.com/
I won’t quote some of the comments about Biden by Hawaiians here because we don’t print that kind of language, but this article from the Daily Caller will give you the idea.
It doesn’t help that people have started noticing that making tragedies all about himself and greatly exaggerating his experiences, if they were even real at all, has become a habit.
Struck down
Federal judges struck down provisions of new election integrity laws in Texas and Georgia, although they let stand provisions in the Georgia law banning ballot harvesting and securing absentee ballot drop boxes.
These rulings will likely be appealed, so I won’t spend too much time on this. But it is a lesson for Republicans that just passing laws to secure ballots and elections isn’t enough. They have to be ready to fight for them when the Democrats go to any lengths to block even the most basic measures to make elections trustworthy and brand them as racist voter suppression and an assault on “our democracy."
They did that in Georgia, slandering state officials and driving the Major League All-Star Game out of Atlanta, only for post-election polls to show that black voters reported “zero” problems with voting. I suspect the Democrats won’t be happy until bails of blank ballots are being tossed out of helicopters with return postage on them.
No Newsletter
Government and Big Tech working together to censor conservative views, is a big reason why we changed things up and moved my newsletter to Substack.
Because you are a free subscriber to my newsletter, I would like you to consider subscribing to the paid version on Substack.
A Substack subscription-based newsletter allows my team and I to focus on what matters: the writing and the research we do to back up the writing, instead of worrying about censorship, or what Google is saying about me, how they are handling advertising on our website or whether or not my work shows up when you search for it.
To keep the newsletter going, we have setup a monthly goal of identifying 600 new paying subscribers for the month of August and we have 172 to go.
If you can afford to do so, please subscribe here:
To become a paid subscriber of my politics newsletter it is $5 monthly or $36 annually. I email daily and my politics newsletters usually take 10-15 minutes to read. I cover the news of the day and the liberal media. I write about the upcoming elections and dive deep on the Biden scandals. I will also share my opinion of the Trump indictment. I don’t think you will regret reading my newsletter regularly, so please consider subscribing today.
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
More incompetent Blue City leadership
I don’t like to constantly harp on the deadly incompetence of the leaders of blue cities and their refusal to do anything serious to restore law and order and protect innocent citizens. I actually hope and pray for a miracle, that they will wake up and do something effective and realistic. But we just keep getting horrific stories like this:
Citizens in Chicago have become so desperate to stop the gang violence that last week, a local youth organization pleaded with gangs that are having a war in Rogers Park to hold a ceasefire between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. That way, at least they would stop shooting kids, the elderly and working people who are out during daylight and get caught in the crossfire.
Did it work? Last weekend, there were over three dozen shootings in Chicago and at least seven killings. Two of the fatalities were students. One was a 14-year-old boy who was so looking forward to starting high school on Monday that he’d already packed his bag. He was shot in the head and chest while playing basketball. The other was a 17-year-old girl who was shot in a park at 4:10 p.m. Her 16-year-old male friend was shot in the leg but survived.
Every life is precious and every shooting is a tragedy and an outrage, but it’s especially terrible when young people, filled with hopes and dreams and with their whole lives in front of them, are mindlessly slaughtered. It steals from them everything they would have ever had or experienced, and everything they might have contributed to the world.
Derek Hunter at Townhall.com is also furious at this, not only over the tragic waste of life, but the way it’s downplayed and swept under the rug by the media because giving this story the coverage it deserves would be politically embarrassing for the Party that’s run Chicago for nearly a century (the same goes for other sinking blue cities, from San Francisco to Baltimore.) That’s the party that loves to proclaim that “Black Lives Matter,” but doesn’t act like they do. Hunter calls this prioritizing of politics over lives by its proper term: “evil.”
https://townhall.com/
Related: Speaking of the tragic consequences of liberals’ refusal to deal with reality, Kevin Downey Jr. at PJ Media has started a series on “gun myths.” He’s “fact-checking” claims about guns made by gun control advocates and a pro-gun rights website to see which one is telling the truth. The first topic under the microscope: the left’s claim that there are more shooting deaths in red states without strict gun laws than in blue states like Illinois. Check out how you have to bend and stretch the premise like a balloon animal artist to reach that conclusion.
Feel-Good Story of the Day:
A Grand Rapids, Michigan, man discovered that the former owner of his farm was telling the truth to him 30 years ago. The strange-looking rock that he’d been using all this time as a doorstop really was a space rock that landed on the farm. In fact, his door stop was a rare, large iron-nickel meteorite. Michigan University’s planetarium just paid him $75,000 for his door stop.
Say, does anyone know where I can get a bronzed lump of cow dung appraised?
Show of hands:
Who, regardless of their race or political views, really wants a cancer doctor who was trained by a professor whose chief qualification for the job was being the wokest applicant? Nobody? Then someone should tell that to San Diego State University’s Biology Department.
Oliver Anthony’s protest song on behalf of downtrodden working people soars
Virginia farmer Oliver Anthony’s protest song on behalf of downtrodden working people, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” came out of nowhere and resonated so strongly with Americans that it’s become the first debut record to hit #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart by an artist with no prior charting songs. It also blew past Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and other big-name artists, and is bringing him $40,000 a day in royalties. And of course, its populist message has made him a target for liberal media outlets that used to lionize singer-songwriters who stood up to the government. Now, these media outlets ARE “The Man,” or at least, the “Non-Binary Person.”
But leave it to CNN to offer the most clueless smear yet, from media writer Oliver Darcy. Darcy pushes the typical leftist talking point that this song is pandering to “rightwing” sentiments, even dropping the dreaded name “Trump” twice (never mind that Anthony said it’s not political, it was just meant to "give hope to the working class and your average hard working young man who may have lost hope in the grind of trying to get by." Something nobody working at CNN can relate to, obviously.)
But Darcy takes it further, lumping this song in with “Sound of Freedom,” “Try That in a Small Town,” Fox News, and anything else in our culture that appeals to someone other than liberal hedonists. He sees it as a terrible trend for society that some people are finally serving that huge audience that Hollywood and the music industry ignore and revile and giving them an alternate choice of news and entertainment that doesn’t spit on their values. Bemoaning the existence of Fox News, The Blaze and the Daily Caller, Darcy whines, “These outlets program their audiences to abhor companies like Disney and then show up with paid content designed to replace the Magic Kingdom in their households.”
Uh, pardon me? Nobody needed those outlets to turn us against Disney. Disney turned the American audience against themselves with their arrogant, leftist, “Not-so-secret gay agenda” and anti-American CRT lecturing crammed into children’s programming, among many other open insults. The same could be said of most of the mainstream entertainment industry (Have you watched the Oscars or Grammy Awards lately? Sorry, trick question: nobody has.) News flash: “Sound of Freedom” and “Rich Men North of Richmond” are outearning all the competition from tired, uninspired woke garbage because they’re superior, and people actually LIKE them.
Wait, it gets worse: Darcy frets that this trend “could spell the end of a shared popular culture, similar to how the advent of right-wing talk-radio and Fox News ultimately spelled the end of a shared understanding of current events.” Pardon me while I pick my jaw up off the floor.
Sorry, but there was never a “shared understanding of current events.” There was a monopoly on news by three networks and PBS, all staffed by well-paid liberal elitists in NYC, DC and L.A. expressing the same tunnel vision views. Out here in America, we saw through their biases all along, it just took us a while to figure out how to get our viewpoint out. Was he equally horrified when Elvis, or even more shocking, black artists like Little Richard, started getting radio airplay that spelled the end of our shared understanding that music should only sound like Lawrence Welk and Mitch Miller?
I’ve been encouraging readers for years not just to boycott Hollywood but to support artists who are on their side (we often promote them, and I welcome them onto my TBN show), because Heaven knows the mainstream entertainment industry doesn’t support them. Now that they are succeeding by putting out superior products that the public likes, these people are panicking. They see their gravy train going off the rails, and they’re painting the public's rejection of their swill as a disaster for American popular culture.
No, leftists were the disaster for American popular culture, spreading their wokeness and nihilism, and silencing, mocking and vilifying anyone who disagreed with them. Now, at long last, Americans are taking their pop culture back. My advice to them: Either compete by learning how to make good movies, TV shows and music that don't repel audiences, or go find another line of work.
This Was No Accident!
By Kenneth Allard
Blissfully enjoying the relief from our first rain in over two months while anticipating tonight's Little League World series, my reverie was suddenly interrupted when insistent headlines intruded. Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin killed in Russian plane crash! Remember that heart-clutching moment in June when General Prigozhin led a coup against Vladimir Putin, inexplicably halting just when his success seemed assured? It was unclear back then how this mini-rebellion might ultimately play our but I concluded, “it will be interesting…to watch the Moscow accident reports as various people commit suicide, die of undiagnosed diseases or perish in untimely traffic accidents.”
It is one thing to poison your opponents, another for their bodies to be found outside high-rise buildings: but to shoot down a private plane midway between Moscow and Saint Petersburg? Isn’t that just a tad blatant, even for a died-in-the wool thug like Putin? I heard at least one network commentator wonder plaintively, “Well, couldn’t this have been an accidental shoot-down?” Of all the possible explanations, the least plausible is that Russian air defenses – known during the Soviet era as PVO Strany – would act independently of a chain of command that is centralized in doctrine and practice, a rigidly top-down structure meant to reflect the orders of the elites. As the Soviets often used to say among themselves when discussing policy dilemmas, “These things, Comrade, are not accidental.”
Today’s events reminded me of when I faced the hurdle most feared by every graduate student: the two-hour examination in which my interlocutors were genuine experts, eager to test my grasp of Russian foreign and military affairs. Their opening was surprisingly gentle, asking what books and authors had been particularly helpful in forming my understanding of the Soviet military and political systems? While reviewing the standard sources, I remembered a key warning from the grad student grapevine: always try to control the discussion. “Sir, all these books have been helpful but the one that helped me most as an operational intelligence officer was Mario Puzo’s novel, The Godfather.” Game on!
Defending this unlikely metaphor proved surprisingly easy, because the Soviet system of controlling agriculture, heavy industry and what little consumer production existed was comparable to the way the Mob ran the rackets, the girls, the numbers and maybe even Hollywood! Our debate turned into a no-holds-barred discussion that ran a half-hour beyond the scheduled closing time. Maybe that is why today as Russian television broadcast those startling images of Prigozhin’s plane haplessly nose-diving to earth (also not an accidental occurrence!) I recalled that epic scene when Michael Corleone presided over the baptism of his infant nephew. Do you remember how Michael responded to the priest’s questioning (“I do renounce the Devil, father”) even as the camera cut-in showed his thugs killing every Mob boss who opposed him. Sorry, father, but neither Don Michael nor Don Vladimir were doing anything except ruthlessly pursuing their own agendas.
Now Joe Biden has more in common with those two characters than you might suppose; but he is also the least likely person on earth to draw far-sighted conclusions from today’s events. Everything about Putin’s most recent actions – from the determined defense of Russian territorial gains in eastern Ukraine to his latest attempts to offset severe personnel and material losses – suggests only a man determined to prevail whatever the cost. Some analysts have been so bold as to predict a sudden collapse of Putin’s latest venture and possibly even threatening Russian state viability as well. Well, what if those analysts are wrong? What if that classic KGB-trained tyrant is more serious about defending his expansive vision of the Russian state than Joe Biden is about stopping him? Most critically: Are there any reasons to imagine that Joe Biden’s perceptions of Putin are better-founded than, say, his understanding of what is required to win a conflict - from our southern border to the European territory covered by Article 5 of the NATO Treaty?
There are a number of stark examples that President Biden and his advisors would do well to consider in coming days: But the killing of Yevgeniy Prigozhin should be first among them.
Colonel (Ret.) Kenneth Allard is a former Cold War intelligence officer, West Point professor and Dean of the National War College. From 1998-2008, he was an on-air military analyst for the networks of NBC News.
I JUST WANTED TO SAY:
Thank you for reading my newsletter.
For more news, visit my website.
Permalink: https://www.mikehuckabee.com/2023/8/huckabee-post-this-was-no-accident
Leave a Comment
Note: Fields marked with an * are required.