By Mike Huckabee
October 18, 2022
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BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee staff! Thank you for subscribing and I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter. There is no Evening Edition today.
With gratitude,
Mike
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
32 Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.
Ephesians 4:32
Jury still out on Danchenko, but OUR verdict is in on FBI
The Danchenko case went to the jury, a 12-member panel at the federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, on Monday after Special Counsel John Durham offered closing arguments blasting the FBI. No, it’s not technically the FBI that’s on trial here, but Durham made it clear that their mishandling of the case doesn’t let Danchenko off the hook for lying to them. (We’d say just the opposite: Danchenko’s false statements helped enable the FBI maintain their own false narrative.)
Durham called the FBI’s multiple failures “the elephant in the room,” and proceeded to discuss it. He’d already determined through his questioning that neither they nor any other U.S. intelligence agency had obtained any corroborating evidence for the Steele dossier.
You know the background of that dossier; there’s no need to go through that again. In short: all roads lead back to Hillary.
Part of what the prosecution has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt is that Danchenko lied when he said he’d had a phone call with Sergei Millian, a former head of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. Phone records show Danchenko did not receive a call at the time Danchenko said it came in. But in his closing arguments, Danchenko’s attorney Stuart Sears said the prosecution hadn’t proved there was no phone call, because there still could have been one made through a phone app, which would not have shown up in the records.
As you definitely know if you read yesterday’s newsletter, the judge has already dropped one of the five charges Danchenko faced for lying to the FBI, on an outrageous technicality. That charge was for denying he “talked” to dossier source Charles Dolan, a Democrat operative and longtime Clinton ally; the judge agreed with Danchenko’s legal team that he was not technically lying because their communication was by email, not actual talking.
Lawyers.
(Incidentally, it took a poisonous eel like Andrew Weissmann to exploit such ridiculous legal hair-splitting, when he tweeted: “Judge dismisses on day 3 of trial one of the charges. This is more than just embarrassing for Durham; it shows a complete lack of objectivity and judgment. How do you charge someone with a crime of making a false statement that is literally true. Answer: you don’t.”)
As for Danchenko’s claim of a phone call with Millian, FOX NEWS reports that “Due to the possibility of Danchenko’s call with Millian taking place over a phone app versus a traditional phone line, Sears said Durham’s team has a ‘giant hole in their case and they can’t fill it with conjecture and argument.”
What the FOX NEWS story doesn’t mention is that the reason they have this “giant hole” is that Sergei Millian, who is not in this country and therefore out of reach of a subpoena, refused to come to the U.S. and testify at this trial. If he were here, he could’ve clarified for the jury whether he and Danchenko had a phone conversation. He told the FBI he’d not had a phone call with Danchenko, but he is not available now to tell that to the jury. If Danchenko walks, it might simply be because of this, so you see what the special counsel is up against.
In case you missed this detail, it was also revealed that the FBI paid Danchenko more than $200,000 to be a confidential human source for the Bureau during the Trump-Russia investigation. This appears to have been done to keep Danchenko’s activities “classified” and out of the reach of investigators. Your tax dollars at work!
So the jury is still out, literally, until at least sometime Tuesday. It may be that Danchenko walks, and that’s likely for the reason above. It’s frustrating, but in the larger scheme of things, it’s small potatoes.
As JUST THE NEWS reports, while Durham was criticizing the FBI during his summation to the jury, the presiding judge, U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga. told him to wrap it up.
Nick Arama in REDSTATE has another revelation from the trial that, not surprisingly, has received minimal coverage. Two people who worked on Robert Mueller’s team, supervisory Special Agent Amy Anderson and former FBI Intelligence Analyst Brittany Hertzog –- both specifically tasked with scrutinizing the allegations in the Trump dossier –- both testified on Friday that they thought the FBI should review and further investigate Charles Dolan, partly due to his business connections to Danchenko. (By this time, Danchenko, a Russian national, had been made a paid FBI informant.)
They were also concerned about Dolan’s links to Danchenko’s friend Olga Galkina, a self-described “big fan” of Hillary who had also been listed as a sub-source by Danchenko for the dossier, though she denies being one. Danchenko introduced Galkina and Dolan in 2016. Dolan apparently had a history of working closely with Russian officials, most notably Dmitri Peskov, press secretary to Vladimir Putin (!). The two agents tried for weeks to get an investigation started, they said, as they were concerned about a possible national security threat, but Supervisory Special Agent Joe Nelson told them the FBI wasn’t going to pursue it.
After being instructed not to take any action on the Dolan-Danchenko link, Agent Hertzog serialized her report on Dolan’s connections with Galkina in three separate case files to try to get it reviewed by 1) the Washington Field Office, 2) FBI Headquarters, and/or 3) the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General, which would be Michael Horowitz.
We learn from this that while Hillary was trying mightily to link then-candidate Donald Trump to Putin, it was her own longtime friend and dossier source Charles Dolan who had the close Putin ties. The FBI has to use a fictional report to justify an investigation of Trump and his associates, but give them REAL concerns of a REAL Clinton associate with REAL Russian ties, and they won’t touch it.
My team had really wanted to hear more about Dolan, and Durham did not disappoint last week. According to the special counsel, this Hillary ally “interacted with senior Russian Federation leadership whose names would later appear in the dossier, and also ‘maintained relationships with’ Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. and the head of the Russian Embassy’s Economic Section in Washington, DC, ‘both of whom would also later appear by name’ in the dossier.” Dolan spent years doing business in Russia and with the Russian government, including in 2016. If our own government were truly concerned with the existential threat posed by “Russia Russia Russia!!!,” wouldn’t they have clamored to look into this?
And as long as we’re talking about the FBI’s extreme reluctance to look into the Russian ties of powerful Democrats, Arama has another story on that theme, this time involving Hunter Biden. While we wait for the Danchenko verdict, I hope you’ll read about the $40 million investment paid to Hunter’s company Rosemont Realty by Yelena Baturina, a close Putin ally who was the widow of a corrupt former Moscow mayor, and her brother Viktor Baturin.
It’s not clear if the DOJ is even looking into these deals of Hunter’s. What do you think?
According to Miranda Devine and Emily Crane at the NEW YORK POST, this $40 million is just for one deal. Their sources say the total “investment” in Rosemont Realty was over $100 million. The wire transfers from Baturina were apparently among those flagged for suspicious activity but –- surprise! –- received no follow-up from the FBI.
John Solomon has uncovered another example of the Biden family’s grift from China, saying the FBI has the evidence. Five years ago, Biden’s clan got a zero-interest, forgivable $5 million loan from Chinese energy company CEFC. The email discussion of this is stunning.
Finally, the Laugh Of The Day: Peter Strzok on MSNBC talking about how unbiased and “professional” his FBI team were during RussiaGate. Unintentionally hilarious.
Banana republic-style persecution
If anyone still doubts that the DOJ is engaged in a banana republic-style persecution of the Democrats’ political enemies, this should settle the question: Biden’s “Justice” Department asked a federal judge to sentence former Trump aide Steve Bannon to the maximum six months in prison and a $200,000 fine for contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House January 6th Kangaroo Kommittee.
https://redstate.com/bonchie/
As Bonchie notes at Redstate.com, this level of punishment is virtually unheard of. In fact, prosecuting people at all for not complying with a Congressional subpoena is nearly unheard of. Former Obama officials Eric Holder and Lois Lerner thumbed their noses at contempt of Congress charges and went on their merry way as the DOJ declined to prosecute them at all. But then, they’re Democrats, so laws that are dropped on Republicans like 16-ton weights don’t apply to them.
Bonchie’s suggestion is that once the Republicans win back Congress, they need to start treating every Democrat with the same iron fist the Dems have adopted until they learn their lesson and beg to return to the previous norms of non-political prosecutions. Of course, they can't take it all the way until the White House and the DOJ are back in Republican hands, so let’s keep working to make sure that happens in 2024.
This story from CNN has more background, including details on how Bannon offered to cooperate if they’d drop the charges but the Kommittee refused.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/
Prosecutors also claim he hasn’t shown “contrition.” For what? He was convicted of exhibiting contempt for an out-of-control, partisan hit squad that was illegitimately formed in violation of its own founding resolution, which required five members to be appointed by GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy. Nancy Pelosi rejected his picks and appointed two rabidly anti-Trump “Republicans” instead.
They’ve gone on to waste taxpayer money on months of hyperbolic claims backed by no evidence except of the cherry-picked and hearsay variety, with no cross-examination, no chance for those they accused to respond to the charges, and a complete disregard for basic fairness and due process. Under the circumstances, contempt is the only reasonable reaction.
“Three Weeks to Rescue America”
Today, the midterm elections are exactly three weeks away (or as I like to think of it, “Three Weeks to Rescue America”), and early voting has begun in 17 states, including such key states as Arizona and Georgia. I advise Republicans to ignore the polls and keep working like crazy right up to (and these days, at least a week beyond) Election Day -- even though the polls are looking scarier for Democrats than anything Hollywood came up with this Halloween.
But because it’s fun to think about how much it must pain CBS to report this, I’ll tell you that the latest CBS Battleground Poll shows that the Dems have pretty much peaked in their support and races are swinging toward the Republicans. Now that people are really paying attention, Independents are breaking toward the GOP. Independents who report that they’re being hurt by the economy and inflation (who isn’t?) are going Republican by double digit margins.
Inflation and the economy are the top issues for voters, and they trust the GOP more on those. Forty-eight percent blame the Democrats for high prices, and 71% think President Biden is either “somewhat” or “a lot” responsible; while only 28% think he’s a “little” or “not at all” to blame (I guess those people aren’t paying attention yet.)
The Democrats, having failed on all other issues, are running almost exclusively on liberal elitist niche issues like “Republicans are a fascist threat to democracy” (a desperate lie only their hardcore base and the media are buying) and unrestricted abortion. The CBS poll shows that they’ve gotten all the support from being the Abortion Party that they’re likely to get, and that’s mostly in blue areas they were going to win anyway. The percentage of voters who say abortion is very important has actually dropped over the past month.
That’s something I predicted months ago. I said they could gin up hysteria over abortion for a while, but it would peter out once people realized that it was only an issue in places that weren’t going to restrict abortion anyway. Their disastrous handling of the economy, the border, crime and other issues has only worsened, and those are a much bigger priority for voters.
It’s a simple question: when you leave home every day, what do you worry about more? Being able to afford gas and groceries and getting home alive? Or obtaining a late term abortion? If I were running for office, I’d sure prefer to have the votes of the first group.
RNC files lawsuit against Pennsylvania
The Republican National Committee and other GOP organizations have filed a lawsuit against Pennsylvania to try to prevent more questions about the legitimacy of the vote in the upcoming elections.
Pennsylvania law requires that mail-in ballots be filled out, dated and signed on the outside of the envelope, and if not signed, they “will not be counted.” The Supreme Court affirmed that counting unsigned mail-in ballots is illegal under state law. But the Democratic Acting Secretary of the Commonwealth is blatantly continuing to direct local election boards to count any “timely received” but unsigned and undated mail-in ballots.
The lawsuit asks the Court to uphold the state law, declare the Acting Secretary’s guidance invalid, and "immediately issue an order directing county boards of elections to segregate any undated or incorrectly dated ballots received for the 2022 general election" since early voting has already begun.
You know, if you don’t want people to believe the “Big Lie” that they can’t trust our elections, maybe stop looking so much like you’re trying to rig the elections.
Biden eats a lot of ice cream
The polls have Democrats so desperate, they’re trying to blame Republicans for problems they obviously created themselves, like rampant crime in blue cities that defunded the police (Robert Reich blames that on Republicans for not backing gun control, as if that would end mass shoplifting) and inflation (Republicans didn’t vote for their “Inflation Reduction Act,” which is actually making inflation worse.)
This isn’t working because most Americans are smart enough to realize what the problems are and who caused them. And how much has two years of Democrat rule cost the average American? The Heritage Foundation did a study that puts a number on it: $34,000!
https://nypost.com/2022/10/16/
Americans’ 401K retirement accounts have lost $2.1 trillion in value so far this year. The average 401K balance has dropped from $135,000 to $101,000, a $34,000 loss. But it’s actually worse than that: thanks to inflation, $101,000 in 2021 dollars is only worth $96,000 today, an additional $5,000 loss. And if you’re part of a traditional pension fund, they’ve lost a total of nearly $4 trillion in value this year. The crashing stock prices aren’t just affecting the rich, they’re really hurting seniors.
That’s why Biden is coming across as so glaringly out of touch with working Americans, like when a reporter asked him about the economy while he was enjoying one of his frequent ice cream cones, and he snapped back, “The economy is strong as hell!” I like to think he just mixed up his words again and said “strong as” when he meant to say, “going to.”
At least Biden’s ice cream habit sparked a hilarious line courtesy of Georgia Senate candidate Hershel Walker. Pressed by an NBC reporter with the kind of question they never ask Democrats about Republicans – “Can you name one thing that President Biden has done that you support?” – Walker replied:
“He eats a lotta cream.”
I JUST WANTED TO SAY:
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