Mike Huckabee

Investigative reporter Paul Sperry has just come out with a “developing” story about investigators learning that Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan set up a task force to target then-candidate Donald Trump. Such a task force would certainly explain a lot of what happened with the “Russia Russia Russia!” story, and we’ve been hypothesizing something similar for quite some time, as it's obvious that Brennan’s in deep. Former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson reported on the task force about a year ago. Here’s what Johnson has to say about it now, in light of Sperry’s latest revelation.

A retired CIA colleague told Johnson in October of 2019 that Brennan had set up a task force, hand-picking the group himself instead of going through the usual posting. Apparently not everyone accepted the invitation, which “could be a problem for John Brennan,” Johnson wrote.

"I am not talking about an informal group of disgruntled Democrats working at the CIA who got together like a book club to grouse and complained about the brash real estate guy from New York,” Johnson said, though I imagine they did that sort of thing, too. “It was a specially designed covert action to try to destroy Donald Trump.”

The way Johnson explains it, a CIA task force, as designed and first used in 1947, can be “expanded” to include personnel from other intel agencies such as the FBI, DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) and NSA (National Security Agency). It operates outside the CIA organizational chart. A typical and appropriate use for it might be to go after foreign terrorists or drug traffickers; it would certainly NOT be used to go after a U.S. presidential candidate! But Johnson was told that’s exactly what Brennan did, with the blessings of then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. (The director of national intelligence coordinates the various intel agencies.)

Johnson’s friends in the CIA have told him that the task force was operating in early 2016 and possibly even in summer 2015. (This would explain a lot of what we’ve already learned from the reporting of Lee Smith and others.)

According to Johnson, the anti-Trump task force included CIA case officers (“handlers” for overseas spies), intel analysts and administrators. Importantly, personnel from the FBI might also have been invited, including Michael Gaeta, the FBI’s “handler” for “confidential human source” (SPY) Christopher Steele, a former member of British spy organization MI-6.

CIA case officers on the task force would have been able to work with foreign intelligence, such as Steele in MI-6 and diplomat Alexander Downer from Australia. They could have used someone like Joseph Mifsud to target George Papadopoulos. They could also have used the NSA to do “targeted collections”; that is to say, to intercept their communications. Let me again stress, all of these activities are legal when used against foreign terrorists or drug traffickers; they are NOT legal when used against a U.S. citizen, and most especially against a major party nominee for President.

Johnson hopes there’s also been an investigation into the so-called impeachment “whistleblower,” ERIC CIARAMELLA (yes, we still dare to use his name around here), to see if he was a part of the task force or perhaps reporting to them.

If this is the way Brennan were using a CIA task force, it was illegal. But even with all he was trying to do to tie Trump to the Russians, he was never able to do it. And no one ever will –- because (say it with me) Trump wasn’t conspiring with the Russians.

Moving ahead to Paul Sperry’s tweet, it makes news because he says not only that Brennan did this, but that “investigators “HAVE LEARNED” he did this.

I assume he’s referring to John Durham’s investigators. Here’s what Sperry tweeted:

"DEVELOPING: Investigators have learned that Obama CIA Director John Brennan ran a secret task force out of Langley with its own separate budget to investigate Trump campaign and alleged ties to Russia. Taskforce set up before FBI officially launched its own probe on 7/31/16.”

Ah, it had its own separate budget. Your tax dollars at work.

Another journalist, Adam Housley, responded, “He’d been doing this well before Trump. As I have reported. Remember I’ve been saying John Brennan ran his own op and had been doing that. I’ve reported/said this for 3 years...”

According to the WASHINGTON EXAMINER, Brennan was questioned by Durham’s team at Langley, his old stomping ground, but Brennan’s spokesperson has said he was told he’s not “a subject or a target” of Durham’s investigation. At the same time, according to ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes, Brennan is NOT in the clear, as he lied under oath to Congress about not including the Steele “dossier” in the Intel Community Assessment of Trump/Russia collusion in January of 2017. (Recall that he laughably said it was not in the “corpus” of information they used.)

If investigators have suddenly found evidence of Brennan’s task force, he can become a subject or target with the snap of a finger. Brennan, who loathes President Trump and has even called him a traitor, is up to his eyeballs in this. And it seems these off-the-book task forces were his M.O., even before he cranked one up against the future President. It’s almost inevitable that some participants are going to skate in this, but let’s hope that justice will finally be served to the one who led the whole thing.

UPDATE LATE WEDNESDAY

As reported in the DAILY WIRE, Attorney General Bill Barr gives us reason to anticipate more criminal indictments in the Durham investigation.

Mike Huckabee

I almost hate to get out of bed these days because apparently, each new sunrise between now and the election is going to bring yet another phony, anonymously-sourced anti-Trump “BOMBSHELL!” fable that some Democratic Party mouthpiece with a byline has been sitting on for two or three years, waiting to launch it within two months of the election. And the rest of the media will dutifully rush to jawbone over it, as if it were the most important story of the day, thinking it’s somehow going to convince Trump voters to violate every principle they hold and go vote for Biden, despite having had four years to watch how Trump actually governs while fielding endless daily attacks of fake news and made-up quotes.

Wednesday’s came to us courtesy of Bob Woodward, who used to be a journalist in the Watergate days of 45 years ago, but has since given us widely-denounced potboilers like the John Belushi hatchet job “Wired;” “Veil,” the CIA expose in which he claimed to hear former CIA Director William Casey’s deathbed confession, even though he was barred from the room and Casey could no longer talk; and now, two anti-Trump books. The controversy du Wednesday came from Woodward’s claim that in a March 19th phone call, Trump told him about the coronavirus, “I wanted to always play it down.” He conveniently didn’t play up the rest of the quote: “I still like playing it down because I don't want to create a panic."

Woodward concludes his book with this quote: “Trump is the wrong man for the job.” You know, like reliable, objective journalists do.

At this link, Matt Vespa covers the latest hair-on-fire “controversy”….

…and also points out that no matter what Trump did, the media and the Democrats (but I repeat myself) would have said he was wrong. If he had played up the dangers, they would’ve accused him of inciting panic. If he didn’t, he would be accused of not taking it seriously. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci responded to Woodward’s claims by saying that there was never a time that Trump contradicted what the top doctors were telling him. It was a new disease and it took awhile for people to learn what we were dealing with. At least Trump’s instincts, like shutting off travel from China immediately, were correct, even while Biden and other Democrats were calling him a racist and a xenophobe for doing it.

Of course, Biden immediately cited the book to slam Trump because if there’s one thing we’ve learned about Joe Biden, it’s that he never waits to find out whether an accusation is true or not before he condemns someone for it. Exactly what you want in a guy who has his finger on the nuclear button.

But Woodward himself is also facing backlash, with questions like, “If you had evidence that Trump was downplaying a deadly airborne disease months ago, why did you wait until close the election and the release of your book to tell anyone?” I guess for the same reason that Democrats who now claim they would have taken it more seriously than Trump were denouncing him for overreacting while telling everyone to ignore it and come on down to Chinatown. Or as late as this summer, telling people that it was fine to ignore safety procedures and go to BLM protests.

As long as we’re playing 20/20 hindsight and blaming political opponents for deaths, here’s a MUST-READ article by Matt Margolis that blows away the laughable claim that if only Biden had been in charge, the pandemic wouldn’t have been so bad. No, it’s not about the H1N1 pandemic that happened under Obama/Biden and that only good luck and the grace of God kept from killing millions of Americans because of their lack of action. This is about the VA scandal. Remember that?

Did you know that more than 300,000 veterans died because of the long waiting lists for care at VA clinics under Obama/Biden, which is 120,000 more Americans than have died of the coronavirus nationwide? Did you know that the problem was improving until they took over, and then it got worse (processing times increased 40% from 2011 to 2013)? Did you know that people who caused the problem and falsified records to cover it up were not investigated and even got promoted while there were complaints of retaliation against whistleblowers who exposed it in 28 states? And this problem was definitely fixable, because when Donald Trump was elected, he FIXED IT!

I hope I don’t have to deal with fresh garbage deliveries by the media every day between now and the election. I think most people have figured out this game by now. At this late date, we’ve lived through this so many times already that nobody’s going to vote for the donkeys because their sheep in the media keep crying wolf.

Mike Huckabee

Yesterday, I brought you what I consider to be THE MOST important story you’ll hear between now and the election: the plan to create election chaos and do whatever it takes –- riots, looting, military intervention –- to get Joe Biden inaugurated, regardless of the will of the voters. The plan is to organize a coup to take down the President and twist the scenario to make it look as though it’s actually the President trying to play “dictator” and bringing it about.

Last night, I went on Sean Hannity’s TV show, along with former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, to talk about one key element of the plan: the ease of voter fraud.

Ari noted some of the problems we’re going to have with mail-in ballots, even with absentee ballots. “Ballot harvesting is really the biggest problem out there,” he said, “because what it means is, it’s licensing people from the parties, and in particular the Democrat Party that does this, to go out and subject voters to possible intimidation.” They can collect votes from Republican areas and not turn them in, he explained, while turning in the ballots from Democrat areas. And that’s just one way to mess up the count. “There’s no accountability,” he said, “no tracing or tracking on these ballots once they’re collected.”

He noted another problem: states whose deadlines are much too close to Election Day to apply for an absentee ballot. “They won’t get it in time,” he said. “And then all the lawyers are going to be empowered to demand to count every vote, even the ones that came in after Election Day.”

I would add that even the Associated Press is now pointing out problems with absentee ballots. I doubt seriously they'd be doing this unless they thought it helped the Biden campaign.

"If ballots are rejected at the same rate as during this year’s primaries,” the AP story said, “up to three times as many voters in November could be disenfranchised in key battleground states when compared to the last Presidential election, according to an AP analysis of rejected ballots. It could be even more pronounced in some urban areas where Democratic votes are concentrated and ballot rejection rates trended higher during this year’s primaries.”

Ah, and there it is: “some urban areas where Democratic votes are concentrated.” The AP is referring to non-white areas, helping to set the stage for race-based disenfranchisement to be used as a pretext to mess with election results. The AP story places this squarely on the agenda. At the same time, TRUMP is being criticized for casting doubt on the accuracy of absentee and, especially, mail-in voting this fall. HE has to be the one blamed for the election chaos, especially if he wins the initial vote count.

This is going to be a mess, and that’s precisely what the Biden campaign wants, as they almost certainly have internal polling that shows better-than-expected results for Trump. The irony is, Trump is absolutely correct about the inaccuracy about mail-in vote counts and the ease with which the system can be gamed. He doesn’t want mail-in voting. He's old-school; he wants all the votes to count, you know, like in AMERICA.

That’s why he (like me) is encouraging voters to cast their ballots in person, not to mail them. He doesn’t want post-election chaos. It’s the Democrats who want it, and they'll make it happen no matter what they have to do. Heck, they’ve got people writing the checks who will PAY rioters to burn down cities.

By the way, Democrats have found something else to be outraged at President Trump about: his recent tongue-in-cheek comment to supporters about voting for him twice. They seriously accuse him of having broken the law for encouraging voters to cast more than one ballot. I think the main problem the left has might be that they just don’t have a sense of humor. They don’t “get” when he's kidding. Heck, they still think he was seriously telling Russia to find Hillary's emails.

That’s why it actually might be a good idea for the Left Coast to secede and take all those leftists with no sense of humor with them. They can burn their own cities down and listen to their unfunny late-night talk shows in their safe spaces while we get back to work and laugh at their stupidity.

Along those lines, I pointed out on HANNITY that the desire for chaos is being driven not by enthusiasm for Joe Biden, goodness knows, but just by hatred for Donald Trump. “They don’t care who gets elected,” I said, “as long as it isn’t Donald Trump.” And this time, it’s even worse than in past years, when maybe we were just worried about who was going to get the “cemetery” vote. Now, we have to worry about people getting more than one ballot and all the other problems.

As I’ve been saying, President Trump has to have an army of people to go vote, IN PERSON. “If the river is flooding, swim the river at flood stage,” I told Hannity.

He brought up another good point: we need poll watchers everywhere! And we’ll also need an army of LAWYERS. It’s sad that we need this, but we do. (Ari recalled the scenario in which Al Franken finally “won” the Senate race in Minnesota after Norm Coleman actually won the vote count on Election Day. As the recount progressed, 26 precincts ended up with more ballots cast than there were registered voters.)

Normally, I think that when it comes to lawyers, the fewer the better. But this time, bring on the lawyers! Reportedly, the Democrats have brought on board over 600 of them. So, CALLING ALL LAWYERS who are fair-minded and want to work for an accurate (as opposed to a partisan) vote count. We are going to need you. If I were a lawyer, I would be on board right now.

Left-wing groups such as MoveOn.org are already organizing a day of “mass public unrest” after Election Day, just in case they don’t like the results (and I don’t think they’re going to). As we’ve said, they want to tie the election in knots and then BLAME TRUMP for it, even as they’re doing it themselves. Look at how they’re already trying to twist the narrative, including their threat of the West Coast seceding unless their demands are met. I say again, let ‘em go.