Mike Huckabee

Here’s today’s Fox News link to the latest bulletins on the Russian invasion of Ukraine:

https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/ukraine-russia-live-updates-03-23-2022

The latest headlines:

Russian forces continued shelling the cities of Mariupol and Kyiv. Thousands of Mariupol residents fled Tuesday, and Ukrainian forces continued to hold off the Russians in Kyiv. Ukraine claimed Russian troops took 15 rescue workers and bus drivers captive who were trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Mariupol. Poland expelled what it said were 45 Russian spies claiming to be diplomats (in America, we call those “U.N. ambassadors” and don’t expel them.) The Russian ambassador to Indonesia claimed that Putin plans to attend the G20 Summit in Bali in October. I’d say that’s about as overly optimistic as his belief that Ukrainians would welcome Russian troops and a puppet government with open arms.

There will be a NATO summit tomorrow to discuss what to do about Ukraine. Russia’s Foreign Minister warned that if NATO sends peacekeeper troops into Ukraine, that “would lead to a direct clash between the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and the alliance," which was taken as a warning of it sparking World War III. Of course, if NATO, which was formed to prevent Russian aggression, sends a message to Putin that they can be so easily intimidated just by a threat from Russia, it might make an eventual World War III sparked by Russian aggression even more likely.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/russian-foreign-minister-lavrov-issues-cryptic-warning-about-direct-clash-with-nato

Among the many Obama-era policies that left America weaker, add this: he saw no reason to maintain the Cold War policy of having a US military big enough to deal with two simultaneous regional conflicts. Yeah, we could never possibly have to deal with military threats in more than one place at the same time.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/two-war-doctrine-obama-pentagon-russia-taiwan-ukraine-china

So this continues Obama’s streak of getting everything wrong except for warning that we should “never underestimate Joe Biden’s ability to (BLEEP) things up.”

Mike Huckabee

It’s good to see that more people are finally daring to speak up about the outrageous unfairness of allowing biological males to compete against female athletes and steal all their records, awards and scholarships.

https://www.foxnews.com/sports/va-tech-swimmer-ncaa-transgender-participation

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gop-candidates-women-defeated-by-lia-thomas

Let’s hope it’s a sign that people are finally shaking off their fear of “cancel culture” and letting a tiny minority whose voices are amplified by social media cow them into quietly accepting – or at least not speaking up about -- things that are obviously wrong.

As a reminder, revisit this story from last November.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2021/11/11/america-is-being-held-hostage-a-progressive-left-that-represent-6-of-the-electorate-n1531975

It reported that Pew Research Center found only about 6% of the electorate are far-left “progressives” who believe the kind of radical “social justice” views that are being forced onto the rest of us. Ironically, these champions of “diversity and inclusion” are mostly young, white, college-indoctrinated (I can’t bring myself to say “educated”) atheists who’ve decided that their point of view is the only one that’s allowed to be expressed. If any other group that looked like them were doing the same thing they’re doing, they’d call those people racists and fascists. But at a paltry 6% of the population, they’re not just the tail wagging the dog, they’re a stub tail.

On a related subject, if you haven’t seen this weekend’s “Huckabee” on TBN yet, then check out my interview with Dr. Todd Rose, author of one of the most important books of the decade, “Collective Illusions.” It’s a game-changer and a mind-opener.

https://youtu.be/FMo-rxxytAE

It will make you realize how people have been misled to believe this nation is irreparably divided into warring radical camps with no common ground, when in fact, most of us still believe in the same traditional American values we’ve always believed in. We’ve just been bullied and brainwashed by a small group of far-too-influential loudmouths into accepting poisonous media and political narratives that aren’t true.

Mike Huckabee

With all that’s been discussed about Hunter Biden’s laptop --- what it reveals about the Biden family and the shocking lengths to which government agencies, politicians and the media LIED, at least until Biden was safely in office --- there’s yet another aspect to the story, one we touched on last week but would like to examine more deeply now.

Doesn’t it seem like an odd coincidence that the very parts of the world that are exploding now are the ones the Biden family was greatly profiting from; namely, Ukraine, Russia and China? (For this discussion, we’re focusing on Ukraine.) This is why voters deserve to know all about a candidate’s potential conflicts of interest before putting him in office.

And doesn’t it also seem weird that the same people whose names we first heard during Trump's first impeachment, some of them officials at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, are now popping up in revelations about the Trump/Russia Hoax? The two casts of characters overlap --- why is that?

It’s long been known by people in government that the corruption in Ukraine made it possible for some Americans to profit hugely. Hunter Biden is an easy example, but numerous people with marketable influence in both parties have apparently used corrupt institutions in Ukraine as their own personal ATM, laundering huge piles of cash as they changed hands for various reasons. Nobody asked questions. The elite members of this club brought in their families, friends and colleagues. It’s been going on for decades.

NOTE: As we’ve said before, the corruption in Ukraine in no way excuses the cold disregard and unforgivable violence Putin has shown to its people, most of whom were just trying to make a living and support their families and communities. Russia is chock-full of corruption as well. So is America, for that matter, as we’re learning more each day. Those who use Ukrainian corruption to rationalize what Putin is doing are trying to defend the indefensible.

That said, it’s also important to recognize that what we’re seeing of the corruption is just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine if Hunter had somehow dimly remembered his laptop was at the repair shop and had managed, in his drug-addled state, to crawl his way back there and pick it up. Life would have gone on, with most of us likely never knowing the extent of Biden family graft. Maybe a few dedicated reporters like Miranda Devine and Peter Schweizer would have succeeded in nibbling around the edges, perhaps written books that conservatives would read, but that would’ve been it.

Likewise, what if Hillary’s use of a private server as Secretary of State had never been exposed? What if Guccifer had never hacked into Sidney Blumenthal’s account and ended up with her private address on classified emails about Benghazi, and if State Department lawyers hadn’t noticed that address themselves and looked into it? Hillary’s criminal (yes) use of a private server for classified official business would have remained a secret. With her load of baggage lightened, she might’ve been elected President after all. At any rate, she would’ve gotten away clean.

Some of my readers –- I know, because they write to me –- are thinking, “Well, she DID get away clean. Why do we even bother talking about these scandals? Nothing ever happens.” At the risk of sounding like Hillary herself, they carp, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

I would argue that it makes a tremendous difference that we don’t just live with the lies. Those of us who’ve been investigating this for years are at last breaking through to the public at large, who only now are learning what we’ve known for some time: that a reasonable prosecutor WOULD have taken Hillary’s case, that there really ARE deep-state actors in our bureaucracy, that the Bidens --- including “the big guy” --- ARE corrupt, that “Russia” WAS a hoax all along, that the laptop IS real and the FBI withheld it during Trump’s impeachment, that social media is a leftist propaganda arm, and that some people who say they care about “our democracy” really just want to keep their personal gravy train rolling. Americans are wising up. The next step (and it’s a loo-loo) is to acknowledge that suppressing the laptop WAS election interference, likely changing the outcome of the Biden-Trump race.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/suppression-of-hunter-biden-laptop-stories-defeinitely-impacted-2020-election-barr_

Incidentally, Barr also says that Biden knowingly lied about the laptop being Russian disinformation. He was “shocked,” he says. Barr tells us this...NOW??

https://slaynews.com/news/bill-barr-comes-clean-says-joe-biden-lied-to-american-people-he-knew-it-was-a-lie-and-i-was-shocked-by-that/

According to investigative reporter Peter Schweizer, the timing of the admission in The New York Times that the laptop is real, with the coordination we might assume they had with Hunter’s legal team and the White House, indicates to him that Hunter is likely to be indicted. (So, does he then get pardoned by his father?) Jonathan Turley, in an interview with Brian Kilmeade Monday night, agreed. “There’s only so long you can deny something that’s staring you in the face,” he said. He noted that since they’ve finally acknowledged it’s real, we can move forward to talk about what it means.

Which brings us back to Ukraine. Mollie Hemingway’s book RIGGED, the chapter “Burying Biden Corruption,” details not only Hunter’s profits in Ukraine ‘serving’ on the Burisma board but also how committee chairman Adam Schiff made sure this were never brought up in the hearings, as it would’ve justified Trump’s “impeachable” phone call to President Zelenskyy. The word “rigged” applies just as well to that sham impeachment as it does to the election.

Dan Bongino has been talking about the curious re-emergence of the same Ukrainian names we heard during the impeachment. He dug up an article in Politico from November 2019, about Ukrainian-American DNC political consultant Alexandra Chalupa wanting to “raise the alarm” about Trump campaign director Paul Manafort’s alleged Russian ties. Recall that Manafort was forced to resign, and later hounded by Robert Mueller’s special counsel, over the so-called “black ledger” of payments supposedly made to him by a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine –- a ledger that has been determined to be fake. What Politico said at the time about Republicans trying to hold back “a mountain of emerging evidence” that showed Trump “used his leverage over Ukraine to pressure the country’s leaders to investigate his political rivals” seems laughable now. What a waste of our nation’s time and taxpayers’ money.

Let’s see...I can think of an American VICE-President who used his leverage to pressure Ukraine’s leaders NOT to investigate someone. That was joe Biden.

A photo turned up of Chalupa in the White House, standing next to the man identified as the impeachment “whistleblower” over Trump’s phone call. Recall that we were never supposed to say his name, but we did: Eric Ciaramella. The big take-away: These people were all working together, folks, and that’s the real “collusion.” Remember this about Ciaramella, from Paul Sperry?

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/10/30/whistleblower_exposed_close_to_biden_brennan_dnc_oppo_researcher_120996.html

Look for our Part 2 tomorrow. In the meantime, we recommend two chapters in Bongino’s 2020 book “FOLLOW THE MONEY: The Shocking Deep State Connections of the Anti-Trump Cabal”: Chapter 1 --- “Insane in Ukraine,” and Chapter 8 --- “Whistleblowing in the Dark.”

Laura Ainsworth, Staff writer

Dear Miss Mannerly:

I am a highly respected journalist for a major, very-long-running and highly respected weekly television news show. On occasion, I am called upon to interview a particular person, a powerful but deeply frustrating individual, and I always try my best to conduct myself like the highly respected professional I am.

But he just makes it so hard! And not just for me –- none of my colleagues and friends can stand him or the people who support him.  We don't care for his uncouth, bombastic style, although I must admit he was polite when I was interviewing him.

Being a seasoned, objective journalist who is always in pursuit of the truth, I have felt the need a couple of times to actually correct this man, on camera, right in the middle of our conversation.  Perish the thought that I would allow misinformation in one of my interviews!  I tried to do it as politely as possible, even calling him “sir” as I corrected him. But both times, stories came out later that showed him, technically, to be right, I suppose. In the last instance, I had told him a particular piece of evidence was ‘unverified” when apparently it was real. Goodness, that was an honest mistake. if it was real, why would our own FBI have chosen not to reveal it?

Anyway, now some are saying not only that I owe him an apology, but two apologies. How should I handle this?

– Clueless

Gentle reader:

If she is not mistaken, Miss Mannerly believes she saw both of those “Clueless” interviews. Here is what you should do, without delay:

Go to your desk and select two pieces of the most beautiful personal stationery you own. Hand-write, preferably in calligraphy if you are skilled in that area, two heartfelt thank-you’s to this gentleman for allowing you to interview him. Apologize profusely for correcting him on camera, and admit you were wrong –- wrong in your facts, and wrong to falsely “correct” him. Include an offer to issue an on-camera apology if he would like you to do this, admitting you were wrong and promising that it will never happen again.

Mail these two letters of apology under separate cover. On the flap of each envelope, it would be a nice touch to add a wax stamp with the CBS logo, to at least offer the impression that your colleagues are sorry as well. Perhaps the producers of your show would like to write separate letters of apology. Miss Mannerly assumes they are all very sorry, as she has heard on occasion that yours is a “sorry show.”

It would be thoughtful to send flowers as well; make sure the bouquet includes some purple lisianthus, the flower of appreciation and gratitude.

Mike Huckabee

Even the Washington Post has admitted, perhaps inadvertently, what the January 6 "investigation" is really all about for Democrats.

We won’t link to WAPO here, because they’re a paid subscription-only service and a propaganda rag --- a candy mint AND a breath mint --- but Tristan Justice at The Federalist offers a great report on the story. WAPO’s headline on Friday was “Jan. 6 committee faces a thorny challenge: persuading the public to care.” (Incidentally, they also ran an op-ed by esteemed former attorney general James Comey on March 7, “Every Jan. 6 case matters.” We think it matters, too, but for very different reasons.)

But here’s the Federalist’s piece from Sunday: “Democrats running the Jan. 6 Committee finally admitted the obvious: it’s a show trial all about the midterms.”

https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/19/democrats-admit-jan-6-committee-is-all-about-midterms/

Democrats in Congress –- also “Republicans” Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Liz Cheney, who has devoted her congressional tenure not to representing the people of Wyoming but in securing a personal vendetta against Trump –- are dismayed because after 14 months, interest in their Priority-One “investigation” has grown tepid, even among many of their Democrat constituents. Gee, who would have thought that with skyrocketing gas prices, a lingering pandemic and the world suddenly becoming a giant powderkeg, Americans have had other things to think about? And those other things do NOT help Democrats.

The left is so concerned about this --- so desperate to have this one thing to run on --- that they’ve reportedly discussed hiring a journalist (correction: “journalist,” or maybe we should just go on and say “propagandist”) to write their reports and produce compelling videos that could be spread around the internet and played during their televised hearings. They’ve been talking about starting public hearings, ideally televised in prime-time (!), in April. According to the Democrat who chairs House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, they intend to showcase “how Trump interfered with official congressional business through his false rhetoric and unlawful actions.”  In other words, they want to say President Trump is a liar and a criminal.  On prime-time TV.  Before the elections.

(If they do hold those televised hearings, you’ll be happy to know that “we watch the news, so you don’t have to!” My writers tell me they deserve hazard pay for this assignment, due to the extreme toxicity.)

https://www.axios.com/jan-6-committee-prime-time-hearings-418b8cbb-6ac5-48c2-807c-a307b426ba97.html

To show what kind of propagandizing we’re up against, a more recent write-up that we won’t link to, from the “social justice” website Truthout, included this paragraph: “Trump’s words were indeed incendiary. On the morning of January 6, 2021, he gave a speech to his loyalists in front of the White House, telling that their country was being ‘stolen’ and that they couldn’t take it back ‘with weakness.’ He then encouraged the mob to go to the Capitol while Congress was in session, certifying the Electoral College win for Biden.” NOT mentioned was that he told them to go “peacefully and patriotically” and that he never said anything about interfering with the process. Also not mentioned by the ironically-named "Truthout" was the fact that the people who moved the barricades and breached the Capitol were already there when Trump was speaking and didn’t even hear him.

Misinformation!  Lack of context!  Of course, Twitter and Facebook will suspend them immediately.

I digress.  Anyway, Democrats want an interim January 6 report in addition to their final report, which will be timed to fall shortly before midterm voting starts. California Rep. Peter Aguilar told WAPO that they want to make sure their reports aren’t written in “Congressional Research Service” style but in a way that will engage readers. Here’s the key observation from the WAPO story, which gives Democrats’ real motive away:

“...A final report...will be published ahead of the November midterms –- with the findings likely a key part of the Democrats’ midterm strategy. They hope their recommendations to avoid another insurrection will be adopted, but also that their work will repel voters from Republicans who they say helped propel the attack.”

Most of us understand that the vast majority of Trump supporters who showed up for the Capitol Hill rally were simply exercising their constitutionally-protected right to assemble and protest. And according to an analysis done by The Federalist, only 8 of the 96 subpoenas issued by Nancy Pelosi’s inquisition went to individuals associated with violence at the Capitol. In addition to those 96 subpoenas, there are 100 more for the telephone records of individuals whose names are still under seal.

To the surprise of no one, the Committee is not even touching the legitimate security failures on that day, including Pelosi’s failure to provide security after thousands of National Guard troops had been offered by President Trump. Here’s an enlightening article from (of all places) CNN in July of last year, explaining where the Democrats were and were not willing to go in their “investigation.”

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/20/politics/january-6-probe-republican-strategy/index.html

One thing the Democrats can in fact be gleeful about is the successful adoption into the lexicon of the word “insurrection” to describe that day’s riot. By any stretch of a sane person’s imagination, a small, ragtag group of unarmed people upset by what they saw as election fraud is NOT an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States. Neither is a crowd of mostly elderly and otherwise harmless people who entered the Capitol not knowing they were doing anything wrong. But thanks to a huge propaganda push, it became the mainstream go-to word, used routinely.

It was, of course, used in the WAPO piece, as seen above. And Arnold Schwarzenegger, who unfortunately has spent way too much time around the Kennedy family, used it in his otherwise-powerful video to the Russian people about the fight in Ukraine.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60794809

“And may I remind you,” Schwarzenegger said, “that I speak with the same heartfelt concern as I spoke to the American people when a wild crowd was storming the U.S.Capitol, trying to overthrow our government.”

https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/full-transcript-arnold-schwarzenegger-urges-russian-troops-in-ukraine-to-go-home/

News flash to Arnold: They were NOT trying to overthrow our government. But such a characterization is certainly in keeping with Tristan Justice’s observation on the anniversary of January 6: that the Democrats are using their lore about that day to substitute one hoax for another. It’s pure politics.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/06/one-year-ago-today-a-new-hoax-was-born/

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

Pat Reeder, Staff writer

Here’s yet another reason to love Dolly Parton: she requested that her name be removed from this year’s nominees for the “Rock and Roll” Hall of Fame. Dolly was at #4 out of five open slots on the fan vote board and feared she might beat out someone who actually belongs there. She’s one of the greatest country singer/songwriters of all time, but she’s not a rock musician and she and everyone else (except the Rock Hall of Fame board, apparently) knows it.

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/dolly-parton-removes-herself-rock-roll-hall-of-fame-nomination

Her request was humble and generous toward other artists, as is typical of Dolly, but it could also be read as subtly chiding the Hall of Fame for its notorious habit of nominating people who don’t belong there while snubbing those who obviously do (I’ve previously noted the long list of those who’ve been inexplicably snubbed, including Jethro Tull, the Guess Who, the Monkees, Blue Oyster Cult, the Jam and Meat Loaf, while the Sugar Hill Gang, Tupac Shakur, Laura Nyro, Janet Jackson, Madonna and Jay-Z are all in.) Dolly nicely wrote that her husband has always wanted her to cut a rock album, and she hopes they’ll consider her again if she ever does that.

Not-nice subtext: “I’ve NEVER made a rock album, Einsteins!”

Now, let’s hope Lionel Richie, Dionne Warwick and Eminem follow suit. Nothing against any of these artists, but like Dolly, they don’t make rock music and they know it.

I’m also sad to have to report that Willie Nelson’s sister, Bobbie Nelson, has died at 91.

https://www.keranews.org/arts-culture/2022-03-11/bobbie-nelson-willie-nelsons-sister-and-bandmate-dead-at-91

She was his first band member and the pianist for his iconic band for decades. She could play whatever style Willie’s songs required, from old time gospel to rollicking honky-tonk to Great American Songbook. Willie recently wrote of how she always looked after her little brother, and that she was a “genuine piano prodigy,” far more of a musical prodigy than he was. Check out that story from the Dallas public TV station KERA to learn more about this remarkable lady who contributed so much to Willie’s musical legacy from just outside the spotlight, and to see a rare sample of her performing all on her own.

Mike Huckabee

Axios reports that US intelligence officials fear a “mass migration event” in which 170,000 illegal immigrants will stream across the Mexican border if the Biden White House ends a Trump-era immigration policy of expedited expulsion due to the pandemic.

https://www.westernjournal.com/report-biden-officials-fear-mass-migration-event-coming-southern-border-soon/

The White House responded with this statement: “Of course the administration is doing our due diligence to prepare for potential changes at the border. That is good government in action. As always is the case, this Administration is working every day to provide relief to immigrants, restore order, fairness and humanity to our immigration system and bring it into the 21st century.”

I would respond that of all the ways you could describe Biden’s handling of the border and (illegal) immigration, “good government in action” is hardly the phrase that springs to mind. Consider that this 170,000-strong “mass migration” that some are so worried about is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the over 1.8 million illegal entrants, the highest on record, that were estimated to have come into the US during Biden’s first year alone.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/forecast-1-8m-illegal-migrants-under-biden-worst-ever-year

The Administration reportedly plans to deal with this potential surge through the newly-formed Southwest Border Coordination Center, which functions like a “war room,” “coordinating responses to issues relating to the southwest border among different agencies.”

Or for once, they could just not end a Trump policy that’s working. Or try securing the border instead of leaving it wide open. For the record, those things would be examples of “good government in action.” I point that out for them because I suspect they would never recognize that on their own.

Mike Huckabee

Warning to all “fact”-checkers and online content moderators (censors): This commentary discusses the theme of election interference, specifically in the 2020 presidential election. And it's all demonstrably true. While some on the left like to rail about supposed “voter suppression,” there’s something else that really can and does affect the outcome of elections, and that’s why it’s used. I’m talking about voter INFORMATION suppression. Voters need information, and to deny them this is to deceive them. We’re tired of the lies.

A poll from the Media Research Center a few weeks after the election in seven key swing states showed that, among the Biden voters who were unaware of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and some others such as the Tara Reid allegations, a full 16 percent said that if they’d known, they would not have voted for Biden. They included 4 percent who would have switched and voted for Trump, another 4 percent voting for a third candidate, and another 4 percent not voting for President. Another 5 percent would not have gone to the polls at all. Then there were 5 percent who just wouldn’t answer the question.

https://www.cnsnews.com/article/national/alexander-watson/poll-shows-media-censorship-cheated-voters-vital-info-robbed

Recall that the great Miranda Devine of the New York Post broke the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, abandoned by him at a Delaware computer repair shop, and later wrote a bestselling book –- highly recommended –- called LAPTOP FROM HELL. Of course, readers of this newsletter know all about what was on Hunter Biden’s laptop and don’t need a refresher. Along with incredible debauchery surrounding Hunter’s personal life, it contained startling information about the Biden family’s foreign business dealings.

Major news outlets such The New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico and NPR suppressed the story before the 2020 election, with the NYT calling it “unsubstantiated” even in September of 2021. Later the Times re-edited that story for their archives but did not issue a formal correction.

But on Wednesday, deep into an inside-page story about Hunter Biden’s taxes being under federal investigation, they quietly acknowledged the legitimacy of the laptop story, saying that files from Hunter’s laptop had been “authenticated.”

To the surprise of no one, major TV networks other than FOX News didn’t even seem to notice, though we may safely assume they did. But on Thursday, the NY Post editorial board had this response, a must-read:

https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/the-times-finally-admits-hunter-bidens-laptop-is-real/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=Slack

Recall that Hunter’s former partner on some China business deals, Tony Bobulinksi, came forward in the fall of 2020, right after Devine had broken the story, and confirmed that the Hunter emails bearing his name were real. (He was also interviewed by the FBI.) “How did the Times [finally] authenticate the laptop?” asks the NYP board. “It doesn’t say...No facts have changed since fall 2020. They knew the laptop was real from the start. They just didn’t want to say so."

The Post editorial board also mentioned the meeting between Joe Biden and an official from Burisma, the corrupt Ukrainian energy company that had hired Hunter and his partner Devon Archer to be on its board. The Times had cast doubt on this meeting as well, they said, simply by quoting a Biden campaign spokesperson who said it the meeting wasn’t on his official schedule. Well, if a Biden campaign spokesperson says so...!  But Devine can document that it must have taken place.

(Note: We’re not linking to NYT stories on this because it is a subscription service that only pretends to be reporting the news. You’d actually have to give them money even to read one article.)

Sixteen months after Joe Biden was elected –- barely squeaking by in key battleground states –- the Times felt it was safe to quietly mention that the laptop was “authenticated.” Can you even imagine what their reporting on this would have been like in October 2020 if such a laptop had belonged to someone in Donald Trump’s family? It would have been more frenzied than a drug-fueled orgy at Chateau Marmont, one of Hunter’s favorite places to party in Los Angeles.

Speaking of must-read commentaries, Matt Vespa at Townhall has a great one, pointing out that the Hunter Biden laptop story was THE “October Surprise” of the 2020 election, buried by the liberal news media and smeared by the same people who peddled the Steele “dossier” and the whole nonsensical Russian hoax in 2016.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2022/03/17/reckoning-all-the-crow-the-liberal-media-will-eat-over-hunter-biden-story-should-choke-them-out-n2604702?utm_campaign=rightrailsticky2

How many times does it have to happen? In story after story, we’ve got it right and they’re shown to be wrong, and they just keep trying to keep the lies going. Vespa points out that when White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked about this on Thursday, she could only weakly deflect. “I would point you to the Department of Justice,” she said, “and also to Hunter Biden’s representatives. He doesn’t work in government.” That’s irrelevant, Jen, and you know it.

Of course, in this era when so many are (unwisely) getting their news from social media, it wasn’t enough that newspapers such as the Times were suppressing information before the election. Twitter had to help, too, and they did, by actively censoring the Post for days, punishment for daring to report their true story. “Twitter banned us for supposedly publishing ‘hacked materials’ that weren’t hacked,” the editorial board said. “The company’s CEO apologized, but by that point, they had accomplished what they wanted. Like the Times, they cast enough doubt to avoid making their preferred candidate look bad.”

In October of 2020, readers of the Post (and this newsletter, of course) knew “that Hunter Biden pursued business deals in Europe and Asia” to the tune of billions of dollars, and that he “may have leveraged his father’s position as Vice President to do it.” There was much more, as you’re aware, such as the reference to setting aside 10 percent of the spoils for “the big guy.” But Twitter and other social media did what they could to contain all of this.

And the term “Russian disinformation” (used interchangeably with “misinformation” because many so-called journalists don’t even seem to know the distinction) was everywhere. Biden himself blamed Russia, in a presidential debate. Thursday night, Tucker Carlson had a great interview with Miranda Devine and also aired a fun montage of “journalists” and public officials repeating variations of the same "Russian disinformation" talking point over and over.

We couldn’t find a clip of just that segment posted yet; here’s the whole episode with the segment starting at 24:30.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr6HL74NjHo

I said recently that Lesley Stahl needed to apologize to President Trump for contradicting him during an interview, after he correctly said he’d been spied on. Update: She now needs to apologize twice, this time for repeatedly insisting that the laptop “can’t be verified” as Hunter’s. When Trump presses her to tell him how she knows, she vapidly keeps insisting it can’t be verified.

https://www.mikehuckabee.com/latest-news?id=50581443-31DE-4A4C-9858-8274544E8A62

President Trump was asked on Thursday–- not by Lesley Stahl –- about the NYT’s admission about the laptop, and we’d like to leave you with his comments, brief and to the point.

https://100percentfedup.com/trumps-response-to-hunter-laptop-story-being-confirmed-by-nyts-is-pure-gold-video/

Mike Huckabee

During one of her press briefings a few days ago, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki brought up that old accusation about Russia “hacking” the 2016 election. There is no evidence that Russia changed any vote tallies or did anything else to change the outcome, and Psaki never really made clear what she meant by “hacking the election,” so we find it ironic that she said this in the same briefing in which she spoke about “misinformation.”

It’s also pretty hilarious that anyone questioning the electronic security of the 2020 vote is roundly scorned, even censored and canceled, while questioning the electronic security of the 2016 vote is just fine, even patriotic at a time when Russia has shown itself to be such an enemy.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/psaki-says-russia-hacked-2016-election-during-briefing-on-combating-disinformation

We’d like to focus on one part of Jerry Dunleavy’s report, the paragraph that has to do with the supposed Russian “hacking” of the DNC’s emails. He wrote that “U.S. intelligence officials did conclude Russian operatives were behind the hacking of Democratic emails in 2016. Russian military intelligence interfered in the 2016 presidential election, in part by spearphishing Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s email systems, then providing them to WikiLeaks, for dissemination, Robert Mueller’s special counsel report concluded. Russia has denied involvement, and WikiLeaks has denied receiving emails from Russia.”

Of course, we can’t believe anything that comes from the Kremlin –- or, sadly, from U.S. intelligence officials –- but I do have considerably more confidence in what comes from WikiLeaks. The story about Russia “hacking” the DNC still belongs in the category of misinformation. It’s a talking point. I say this even though Robert Mueller concluded in his special counsel report that this had happened. We know now that this conclusion was reached without any actual evidence, because the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike never allowed the FBI to do a forensic examination of the DNC server. The FBI never demanded that they turn it over and, incredibly, took CrowdStrike at its word. We scratch our heads at how the U.S. intel community could legitimately have had “high confidence” –- their words –- that the Russians did this. For what it’s worth, here’s what Mueller said at the time, as reported by Dunleavy in 2019...

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/mueller-says-russias-gru-stole-clinton-dnc-emails-and-gave-them-to-wikileaks

But fast-forward to 2022, and Margot Cleveland is reporting that Special Counsel John Durham is investigating the 2016 DNC server hack. If anyone is serious about getting down to the truth about this, you know he is. Until now, there was no known link between the Alfa Bank hoax being investigated by Durham and the DNC “hack,” but now there is. As it happens, the Defense Department tasked the same Georgia Tech researcher involved in the Alfa Bank hoax –- “Researcher – 1” in Durham’s court filings pertaining to the Michael Sussmann case but known to be Mano Antonakakis –- with investigating the “origins” of the DNC hacker.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/10/exclusive-special-counsels-office-is-investigating-the-2016-dnc-server-hack/

And here is Cleveland's update on that story:

https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/14/exclusive-researcher-tells-durham-he-saw-holes-in-the-alfa-bank-hoax-before-democrats-shopped-it-to-the-fbi/

According to an email obtained by The Federalist on March 9 in response to a “Right-to-Know” request, the special counsel’s office is indeed investigating the so-called “hack,” and “prosecutors harbor concerns” about the Defense Department’s choice of this particular researcher to investigate it.

Cleveland’s report provides a good refresher on Durham’s investigation, but it boils down to this: According to Durham’s indictment of Sussmann (Perkins Coie attorney for the Hillary campaign and DNC), a cyber executive named Rodney Joffe (“Tech Executive- 1”) asked Antonakakis and another Georgia Tech researcher, David Dagon (“Researcher – 2”) to find some way to use internet data to connect then-candidate Donald Trump and Russia. Antonakakis –- whom I would add has shown himself in emails to be strongly anti-Trump –- apparently couldn’t find anything useful, because he told Joffe that the results “do not make sense with the storyline you have.” Even so, Joffe came up with a draft “white paper” containing the fake story of a connection between Trump and Alfa Bank, which he gave to these two men and another researcher involved, April Lorenzen, to review. Then Sussmann passed this “white paper” to then-FBI general counsel James Baker, purportedly out of his sense of duty but secretly in service to Joffe and the Hillary campaign, which Durham found was being billed for Sussmann's services.

Until The Federalist got hold of this particular email from Antonakakis, nothing was known of any connection between the Alfa Bank story and the DNC “hack,” but he's the link. Antonakakis had written it to general counsel and other higher-ups at Georgia Tech about a week after his testimony before Durham’s DC grand jury, highlighting “areas of concern” that he wanted to discuss “after the dust settles.” In Cleveland’s words, he “launched a soliloquy that perfectly described the Russia-collusion and the plot by anti-Trump politicians and the deep state intelligence and law enforcement communities to take down the President of the United States.”

It was also a rant in which he painted himself as the victim of the special counsel. He said he’d been asked “point-blank” if “DARPA [the central R&D organization of the Defense Department] should be instructing you to investigate the origins of a hacker (Guccifer2.0) that hacked a political entity (DNC)?” How DARE the special counsel’s office ask that question, he steamed. It’s easily determined from the email that he had indeed been asked to investigate this.

The fact that he was being questioned because his team had allowed itself to be exploited by Sussmann and Joffe for political reasons seems to have been lost on him.

Antonakakis reveals himself to be a sanctimonious and hypocritical piece of work who actually believes he was involved in this fake-narrative project to “preserve our democracy.” Yes, that's the phrase he used, one we've heard all too often from Democrats.

So, why did the special counsel’s office “dare” to ask him about this? Something had to lead Durham to find out, or at least suspect, that Antonakakis had been tasked by DARPA with investigating the DNC "hack." And something had to lead Durham to be concerned about this. What did this arm of the Defense Department have to do with it, and who there was involved? Did they gain access to the DNC server? If so, was it Sussmann, as attorney for the DNC and Hillary’s campaign, who granted it?

This opens up a whole new area for Durham, but one that continues to tie together the same group of folks. Sussmann ties them to Hillary, where (as we’ve said many times) all roads lead. Too much remains a mystery about the DNC “hack” --- note that we always put "hack" in quotes, as there is no proof it even WAS a hack, let alone by Russia. Julian Assange has said flat-out that neither Russia nor any other state government was his source. Yet it seems to have been the event that spawned the whole long “Russia Russia Russia” hoax that, in some circles, still refuses to die. Other than Assange, who else knows the identity of whoever obtained the Podesta/DNC emails and gave them to him?

Mike Huckabee

I hope you’re able to escape from what the great Irish-American humorist P.J. O’Rourke called “All the trouble in the world” and enjoy St. Patrick’s Day today.

We took a brief pause from breaking news so that my staffers could spend some spring break time with their families, so I thought we should catch up on all the trouble in the world that we missed. But it turned out that there was very little “new” in the news for the first part of this week.

Vladimir Putin continued his horrific attack on Ukraine, ratcheting up the unconscionable attacks on civilians, including bombing a theater in Mariupol that was being used as a shelter for hundreds of civilians and plainly labeled on the outside with the Ukrainian word for “children.” At this writing, the death toll is still unknown, but there are hopeful signs, with reports of survivors emerging safely.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/russian-forces-bombed-mariupol-theater-despite-signs-warning-children-were-sheltering-inside-ukraine

We’d also like to extend our sympathies and prayers to the families of Fox News cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and his colleague, Ukrainian journalist Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova, who were both killed when they were struck by incoming fire outside Kyiv. Fox News correspondent Benjamin Hall was also injured in the attack, but he’s been safely evacuated and will recover. Our prayers for him as well.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/fox-news-cameraman-pierre-zakrzewski-killed-ukraine

The Biden Administration seems conflicted about whether this invasion makes Putin a “war criminal” (a rather toothless term, if the alleged criminal recognizes no authority to enforce the law against him.) Russia fired back, citing the many people killed by American bombs around the world. They conveniently overlook the difference that America bombed states and terrorist organizations that attacked us first, and while there have tragically been instances of innocent people who were killed, we’ve never invaded any nation that hadn’t attacked us first or harbored people who did.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/president-biden-calls-putin-war-criminal-invading-ukraine

Despite what you might have heard from Kamala Harris, Ukrainian President Zelensky said Ukraine is not a member of NATO, and he conceded that it is unlikely Ukraine will join NATO, which was one of the pretexts that Putin used for his invasion. That could signal a potential break in a ceasefire agreement, but only if you believe Putin is honest about his motives.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/zelensky-ukraine-conflict-nato-russia-b2037181.html

However, Ukraine has joined the EU’s Energy Union, uniting its power grid with Europe’s. Zelensky also warned that World War III may have already started in his country.

I miss the good old days, when the media were telling us that if Trump got elected, he’d start World War III, and I could rest easy knowing that was just partisan nonsense.

Mike Huckabee

Kenneth Allard

My good friend Colonel Ken Allard has sent me this Ukraine update for my newsletter readers. I hope you will read it!

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

Three weeks into the Russo-Ukraine War of 2022, it is reasonable to ask: Who is deterring whom - and from what?

So far, the only one being deterred seems to be Joe Biden, who clumsily refused to allow Polish Mig-29’s to be transferred to Ukraine despite the fervent pleas of embattled president Volodomyr Zelenskiy. Meanwhile, Old Uncle Joe was busy linking Vladimir Putin not only to the war in Ukraine but also to sky-rocketing American gas prices and rising inflation, twin outrages for which the Russian premiere bears only slight, if any, responsibility. Through such constant buffoonery, President Biden seems intent on channeling that canonical Mayor of Amity, hilariously reassuring townsfolk that a lucrative tourist season lay just ahead, despite Jaws occasionally snacking on their relatives.

Because we are a nation divorced from studying such politically incorrect subjects as military history, we can no longer distinguish the consequential from the trivial, the capillaries from the arteries.  From Afghanistan to Ukraine, our intelligence community has been hit hardest, seemingly unable to predict whether Tuesday will be followed by Wednesday. Not only were our intel weenies utterly mistaken in predicting how fast the Taliban would triumph but they also admitted last week to the House Intelligence Committee that they had seriously under-estimated the fighting spirit of Ukraine’s citizens. Naturally, they over-corrected, reciting a laundry list of Russian tactical shortcomings. Caught up in the latest zeitgeist, Francis Fukuyama - famous for predicting the end of history several decades too early - argued last week “Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine…The army in the field will reach a point whether they can no longer be supplied nor withdrawn, and morale will vaporize.” https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/preparing-for-defeat/

While we can all hope that Professor Fukuyama will be proven right, America’s enemies seem to be a long way from desperation. While we plead for them to produce additional oil and prepare to sign yet another nuclear non-proliferation scam, the Iranians were not deterred at all - raining their rockets down on an American consulate in Irbil, Iraq. How much does Putin fear NATO - with or without a rearmed Germany - when he launches air-strikes that came within a dozen miles of Polish territory over the weekend? And for good measure also threatened to target logistical routes acting as lifelines to the Ukrainian resistance?

Please forgive me for casting doubt on such widely-cherished Beltway assumptions: But Vladimir Putin and his fellow conspirators in the new Axis nations are not desperate! Instead, they have concluded - correctly in my view - that America suffers from catastrophically weak leadership, that it has abandoned its core spiritual values, as well as the world-beating confidence that our country once took for granted. While conceding that American martial prowess can be painfully recovered (or at least not entirely ruled out) neo-Axis leaders believe that the timing will never be better for a basic re-ordering of the global order. That new order will naturally reflect non-Western interests and dismiss any weaker set of values.  

Ukraine is already one major stake in this game, Taiwan is surely next while NATO’s newly-minted Baltic states might not be far off. When measured against the potential stakes, who cares if Russian logistical problems persist, if they lose a few tanks or if they sacrifice a few more generals trying to recapture the morale of their troops? As my friend LTG Jim Dubik wrote recently, “Like other raw realists, Putin has no intention of stopping with Ukraine…Raw realists (like him) take what they can, when they can, until someone stops them.” https://thehill-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/thehill.com/opinion/national-security/596614-the-world-after-the-war-in-ukraine-who-or-what-will-stop-putin?amp

I am also a realist of sorts, one who cherishes memories of the West Point faculty but now wonders how far the fault lines extend when five cadets are hospitalized after taking fentanyl-laced cocaine while on spring break. To say nothing of that loser who belatedly forfeited his commission only after posting a selfie that argued, “Communism will win.”  It is also frustrating to see other losers with stars on the shoulders of their World War II knock-off uniforms, who have either forgotten or never learned the harsh lessons of real war.

They now confront an opponent who will shrug off small shortcomings to focus on the larger objective- using traditional Russian reliance on massed troops and massed firepower to compel the enemy’s total compliance or complete obliteration. He will not be stopped by the mindless half-measures or the bloodless counter-moves now passing for “deterrence.”

During a three-decade career, Colonel Allard advanced from draftee to the West Point faculty and Dean of the National War College. The author of four books, he was also an on-air military analyst for the networks of NBC News.

Mike Huckabee

Probably the surest way to tell when someone doesn’t have a good argument for their point of view is when they’re terrified of letting anyone hear the opposing point of view. In a free marketplace of ideas, people who are confident in their views have no fear of having to defend them. Only those who can’t defend their views want to shut down debate.

This explains why the left – the people who believe in proven disasters like socialism, big government, high taxes, open borders, racial divisiveness, gender confusion, defunding police, releasing criminals, and eliminating oil and gas before having a viable alternative – are so desperate to silence their opponents by banning them from the media and the Internet. And here’s the latest example that has them frothing at the mouth, courtesy of Mike LaChance at Legal Insurrection.

https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/03/new-conservative-spanish-language-network-has-democrats-and-media-in-a-panic/

Tuesday, Americano, the nation’s first Spanish-language conservative network, debuted on satellite radio, and top Democrats are positively wetting themselves over the thought of Hispanic audiences hearing conservative views without having them spun by leftist reporters. Of course, they claim this is because they’re worried Hispanics will be the victims of “disinformation,” their current euphemism for “information that disproves what we believe.”

Americano founder and CEO Ivan Garcia-Hidalgo fired back that the network isn’t airing “disinformation” or “misinformation,” it’s airing views leftists don’t want Hispanics to hear. He said, “They’re scared. And they should be. Democrats took Hispanics for granted for too long, and no one thought to create a home for us in conservative media. There is an appetite for this. You see it on social media. You see it in elections.”

You certainly saw it in last week’s Texas primaries, where GOP turnout in largely Hispanic border counties was up by as much as 160+ percent. That was before Americano launched, so they obviously weren’t “victimized” by conservative “disinformation.” What moved them was that they saw with their own eyes the results of Biden’s pro-criminal, open border policies.

Besides, as Spencer Brown at Townhall points out, they were blithely unconcerned about all the anti-Trump disinformation like the Russia collusion hoax that was relentlessly promoted for four years by Spanish outlets like Univision.

Mike Huckabee

As expected, on Tuesday, President Biden announced that he would end US imports of Russian oil. It’s assumed he didn’t want to, since he’s let it go on all through the buildup to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and past the first two weeks of shocking carnage. But after even Nancy Pelosi agreed with Ted Cruz (one of the signs of the Apocalypse) that Congress should act and cut off Russian oil, Biden reportedly asked Pelosi to delay Monday’s scheduled House vote so that he could jump out in front of the parade and pretend to be leading it.

https://www.westernjournal.com/joe-biden-can-beat-putin-transforming-economy-run-56000-electric-cars/

In the speech, Biden warned Americans that gas prices, which shot up even further beyond previous records on Tuesday, would go up even more because of the cutoff of Russian oil. But apparently, his plan is to replace Russian oil with banana oil, because he dispensed so much of it in his speech as he attempted to convince Americans that “Russia is responsible” for a gallon of gas costing more than a Burger King Whopper (I chose that because there were plenty of whoppers in the speech, too.)

The first thing that caught my ear was Biden's carefully-constructed phrase “Putin’s price hikes,” laid on with all the subtlety of a 10-year-old boy standing by a broken vase and pointing at the cat. As the media would say, “Republicans pounced” on that. Jorge Bonilla tweeted a couple of charts, the first one having already gone viral, showing how the price of gas has been climbing since the day Biden took office, with the recent “Ukraine war” spike representing only a fraction of the increase.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/03/08/ted-cruz-busts-bidens-latest-sorry-excuse-n533490

The second chart was the same, except it went back even further and showed that the rise in gas prices actually began right after Election Night, when oil futures investors realized that Biden would be replacing Trump. Trump had made energy independence and low gas prices a priority, while Biden had campaigned on destroying our domestic fossil fuel industry in the name of fighting “climate change.” No wonder Trump sent out a message in response that consisted of nothing but the headline about record gas prices, and one sentence: “Do you miss me yet?”

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/03/08/trump-nails-biden-to-the-wall-with-just-five-words-n533335

But that was hardly the end of the Biden jaw-droppers. I guess he thinks we can save energy by returning to gas lighting, which is the only way to explain lines like this:

“First, it’s simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production. It’s simply not true.” Except it simply is true. Thanks to his policies, US oil and gas production are down by more than a million gallons a day. Again, that was actually one of his campaign promises, to kill the fossil fuel industry, and he started doing it with executive orders on his first day in office.

He also tried to blame the oil companies, saying they had 9,000 permits to drill and it was their decision not to use them to produce oil. An industry spokesman replied that that reflects a “fundamental misunderstanding” of how the industry works, which doesn’t surprise me in the least. Not only are government drilling leases down by about 75%, but a lease doesn’t even mean there’s oil on the land. There’s a long process of development to explore and start pumping the oil, and Biden has not only cut the number of leases but added lots more regulations to hamstring that process even more.

Here’s a former Keystone Pipeline worker who urges Americans not to buy this blame-shifting and reminds us that they tried to warn everyone what was coming. Hey, join the club, pal!

https://www.foxnews.com/us/former-keystone-pipeline-worker-says-us-energy-crisis-is-result-of-bidens-policies-we-tried-to-warn-you

Toni Williams at the Victory Girls blog also has a good rundown of the many lies packed into that one speech.

https://victorygirlsblog.com/joe-bidens-dirty-lies-about-u-s-energy-production/

And Katie Pavlich at Townhall.com did a good fact-check as well.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2022/03/09/biden-claimed-his-climate-agenda-isnt-hurting-domestic-oil-production-here-are-the-facts-n2604276

But to me, the biggest tip-off that we are dealing with people who are completely out of touch with the reality of the pain they’re causing for working Americans was that both Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg actually suggested that the solution to high gas prices was for everyone to buy electric cars.

https://www.westernjournal.com/buttigieg-buy-55000-electric-car-dont-worry-gas-prices-anymore/

The average price of an EV is over $56,000; there’s a long waiting list to obtain one just with the demand that exists now; and even if every American could afford and obtain one, they’ve still never answered where we’re going to get the power required to charge them all. It’s as if they think regular cars run on bad, dirty gas but the fuel for electric cars comes out of a wall socket directly from Heaven.

With that argument, Biden, Buttigieg and their house jester Stephen Colbert are all competing for the title of the Marie Antoinette of the 21st century: “So the peasants can’t afford gas? Well, let them buy Teslas!”

https://nypost.com/2022/03/08/stephen-colbert-blasted-for-saying-hes-willing-to-pay-more-for-gas/

Mike Huckabee

Those of us who used to read the front page of the newspaper, back when it was a literal paper and not a lighted screen with type that moved around, remember what it was like to find interesting juxtapositions of the headlines that in themselves told a story. Maybe in the upper right, there would be a headline like “Scores Killed in Weekend Murder Rampage,” while off to the left, it would say “Drop in Tourism Mystifies City Leaders”

I had a similar experience yesterday, scanning the news aggregator site The Liberty Daily.

The huge story at that moment, in big type right in the middle, was “PROJECT VERITAS: PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING NY TIMES JOURNALIST ADMITS JAN. 6 WAS ‘NO BIG DEAL.’”

Nearby, in the small typeface above the big headline, was this: “DOJ Offers 70- to 87-Month Prison Sentence to American Patriot Photographed with Feet Up in Nancy Pelosi’s Office.”

Farther down was this: “Guy Reffitt, First Political Prisoner to Stand Trial in Mostly Peaceful Protest on Jan. 6, Found Guilty by Democrat D.C. Jury.”

Then this: “Shocking Statement by January 6 Daughter Called by DOJ Political Prosecution: I Never Felt Threatened by My Dad --- The DOJ Wanted Me to Say That!’” Nothing says “politics in 2022” better than all these January 6 stories appearing onscreen together.

Let’s go first to the Project Veritas story. James O’Keefe really has done it again. As J. D. Rucker reports, Project Veritas managed to get undercover video that enables us to watch NYT National Security Correspondent Matthew Rosenberg “spill the beans over drinks.” Pretty amazing, and this is just Part 1. The language gets a little rough, as one might expect from a journalist talking up his work over double scotches, but it’s bleeped.

https://thelibertydaily.com/project-veritas-pulitzer-prize-winning-ny-times-journalist-admits-jan-6-was-no-big-deal/

“I’m so over it,” he says of January 6 with a chuckle. “The left’s overreaction to it, in some places, was way over the top.”

We already knew that corporate media, in their zeal to paint President Trump as evil and unhinged, was milking the January 6 Capitol Hill story for all it’s worth. And Rosenberg’s reporting was very much a part of that. But we see that his own opinion was the opposite. He was supposed to be “traumatized,” he said, but nobody on the NYT staff –- at least the seasoned reporters –- thought they were in any danger. “We were just having fun!” he said. The newbies in their twenties, he said, the “little dweebs,” did not share his cavalier attitude, and he wanted to tell them to just “man up.” He said he wanted to be “like, dude, come on, like, you were not in any danger.” (Editorial note: true, people weren’t in any danger –- unless they were on that stair landing where Ashli Babbitt was shot and killed.)

“They were making too big a deal,” Rosenberg said. “They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.” On the other hand, he said, “There were a ton of FBI informants amongst the people who attacked the Capitol.” (To his credit, he did actually report that.)

As Rosenberg told his companion at the table, he is an investigative reporter who usually tackles longer-term stories as opposed to single events. The implication: that he’d have a “nose” that might be able to sniff out informants. In fact, he says in the video that because acting CIA and NSA (National Security Agency) personnel can’t talk to the media, he dug into this by talking to former officials who didn’t have to fear the dreaded annual polygraph. So he was aware of the government infiltration.

Being a reporter for the NYT, though, it’s no surprise that he said the left’s overreaction gave “the lunatics on the right” ammunition to say, “Oh, well, nothing happened here.” (For the record: Not being lunatics, we never said that nothing happened. And what DID happen never should have, as the political and personal repercussions for many people touched by this story have been staggering. But it was not an attempt to overthrow the government, nor anything close to the way it’s been portrayed.)

When asked if he’d talked to people who had been arrested, he said their lawyers generally advise them not to talk to journalists. “No good can come of it,” he said. But according to O’Keefe, some of those incarcerated after January 6 have indeed made their voices heard, not to NYT reporters (smart!) but to Project Veritas, about the stunning lack of due process they’ve received, which stems largely from the “overreaction,” as Rosenberg put it, from the media and politicians on the left.

Now, let’s move on to the other January 6 stories:

Richard ‘Bigo’ Barnett, the Arkansas man who was photographed with his feet up at Nancy Pelosi’s desk, has rejected the offer of a guilty plea in exchange for a prison sentence of between 70 to 87 months. That’s for a PLEA, from someone with no criminal record. So he’ll be taking his chances at trial in the fall and, if found guilty, could be in prison for the rest of his life, as he is 61.

This story also highlights the recent suicide of another defendant, Matthew Perna, 37, which we reported last week.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/doj-offers-70-to-87-month-prison-sentence-for-man-photographed-with-feet-up-in-nancy-pelosis-office

Next, we have Guy Reffitt, who went to trial before a DC jury and on Friday was quickly found guilty on all five counts. He’s the first January 6 defendant to stand trial, and this outcome doesn’t bode well for the others. As Julie Kelly points out in American Greatness, it’s hard to get a fair trial in a city that voted nearly 94 percent for Joe Biden in 2020. Afterwards, a juror told CBS News that the case was “simple” and there was “not a dissenting voice in the jury.”

He’d already been incarcerated since his arrest in January, 2021, and could face 20 years in prison for each count of obstruction. He’ll be sentenced in June.

He never entered the Capitol building that day.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/08/first-january-6-defendant-to-face-trial-found-guilty-by-d-c-jury/

Finally, there’s the story of how, during Reffitt’s trial, the DOJ called his teenage son to testify against him, as their narrative included allegations that Reffitt had physically threatened his kids about going to the FBI.

Prosecutors had convinced Reffitt’s son to secretly record him at home for eight days before turning him over to the FBI. They had intended to call his younger sister to the stand as well but changed their minds, and the reason seems clear. Outside the courthouse, she said, “I never felt threatened by my father...It hurts me so much that they are saying that.”

She had wanted to be called to the stand to DEFEND her dad, but Reffitt’s court-appointed attorney never called a single witness. This is a shocking story and a must-read.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/never-felt-threatened-dad-doj-wanted-say-must-read-shocking-statement-january-6th-daughter-called-doj-prosecution/

So, we have the big-deal NYT reporter, someone who furthered the left’s January 6 narrative while saying in private that it was really overblown, and then we have a heartbreaking travesty of “justice” like this. Matthew Rosenberg should have to sit through all these trials.

Mike Huckabee

Okay, here’s a real “fact-check,” or maybe I should say a punch in the gut with reality: Monday, the average price of a gallon of gas in the US hit a record high of $4.104, surpassing the previous record of $4.103 set in 2008. The best you can say for Biden is that it might not actually be the highest ever when you adjust it for the galloping inflation that’s the only thing he seems interested in fueling.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/u-s-gas-prices-hit-new-record-high

Naturally, the highest price is in deep blue California, where the average price of a gallon of gas is $5.43. That means in many places, it’s much higher, like in the $6 range. And if any alleged “experts” still think Trump’s prediction of even higher prices seems “dubious,” some oil traders are now bracing for oil to hit $200 a barrel by the end of this month.

https://www.westernjournal.com/warning-americans-traders-eye-200-per-oil-barrel-month-report/

Meanwhile, President Biden was finally pressured enough that he will reportedly announce an end to importing Russian oil on Tuesday morning.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/biden-russian-oil-import-ban

But what will he replace it with? Judging by comments from Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, buying it from Iran is on the table. He’d rather buy it from terrorists than let Americans pump it. A meme has gone viral that says Biden is scouring the world for any place that has oil other than Texas. That doesn’t even make sense from an environmental standpoint since our oil is much cleaner than Russia’s and doesn’t have to be transported halfway around the world.

Even in liberal Massachusetts, one Springfield man told a reporter that the gas prices made him sick to his stomach, adding, “They’re killing the working man.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/american-brutal-reaction-gas-prices-bidens-america-sick-stomach/

Biden’s fellow Democrats (the former “friend of the working man” Party) are starting to panic and suggest any gimmicks to try to temporarily lower the price of gas before the November elections.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gas-prices-democratic-bloodbath-midterms-republicans

But they’re still unwilling to do what everyone with a brain bigger than a chicken’s knows we have to do: reverse Biden’s idiotic policies and get our pumps and pipelines back online ASAP. Last week, House Republicans introduced a bill to do that, and Democrats voted it down by 221-202.

https://notthebee.com/article/house-democrats-voted-down-a-major-oil-independence-bill-because-they-prefer-renewable-energy-and-someone-needs-to-tell-them-that-you-can-do-both-its-fine-to-do-both

Maybe those $6-a-gallon gas prices will convince them to hold a do-over and get it right this time by passing Ted Cruz’s Energy Freedom Act. Or maybe they think that keeping gas prices sky-high will prevent all those truckers from reaching Washington to protest them. The big question is, how long will they keep on killing the working man before they finally force themselves to admit that Trump was right and unleash America’s energy industries?

Mike Huckabee

With our usual caveats that we can’t cover breaking news, and that first reports from war zones are often unreliable, here is today’s continuously-updated feed of Ukraine bulletins from Fox News:

https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-3-7-2022

Among the latest developments as Monday starts day 12 of Russia’s invasion:

Russia claimed it will honor another ceasefire, but Ukraine rejected a proposal to evacuate Ukrainian citizens to Russia and Belarus, the equivalent of evacuating out of the frying pan and into the fire. Ukraine is also calling for a worldwide boycott of Russian products.

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy held a Zoom meeting over the weekend with 280 US Congress members. With NATO having rejected his request to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, Zelenskyy pleaded with lawmakers to introduce an oil embargo on Russia and stop buying Russian oil. He also said if the US had started serious sanctions months ago, there wouldn’t have been any war. That must’ve been an uncomfortable phone call for the Biden backers in Congress.

https://www.westernjournal.com/ukrainian-president-zelenskyy-makes-one-request-us-meeting-change-everything/

Visa and Mastercard announced that they will cease all transactions involving Russian banks. But Robert Spencer at PJ Media argues that that will mostly harm ordinary Russians who might oppose Putin’s invasion. It also sets more precedent for financial companies to deplatform people with unapproved views.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2022/03/06/why-americans-shouldnt-be-happy-that-mastercard-and-visa-have-suspended-russia-operations-n1564206

Nick Arama at Redstate.com notes that Paypal, Payarama and Adobe have also suspended operations in Russia. Yet President Biden continues doing business with Russia, buying their oil instead of pumping our own.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/03/06/latest-shoe-is-a-big-one-to-drop-on-russia-but-joe-biden-is-still-holding-back-n532341

Meanwhile, China was only too happy to step in and fill the void. Russia will start using China’s UnionPay credit card system instead of Visa and Mastercard.

https://news.yahoo.com/russian-banks-switch-chinese-card-161004241.html

The Chinese foreign minister touted China’s relationship with Russia, calling Moscow China’s “most important strategic partner.” Previous Presidents understood that both powers had to be treated with a mixture of praise/diplomacy and ironfisted restrictions because we wanted each of them kept off-balance and dependent on/afraid of us so they wouldn’t align with each other. Previous Presidents understood that it was better to have an uneasy alliance with each against the other than to have Russia and China team up against us. But previous Presidents weren’t Joe Biden.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/china-russia-most-important-strategic-partner-ukraine-invasion

Mike Huckabee

Lately, Tesla and Starlink billionaire Elon Musk has been showing more common sense and leadership than we’re getting from our own White House. He stood up for increasing American oil production (even though he sells electric cars), and in less than a day, he provided satellite access and equipment for Ukraine to get back onto the Internet. But now, he’s drawing the line at what he sees as doing the same thing Russia is doing.

https://www.westernjournal.com/governments-pressure-elon-musk-turn-assets-russia-tells-bring-gun-next-time/

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Putin signed a new law barring Russian news outlets from reporting on his war on Ukraine. In response, many governments (but not Ukraine’s, oddly) are pressuring media and Internet companies such as Starlink to ban Russian news outlets as propaganda. He tweeted, “We will not do so unless at gunpoint. Sorry to be a free speech absolutist.” He added, “And also my sympathies to the great people of Russia, who do not want this.”

I understand the impulse to ban Russian media outlets when we know they’re being forced to censor themselves and air Putin’s propaganda. But if we are aware of that in advance, wouldn’t it be useful for us to know what they’re telling their own people, so we know what we have to counter? Also, you never know when some brave journalist is going to slip in some helpful real information or make a stand that the world should see.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/russian-news-walks-crackdown-media

In America, the Founders gave us free speech and freedom of the press because they trusted the people to have enough sense to know when they were hearing garbage ideas and argue them down and reject them. When the government starts deciding whose ideas are incorrect and unworthy of being spoken, that’s the slippery slope to tyranny.

We were already sliding that way as it is. Letting our government use Russia as an excuse to outright ban certain media outlets from the public square would only move us further down the well-known path of all fanatics, who eventually become what they once claimed to hate.

Mike Huckabee

Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff!

Today's newsletter includes:

• Ukraine: Biden Feels the Pressure
• Durham responds masterfully to Sussmann's lawyers
• This 2020 Trump claim was fact-checked…it turns out he was right
• And much more

Thank you again for reading.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

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Proverbs 22:6

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3. Ukraine: Biden Feels the Pressure

This is today’s Fox News link for the latest bulletins on the Russian invasion of Ukraine:

https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-3-8-2022

Some of the top stories from the past 24 hours: President Biden has FINALLY been pressured into ending US imports of Russian oil, but at this writing it’s unknown whether he’ll take his foot off the neck of America’s oil producers or try to replace it with oil from OPEC or (God forbid) Iran (which would spike gas prices even higher), or just rely on sunshine, windmills and wishes (which would send gas prices to the moon.)

Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy said some of the responsibility for deaths in Ukraine falls on nations that refused to impose a no-fly zone. The UN estimated that over 2 million people have fled Ukraine. US officials estimate that more than 3,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, which is about 1 out of every 300 Russian military members. Ukraine officials claim that Russian forces are shelling a humanitarian corridor established to allow evacuees to leave safely.

For those who want to understand more of what’s going on with Russia and Ukraine, Putin’s history and motivations, and what’s likely to happen in the future, Kamil Galeev of the Wilson Center has a series of interesting Twitter threads that take a deep dive into those subjects.

https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1498377757536968711

You might start with this one, which is very eye-opening. All the “Z’s” you see popping up in Russia do not mean the people support Zelenskyy.

https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1500495309595725831

4. This 2020 Trump Claim was fact-checked, it turns out he was right

Here’s more proof that when liberal media outlets begin a story with “Experts say…” there’s a very good chance you’re about to get a snow job. If it’s a story about anything Donald Trump said, you can count on it. The self-appointed “fact-checkers” were constantly telling us that Trump was lying about something, according to “experts,” when it later became obvious that he was right. And now, here’s yet another example.

Just before the 2020 election, Trump was speaking at a rally in Grand Rapids, where he was boasting about making America energy-independent for the first time and bringing gas prices down to $2 a gallon or less. He then said, “If Biden got in, you’d be paying $7, $8, $9, then they’d say, ‘Get rid of your car.'”

https://www.westernjournal.com/video-trumps-bold-prediction-2020-comes-true-americans-live-reality-bidens-america/

The Washington Post responded with an “analysis” calling the claim that gas prices would spike under Biden “dubious,” adding, “Experts say those fears are overblown,” and that Biden’s policies could ease tensions with Iran and “result in incrementally lower gas prices.”

5. Durham responds masterfully to Sussmann's lawyers

Say what you will about former Attorney General Bill Barr…

https://www.abc4.com/news/national/trump-rips-barr-in-letter-to-nbcs-lester-holt/

...but he deserves credit for his fantastic pick of John Durham as special counsel to investigate the origins of the phony “Trump/Russia” probe. For a long time, we all wondered what he could possibly be doing, as months and months went by without any news. But now it’s easy to understand why the case is taking so long. There’s much more to it than anyone imagined at the outset.

In his latest court filing, made Friday to counter Michael Sussmann’s attorneys’ most recent motions, Durham has shown that he'd make a great archer, as he aims right at the target and hits a rhetorical bull’s-eye. Here’s a link to the whole 16-page document.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.235638/gov.uscourts.dcd.235638.44.0_6.pdf

Recall that Sussmann, conveniently the attorney for both the Hillary Clinton campaign and Rodney Joffe (Tech Executive – 1), has been charged with lying to the FBI by failing to disclose that he was acting on behalf of legal clients. He maintained that he had brought the (fake) Alfa Bank story to the FBI simply out of his sense of patriotic duty, as a concerned citizen. A couple of weeks ago, in their motion to dismiss that charge, Sussmann’s attorneys said --- try not to laugh --- that their client hadn’t lied, but that even if he HAD lied, the lie was not material to the case and was protected by the First Amendment besides, so, come on, judge, just let it go.

Durham, in his response to the First Amendment argument, took aim and said, “Far from finding himself in the vulnerable position of an ordinary person whose speech is likely to be chilled, the defendant --- a sophisticated and well-connected lawyer --- chose to bring politically-charged allegations to the FBI’s chief legal officer [James Baker] at the height of an election season.

“He then chose to lie about the clients who were behind those allegations. Using such rare access to the halls of power for the purposes of political deceit is hardly the type of speech that the Founders intended to protect. The Court should therefore reject defendant’s invitation to expand the scope of the First Amendment to protect such conduct.”

Is that not great?

As for whether his (false) statements to the FBI were material to the case, Durham was spot-on again. Imagine how things might have gone if Sussmann had been honest about his true connections, given their implied motivations. His ties to the Clinton campaign could --- at least SHOULD --- have had tremendous bearing. As Durham put it:

“Had the defendant truthfully informed the FBI General Counsel that he was providing the information on behalf of one or more clients, as opposed to merely acting as a ‘good citizen,’ the FBI General Counsel and other FBI personnel might have asked a multitude of additional questions material to the case initiation process.”

It’s hard to imagine information more material to the case than this. As Durham said, the lie was capable of “influencing both the FBI’s decision to initiate an investigation and its subsequent conduct of that investigation.”

Knowledge of these attorney-client relationships, he said, “would have shed critical light on the origins of the allegations at issue.” It goes without saying that this would certainly not have been in the interest of Sussmann’s clients, Hillary Clinton and a man trying in an underhanded way to help get her elected. Sussmann's charade was completely in their interest.

“Given the temporal proximity to the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” Durham said, “the FBI also might have taken any number of different steps in initiating, delaying, or declining the initiation of this matter had it known at the time that the defendant was providing information on behalf of the Clinton campaign and a technology executive at a private company.”

Sussmann’s attorneys had also moved to strike the “Factual Background” in Durham’s charge –- the part that went into detail about Sussmann’s ties with Clinton and Joffe as part of the larger picture. They said Durham had included that part “to politicize this case, inflame media coverage, and taint the jury pool.” We'd thought their attempt to strike that section seemed like a well-we-gotta-try-something move, as they ended up calling MORE attention to it.

Durham made it clear that there was no basis to strike any part of that motion, as the factual background was “central” to proving the allegation of Sussmann’s criminal conduct. He also said that some of it was necessary for explaining the conflicts of interest that were the point of his earlier filing about various people of interest (Sussmann included) being defended by the same law firm, Latham & Watkins.

Margot Cleveland has another great article about the filings in Durham’s case, this one saying he “demolished” the attempt to get Sussmann’s charges dropped.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/07/5-new-special-counsel-arguments-against-a-russia-hoaxers-attempt-to-escape/

Cleveland offers her usual superb analysis, making points seen nowhere else. She offers five “key takeaways” from Durham’s filing:

1. On the issue of materiality, Durham states what the correct standard for that is, stressing that it refers to the “potential,” as opposed to the actual, effects of the lie. And even using the defense attorneys’ very narrow standard, Sussmann’s alleged “misrepresentation” (lie) is still material because it could have influenced the FBI’s decision-making.

Cleveland says denial of the defendant’s motion to dismiss is “inevitable” and that Durham refuted “six ways to Sunday” the claim that Sussmann's lie was not material. It plainly was, he said, “because it misled the General Counsel about, among other things, the critical fact that the defendant was disseminating highly explosive allegations about a then-Presidential candidate on behalf of two specific clients, one of which was the opposing Presidential campaign.” Doesn't get much plainer than that.

2. Durham destroyed the Democrats’ talking point that the FBI already knew Sussmann was an attorney for the DNC. Sussmann had held himself out as a cybersecurity and national security attorney, “not an election lawyer or political consultant,” Durham wrote. So when Sussmann had denied any client relationships, he had made it seem that he was not there in a political capacity, when he was.

3. Durham countered the defense’s argument that Joffe’s status as “a long-standing respected FBI source” made Sussmann’s failure to disclose representing him immaterial. This one is a bit “in the weeds” but really interesting, so if you’re following these arguments closely, do read Cleveland’s piece.

4. Durham countered another defense argument that's also a talking point, the one saying that Trump was not the target because data brought by Sussmann was from before he was President. The special counsel made it clear that this is a distinction without a difference, as Trump clearly was the target.

5. Finally, Durham had some fun with the defense’s assertion that the charge against their client “risks valuable First Amendment speech,” calling a comparison they'd made “absurd.” Sussmann, he said, “as a former government attorney and prosecutor...was well aware that the law required him to honest and forthright when communicating with the FBI.”

I wonder --- is that even possible when furthering the interests of Hillary Clinton?

6. Fact: Average $ for a Gallon of Gas Hits Record High

Okay, here’s a real “fact-check,” or maybe I should say a punch in the gut with reality: Monday, the average price of a gallon of gas in the US hit a record high of $4.104, surpassing the previous record of $4.103 set in 2008. The best you can say for Biden is that it might not actually be the highest ever when you adjust it for the galloping inflation that’s the only thing he seems interested in fueling.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/u-s-gas-prices-hit-new-record-high

Naturally, the highest price is in deep blue California, where the average price of a gallon of gas is $5.43. That means in many places, it’s much higher, like in the $6 range. And if any alleged “experts” still think Trump’s prediction of even higher prices seems “dubious,” some oil traders are now bracing for oil to hit $200 a barrel by the end of this month.

https://www.westernjournal.com/warning-americans-traders-eye-200-per-oil-barrel-month-report/

Meanwhile, President Biden was finally pressured enough that he will reportedly announce an end to importing Russian oil on Tuesday morning.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/biden-russian-oil-import-ban

But what will he replace it with? Judging by comments from Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, buying it from Iran is on the table. He’d rather buy it from terrorists than let Americans pump it. A meme has gone viral that says Biden is scouring the world for any place that has oil other than Texas. That doesn’t even make sense from an environmental standpoint since our oil is much cleaner than Russia’s and doesn’t have to be transported halfway around the world.

Even in liberal Massachusetts, one Springfield man told a reporter that the gas prices made him sick to his stomach, adding, “They’re killing the working man.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/american-brutal-reaction-gas-prices-bidens-america-sick-stomach/

Biden’s fellow Democrats (the former “friend of the working man” Party) are starting to panic and suggest any gimmicks to try to temporarily lower the price of gas before the November elections.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gas-prices-democratic-bloodbath-midterms-republicans

But they’re still unwilling to do what everyone with a brain bigger than a chicken’s knows we have to do: reverse Biden’s idiotic policies and get our pumps and pipelines back online ASAP. Last week, House Republicans introduced a bill to do that, and Democrats voted it down by 221-202.

https://notthebee.com/article/house-democrats-voted-down-a-major-oil-independence-bill-because-they-prefer-renewable-energy-and-someone-needs-to-tell-them-that-you-can-do-both-its-fine-to-do-both

Maybe those $6-a-gallon gas prices will convince them to hold a do-over and get it right this time by passing Ted Cruz’s Energy Freedom Act. Or maybe they think that keeping gas prices sky-high will prevent all those truckers from reaching Washington to protest them. The big question is, how long will they keep on killing the working man before they finally force themselves to admit that Trump was right and unleash America’s energy industries?

7. Barr makes news: Defends cops and says he would vote for Trump over the “progressive agenda”

Former Attorney General Bill Barr is making appearances to promote his new book. Naturally, the media are trumpeting anything he says that reflects badly on Donald Trump, and there’s plenty of that. And he made it clear he wouldn’t support Trump for the Republican nomination. But before they start trying to elevate Barr into the next never-Trump CNN regular, I’ll bet the liberal talking heads nearly exploded when Barr said that if Trump were the nominee in 2024, the “progressive” Democrat agenda is such a threat to America that it’s “inconceivable” that he wouldn’t vote for the Republican, whoever it is.

https://redstate.com/streiff/2022/03/07/savannah-guthrie-gets-poleaxed-by-bill-barrs-answer-to-her-question-about-the-2024-election-n533046

It must be hard for those people to hear that after five years of blasting Trump with all they’ve got, even someone who doesn’t like him would say in effect, “But I’d still vote for him if that was the only alternative to the walking dumpster fires you people support.”

Barr also probably won’t make many friends in the media with his defense of cops as not being racists but as simply arresting people who commit crimes.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/washington-secrets/liberal-media-scream-lester-holt-fights-truth-that-cops-are-where-crime-is

I Just Wanted to Say:

Thank you for reading my newsletter. 

For more news, visit my website here.

Mike Huckabee

Putin's invasion of Ukraine has sparked letters touching on stories that are going around. Here are two...

From John K:

“Mike, a history lesson is in order here. Didn't USSR, now Russia, help in [email protected] the Nazis? Some pundits are saying that Russia is now invading European lands. How did that happen? We don't have history on the History channel or Wikipedia. This land was never European land but as I recall it was part of Russia before we sorted that out. The fake new Republic of the World, or as they say the New world Order promulgated by the Sorosbrand and "Progressive Liberals," is or is coming soon to a theatre near you. The play is just starting, so take your seat. I want to sit next to you.”

From Fiorella W:

“I hear many conflicting stories about Putin's real motive. One source says that the U.S. has established 11 biolabs in Ukraine and Putin has taken 7 out... And then, of course, there is the whole Biden family continuing corruption with the puppet regime. What should we believe?

Thanks to you both, and to all who have written. Yes, Soviet Russia did fight against Hitler, after Germany invaded Russia in June, 1941.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/invasion-of-the-soviet-union-june-1941

Technically, the Soviets became our allies when we entered the war. That’s why, with the way people tend to think in “either/or” terms, alliances ever since have been framed in that way. You checked a box: 1) pro-Nazi, or 2) pro-Russia. Later on, it became 1) pro-Russia, or 2) pro-China. The truth: NONE of them deserve our support.

Eastern Europe was carved up in 1945 at the Yalta Conference –- led by FDR (very ill at the time), British Prime Minister Churchill and Soviet Premier Stalin. They were then looking at terms to induce the Soviets to enter the war in the Pacific. Because of that, and also because Russia had done much in recent days to drive back the Germans, Stalin was seen to have an advantage at the talks.

Stalin refused to relinquish Poland but said he’d permit free elections. Same with Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. At that time, Soviet Russia was an "ally," but that was exposed as a sham when, in 1945, the U.S.S.R. made it clear they’d be clamping down on Poland and not allowing political freedom at all. Our former “ally” controlled those Eastern European nations and also East Berlin, which they shockingly encased behind a wall topped with barbed wire and snipers. In March 1946, Churchill gave his speech saying an “iron curtain” had descended upon Eastern Europe, marking the start of the Cold War.

Since then, the U.S.S.R. has fallen and Russia’s borders have changed. But we see from this snippet of history that distinctions between so-called “Russian territory” and “Eastern Europe” are likely lost on Vladimir Putin.

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/yalta-conference

To say Ukraine was once “part of Russia” echoes Putin’s propaganda campaign but ignores the naked, horrific aggression he committed. Some have even said that since Ukraine has corruption, the altruistic Mr. Putin was trying to right a wrong by invading. As if Russia doesn’t have corruption? I have hardly ever heard anything crazier: that Putin is trying to “save” Ukraine from corruption by bombing the daylights out of it. Couldn’t he have just...made a phone call or something?

I say that facetiously to set up a point: that when Trump tried to address corruption through a phone call, he got impeached. Putin wouldn’t have such worries.

Then there’s the story about biolabs. We don’t know --- it’s hard enough finding out about biolabs in China and talking about those freely --- but even if this is real and NOT Russian disinformation, invading Ukraine and killing thousands of innocent people is not an acceptable response. Sounds like a pretext to us. It works well as propaganda, though, because after what we’ve learned about the World Health Organization, it’s believable. But it doesn’t justify Putin’s invasion. Here’s a good write-up by Kyle Becker.

https://beckernews.com/3-russian-ministry-of-defense-claims-it-has-evidence-of-u-s-funded-bioweapons-labs-in-ukraine-44303/

We do know that Putin is a sociopath because operatives have killed many of his critics, defectors, and others besides. From the Homeland Security News Wire in 2020: “...Putin has adopted a milder version of Stalin’s tactics of random killings in order to instill a generalized sense of fear and insecurity in the Russian elite.” They provide a list of murders.

https://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20200825-putin-s-victims-a-long-list-getting-longer

We’ve long known that Putin is a KGB thug, but there are loathsome factions in the U.S. that avoid criticism of him. Bizarrely, President Biden even has Putin involved in the negotiations for a new “Iran deal,” which we know would lead to Iran becoming a nuclear power. Mark Levin had a great show on this and related matters Sunday night.

https://video.foxnews.com/v/6299850695001#sp=show-clips

We’ve heard some particularly inane observations, such as that Ukrainian President Zelensky shouldn’t be believed "because he was an actor.” Well, Ronald Reagan was an actor, and he was about as trustworthy as it gets. That doesn’t mean Zelensky is trustworthy, just that the observation is stupid. Putin undeniably is a thug, and Zelensky understandably wants our help with a no-fly zone, but we must anticipate the perhaps-literal fallout. To reject this step does not make one pro-Putin in any way, just pro-using-your-brain.

Trump’s political enemies call him pro-Putin because he’s flattered Vlad now and them, calling him “smart” and such. They fail to understand that this move in itself was smart –- played to discourage Putin from cozying up to China. (Too late now, it seems.) Critics play checkers when they should be playing chess.

Here are more debunked stories...

https://thenationalpulse.com/2022/02/28/pro-ukraine-propaganda-floods-social-media/

And here’s a fabulous more-recent Ukraine history lesson, a “premium” article by Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke for The Epoch Times. Highly recommended...

https://www.theepochtimes.com/before-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-a-decade-of-destabilization_4316990.html/?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=TheLibertyDaily

(Note that The National Pulse, just for offering facts, feels the need to run a disclaimer: “For the avoidance of doubt, The National Pulse is against wars of aggression, and is not supported financially by any government or entity acting on behalf of a government or foreign interest...”)

As for George Soros, yes, his influence in Ukraine has been huge, starting in 1989, just before the fall of the Soviet Union. He’s been pushing for Ukraine to enter the E.U. We highly recommend Matt Palumbo’s book about him, THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN, in which Ukraine gets its own fascinating chapter, with names you’ll recognize from Trump’s first impeachment and even the Steele “dossier.” That country’s full of the kind of secrets you’d expect from a pro-Obama, pro-Hillary crowd.

There are so many unknowns. As we said Saturday, this really is “the first draft of history.” It’s a shame we can’t trust what our own government tells us. Scott Adams, bestselling author and “Dilbert” creator,” called the situation “a big black box that we can’t see into.”

Even so, there's one truth we should agree on: that unprovoked aggression is always wrong. For everything else you might read or hear about this war, ask yourself two questions: 1) Has this person generally been right before, and 2) How can this person possibly KNOW what he’s saying is true?

Mike Huckabee

When we think of people being arrested and then waiting for months without charges being filed, we think of dictatorships and banana republics. So why is it happening here, in the very capital of the United States of America?

https://redstate.com/leslie-mcadoo-gordon/2022/03/08/doj-rushes-obtain-indictment-for-january-6-defendant-to-cure-illegal-detention-n533107

There’s a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo to weed through, but the upshot of that article is that a January 6th defendant, Lucas Denney, was arrested back in December and still had no idea what he was charged with. His attorney filed for the case to be dismissed because under the Speedy Trial Act, prosecutors are required to issue an indictment within 30 days of arrest. Denney had a hearing set for Monday, but the DOJ rushed through a one-count indictment at the last minute and cited various excuses, such as COVID delays.

The judge ruled on a technicality that he couldn’t dismiss the case that day, but if the law means anything anymore (an open question), the charge should be dropped because the DOJ clearly violated the Speedy Trial Act.

However, the judge sharply rebuked the DOJ, saying that if they’ve charged more people over January 6th than they can keep up with, that’s their fault, not the defendants’. He pointed out that they claim these are such important cases because they’re protecting the Constitution, then they violate the defendants’ Constitutional rights in the process of prosecuting them.

But then, that seems to be a recurring theme in all the Democrats’ zealous drum-banging over January 6th: they’re going to save the Constitution and “democracy,” even if they have to trample both of them to death to do it.

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

Special counsels can be appointed at the state level, too, and it appears that one in Wisconsin has found evidence to confirm widespread election fraud.

The Wisconsin Assembly appointed Special Counsel Michael Gableman, a retired State Supreme Court justice, to investigate concerns about the 2020 election, and on Tuesday, his office issued its second interim report, which runs 150 pages. In Chapter 7, it confirms the conclusion of the Racine County Sheriff’s Office last fall that fraud occurred at Wisconsin nursing homes.

https://legis.wisconsin.gov/assembly/22/brandtjen/media/1552/osc-second-interim-report.pdf

It was the sheriff’s investigation that led to this broader one. Sheriff Christopher Schmaling held a press conference last October 28 at which lead investigator Michael Luell presented their findings. (Note that this hour-long press conference got mostly crickets from national media.) Luell explained that under Wisconsin election law, local municipalities must dispatch two special voting deputies, or SVDs, to residential care facilities to supervise the voting. These officials are tasked with personally delivering ballots to residents and witnessing the voting process. Under law, only a relative or an SVD may assist a resident with the voting process. Once the resident has voted, the SVD seals the ballot envelope and delivers it to the elections clerk.

This sounds like a great plan to preserve the chain of custody and discourage undue influence. Unfortunately, the sheriff’s investigation found that the Ridgewood Care Center in Racine violated every one of those requirements. Amazingly, the blame for this can be traced back to the Wisconsin Election Commission, whose members had allegedly taken it upon themselves to tell municipalities not to use the SVD system and to instead just mail ballots to residents. Such a directive would be illegal.

So it was up to staffers to help residents complete their ballots, and according to the sheriff, they “helped” them, all right --- improperly completing sections of the ballots, mishandling ballots and failing to secure them, and going beyond just reading the ballots to actively discussing the elections and candidates. In legal parlance, that is a no-no.

As Sheriff Schmaling said during his press conference, his investigation had covered only the Ridgewood Care Center, when Racine County was home to 11 such facilities, and Racine County is just one of 72 counties. “There are literally hundreds and hundreds of these facilities throughout the state of Wisconsin,” he said. “We would be foolish to think for a moment that this integrity issue, this violation of the statute, occurred to just this small group of people at one care facility in one county in the entire state.”

Several days after their press conference, the Sheriff’s Office announced that they had forwarded their conclusions to District Attorney Patricia Hanson, recommending that five members of the Wisconsin Election Commission be charged with election fraud, including two felony counts. (Only one member was not cited.) Margot Cleveland has details on the specific charges in her report for The Federalist.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/03/wisconsin-special-counsel-finds-widespread-election-fraud-in-2020-nursing-homes/

You can probably guess what happened next, which is to say nothing –- no charges were filed. After several months, DA Hanson concluded that she “lacked jurisdiction” and had no authority to prosecute the commissioners because they don’t live in Racine County and didn’t issue the “allegedly illegal directive doing away with SVD.” So, we're confused, as the sheriff's investigation had concluded they did do that.

And after deciding not to charge the commissioners, Hanson couldn’t very well charge the staff at the nursing homes, could she? She reasoned it this way: “[I]t would be unfair for me to expect these health care professionals would better understand the election law in Wisconsin than the Wisconsin Election Commission.” Never mind that she should have had higher expectations for the WEC; after lowering the bar for them, she was able to lower it even farther for the nursing home staff. Case dismissed!

Here’s some of the fallout as reported by a local news outlet, just a few days before the special counsel dropped his report.

https://journaltimes.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/elections/four-wis-prosecutors-considering-whether-to-file-charges-against-elections-commissioners/article_b928849a-965f-512a-920c-62f9527b0844.html

Fortunately it didn’t end with that DA, and we now have an eye-opening special counsel report. This would not have happened without the sheriff’s investigation, which had stemmed from a complaint by some individual about potential violations at just one nursing home. Moral: one person speaking up CAN make a difference.

And now, the special counsel apparently has the goods. “Rampant fraud and abuse occurred statewide at Wisconsin’s nursing homes and other residential care facilities,” his report says.

This conclusion came after his investigation of more than 90 nursing homes in five different counties. We’re talking about blatant violations of the election code by nursing home staff and administrators, such as illegal handling of absentee ballots, illegal assistance in marking ballots, illegally “witnessing” the voting, and possible forgery. According to the report, the fraud and abuse resulted ultimately from the unlawful acts of the WEC’s members and staff, because on June 24, 2020, they did issue that directive to mail the ballots to the nursing homes and just follow the rules for regular absentee voting by mail.

The special counsel found “improbably high voting rates” at nursing homes. He was even able to determine that some of the filled-out ballots did not reflect the intent of the nursing home residents. He found suspected forgeries of signatures and votes by people who had been judged incompetent and could not legally vote. He found votes "cast" by people who were unaware of their surroundings and didn’t even know what year it was.

The WEC had tried to use COVID to justify what it had done, saying they didn’t want seniors ”disenfranchised.” Special Counsel Gableman was stern in his assessment of that: “In no way was WEC’s mandating illegal activity a ‘solution’ to ‘disenfranchisement’ and to suggest that WEC’s actions were a good faith effort at doing so ignores the facts and the law.” He went on to point out that the problems he had found, resulting from their directive, WERE examples of disenfranchisement.

Gableman said that to get the full picture of the significance of the fraud, “a state-wide, complete audit of all absentee votes from all facilities” required to use the SVD system is necessary.

In the 2020 election, Wisconsin went for Biden by a margin of just 20,682 votes. Since about 92,000 people reside in Wisconsin nursing homes, the findings of this investigation cast “doubt on the election result” according to the special counsel report. The Wisconsin State Assembly might authorize Gableman to expand his audit, but that’s not official at this writing. Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul called the sheriff’s original investigation a “publicity stunt” and is highly unlikely to do anything with this one. That seems like a great reason for voters to show up in droves this fall and boot him out of office.

Incidentally, the report has chapters dealing with other issues in Wisconsin that we’ve discussed before, such as the infusion of money from Mark Zuckerberg and the Center for Tech and Civic Life, and potential violations of law concerning ballot security at dropboxes. Look for social media to flag discussions of this report as heretical and news outlets to trash it (Politico and BuzzFeed already have), even though it’s the product of a special counsel investigation and contains, presumably, facts.

Mike Huckabee

The polls have Democrats looking forward to the November elections with as much optimism as bugs look forward to a visit from the Orkin man. So between now and then, their friendly media will be trying to gaslight us in all sorts of ways to convince us that they’re not responsible for the messes they’ve created. You’ll be expected to believe that they never went overboard with COVID restrictions, that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is responsible for Putin invading Ukraine, and that most Democrats in Washington are patriotic moderates who don’t back the far-left radical ideas pushed by “The Squad.”

When you hear that, remember this:

In a move that some pundits are calling “a gift to Republicans,” Senate “Majority” Leader Chuck Schumer forced a show vote on a bill that would have made it legal to perform abortions at any time. It would have wiped away every state-level protection, making it legal to kill a child in the womb at nine months if a doctor says there’s a risk to the mother’s health -- despite the fact that obstetricians say there’s almost no circumstance under which an abortion at that stage is less dangerous to the mother’s health than birthing the baby.

As of that weren’t radical enough, check out this, from the Fox News write-up:

“The bill also claims that abortion rights qualifies as ‘reproductive justice’ seeking to address ‘systems of oppression, lack of bodily autonomy, white supremacy, and anti-Black racism.’ While the bill claims that abortion restrictions ‘are a tool of gender oppression,’ it also clarifies that despite using ‘the terms ‘woman’ and ‘women,’’ legislators intend to ‘protect all people with the capacity for pregnancy—cisgender women, transgender men, non-binary individuals, those who identify with a different gender, and others—who are unjustly harmed by restrictions on abortion services.’”

That’s right: it’s “racist” to oppose abortion, even though blacks make up 14% of the population but black women get 36% of all abortions. Since Roe v. Wade, about 20 million black babies have been killed by abortion, more than the entire black population of America in 1960.

https://azcapitoltimes.com/news/2020/02/25/abortion-the-overlooked-tragedy-for-black-americans/

And here’s now all those “moderate” Democrats voted: The House already passed it 218-211, with every Democrat except Rep. Henry Cuellar supporting it. And in the Senate, it was blocked by filibuster from coming to a vote by 48-46. Six Senators didn’t vote. Joe Manchin was the only Democrat to join Republicans in voting against it. And Manchin and Bob Casey (who did vote to bring it to debate) were the only Democrats who didn’t co-sponsor it.

How do these allegedly moderate Democrats who sponsored and voted for it compare to average Americans? A recent Marist poll found that only 17% of Americans think abortion should be available at any stage of pregnancy, as do only 31% of Democrats. The Democrats in Congress are so far left, they’re even out of touch with other Democrats.

So when you’re voting in November, unless you’re voting for Joe Manchin or Henry Cuellar, remember that all that talk about moderate Democrats in Congress is, as our President would put it, “malarkey.”

Mike Huckabee

It’s too late to make any difference now, but in Wisconsin, which Biden won in 2020 by less than 21,000 votes, an audit led by former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman found so much corruption that Gableman said legislators should consider decertifying the vote.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/03/01/2020-wisconsin-vote-should-be-decertified-investigator-says-n1562797

Gableman’s investigation found problems with drop boxes, ballots gathered from nursing homes, and with the $9 million given to election officials solely in Democrat districts by Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, which violated the state’s bribery laws.

Margot Cleveland at the Federalist has more details.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/01/breaking-special-counsel-finds-mark-zuckerbergs-election-money-violated-wisconsin-bribery-laws/

While there’s no mechanism for changing the outcome of the election at this point, this report is valuable because it shows the weaknesses that were exploited in the last election and how the election system needs to be reformed and security tightened. Indeed, as Matt Margolis at PJ Media notes, at least 10 states have already moved to ban or restrict the “Zuck Bucks” that were used to influence partisan turnout in 2020.

It also gives Americans all the more reason to do a little suspicious grumbling when their social media accounts are shut down for spreading “dangerous misinformation” if they express any doubts about the integrity of the last election. I have doubts about the integrity of a lot of things, and that’s just one of them.

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

Last night, President Biden gave his first State of the Union Address. At least, I think he did. I tuned in to watch, and something bizarre happened. I believe due to some weird atmospheric anomaly, my satellite dish picked up a SOTU Address by a totally different President Biden speaking from an alternate universe.

In this parallel universe, the alt-President Biden spent the past year strengthening international relations and the past few months working with our allies to get sanctions in place that have Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian invasion plans on the ropes. In our universe, our President Biden pulled a botched Afghanistan withdrawal without consulting our allies and signaled that America was an unreliable partner (there was also that business with the submarines that ticked off France.) Our Biden admitted just last week that the sanctions, which he waited too long to impose, didn’t work, as Putin enters his seventh day of ramping up his horrific assault on Ukraine.

In the alternate universe, a record number of new jobs were created last year. In this universe, people returned to their old jobs that were artificially shut down by the government, but we’re still millions short of where we were before the pandemic.

In the alternate universe, the House chamber was filled with unmasked people. In our universe, many kids are still forced to wear masks in school, despite even “Saturday Night Live” now admitting they made very little difference.

In the alternate universe, alt-President Biden promotes buying American and cracking down on illegal immigration. In our universe, Trump did those things and Biden called him a racist and a xenophobe.

In the alternate universe, inflation can be cured by ordering businesses to lower their costs while also forcing them to raise wages and pay much higher taxes. In our universe, inflation is caused by the government printing too much money, and wages and taxes actually are two of the biggest costs of doing business.

In the alternate universe, COVID is not a reason for Americans to be divided. In our universe, it’s a reason to demonize people, fire them from their jobs, and refuse them medical care.

In the alternate universe, Biden denounces illegal immigration and skyrocketing crime and calls for more funding for police and gets standing ovations from the Democrats. In our universe, Biden opened the borders, denounced our border guards as whip-cracking racists, wants to tear down the border wall, and secretly disperses illegal aliens by plane all over America under cover of darkness. And the crime waves are in Democrat-run cities where leftist DA’s have actually made crime legal while Democrats defunded the police. Democrats applauding our Biden for vowing to crack down on illegal immigration and fund the police would be like a gang of arsonists applauding their leader for vowing to do something about the problem of how it’s getting really hot in here.

In the alternate universe, President Biden will take action to reduce the cost of insulin. In our universe, Biden reversed a Trump executive order that reduced the cost of insulin.

In the alternate universe, Biden will take swift action to fix long-standing problems like infrastructure and veterans’ care that in our universe dragged on for eight long years under Obama and Biden.

In the alternate universe, “Build Back Better” and the federal takeover of elections are apparently still alive.

In the alternate universe, the Trump-era tax cut benefited only the ultra-rich. In our universe, it gave a huge amount of tax relief to the poor and middle class, with many having their income tax burdens eliminated entirely, while the rich ended up paying a larger percentage of taxes.

The alt-VP Harris stands and applauds the ideas of cracking down on crime and funding the police. Our VP Harris raised money for a fund to bail rioters out of jail.

In our universe, the people looking at an empty chair where family members used to be included the families of 13 military members needlessly killed in Afghanistan. Since they weren’t mentioned, I assume (and hope) that never happened in their universe.

And the most glaring differences of all: in the alternate universe, the state of the union is strong, and President Biden is competent, popular, gets thunderous applause and standing ovations, and can talk for a solid hour. Oh, and Ukrainians are known as “Iranians.”

Now, the big question: How do I get out of this universe and live in that one until 2024?

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

Pat Reeder, Staff writer

I’m sad to have to report that Sally Kellerman, the beautiful, lanky actress with the smoky voice, died Thursday at 84 after a five-year battle with dementia.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/sally-kellerman-dead-hot-lips-houlihan-mash-1235099282/

She made her movie debut in 1957 in the crime drama “Reform School Girl,” and over her long career, appeared in many TV shows, movies and plays, from “That Girl” and “Star Trek” in the ‘60s through “Columbo,” “Evening Shade” and “Murder She Wrote,” all the way up to “The Young and the Restless,” for which she scored a Daytime Emmy nomination in 2015. Her movies included “The Player,” “Brewster McCloud,” “A Little Romance,” “The Boston Strangler” and “Last of the Red Hot Lovers.”

But of course, she will always be remembered for her two most famous roles: Maj. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan in the original movie version of “M*A*S*H” and the teacher Rodney Dangerfield fell for in the classic comedy, “Back To School.” She said when fans saw her in public, they either yelled, “Hey, Hot Lips!” or Rodney’s famous pickup line, “Call me when you have no class!”

Since you count on me for the information other obituaries leave out, here are two cool stories about Sally Kellerman: She recalled being nervous about doing the famous nude scene in “M*A*S*H” where Hawkeye and Trapper dropped her shower tent as a prank. To help capture a genuine look of shock and surprise on her face, when the tent fell, Gary “Radar O’Reilly” Burghoff (the only actor to repeat his character on the TV series) was standing beside the camera, also naked.

Also, of special interest to me, since I co-wrote “Hollywood Hi-Fi,” the history of celebrity singer records (http://www.hollywoodhifi.com), is that Sally Kellerman was a terrific singer. That was her original ambition, and her smoky voice was so good, Norman Granz of the legendary jazz label Verve offered her a contract when she was only 18. But she was too young and lacking in self-confidence to sign. After establishing herself as an actress, she returned to singing in jazz clubs and cabarets and put out two albums, "Roll With the Feelin''' in 1972 and "Sally" in 2009. One of her biggest regrets was rejecting a role in a Robert Altman movie that later turned out to be "Nashville" and would've given her both a prestige role and a chance to sing on screen.

To show how good she was, here's 15 minutes of her cabaret act from 1977. RIP to a beautiful and talented lady.

https://youtu.be/LbVYY7X1XR4h

Mike Huckabee

If you would like to help the men, women and children of Ukraine who have been forced to flee their homes to escape the Russian attack, Fox News has information on three vetted charities that are rushing aid to the refugees:

https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/how-help-people-ukraine

Prof. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit also has a suggestion sent along by a friend: the US should offer to take in up to a million Ukrainian refugees. He says that since Eastern Europeans vote overwhelmingly rightwing, it would be interesting to see the Democrats suddenly turn on a dime and argue that America just can’t accept any more immigrants and refugees.

https://instapundit.com/505550/