Mike Huckabee

After the impeachment trial fizzled, Democrats needed something else right away to go after President Trump for. Fortunately for them, they’re gifted with being able to turn on a dime and quickly “find” something else to turn into a federal case (literally). They will stop at nothing. Between now and the election –- and afterwards –- they'll keep him in their sights, demanding investigation after investigation. So, what is it this time?

It’s his tweets about the Roger Stone sentencing.

President Trump tweets about everything. Sick of the media distorting everything he says and does, he takes it directly to his audience. But the media work overtime to use the tweets against him, too. The folks at MSNBC and CNN have lost their minds once again, over the Stone case and also his suggestion that the Pentagon might look into Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman; they’re likening Trump to the “dictator” of a “banana republic.” On the contrary, it’s in a banana republic that we see egregious prosecutorial abuse, people getting prison sentences way out of proportion to their crimes simply for getting caught up in a fight for political power.

Devin Nunes and some other House Republicans suspect that the Mueller prosecutors set up Stone and some others, to be able to “put the squeeze” on them to get damaging information on Trump. “We believe that this is not gonna be the only example,” Nunes said on FBC’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” “We think there’s other examples of things that they did during the Mueller investigation that...the American people will be very interested to learn in the coming weeks, as we start to [peel] the onion of what the Mueller team was really doing.”

I told you yesterday about the reaction from Sen. Chuck Schumer and Reps. Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler to the President’s tweets about the outrageous sentence recommended by prosecutors for Stone, who had the misfortune to be caught up in the effort to “get” the President. Their investigation tried unsuccessfully to tie him to WikiLeaks and an attempt to use Russian-hacked (so they said) emails to hurt the Democrat Party and Hillary Clinton, but they got him on a process crime. Now Democrats accuse Trump of trying to interfere with a criminal prosecution. With tweets.

No doubt Trump feels bad for Stone, as he does for his original national security adviser Michael Flynn and others who are collateral damage in the Democrats’ strategy to oust him. Former Trump campaign director Paul Manafort, 70, spent long months in solitary confinement and is now serving a sentence that could keep him behind bars for life. Now prosecutors are recommending a sentence for the 67-year-old Stone of seven to nine years –- also a possible life sentence –- on charges of lying to Congress and witness tampering.

Trump has said he didn’t talk to anyone in the DOJ about Stone’s case but that it would’ve been all right to do so. Contacts within the bureaucracy who know how things are done say this sentencing controversy must have been going on for weeks, certainly before Trump tweeted anything about it. Doesn’t matter. Ha, don’t be surprised if an anonymous “whistleblower” (or two or three) come forward to claim they overheard Trump say to the AG that he expects the prosecution to go easy on Roger Stone, or else the DOJ’s funding will be withheld. To add even more drama, perhaps Schiff could go on the floor of Congress to recite for the record a “parody” of what he alleges Trump said to Barr behind closed doors.

Already they’re calling for Barr to...(yes) resign as attorney general. And some of them are threatening Trump with Impeachment 2.0. California Rep. Eric Swallwell let this one rip on Wednesday with Jake Tapper on CNN: “...We’re not going to just let him torch this democracy because he thinks that he’s been let off once and we’re not going to do something about it.” I think we know who’s been trying to torch the democracy for the past few several years, and it ain’t Trump.

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/02/12/swalwell-impeaching-trump-over-roger-stone-is-not-off-the-table/

Former South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy defended Barr for deciding to review the harsh sentence recommended for Stone. “There are child pornographers who don’t get nine years,” he said. “There are people who rob banks who don’t get nine years. So let the judge decide. I think two or three years is about right.” Gowdy said it would have been inappropriate for Trump to weigh in before the decision was made, but he contended that Barr was aware of the recommendation long before “Trump ever tweeted a single syllable.”

https://dailycaller.com/2020/02/12/trey-gowdy-roger-stone-bill-barr/

The DOJ didn’t need Trump to call their attention to this extraordinarily punitive sentence. According to Chuck Ross at the DAILY CALLER, “Justice Department officials were reportedly ‘shocked’ by federal prosecutors’ recommendation that longtime Trump associate Roger Stone serve up to nine years in prison...”

https://dailycaller.com/2020/02/11/doj-shocked-roger-stone-sentence/

So, if Trump had nothing to do with Barr’s involvement in the case...well, then he must have been trying to bully this judge with his tweets. Yeah, that’s the ticket. It could be argued, though, that the judge might be even harder on Stone now, just to show she isn’t intimidated by the President. The judge determines the sentence, and after what Stone has already been through, it would be sad if he were now caught in the crossfire between her and the President. The latest news at this writing is that the judge has denied Stone’s attorneys’ request for a new trial.

If you missed what Tucker Carlson had to say about this Tuesday night, he noted the same thing I have about the comparative harshness of this sentence and gave some specific examples. The average sentence for a rapist is four years. The average sentence for an armed robber is three-and-a-half years. For violent assault, it’s a year and a half. He calls for Trump to pardon Stone rather than let him die in prison as CNN would like. Here’s the link to his must-see rant.

https://dailycaller.com/2020/02/11/tucker-carlson-roger-stone-pardon-sentencing/

Predictably, Democrats are pulling out all the stops to silence Barr and those who offer evidence that supports the President and reveals their own wrongdoing. They have a big problem with him getting information on Ukraine from Rudy Giuliani, since Giuliani is Trump's attorney. (My answer: If it’s true, so what?) Watch what Democrats do now to try to damage both of them, for sniffing too close to the corruption.

Barr has agreed to go before the House Judiciary Committee on March 31 –- wish it were sooner.

As for Trump, he will not be silenced. He’s been on a justifiable tweet-rant on the two-tier justice system. And on Wednesday, the day before her Senate hearing, he withdrew U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu’s nomination as undersecretary in the Treasury Department. Until her nomination, she’d overseen the prosecutions of both Stone and Flynn. For a lively read on the newly emboldened post-impeachment President, here’s Kurt Schlichter…

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2020/02/10/time-for-trump-to-get-his-godfather-on-n2561014

And here’s a hot-and-fresh one, specific to the Stone case…

Trump Charges the Liberal Hacks’ Latest Ambush

Mike Huckabee

Only in today’s Democratic Party could someone like former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg be considered a "moderate."

The prevailing narrative of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination has been shaped by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and his unrepentant socialism, which has bifurcated the party between outspoken extremists and radicals masquerading as moderates.

On the one hand, there is Bernie himself and the similarly extremist candidacy of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. On the other hand are the candidates who have been assigned the misleading appellation “moderates” simply because they stop short of preaching outright revolution.

The alternatives to Sanders are handed the moderate label more as a matter of convenience than because their policies actually conform to the American mainstream.

Until recently, the standard-bearer for this group was former Vice President Joe Biden. But Biden’s spectacular demise – a fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses and a truly embarrassing failure to even hit the 10 percent mark in the New Hampshire primary – has sent the Democratic establishment scrambling for someone to fill the role of the putative “moderate” in the race.

Many are gravitating toward Buttigieg, whose seldom-examined policy agenda is, in fact, so far to the left that it would have been unimaginable in the Democratic Party of President Barack Obama, let alone that of President Bill Clinton.

Clinton, for instance, won the White House in 1992 while calling for abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare” – a strategy that also worked for Obama 16 years later. That constitutes a moderate position, at least within the Democratic Party.

So-called “moderate” Pete Buttigieg, however, has taken a much more aggressively pro-abortion approach, opposing restrictions on abortion right up to the moment of birth. If that makes Mayor Pete a “moderate” then let’s call Col. Sanders a vegan!

A 2018 Gallup poll found that only a truly tiny minority of Americans – 13 percent – believe abortion should generally be legal in the third trimester. Even among Democrats, only 18 percent think abortion should generally be legal in the third trimester, making Mayor Pete’s position truly extreme.

Buttigieg is even more radical when it comes to criminal justice reform, pledging to “Ensure more people are free by significantly reducing the number of people incarcerated in the United States at both the federal and state level by 50%.”

Between jails and prisons, that would mean about 1.1 million convicted criminals released into American communities. They wouldn’t all be “non-violent drug offenders,” either – though Buttigieg is saying that as president he would decriminalize possession of all drugs, including meth and heroin.

President Trump has gotten behind historic federal sentencing reform, too, but he took a much more responsible approach. Recognizing the excesses of the so-called “War on Drugs” and its devastating impact on some poor and minority communities, he signed the First Step Act into law.

The First Step Act offers certain nonviolent offenders opportunities to reduce their sentences by participating in programs designed to help them become productive members of society. That is a moderate position, and the broad bipartisan support for the First Step Act is proof.

Casually releasing more than 1 million criminals onto the streets is decidedly not a moderate position.

Supporting open borders is also a far cry from what any reasonable person would call “moderate” – so it should come as no surprise that Mayor Pete not only embraces unfettered illegal immigration, but actually wants to encourage more of it.

Mike Huckabee

The most underreported story of the New Hampshire voting was President Trump’s win in the Republican primary. Despite Bill Weld taking about 12%, Trump was basically running unopposed, so there was no get-out-the-vote drive for him. Even so, Trump received 110,717 votes. That’s by far the most votes ever for an incumbent President running for reelection. Obama got only 49,080 votes in 2012, George W. Bush got 52,962 in 2004, and the previous record was Bill Clinton in 1996 with 76,797. Trump scored over 35,000 more votes than that.

https://hotair.com/archives/jazz-shaw/2020/02/12/nobody-looking-trump-shattered-primary-records-new-hampshire/

As Jazz Shaw put it at Hotair.com, while the Democratic turnout wasn’t particularly high even with all the candidates and campaigning, “New Hampshire Republicans turned out in record numbers on a blustery February day to cast their votes for Trump in a primary election that was completely meaningless.” So what will it be like at the real election in November? I suspect that like the Trump rallies, people will start lining up 48 hours in advance.

-------------------------

MORE ON NEW HAMPSHIRE

As I write this, it’s early Wednesday morning, and close to 90% of the votes have been counted in New Hampshire (what is it with Democrats and math?) At the moment, it appears that Bernie Sanders won with about 26%, a couple of points ahead of Pete Buttigieg. Amy Klobuchar came in a surprise third with 20%. The Hindenburg moments belonged to Elizabeth Warren in fourth place (9%) and Joe Biden fifth (8%.) Neither even cracked double digits, much less the 15% minimum to win any delegates. Sad!

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/new-hampshire-primary-polls-close

What’s all this mean? It’s tempting to say it doesn’t mean all that much at this point, but Iowa and New Hampshire offer the first opportunities for voters to weigh in on the candidates the hyper-partisan media have been hyping for months. This is when we find out whether the public agrees that they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread or just another New Coke or Lady Ghostbusters.

As I see it, despite the sprawling array of candidates, Democratic voters obviously aren’t that excited by any of them. Bernie boasted of this being the first step to his defeating Trump. But a near-record 270,000 people voted in the Democratic primary and if his 26% holds, he’ll finish with a little over 70,000 votes. In 2016, he got 60% against Hillary Clinton and a couple of dozen nobodies, and won over 152,000 votes. To me, this indicates less of a burning Bernie surge than a step down, and more evidence that even Democrats really couldn’t stomach Hillary. Bernie’s strength lies in his followers being rabid and well-organized, but his following isn't growing larger, they’re just making more noise. Like Spinal Tap, his appeal is becoming “more selective.”

If Bernie and Warren represent the socialist/far left/radical wacko wing, their combined total was only 35% of the vote. Granted, there’s nobody viable left in this race who isn’t so far to the left that the center looks like the John Birch Society compared to them. For instance, they all want to give free health care to illegal aliens, and alleged “centrist” Pete Buttigieg thinks babies can be “aborted” after they’re born and anyone who disagrees doesn’t belong in the Party. On this issue, he’s indistinguishable from Sanders.

https://www.westernjournal.com/sanders-pushes-pro-life-voters-trump-supporting-abortion-essential-dem/

Buttigieg came in second (and again got two more delegates than Bernie -- since he hates the Electoral College, shouldn’t he redistribute his delegates to the popular vote winner?) But Klobuchar’s surge based on one strong debate performance shows that many voters who want a “centrist” are still looking for one. Maybe they imagined sending Buttigieg to face down Vladimir Putin or the communist leaders of China. They’d eat him alive and send the bones home in a doggy bag.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/feb/9/pete-buttigieg-runs-moderate-champions-far-left-po/

Joe Biden was supposed to be the “centrist,” “electable,” preordained winner, but New Hampshire looked so dire, he bugged out at midday as if he were scrambling for the last helicopter out of Saigon. His dismayed voters told reporters they were stunned that he abandoned them. They should’ve known that when you’re under siege, don’t expect anyone from the Obama Administration to show up and help. At the ghost town-like post-election “party” at Biden headquarters, reporters outnumbered supporters. Biden hightailed it to South Carolina, where he hopes his rapidly crumbling firewall holds. It’s amusing that his only hope of survival is a wall he’s built in the south.

When will the media learn that declaring someone the presumptive nominee (Hillary in 2008) or President (Hillary in 2016) is a recipe for disaster? Particularly when it’s Joe Biden, who’s on his third run for President and has yet to survive past the earliest primaries. The fat lady might not be singing for his campaign yet, but I can hear her clearing her throat.

With New Hampshire’s uber-liberal base and proximity to her home state of Massachusetts, Warren was counting on a good showing. Her abysmal finish should spell the end, but she’s vowing to press on to Super Tuesday. How she’ll do that when it takes a lot of ad money that she isn’t attracting, I can’t say. Also, if she can’t make it in New Hampshire, is she really going to win the South? Her disingenuous praise of Amy Klobuchar for proving a woman can do well was a sterling example of trying to put a cherry on a horse poop sundae. What she really meant was, “Voters will support a woman…as long as it’s not me!” She really is Hillary 2.0.

Congratulations to Amy Klobuchar for doing better than expected, but all the talk of her “momentum” is a bit farcical. She won a better-than-expected 20%, but has there ever been this much media hoopla over placing third? I suspect it’s mostly a function of Democrats still casting around for someone palatable, and she had the lucky timing to be the latest option to come to their attention just as the voting started. They tried her on in New Hampshire, but it doesn’t mean they intend to buy. Let's see how she does in South Carolina when she's no longer the new flavor of centrism.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/new-hampshire-gives-klobuchar-major-boost-puts-biden-and-warren-on-2020-life-support

The primary winnowed the field a bit, but as with a weed-infested garden, the thinning was barely noticeable. Andrew Yang suspended his campaign (darn it, I was counting on him giving everyone a thousand bucks a month so my staffers wouldn’t ask for a raise.)

https://www.westernjournal.com/andrew-yang-ends-presidential-campaign-nh-votes-even-counted/

Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick also dropped out of the race, devastating the six people who remembered they were in. And a rumor circulated that Tom Steyer was quitting, but it was denied. I guess he realized he still had a lot more money to throw away.

Overall, my takeaway is that most Democratic voters don’t want Bernie or Warren, but they aren’t crazy about any of the other choices, either. Ironically, the continuing vote split is likely to encourage marginal candidates to stay in longer, allowing Bernie to keep winning with small pluralities. But that makes it less likely that any candidate will gather enough delegates to clinch the nomination. Unless more drop out so the non-socialist vote can coalesce around one candidate, the Dems could be looking at a brokered convention. By then, they could be so broke that Mike Bloomberg could buy the Party in a liquidation sale and just declare himself the nominee.

NOTE: Next stop is the Nevada Caucuses, where Bernie Sanders will get to explain to a lot of tough union negotiators why the great health care plans they won for their members should be traded in for “Medicare for All.” Good luck!

Mike Huckabee

In the Trump administration’s war against the ‘deep state,’ there’s news on multiple fronts. Here’s the rundown for today…

While we’ve been looking at Manafort and the Ukraine, there have been some big developments in the ongoing Roger Stone case, as he’s scheduled to be sentenced on February 20. (Recall that his home was invaded by an FBI S.W.A.T. team in full combat gear while CNN had cameras rolling.) President Trump tweeted explosively about the recommended sentence, saying, “Who are the four prosecutors (Mueller people??) who cut and ran after being exposed for recommending a ridiculous 9 year prison sentence for a man that got caught up in an investigation that was illegal, the Mueller Scam, and shouldn’t ever even have started? 13 Angry Democrats?”

One of the prosecutors in question, Aaron Zelinsky, did indeed work on Mueller’s special counsel team. All four prosecutors resigned from the case after the DOJ asked a federal court to reduce the seven-to-nine-year prison sentence they had recommended for the 67-year-old Stone, who was found guilty of seven counts of lying to Congress and witness tampering when the feds were investigating his possible involvement with WikiLeaks and information purportedly hacked by Russia. (Nothing came of that, incidentally.) The DOJ said some prison time would be appropriate, but not such a long sentence, which they termed “extreme and excessive and grossly disproportionate to Stone’s offenses.”

These prosecutors must have really wanted to clap Stone in jail and throw away the key. One of them, Jonathan Kravis, announced his resignation as an assistant U.S. attorney, leaving his job entirely.

Trump’s critics expressed alarm –- stop the presses –- at what they theorize is his interference with what certainly would be a severe punishment, possibly even a life sentence for a man of his age. In fact, many killers and rapists get less prison time than they are recommending for Stone. (And Democrats who lie to Congress get to walk free, ha.) Trump told reporters he had not spoken with DOJ officials about the case but maintained he had the right to do that. He didn’t say whether he might commute Stone’s sentence. I would add he has the right to do that, too.

"I thought the whole prosecution was ridiculous,” Trump said. “I thought it was an insult to our country.”

As if on cue, Adam Schiff, Jerrold Nadler and Chuck Schumer had a collective fit about Trump’s comments, with Schumer calling for the DOJ inspector general to begin a formal investigation into the reduced sentencing recommendation. “This situation has all the indicia of improper political interference in a criminal prosecution,” he wrote to IG Michael Horowitz. “I therefore request that you immediately investigate this matter to determine how and why the Stone sentencing recommendations were countermanded, which Justice Department officials made this decision, and which White House officials were involved.”

Good grief. These three lowlifes have all the indicia of Trump-deranged prosecutors who failed to get their nemesis tossed out of office. If they got even a week in prison for every whopper they’ve told in the House and Senate, they’d never see the light of day again. Even better, we’d never have to see them.

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/482655-doj-lawyers-resign-en-masse-over-roger-stone-sentencing

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/482694-trump-swipes-at-resigned-prosecutors-judge-in-roger-stone-case

On another front, Rudy Giuliani, who has said he has the goods on the DNC and Ukraine, is indeed being vetted by Attorney General Barr’s Justice Department, as Barr announced on Monday. In other words, Giuliani wasn’t just blowing smoke on Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday show. According to Barr, they have “established an intake process in the field so that any information coming in about Ukraine could be carefully scrutinized by the Department and its intelligence community partners so that we could assess its provenance and its credibility. And that is true of all information that comes to the Department relative to Ukraine, including anything Mr. Giuliani might provide.”

Giuliani claims there are three Ukrainian officials willing to testify about a meeting at the White House in January of 2016 involving a secret bid to interfere in the November election in which Donald Trump was a candidate. “The three of them will say that they were at the National Security Council and two members of the [NSC] who represented Biden asked them basically to dig up dirt on the Party of Regions and any of their consultants, and their consultant was Manafort. It was later clarified they wanted Manafort. And one of the key people at the meeting making the request is one of the people suspected of being the whistleblower.”

Giuliani doesn’t say it here, but I will: he’s talking about ERIC CIARAMELLA, the NSA official that everyone knows (unofficially) is the “whistleblower” but that hardly anyone will dare to name. I do, of course, because he's not a real whistleblower at all but part of a plot to target Trump for his phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky, and he is not entitled to anonymity. His NSA colleagues Sean Misko and Abigail Grace went to work on Adam Schiff’s staff. Recall that two weeks after Trump was sworn in, CIARAMELLA and Misko, who had some foreign policy disagreements with the new President, were overheard in the White House proclaiming they were going to take Trump down. This is the guy; he’d been working in the White House since 2015 and was one of hundreds of Obama “holdovers.”

As Giuliani describes the witnesses’ accounts of the January 2016 meeting, “Obama’s people are asking political operatives of Ukraine to get information on the Trump campaign. It’s as simple as that.”

I've been saying that the Democrat Party and the media (sorry for the redundancy) are desperate to bring down John Solomon and Rudy Giuliani, and this is why. The Swamp is out to destroy them both. In the case of Giuliani, his effort is no longer just about protecting his client from the slings and arrows of outrageous Democrats. And it’s certainly not to take Joe Biden down as a candidate; Biden will certainly not be the Democrat nominee and Trump likely never thought he would be a political threat. J. D. Rucker of the NOQ REPORT is correct when he says this of Giuliani and The Swamp:

"They’re going after him for the sake of vengeance over what he has uncovered so far. They’re going after him out of a sense of self-preservation to stop what he might find next. They’re firing every political and media weapon they have at their disposal at him in an effort to slow him down if not dissuade him from pushing forward. They’re scared. They fear his courage and his resolution. And they should. Whatever they’re hiding, Giuliani is digging until he finds it. All of it.”

The same, of course, can be said of The Swamp's reaction to Solomon and any other reporters who have refused to be deterred. Also Devin Nunes and a few others in the House and Senate. And Barr, of course.

The Democrats’ narrative is that Giuliani is a “loose cannon,” but what that really means is that he is a patriot who isn’t held in check by congressional oversight or the bureaucracy. He’ll do what he thinks is right.

https://noqreport.com/2020/02/11/why-rudy-giulianis-ongoing-battle-with-the-bidens-is-more-significant-than-most-realize/