Mike Huckabee

DIDN'T THINK THIS ONE THROUGH

A Democratic PAC wanted to promote the idea that voting by mail is trustworthy. So they hired “Seinfeld” star Wayne Knight to revive his role as the villainous, lazy, incompetent, scheming, dishonest postal worker “Newman” to deliver that message while eating cookies out of a package he opens illegally. “NEWMAN!!”

BIG CROWDS

On the first day of early voting, Georgia saw such big crowds that there were technical problems and waits in line of up to six hours.

This story mentions that there were big crowds in an area that supports Trump heavily, but most of these long lines it covers were in heavily Democratic DeKalb County. Unless those are Democratic Trump voters (a possibility), that tells us two things: (1) Democrats can’t run anything efficiently, and (2) there is a heavy anti-Trump vote (I’m not going to call it a pro-Biden vote because…well, you know.)

So to everyone who wants to see Trump reelected, take this as a warning that you need to vote and take every like-minded person to the polls with you. Bring along a book, an iPad and a beach chair if you have to, but get in line and vote!

PERFECT METAPHOR FOR LIBERAL GOVERNMENT

Philadelphia politicians voted to remove a statue of Christopher Columbus because he’s too politically incorrect to deserve to be honored. But when Columbus Day rolled around, they all took a paid day off work.

U.S. Attorney John Bash of Texas, who was tasked by Attorney General Bill Barr with looking into the repeated unmaskings of associates of Donald Trump, resigned his office and left the Justice Department last week, without even issuing a report.

So far, the Department has declined to release any of Bash’s work.

News media are reacting as one might imagine, affirming that unmasking the names of American citizens caught up in surveillance of foreign targets was “a common and appropriate” practice exploited by conservatives to create a political conspiracy. (In reality, it used to be relatively uncommon.) According to the predictably predictable WASHINGTON POST, “Legal analysts feared that Bash’s review was yet another attempt by Trump’s Justice Department to target political opponents of the President. Even if it ultimately produced no results of consequence, legal analysts said, it allowed President Trump and other conservatives to say Obama-era officials were under scrutiny, as long as the case stayed active.” Here’s their take in full, if you really want to subject yourself.

Bash and his team were looking not only at the unmasking but also at the leaking of information to reporters, which we know was done. But the AG’s office chose not to release any findings publicly. According to WAPO, “the WASHINGTON POST was unable to review the full results of what Bash found.”

According to the WAPO story, Bash accepted a job offer in the private sector and told Barr of this about a month ago. He surprised many at the DOJ when he announced his departure last week, making no reference to the unmasking investigation he’d been working on.

The U.S. attorney replacing him in the San Antonio office will be Gregg Sofer, and it’s hard to tell if any leftovers from the investigation will be transferred to him, or if it will just be closed.

Bash had no comment. A spokesman for the DOJ’s San Antonio office had no comment. So far, Barr has had no comment. It’s not clear why the Department is holding back Bash’s findings --- even WAPO acknowledged that.

But Bash’s probe is just one part of this look into unmasking. Reportedly, U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation includes unmasking as well, and it’s hard to know how the two investigations overlapped. Barr has said that no report of Durham’s findings will be released before the election. But he’s also said he wouldn’t delay Durham’s findings over concerns about the election being so close. Well, that’s confusing; I guess he’s saying he won’t delay the findings but knows they won't be ready, anyway. So the question is, why the heck won't they?

We know, thanks to the efforts of then-acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell, that unmasking requests skyrocketed under Obama, with more than three dozen former Obama administration officials on the list of those who made those requests. These include presidential candidate and then-Vice President Joe Biden, former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough.

But Bash will be providing details on none of this. As Trump said of a similar review conducted by U.S. Attorney John Huber in Utah, “He was a garbage disposal for important documents & then tap, tap, tap, just drag it along and run out of time.”

Since there's no report, it’s not known if Bash collected evidence that supported the allegations of Michael Flynn's attorney Sidney Powell, but on Monday, Powell appeared on FOX Business News with Maria Bartiromo to allege that the Obama administration participated in the smear campaign against her client.

Democrats are braying that, absent the indictments (well, there's been one), all of this is a big “nothingburger.” But we already know enough about it to say they're as wrong about this as they are about most things, which is saying a lot.

One thing noted by THE CONSERVATIVE TREEHOUSE last June is extremely pertinent to this perplexing new development: that Flynn’s conversation with Russian Ambassador Kislyak was NOT obtained by unmasking his name. Flynn himself had already been put under surveillance. The targeting of Flynn is something Durham should definitely be looking at. For when you have time, this detailed piece explains it all.

We know this is true from the Mueller report, which says that before Flynn’s phone call with Kislyak, “the FBI had opened an investigation OF FLYNN [emphasis mine] based on his relationship with the Russia government.” This is why there’s no paper trail of an unmasking request on this phone call with Michael Flynn. No unmasking necessary! They were getting that information anyway.

One piece of evidence that finally did come out on Tuesday was the FBI’s Steele dossier “spread sheet,” showing what was included vs. what was actually verified. Virtually nothing was verified. Finally declassified, this 94-page document supports –- one might say “verifies” –- just about everything we already knew about the phony Trump/dossier. It was a big pile of nothing. The “verification” was hearsay and circular reporting.

CONSERVATIVE TREEHOUSE also has an excellent, very detailed report for when you have time, including a link to a pdf of the spreadsheet.

Finally, Drew Holden at THE FEDERALIST said it well: “In hindsight, the allegations range from overeager to merely comical. But it’s important to remember that they have had a real, lasting impact on American politics, and that those chiefly responsible have yet to be held accountable.”

We're long past time to see accountability. It's now or never.

Mike Huckabee

We’re one day closer to Election Day --- now just three weeks out --- and most voters are still wearing blindfolds, clueless on a variety of issues. To a large extent, it’s because information is being hidden from them.

As reported yesterday, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won’t even answer questions about what they plan to do in office, notably whether they’ll pack the Supreme Court –- a prospect that used to horrify even the most diehard Democrats. Attorney General Barr has told us not to expect U.S. Attorney John Durham’s report before the election is over, and it seems voters won’t even see an interim report. My patience has certainly worn thin. Lawmakers, even some Republicans, are dragging out the search for evidence that implicates Biden and his cohorts in potentially criminal behavior.

Voters tend to make their choices based on economic issues and other things that directly affect them, so why are the results of these investigations important now? Because if Trump loses, those same people will be right back in place, ending the investigations and cementing their power in a variety of ways. Voters deserve to know if their candidates are criminals. Heck, some in the middle who are currently leaning left might even care.

As we’ve reported, social media also play a huge role in hiding information. The Tweet Police at Twitter are blocking tweets that provide evidence of ongoing voter fraud with mail-in ballots. They even “play doctor,” critiquing and blocking President Trump’s tweets about coronavirus, comments that might be pretty darned informative considering what he’s personally been through. The mainstream media enforce the Democrat narrative as well, in part by hiding violence infecting those “peaceful protests” in leftist-run cities.

These are just a few examples. Their strategy is to HIDE EVERYTHING POSSIBLE UNTIL AFTER THE ELECTION.

Speaking of hiding, we have an update on what I reported yesterday, about CIA Director Gina Haspel working to protect her agency from oversight at all costs. She received a letter last Wednesday from Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, ordering her to comply with a number of oversight requests regarding “Crossfire Hurricane” that they’d sent her in July. (July!) But she’s blown it off.

An excerpt from their letter to Haspel reads, “The American people have a right to know the full extent of official action taken by federal officials during the 2016 campaign, the presidential transition, and into the Trump administration...Unfortunately, many of the puzzle pieces remain hidden, and some of the information rests within your agency.”

Haspel was given until October 9 to comply with their requests. It’s now October 13. As reported earlier in THE FEDERALIST, Haspel is personally setting up the roadblocks. To protect her position, she’s pulling for Biden to win and all the Old Guard to resume their places in The Swamp.

As then-CIA Director John Brennan’s hand-picked station chief in London, Haspel was in the perfect spot to know what was going on with former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele and whatever was being choreographed across-the-pond to create the phony “Trump/Russia” narrative. But she’s still hiding it.

Ironically, Haspel said this during her confirmation hearing for CIA director in 2018: “As both a career intelligence officer and as an American citizen, I am a strong believer in the importance of oversight [and accountability]...I will uphold the Agency’s obligations to Congress and ensure that oversight works on behalf of the American people.”

What a hoot. The President should order her to respond fully to all inquiries immediately or else collect her things and be escorted out of the building. And how long does it take to prepare a subpoena?

So, why is all this important right now? Haven’t most people already decided which candidate to vote for? Yes, they have. In fact, many have voted already, as the DNC has been pushing them to VOTE EARLY! (The old saying “vote early and vote often” might not be much of a joke this year.) But Biden’s support is not what you’d call enthusiastic; many might swing away if they knew more: his rapidly deteriorating mental condition, his repeated and demonstrable lies, the radical leftists pulling his strings, his disrespect for voters, and, yes, his scandals, including alleged criminal conduct. The Democrat leadership knows that the sooner voters cast their ballots, the less likely they are to be operating on any of this information when they do.

Another investigation that hasn’t seen resolution before the election (and absolutely will end if the Democrats get back in power) is that of the DNC “hacks” that were supposedly done by the Russians. This was the start of the whole @#$% “Russia Russia Russia!” obsession we were subjected to for four years. Incredibly, some Biden supporters STILL believe that Trump was and is an agent of Vladimir Putin, and their votes will reflect that lie.

It would come as a surprise to most voters that there isn’t even any evidence that Russia hacked the DNC. You and I now know this was a story concocted by Hillary Clinton, apparently with help from one of her foreign policy advisers, to distract from her own email scandal. Recall that the cybersecurity company that DNC/Hillary law firm Perkins Coie hired to examine its servers and that launched the hacking allegation against Russia in 2016 was a firm called CrowdStrike, which is no little mom-and-pop.

CrowdStrike never transferred custody of the servers to the FBI but gave them reports, which were later cited by both the FBI and the special counsel. As RealClear Investigations writes, “During that fateful July 2019 phone call that would later trigger impeachment proceedings, Trump asked Ukraine’s [president] to scrutinize CrowdStrike’s role in the DNC server breach, suggesting that the company may have been involved in hiding the real perpetrators.” And why shouldn’t the President suspect them? After all, IT WAS HILLARY WHO HIRED THEM.

If you've been following the details, here’s the latest on CrowdStrike. By the way, the reason CrowdStrike is in the news today is that according to recent financial disclosure filings, Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul have just invested up to $1 million in CrowdStrike Holdings.