The so-called “Lincoln Project” (I put it in quotes to stress that the name is an insult to Abraham Lincoln) claims to be a group of “principled conservatives” who oppose President Trump because he just doesn’t live up to their high standards of principled conservatism.

Funny, I’ve always thought of myself as a principled conservative, but I had no idea that “conservative principles” included taking a lot of donor money and putting in my own pocket, or signing up as an official representative of Russia, or working to defeat even moderate Republicans so that the Senate and White House can flip to the Democrats and usher in a new era of far-left policies, sky-high taxes and unbridled deficit spending that will destroy America as we know it.

I decided to look at some lists of conservative principles, and I admit, I could not find any of those things on any of them. But in an era when money-grubbing liberal frauds like the Lincoln Project pose as conservatives and are actually treated as such by the media because they’re useful in promoting the left’s agenda, I think it’s important to remind people what conservative principles actually are. They do not include “white supremacy,” nor do they include turning all power over to dangerous socialists. Who better to teach us what real conservatives stand for than the late Sen. Barry Goldwater?

And as long as we’re quoting the great leaders of conservatism, here’s a comment from Ronald Reagan that couldn’t be more timely or more sobering:

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States when men were free."

Mike Huckabee

The NYPD Crime Stoppers are offering a $2500 reward for the identity of a man who brutally assaulted police officers with a bat during a protest at the Brooklyn Bridge. Video of him and more information is at this link:

Video also appears to show the “peaceful protesters” receiving a shipment of bats from a car shortly before the protest.

I’ll let you know whether Mayor DeBlasio blames the bat assault on the cops or President Trump. If you think I’m being flippant, note that the leftist Mayor of Portland blames the street violence and graffiti in his city on the Department of Homeland Security Agents there, and he’s demanding that they clean the graffiti off and leave town, even as he refuses to let Trump send in federal troops to end the lawlessness in his own city. I guess he must’ve heard all the talk about DeBlasio being the worst mayor in America and said, “Hold muh latte!”…

In truth, all of this lawlessness, violence and filth is going on in cities run for decades entirely by Democrats. It’s the natural order of things that leftists impose their insane failed policies and make a huge mess. On rare occasions, the people wake up and realize it’s necessary to elect Republicans to clean up the left’s disasters (as Rudy Giuliani did in New York.) But even then, sadly, memories are short. Voters start to think that a clean, successful city runs itself. They forget what it was like, so they think it's safe to put a DeBlasio back in power. And they discover just how quickly it can all slide back into the sewer.

If you want to see what happens when you elect leftists for too long, and then let them institute their own “solutions” to the problems they caused themselves instead of calling in a Republican to fix it, look at this shocking report from San Francisco. First, the city’s leaders let it be taken over by homeless people with crime, mental and addiction problems. Then came COVID-19 (on top of all the other diseases that were coming back from the Middle Ages.) Leftist solution: put the homeless people into the empty hotels. So how is that "fix" working out? The words “disaster” and “pandemonium” in the headline should give you a clue.

I have to warn you, this story requires a strong stomach to read. You probably should also avoid it if you’re prone to spikes in your blood pressure from things that are infuriating.

Mike Huckabee

A few days ago, I told you about the new book FALLOUT from investigative reporters John Solomon and Seamus Bruner, and late yesterday, John Solomon had an update about the John Durham probe.

He said that Durham has been conducting “a lot” of interviews and going through a lot of documents; apparently, his investigation has been fairly unhampered by the virus. He said there have been discussions about plea bargains and cooperation from certain individuals, though, of course, he couldn’t name names.

He reported on Thursday’s HANNITY TV show that “multiple sources” with direct knowledge of the U.S. attorney’s investigation had informed him that Durham is looking specifically at the Defense Department’s Office Of Net Assessments, which had kept “confidential human source” Stefan Halper under contract to “write reports.” Durham wants to know if the Defense Department was actually funding Halper’s undercover (SPYING) activities “prior to the FBI having a predicate to do so.” (Never mind that the so-called “predicate” used later by the FBI was phony.)

Recall that the Office Of Net Assessments, like all offices at the Defense Department and within the intel community, would have been subject to audits and likely sweeping budget cuts if former national security adviser Michael Flynn had kept his job. That one fact probably explains a lot about what happened to him. Perhaps justice will be done.

"Listen, all signs are pointing to the building of a criminal indictment,” Solomon said. “Maybe it’ll come up around, just before or after Labor Day.”

But, incredibly, former special counsel Robert Mueller is still defending the “Trump/Russia” investigation, even though doing so involves contradicting his own report. Right after President Trump commuted Roger Stone’s prison sentence last week, Mueller wrote an op-ed for the WASHINGTON POST that, as reported by RealClear Investigations, didn’t just attack Stone but also disputed “broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives improper.”

And why would critics (like me) be making such claims? Well, maybe it’s because after years of examining their bogus “investigation” and finally obtaining documents and testimony that had been withheld even from defense attorneys, we could see that their investigation was illegitimate and their motives were improper.

Mueller’s op-ed contradicts the official findings concerning George Papadopoulos, whose barroom conversation with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer was NOT evidence that “the Russians had signaled” anything to him and also was NOT even mentioned by Papadopoulos to anyone in Trump’s campaign. The record, in the form of a recently-declassified electronic communication (EC) that officially opened “Crossfire Hurricane,” shows it was nothing but hearsay, with no evidence it had come from the Russian government or even from a Russian national.

It seems Downer didn’t know at the time he passed along this hearsay to the FBI that it had come to Papadopoulos by way of Josef Mifsud, a mysterious Maltese academic. Although former FBI Director James Comey has claimed without evidence in a WASHINGTON POST op-ed of his own that Mifsud was a Russian agent, the U.S. government has never tied him in that way to Russia, and the Mueller report takes care not to label him as such. Likewise, when Andrew McCabe was interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 –- this testimony has only recently been declassified –- he said the tip given to Papadopoulos by Mifsud about Hillary’s emails was not considered evidence of a Russia connection.

But Mueller is still pushing this debunked narrative. “By late 2016,” he writes in WAPO, “the FBI had evidence that the Russians had signaled a Trump campaign adviser that they could assist the campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to the Democratic candidate.” No, Mr. Mueller, they did not.

At his unimpressive congressional hearing a year ago, Mueller declined to comment on Mifsud’s identity or explain why the FBI hadn’t arrested him after his interview and charged him with perjury. After all, the Mueller report claims that he made false statements. Why didn’t they treat him the same shameful way they did Roger Stone?

Speaking of Roger Stone, Mueller goes on to vilify him in ways that don’t match the conclusions of his investigation. In the op-ed, Mueller writes that he “lied about the identity of his intermediary to WikiLeaks” and also about “the existence of written communications with his intermediary.”

But as RealClear Investigations reports, “that claim from Mueller is at odds with his investigation’s failure to establish that Stone HAD [emphasis mine] an intermediary to WikiLeaks.” Stone had claimed this, but it turned out that the two individuals ever singled out by name, Randy Credico and Jerome Corsi, didn’t actually make contact with WikiLeaks. (Credico did interview Julian Assange on his radio show in August of 2016, but this had nothing to do with being a go-between with Stone.)

There's only one known contact between WikiLeaks and Stone from before the 2016 election, and it was WikiLeaks tweeting to Stone to stop making “false claims of association.”

Stone claimed to have advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ release of email material, but Mueller has never asserted that he actually did. According to RealClear Investigations, Stone did have “minimal and inconsequential” contact with Guccifer 2.0, but it was actually exculpatory for Stone, as none of the three short Twitter messages even mentioned the stolen DNC emails.

Former senior attorney for the special counsel Andrew Weissmann went even further in his own op-ed, this one in THE NEW YORK TIMES three days later. Weissmann, now a legal analyst for MSNBC (of course), wants to continue the investigation and see Roger Stone go before a grand jury. He still suspects that Stone hid incriminating evidence to try to help Trump, and by gum, he’s going to get to the bottom of this and find out what it is!

I think that even now, many people are unclear about just what Roger Stone was convicted of lying about. Did you know he wasn’t even accused of lying about any actual coordination regarding those emails? That’s because there WAS no coordination. Stone was accused and convicted of making false statements about his FAILED efforts to obtain information about WikiLeaks during the campaign. That’s all. He never was able to actually do it. And by the time they charged him with lying, he had already corrected the record, just not under oath. (They didn’t swear him in and give him the chance to do that, because then they wouldn’t have been able to indict him for lying. That alone is enough reason for Trump to commute his prison sentence.) Even the NYT itself reported that Stone “had no real ties to WikiLeaks.”

The contrast between Weissmann’s op-ed and the known facts of the Stone case, as laid out by RealClear Investigations, makes for some entertaining, if perplexing, reading. Weissmann’s inability to stop chasing windmills when it comes to Trump reminds me a lot of someone else who has been in the news lately. Emmet Sullivan.