Mike Huckabee

Investigative reporter John Solomon has outdone himself this time –- which is saying a lot –- with a “whistleblower” interview that confirms all we thought about the FBI’s misuse of their spying programs, and not just FISA.

This whistleblower is not anonymous and, being retired from the Bureau, receives no whistleblower protections. Retired Special Agent Bassem Youssef ran the FBI’s Communications Analysis Unit from late 2004 to late 2014. This was the (yes) “warrantless spying” program started after 9/ll that he came to believe was “deeply flawed” but that was kept on, he said, to give Americans a false sense of security and possibly also to enable “inappropriate spying, such as that which targeted President Trump’s 2016 campaign.”

Solomon conducted an interview with Youssef for THE HILL in 2018, and now, in a lengthy podcast for John Solomon Reports, Youssef has added to our understanding of what the intel community was doing. He sat down with Solomon again for the podcast after the release of a report from the White House civil liberties board that outlines the same problems he’d tried to discuss with James Comey and Andrew McCabe for years. “I have no doubt, or very little doubt, that it was used for political spying or political espionage,” he told Solomon.

This was called the NSA program, because it searched call records captured by the National Security Agency. (As I read about this, I couldn’t help but remember James Clapper lying before Congress when asked if the government spied on Americans. “Not...wittingly,” he fibbed unconvincingly.) After Edward Snowden leaked the existence of this program, the FBI performed an audit, which revealed a lot of monetary waste and numerous false positives and negatives. According to Youssef, it also showed “there was collateral damage in terms of civil liberties” of Americans whose phone records were unnecessarily searched or who were wrongly identified as being connected to terrorism. (And here, I can’t help but think of Michael Flynn and all the others who were surveilled and unmasked.)

Youssef discussed his concerns about the NSA program with Andrew McCabe on two separate occasions, the first when McCabe was assistant director for counterterrorism and the second after he’d been promoted to acting executive assistant director, the third most powerful job at the Bureau. Both times, Youssef’s warnings were brushed off. “...He was so adamant about, we need this program,” Youssef told Solomon. “We’re keeping it as this, even though we’re not getting anything out of it.”

So, why should it be so important to McCabe to continue a program that isn’t giving them what it’s supposed to deliver? He must have had some other reason to keep it around.

Likewise, when Youssef went to James Comey in September of 2014, Comey’s only expressed concern after Youssef had laid out all the problems, including the potential for abusing civil liberties, was “is it legal?” Or, in bureaucrat-ese: “Do you have a problem or concerns with the statutory authority?” As Youssef recounted it to Solomon, he told Comey he had no reservations about the program’s legality because the surveillance had to be approved by FISA court judges. (I wonder if he looks back on that comment now and smacks his forehead for being that naive.)

Youssef told Solomon that he had “no doubt whatsoever” that McCabe and Comey were fully briefed and understood the severity of the problems with the NSA program. Yet they continued it.

He said that since his retirement, he has developed “deep concerns” that the NSA program has been abused, just as the FISA program has been, during the Russia “collusion” investigation into the Trump campaign that involved spying on Carter Page. “There is no doubt in my mind now, looking at the backdrop and the information that has come up since 2016 in the media, that the abuses were rampant,” he told Solomon, “and not just for the FISA process, the FISA program, but for other programs that were used to spy on the Trump campaign. That to me is almost the obvious conclusion of what I’ve seen.” He very strongly suspects the NSA program he had run for ten years was used “to handpick selected targeted numbers” for political espionage. No wonder McCabe and Comey wanted so badly to keep it --- it was to be quite useful.

Here are the full details; there’s also a link to the podcast.

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/ex-fbi-unit-chief-blows-whistle-comey-mccabe-over-warrantless-spying-0

I’m passing this reader comment on to you because it’s particularly well-articulated and speaks for many who have written to me about the lack of accountability in Washington, DC. It came in reply to my commentary on the FBI lying to the court about George Papadopoulos…

From Melana:

Ok, great! This is all well and good but WHEN IS SOMEONE GOING TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! And yes, I'm YELLING! Flynn lied....he goes to jail....Schiff, Clinton, Brennan, Comey, Holder, Lynch, Obama, Biden, McCabe, Rice....et all LIE and they are out writing books making millions! Please, answer that question...when is someone going to be accused, tried and go to jail? Those of us with an ounce of common sense can see pretty darn clearly how this has gone in the past and will most likely go in the future. I no longer trust the FISA "secret court"....get rid of them; I don't trust the FBI, CIA, IRS, DOJ or any other agency. There is no "justice" in the United States any longer. The rich and powerful can buy what they want, say what they want and DO what they want (example from last night's debate: Bloomberg was happy to state he "bought" the House in 2018). I grow weary reading all the well-written articles like this one to realize you might as well be reading it sitting in the dark in a closet because no "light" will be brought to the situation other than to continue to hammer home the point that NOTHING WILL EVER BE DONE.

From the Gov:

I’m not so sure that’s true, though even if I thought it likely that none of those people would see the inside of a jail cell, I’d still feel obliged to report to you what’s going on from day to day. If they operated in complete secrecy, their efforts to destroy this country’s founding principles would be even more brazen and much more consequential --- quickly so --- believe me. (That’s why they did so much damage to the process when Hillary was assumed to be the next President: “Ha! No one will ever know what we’re doing!”)

Now we KNOW what they were up to, and still are. Unfortunately, they continue to have most of the media on their side, covering for them, which means we have to work harder to expose them, rather than conclude we're fighting a losing battle and get so sick of the whole thing that we just give up. That would be the worst thing to do –- the very thing they want us to do and are trying to get us to do. (How happy they would be if we said, "Millennials want socialism? Okay, they can HAVE it and then let them see how they like it when the nation goes bankrupt and they're eating the bark off trees!") I can think offhand of several reasons to be hopeful:

1. Hillary did NOT get elected. (By the way, have you noticed that every scandal seems to lead, in some circuitous way, back to her? Amazing, isn’t it?) This one's at the top of my list. Consider that if she had fulfilled her dream of becoming President, the curtain of secrecy would have been fully lowered and nailed to the floor, and we would never have learned about what was going on. Heaven knows what they would be doing now behind the scenes to cement their power forever. Thank the Lord that we dodged that bullet; it was the kind of ammo that explodes inside its target and destroys vital organs with no hope of recovery.

2. Trump DID get elected, in spite of The Swamp's lying and spying, and he’s likely to be re-elected (though we must never take that for granted!) To cite just one accomplishment relevant to my argument, he’s made great strides with judicial appointments, and he needs the opportunity to do much more in that area. In fact, that's likely the biggest reason of all that the left wants him gone.

3. With luck and hard work –- this is where we as Americans need to put our effort –- the House will change hands with the upcoming election, and we can get down to the business of reform after two years of Schiff and Nadler and impeachment madness. (This is so important. Consider that the Democrat-led House is currently working on the bill to re-authorize the FISA process; too bad Republicans aren’t in charge of that right now!)

4. At last we have an attorney general who is set on getting to the bottom of what has gone wrong and, like the President, has the strength to stand up to the partisan attacks against him, which will become even more vicious in coming months. His appointment of John Durham to quietly and methodically lead the criminal investigation into the FBI/DOJ/CIA and “Crossfire Hurricane” appears to have been a masterful move.

5. Along with Durham and his team inside the government, we also have investigators such as Lee Smith and John Solomon in the private sector who refuse to stop digging. As “60 Minutes” doesn’t do its job any more, we should be especially thankful for people like him --- and for their publishers. The success of podcasters such as Dan Bongino and numerous others also gives me reason to hope. Leftists certainly are fighting to control social media --- along with everything else they want to keep a lid on --- but what does not kill us makes us stronger.

That’s five reasons, off the top of my head, not to despair. Something else I just thought of: the American people. I think we still have enough voters with sufficient brains to see that the left has gone off the rails at 200 miles an hour. (Anybody who watched the lineup of Democrat candidates in Tuesday’s embarrassing train-wreck "debate" could see that.) And, instinctively, most of us still react with horror at the idea of a two-tier justice system and government authoritarianism in general. This next election will likely tell the tale. Don’t give up, Melana.

I’ll close with this helpful comment from Don:

Actions and comments about Roger Stone by Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson shows that President Trump will need another 4-year term to just to drain the judicial swamp. How many more swamps are there?

From the Gov:

Thanks, Don. Four more years!

Mike Huckabee

With a few rare and now-gone voices of sanity, such as John Delaney, the Democratic Primary has largely resembled a Bizarro World auction where the participants bid against one another to see who can give away the most stuff for “free.”

“Free” is in quotes because, as every child should be taught and obviously, far too few are these days, there is no such thing as a “free lunch.” That’s been true since the dawn of time, and putting the word “Democratic” in front of “socialism” won’t change it, any more than calling useless and counter-productive gun laws "common sense" will make them common sense. Not even the schools’ “free lunch” program is free: taxpayers pay a lot for it, and the money often comes with government strings attached. Or a “quid pro quo,” to coin a phrase.

Just last night, Tom Steyer added paying reparations for slavery to the list, and earlier, Bernie Sanders tossed another new expensive “human right” on the pile: a $1.2 trillion plan called “Free Child Care and Pre-K for All.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/bernie-sanders-unveils-free-childcare-plan-eye-popping-price-tag-1-5-trillion/

Personally, I can think of few ideas more chilling than every child from the age of three being put into an “education program” designed by Bernie Sanders. But I suppose we should be thankful that the cost of this one is “only” $1.2 trillion, or a little less than 1/4th of the entire current federal budget, rather than his typical plan that costs the entire US GDP.

I know that child care is very important. It’s a real problem for many low-income working people, and the government might have a role to play, although it should be on the state or local level, or better yet, handled by community organizations and churches. But spending nearly a quarter of the entire federal budget to create a new “human right” to free day care is what passes in Bernie’s mind for “common sense” government action that isn’t “radical” at all.

I know that Bernie knows the word “privilege” because when he recently declared health care to be a “human right,” he added, “It is not a privilege!” I’ve written before about how “progressives” can’t win arguments on facts or experience, so they win by rewriting the language (for instance, liberals, leftists, socialists and communists became too infamous as purveyors of tragically failed policies, so they magically became “progressives.”)

But some of us still care about the English language, and how words actually mean things. As children used to be taught, a “right” is something you are endowed with by God, such as the right to free speech. It doesn’t require anyone else giving up their rights to provide it to you. Making a speech in a public park is a “right.” Demanding that the government provide you with a free P.A. system is a “privilege.” Just as demanding that other people attend medical school or deal with government paperwork to spend their time caring for you while others pay higher taxes to cover the cost makes that a “privilege.” You may say that you think health care should be a privilege of citizenship, but by definition, it can never be a “right.” Bernie goes around finding new “rights” the way my grandkids find Easter eggs, but they don’t have a "right" to chocolate eggs: that’s a privilege of me being their grandpa.

And as long as I’m offering a remedial primer on rights, I’d also like to point out that the Bill of Rights doesn’t list rights the government gives to you. It lists rights with which God endows you and that the government has no right to take away from you.

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

As liberal media people start to panic at the idea of Bernie Sanders being the nominee, they’re finally starting to do some background research into his previous kooky statements (both the ones we’re all known about for years, and some that are more…exotic.) As they put it at the Instapundit blog, Bernie keeps telling you what he is; you should believe him. Mike Bloomberg reportedly plans to spend some of his riches on blasting this oppo research far and wide, like Bernie’s ideas on child care that should make anyone recoil at the idea of a government day care program created by him.

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/bloomberg-spox-rips-bernies-loopy-comments-said-toddlers-should-run-around-naked-and-touch-each-others-genitals/

Even more concerning is Bernie’s admiration for communist dictatorships like Cuba, Nicaragua and the USSR. He claims he doesn’t admire “authoritarianism,” but socialism without authoritarianism would be like trying to make coffee without coffee beans. If the government controls production and decides what choices you get to make (and Bernie is on record as thinking capitalism gives you too many choices of deodorants), then if someone disagrees and wants to make a different choice than what the government approves, somebody has to stop them to protect the “system.” Enter the government guns and gulags.

But Bernie is the eternal optimist, always able to see the daisy growing out of the pile of bull manure. First it was Castro’s “literacy program” (which forced people to read communist propaganda), and now he’s praising communist China for lifting more people out of extreme poverty than any other nation on Earth (too bad about all the genocides, forced sterilizations and destroying of churches.)

https://www.westernjournal.com/sanders-doubles-communist-regime-praise-gives-credit-china-fighting-extreme-poverty/

Actually, it’s socialism and communism that put people into extreme poverty, and capitalism that’s lifted more of them out of it than at any time in history. Even China made the advances they did by allowing limited amounts of capitalist free enterprise (but not too much freedom: see “Hong Kong.”)

Bernie’s go-to model for the US is Denmark, and other “Democratic socialist” Scandinavian nations. But there are things rotten in Denmark, and Bernie just can’t smell them. The problems with his argument include…

(A.) The Nordic nations are not socialist, as their leaders adamantly insist; by some metrics, Denmark has more economic freedom than the US. Norway’s prosperity is largely thanks to off-shore oil wells, which Bernie would surely ban…

(B.) These nations are actually rolling back some of the socialist-lite programs they instituted after realizing they were unaffordable and were eroding their people’s traditional work ethic (if you’ve ever heard the stories about “Norwegian bachelor farmers” and Lutherans on “Prairie Home Companion,” you know that if socialism won’t work on Scandinavians, who are raised to work hard and expect little in return, then it won’t work anywhere.)

(C.) The image of all those Danes who are happy as larks to pay exorbitant taxes in return for those amazing government services is a delusional fiction. Read this commentary from the Bookworm Room blog, on a book written by someone who’s lived there. Example: under that fantastic Danish government health care, the author visited an emergency care center and was told he’d have to make an appointment.

https://www.bookwormroom.com/2020/02/23/the-truth-behind-bernies-shtick-that-he-just-wants-to-make-america-like-denmark/

One of the comments on this story includes a great quote. The writer says that when the media were touting Denmark as the “happiest place on Earth” (they’re actually #2 in Europe behind Iceland in anti-depressant consumption), he met a Danish couple applying for US citizenship. When he asked why the Danes they were leaving behind were were so happy, she replied, “Because their expectations are so low.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to replace “Keep America Great” with “Lower Your Expectations.”

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

The stock market is taking a dive this week amid fears of the coronavirus spreading (or as President Trump called it, “a buying opportunity.”) It’s too early to know just how bad this could become, but it’s also too early to be launching panics over it. Here’s a little information that might help put things in perspective.

https://www.westernjournal.com/numbers-show-coronavirus-appears-far-less-deadly-flu-govt-media-keep-promoting-panic/

Mike Huckabee

With a few rare and now-gone voices of sanity, such as John Delaney, the Democratic Primary has largely resembled a Bizarro World auction where the participants bid against one another to see who can give away the most stuff for “free.”

“Free” is in quotes because, as every child should be taught and obviously, far too few are these days, there is no such thing as a “free lunch.” That’s been true since the dawn of time, and putting the word “Democratic” in front of “socialism” won’t change it, any more than calling useless and counter-productive gun laws "common sense" will make them common sense. Not even the schools’ “free lunch” program is free: taxpayers pay a lot for it, and the money often comes with government strings attached. Or a “quid pro quo,” to coin a phrase.

Just last night, Tom Steyer added paying reparations for slavery to the list, and earlier, Bernie Sanders tossed another new expensive “human right” on the pile: a $1.2 trillion plan called “Free Child Care and Pre-K for All.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/bernie-sanders-unveils-free-childcare-plan-eye-popping-price-tag-1-5-trillion/

Personally, I can think of few ideas more chilling than every child from the age of three being put into an “education program” designed by Bernie Sanders. But I suppose we should be thankful that the cost of this one is “only” $1.2 trillion, or a little less than 1/4th of the entire current federal budget, rather than his typical plan that costs the entire US GDP.

I know that child care is very important. It’s a real problem for many low-income working people, and the government might have a role to play, although it should be on the state or local level, or better yet, handled by community organizations and churches. But spending nearly a quarter of the entire federal budget to create a new “human right” to free daycare is what passes in Bernie’s mind for “common sense” government action that isn’t “radical” at all.

I know that Bernie knows the word “privilege” because when he recently declared health care to be a “human right,” he added, “It is not a privilege!” I’ve written before about how “progressives” can’t win arguments on facts or experience, so they win by rewriting the language (for instance, liberals, leftists, socialists and communists became too infamous as purveyors of tragically failed policies, so they magically became “progressives.”)

But some of us still care about the English language, and how words actually mean things. As children used to be taught, a “right” is something you are endowed with by God, such as the right to free speech. It doesn’t require anyone else giving up their rights to provide it to you. Making a speech in a public park is a “right.” Demanding that the government provide you with a free P.A. system is a “privilege.” Just as demanding that other people attend medical school or deal with government paperwork to spend their time caring for you while others pay higher taxes to cover the cost makes that a “privilege.” You may say that you think health care should be a privilege of citizenship, but by definition, it can never be a “right.” Bernie goes around finding new “rights” the way my grandkids find Easter eggs, but they don’t have a "right" to chocolate eggs: that’s a privilege of me being their grandpa.

And as long as I’m offering a remedial primer on rights, I’d also like to point out that the Bill of Rights doesn’t list rights the government gives to you. It lists rights with which God endows you and that the government has no right to take away from you.