Mike Huckabee
Today's Edition
The first day of the Senate “impeachment” trial finally wound down after 1 a.m., with tempers flaring and Justice Roberts having to warn both sides to restrain their anger and show decorum.
The shouting match came after Rep. Jerrold Nadler pulled the Democratic accusation for the umpteenth time that denying their requests to call more witnesses that they didn’t bother to subpoena before voting to impeach meant that Senate Republicans were conspiring in a cover-up. He declared that the “Senate is on trial here,” and that President Trump’s invoking his executive privilege rights was because “only guilty people try to hide evidence.” That “triggered” Trump’s attorneys Pat Cipollone and Jay Sekulow, who blasted Nadler for making false allegations against the Senate the way he’s made false allegations against the President and his attorneys, and for shredding the Constitution by claiming that invoking your due process rights is proof of guilt.
It was an appropriately explosive ending to a day when even the most patient man on Earth would’ve been tempted to pull an Elvis and shoot out his TV screen in frustration.
With gratitude,
Mike Huckabee
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FEATURED STORY
END OF DAY 1: The Gov. answers comment on Senate trial
By Mike Huckabee
While suffering through Tuesday's Senate trial "rules" hearing, I looked through some of the reader comments I've received on Tuesday's trial preview. Most expressed the same intense sickness I feel at watching the outrageous sham our country is being put through, when the President was just exercising his constitutional authority. But not all the comments were like that.
From William T:
Mr. Huckabee,
Two comments:
1) President Trump’s successes e.g. on the economy, should not excuse and completely obliterate failings and abuses.
2) The perjury in the Clinton trial involved testimony around his personal sexual conduct and therefore did not involve political matters in my opinion.
From the Gov:
William, I simply don’t know why you wrote to me to make these two points, but as I like to answer people who disagree with me, I’ll respond.
First of all, no one defending President Trump during this attempt to void the 2016 election and remove him from office --- certainly not me nor anyone on my behalf --- has said that the President’s successes should excuse and obliterate his failings and (alleged) abuses. You have set up a “straw man” argument, and I’ve had just about enough of those after watching the House managers on the Senate floor on Tuesday, so your letter was the last straw.
There’s a point I’d like to make, though: I do think Trump’s stunning successes are one of the reasons Democrats are pushing this impeachment sham so hard. It’s really their only hope of hurting him enough to help their own election chances in the fall, and some of them have even admitted that. They had the nerve to come to the Senate with no direct evidence of misconduct by the President. This was after they refrained from issuing subpoenas during Schiff’s House “inquiry” because those requests would have had to go before the Supreme Court, where they almost certainly would have been denied, as “executive privilege” is and has always been a very real consideration. That denial would have ruined their plan to falsely say the President was involved in a “cover-up” when he was simply exercising his constitutional authority as President.
Now they’re trying to bury the Senate proceedings under a deluge of requests for the same witnesses and documents they should have asked for in the House. It’s all to damage the President as much as possible, at taxpayer expense, in the months leading up to the November election –- which they know Trump will likely win, given his lackluster competition and his amazing accomplishments in just a few years. Who needs Russia to “meddle” in the 2020 election when you’ve got these people to do it? But for what it’s worth, I have a message for them: Be careful what you wish for, because if you get witnesses and documents, so do the Senate Republicans, and they have some that would blow your already ridiculous case out of the swamp-water.
On your second point, William, President Clinton was impeached NOT over personal sexual conduct but for lying and suborning perjury in a civil suit brought by Paula Jones about his personal sexual conduct, towards her; there were eleven counts. As I recall, his sexual conduct had been ruled material to her case. (Clinton later made a deal that ended up with him paying a fine and being disbarred by the State of Arkansas.) His impeachment was not for his personal behavior, even though some of his sexual misconduct (of which there was a great deal) took place inside the Oval Office with an intern on the White House staff. I find it curious that in this age of #MeToo, Bill Clinton is generally excused for this behavior, which created a hostile workplace for women and, in doing so, ignored a policy that he had personally signed.
If this had been a Republican President, I guarantee he would be a nonperson now, in this age of PC shaming and “cancel culture.” They’d be taking down his portraits and renaming all the “President William J. Clinton” public buildings. But he was a Democrat, and the standards are completely different. In fact, I wonder why you speak of Trump’s “failings” –- I assume you mean personal failings, given the second point in your letter –- when Trump has never been credibly accused of any sexual impropriety during his time as President, let alone in the Oval Office. Maybe he’s reformed; I doubt that Clinton has, but that’s neither here nor there.
Finally, as long as we’re comparing Bill Clinton to Donald Trump, I’d like to remind you that when Bill Clinton was impeached, the House gave him all the due process considerations and basic constitutional rights that they have refused to President Trump. The resulting trial in the Senate certainly is “the fruit of the poison tree.” I feel as if I've been poisoned myself, just listening to hour after interminable hour of it.
That’s about all I have for you right now, William. If I seem cranky, it’s because of already having to listen to so many “straw man” arguments and outright, demonstrable lies from the likes of Adam Schiff, Jerrold Nader and Hakeem Jeffries. And all the whining about “fairness,” good grief. After the way the House conducted their impeachment. There’s only so much a person can take. And this was just the first day!
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As a palate cleanser, I'm going to leave all my readers with these words from Trump attorney Pat Cipollone that came near at the end of Tuesday's hearing (actually Wednesday morning), after a particularly atrocious stream of lies and false accusations from Nadler. Mr. Cipollone did NOT let that stand, and called Nadler out: "We came here today to address the false case brought to you by the House managers. We've been respectful of the Senate. We've made our arguments to you. And you don't deserve, and we don't deserve, what just happened. Mr. Nadler came up here and made false allegations against our team. He made false allegations against all of you. He accused you of a cover-up. He's been making false allegations against the President. The only one who should be embarrassed, Mr. Nadler, is you, for the way you've addressed this body. This is the United States Senate. You're not in charge here...Mr. Nadler, you owe an apology to the President of the United States and his family. You owe an apology to the Senate. But most of all, you owe an apology to the American people."
As do all the House Democrats. Thank you, Mr. Cipollone --- well said.
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I wanted to make sure you also read these comments:
One of the many outrageous demands made by the Democrats during the Senate impeachment trial was that White House counsel Pat Cipollone be removed from Trump’s defense team because he is a “fact witness.” (This means they want to go on another fishing expedition and try to force the President’s attorney to reveal confidential conversations with him.)
Sen. Ted Cruz had the perfect response: while the President is protected by his Constitutional rights, it’s Adam Schiff who should be disqualified from being an impeachment manager, since this whole thing started with an unnamed whistleblower whom we now know coordinated with Schiff’s staff. So Schiff would definitely be a “fact witness” whom Republicans might want to force to testify. And you can’t be both the prosecutor and a material witness.
That view might be more popular than you’d think. After having to listen to Schiff spend much of Tuesday gassing on at great length, repeating unsubstantiated allegations and known lies as if they were fact, I have to think even some Senate Democrats might jump on any excuse to tell him to shut up and go away.
Incidentally, about that “whistleblower”…Paul Sperry at Real Clear Politics has a new investigative piece quoting a source as saying the “Ukraine whistleblower” was “popping off” about how he was going to get Trump removed from office as far back as early 2017.
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I know you won’t want to miss this: in March, Hulu will debut a four-hour documentary called “Hillary,” all about Hillary Clinton. Hey, wait! Come back! There’s actually something about it you might want to hear!
In the documentary, Hillary blasts her 2016 rival, Bernie Sanders, saying, “He was in Congress for years. He had one Senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” When a Hollywood Reporter interviewer asked if that still holds, she said yes.
It’s interesting to see the blind spot on display here. Hillary can recognize Bernie’s problems as being that he’s a career politician and nobody likes him, yet continue to blame her own defeat on Russian bots, the FBI, sexism and everything under the sun other than that she’s a career politician and voters didn’t like her.
This is similar to the blind spot that so many Democrats and media members (pardon my redundancy) are exhibiting about the corruption issue with Joe and Hunter Biden. They seem to think that if they can just prove President Trump wanted Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, his supporters will realize that’s an impeachable offense and turn on him.
Um...Why?
They haven’t come anywhere near proving that’s what Trump did, but even if he was trying to get Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden, I think most Trump supporters would assume he was just doing his job. Anyone who can look at a corrupt energy company paying $80,000 a month to the totally unqualified, crack-smoking son of the federal official in charge of that nation’s billions in US foreign aid and not smell a rat must be like the teenagers in Febreze commercials who’ve gone “nose blind” and can’t smell their own filthy sweat socks.
Many Americans can’t figure out why being a Democratic Presidential candidate should amount to a “Get-out-of-jail Free” card, or why Trump should be impeached merely for allegedly suggesting we investigate the apparent corruption of the guy they want to replace him with. I tried to warn them in my book, “God, Guns, Grits and Gravy,” that Americans outside the media bubble were fed up with the double standard whereby the rich, powerful and connected skated on things that would end anyone else up in prison. A large part of the appeal of Trump was that he was an outsider, and he vowed to hold the insiders accountable at long last.
In that way, Hillary might be correct that the FBI investigation helped cost her the election, but she still doesn’t understand why. It’s not the fact that she was investigated that turned off so many voters. It’s the way that she was…”investigated.” You know: the way that none of us peasants would ever be.
If Democrats are really so upset that anyone would investigate their Presidential nominees for political corruption, there’s a simple solution: stop nominating corrupt politicians for President.
PS – Hillary’s slam on Bernie also went over with fellow Democrats like a hairball in the cole slaw.
Bible Verse of the Day (KJV)
"Thy word is a lamp unto my feet,
and a light unto my path."
- Psalm 119:105
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