Mike Huckabee

Going into the weekend, we’ve got some great new reading material to pass along that blasts to Kingdom Come any pretext of legitimacy concerning the “Trump/Russia” investigation.

As Sen. Lindsay Graham forecast a couple of days ago, the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, has at last obtained a couple of highly significant documents, newly declassified.

The first is a curious typewritten report by Peter Strzok on the accuracy of a NEW YORK TIMES story on the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russia. Written February 14, 2017, his report (as opposed to the story) shows beyond all doubt Strzok’s awareness that there was NO reliable evidence that the Trump campaign had had contact with Russian intelligence, in any form.

How can we be so sure of this? Well, the NYT had reported that “phone records and intercepted calls” showed that Trump campaign officials had contact with members of the Russian intelligence services. But Strozk, in his report, said, “This statement is misleading and inaccurate as written. We have not seen any evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with [intelligence officers]."

As Zachary Evans writes in NATIONAL REVIEW, Strzok wrote this not once, not twice, but three times in his report.

Investigative reporter John Solomon, appearing with Devin Nunes and guest host Tammy Bruce on Friday’s HANNITY, said that “nine substantive errors” were found in that single NYT story and that it should be retracted. (Ha, don’t hold your breath. Not that it matters; the damage was done at the time.) According to Solomon, what we’re now finally able to see proves that the FBI knew for months “that everything they gave to the FISA court was wrong --- EVERYTHING --- and yet they never retracted it and renewed the FISA application two more times.”

Nunes stressed the importance of INDICTMENTS. (I put that in capital letters to stress the importance of indictments myself.) “I’m not too interested in the Durham report,” he said. “I would like to know everything, for the four-plus years, that went on, including even the Mueller investigation, but really what we want is...indictments. We’ve made 14 criminal referrals; we have another investigation that’s ongoing...Also, we have suspected for a very long time that Steele had maybe only two Russians, but we believe [that]...he didn’t really know them. How was it that Steele found these supposed 'Russians' and was able to use them? We’ve asked the FBI and the CIA about these Russians; I’ve said for a long time we’re interested in two Russians –- and...they have yet to allow us access to these two Russians who we now believe are living in the United States.”

All right, Director Wray, what is going on with that? It should be all right for senate and congressional investigators to have access to the whole cast of characters by now, as part of their oversight function of the FBI. What is the holdup at this point? If it's just that this is going to make the FBI look bad, well, sorry, that's not a good enough reason.

Moving on...the other document now available is the 57-page transcript of an interview with Steele’s primary source for the “dossier.” The document still contains some redactions, but as THE DAILY CALLER reports, Sen. Graham says it “indicates the reliability of the dossier was completely destroyed” after the interviews, which were conducted over three days in January 2017.

In other words, over January and February of 2017, the “dossier” –- and, by extension, the investigation based on it –- was shown without a doubt to be an outrageous farce with no evidence to back it up. But the FBI just kept pushing. So, of course, did the Democrats. Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel in mid-May!

Incidentally, there had been a hold-up in obtaining this document as well, as can be seen in this earlier report from THE DAILY CALLER, dated June 25.

According to THE DAILY CALLER, the FBI had been “refusing” to supply the document, “saying in response to a public records request that the information is classified and risks identifying a confidential FBI source.” Reading their account, you can see how long and hard the tug-of-war has been to get hold of classified documents that tell the tale of this hoax.

But they're out now --- happy reading!

Mike Huckabee

Today’s corporations will go to some pretty absurd lengths to appeal to eco-consumers, but Burger King has just raised (or lowered) the bar with a commercial for its new burger made from cows that burp and fart less greenhouse gas than your average bovine. The cows are on a lemongrass diet that reduces methane. The commercial features young viral celebrity/country music yodeler Mason Ramsey extolling in song the virtues of less-flatulent cows.

Now, if only we could get green politicians like AOC to emit less gas.

As long as we’re on the subject, Amazon is also running an inadvertently horrifying eco-ad, as my bird-loving writers Pat and Laura, who rescue homeless parrots, point out. The spot starts with white text on a black background, listing all the ways in which Amazon is going green, such as electric vehicles, to eliminate carbon emissions. This is accompanied only by the lulling, natural sound of birds chirping.

Then at the end of the ad, the text gives way to video of how they plan to accomplish this: with a field full of spinning wind power turbines. Or as Pat and Laura call them, “Bird Cuisinarts.” Those spinning blades dice, slice, chop and slaughter countless birds, as well as bats that are also vital to the eco-system. All to produce a tiny fraction of the clean energy that can be generated by a safe, modern nuclear plant. Enjoy the bird songs while you can.

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.

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

UPDATE: I told you yesterday about ViacomCBS severing ties with Nick Cannon over his podcast that spread vile conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism and anti-white racist rhetoric. I said that we finally knew how far a leftist had to go to get “canceled” from holding a high profile job. Well, I take it back: Fox decided that Cannon will continue in his most high profile gig, as host of “The Masked Singer.” After all, he’s apologized and is “remorseful.” Well, that settles it, then. Oh, and by the way, Cannon is demanding an apology from ViacomCBS. Don’t be surprised if he gets one.

Meanwhile, black actor Terry Crews is still facing Twitter mob demands that he be fired from the TV show “Brooklyn-Nine Nine” for criticizing Black Lives Matter, saying we shouldn’t demonize anyone because of their race, and that the solution to white supremacy isn’t black supremacy because “we’re all in this together.”

Well, you can see why they’d want him fired while pouring support out for Nick Cannon. Saying we shouldn't hate each other because of race and we should all work together is genuinely offensive to today’s leftists. It undermines all their hard work.

Mike Huckabee

For all the media figures and politicians were rooting against and trying to block the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 patients just because President Trump said it might work, take a look at the chart from France in this article. It shows what happened to the case fatality rate between the moment when a bogus study trumpeted by biased media outlets got the drug banned and the moment when the study was retracted and doctors were allowed to prescribe it again.

I think we can now officially classify Trump Derangement Syndrome as a fatal disease, except it doesn’t kill the carrier, it kills other people.

Mike Huckabee

With all the political and racial unrest going on in the country right now, there’s a very different --- and extremely welcome (to me) --- kind of unrest going on at the same time. It’s happening in the media, as “cancel culture” starts to eat its own.

Yesterday, we brought you the story of Bari Weiss, a self-described “centrist” journalist who very publicly left her job as a writer and editor at THE NEW YORK TIMES after finding out what it was like there to try to express an individual, intellectually curious, non-sanctioned thought or even to report a story that didn't advance a leftist, anti-Trump agenda. In case you didn’t see her open resignation letter, here it is at her website. There is still smoke coming off of it.

Weiss justifiably slams media people, particularly at the NYT, for their sense of self-importance. “A new consensus has emerged in the press,” she writes, but perhaps especially at this paper that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”

Seems to me that it should have been enough that Weiss was upset at Donald Trump’s victory and even cried at her desk when he won. But, no, that wasn’t nearly enough. In fact, they were all too busy sobbing at their own desks to notice her dismay. She soon found out that in the new Era of Trump, all so-called “journalists” were required from that day forward to have a single-minded focus on destroying...HIM.

(By the way, I thought it was interesting that Weiss’s colleagues called her a “Nazi” while also complaining that she was "writing about Jews again.” Just wondering: if they’re complaining about her writing about Jews, just who are the Nazis here? Do these so-called professional journalists even know what a Nazi is? But I digress.)

Brian Kilmeade, subbing for Tucker Carlson on his Tuesday evening show, played a clip of Ms. Weiss from “The Joe Rogan Experience,” talking about what happened. She makes a very interesting point about “cancel culture”: “The people who are inoculated from it [the ostracism, firings, etc.] are people that are already extremely successful and can take the risk. It’s why Ricky Gervais can be Ricky Gervais; it’s why J. K. Rowling can tweet what she tweeted a few months ago and survive it, because they’ve already accumulated enough capital. The people that I hear from that are completely screwed by it are people like artists and poets and untenured professors are aren’t famous and no one knows about, and are, you know, having to go with a begging bowl..to get support after they’ve, you know, made a bad joke, or whatever it is.”

Weiss apparently hadn’t reached the point in her career at which she could get away with expressing her own thoughts. Thank goodness actor/comedian Ricky Gervais had attained that level by the time Hollywood “cancel culture” inspired him to ridicule it, which he has done mercilessly. And he hasn’t let up. (My theory: he knows what he says is really what most people think.)

Kilmeade pointed out that another NYT editor, Liz Spayd, sounded very much like Weiss in an interview with Carlson back in December of 2016 (right after Trump was elected). Spayd lost her job (surprise!) shortly after doing that interview. “I consider it almost an unrecognized point of view,” she said, “that The Times has that comes from being in New York, being in that, you know, in a certain circle, and seeing the world a certain way, not being in touch with people who don’t live like them or don’t live in cities and who are the ones who elected Donald Trump to the presidency. They’re just out of touch with that.”

I’ll say it again: they should have just read my 2016 book GOD, GUNS, GRITS, & GRAVY.

Journalists who try to challenge their more radical, “woke” colleagues at The Times to look outside their safe little thought-bubble tend not to last long there. It’s a hostile work environment, to say the least. Weiss believes there are many in the same position she was in; they just do what they know is expected of them and don’t speak up. I would imagine that even some of the editors directing and correcting their underlings are doing it out of fear of “cancel culture,” protecting their own job security.

But now Andrew Sullivan has left his job at THE NEW YORKER. Sullivan is someone who does have quite a big name. He says the underlying reasons for his exit are “pretty self-evident” and that he’ll address them in his last column on Friday. Sullivan also has backed Weiss, saying, “The mob bullied and harrassed a young woman for thoughtcrimes. And her editors stood by and watched.”

Someone else has resigned, not from the media but from another influential post in popular culture: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art senior curator of painting and sculpture Gary Garrels. As reported by Robby Soave at REASON magazine, he was accused of “toxic white supremacist beliefs” in a petition from museum employees for daring to say he would still accept works of art from white men. I am not kidding –- that is ALL he said. I wish Garrels, after 20 years with the museum, had put up more of a fight against such a ludicrous accusation, but at least this puts into focus how a small minority of crazies are trying to run the show. More sane people will become fed up with this type of radical orthodoxy, and more WILL fight back.

Finally, today's look at what’s happening with media wouldn’t be complete without examining how it’s blurring the lines between news and outright campaign advocacy. CourierNewsroom.com, known as “Courier,” was created and funded by the Democrat-aligned digital organization Acronym. It is absolutely political, but because it’s organized as a media outlet, it doesn’t have to disclose its donors or the total dollars it spends promoting Democrat politicians. (In that way, it’s a lot like Black Lives Matter not having to report its source of funding.)

According to this story in POLITICO, “Experts in media ethics and misinformation worry that the advocacy-cloaked-in-journalism tactic is pouring gasoline on a raging fire of consumer misinformation and online disinformation." Yes, there is that, but I also agree with those who say that this trend will further undermine the public’s trust in news, which has already fallen to about as low as it can go. It gets harder all the time just to find accurate information on a candidate or an issue, even as partisan “fact-checkers” abound. That’s why we’re trying so hard here to sort it all out and be a valued and trusted source.

Mike Huckabee

I noted recently that former employees of CNN are speaking out about how biased and unprofessional that network has become in its TDS-induced hysteria. Now, do I sense a trend?

Bari Weiss is a centrist writer/editor who was hired by the New York Times after the 2016 election shocked them into realizing they were out of touch with the American people (they could have known that sooner if they’d read my book, “God, Guns, Grits and Gravy.”) But instead of listening to her, they’ve allowed young, ultra-woke staffers to target and slander her, as they do anyone who makes them feel “unsafe” by voicing a non-far-left opinion. She finally had enough, and she not only quit the Times, she released her resignation letter, and it’s a must-read.

In it, she torches the Times as only an insider can, blasting the publisher and editors for their cowardly surrender to intolerant leftist groupthink. She says that stories are chosen and written to appeal to the narrowest of audiences. Instead of writing “the first draft of history,” even history itself must be molded to fit the preconceived narrative. She’s been subjected to a hostile work environment where suggesting any story that doesn’t advance the “progressive” narrative leads to attacks on social media and claims that she’s a racist, a Nazi and “writing about the Jews again.” No action is ever taken against the attackers, only the victims. She says Twitter has become the Times’ ultimate editor, and rules are applied extremely subjectively: those who hold to the leftist orthodoxy go unscrutinized while anyone who varies from it lives in fear of the “digital Thunderdome” and “online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.”

Her advice to anyone going into journalism today (aside from “don’t”):

“Rule One: Speak your mind at your own peril. Rule Two: Never risk commissioning a story that goes against the narrative. Rule Three: Never believe an editor or publisher who urges you to go against the grain. Eventually, the publisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or reassigned, and you’ll be hung out to dry.”

I repeat, this is a must-read. Whatever suspicions you’ve had about the cowardly, biased tunnel-vision of the New York Times, the death of journalism in general, or how the adults must be totally cowed by the red diaper babies on their staffs, this confirms it all and more.

If you’d like more background on Ms. Weiss and some of her previous reasonable criticisms of the Times that earned her the hatred and scorn of the woke brigade, Instapundit has a good round-up. It includes a headline from the satirical site, The Babylon Bee, that contains more blunt truth than you'll find in a month's worth of the New York Times.

Mike Huckabee

Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom once again ordered the closure of many businesses in the state (including worship services) due to an “alarming” rise in COVID-19 (Chinese) coronavirus cases.

However, just as with fellow leftist Bill DeBlasio in New York City, the one exception to bans on any large gatherings is BLM protests, which are still perfectly fine, even though the spike in cases has correlated to them much more than to business reopenings. Also to proximity to the US-Mexico border, which Newsom has been trying to erase.

In announcing his latest mass closings, Newsom scolded Californians, saying, “The data suggests not everyone is acting with common sense.” For once, I agree with him. Just look at who they elected Governor.

Mike Huckabee

One of the most common symptoms of the brain-wasting disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome is how it targets and destroys the part of the brain responsible for long-term memories. This explains why, every time President Trump says or does anything, no matter how clearly it is within his powers as President, TDS victims fly into a rage and scream that it’s an “unprecedented abuse of power” and “no other President in history has ever done anything so outrageous!”

And so, when Trump announced that he was commuting the prison sentence of former campaign adviser Roger Stone, like clockwork, the howls erupted that no other President had ever committed such an outrageous abuse of clemency power, it was something that is “simply not done by American Presidents,” and it’s “the most corrupt and cronyistic act” in American history!!!!! (Is that enough exclamation points to capture their mood?)

As is usually the case in these situations, that’s hyperbolic nonsense. Even liberal law professor Jonathan Turley, who is no Trump fan and who believes that Stone should have merely received a new trial, reminded us in The Hill that Presidents have broad pardon powers and have used them in ways that infuriated their political enemies almost since the nation began. He says the claim of Trump’s action being unprecedentedly corrupt is “almost quaint.”

Turley looks back at American history (while we still have it), and cites similar pardon controversies, from Thomas Jefferson all the way up to Bill Clinton, who pardoned his brother, his Whitewater partner, and worst of all, financier Marc Rich, a major Democratic donor who was indicted on 65 criminal counts, including fraud, racketeering, tax evasion and illegal dealings with Iran. His companies pleaded guilty to 35 counts, but Rich himself went on the lam and spent years on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted fugitives list. He was living in Switzerland when Clinton pardoned him on his last day in office.

And since Prof. Turley observes the unwritten media rule of never saying a negative word about Barack Obama, it’s left to conservative media to remind us that Obama pardoned Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, a traitor who leaked a massive trove of sensitive government documents to WikiLeaks, and he commuted the 70-year sentence of Oscar Lopez Rivera, leader of the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN, responsible for 130 terrorist attacks in the US and at least six deaths.

Makes Roger Stone look like pretty small potatoes, doesn't it?

Mike Huckabee

Over the past several years, investigative reporter John Solomon has proven to be a rich source of information about Obama-era misconduct that was mostly ignored and/or excused by the media. Thanks in large part to his reporting, we learned that one didn’t have to be a crazy hard-case conspiracy theorist to understand that the “deep state,” as we have come to know it, absolutely exists and was doing its dead-level best to take Trump down, both before and after he was elected President. And through his confidential but rock-solid sources, we learned about its inner workings months and even years before long-hidden documents, texts, scribbled notes, and sworn testimony finally gave us the proof.

And now, Solomon and co-author Seamus Bruner have a new book that one can tell from the title covers a lot of important ground. It’s called ‘FALLOUT: Nuclear Bribes, Russian Spies, and the Washington Lies that Enriched the Clinton and Biden Dynasties.’ Solomon and Bruner make quite a team, as Bruner has previously partnered with Peter Schweizer on projects such as the book CLINTON CASH, and he also wrote ‘COMPROMISED: How Money and Politics Drive FBI Corruption.’ He’s also the Associate Director of Research for the Government Accountability Institute, and there's no word we want to hear more these days than "accountability."

Of FALLOUT, President Trump could not be more enthusiastic; he says, “This book is a MUST BUY!”

Of course, Trump himself had a role to play in all this, simply by (justifiably) making Uranium One a focus of his “Crooked Hillary” attacks during the 2016 campaign and making it dangerous for the Obama-Biden camp to let him continue making accusations. Solomon’s theory is that they had to do whatever they could to neutralize Trump so he wouldn’t be able to expose their own role in selling out to Putin; that’s why they launched their own investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia. They were trying to cover up their own corruption after cashing in. (As we’ve always said, look at what the Democrats accuse the Republicans of doing, and then you’ll know what THEY’RE doing.)

FALLOUT was written to provide the background for the “Trump/Russia” narrative he has already given us. It's sort of a "prequel" that answers the question, why were Russia and Ukraine the center of all this? As Solomon tells it, the story began much earlier, with Vladimir Putin’s quest for nuclear dominance, “one that produced a series of political scandals that ultimately posed one of the greatest threats to our democracy in modern American history.” It’s a story of intrigue that reads like a thriller --- but it’s real.

FOX NEWS reporter and legal analyst Gregg Jarrett –- another of our favorite authors –- says of FALLOUT, “The Russian and Ukraine scandals are unraveled, corruption and greed exposed. No one is better at uncovering the truth than these two investigative journalists.” It shouldn’t surprise you that Michael Flynn attorney Sidney Powell and investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson give raves as well, with Attkisson saying, “The Russian and Ukraine scandals not only corrupted government decisions, they helped enrich lots of Washington insiders. FALLOUT tells it all.”

This is a great time for the book to be coming out, as Democrats trying to help Biden win are trying, all over again (sigh), to point at Trump and cry “Russia Russia Russia!” They just can’t stop themselves; it’s all they’ve got even after years of investigation turned up no evidence at all against Trump but plenty of evidence against the Obama administration.

In fact, when Solomon appeared on Monday’s INGRAHAM ANGLE to introduce the book in an exclusive interview, one focus of discussion was Joe Biden’s former energy policy adviser, Amos Hochstein, who seems to have been playing both sides of the fence. According to Solomon, Hochstein, while working in the private sector as a U.S. lobbyist, had been an adviser to Tenex, a subsidiary of Rosatom, the huge and corrupt Russian nuclear conglomerate. In other words, Hochstein was actually helping the Russians, at the expense of the American energy industry. “Before long,” Solomon writes, “he was directly advising Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, her successor John Kerry, and finally Vice President Biden (and even President Obama).”

As Solomon reminds us, Russia was one of the Obama administration’s biggest foreign policy failures. (Remember Hillary’s lame “Russia reset”?) They gave huge utility contracts worth billions of dollars to the Russians, making American consumers of energy dependent on Russian uranium (!). Of course, we've known about the Uranium One contract that gave Russia control of 20 percent of America's uranium supply. And then, after getting what he wanted, Putin did exactly as HE wanted and invaded Ukraine.

"The Democrats did not want that to be the storyline in 2016,” Solomon explains. So they tried to implicate Trump and his associates in corruption with Russia, even though they had to make it up and falsify evidence.

One thing I can’t wait to read about: Solomon tells of a weird FBI plot to invite Vladimir Putin to the 2013 Kentucky Derby to honor him as a “Kentucky Colonel” and, by the way, spy on him. (I am not kidding. Wow, we are finding out more every day about things the FBI was coming up with to do in their spare time.) Putin, of course, is no fool, and he probably prefers straight vodka to mint juleps, anyway, so he sent his regrets. This was at the time when the FBI had an informant inside Rosatom and was finding out how corrupt it was.

It was also when President Obama was pursuing his infinitely disastrous Iran nuclear deal, and the FBI was concerned that Putin was assisting Iran in carrying out its illicit nuclear program. So making Putin a “Kentucky Colonel” might have been a wacky idea, but at least one can see why the FBI was interested in finding out all they could.

Of course, Obama didn’t care. He was going to get that deal inked no matter what –- even though it was a Deal With The Devil.

Anyway, this looks like a fantastic read, and it really happened. Gosh, why even bother with fiction? You can’t make this stuff up! Here’s an excerpt, detailing one critical day in the life of undercover FBI operative Doug Campbell, whose agency code name, because of his deep religious faith, was “The Pastor.” No doubt he was praying extra-hard that day as he worked to expose the kickback scheme within Putin’s uranium empire by delivering a briefcase containing $50,000 cash and recording the exchange with a camera hidden in his pen.

Mike Huckabee

Investigative journalist Daniel Greenfield at FrontpageMag.com took a deeper look at some of the giant US corporations that are showering Black Lives Matter with millions of dollars, frantically virtue-signaling about America’s shameful legacy of slavery and backing efforts to silence conservative voices on social media. He asks why so many of these uber-woke corporations are making their profits off of actual slavery – not slavery from the 1860s that over 360,000 Union soldiers died to end, but current-day, 21st century forced labor in China.

Some of the corporations cited include Coca-Cola, Apple, BMW, Calvin Klein, Abercrombie & Fitch, GM, LL Bean, Gap, Volkswagen, and that paragon of ostentatious wokeness, Nike. Here’s what Greenfield writes about Nike, citing a report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute:

“A factory making shoes for Nike was ‘equipped with watchtowers, barbed-wire fences, and police guard boxes.’ Nike Shox were discovered being made in another factory by slave laborers shipped far from home to produce shoes for the sportswear giant. Too far for them to run away.

‘We can walk around, but we can’t go back,’ one worker said.

The same company that holds up Colin Kaepernick, a millionaire anti-American activist, as an icon of social justice, also profits from an alleged slave labor facility that moved to be closer to ‘the region’s cotton fields’. The millionaire victims of imaginary racism that Nike wants us to care about are on their billboards while modern-day slaves still toil in the cotton fields because their lives don’t matter.”

If you’re wondering why this is suddenly coming out, it’s not sudden; you just weren't told about it until now. The bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China, whose members range from Sen. Marco Rubio to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, released a report on forced labor in China back in March. It inspired a proposed bill called the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act that names Nike and a number of other large US corporations as being suspected of profiting from forced labor. It’s also prompted sanctions on some Chinese officials, for which China just retaliated with some vague “sanctions” on Rubio, Ted Cruz, and other US critics of its unconscionable policies.

At least that’s getting a little media attention. But why have the media buried this story for so long while they hyperventilate over America’s long-banished era of slavery from the century-before-last? Greenfield believes it’s because it makes their big pockets advertisers look bad. I would add that there is also a tangled web of profits and ownership connecting news outlets (and sports franchises) to big media companies, Chinese investors, and reliance on both Chinese labor and the Chinese market. To put it bluntly, they’ve sold their souls to China.

It’s ironic that they vilify America while covering for China, where any criticism of that nation’s government, history, and culture would be ruthlessly and violently suppressed. These corporate honchos should savor the American freedom of speech that allows them to attack their own nation because if control of it ever fell into the hands of the people they’re covering for, that freedom would quickly become a thing of the past (Don’t believe me? Look at Hong Kong.) They would soon find themselves even less free to express a dissenting opinion than a conservative on Twitter.

Mike Huckabee

I spent much of last week drawing comparisons between the violent unrest and strict “cancel culture” going on in our country with the swift transformation of such places as Hong Kong, all to show how quickly that same socialist takeover and loss of freedom can happen here. We know exactly what the Democrat Party will do, step by step, to cement its control if it (shudder) wins in November, as we (and it) can see that Biden is a diminished human being who would be a mere figurehead with no principles of his own, a puppet of the left. That, obviously, is the plan.

Our freedom is something many of us took for granted in the past –- even on the Fourth Of July –- but we can’t do that now. If we do, there might be no more Fourths of July to celebrate, certainly not by waving an American flag around! Since last week, I’ve seen other pieces that reflect the same thinking.

Here’s one from a writer named Xiao Li, an American whose father came to this country two decades ago after the death of Mao but had grown up in China under Mao’s Cultural Revolution. When the writer was 18, his father took him on a trip to China to show him something of his youth, of which he’d spoken to his son very little before then.

Xiao tells of meeting a number of amiable older men, one by one, from his father’s past and hearing from his father after each meeting what each of these men had actually done to him under Mao. Memories fade, I suppose, and these men, many years after performing their duties as ruthless revolutionaries, had forgotten some awful things they’d done to him. Some of these men were his own family members. Xiao says, “Some of my father’s tormenters were blood relatives, who were especially keen to display their revolutionary credentials through violence, a situation that was sadly not uncommon. As Xiao explains, you can’t have a revolution without dissolving “the bonds of organic trust” between children and their parents or students and their teachers.

I’m reminded of what so many American parents are saying now about trying to have political discussions with their own kids. As soon as the parents introduce some unsanctioned point, the discussions unravel, with their kids yelling at them, calling them racists and white supremacists (!) and hurling demands at them straight out of WHITE FRAGILITY, such as “Do the work!” One hallmark of revolutionary thinking is that the family must be destroyed in favor of the State and that independent thinkers within the family must be exposed and shamed. We are seeing this now.

Xiao does reference another article that tries to differentiate the Chinese Cultural Revolution from the radical leftists’ quest for power currently going on in America. I’ll link to it here in case you’d like to read it. The author is right in saying there are some nuances of difference, but if you’re like me you will find no comfort in these. It’s like saying Alaskan grizzly bears will tear you apart and eat you alive but this one is more like one of those Canadian grizzly bears that might be satisfied with ripping your arms and legs off, so don’t be too concerned.

As Xiao puts it, “No historical analogy is ever perfect, and to seek exactitude over verisimilitude is to miss the point. In other words, as the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Xiao’s father and many of his contemporaries who lived through the era of Mao “can’t put their finger on the why,” but in America they are sensing something in the air that reminds them of the events of their youth in China.

One commonality Xiao sees is the fact that the young Chinese revolutionaries, the Red Guard, tended to come from privileged backgrounds; they were young and well-educated like the current American activists. In China, he says, “the young students saw their chance to to achieve revolutionary greatness...seeking to root out imaginary class enemies from within.”

In the next step, the movement’s slogans and way of thinking worked their way down to “non-elite institutions and popular discourse.” We see this in America every day in the news media, on TV shows and in magazines. In other words, it’s not just on campus anymore. We also we see “the blatant denial of reality, the constant gaslighting which almost seems designed to ferret out people with any sanity left.” We must refuse to be ferreted.

Xiao’s article is a must-read as a follow-up to my commentary of last week. Also, my writer/researcher Laura Ainsworth has been busy tackling a different aspect of the current dark revolutionary spirit: the curious radicalism of white leftist women trying so desperately to make up for their “privilege” and the shame of not being born “of color.”

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: Ainsworth: On the brainwashing of white women

The article Laura cited in her commentary had a link to a piece from last year by Peggy Noonan, which draws a comparison with the Chinese Cultural Revolution as powerful as any made by Xiao Li in his piece about his father. Noonan describes the “struggle sessions” implemented by Mao to humiliate people in various ways to get them to confess to social “crimes.” This is similar to the shaming that is done on college campuses in 2020. And today, we also have the internet, which makes this sort of psychological pressure much more pervasive in students' lives.

I’ve mentioned a few things we can do to fight the onslaught, but here is a great article I’ve found since: “Five Ways to Conquer The Cancel Culture,” by radio talk show host Dr. Michael Brown. Yes, he says, we can face this down and beat it, and we can take our cues from the Bible. If we stand strong and handle this attack on our values with assurance, the “cancel culture” will devour its own. We can see this already happening.

You also can’t go wrong with anything written by the brilliant Shelby Steele, whose book WHITE GUILT, though it came out in 2007, is a wonderful antidote for the toxic identity politics being practiced by leftists today. If anyone in your family is having to read WHITE FRAGILITY for school –- and, sadly, it seems every student is –- do what you can to make WHITE GUILT companion reading.

RELATED READING: What do Americans have to lose? Look at Hong Kong...

Mike Huckabee

IF I WANTED TO DESTROY AMERICA...

Do you ever get the idea that some of the people in our country just don’t like it? Even some elected officials who want to govern the country, like MN Congresswoman Ilhan Omar openly says we need to dismantle the very structures of America, including our economic system. I find that a bit strange coming from someone who escaped the absolute squalor of Somalia where the annual per capita income is $225 and came to America where she lives large and even somehow got elected to Congress. Is her goal to make us like her home country? I sure hope not! I’m starting to think that some loud voices in our world want to get rid of America once and for all. And they’ve observed that it doesn’t work to do it from the outside. An attack like Pearl Harbor or 9-11 only unifies the country and gives us the resolve to fight back. So suppose I wanted to destroy America? What would be the best way to do it?

I’d first replace the education system top to bottom. Instead of giving students the tools to think, reason, and analyze based on hard facts, I’d give them a system in which everyone thinks alike. Deviating from “group-think” would be strictly forbidden, and would result in a person being ostracized, scorned, and prohibited from even being employed. I’d erase all substance and symbols of history. Instead of ensuring that students actually read and understood the documents of our origin, like the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, I’d focus instead on pop culture and fill history books with Lady Gaga, the Kardashians, and Beyonce. I’d demonize George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin by never allowing students to see what these men actually said or did. I’d find any flaw in them and make that the only thing kids learned.

I’d never simply teach that the country had some ugly chapters of slavery and racism, as did virtually every nation. I’d pretend that those things still exist now, despite the obvious fact that a black person was twice elected President by defeating white candidates which meant that a large number of white people voted for the black candidate. I’d ignore that black people have held virtually every cabinet agency at one time or another, served at the top of our military, advanced in business to become millionaires and billionaires, led the world in several scientific and medical innovations.

I would seek to undo a system of economic capitalism which rewarded work and innovation. I wouldn’t demand equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome, which would mean that there wouldn’t be an incentive to study all night for an “A” since everyone would get the same grade anyway. And why take the risk of starting a business based on a better idea to do or create something if working from early to late still netted you the same pay as the person who came late, left early, and never created anything? I’d just give everyone a trophy. No one would ever lose.

I’d get rid of law enforcement. Cops get in the way of us doing what we want, taking what belongs to others, and having civil order. If there is anarchy and chaos and people are terrified to live and work where they live, it’ll be easier for me to convince people that the problem is not LACK of law enforcement, but the presence of law enforcement. I’d use words that sound good to cover my real intentions. I’d say equality when I really mean favoritism; I’d say tolerance when I really mean intolerance; I’d say diversity when I really mean uniformity; and I’d say women’s health when I really mean doing a very unnatural surgical procedure to kill a baby and do real damage to a woman’s physical and mental health. I’d marginalize religion and brand its adherents as fanatics, bigots, hate-mongers, and racists because belief in moral absolutes like love, forgiveness, charity, sacrifice, and service are a real threat to controlling people and making them follow what they are told.

I’d never attack America with a bomb, bullets, or battleships. I’d just lie about her history and origins, destroy every symbol of its legacy both good and bad, indoctrinate instead of educate so as to have uniformity of thought, and I’d take away all ownership of private property and personal capital and give everyone the exact same thing so as to destroy the incentives that made people like me who grew up poor to work really hard to live better and with that to give better.

But I don’t want to destroy America. I love America. And it’s why I won’t let her get destroyed without a fight.

Mike Huckabee

A salute to Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Hackett for finally demonstrating to other corporations the proper way to deal with “cancel culture” cranks on their payrolls. We’ve seen far too many companies cave in to the childish demands of crybully leftist staffers, from the publisher who canceled Woody Allen’s autobiography to the New York Times, who fired an editor for daring to run an op-ed by a Republican Senator. So when some employees of Ford demanded that the company stop making police cars because they’re “accessories to police brutality and oppression” and “racist policing policies,” Hackett politely but firmly refused. He couched it all in a lot of soft-soap liberal buzzwords to keep from offending anyone, but the point was clear.

Personally, I would have suggested that if their consciences wouldn’t allow them to do their jobs, there are plenty of other people who’d be happy to take them, while, to quote Bill Murray from “Ghostbusters,” “someone with your qualifications would have no trouble finding a top-flight job in either the food service or housekeeping industries.” That’s also what should have been said to the entitled snowflakes at the Times and the publishing house, two businesses where there are easily a thousand eager applicants for every open position.

By the way, I’ll throw the Ford CEO a salute, but only with my index finger. If he wants the full-hand salute, then the Ford Foundation should stop giving money ($7.6 million since 2018) to groups like Black Lives Matter that are now pushing to defund the police departments that buy police cars from Ford. That’s both bad politics and bad business. You’d think the shareholders would bring that up to him.

Now, here’s a CEO who deserves the full-hand salute for bravery…

Mike Huckabee

Joe Biden unveiled his economic plan in Pennsylvania Thursday. If I had to sum it up in a few words, they would be: “Exactly like Trump, only with a lot more government. And he doesn't really mean it.”

It’s almost funny to see how much “America first” rhetoric Biden has cribbed from Trump, after spending the past three years accusing Trump of being a xenophobic fascist for putting America first. I guess it’s not xenophobic if you don’t really mean it. I have to assume Biden’s talk about bringing back manufacturing jobs from overseas and standing up to China and being “laser-focused on working families” is all banana oil. That’s because he’s done nothing about any of those issues during 42 years in government, the last eight as veep to a President who scoffed that Trump would need a magic wand to bring back manufacturing jobs. Also, Biden mocked Trump for suggesting that China was our adversary. And frankly, I don’t think he can laser-focus on anything these days.

What he’s mostly done is take popular buzzwords from Trump, like “bring back American manufacturing jobs,” and parrot them while proposing a lot of big government plans that would actually retard growth. Before the pandemic (from CHINA) knocked down the economy, Trump was standing up to China, renegotiating bad trade deals, bringing manufacturing back to the US and creating real private sector growth, with record low unemployment in all demographics and wages rising for the first time in years.

One of the biggest keys to that was that Trump cut taxes and slashed the onerous regulations that were acting like a boot on the neck of business. Biden now claims he will “stimulate” the economy by having the government spend hundreds of billions of dollars on American goods (with money raised from new high taxes on Americans, who might have spent their money on American goods themselves if they hadn’t had to send it to Washington) and tons more new regulations to pick winners and losers in the markets and punish industries that don’t do what he wants them to do.

Sorry, but I’ve seen those policies, and their lousy results, before. I believe it was during the Obama-Biden Administration. Trump calls his plan, “Keep America Great.” If Joe is looking for a name for his, I’d suggest “The ‘Fool Me Twice, Shame On Me’ Plan.”

Mike Huckabee

MORNING EDITION

July 9, 2020 

By Mike Huckabee

DEFEATING THE ENEMY WE FACE

In commentaries over the past couple of days, I’ve illustrated how quickly freedom can be lost --- Hong Kong is the current real-life example --- and shown the true nature of the threat our country faces, as we need to know what that is before we can combat it. Turns out, it really is very much like the Chinese Communist Party that clamped down on Hong Kong, with the same Marxist underpinnings as the CCP.

For example, let’s take a look at Black Lives Matter, which has shown itself NOT to be as much about black lives as many thought. Thanks to Tucker Carlson for bringing attention to a CNN interview segment with “America’s Got Talent” host Terry Crews criticizing BLM’s indifference towards black-on-black shootings. Host Don Lemon said this: “The Black Lives Matter movement was started because there was talking about police brutality. If you want an ‘All-Black-Lives-Matter’ movement that talks about gun violence in communities including, you know, black communities, then start that movement with that name, but that’s not what Black Lives Matter is about.”

READ MORE AND COMMENT HERE>>>

BULLETIN: SCOTUS RULING ON TRUMP TAXES

This morning, in two 7-2 decisions, the Supreme Court allowed Democratic Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance Jr. access to President Trump’s personal and business tax returns, but denied Democratic Congressional investigators access to them.

There are more details on the rulings at the link. In the meantime, we’ll start the clock ticking on how long it takes the Manhattan DA to illegally leak the tax returns to the Congressional Democrats and the New York Times. Tick, tick, tick…

Mike Huckabee

This morning, the Supreme Court upheld President Trump’s order protecting the Little Sisters of the Poor from having to provide abortion-causing drugs to workers under their health insurance plan. (For the record: this is an order of Catholic nuns who take a vow of poverty and provide care to terminally ill indigents, so just imagine how shriveled a soul you’d have to have to threaten them with ruinous fines and legal costs just because you love abortion so much.)

The ruling was 7-2, with Chief Justice John Roberts remembering he’s supposed to be a conservative and protect people’s First Amendment rights. Only abortion-rights-above-all Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented from what should have been the most obvious slam-dunk decision possible (“No, the government shouldn’t be able to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for abortion drugs! Are you insane?!”) It will now be up to historians to argue how anyone could have ever thought that was (A.) remotely Constitutional or (B.) not a repulsive and reprehensible idea.

The nuns have already had to fight for years against the government forcing them to violate their most sacred beliefs, and having won that exception, to fight for it again. Just as with the same-sex marriage lawsuits against Christian bakers and florists, losing in court doesn’t stop those bent on destroying religious liberty, they just find some other legal loophole to attack from. Let’s all pray this will settle it for good.

Let’s also pray it will serve as a long-overdue lesson to the SCOTUS to stop throwing bombs into settled moral and Constitutional issues, and then expecting people to go bankrupt fighting endless lawsuits in order to clear up the legal murk that they created.

Mike Huckabee

And in a second ruling that also strikes a blow for religious liberty, the Supreme Court again ruled 7-2 (Ginsberg and Sotomayor dissenting) that religious schools should be free from discrimination lawsuits if they don’t hire people for ministerial positions whose lifestyles conflict with their religious beliefs.

Read the details of both cases at the link. Religious schools were already supposed to be protected from these lawsuits, but again, litigants are searching for ways around those protections and liberal judges in places like California are only too willing to help them do that. This ruling expands that protection to cover less ministerial positions and more types of discrimination lawsuits to help head off all the various ways in which people were trying to use the law to force religious schools to hire people who contradict their beliefs and teachings.

As this article points out, the decision will raise controversy because opponents claim it allows religious organizations to discriminate against employees who are not in fully ministerial positions, such as math teachers. But the alternative is to allow the government to decide which positions in a religious institution qualify as “ministerial,” and that doesn't sound like a job that the government should be doing at all. It sounds instead like a perfect example of what the Founders were banning when they wrote that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:  Supreme Court rules on abortion-health care fight

Mike Huckabee

Tuesday, Minnesota Rep. and “Squad” member Ilhan Omar condemned the entire American way of life, telling an audience “As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality…We cannot stop at the criminal justice system. We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.”

Conservatives immediately pointed out that Omar was openly calling for the destruction of the US political and capitalist economic systems, and demanded to know if Joe Biden and fellow Democrats backed those goals. Which is silly…they’d never admit that!

I take a more charitable view of Rep. Omar’s bloviations. Let’s look at the evidence:

She came to America as an immigrant from Somalia, a nation that is under the following travel advisory from the US State Department: “Do not travel to Somalia due to crime, terrorism, civil unrest, health issues, kidnapping, and piracy.” So at least we can assume she thinks America is slightly better than that or she wouldn't be here.

After having come to America, she got elected to the House, where she currently pulls down a healthy $174,000 a year. That’s about 773 times the average annual income in Somalia ($225 US.) She has parlayed that position into other lucrative areas, including a book deal for a memoir (“This Is What America Looks Like”) with an advance alone that was reported to be in the $100k-$250k range.

I think we can also assume that she will personally benefit from the reported $878,000 paid since 2018 to her latest husband’s political consulting firm out of donations to her Congressional campaign. They’re taking advantage of a loophole in the federal anti-nepotism law that bars Congress members from hiring relatives for government jobs but not from doing campaign work.

So while Rep. Omar might enrage a lot of people by seemingly wanting to turn America into Somalia, a more charitable view might be to take inventory of all the ways she’s turned into a money-grubbing capitalist since escaping Somalia for our oppressive, racist shores. Maybe mouthing a lot of anti-American, anti-capitalist garbage to her deluded leftist followers is just her business model. To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, nobody ever went broke underestimating the gullibility of rich liberals.

By the way, none of this is to suggest that I think she’s not a dangerous figure who shouldn’t be within 300 miles of government power. If her constituents are having trouble finding someone better to send to the House to replace her, I will happily provide them with a local phone book and a dart free of charge.

And now, a rebuttal to Rep. Omar by a Venezuelan refugee who has seen exactly where all her socialist rhetoric really leads (and it’s not to Rep. Omar’s now-fat bank account):

Mike Huckabee

Warning to anyone playing poker with President Trump: Never assume he’s bluffing. Tuesday, Trump officially served notice to the UN and Congress that the United States will withdraw from the World Health Organization, effective one year from today. Of course, that means he’ll need to be reelected because if Biden gets in, the WHO will be only one of many international organizations in thrall to China that will have more sway in the White House than American citizens do.

Trump’s announcement drew the expected condemnations from Democrats, the media and even some Republicans. The general thrust was “It’s outrageous to withdraw from the World Health Organization during a worldwide pandemic!” Going unspoken is the fact that if the WHO hadn’t covered up for China and repeated its lies, there might not even be a worldwide pandemic. As Trump pointed out, we give the WHO $450 million a year while China gives it $40 million and seemingly has total control over it.

I mention the money because opponents will try to claim that withdrawing from the WHO means Trump is turning his back on world health initiatives. No, it means the money that was going to the WHO can instead go to more effective, efficient and honest health organizations. This is the same false argument presented whenever we talk about cutting funding to Planned Parenthood and liberals scream that we’re slashing “women’s health care.” No, the money would instead go to real local medical clinics that actually provide women’s health care, not to those that spend all their money on abortion facilities rather than purchasing a single mammogram machine.

Personally, I second Charlie Kirk’s tweet in that linked article: now that we’ve notified the UN that we’re withdrawing from the WHO, let’s next notify them that we’re withdrawing from the UN.

Mike Huckabee

I hope you had a safe and enjoyable Fourth of July weekend, which means I hope you didn’t turn on the news for the past four days, except to watch President Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore. Here it is if you missed it, and if so, it’s today’s Must-See. It may be the most important speech of his Administration, and one of the most important of any President.

After weeks of riots, looting, arson, vandalism of national monuments and historic statues, slander of America’s founders, bullying and intimidation of law-abiding citizens and “canceling” of anyone who dares voice an opinion unapproved by the radical left mobs, Trump took to national television to stand up and fight back against leftist fascism and on behalf of America’s great heritage of liberty, justice and government of, by and for the people. In the most memorable line of a stunning speech, he declared that Americans “only bend the knee for God.”

Naturally, the anti-Trump media had a hair-on-fire hissy fit. The New York Times repeated the mischaracterization of his Inaugural speech by claiming that Trump gave a “dark and divisive” speech. The most hilarious bit was their claim that he created a liberal “straw man” by trying to convince us that the left is engaging in violence, rioting and anti-American radicalism. I have to assume that the Times’ reporters haven’t glanced at their own news pages in the past month.

Of course, for the Times, denying reality is par for the course.

Mike Huckabee

While President Trump’s speech defending America’s history, heroes and values was mercilessly attacked by the media, their Presidential hope, Joe Biden, also made a 4th of July statement. His vision of America (which I’m sure they would never call dark or divisive) is of a place rotten with racism, a “systemic racism” that he vowed to rip out in its entirety (translation: government will take over everything) and that once elected, he will “transform America.” Into what, downtown Minneapolis? The CHOP autonomous zone in Seattle?

As was noted when Barack Obama used that phrase, how can anyone claim to love America, then vow to fundamentally transform it? Biden’s radicalism is especially eye-opening, considering that he’s what now passes for a “moderate” in the Democratic Party. It’s even rubbing off on his potential running mates, who are so scared to upset the mobs, they can’t even say they wouldn’t blow up Mount Rushmore if elected.

The narrative of Biden as a “moderate” is the basis of what I call the Democrats’ Trojan Horse campaign (or maybe that should be Trojan Donkey.) The Party has moved so far to the left that they could never get elected if they admitted what they really plan to do, so they’re hiding it behind Biden’s bland image. But nobody seriously believes that Biden will set the agenda, any more than we believe that Lambchop was the brains behind Shari Lewis’ ventriloquist act.

Possibly the most hilarious self-reveal came when Ted Cruz listed some of the radical ideas that they represent, and to refute him, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sarcastically tweeted back that the Democrats wanted to do all those radical things, so they nominated Joe Biden.

Yes, that’s precisely why they nominated Joe Biden. Because if they nominated someone like AOC, they wouldn’t win, even if those are the policies you’ll get either way. What you should be asking yourself is this: “If Joe Biden is such a moderate, why is he being defended by one of his top campaign advisors, notorious socialist and ‘Green New Deal” pusher, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?”

Mike Huckabee

Last week, it was reported that a record 4.8 million jobs were added to the economy in June, dropping the unemployment rate back down to 11.1% and bringing the two-month total to nearly 8 million jobs restored since the coronavirus lockdowns began. Even with some states reimposing lockdowns and closures because of a rise in cases, this is more proof that the underlying economy remains strong and is being artificially held down by the virus and the official reactions to it.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden had to dump a big shovel full of gloom and doom on the good news. I won’t bother recounting it all here, but you can read it at the link if you’re not easily inclined to losing your lunch.

A couple of reminders:

(1.) Joe Biden was part of the Administration that turned what should have been a quick economic recovery into an 8-year struggle in economic quicksand; the slowest recovery in history, where people working three part-time jobs were told to get used to it because anemic job creation and below-2% GDP growth were the “new normal.”

(2.) Biden blames Trump’s “bungled” response to the coronavirus for both the job losses and the deaths from the disease. Yet Biden was part of the Democratic crowd that accused Trump of racism and xenophobia when he shut down travel from China (a nation that owns Biden so thoroughly, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a receipt). They also predicted 2.2 million US deaths and now blame Trump that there are 126,000 deaths, even though most of them were in the Democrat-run states of New York and New Jersey and due to idiotic policies like forcing nursing homes to take in COVID-19 patients. Biden also points to the recent rise in cases, implying that it's due to the economy reopening, conveniently ignoring the massive superspreader events that Democrats not only endorsed but participated in. Finally, how many of those victims might be alive today if Democrats and the media weren’t more interested in badmouthing the now-proven drug hydroxychloroquine to make Trump look bad than in saving patients’ lives?

Mike Huckabee

MORNING EDITION

July 4, 2020 

By Mike Huckabee

A BIG SHOW THIS EVENING

We’re taking a brief break from the daily news so that my staff and I can enjoy some time off to celebrate the Fourth of July with our families. But don’t worry, we’ve prepared some newsletter material in advance. And if anything major occurs that cries out for comment, we’ll set down our hot dogs and rush to our laptops! We will return to covering the daily headlines on Tuesday.

Before watching the socially-distanced Fourth of July fireworks displays on TV, join me for some real fireworks on “Huckabee” on TBN! We’ve put together a very special July 4th show for you. I’ll have some new comments on the holiday and the news, plus we’ll revisit some of the very best, funniest and most patriotic moments from previous shows. I won't spoil the surprises, but I guarantee you'll love it.

It’s all coming your way tonight at 8 and 11 EST, 7 and 10 CST, and the same times on Sunday, only on TBN. To find where you can watch TBN, from local cable and broadcast channels to streaming, visit https://www.tbn.org/huckabee and click on the “WATCH” menu at the top. You can also stream previous episodes, highlights and Internet-only “Digital Exclusives,” like extended interviews and extra performances by our musical and comedy guests. It’s all at https://www.tbn.org/huckabee

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA

Happy Independence Day and happy 244th birthday to the United States of America! No, this nation was not born in 1619 when slaves first arrived, no matter how many trinkets liberal “journalists” award themselves for creating bogus history. It was born on July 4th, 1776, with the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which officially kicked out the previous regime and kicked off history’s greatest experiment in freedom.

Today is when all Americans celebrate our freedoms. But sadly, too many young Americans have been miseducated to feel no gratitude for the titanic struggles and sacrifices made by those of previous generations to secure and preserve those freedoms. Even those who recognize how lucky they are to be Americans are often too willing to trade away their freedoms in exchange for hollow promises of comfort and security. As the great philosopher Joni Mitchell once said, “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone.”

That’s why the Founding Fathers took such care to lock our most important rights safely within the First Amendment to the Constitution. There are more freedoms guaranteed in that one short sentence than people in most nations can even dream of. That’s why for centuries now, people from around the world have risked their lives to come to America, and why immigrants are often more aware of how unique America is and more grateful for those freedoms than native-born Americans. The Founders understood that freedom really is that precious.

When the framers of the Constitution first met in 1787, many feared that if they created a strong federal government, it would trample the rights of the people, just like the British king they’d fought to break free of. So to make sure the people’s rights would always be protected, they added 10 amendments - although George Mason thought they were so important, they should come first, as the Preface!

Now, in case you’ve never heard it or have just forgotten (as too many federal judges and a few Supreme Court Justices I could name have), here is the First Amendment, in its entirety. Don’t worry, this really won’t take long:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Yep, that’s it. This was before the government needed a 2,000-page bill just to ruin your health insurance. Only 45 simple words were needed to protect our right to speak freely without fear of government retribution...Our right to publish those words so that other Americans can read and debate them…Our right to band together with like-thinking Americans and protest peacefully without fear of arrest (note: protesting peacefully does not include rioting, arson, and looting)…Our right to petition our leaders to change their policies…And our right to be free from having an official state religion forced upon us, but also from government interference with the free expression of our personal religious beliefs (like telling us we can’t gather in church to worship, but we can gather in Walmart.) A lot of people celebrate the first half of that religious right (no state religions) but pretend the second half (no state interference in religion) doesn’t exist. The Supreme Court even seems to be reticent lately to make clear that it means what it says, even though it takes only six words to say it: “…or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

These are the rights that together create the free American culture that those of who know real history celebrate today. The Founders thought they were all so important that somehow, they found a way to list every single one of them first.

Then, just to be certain that no future government ever tried to take those rights away, they made the very next amendment the right to bear arms.

And they emphasized that these rights are given by God, not government. So no matter how hard some people might try to scratch some of them off of the parchment, it won’t make a lick of difference. You can’t edit God.

Mike Huckabee

I hope you’re having a great 4th of July week, but between the celebratory fireworks on one hand and the anti-American political fireworks on the other, let’s take just a moment to reflect on what Independence Day really means and how it led to the freedoms and blessings that far too many Americans fail to appreciate these days.

Most historians (not New York Times writers, but real historians) mark the beginning of America as the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776. But in truth, there was still a long road to travel before America as we know it came to be. First, of course, there was the matter of fighting a bloody revolution against Great Britain, one where victory was an overwhelming longshot, and win or lose, the leaders risked their lives and fortunes. Victory was followed by more heated battles over what kind of government we would have.

Our Forefathers finally agreed to a blueprint, the Constitution, that wasn’t even introduced until 1789 – over 13 years later. Today, many Americans take those hard-won freedoms very lightly and seem eager to trade them away for false promises of security. Some can’t even name the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Maybe they’d cherish them more if they knew how close they came to not having them at all.

Did you know that the Constitution very nearly got passed without the Bill of Rights? Even some of the wisest of our forefathers thought a Bill of Rights was a dangerous idea. Alexander Hamilton argued that it was risky to list the rights the government couldn’t take away because then, politicians might try to grab any and every power that wasn’t specifically prohibited to them (apparently, the ability to rap wasn’t the only way Hamilton predicted the 21st century). He and many others also felt that a Bill of Rights was unnecessary: since nobody was surrendering their God-given rights by agreeing to the Constitution, there was no need to list them, right? Hamilton wrote, “Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?”

It’s ironic that Hamilton made that argument. Later on, as the first Treasury Secretary, he cited powers that the Constitution merely implied that the government had in order to take on debt, create a federal bank and impose unpopular taxes. Over a century later, when the federal income tax was passed, some lawmakers wanted to include a 10% limit, but they were voted down. Opponents scoffed that it was absurd to think the government would ever steal as much as 10% of an American’s hard-earned wages. Flash forward just 30 years, and they were happily taxing away 94%. So just imagine how few freedoms we’d have today if they’d listened to Hamilton and decided it wasn’t necessary to put specific limits on government power.

Luckily for us all, Thomas Jefferson won the argument, and the Bill of Rights was added. They even included the 9th amendment, which I’ll bet most people can’t even describe. Here’s what it says:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

It means that just because some God-given rights aren’t specifically listed, that doesn’t mean the people cede them to the government. Maybe because so many of the framers were also farmers, they understood that like weeds, government tends to grow and grow, choking out the productive crops -- and like a bull, it will trample you if you don’t corral it.

So if we want to preserve our freedoms, and keep government limited, maybe we should send more farmers to Washington -- and fewer lawyers.

Mike Huckabee

The Democrats tweeted, then deleted, this message. But too late; it was archived.

So this is what we’ve come to in 2020. If you vote for Democrats, you’re voting to put people in charge of a nation whose own history and culture they hate so much that when they hear the patriotic phrase “President to attend 4th of July celebration with fireworks at Mount Rushmore,” what they hear is “President to attend white supremacist rally at sacred land stolen from indigenous peoples.”

I implore you: please have some sympathy for the poor Democrats and don’t curse them by forcing them to hold public office in a nation for which they are seething with hatred and obviously despise most of its people, whom they believe are irredeemable racist deplorables. Encourage them instead to retire to someplace where they would feel much more comfortable, like Cuba or Venezuela.

Mike Huckabee

And now, something fun to take your mind off all the crazy and infuriating news, and remind you of how little most of America has changed. Ford commissioned a survey to find out just how much Americans love their pickup trucks. They were asked what they would give up before they would give up their pickups. Here’s what they said:

* 82% would give up Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime Video.

* 79% would give up drinking alcohol.

* 71% would give up drinking coffee.

* 47% would give up using their phone.

* 44% would give up eating meat.

* 38% would give up sex.

And if people had to give up alcohol, sex and barbecue, PLUS their pickups, we’d all have to give up country music, because there’d be nothing left to write songs about.

Mike Huckabee

Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET) and America’s first black billionaire, has a message for all the virtue-signaling white liberals who are making a big show of their racial wokeness by vandalizing statues of historical figures and getting “The Dukes of Hazzard” taken off TV. And that message is:

Black people are laughing at you!

Johnson calls these overheated white racial warriors (have you seen the video of the entitled young white woman screaming in the faces of two black police officers about how they’re undermining her struggle against racism?) “borderline anarchists” and says their attempts to “cancel” people for thought crimes such as saying that “all lives matter” are "tantamount to rearranging the deck chairs on a racial Titanic. It absolutely means nothing…White Americans seem to think that if they just do sort of emotionally or drastic things that black people are going to say, ‘Oh my God, white people love us because they took down a statue of Stonewall Jackson.’ Frankly, black people don’t give a d**n."

And he thinks the “silliest expression of white privilege” is white celebrities releasing videos of themselves apologizing for being white, and saying, “'Oh, my God, I am so sorry that I am white.’ I don't find any black people getting on Twitter and saying, 'Oh, I'm so sorry I'm black.' And we got the worst problems...My thing is: embrace being white and do the right thing."

Johnson said none of this self-righteous political theater is going to “give a kid whose parents can't afford college money to go to college. It's not going to close the labor gap between what white workers are paid and what black workers are paid. And it's not going to take people off welfare or food stamps.”

Incidentally, I should point out that that’s what he means by “Do the right thing,” not that you should watch the Spike Lee movie instead of “Gone With The Wind” and tweet at length about how woke to your privilege it made you.

Mike Huckabee

Michael Flynn knows firsthand what it’s like when a small group of highly motivated people gets together behind the scenes to “affect change.” He was “changed” right out of the White House.

Lately, he’s applied that wisdom to the country at large and doesn’t like what he sees. Now that he can glimpse the light at the end of his own personal tunnel, he’s raising alarm bells to all Americans who want to continue their way of life. This is no time to be complacent, he says in an op-ed for the WESTERN JOURNAL. If we stand by, it’s not too much to say that America as we know it will be destroyed.

Reading this piece, one can’t help but think that its author would have made such a fine national security adviser. (Who did we end up with after the FBI interfered? John Bolton.) It’s clear that he would be encouraging President Trump right now to set up a tough line of defense. This is a man who loves America while recognizing its flaws --- having almost been done in by them himself --- and who knows how vulnerable our democracy is.

"I believe the attacks being presented to us today are part of a well-orchestrated and well-funded effort that uses racism as its sword to aggravate our battlefield dispositions,” Flynn says. “The weapon is used to leverage and legitimize violence and crime, not to seek or serve the truth.”

Its end goal: the creation of a socialist society. “The very heart and soul of America is at stake,” he warns.

This is a wake-up call for us to face the reality of 2020. Obviously, Flynn sees America right now as a battlefield, and battlefields are something he knows quite a bit about. He understands that a small, highly motivated, and organized group can quickly gain control over a much larger group that isn’t fighting back hard enough. As he puts it, “If we’re not careful, 2 percent of the passionate will control 98 percent of the indifferent 100 percent of the time.”

"Treason and treachery are rampant,” he says, no doubt drawing on personal experience with our own government, “and our rule of law and those law enforcement professionals who uphold our laws are under the gun more than at any time in our nation’s history. This passionate 2 % appears to be winning.” He’s concerned that Americans don’t realize how severe the consequences will be if the “passionate” do win.

Voting is one very important part of this (it’s become a cliché, but in this case, it’s true that no election in our lifetimes has mattered more than this upcoming one.) But Flynn says we have to do more. We have to exhibit the “audacity and resolve” that the small, well-organized, fired-up groups do.

Speaking like a battlefield commander, he makes an intriguing point: that our enemies have vulnerabilities we don’t know about. “I also sense that only a slight push on our part is all that is required to defeat these forces.” Mostly he looks to our law enforcement professionals to hold the line against “the corrupt and the criminal.” They need our support most of all, the support of “our entire being.”

They are NOT the enemy, he says. “They bring light to the darkness of night through their bravery and determination to do their jobs without fanfare and with tremendous sacrifice.” (One might say this is the ultimate example of the enemy of our enemy being our friend.)

He also warns not to be taken in by fake news. Trust your instincts and your common sense to help you see the difference between right and wrong. “Those with courage will always choose the harder right over the easier wrong,” he says. He applies this not only to dealings with our enemies but with our own government, our own “so-called leaders,” the people WE put in charge and can remove as well. Politicians who have been in office too long have “discarded us like old trash,” he says.

Flynn communicates the same strong faith, commitment, and optimism that surely kept the soldiers under his command at their peak in the field. Our goal, he says, “is to remain an unwavering constitutional republic based on a set of Judeo-Christian values and principles.”

"In war, as in life, most failure comes from inaction.”

Reading this, I am angered anew that Michael Flynn was kept from being Trump’s national security adviser, and not just because of the criminal way he was treated. We were shortchanged; we deserved someone of this caliber working for us. Personally, I would love to see him put right back into that job. In the meantime, he has made his position clear, and the President knows, at least in general, the advice he would be giving.

Incidentally, Flynn lawyer Sidney Powell made some news in an interview on “The Vickie McKenna Show” on Madison, Wisconsin, radio by saying one reason Flynn was taken down was that he was prepared to “audit” the U.S. intelligence community. The big fish there: former CIA Director John Brennan.

Now, if you’ve been reading the HUCKABEE newsletter, you already knew that Flynn was planning to do that audit. As Lee Smith reported in his book, THE PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT, Flynn wanted to streamline the Pentagon and the intel community, and that would have involved financial audits and much-needed downsizing. They didn’t like it at all. One area of particular interest was the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), which appeared to be hiring contract people to produce reports of dubious value. Interestingly, one of those contractors was...(yes) Stefan Halper, the very person who would go on to ambush Trump campaign associates as a confidential human source on foreign soil and record their conversations. On the books, he was being paid to “write reports.”

Anyway, there were lots of reasons why Obama’s intel community --- and Obama himself --- did not want Michael Flynn around. Ironically, he thought the CIA was “too political,” and it was the truth of this that ended up taking him down. The idea of his being national security adviser and almost certainly discovering what they'd been up to in the summer of 2016 had to be just too much. That’s why McCabe, Strzok, and the rest HAD to make sure the case against him stayed open and why they had to see him gone baby gone. Look around today and you can see that it was our country’s loss.

By Pat Reeder, “Huckabee” writer/pop culture historian

The streaming service Hulu has yanked an episode of the ‘80s sitcom “The Golden Girls” because Rose and Blanche appear in blackface – except they don’t. The two ladies are wearing mud masks on their faces, just like women (and some men) of all races have for centuries.

When a black character walks in on them, they’re embarrassed and insist they’re not wearing blackface, which shows that the writers were aware even then that blackface was offensive. But of course, trivialities such as accuracy, intention or context mean nothing when you’re competing to see who can find the next thing to be faux-offended by, or when you’re panicking in fear before the phony outrage of the cancel culture brats.

But there’s a larger point that makes what Hulu is doing seem even stupider, if that’s possible. Most people forget now, because “The Golden Girls” is so beloved by multiple generations for its humor, its cast and its wonderful characters who seem like family, but in its day, it was one of the most “progressive” shows on TV. Creator Susan Harris (who wrote the landmark abortion episode of “Maude”) filled the show with liberal messages that were on the then-cutting edge of what was allowed on prime time

Blanche, of course, was the poster girl for recreational sex, but the show also touched on adultery (Dorothy’s husband left her for another woman, and she later had an affair with a married man) and sex among senior citizens. Blanche’s single daughter wanted to get artificially inseminated, a lesbian had a crush on Rose, Dorothy’s brother was a transvestite (the girls also accidentally hired a transvestite band for a fundraiser), a male character confessed to having had a sex change operation, and Blanche’s gay brother showed up with his partner to announce that they were getting married.

This was well before “Friends” aired the first lesbian wedding, although that show made sure to put a thumb in the eye of Christian conservatives by casting Newt Gingrich’s lesbian sister to officiate and say that “nothing makes God happier than when two people – ANY two people – come together in love.” (I’d cite the Bible chapter for that, but I can’t find it.) “Friends” also included Kathleen Turner as Chandler’s trans dad. In the same way, “Will & Grace” is often lauded for using the sitcom form to promote acceptance of gays and “soften America up” for accepting same-sex marriage.

Even in the “Golden Girls” episode that Hulu is pulling, the storyline was about Dorothy’s son marrying a much older black woman and everyone having to overcome both racism and ageism.

But here’s that larger point I mentioned: The left always eat their own. The creators of “Golden Girls,” “Friends” and “Will & Grace” thought they were brave pioneers of tolerance for including all those liberal messages in their shows. Yet all three are now under fire from intolerant leftists: “W&G” for promoting swishy gay stereotypes, “Friends” for homophobic behavior by the men, and “GG” over a “blackface” scene that really isn’t. Instead of honoring them for pushing the envelope in an earlier time, leftists attack them for not living up to current standards that might not even exist if it weren’t for them. They demand that those shows be edited or yanked, just like they demand that statues be smashed or books be burned or bowdlerized – and by the way, the big streaming services are already doing that with some e-books.

In social justice warrior land, there is no honor or respect for those who went before. There is only ruthless judgement and condemnation for not meeting a standard that changes almost hourly. If you give into it, it’s like trying to appease the sharks circling your life raft by cutting off a finger and tossing it to them. The taste of blood will only make them all the more ravenous. It’s better just to give them the finger from your boat and preserve history the way it happened.

This is why my house is stuffed to the rafters with real books, LPs, CDs, DVDs, files on hard drives, singles, VHS tapes, cassettes, 8-tracks, Play-Tapes, etc. etc. If you have to rely on streaming for anything, then you don’t really own it.

Incidentally, for a great lesson in how to react to the SJW mob and how not to, look at Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel. Former partners on the raunchy comedy series “The Man Show,” Carolla refused to knuckle under to the mob. He started a very popular podcast so the networks can’t censor him, and he’s become a defiant champion of free speech. He’s often vilified, but he is never censored or silenced. And he has a new book out on that very subject called “I’m Your Emotional Support Animal” that’s sure to be a best-seller. (Warning: contains rough language that he refuses to self-censor.)

Meanwhile, his former partner Kimmel has tossed in his lot with the leftists. His once-funny late night show has become just another Trump-bashing snoozefest, and he’s as likely to deliver a teary lecture on some hot button leftist subject as a comedy monologue. But all that virtue signaling gained him zip: when it was revealed that in long-ago comedy bits, he’d worn blackface and said the “n-word” while impersonating black celebrities, he was forced to take a break to “spend time with his family.” He’s now playing the liberal martyr by blaming his problems on evil right-wingers digging up his old material. But it’s not right-wingers who are demanding his head for comedy bits he did 20 years ago. All they’d like from him is for him to be funny again. It’s the leftists he sucked up to and who will turn on him on anyone else in an instant if they smell any deviation from accepted groupthink.

My advice to him would be to spend less time interviewing boring leftists and more time with Adam Carolla.

Mike Huckabee

With the investigation of “Crossfire Hurricane” by U.S. Attorney John Durham looking more serious by the day, it’s obvious what the political cover is now. The memo has gone out to everyone in the Democrat Party and the media (but I repeat myself) to paint Attorney General Bill Barr, who had the gall to appoint Durham in the first place, as a purely political AG. Why, he’s not there to consistently enforce the law of the land; he’s just there to be President Trump’s protector, his lackey, his “wingman,” so to speak. (Wait, no, that was Eric Holder’s self-described role as attorney general for President Obama.)

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, with visions of impeachment still dancing in his head, assisted in this effort last week by bringing in federal prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky to speak to his House Judiciary Committee about Barr’s “interference” last February in the sentencing of Trump campaign associate Roger Stone.

Keep in mind that Zelinksy was a member of Mueller’s get-Trump special counsel team and also used to work under Rod Rosenstein. He was one of four prosecutors who dramatically resigned from the Stone case; in fact, he even chose to leave his position but (big surprise) continues to work with the Justice Department. In an interview for NPR on Thursday, Barr dismissed his testimony as “simply false” and “double hearsay.”

"I was the decision-maker in that case,” he said, “because there was a dispute. And usually what happens is, disputes, especially in high-profile cases, come up to the attorney general.” He said he had not discussed the sentencing with Trump and had already decided to change his recommendation before Trump’s angry tweet. Barr said that Stone “doesn’t deserve a break, but he doesn’t deserve to be...singled out, and treated more harshly than everyone else.”

I’ll point out what few Barr critics have: this was simply a sentencing RECOMMENDATION. Judge Amy Berman Jackson may follow the suggested guidelines or not. So what is the all-fired big deal?

Trump’s political enemies want looooong sentences for his associates because that puts pressure on him to pardon them, and that would unleash a media hysteria to last until Election Day. If this means putting a 67-year-old man behind bars potentially for life (especially if he gets coronavirus in there), so be it.

The narrative from now on will be that Barr is motivated only by the desire to help President Trump. Therefore, everything he does will be examined strictly from that perspective. It doesn’t matter that Stone’s sentence WAS harsh, that invading his home with a SWAT team while CNN cameras rolled WAS an abuse of power, and that the Russia “collusion” story in which he was ensnared WAS a hoax.

But Kimberly Strassel, writing about the Michael Flynn case in the WALL STREET JOURNAL, departs from the chosen media narrative. She points out that the three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that ruled on Judge Emmet Sullivan’s rejection of Barr’s decision to drop the case has done something beyond simply rule on the legal merits.

Importantly, the ruling is also a rebuke of the FBI and Robert Mueller’s special counsel team. This isn’t being widely reported, of course, but Strassel says it marks the first time a federal court has acknowledged the misconduct that Barr is trying to bring to light.

Judge Sullivan had bought into the same (debunked) Democratic conspiracy theories the FBI had been using; recall that he flew into a fit and even called Gen. Flynn a “traitor,” right there in the courtroom. So, naturally, he couldn’t let this case go just because the attorney general told him to, choosing instead to call on retired Judge John Gleeson to take on the role of shadow prosecutor.

Strassel makes an important point: that if the circuit court judges had any thought that Sullivan was right about Barr playing political favorites, they could have allowed him to continue fighting that. Instead, they said quite bluntly that there was “no legitimate basis” to question the Justice Department's behavior.

They even went after Judge Gleeson for relying in his amicus brief on “news stories, tweets, and other facts outside the record,” contrasting that with the DOJ’s motion that “includes an extensive discussion of newly discovered evidence casting Flynn’s guilt into doubt.”

They said this “includes evidence of misconduct by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

According to Strassel, the DOJ had provided voluminous evidence --- I would add that this is thanks to the determination of Flynn attorney Sidney Powell --- that the FBI had improperly pursued Flynn, kept the investigation open even when it had produced no evidence of wrongdoing, gone after him on the never-used Logan Act when he had acted appropriately, and schemed to trap Flynn into perjury with an interview that had no “legitimate investigative basis.”

Recall that in February of this year, Barr appointed U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen to review the Flynn case, and four months later, Jensen concluded that dismissal was “the just and proper course.” The appeals court decision was consistent with this.

Former U.S. Attorney Brett Tolman was on FOX & FRIENDS on Friday to offer a similar viewpoint, saying that Flynn was so wronged that he should consider a “Bivens Action” against the Department of Justice and former Obama administration officials. A Bivens Action is the legal remedy to use when one’s rights have been violated by a federal investigator.

"I hope he is looking at it strongly,” Tolman said. I would imagine that at this point, Powell's team is already putting together that lawsuit. Let’s hope they are, and also hope he becomes an extremely wealthy man after losing his career and financial security over this bogus case.

Tolman agreed with Powell’s brief that the newly obtained notes penned by Peter Strzok, which describes the underlying action of Flynn’s phone calls as legitimate, show that stunning exculpatory evidence was withheld from Flynn’s defense.

He described what happened as “an absolute effort --- call it collusion, conspiracy, whatever you want to say --- that now we know goes as high as the Vice President and the President. To not only withhold information about the investigation to the incoming President, but to go after the incoming President through the incoming national security advisor on an investigation that did not have a foundation to it.” The fact that they should still have managed to bring a case should concern everyone, he said.

Tolman dared to voice what we’ve known for a long time: that they were trying to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office.

So remember when Barr continues to be accused of politicizing the DOJ, it’s just another example of Democrats accusing others of what they themselves are doing. The attack on Barr is political, and it’s coordinated. It sure seems to me that Barr’s the one trying to get the politics OUT. If his decisions at times help President Trump, perhaps it’s because the President actually has the truth and the law on his side.