Mike Huckabee

Liberty Counsel is defending a number of churches from unconstitutional attacks leveled in the name of combating the coronavirus. One of the most outrageous yet was a story that the mayor of Kansas City is requiring churches to keep lists of the names, addresses and phone numbers of every person who attends services.

The mayor’s office, hit with a furious backlash, responded with a “clarification”: the city was not demanding a list of every church attendee, but requiring that the churches keep the list for 30 days so that if an attendee was diagnosed with the virus, everyone else could be notified, but the church could keep the list and destroy it in 30 days

That’s better than the first story, but it still requires churches to demand personal ID information from everyone who comes to worship, which is a very dangerous precedent, no matter the justification. The city argues that they require it of every other business except “essential” groceries and medical facilities.

The issue, however, is that churches are not “non-essential businesses.” They are sacred places specifically protected from government oversight and interference by the First Amendment. It appears that too many people in positions of power are unable to grasp the difference. They can ask for cooperation from churches, and most have been more than happy to cooperate. But when government tries to coerce churches into "cooperating," they’ve crossed the line.

Mike Huckabee

Whether it’s about the Chinese coronavirus, the Russia hoax or anything else in the news, there’s so much “information” floating around in the media that it’s almost impossible to know what’s true. Yet, trust me, there are millions of people plugged into THE NEW YORK TIMES, the WASHINGTON POST, CNN, late-night “comedy” shows and Facebook memes who believe they are extremely well-informed, always right, and much smarter than you. It doesn’t even do any good to talk to them.

Check out Scott Adams for an analysis of how the mind works to reject facts that don’t support one’s narrative. We all do this to some extent, as it’s human nature, but some do it a LOT more than others; it’s called “confirmation bias.”

To a large extent I blame the reporters, who should show enough intellectual curiosity and humility to look for ways to disprove their own opinions and their own “facts” before they unleash them on the public. My theory is that they’re afraid to look, afraid of being proven wrong, like the atheist who subconsciously is terrified to expose himself to religion and perhaps be compelled to change his mind, or, conversely, the believer who is terrified to expose himself to anything outside the walls of his church. Political ideology and/or party identification can be just as powerful a self-imposed limitation.

It’s extremely anxiety-producing to be proven wrong. For if you’re wrong about one thing, who knows what else you’re wrong about? For example, if you live in an imaginary world where Trump is always wrong, and everybody you know and respect believes Trump is always wrong, it will knock you sideways to have to admit he was right about even one tiny thing. So when it does turn out Trump was right about something, the apology is never made and the mistake never acknowledged, let alone corrected. The misinformation lives on in the Internet, forever, co-existing with the truth.

I’ve just described the liberal, Trump-hating mindset, but online rumors and “fake news” come from both left and right. About a week ago, my staff came across an email, circulated by some on the right, claiming that the father of John Kerry’s son-in-law is a mullah in Iran. Now, whether this is true or not, we could tell you plenty about John Kerry that would make anyone in his right mind want to keep him far from the seat of power. (Fortunately, he now is, but questions have arisen about his family’s relationship with Hunter Biden and the Biden family business dealings. That's for another time.)

Anyway, we were curious about that story and decided to look into it. There are some basic facts we can put together: Kerry’s son-in-law is named Behrouz Nahed; he goes by the first name Brian. He is a neurosurgeon. According to TRUE PUNDIT, he is an Iranian national. They also say that, according to some reports, his best man at his 2009 wedding to Vanessa Kerry, also a doctor, was the son of Muhammad Javid Zarif, Irans’ Minister of Foreign Affairs. Zarif was Kerry’s counterpart in negotiations for the Iran deal. Whoa.

BUT, the best man story is challenged in a piece from 2015 in THE HILL, which also says Dr. Nahed is an American citizen, born in America. Somebody’s wrong. The preponderance of the evidence would suggest it’s TRUE PUNDIT that is wrong, and that Nahed was born in New York.

Even a conservative website like THE BLAZE has debunked the “best man” rumor.

STILL, even though Muhammad Javid Zarif’s son was apparently not best man for Kerry’s son-in-law, there’s something else we found on TruthOrFiction.com that is every bit as concerning, at least to us: Kerry himself did already have a longstanding personal relationship with Zarif that predated the talks for the Iranian nuclear deal. This relationship is detailed in a 2012 book by Hoorman Majd. I do wonder about that; it is just too close for comfort.

A piece from 2013 in the DAILY CALLER goes into some detail about Dr. Nahed, who has “extensive family ties” in Iran. “Since its inception,” the story reads, “the FBI has vetted U.S. officials involved in national security, and it generally won’t grant clearances to individuals who are married to nationals of an enemy nation or have family members living in that country, for fear of divided loyalties, or, more simply, blackmail.”

Both of Dr. Nahed’s parents reportedly live in Los Angeles. His father is a pulmonologist. But shortly after Vanessa and Behrouz tied the knot, they reportedly went to Iran to visit the other relatives who live there.

Though Nahed’s father is not a mullah, the family and social connections still create such an obvious conflict of interest that Kerry should never have been involved in negotiations with Iran. I would think the conflict is so great that he should never have been approved for any cabinet-level position, let alone Secretary of State. The DAILY CALLER piece goes into just some of the problems with this.

Here’s another really good commentary, also from 2013.

So, after looking at numerous sources, we’d say this rumor is “iffy.” The central claim is not true –- Vanessa Kerry’s husband Behrouz Nahed is not the son of a mullah. His parents are physicians who work in California. And we don’t know for sure about the identify of Nahed’s best man, though we’ve seen no evidence that his father is the Iranian minister of foreign affairs. (This would not be surprising, however, given that Kerry and the Iranian minister had a social relationship.) But regardless of who the best man was, the family and social connections should have posed a huge problem for Kerry in his bid to be Secretary of State. Heck, we even turned up something else that would have been worthy of exploring: Kerry's previously existing personal relationship, going back a decade, with the Iranian minister of foreign affairs, the man with whom he was negotiating on behalf of the United States (or supposedly on our behalf)!

I don’t know why these online rumors have to be so exaggerated when the truth is plenty bad enough. “Fact-checkers” often don’t deal with the underlying truth when it’s so easy simply to debunk the exaggerated claim, generating headlines like this…

(We tend not to use FactCheck.org around here; too often we find ourselves fact-checking the fact-checkers. There’s only so much time in the day to be pushing boulders uphill.)

It’s the same with rumors about COVID-19. What we’re learning about its origins –- almost certainly from within the biolab in Wuhan –- and the PRC’s deadly deceit is so disturbing that there’s no need to exaggerate it into an even wilder story. Let’s stick to the facts as we learn them. We want to remain a solid, trusted source for truth; we would certainly report the wilder story, but only if and when the facts supported it.

We'd never even heard this rumor about Kerry and his Iranian son-in-law till now, which just goes to show how the media have covered for the former Secretary of State and exercised a shameless double standard. Imagine the uproar if, say, Jared Kushner were, say, Russian, and there were rumors that his best man was the son of some high-up Russian state official? The screaming would never stop.

Laura Ainsworth, Staff Writer

Hydroxychloroquine has been shown to protect against malaria –- I took it myself on a trip to India several years ago –- and it has been around for, oh, about 70 years. It’s considered by doctors to be quite a safe drug, though patients should be monitored by their health practitioner “just in case” because it has been associated with heart arrhythmia. Many people who have lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune problems have been on this drug for years, even decades, at a time, and some of these patients really need it to get along, as we're discovering now that they're having trouble obtaining it.

But to hear the media, this drug has terrible, life-threatening side effects. Never mind the stories of dramatic reversals and recoveries; this drug will KILL YOU, even if you're on it for a week or less. President Trump has been irresponsible for suggesting this drug might be helpful in keeping coronavirus patients out of the hospital and off ventilators.

Over the years, medical science has indeed brought us harmful drugs (thalidomide comes to mind) and ineffective drugs. But it looks as though hydroxychloroquine will go down in history as the first politically-incorrect drug.

Since they’ve gone on and on so much about the risks of taking this drug, I got curious and decided to do a little research. So, check these bad boys out: signs of an allergic reaction, such as “rash; hives; itching; red, itching, swollen, blistered, or peeling skin with or without fever; wheezing; tightness in the chest or throat; trouble breathing, swallowing or talking; unusual hoarseness or swelling of the mouth, face, lips, tongue or throat. Signs of liver problems like dark urine, feeling tired, not hungry, upset stomach or stomach pain, light-colored stools, throwing up, or yellow skin or eyes. Fever, chills, or sore throat; any unexplained bruising or bleeding; or feeling very tired or weak. Feeling confused. Hallucinations (seeing or hearing things that are not there.) Not able to pass urine or change in how much urine is passed. Seizures. Very bad dizziness. Very bad headaches. Very bad joint pain. Vaginal itching or discharge. Diarhhea is common...Rarely, a severe form called C diff-associated diarrhea (CDAD) may happen. Sometimes this has led to a deadly bowel problem (colitis). CDAD may happen during or a few months after taking. Call your doctor right away if you have stomach pain, cramps, or very loose, watery or bloody stools...A very bad skin reaction (Stevens/Johnson syndrome/toxic epidermal necrolysis) may happen. It can cause very bad health problems that may not go away, and sometimes death. Get medical help right away if you have signs like red, swollen, blistered or peeling skin (with or without fever); red or irritated eyes; or sores in your mouth, throat, nose or eyes...Call your doctor or get medical help if any of these side effects or any other side effects bother you or do not go away: stomach pain or diarrhea, upset stomach or throwing up. These are not all the side effects that may occur...This is only a brief summary of general information about this medicine. It does NOT include all information about the possible uses, directions, warnings, precautions, interactions, adverse effects or risks that may apply to this medicine.”

Wow, that IS overwhelming. I'm not so sure I should ever take this medicine, even for just a few days; It seems you really could die from taking it. The list of possible reactions goes on and on.

But I suppose it’s time to tell you that this is not the list of risks associated with hydroxychloroquine. This list was taken directly from the insert that came in the bag from my drugstore yesterday along with my prescription for an antibiotic called Cephalexin. I’ve been prescribed this exact same drug numerous times in my life, even when I was a very young child with sinus infections; it went under the brand name Keflex. How could my doctor have been so irresponsible as to prescribe it for me? How could my parents have taken such a risk? But here I am --- I lived to tell the tale!

Just a little something to put this issue into perspective. If President Trump had touted Keflex as a way to (in my case) prevent infection after a relatively minor outpatient procedure, the media would be screaming that this is really a very dangerous drug and his ignorance is killing people.

As for me –- because I HAVE done my research –- if I do come down with COVID-19 (actually, I think my husband and I both had it last winter and want to take the antibody test), I will immediately ask my doctor for just three things: hydroxychloroquine, the “Z-pack,” and zinc. Anyone who has a problem with that can go take a long walk inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Mike Huckabee

Joe Biden’s adamant denial of former staffer Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegation may be enough for Democrats who are doing Olympic-level backflips to back away from their previous “believe all women” statements. And the press, naturally, is helping by trying to dig up any discrepancies in Reade’s story and to question her motives, something they never did with Kavanaugh’s accuser, who was declared to be one of the greatest heroines of the year.

But that hasn’t stopped the questions about whether Biden had minions remove papers from archives, or whether he’s trying to hide evidence, or even, according to Greg Gutfeld, whether he made a slip of the tongue that gave away more than he intended.

And of course, the Trump campaign already has an ad ready to point out his hypocrisy…

As I have said consistently for years, whenever such old allegations are made against anyone, be it Kavanaugh, Trump or Biden, the accuser deserves a respectful hearing, but the accused deserves the presumption of innocence and due process to get to the truth. That was sometimes a very lonely position to stake out, although I do suddenly have a lot of Democrats keeping me company.

But let’s put aside the comparisons to Kavanaugh and Trump, because those are just examples of expected media/political bias and hypocrisy. Instead, I’d like to draw your attention to a very interesting article by Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine. Sullivan is no Trump supporter (indeed, despite what he writes about Biden, he says he’ll still vote for him, just because he’s not Trump.) But he makes a strong case, one that I haven’t seen anyone else bring up, that putting aside Reade’s claim, by his own standards, Joe Biden is guilty of multiple sex crimes, many of which we can watch him commit on videotape.

That's because during the Obama Administration, Biden was instrumental in pushing the revamped guidelines for Title IX sexual discrimination and harassment on college campuses. Those were the draconian (many of us would say sexist and unconstitutional) rules that redefined sex crimes and stripped the accused (usually male students) of their basic rights to self-defense, finding them guilty until proven innocent – except they weren’t allowed to prove themselves innocent, since they couldn’t even see the evidence or question their accusers.

The definition of “sexual violence” was also expanded to include remarks about physical appearance and unwanted touching. How many times have we seen Joe do those very things to women - actions that, as Sullivan notes, would have destroyed the lives of male students under the rules Biden championed?

Fortunately, many of those rules have been rolled back (they had to be; too many colleges were losing expensive lawsuits by former male students.) Democrats naturally assailed the Trump Administration for doing it, accusing him of enabling sexual predators. But as Sullivan makes clear, if they really believe in those standards, then they are backing a Presidential candidate who is plainly guilty of multiple sex crimes under them, even aside from Ms. Reade’s accusation. This is yet another reason why I keep saying that if it weren’t for double standards, some of these people wouldn’t have any standards at all.

Mike Huckabee

"I don’t think we’ve seen the beginning of the reality of what was going on in this faux investigation, from the top to bottom.”

That’s Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice, commenting on Sean Hannity’s TV show Thursday night about revelations in the Michael Flynn case. He’s right; there is much more to come. But one thing we know for sure is that James Comey deliberately set Flynn up, and he did it because he assumed he could get away with it. He almost did.

Flynn attorney Sidney Powell really is the hero in all this; I nominate her for “Person Of The Year.” She has changed history. If she hadn’t gone after the powers that be like a pit bull, Flynn, an innocent political victim, would have been stuck with a coerced guilty plea and would never have been exonerated. (Flynn truly is vindicated from this day forward –- Trump was right to hold off on a pardon for now and let Powell do her work instead.)

Oh sure, the same books and columns would have been written exposing what the intelligence community had been up to, and the people who actually read them would have been aware of the travesty, but it wouldn’t have made any difference in the life of Michael Flynn and others who were abused by the system. Thanks to Powell, and also to the doggedness of AG Bill Barr, U.S. Attorney John Durham, and another U.S. attorney who’s been reviewing the case, Jeff Jensen, the scheme to take Flynn down is in the process of being exposed.

There MUST be accountability.

Powell appeared on the Hannity show as well, saying that the case absolutely must be dismissed, “preferably for government misconduct,” and that in any event the guilty plea has got to be thrown out, as there is finally documentation that Flynn was coerced in “a secret side deal” involving the threat of prosecution of Flynn’s son, who himself had just become the father of a newborn baby. She recapped the story we already know, that they “tried one thing after another,” starting with the Russia hoax (they’d been trying to falsely associate him with Russians since 2014-15), which failed to find anything on Flynn.

Now we have a revealing timeline for January 2017. On January 4, the FBI file is closed on the Flynn investigation, “Crossfire Razor,” with nothing derogatory found. When Strzok hears this, he texts an unknown recipient, "Hey, if you haven't closed RAZOR, don't do so yet." (Recipient: "Okay.") On January 5, Obama meets in the Oval Office with Comey and the crew; Steele also “wipes” his records, including those on Fusion GPS. On January 6, Comey briefs Trump on the “dossier” to give BUZZFEED and CNN a “hook” for using the story. It goes on from there; January is 'abuzz' with activity, both before and after Trump’s inauguration.

I’ll refer you to Sara Carter for a rundown of the documents released on Thursday. These communications are absolutely stunning, particularly the texting among Strzok, Page and Priestap about how they planned to question Flynn. Texts between Strzok and Page also reveal that they substantially re-wrote the original 302 of the ambush interview, “crafting the narrative,” in Powell’s words, “to charge Gen. Flynn with a crime he did not commit.” Unfortunately, there are still some redactions in the texts as released, but what these people were doing is obvious.

One disturbing piece of information that might explain a lot: According to Powell, the person who advanced the career of Andrew Weissmann was none other than...(drum roll, please)...our current FBI Director Christopher Wray. Wray was Weissmann’s supervisor when they were at the Department of Justice “running roughshod over the rights of everyone in Houston.” (This backstory is discussed in her book LICENSE TO LIE.) “There are people there who still have nightmares as a result of his [Weissmann’s] conduct,” she said to Hannity, “in violation of everyone’s rights, naming over 100 people as unindicted co-conspirators, forcing them to ‘lawyer-up,’ threatening witnesses right and left, every variety of prosecutorial misconduct you can imagine. He was a terrorist of a prosecutor. And he was handpicked for that job by Michael Chertoff and Bob Mueller and James Comey and people like that, during the Bush administration.” That’s right, “the swamp” pre-dates Obama, but his administration sure did take full advantage of it.

Since Wray was presiding over all of this earlier in his career, Powell has no illusions that as FBI director he will seriously address the corruption. I would really like to know the backstory of how he got that job. Surely there was a lot Trump didn’t know when he appointed him. Wray does serve "at the pleasure of the President," and it's hard to imagine that the President is at all pleased.

There are similar questions about Robert Mueller. As Sekulow mentioned Thursday, the documents and notes that have just been released had the same notation: “OSC,” for “Office of Special Counsel.” So, where was Mueller? If he had been doing his job, those documents would have been turned over to the defense. But, no, he said, “the Weissmanns of the world were running that office.”

One must-read article about the misconduct in this case is by Jonathan Turley at THE HILL. He goes down the list of FBI officials who have lied and otherwise “acted in arguably criminal or unethical ways,” such as leaking and falsifying evidence, but have not been charged. In Turley’s words, “the disconnect of these cases with the treatment of Flynn is galling and grotesque.”

Turley also has plenty to say about the presiding judge in the case, Emmet Sullivan, who has treated Flynn shamefully. “Even the federal judge used Flynn to rail against what he saw as a treasonous plot,” Turley says. Of course, he's referring to the phony “Russia hoax” plot, not the ACTUAL treasonous plot that was going on inside Sullivan's own courtroom, courtesy of the DOJ and FBI.

Now watch the media pull out all the stops trying to dismiss and/or rewrite this. Turley is no Republican or Trump cheerleader, but he’s objective enough to recognize a miscarriage of justice when he sees one. His commentary here is magnificent.

Mike Huckabee

Tuesday, there was no White House briefing from the Coronavirus Task Force, but President Trump did hold a briefing on a wide range of topics. The full video is here.

He talked about the status of the virus response, but also the Paycheck Protection Program, states reopening, and the bill to protect meat packers to keep them from shutting down and causing food shortages…

He also mentioned the possibility of making airlines test passengers from nations that have heavy COVID-19 caseloads and his opposition to states using the crisis to get bailouts for their own bad policies unrelated to the virus, such as unsustainable public worker pension obligations. Trump suggested that he might be willing to talk to states but would expect reforms in return, like abolishing “sanctuary cities.”

On that subject, Sean Hannity on Fox News put together a montage of media outlets parroting the latest DNC talking point, which is accusing Trump of exploiting the crisis to promote his political agenda. I’m not sure how he’s doing that, unless you believe their narrative that holding daily briefings is tantamount to hosting campaign rallies (I've seen his rallies; reporters don't badger him with dumb questions there), or that nonsense about his name appearing on the printed stimulus checks, which reportedly wasn’t even his idea (it was done by the Treasury Secretary.)

But if you want to talk about exploiting the crisis to promote a political agenda, how about Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats holding up desperately-needed aid to unemployed Americans and struggling small business owners while they tried to insert their wish list into the bill? Or Pelosi’s boast that she’ll force “vote by mail” into any future relief bill? Or the issue Trump was talking about, of blue states trying to stick taxpayers with the cost of bailing out their longstanding mismanagement under the guise of coronavirus relief? Now, that’s exploiting a health crisis to promote a political agenda.

This is why it’s often said in Republican circles that if you want to know what the Democrats are really doing, just look at what they’re publicly accusing Republicans of doing.

Mike Huckabee

After observing that the Michael Flynn case “took a turn” last Friday, I saw a new article from Margot Cleveland at THE FEDERALIST that says essentially the same thing. That puts me in extremely good company. (Well, she says it “imploded.”)

Cleveland goes into detail about the legal maneuvering that led to this point, with Brady evidence finally turned over that not only reveals the FBI’s intention to frame Flynn, but also strongly suggests coercion on the part of Mueller’s team to get that guilty plea out of him, by hook or by crook (emphasis on the "crook"). What gives this evidence more weight now is that it was uncovered by an outside attorney, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, Jeffrey Jensen, who was appointed by Attorney General Bill Barr to conduct a review of the Flynn case.

Under these circumstances, Cleveland says, it’s “unfathomable” that Judge Sullivan could continue to reject Flynn’s motion to withdraw his guilty plea. I would add that if he did reject that motion, it wouldn't be the first time a ruling of his in this case has been unfathomable. But surely this time, the conduct of the prosecution has been shown to be so outrageous that he’ll have no other choice.

RELATED READING:  FBI news: "Brady" evidence on Flynn finally coming out!

Mike Huckabee

A judge in Illinois has ruled that Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker's stay-at-home order exceeds his emergency powers and infringes on citizens’ Constitutional rights. Pritzker railed that the questioning of his authority on this is “insulting,” “dangerous” and will put people’s health at risk, and he vowed to appeal the ruling.

The irony is that the other major controversy Pritzker is facing is anger over his releasing prison inmates who might be at risk of contracting the coronavirus. So if you’re a convicted criminal, you have to be released to keep you healthy. But if you’re a law-abiding citizen, you have to be locked up to keep you healthy. Understand? If so, please explain it to me.

FYI: Gov. Pritzker probably won’t want to appeal his case to Attorney General Bill Barr, who just told federal prosecutors to report any excessively restrictive shutdown orders that violate Americans' civil rights…

Mike Huckabee

A big Huck’s Hero salute to New Jersey newspaper deliveryman Greg Daily. When an elderly customer asked if he could throw the paper closer to the garage, it made him think that if she couldn’t walk that 20 feet, how could she go out for groceries during the lockdown?

So he put a note inside every newspaper, offering his services to shop for and deliver groceries free of charge to his elderly customers. He’s now busy helping nearly 100 people, some of them not even on his paper route. One grateful 85-year-old widow called him “one of the finest people in the world.” Daily said the seniors appreciate the help so much, he’s decided to keep doing it even after the lockdown ends. He said, “There’s something about being able to do something really nice for people.”

There sure is! Our thanks to Greg Daily for reminding us all that “social distancing” doesn’t mean you can’t reach out to the people around you who really need your help.

And on that subject, here’s another story that could have gone a very different way, if it weren’t for the kindness and compassion of a grocery store owner in Ontario.

Mike Huckabee

There are times when I almost feel sorry for loyal Democrats. Over the past few years, in order to keep from being slandered and hounded by Twitter mobs, they’ve had to force themselves to live in a constant state of denial. And I don’t just mean pretending not to notice how badly their cherished leftist policies failed during the Obama Administration and everywhere else they've been tried.

Starting in 2016, to remain a Democrat in good standing, you had to deny that Donald Trump was really the President (or “my President”), that his negotiating tactics really had resulted in better trade deals for the US, that the tax cut benefited people other than the “super rich,” that the economy really was creating record numbers of jobs, and that pay for lower and middle class workers really was rising. It took a pandemic to derail that booming economy.

Just since January, Democrats have had to deny that Trump was right to block travel from China and Europe, that the pandemic was caused by China’s carelessness and lies, that it’s worth studying promising treatments like hydroxychoroquine and UV light even if Trump did say good things about them, and that globalism and open borders have proven to be disastrous ideas, even more dangerous than densely-populated urban living, mass transit and reusable grocery bags.

But the denial of reality shifted into hyperdrive this week. Democrats across the nation are refusing to listen to Americans as they demand to reopen their businesses, even when some of those on the verge of open revolt are other Democratic politicians…

They accuse Republicans of being “science deniers,” yet they refuse to listen to doctors and researchers who say the data indicate that the coronavirus is far more widespread and less lethal than we originally thought, and that keeping society shut down is doing more harm than good. It’s even doing irreparable harm to the health care system (laying off doctors and shutting down hospitals) and causing deaths by preventing people from getting necessary medical care (here’s just one example…)

…all in the name of keeping hospitals free for the projected crush of COVID-19 patients that never materialized.

When two urgent care doctors in California discovered that the virus was far more widespread in their counties than previously believed, and that the real odds of dying from it were only 0.03%, they were denounced for no solid reasons and YouTube (a subsidiary of ultra-liberal Google) removed their video because it didn’t jibe with the World Health Organization – the same group that’s repeated patently bogus Chinese propaganda since the beginning.

And those aren’t the only doctors who are speaking up against the “shut down the world or we’ll all die” Democratic party line.

Some Democrats are even denying their own previous statements…

And speaking of denying your own alleged principles, whatever happened to “Believe all women?” Two more women have come forward to verify that former Joe Biden staffer Tara Reade told them of her sexual assault allegation against Biden in the 1990s, and both women are Democrats.

Speaking of denial, one of the women who spoke up for Reade said, "I personally am a Democrat, a very strong Democrat. And I'm for Biden, regardless. But still I have to come out and say this." Remember the outrage from Democrats when Trump facetiously said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn’t abandon him? Well, here’s someone corroborating an allegation of sexual assault of a friend against the presumptive Democratic nominee and adding, “I’m for Biden, regardless.” And she's actually serious.

Yet the Party and its PR flacks in the media are sticking their fingers in their ears and “la-la-la’ing” all the way to the election. The Washington Post even seems to think the only newsworthy part of this story is that “Trump allies” are “amplifying” Reade’s story by paying attention to her. Well, somebody should, don’t you think?

Move over, Cleopatra! We have millions of new contenders for the title “Queen of Denial.”

Mike Huckabee

I am saddened to report that the coronavirus has taken another talented musician from us. Grammy-nominated gospel singer Troy Sneed died Monday in Jacksonville, Florida, of complications from the virus. He was only 52.

Sneed started his career with the Georgia Mass Choir, which appeared in the film “The Preacher’s Wife” with Whitney Houston. He then formed Youth For Christ before launching a gospel record label with his wife Emily and releasing seven solo albums. His hits include “Work It Out” and “My Heart Says Yes.” Our deepest condolences and prayers for his wife and family. Here are some samples of the inspiring musical legacy he left us here and here.

Mike Huckabee

Several states are gearing up to start letting businesses gradually reopen, and not a moment too soon. All around the nation, Americans are signaling that they have had enough, and while some political leaders want to continue the lockdown indefinitely, citizens are assessing the relative dangers of the disease compared to losing their businesses, jobs, salaries and homes, and judging the latter as worse than the former.

For instance, in Dallas, Texas, the owner of a hair salon defied the shutdown last week and reopened, while observing strict hygiene standards. She said if she'd waited any longer, she would have to fire her employees and declare bankruptcy. She's been ordered to “cease and desist,” but she’d had enough of ceasing and desisting, and she has plenty of support.

Meanwhile, the Dallas suburb of Colleyville declared that business owners couldn’t wait any longer and some could start reopening in defiance of state and county leaders.

And this is in Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott has been one of the most lenient, pro-business leaders. In states such as Michigan, where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has been channeling Mad King George and imposing inexplicable, rights-crushing edicts, many people are on the verge of rebellion.

I sympathize with the protesters, but if I may offer one bit of advice: Please remember that while the threat of the virus may turn out to have been wildly overstated, we still don’t know its full effects (stories are circulating of possible links to blood clotting and strokes in younger victims, among other unknowns.) And while far more people than we initially knew were apparently exposed to it and suffered little or no ill effects, for those who are vulnerable, it can be a terrible, even fatal disease (nearly 55,000 deaths in the US so far.)

If you are going to protest to reopen the government, please do so responsibly. Wear face masks, keep up social distancing, and don’t shake hands with strangers (I’ve seen video of protesters violating all these common sense rules.)

Even if you don’t believe the coronavirus is as bad as advertised, why take unnecessary chances? If not for your own safety and that of your family and community, you should follow the health guidelines at protests to prove that you are responsible citizens who can be trusted to go back to work without spreading the disease. Consider this: If you don’t, you’re giving PR ammunition to the people who want to keep America locked down forever.

Mike Huckabee

I would normally start off with a link to President Trump’s daily briefing on the COVID-19 (Chinese) coronavirus, but for the first time in weeks, he didn’t hold one over the weekend. He implied that he might end them because of the hostile/idiotic media response, tweeting:

“What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort!”

I can’t say I blame him, since I had the same reaction to last week’s off-the-rails hysteria accusing Trump of suggesting that people inject themselves with Lysol (incidentally, where would they get all this Lysol? I can’t even find it in stores.) That and “Labradoodle-gate” were so jaw-droppingly stupid, childish and willfully obtuse that I didn’t even want to waste my time commenting on them, and that's my job. At least take the effort to make up fake news that sounds half-way plausible.

Trump has spent day after day, sometimes for over an hour at a stretch, dispensing information, trying to keep up people’s hopes and dispel their fears, and answering questions from the media. And in return, every syllable out of his mouth has been parsed, twisted, disputed, refuted, mocked and scorned. Reporters have wasted their precious opportunity to ask the President about a matter of monumental importance to every American, instead lobbing gotcha questions and childish accusations. Even after putting up with it every day for weeks, when he finally got fed up and took a weekend off from their incessant barking, CNN ran this accusatory headline: “Trump goes into hiding.”

So what did CNN call it when Obama went for months without a press conference, averaging fewer than two a month through his entire term? I can’t imagine they accused him of “going into hiding.”

I prefer to think of it as Trump setting a good hygiene example for all Americans by washing his hands of this nasty media virus.

Mike Huckabee

Here is Friday’s White House press briefing on the COVID-19 (Chinese) coronavirus.

It was a short, but very news-packed briefing. The major points: we have now topped 5 million tests, numbers of new infections and deaths are trending downward, states are getting ready to reopen for business, President Trump signed the bill adding new funding to aid small businesses, and the FDA has approved an at-home test for the virus that lets people swab themselves and send it to a lab for testing. Also, Trump didn’t take questions because the media absolutely beclowned themselves after the previous briefing. More on that later. I can’t consider their hysterical antics to be “news” anymore.

Also, in case you missed it, Friday night, I filled in for Sean Hannity hosting his Fox News TV show, to take a look at the coronavirus and how both the disease and the reactions to it are damaging America. You can watch the full episode here:

We talked about the way that Democrats are trying to extort Republicans into paying for the bad policies of blue state governments as part of the emergency relief bills. They’ve long dreamed of sticking American taxpayers with the cost of covering their unsustainable public worker pensions, entitlement programs and green energy schemes, and now they’re claiming that if we tell them to declare bankruptcy instead of bailing them out, it’s tantamount to wanting the people of those states to die. Take a look at the New York Congress member at around the 3:30 mark, accusing Mitch McConnell of telling first responders to “drop dead,” and tell me he doesn’t remind you of this.

If you watched the sitcom “Friends,” you’ll recognize the Democrats' "bail out blue states" tactic. Remember when Ross’s dad offered to help pay for his wedding, and his fiancee’s dad tried to stick him with the bill for everything from landscaping his lawn to building a new wine cellar? Well, that guy is the Democrats’ and Ross’s dad is all of us taxpayers.

As liberal Rep. James Clyburn openly admitted, the Democrats see this crisis as an historic opportunity to impose their agenda of transforming America. They seem to think that to fight a virus, we need to bail out blue states, raise the minimum wage, pass the Green New Deal, institute voting by mail with no ID, bar people from going to church and declare abortions to be an essential medical procedure. As they often say at the Instapundit site, It’s amazing how the answer to every crisis is to do everything they’ve always wanted to do.

Back in Reality Land, here’s what is actually in the bill that Trump signed.

Mike Huckabee

The Democrats have proposed the Green New Deal and the basic tenets of it have now been embraced by their presumptive nominee, Joe Biden. Those pushing the radical notion of ending fossil fuel use within 10 years because they believe the earth is only going to last for 11 years have said we have to do this NOW. So before you vote for Joe Biden to be President and for Democrats in the House or Senate or in the Governor’s office, you might wonder what the Green New Deal would mean to you. Now, it’s easier than ever to explain. Because if you have enjoyed “stay at home” orders and inability to travel during the coronavirus scare, you’re really going to love the Green New Deal!

Airplanes, cars, trucks and cruise ships won’t be around under the Green New Deal because they run on fossil fuels, which by the way we have plenty of—as in we could go for hundreds of years on them and not run out. The pandemic has caused people to stay home for fear of a virus. In the Green New Deal, you’ll stay home because unless you can walk or ride a bike, you won’t have a way to get to grandma’s house, the store, church, or a vacation. Since meat will be mostly eliminated because cows and other livestock produce methane gas when they….well, when they pass gas, grocery shelves will be stocked with tofu and plant substitutes instead of ribeyes and pork chops. And if you eat that stuff, there probably will be another toilet paper shortage. But unless you live on a farm, since since trucks won’t be allowed to burn fuel and bring produce to your supermarket, I’m not sure how your groceries will get to you anyway so learn to plant a garden unless you live in Michigan where the Governor there doesn’t think you ought to be able to buy vegetable seeds or go fishing.

Next, look around your house for plastic things you have and use. Hang on to them if you like them. They disappear with the Green New Deal.

And I’m not sure how you’ll power your iPhone, laptop or your TV when you have to run your household on the amount of electricity provided by a hamster running on a little wheel. Get used to washing your clothes the way your great-grandmother did, with a washing board and drying with a clothesline in your lawn or apartment balcony. Hope you don’t mind your neighbors seeing your underwear waving like a team flag at the playoffs. And if you live in a cold climate, be careful about those frozen articles of clothing. They will actually break like glass if you aren’t careful. One of the worst whippings I ever got when I was a kid was for going out and breaking my grandmothers frozen underwear that was hanging on the line after a hard freeze.

We’ve experienced lots of inconveniences during the pandemic, but at least we’ve believed they are temporary. In the Green New Deal, we’re talking about permanent changes of the way we live. I hope you liked online church because unless you live in walking distance, you’re out of luck. Remember-no cars!

But younger people who think Greta Thunberg is a prophet and who are especially pushing for these measures better be ready for the sacrifices of giving up air conditioning in the summer and fossil-fueled heat in the winter at home and at school. To help them prepare, I think we ought to go ahead and turn off the a/c at their schools and disable it in their cars. (They ain’t going to like that in Arizona!) And like their ancestors who walked or rode mules to school, students under the Green New Deal for sure will walk but the mule is out of the question because it might emit flatulence which, according to the disciples of the Green New Deal, will destroy the planet.

Yes, a hidden blessing of all of us losing jobs, income, freedom, mobility, investments, retirement accounts, convenience, and all forms of common sense is that we are now better prepared to live in an America run by the people who think you’d rather have their Green New Deal than to enjoy the benefits of a free market and a free people. If Americans really are dumb enough to elect politicians who will destroy our freedom and our prosperity, then the coronavirus ain’t the worst thing that can happen to our brains and our country.

Mike Huckabee

From Lawrence:

Regarding the second-guessing about whether we should have shut down the whole country that will come (already has in some cases), I learned in Vietnam, and again in Iraq, second-guessing is second nature to some folks. In both wars, we would provide intelligence to commanders that an attack was planned for a certain base and a certain time period. The commanders would then undertake very visible upgrades to their defense, readily observed by the enemy, and if an attack did not come, they would deride the intelligence unit instead of saying that they had deterred the attack by their defensive upgrade efforts. I guarantee, at some point Democrats will say the shut-down was unnecessary, and Trump did it for his own self-gain, and the damage to the economy was Trump's fault.

From the Gov:

Anything they can twist to make the President's choices seem at fault, you know they will. They would never have given him credit for the fabulous economy we had pre-virus, but they’ll hang this on him for sure. It won't even have to make sense. Thanks, Lawrence, for being such an astute observer of human nature and writing in.

Mike Huckabee

The biggest real news of the day involving the COVID-19 (Chinese) coronavirus is that it might not be as deadly as we were led to believe when we shut down the economy based on computer models that predicted millions of deaths, and have since been adjusted steadily downward. There’s always a temptation when dealing with a disease scare to look back with 20/20 hindsight and say, “It wasn’t that bad! We didn’t need to take all those precautions!” when it’s possible that if we hadn’t taken the precautions, it might’ve been much worse. It was certainly necessary to take drastic action upfront to “flatten the curve” and keep the disease from spreading and overwhelming the medical system.

But we’ve done that. While we don’t want a second wave to bring it roaring back, we can’t keep the economy shut down forever. Due to the shutdown, another 4.4 million Americans just applied for unemployment benefits, bringing the total to 26 million. Indeed, there are estimates that keeping it shut much longer will lead to so much despair, depression, drug abuse and suicide that more people will die than would have died of the virus.

We were also told that we needed to take drastic measures until we knew more about the threat. Well, now we know more, and some of it is good news, but the people lobbying to keep the economy shut down don’t want to hear it.

For instance, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who not that long ago was worried about millions of deaths and a shortage of ventilators and hospital beds (none of which came to pass) announced that a test of 3,000 people across 19 New York counties found that 13.9% of them had coronavirus antibodies. Extrapolated to the entire state population, that would be 2.7 million people who contracted the virus but had no symptoms or sickness too mild to go to the hospital. That would mean the death rate per infection isn’t 6%, as previously stated, but 0.5%. We still don’t know if antibodies provide long-lasting immunity, but it is proof that many people can catch the virus and not even get sick enough to need a doctor.

We also now know that 94% of coronavirus patients who were hospitalized in New York City had another underlying condition, and 88% had two or more. The most common was hypertension, followed by obesity, diabetes, morbid obesity, and coronary artery disease.

But the most important MUST-READ article of the day is by Dr. Scott W. Atlas, former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center. It’s titled, “The Data is In; Stop the Panic and End the Total Isolation.”

Dr. Atlas lists five facts that all point to the need to end the economic lockdown while continuing to proceed with reasonable caution. These facts, which he explains in much more detail, are:

The overwhelming majority of people have little risk of dying from COVID-19 (those over 75 are at greatest risk; the current death rate for those 18 and under is zero)…Protecting older, high-risk people eliminates hospital overcrowding…Our total isolation policy is prolonging the problem by preventing the development of “herd immunity”…People are dying because hypothetical projections of the need for care for COVID-19 patients caused states to cancel other medical procedures, from cancer screenings and biopsies to chemotherapy and brain surgeries…We now have a clearly-defined at-risk population who can be protected with targeted measures, so we don’t have to shut down the entire country.

This isn’t to say that we can immediately go back to life as it was two months ago. We’ll still need to follow reasonable precautions. Even if you’re not at greatest risk, why take unnecessary chances? But we now know a lot more about how dangerous the disease is, and about how damaging the response has been. We now have to consider whether the cure is on the verge of becoming worse than the disease.

Mike Huckabee

In Harris County, Texas (Houston), Democrat Judge Lina Hidalgo ordered the county’s 4.7 million residents to wear face masks in public at all times with very limited exceptions, or face a fine of up to $1,000, a ruling that Houston’s Democratic mayor agreed with. But Republicans, many residents and the Houston Police Officers Union definitely did not agree. Critics say that encouraging and urging mask use is fine, threatening to arrest and fine people for not doing it crosses the line into unconstitutional tyranny.

In fact, the police union flatly refused to enforce it, saying that while they believe everyone should be wearing a mask in public, “we draw the line at the draconian measures Hidalgo has decided to engage in. Our officers work every single day to bridge the gap with our community and earn their trust, we will not stand idly by and allow Hidalgo to tear that bridge down, with her horrific leadership and echo chamber decision making.”

As the story above details, other police and sheriff’s departments around the country are also refusing to enforce draconian, contradictory (landscapers are allowed to work outside, building contractors aren’t, etc.) and most of all, unconstitutional edicts by judges. You know you’ve overreached your powers when even the cops are telling you to put your legal threats where the sun doesn’t shine.

To show how seriously locals are taking Judge Hidalgo’s commands, a hilarious typo in a graphic from KPRC-TV went viral nationally. It read that the Judge ordered everyone over the age of 10 to cover their faces with either masks, scarfs or “bananas.

As a public service, and since so many judges are now issuing rulings that are so bananas they sound like a Monty Python sketch, here’s what to do if you are attacked by a masked person with a banana.

Mike Huckabee

The “Party of Tolerance” is giving African-Americans a good look at how savagely intolerant they really are toward anyone who expresses a non-approved thought. If the Republican Party ever treated its black members with such harsh disrespect, the charges of racism would be headline news. And there are two glaring examples that have arrived simultaneously.

First came the story of Democratic Michigan State Rep. Karen Whitsett, who thought she was going to die of COVID-19 until she received the treatment mentioned by President Trump. She quickly recovered and publicly thanked him, saying the drug saved her life. For that, a group called the 13th Congressional District Democratic Party Organization announced that it will meet tomorrow to consider censuring Whitsett.

Now, think for just a moment of all the outrageous things various Democrats (cough-Adam Schiff!-cough!) have done for which they were never censured – but they want to censure her for saying something positive about Trump for recommending a drug that she believed saved her life.

Trump drew attention to that “disgraceful” move and offered a great suggestion to Whitsett: “Should join the Republican Party!”

Meanwhile, Georgia State Rep. Vernon Jones has had a change of heart. The black Democrat set off a firestorm by saying he endorsed Trump’s reelection because of his record on job creation and supporting black colleges and prison sentence reform. He and his family were hit with so many hateful, threatening messages that he announced he would step down. But he now says that after receiving a wave of support, he’s changed his mind and will remain in office. Having already compared the Party to a plantation, Jones declared, “I will not allow the Democrats to bully me into submission. I will not let them win. I will NOT resign.”

Good for him! That’s the “punch back twice as hard” philosophy that Obama originated, but that Democrats never imagined would be used against them until Trump came along.

Mike Huckabee

The most important MUST-READ article of the day is by Dr. Scott W. Atlas, former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center. It’s titled, “The Data is In; Stop the Panic and End the Total Isolation.”

Dr. Atlas lists five facts that all point to the need to end the economic lockdown while continuing to proceed with reasonable caution. These facts, which he explains in much more detail, are:

The overwhelming majority of people have little risk of dying from COVID-19 (those over 75 are at greatest risk; the current death rate for those 18 and under is zero)…Protecting older, high-risk people eliminates hospital overcrowding…Our total isolation policy is prolonging the problem by preventing the development of “herd immunity”…People are dying because hypothetical projections of the need for care for COVID-19 patients caused states to cancel other medical procedures, from cancer screenings and biopsies to chemotherapy and brain surgeries…We now have a clearly-defined at-risk population that can be protected with targeted measures, so we don’t have to shut down the entire country.

This isn’t to say that we can immediately go back to life as it was two months ago. We’ll still need to follow reasonable precautions. Even if you’re not at greatest risk, why take unnecessary chances? But we now know a lot more about how dangerous the disease is, and about how damaging the response has been. We now have to consider whether the cure is on the verge of becoming worse than the disease.

Mike Huckabee

Remember, when most of the news is, “all coronavirus, all the time,” much more of consequence is still going on. In addition to bringing you virus news, we’ve been trying to call attention to the stories that, without COVID-19 sucking all the air out of the room, would rightly be front and center. And there’s a stunning story that broke last night about British ex-spy and creative anti-Trump fiction writer Christopher Steele.

Chuck Ross of THE DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION has obtained the transcript to a deposition from March 17-18 by Christopher Steele for a defamation case in Britain related to the “dossier.” This was a suit brought against Steele by the owners of Alfa Bank –- Petre Aven, German Khan, and Mikhail Fridman –- over a memo in the “dossier” that claimed they had made payments to Vladimir Putin. Their lawyer, Hugh Tomlinson, was challenging Steele on the accuracy of that memo, and also his relationship with his “primary sub-source” for the information.

Since the IG report contains a rebuttal from Steele’s lawyers that mentions recordings and documents “meticulously” backing up his information, Tomlinson asked Steele about their existence. Conveniently, they do NOT exist; it’s impossible now to say how “meticulous” they were. And the source himself has testified to the FBI that Steele exaggerated and/or misrepresented what he had said, which was only “rumor and speculation.” Here’s how the questioning of Steele by Alfa Bank’s lawyers went:

Q: (Tomlinson) The “Primary Sub-Source’s” debriefings by Orbis [Steele’s company] were meticulously documented and recorded.

A: (Steele) At the time.

Q: But none of these documents exist, so they have all been destroyed.

A: At the time, Mr. Tomlinson, when we wrote the report.

Q: But you say it was meticulous, but no one is in a position to check that because the records don’t exist.

A: They no longer exist, but that is my assertion, indeed, my assertion under oath.

Further questioning revealed that Steele retained no contemporaneous emails or notes except for those with the FBI. He had used a personal email account for everything related to the Fusion GPS project, and those records were deleted.

And, specifically, the notes for “Report 112,” the memo on Alfa Bank, were not kept.

Q: You have no record of anything, have you?

A: I haven’t got any records relating to the creation of 112.

Q: Or indeed, any of the other memoranda?

A: No, THEY WERE WIPED IN EARLY JANUARY 2017. [Emphasis mine.]

It's true: communications with Fusion GPS on his company’s computer network were wiped on January 5, 2017. A Hushmail account he’d used in late December 2016 was also wiped. And no, I don’t mean, like “with a cloth.”

It was five days later that BUZZFEED published the “dossier.”

As Chuck Ross reports, Steele’s source allegedly used a number of contacts inside and outside of Russia to gather tips about Donald Trump, his associates, and Kremlin officials. Steele said the Trump campaign took part in a “well-coordinated conspiracy of cooperation” with the Russians to influence the 2016 election. After almost two years of investigating, the special counsel found no evidence of such a conspiracy, and newly declassified footnotes from IG Horowitz’ report shows that the FBI was well aware that Steele might have been receiving Russian disinformation.

Specifically, they suspected the stories regarding Michael Cohen’s trip to Prague and Trump’s antics with hookers at a Moscow hotel were false. (And, indeed, they were.)

But that didn’t stop them from using these stories and the rest of the unverified garbage in Steele’s “dossier.” They swore the information was VERIFIED when they applied to the FISA Court for a warrant to spy on Trump campaign associate Carter Page.

Even during the Alfa Bank testimony, Steele would not reveal the name of his primary source. Whoever it was, they had done business with Orbis for “several years.” Steele said his sources got paid retainers of $3,000 to $5,000 a month. Nice work, a little extra money for making up stuff.

And now, all the records of any of this appear to be gone.

Ross’s report doesn’t go into this, but I assume Alfa Bank’s defamation lawsuit might also relate to the completely debunked story about computer “pings” emanating from their bank tower to signal between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Yes, there were lots of anti-Trumpers who thoroughly bought into this ridiculous story, with no evidence at all.

For context, here’s Ross’s report from December of last year on the rebuttal by Steele’s attorneys of the IG report. It’s kind of funny in light of what we’ve just learned to read that “the lawyers did not say what, if anything, Steele plans to do with the recordings of the source.” The humor derives from the fact that STEELE HAD ALREADY GOTTEN RID OF THEM, all the way back in January of 2017. Pretty good joke, except that the joke was on all of us. I hope Alfa Bank cleans up big on this lawsuit. But, hey, where does President Trump go to sue?

Incidentally, remember when I recently asserted that not only did the Russians NOT want to help Trump, but they wanted to help Hillary win (not just “create chaos,” as we always hear)? Well, David Krayden, also of the DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION, has just written about that very thing.

As you likely know, the report submitted Tuesday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence supports the U.S. intel community’s assessment, back in January of 2017, that Russia “meddled” in the 2016 election to help Trump win. This conclusion seems extremely illogical, considering that the particular stories the FBI suspected were Russian misinformation –- the Michael Cohen trip to Prague and the prostitutes in the Moscow hotel –- were extremely damaging to Trump.

As Krayden notes, the committee released the document in a highly edited form that does not include any reference to the recently declassified files that point to a Russian disinformation campaign.

Former CIA officer and National Security Council Chief of Staff Fred Fleitz wrote an op-ed for FOX NEWS that addresses the flaws in this report, pointing out that its findings directly contradict those of the House Intelligence Committee from March 2018. Given all that we know, I would agree with Fleitz and go with the House findings that the intel community’s findings were tainted by anti-Trump forces. Most notable among the problems with the Senate report cited by Fleitz is its over-reliance on the potentially politically-charged observations of the CIA.

Fleitz calls former CIA Director John Brennan “the most politicized intelligence chief in American history.” He says that Brennan relied on “low-quality intelligence that failed to meet intelligence community standards [the Steele dossier?] to support the claim that Russian officials wanted Trump to win...” and “suppressed high-quality intelligence suggesting that Putin actually wanted the more predictable and malleable Clinton to win the 2016 election.”

Thank you! As I’ve said, this is the only conclusion that makes sense.

So, why did the Senate committee come to the opposite conclusion as the House and endorse John Brennan’s narrative that the Russians wanted to help Trump win? Fleitz speculates about that in his superb op-ed, a must-read. He says that the vice chairman, Democrat Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, essentially ran the show. Well, that would explain a lot.

Mike Huckabee

One relative upside of the pandemic shutdown is that it has made a lot of people who like to wrap themselves in the mantle of “compassionate liberals” show their true colors. For instance, we’ve seen some truly wretched comments, ranging from anonymous Twitter trolls wishing death on the President and his supporters to clueless, bubble-dwelling celebrities and politicians mocking people who are desperate to get back to work so they don’t lose their homes and businesses and so they can pay their bills and feed their families.

We’ve also seen in stark terms the ugly selfishness of the left's “never let a good crisis go to waste” mentality, as Nancy Pelosi held up desperately-needed aid to small businesses to try to extort her “progressive” wish list into the bill. She’s now boasting that if we need another bill to keep the economy alive, she will force a national vote-by-mail law into it, creating a tsunami of vote fraud that will keep Democrats in power forever.

Another way that opportunistic leftists have tried to use this crisis to impose their agenda on America was by making it more lucrative to stay unemployed than to go back to work. They insisted that this wouldn’t incentivize unemployment. But it already is…

Some analysts say the lucrative unemployment benefits are a stealth way of forcing small businesses to raise wages without having to pass a new national minimum wage law. If so, then it’s a stealth way to put small businesses out of business nationwide, just as they have in cities and states that raised the minimum wage above market rates. Small businesses are drowning, and the Democrats want to throw them an anvil.

To sum up, Americans have gotten a good, hard look at what life under “Democratic socialism” and the Green New Deal would look like, as some prominent leftist politicians have celebrated the blows to the fossil fuel industry, all the lost jobs in industries they don’t like, and the expansion of dependence and government power, with people being ordered to stay inside, not drive, live off handouts, etc. If you like the current despair, impoverishment, lack of freedom and official disregard for constitutional rights, elect more AOCs and they’ll make it permanent.

Mike Huckabee

LATEST COVID-19 NEWS

Here is our link to the most recent, complete White House press briefing on the COVID-19 (Chinese) coronavirus. On Wednesday, President Trump was joined by CDC Director Robert Redfield…

Trump asked Redfield to speak and correct what he called “fake news,” headlines suggesting that Redfield said there could be an explosion of new cases in the fall. Redfield said that he just meant it would be more complicated to deal with a second wave in the fall because it would hit simultaneously with flu season, so there would be two viruses circulating at the same time. He said that doesn’t mean COVID-19 would be worse or impossible to handle, just difficult. But he’s confident that our mitigation strategies can keep it in containment mode and it will not overwhelm the medical system.

Trump also announced “Operation America Strong,” which he said was suggested by military officials. The Thunderbirds and Blue Angels will do flyover air shows in major cities, as tributes to the heroism of frontline health care workers who, like soldiers, have run toward the danger.

GO AHEAD, MAKE MY DAY

Fresh off of deleting her tweet about how great it is to have all those people unemployed and forced into their homes while the economy languishes and the fossil fuel industry craters (“How are you enjoying your 30-day free trial of socialism?”), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once again inadvertently told us what “Democratic socialists” really believe. She said that even after the virus lockdown ends, people should “just say no” to going back to work. She wants Americans to say, “We’re not going back to working 70-hour weeks just so that we could put food on the table and not even feel any sort of semblance of security in our lives.”

Get the impression that she doesn’t grasp the importance of “putting food on the table”? Or that not everyone has a job that pays over $170,000 a year for doing nothing? But to be fair, if she wants to stage a boycott and not return to Congress, she has my blessing.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:  Evening Edition - April 22

TRUMP DISAGREES WITH GEORGIA GOVERNOR

In one surprising twist, Trump undercut the claim that he’s pushing too hard to reopen America by saying he disagrees strongly with Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s plan to reopen some Georgia businesses. Trump said the time isn’t right yet under the guidelines, but that “at the same time, he must do what is right.” Boy, he really doesn’t have this “Hitler-like authoritarian dictator” thing down very well, does he?

In addition to Georgia, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina and Colorado have announced plans to begin reopening. More details about each state’s plans are here.

PROBLEMS WITH THE MEDIA'S FAVORITE STUDY

Yesterday, I wrote about a study of coronavirus patients at VA hospitals that found that the drug hydroxchloroquine did not help and was even associated with a higher death rate. As I expected, the mainstream media gave massive play to this study, since it gave them a chance to make President Trump look wrong (and even responsible for MORE DEATHS!!) for suggesting patients try it.

I saw none of these breathless accounts point out what I did: that the footnotes to the study made it clear that the drug was given to severely ill patients who were more likely to die anyway. Since then, other problems with the study have come up that will probably be ignored, since they don’t advance the “Trump is a dumb liar who wants people to DIE!” narrative.

Laura Ingraham has more…

…As does Matt Margolis at PJ Media, who lists five serious problems with the study…

These are the same people who demand rigorous standards of proof from any study that shows the benefits of hydroxychoroquine. Is it too much to expect them to demand the same standards from studies that purport to refute those benefits?

Again, I’m not a doctor and I’m not qualified to recommend any particular treatment. But I am capable of recognizing media malpractice when I see it. Discouraging sick people from trying a promising treatment just because if it works, it might make your political opponent look better, is journalistic quackery at its worst.

MOVING FAST

A potential COVID-19 vaccine is already entering the first phase of human trials. Developing a vaccine can take years to decades, but there are ways to speed testing and invoke emergency use authorizations to get it to high-risk areas faster. There’s much more info at this link.

"SARS 2"

Here’s yet another way in which the World Health Organization ran defense for China: It turns out that in the early days of the coronavirus, it was being referred to as “Sars 2.” That was the devastating disease that came out of China in 2003 and has escaped from a Beijing biolab four times since. The WHO decided that, “From a risk communications perspective, using the name SARS can have unintended consequences in terms of creating unnecessary fear for some populations…” In other words, bad PR for China. So they called it COVID-19 instead.

I can certainly see their point. We wouldn’t want to frighten and confuse anyone by calling it Sars 2. So I’ll continue calling it by a clear and accurate name: either the “COVID-19 (Chinese) virus,” or, most clear and accurate of all, “the Wuhan virus.”

TRUE COLORS

During an Arbor Day/Earth Day tree-planting ceremony at the White House Wednesday, President Trump announced that over the next few weeks, national parks will begin reopening. Maybe this will help discourage the harassment and arrests of people who dare to walk through public parks. Some local officials seem to believe that the coronavirus can be spread over a hundred yards of open territory, or maybe that it came from Smokey the Bear, not Chinese bats.

Meanwhile, as Trump was planting a tree, renowned eco-warrior Al Gore and Joe Biden provided the fertilizer. In a dual video appearance for Earth Day, Gore endorsed Biden for President and Joe responded with some organic word salad that must’ve had Al immediately regretting his endorsement.

I’m sure Gore would have preferred to take a private jet and a fleet of SUVs to some big gathering of fellow environmentalists at a five-star resort to tell the rest of us to live in caves, which is how celebrity environmentalists normally mark Earth Day. But this year, he was forced to use Skype, something I’ve been suggesting to them for years with no response.

Meanwhile, CBS and other media outlets showed their true colors on Earth Day by celebrating how wonderful it is that the air is cleaner, what with all those people being locked in their homes, forced to be wards of the government and having their freedom to travel taken away. They showed their love of the Earth by celebrating how great it would be if there were no people on it.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard someone in the media declare, “I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand!” But that used to just be Linus in the “Peanuts” comic strip, not the environmental reporters.

NEW KURT SCHLICHTER 

As always, Kurt Schlichter dares to say what the mainstream media never will...but we’re all thinking it.

BRING BACK DRIVE-IN MOVIES

John Nolte serves up a nostalgic tribute to drive-in movies, and urges Hollywood to counter the coronavirus by bringing back drive-ins, good movies and hot dogs heated on engine blocks.

DAILY BIBLE VERSE

O Lord, thou art my God;

I will exalt thee, I will praise thy name;

for thou hast done wonderful things;

thy counsels of old

are faithfulness and truth.

Isaiah 25:1

Mike Huckabee

Georgia State Rep. Vernon Jones, who made headlines for being an African-American Democrat who endorsed Trump’s reelection, is stepping down from his office less than a week later. He said he’s sick and tired of him and his family being attacked and harassed by the Democrat Party for putting his country ahead of his political party.

Jones said, “I take pride in being an independent thinker. My First Amendment right to freedom of speech is under siege. I intend to help the Democrat Party get rid of its bigotry against Black people that are independent and conservative. Turn the lights off, I have left the plantation. Someone else can occupy that suite.”

He said that with Trump’s record of creating jobs and record-low unemployment for African-Americans, he is best prepared to lead a post-virus recovery. He added, “I endorsed the White guy (Trump) that let Blacks out of jail, and they endorsed the White guy (Biden) that put Blacks in jail.”

The Democrats are playing a dangerous game by refusing to rein in their Trump Derangement Syndrome mobs with their vicious intolerance of any wavering from the leftist line. They’ve already sparked a “Walk Away” movement. If they can’t count on 90+ percent support from black voters, they’re in trouble electorally. And when their intolerance has grown so glaring that their own Black office holders are not only walking away, they’re comparing the trip to fleeing a plantation, that’s really bad optics. It might even inspire a lot of miseducated students to finally pick up a real American history book and learn who ran the original plantations and which party was created to end that system.

Mike Huckabee

Rubio Warns of Subpoenas for Companies Abusing PPP

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Mike Huckabee

In welcome news, Attorney General Bill Barr said the Department of Justice may side with citizens who sue local governments for trampling their Constitutional rights in the name of preventing the spread of the coronavirus.

Barr made it clear that he’s not talking about justifiable restrictions to protect public health, but “onerous” crackdowns that go too far and become “burdensome impingements on liberty.” And proving that sometimes, lawyers and courts are useful to people on the right, too, the Mayor of Greenville, Mississippi, announced that the $500 tickets handed to church members for attending a drive-in service in their own cars will not be enforced.

The American people are speaking up against government overreach in the name of public health, and they’re not always doing it politely. Like the Idaho mom who demanded to be arrested, and whose arrest sparked protests, when she was threatened with arrest for entering a closed public park to protest the government’s clampdown policies.

But Idahoans are downright polite compared to New Yorkers. When Mayor Bill DeBlasio set up a snitch hotline for people to turn in their neighbors for allegedly violating his stay-at-home orders, he got a lot of calls – but not the kind he was hoping for. Some of the nicer ones ratted on him for going to the gym when he banned it for other people. Some of the more New York-y responses included words I can’t repeat and photos of various finger gestures and parts of their anatomy that should definitely be kept behind closed doors. It’s funny how New Yorkers will elect liberals who love telling people what to do, but nobody better dare tell them what to do!

Maybe Mayor DeBlasio was under the delusion that New Yorkers were like the Australians who reported a couple to authorities and got them fined for violating the ban on non-essential travel after they posted some vacation photos on Facebook – from last year’s vacation. Who do those snitches think they are, Mark Zuckerberg?

Laura Ainsworth, Staff Writer

Every now and then, when new developments pointed to Michelle Obama being on the ticket for 2020, I’ve written to sound the alarm once more. The last time was March 6, which seems like a thousand years ago. At that time, I said that she would be installed, “either as a last-minute substitute for him [Biden] or as #2 on the ticket, as he quietly fades away.” Since then, we’ve entered a whole new era, with a pandemic that has devoured all our attention, caused us to do the unthinkable and shut down the entire economy, and also completely changed the process of running for President (and all elective offices) this time around.

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At least a couple of years ago, I was sure Michelle Obama would somehow end up on the Democrat ticket --- for President. It was in February of 2019 that I felt it was necessary to start putting out the warning that she would be the nominee, that this was a foregone conclusion no matter what kind of make-believe show the Democrats put on. I won’t go back over the myriad reasons this seemed inevitable, but I will tell you why it seems like even more of a given today.

First with the obvious: In the past few months, even though the 77-year-old Biden stumbled his way to the top spot on the ticket, his mental decline has been even more marked. True, the coronavirus has made it easier for the Democrat Party to keep this confused, rambling, apparently senile man under wraps, as there will be no personal appearances, no town halls, apparently not even a convention. I doubt most Democrats seriously think that if he wins, decisions of any consequence will actually be made by him. But they’ll vote for him anyway, because 1) they hate Trump with the fire of a thousand suns, and 2) he’ll be bringing back the Democrat power structure, which is this time even farther to the left.

The real attention now is going to be on the choice for VP, who one way or another will have the real power if they win.

In January, an Iowa man asked Biden if he might consider former President Obama for the Supreme Court. “Yeah, I would, but I don’t think he’d do it,” Biden answered. “He’d be a great Supreme Court justice.” The man then asked, “The question is, which Obama?” The room predictably exploded with applause and various other warm expressions of approval.

"Well, I sure would like Michelle to be the Vice President,” Biden said with a laugh. “They’re both incredibly qualified people, I mean, and they’re such decent, honorable people.”

The buzz started immediately, with the INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TIMES writing that “Michelle Obama recently sparked rumors that she could become the next Vice President of the United States.”

Just a week ago, a report in the WASHINGTON EXAMINER said, “Former first lady Michelle Obama is back in play big-time as a favorite to be Joe Biden’s running mate.” It went on to say that according to OddsChecker.com, gambling markets have seen a surge for Obama.

"Michelle Obama has been the most backed person in the market, accounting for almost 32 percent of all bets,” the firm reports. (On the other hand, I don’t know how much weight should be given to that, as another name “surging” a bit recently has been the extremely frightening and power-mad Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.)

On March 8, John Fund at NATIONAL REVIEW broke down the reasons she might or might not do it. “Stranger things have happened in politics,” he said, “and in the age of Trump, they often do.” He pointed out some of the inducements: She wouldn’t have to endure the marathon campaign for President (and since he wrote that, it’s become clear there won’t be much campaigning at all). She reportedly doesn’t like mingling, but there will be no hand-shaking now; she could just “appear” at events before the adoring crowds. (I would add it looks now as if there will be no events and no crowds.) She wouldn’t have to do fundraising. Malia and Sasha are college-age now, and the media would continue to treat them with deference.

RELATED READING: Ainsworth: With Biden winning, watch what Michelle O does now

There’s also the inducement of Biden appointing Barack Obama to the U.S. Supreme Court. Yes, we have precedent for this: William Howard Taft in the 1920s.

Cut to yesterday (Tuesday), when CNN.com reported that in an interview with Pittsburgh’s Jon Delano, Biden said of Michelle, “I’d take her in a heartbeat. She’s brilliant. She knows the way around. She is a really fine woman. The Obamas are great friends.”

The article goes on to say there’s no one who could help Biden’s ticket more than Michelle O. “Period.” But it expresses major doubt as to whether she would agree, citing what she has said previously about running for office, which I will say means exactly nothing. As the article muses, “...it’s impossible to totally rule out the possibility of Michelle Obama agreeing to be the Vice Presidential nominee. Why? Because if Biden asked her and told her that if she said ‘yes’ they would have a greatly increased chance of ending Trump’s time as President, it is theoretically possible that she might be swayed by that argument.”

CNN also cites her criticism of Trump in a 2019 interview with Gayle King: “...what saddens me is what it’s doing to the country as a whole. What we have to be really conscientious of is what kind of country we’ve leaving for our children and grandchildren.” That, of course, would be the media-reinforced theme of her candidacy:  bringing the nation together after this time of great conflict (which, of course, is all because of Trump, not the irrational hatred the left has for him).

Here’s another story from yesterday, at Yahoo News, in which we learn from Obama “family adviser” Valerie Jarrett that Michelle “really kind of transcends politics. “Obviously, she supports Vice President Biden bur doesn’t see herself as a political figure.” That’s what Jarrett told POLITICO, but don’t be fooled. It is not a denial.

The POLITICO article is what sparked me to write on this topic again.

About the only other real possibility was New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, but my Magic 8 Ball says IT IS NOT TO BE. Cuomo did a radio interview with Sean Hannity a few days ago in which Sean really put him on the spot about running. The way that conversation went, I actually believed Cuomo (yes, seriously) when he said he is absolutely not leaving New York. Besides, Biden has committed to picking a woman, preferably a black woman, and I’ll bet Cuomo already knows Michelle is it. While we’ve been talking about infection rates and “flattening the curve,” they’ve been moving the chess pieces around.

Democrats know that putting Michelle on the ticket and winning with that is the one way to keep the Obama legacy from being entirely dismantled during a second Trump term. She could end up sliding neatly into the Oval Office without even having to campaign. If anything poses more long-term danger to America than the damn coronavirus does, this just might be it.

Mike Huckabee

The current stay-at-home orders have left many parents struggling to learn how to homeschool their kids. But what they’re actually doing is known as “crisis schooling,” not homeschooling. Most real homeschoolers put in a great deal of time, research and effort to plan their schooling programs, select curricula, etc. They didn’t just have it suddenly thrust upon them. That’s why, home school students typically rank well above public school students in most metrics, from college admissions and SATs to social development to community service, and score up to 30 points higher on standardized tests.

I suspect that having so many kids at home, where parents are being forced to school them (and they’re not getting their leftist/anti-American/eco-warrior indoctrination) has leftist “educators” panicked that parents might decide they prefer homeschooling. And so we get garbage like this, from Harvard Magazine.

It’s about a Harvard law professor who’s demanding a ban on homeschooling. She calls for a "radical transformation in the homeschooling regime and a related rethinking of child rights" that "recommends a presumptive ban on homeschooling, with the burden on parents to demonstrate justification for permission to homeschool."

She claims that homeschooling allows parents to spend too much time with their own children (parents can’t be trusted not to abuse their kids), and that some parents have “extreme religious” beliefs that they might pass on to children instead of “ideas and values central to our democracy” (you know what that means, I assume). She says that many homeschoolers "promote racial segregation and female subservience." I know a lot of homeschooling parents and kids and have never seen that. I also don’t know how that she'd explain all the female students and kids of all races who’ve excelled at academics because they’re home schooled, but she’s a Harvard professor, so she’s obviously better than the rest of us.

Or maybe not. Maybe she’d be a bit smarter, a bit less brainwashed by the leftist education machine, and a bit less prejudiced toward people she knows nothing about if her own parents had homeschooled her. In fact, if all the people who run Harvard had been “indoctrinated” with Christian values by their parents, maybe we wouldn’t have stories like this.

Mike Huckabee

Saturday, a federal judge in Kansas blocked Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s executive order restricting church services in the name of stopping the coronavirus. As the state attorney general, who opposed Kelly’s order, put it, the government can tell churches that they shouldn’t hold services during this time, but it doesn’t have the power to ban them. This is the latest of several cases across America where judges have had to remind liberal officials that they don’t have the power to rescind the First Amendment.

While it is certainly prudent for churches to protect their members by holding online services or drive-in services (although even those have been targeted for no good reason), the judge in this case pointed out that the Governor’s ban on large public gatherings includes 26 secular exceptions, including bars, libraries and shopping malls. Her order seems to specifically, and unconstitutionally, target religion. For instance, the judge noted that a large group could meet in an office building to conduct a real estate deal, but not to hold a Bible study.

Gov. Kelly vowed to fight the judge’s order, saying, “This is not about religion. This is about a public health crisis.” I’d say it’s about more than that. It’s about a public health crisis and about how some public officials will use a crisis to advance a political agenda. We all want to stamp out the coronavirus, but let’s make sure that in the process, we don’t succumb to an even worse virus that kills off our Constitutional rights.

Mike Huckabee

Some major points: The US has now completed 4.18 million virus tests, more than France, the UK, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Austria, Australia, India, Sweden and Canada combined, and testing is expanding rapidly. Saturday’s briefing included some charts showing the rise and fall of cases in different metro areas (and no, media claims aside, we do not lead the world in coronavirus deaths.)

Trump also referred to an article in the Wall Street Journal by Christopher DeMuth called “Trump Rewrites the Book on Emergencies.” It argues that while all other Presidents have dealt with emergencies by expanding federal power and control, Trump has gone the opposite way by letting state and local authorities deal with the disease on their levels while he sticks to things that are federal duties, like allocating resources to the states and restricting foreign travel. For this, his critics have alternately attacked him for not doing enough, then turned on a dime and accused him of being a dictator when they thought he was doing too much. The article is behind a paywall, but Instapundit has a lengthy excerpt:

Trump said in his Sunday briefing that a deal was close with Democrats to stop holding up a bill to provide more funding for loans to struggling small businesses. Late Sunday, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said he hoped the bill would be voted on in the Senate today and pass the House on Tuesday (a personal note to Nancy Pelosi: your two refrigerators will preserve all your $13-a-pint artisanal ice cream just fine until you get back from doing your job; that’s why they cost $12,000 apiece.)

Here is a list of all 50 states and the latest plans for reopening businesses in each state.

On that subject, I’m getting awfully tired of hearing leftists mock and attack people who are demanding easing of restrictions so they can go back to work. Their frustration is perfectly understandable. First, some of the restrictions imposed, especially in blue states and cities, are ridiculous, unconstitutional, and have no impact at all on reducing the spread of the virus. For instance, refusing to let people buy needed items that are available in stores that are open because the Governor doesn’t deem them “essential.” Or shutting down safe drive-in church services while allowing drive-through liquor sales. Or cancelling all “elective” surgeries, including cancer biopsies, while allowing abortion clinics to continue operating. That’s not public health and safety, it’s tyranny and idiocy.

Second, aren’t the leftists always claiming that many Americans are “just one paycheck away from disaster”? Yet when Americans get desperate after losing three paychecks, or even their jobs, the same leftists mock and belittle them.

They can’t comprehend, or else simply don’t want to, just how devastating to people’s lives this business shutdown is, or how angry people get at having government arbitrarily trample their Constitutional rights. Scott Morefield at Townhall.com makes the argument that the left actually wants to keep the lockdown in place indefinitely (keeping everyone else from working advances their work of destroying the American system), and he lists the reasons why.

One other point worth noting: most of the liberal talking heads live in deep blue cities with dense populations (no offense intended), and are notorious for being bubble dwellers who neither know nor care about how people live outside of their own social circles. Maybe this will help give them a little perspective on Americans who don’t understand why they’re expected to endure the same draconian quarantine measures as, say, New Yorkers.

Matt Margolis at PJ Media, who understands that people in Wyoming or Arkansas live very different lifestyles than New Yorkers, decided to see what the coronavirus statistics would look like if you separated out downstate New York (just eight counties: Kings, Queens, New York, Suffolk, Bronx, Nassau, Westchester and Richmond) and treated that small, densely-populated (about 12 million people) and hard-hit area as a separate nation from the US. The results were stunning.

If those eight counties in downstate New York were a separate nation, it would lead the world in confirmed coronavirus cases (16,230.65 per million people.) Meanwhile, without Downstate New York, the US would drop out of the top 10 entirely, from 7th place all the way to 13th. Also, despite the fake news about the US leading the world in coronavirus deaths, as I already mentioned, we actually rank 8th in deaths per million in population (less than a fourth of first-place Belgium.) But if Downstate New York were a separate nation, it would rank #1 in deaths per million, and the rest of the US would drop to #11.

If you’d like an easy illustration of how much New York is skewing the infection and death figures, click the link above to PJ Media to see a chart comparing the growth of cases in the top 25 metro areas in the US. That red line that looks like a jet taking off over the heads of all the others is New York City/Newark.

Of course, none of this means that Americans anywhere should stop taking sensible precautions to avoid catching or spreading this disease. But it’s time we recognized that someone in Arizona or Alabama who drives his pickup alone from his ranch house to work at Home Depot is not as likely to contract the disease as New Yorkers who pour out of apartment buildings to cram shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers in a subway car on their way to work in crowded Times Square restaurants or the New York Stock Exchange. That’s the problem with “one-size-fits-all” solutions: they don’t fit most people.

Finally, here’s “A Tale of Two States, Coronavirus Edition”.

Mike Huckabee

Last week I made the case for why the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) from January 2017, which concluded that Russia was trying to damage Hillary and help Trump win, was 180 degrees WRONG. It’s no longer just a wild right-wing conspiracy theory, but, I believe, the only logical conclusion, to say that Russia was actually trying to hurt Trump and stay on what they assumed was the winning side, Hillary’s.

Let’s start making sense: if certain “dossier” stories were Russian disinformation designed to help Trump, as recently-declassified footnotes in the IG report suggest the FBI suspected, then they wouldn’t have been anti-Trump falsehoods like Michael Cohen’s imaginary trip to Prague or Trump’s fictional romp in a Moscow hotel with a couple of full-grown Betsy-Wetsy dolls. Heck, the Russians would have been working on a “dossier” of their own, full of terrible Hillary stories (as if we didn’t have enough of those).

It certainly makes sense to think they’d assume Hillary was going to win. (And surely they would not want the scenario of Hillary winning and then finding out they’d been working for her opponent!) Hillary was a known quantity, she headed an unfathomably-huge international political power machine, they’d supported the Clinton Global Initiative and they’d paid her husband a fortune just to give a couple of speeches. Surely they were expecting some big things in return. One of these things they’d already received, when she signed off on an agreement that led to Russia owning 20 percent of America’s uranium reserves. Do they think President Donald Trump in their wildest dreams would have gone for THAT?

But as John Solomon wrote over the weekend, “As the Obama administration was headed out the door in January 2017, its intelligence leaders concluded with moderate to high confidence that Russia’s meddling in 2016, including the hack of emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the Democratic Party, was designed to help Trump defeat Clinton.” And that was their narrative (with cooperation from the media) going into Trump’s administration –- not just Russian "meddling," but that Trump's campaign had actively conspired with the Russians. They claimed this with no evidence at all, as the special counsel would determine much later.

You know, we still don’t even have hard evidence that the Russians were the ones who got those emails in the first place. The DNC never did turn over the information on their servers to the FBI, only the report from CrowdStrike. Yet for some baffling reason the FBI were okay with that and went along with the DNC’s self-serving conclusion. Others have come up with some very different possible scenarios for the hacking or leaking of that information, but these are dismissed as wild conspiracy theories.

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Daniel Hoffman, the CIA’s former Moscow station chief and one of our top experts in Russian spycraft, said he believed all along that the Obama administration’s assessment was wrong and sees the newly-declassified footnotes as confirmation. In other words, the Russians were NOT trying to help Trump get elected. On the other hand, he thinks the whole issue of whether the Russians were helping Trump or Clinton is “superfluous.” If I understand correctly what he’s quoted as saying, I disagree strongly with that because of the anything-but-superfluous political consequences of the "helping Trump" narrative chosen by Obama’s outgoing administration.

So, considering there was no evidence that Trump was “colluding” with Russians, where did the FBI get that idea? According to Solomon, Republican investigators such as Rep. Devin Nunes of California, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, are focusing on what John Brennan’s CIA was telling the FBI in 2016.

Hoffman said he’s always maintained that the Kremlin was tracking Christopher Steele’s information-gathering efforts. “Putin would have recognized the opportunity to infiltrate Steele’s work and plant misinformation, which would not immediately be spotted because Steele was supposed to be a reliable, retired MI-6 officer with a strong background on Russia,” he said. (I would add that if Putin thought that about Steele, he was wrong, as the FBI had been doubting him as a reliable source since 2015.)

I still say Putin was doing this to help Hillary, to gain additional favor with her, as he must have assumed she would find out after she was President about his efforts to help her win. No telling what he might get in return --- plus it occurs to me that it might be an interesting blackmail opportunity for him as well. Nobody thought Trump was going to be President (well, except for me and a few other independent thinkers.) “The Steele dossier was used as fodder in our partisan, political meat grinder,” according to Hoffman. “Putin’s goal is to exacerbate the already high level of animosity between Democrats and Republicans, with an eye towards degrading our democracy.”

Well, his effort to help Hillary with anti-Trump "disinformation" failed, but he certainly degraded our democracy, with plenty of help from Democrats.

Mike Huckabee

I’ve been concerned enough about the Coronavirus that I haven’t left my home in almost 6 weeks and have taken extreme precautions to protect my family and myself. It wasn’t irrational fear about getting sick, but respect for the guidelines so we can get this over with. But there is something that scares me worse than a virus and in fact, scares me more than death itself. I’ve made arrangements both for my physical death and my eternal life once that happens. But I’m genuinely afraid that we are losing our civil liberties and our fundamental freedoms as they are ripped from our lives. Shockingly, many American are actually cheering about it. To quote Jesus, “Father, Forgive them-they know NOT what they do!”

In KY, it took a smart and “rule-of-law” federal judge on Saturday afternoon before Easter Sunday to declare that the government couldn’t forbid a Louisville church from offering a drive-in service to its members. The federal judge noted that there was irony in that people were free to visit a liquor store drive-through couldn’t attend a drive-in church service and that he doubted that consumption of alcohol was somehow considered more “essential” than attending church on Easter Sunday.

In Greenville, MS the mayor sent cops to a church to forbid the people from even sitting in their own cars in the church parking lot for a drive-in service and gave $500 tickets to each person sitting in his or her own car. The only violators of safe social distancing were the cops, who went right up to car windows and barked orders and handed tickets to startled worshippers. Thank God, Attorney General Bill Barr has decided to review clear violations of the 1st Amendment in cases like this.

In Michigan, the Governor moved from nanny to tyrant by forbidding people to buy seeds to plant gardens, even though the seeds were on shelves in stores that were open! That resulted in hundreds of people driving around the State Capitol, honking their horns in protest. The Governor stubbornly asserted that she was right. So people planting their own gardens and eating produce they grow is somehow more unhealthy than going to a supermarket and handling produce that may have been touched by dozens of strangers?

In addition, a father was arrested and handcuffed for playing catch with his own daughter in a completely deserted public park. People have been threatened with arrest for setting foot in their own backyards. The New Jersey Governor, when asked about what gave him the right to suspend the Bill of Rights, said, “that’s above my pay grade…we weren’t thinking about the Bill of Rights when we did this.” Obviously not! Well we all need to be thinking about it!

I don’t want any of us to get sick or die from a virus that probably came not from bat-soup, but a Chinese bio-lab. But if we freely surrender our basic civil liberties now, don’t think we will ever get all of them back. I don’t trust government. I was in government long enough to know that the only thing between freedom and tyranny is a vigilant citizen who remembers that government works for us—not the other way around.

I fully understand the Biblical mandate to obey civil authorities, but I also understand that when civil authorities demand of me to do something immoral or against the law or Constitution, I have not merely a right, but a responsibility to resist and to willingly suffer the consequences. Thank God for Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and for that matter the entirety of our Founding Fathers who revolted against racism, Nazism, and tyranny but willingly suffered for doing so because they valued liberty and the law more than life itself.

It’s fine to be afraid of the virus. It’s wise to take precautions. But be afraid of a government that can take your life, your liberty, and these days, even your freedom to worship your Lord.

Mike Huckabee

If you’re like me, you get an initial impression of a story but then, after thinking about it for another day or so, you sometimes realize there are even more far-reaching implications than anyone is talking about. Such was the case for me and my research staff after reading about the newly declassified footnotes from the IG report on the FBI’s FISA warrant applications.

Yes, we know that Russia might have been running a disinformation campaign on Christopher Steele. (This could be true even though we have reason to believe that a lot of it actually came from Glenn Simpson with Steele’s name attached.)  We know the Russians had information by summer of 2016 that he was working for Fusion GPS to help Hillary.

Yes, we know that the FBI knew about this possible Russian involvement --- BEFORE the FISA warrant application was renewed to spy on Carter Page and before the Mueller special counsel had been appointed. (I believe they were duty-bound to alert the FISA Court of any problem with information in their original application, but they ignored that and blithely went on to renew it three more times.)

But there’s something MORE we know: that, contrary to what the FBI said and the Intelligence Community concluded in their January 2017 report, Russia was NOT doing this to help Trump. They weren’t even doing it just to “create chaos,” although that was a plus.

So what was their actual goal? Well, class, if they were doing it to help Trump, if they were “colluding” with Trump to win the election, wouldn't they have been spreading damaging stories about HILLARY?  Why would they be spreading phony stories like the one about Trump attorney Michael Cohen going on a suspicious trip to Prague (he never went), or the one about Trump frolicking with incontinent hookers in a Moscow hotel (it didn’t happen)? These are two examples of stories, as revealed in the IG footnotes, that the FBI thought might have come from a Russian disinformation campaign. Who does that kind of story help? I’ll give you a hint: not Trump.

And why would Christopher Steele’s sub-source be a vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton, as is revealed in the footnotes? Who would his information be intended to help? Hint: Not Trump.

Why would Steele himself, an ardent Clinton supporter who was hired by Hillary and the DNC, who was “desperate” to make sure Trump didn’t win and who had a deadline of Election Day to get his anti-Trump “dossier” out, be doing this project in the first place? Who was he trying to help? Not Trump.

So where does anyone get the idea that the Russians were trying to hurt Hillary and help Trump?

That was the FBI’s narrative in the summer of 2016 and onward, and it led to years of ridiculous investigation, but the truth was actually just the opposite. Everyone connected with this scheme --- Steele, his sources and sub-sources, Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS, the Democratic National Committee, Hillary’s lawyers, the top echelon of the FBI, the director of the CIA, the special counsel team, Democrats on the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, allies at the DOJ and State Department, and, obviously, RUSSIA --- was aligned with Hillary. They were all trying to hurt Donald Trump and help Hillary Clinton, whom they surely believed would be the next U.S. President. This isn’t a wild conspiracy theory; with all we know now, any other conclusion defies logic.

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I would add that with a group of this size, power and scope aligned with Hillary, the then-President of the United States was aware of their activities. Hard to prove, but, again, it defies reason to think he wasn't informed about a lot of it. As Lisa Page texted to Peter Strzok in September 2016: “POTUS wants to know everything we’re doing.”

Here’s a concise report on what the footnotes, just released by acting Director of National intelligence Richard Grenell, reveal:

It was so important for the FBI and whoever else was working with them to “get” Trump that they violated the rights of innocent Americans such as Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, who were literally caught in the “Crossfire.” Papadopoulos even got jail time. 

And speaking of George Papadopoulos, Lindsay Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has just declassified and released documents and transcripts relating to him and the FBI’s targeting of him. The material he released falls into three categories:

1) Declassified information related to “Crossfire Hurricane.”

2) Timeline of correspondence sent and received by the Committee regarding FISA abuse investigation.

3) Corrective action taken by the DOJ and FISA Court as a result of FISA abuse investigation.

We learn from the correspondence that the DOJ has produced the following documents:

–- Transcript of conversation between Papadopoulos and the FBI confidential human source (CHS, or “SPY”).

–- Another transcript of conversation between Papadopoulos and the aforementioned SPY.

--- The original FISA warrant application to spy on Carter Page.

--- Renewals one, two and three of the original Carter Page application (written AFTER the FBI knew of the problems with the “dossier” used therein).

--- A July 2018 letter from the DOJ to the FISA Court alerting them to some of the errors and omissions in the Carter Page application.

You can read the transcript of the conversation between George Papadopoulos and the SPY here, at the link.

When Papadopoulos was informed that this material had been declassified, he had an interesting reaction. A big question, of course, is who sent Hillary supporter and Australian diplomat Alexander Downer to London to meet with Papadopoulos in the spring of 2016? Recall that the FBI said their conversation, in which Papadopoulos reportedly said the Russians had damaging information about Hillary (which appears to have been fed to him by another CHS), is what sparked the opening of “Crossfire Hurricane.” Here’s what Papadopoulos tweeted on Thursday evening:

"Senator Graham in his letter to Australia made it clear that Alexander Downer was instructed to meet with me. Mueller’s team acknowledged he was recording me after I reported him to them (the irony). The key question is, who put the Clinton errand boy up to it? DURHAM KNOWS.” (Emphasis mine.

Papadopoulos Reacts to Declassification of Spygate Transcripts: "Durham Knows" Who Sent Clinton Errand Boy to Meet with Me in London

So we can add Alexander Downer --- and whoever sent him to London --- to the massive column of Spygate characters who were out to HELP HILLARY WIN. And, yes, we can add Russia, too.  Much more to come, because Durham knows.

Mike Huckabee

Wednesday, Germany observed a national moment of silence in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15, 1945. Unfortunately, due to the coronavirus shutdown, the memorial was closed, survivors who had planned to attend were forced to stay home, and events to mark the date had to be postponed to 2021.

Bergen-Belsen was one of the first camps to be liberated by the Allies. It’s estimated that more than 50,000 people died there. British troops found it riddled with disease and more than 13,000 unburied corpses. They freed about 60,000 prisoners who were in shockingly bad condition, sick and starving and in desperate need of medical care. The victims included Anne Frank and her sister Margot, who are now believed to have died of typhus about two months before the Allied troops arrived.

Even though current circumstances have forced the official commemoration to be postponed, you can learn more about this horrific chapter in history online at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum site. Once you read the story of Bergen-Belson, and the other concentration camps, you’ll understand why we must pass it on to future generations so that it is never forgotten and never allowed to happen again.

Mike Huckabee

But wait, there’s more! In my recent commentary on revelations in newly declassified footnotes from the Horowitz report, I said the FBI would try to claim they were duped by the Russians but that they actually weren’t. As of yesterday, we have hard evidence that if the Russians were getting in on the act and supplying disinformation to Steele, FBI agents KNEW IT.

In other words, there was no “duping” going on. Well, maybe of Steele, but not of the FBI.

As Chuck Ross at the DAILY CALLER reports, Russian intelligence knew during the 2016 campaign that Christopher Steele was investigating Trump’s campaign. Just-declassified footnotes from the IG report show not only that Russian intelligence might have been collecting information on Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, but that in January of 2017, a member of the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” team had evidence of this.

Recall that Steele started working for Fusion GPS on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee in June of 2016. There’s a footnote in the IG report that says a June, 2017, intel report “indicated that two persons affiliated with RIS [Russian Intelligence Service] were aware of Steele’s election investigation in early July 2016.”

So the Russians knew he was doing this almost from the beginning and very likely were feeding him disinformation; this would certainly help explain the many inaccuracies.

But, to me, this isn’t the most important part of the story. It was almost a given that the Russians would have known what Steele was up to and would have tried to create a little chaos. (It’s what they do.) The really important part is that the FBI agents KNEW about this. Information released on Wednesday, in the form of these declassified footnotes, shows that the FBI found out on January 12, 2017, two days after BUZZFEED published the “dossier.” At that point, they knew, for example, that the fake story Steele had provided about Michael Cohen going to Prague in August of 2016 was likely Russian disinformation.

Oh, and the fake story about Trump and the hookers in the Moscow hotel? On February 27, 2017, the FBI found out that might have been Russian disinformation, too.

In fact, the FBI had been questioning Steele’s value as a source since 2015 because of his multiple contacts with Russian oligarchs and/or their intermediaries.

There were problems with the sub-source, too (the person who passed information to Steele), and the agents knew about that, too, as of early June 2017. According to these footnotes, the sub-source (not identified) had contacts with an individual in the Russian presidential administration in June/July of 2016. Also, the sub-source had voiced “strong support” for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign. (I would add that Steele had, too.)

So, once the FBI agents involved in “Crossfire Hurricane” knew that Russians might have compromised Steele’s information, did they go to the FISA Court and say, “Um, we see that there might be a problem with some of the information in our original warrant application...”? Heck, no, they just kept right on renewing the application and continuing their spying. Why spoil a good thing? And did they go to BUZZFEED and say, “You know that Trump ‘dossier’ you published a couple of days ago? There’s some false information in there that we are pretty sure was planted by the Russians.” Again, heck no.

As Chuck Ross reports, “The lead supervisory intelligence analyst on the FBI investigation told the IG’s office he did not know as of June 2017 that Steele’s source network “had been penetrated or compromised.”

Read the full report here.

On Wednesday’s HANNITY show, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes said, “...You’re beginning to see what we wanted you to see all along….Here’s the problem that we have with the dirty cops at the FBI and DOJ and elsewhere: ...House Republicans were running an investigation, starting in 2017, on everything ‘Russia,’ remember? Well, here, the whole time, who had this information? The FBI knew that Steele could be compromised.”

"I hope,” he said, “that---there better be people who are charged with lying and obstructing a congressional investigation, because we should have been given this information.”

Nunes also noted that in the Intel Community Report on Russia –- the one that concluded Russia had interfered in our election to help Trump –- Steele’s phony “dossier” had been used. (I would add that both John Brennan and James Comey were pushing hard for it to be included in that report.) “Now, if that is all of the information that we have from all of our intelligence assets, where was the information that we now learn from the Horowitz report? Why was that not in the ICA?”

House Judiciary Committee member Matt Gaetz added that when he questioned Robert Mueller directly, asking if the Steele “dossier” was part of the Russian disinformation campaign, he said, “That’s not my purview.” I would observe that if he really didn’t know the answer to this most basic of questions, then he couldn’t possibly have been in charge of the special counsel investigation into Trump/Russia “collusion” (as if we didn't already have plenty of reason to conclude that), and that makes the Mueller probe a big fraud. And if he did know, then he was lying his head off, which also makes the Mueller probe a big fraud and Mueller himself guilty of lying before Congress.

It’s all becoming clearer by the day. Lying (both to Congress and the FISA Court) and obstruction of a congressional investigation --- those are crimes, the sort of thing U.S. Attorney John Durham has been looking into and (let's hope) making a case. Attorney General Bill Barr had good reason to say that what happened to President Trump was “a travesty.”

Here's another excellent report on the story, from Law Enforcement Today.

Declassified Report: FBI knew Steele Dossier against Trump had ‘Russian disinformation’

Mike Huckabee

There are much bigger issues to deal with than the wounded pride of a gaggle of juvenile Democratic operatives with by-lines (to use Instapundit’s popular description of today’s “journalists.”) Chief of among them is how and when to reopen the economy so that we avoid both a spike in infections and a prolonged depression.

President Trump has said that choosing when to reopen the economy is the biggest decision he’s ever faced. He noted that if it were up to the doctors, they’d shut down the whole world indefinitely, but we can’t let the treatment become more destructive than the problem.

Another fake controversy was set off by the media when Trump said he has “total” authority over when to reopen the economy. Reporters who only recently emerged from their worship of Obama and rediscovered limits on Presidential power went ballistic over that, but it seemed obvious to me that he wasn’t saying he has “total authority” over the US economy, but over the decision he has to make – in other words, he is listening to the doctors, but the decision is up to him, not them or anyone other advisers. That would be the rational interpretation, which, again, is why most of the news outlets seemed to miss it.

As if to prove that Trump knows he doesn’t have total authority over the entire economy, the governors of several states announced their plans to start reopening for business, and I notice that Trump didn't have them arrested for insurrection.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he thinks most states can reopen sooner than May 1.

With the projected infection rates and death tolls dropping sharply, it appears that the American people, through responsible actions like self-isolating, social distancing, wearing masks and gloves, and washing and disinfecting their hands frequently have made a big impact on the spread of the virus. With regular reminders to stay vigilant, there’s no reason why most businesses can’t start reopening.

For instance, if it’s safe for people who wear masks and stand six feet apart to go to Walmart or CVS for food and drugs (stores that have remained open), then why wouldn’t it be just as safe to go to any other business under the same safety and hygiene standards? Then again, you’d have to explain that logic to at least one Governor, who seems to think it’s safe to go to Walmart to buy bread, but if you also pick up a package of tomato seeds or a pair of shorts, WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!

This is a problem that can only be remedied by putting on your masks and gloves and standing six feet apart in long lines to vote out any authoritarians who would use a health crisis to abuse power and shred the Constitution.