Sunday Standard - February 27
Good morning! Here are the top stories from this week that I think you will want to read. Topics include:
Bible Verse of the Day - Jeremiah 31:1
Lesley Stahl needs to apologize. Think she EVER will?
Trudeau’s “Emergency Powers” come up for a vote
Invasion for Real
Romney was right about Russia
America the Beautiful
Reeder: RIP Sally Kellerman
We know: Spygate was "A Hillary Clinton Enterprise"
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
“At that time,” declares the Lord, “I will be the God of all the families of Israel, and they will be my people.”
Jeremiah 31:1
Lesley Stahl of 60 MINUTES owes President Trump a big-time apology.
For anyone who still hasn’t seen why she needs to apologize, here’s the video…
Here’s the transcript…
She needs to apologize for “correcting” Trump for saying he’d been spied on. We say this for a number of reasons, but mainly because special counsel John Durham says in court documents that he has evidence showing that Trump's campaign and transition actually WERE SPIED ON.
Think Lesley will realize her grievous error and come groveling? She won’t. She and her colleagues are too invested in thinking they’re right on this, even when they’re wrong, and The New York Times is helping them delude themselves. More on that in a moment.
Meanwhile, Mark Levin was blunt about the spying on his Sunday FOX News show, just as we have been for over five years: There’s been spying going on, he said, illegal and unconstitutional spying, against a President of the United States. “[Trump’s] campaign was spied on, his transition was spied on, his presidency was spied on. SPIED ON.” The media were part of it and are now trying to cover it up. It’s the greatest scandal in American history, Levin said, and Levin is a historian par excellence.
He speculated that President Obama “had to know a lot,” simply because he, Levin, knew a lot, and they both “read the same newspapers.” Plus, as President, Obama got briefings twice a day from the very agencies that were purportedly spying on a candidate who was in league with Putin. How could there not have been conversations about this? The idea that it wouldn’t have come up is preposterous.
Recall that Obama, in the last days of his presidency, gave the National Security Agency more latitude to share “globally intercepted personal communications” with the other 16 intel agencies, BEFORE applying privacy protections. Never mind the question of constitutionality –- why would he do this on his way out the door?
Levin spoke Sunday with former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe. The whole episode would be good to see if you missed it, but here’s the link just to that excellent interview.
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6298183244001#sp=show-clips
Ratcliffe notes that “the mainstream media is trying to re-use [the report] as a way to...tamp down the idea that the Trump campaign wasn’t spied on because they can’t find the specific reference to that in something that John Durham puts in a federal pleading.”
Here’s something we hadn’t heard: Ratcliffe told Levin that on February 5, 2020 he questioned FBI Director Christopher Wray as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, asking him “point-blank” if, since an FBI agent had lied and there wasn’t really a proper justification to spy on the Trump campaign, the Trump campaign had been illegally spied on. Wray said yes, it had happened, and it was illegal and “totally unacceptable.”
When Ratcliffe became DNI, he asked to see all the evidence there was on Trump-Russia collusion, and there was none. “But we had all kinds of intelligence about FAKE Russia collusion” that was part of what Hillary’s team created to smear Trump. In fact, Ratcliffe declassified then-CIA Director John Brennan’s handwritten notes, in which Brennan mentions that he’s briefing Obama, Biden and Obama’s national security team on it.
He explained that even though some would like to dismiss this as political dirty tricks, when you start taking false allegations to government agencies such as the FBI and the CIA, trying to make it look authentic by opening an investigation, “that’s all sorts of criminal activity.” Lying, conspiracy, possibly racketeering. He knows Durham is looking at all that because they had conversations about it when he was DNI. But he emphasized that it can take a long time to put that kind of case together.
Durham is revealing more of the details now, Ratcliffe said, but the issue of whether or not this happened “has long been settled.”
Devin Nunes, in an appearance on FOX News’ “Sunday Morning Future” with Maria Bartiromo, pointed out that the committee he chaired, the then-Republican-led House Intelligence Committee, had carried out an investigation that led to 14 criminal referrals being made to the DOJ, even though they had to work largely with circumstantial evidence. This was because they “were misled or outright lied to by government officials.” Ratcliffe as DNI was able to declassify documents that now serve as direct evidence that Nunes’ committee should have seen.
Nunes also recalled the disinformation campaign that was run against members of his committee and all who disagreed with the Trump-Russia story. When anyone said the Trump-collaborating-with-Russia story was a hoax, the media would say, “Well, you must be a Russian agent!”
The difference now, he said, is that Durham is working with direct evidence. An example of new direct evidence Durham has would be the missing cell phones that have now turned up from IG Horowitz. (“Durham couldn’t even get to them...for a year and a half,” Nunes said.)
As Nunes explained it, “What they’ve creatively done here...is they set up legal avenues, using lawyers, to essentially launder all of this spying that was done and communicate to top FBI and DOJ officials. And Durham is starting to piece all of that together.” He hopes Durham can bring conspiracy charges, as he sees “a dozen or more laws” broken, “and people need to pay a price for it.”
“For sure by early 2016, all of the high-level people within the Obama-Biden administration knew about this,” he said. “...A lot of these Obama-Biden people have ‘failed upward,’ and they’re now in high-level positions...in the new Biden administration.” These include Biden’s national security adviser, the large-scale Russia Hoax perpetrator Jake Sullivan.
Nunes called this a “classic frame job” that went to all levels of government, “from the FBI to the Department of Justice, all the way through most of the intelligence agencies,” along with “the culpability and the involvement of the media.” This is what turned the already left-leaning media into “a propaganda machine for the left-wing party in America.”
Nunes said we don’t know what other direct evidence Durham has, but because he’s not putting out what he has in leaks but in very strongly-worded court documents, he finds it “hard to believe that he doesn’t have the goods on a lot of people.
“The question will be, how high can he go and who can he get? I think we all want to know that, but we need to let him do his job.”
So, at this point, why won’t Lesley Stahl finally apologize to President Trump for her mistake? Well, it most likely has to do with a collective self-delusion going on with the left. They cannot admit they were wrong about this. So The New York Times ran a laughable piece by Charlie Savage featuring Democrat talking points that he insists show Durham’s narrative to be “off track.” The usual suspects lapped it up: Vanity Fair, CNN, Jimmy Kimmel…
But Margot Cleveland saw it, too, and came back with a great commentary refuting it point by point. It’s a must-read...especially for Lesley Stahl, who still needs to apologize.
https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/18/5-media-lies-about-the-latest-special-counsel-revelations/
Trudeau’s “Emergency Powers” come up for a vote
If Canada is going to allow Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to turn a once-free nation into an autocratic police state, then Parliament will have to vote today to allow it. Trudeau wants to make many of his “emergency” powers permanent.
But the emergency powers act he invoked to crush the truckers’ freedom protesters can only hold for seven days unless Parliament votes to extend it, and may the eternal light of shame shine on any member who does.
There have been so many developments and so many outrages just in the past couple of days that I can’t list them all. Here are just a few: The arrests of protesters in Ottawa have continued, although some say they weren’t taken into custody, just driven out of town and released, and many of them returned. This is possibly because they weren’t actually breaking any laws so there wasn’t anything they could be charged with if they were taken to a police station.
It turns out that the elderly lady in a mobility scooter who was trampled by a police horse was an Indigenous People’s leader of full Mohawk heritage. Or as Trudeau would call her, “a white supremacist.”
The government crackdown on rights has gone so far overboard that people are having their bank accounts frozen just because they made donations to the truckers weeks ago before Trudeau even invoked his emergency, creating a new category of retroactive thought crimes.
https://instapundit.com/504817/
Coffee is also apparently insurrectionist. A café owner was reportedly threatened with arrest for serving coffee to truckers. And here’s video of police hitting a woman’s camera and threatening her for the crime of being from Alberta and trying to walk somewhere to buy coffee.
This protest was never really about vaccine mandates (it’s reported that 90% of the truckers are already vaccinated.) It was certainly not about racism, as most of the truckers are minorities. It was about the heavy hand of the government crushing the people’s rights. If that wasn’t clear to begin with, it certainly should be now.
Instapundit has been doing a good job of rounding up all the latest stories and comments on this dark time in Canada’s history. You can find a lot more here:
https://instapundit.com/504808/
https://instapundit.com/504761/
And David Solway at PJ Media has a stark warning for Canadians titled “Requiem For a Nation.”
https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/02/19/requiem-for-a-nation-n1560630
I hope Canadians will read it because as Solway writes, it’s up to them whether events of the next few days miraculously save their Charter of Rights and Freedoms from being “nothing but an irrelevant scrap of parchment,” or whether “Canada has been transformed into a federal caricature” whose “leaders are unaccountable and depraved and the majority of the population, to quote Aristotle, 'are not capable of sufficient rational appreciation of political ends.'”
Finally, here’s a warning for Americans who think they can ignore what’s happening to our neighbor to the north: William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection says that Trudeau is following the same playbook that the left is following here to cement their own tyrannical rule: declare anyone who disagrees with them to be a lower class of “others” who hold “unacceptable views,” and have government collude with big tech, the financial industry and other systems that everyone relies on to shut their opponents out of the means of communication and the basic necessities of life.
It’s working in China, with their surveillance state and “social credit" system. If China’s too far away for Americans to see the dangers and stand up to stop it, then is Ottawa close enough?