Sunday Standard - June 19
Good morning and a Happy Father's Day to all the Dads out there! Here are the top stories from this week that I think you will want to read:
Thursday's January 6 hearing: Pence's role
The Kangaroo Court
Acts of Domestic Terrorism
Curious: Does Jan. 6 committee WANT to stop Trump from running?
Breaking: John Solomon obtains secret Jan. 6 report
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
1. DAILY BIBLE VERSE
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
1 Corinthians 13:13
If you have a favorite Bible Verse you want to see in one of our newsletters, please email chris@mikehuckabee.com.
Thursday's January 6 hearing: Pence's role
This was originally published on June 17.
During NBC’s Thursday coverage of the January 6 committee hearings, they cut away to golf. Hey, it was the U.S. Open. Here’s Nick Arama at REDSTATE.
The focus on Thursday was Vice President Mike Pence and what he went through that day. Not that there was any cross-examination in an attempt to really know. We did learn that Pence spent several hours in a secure location, which appeared to be a loading area deep within the complex, and we heard committee Democrats praise him lavishly for his courage in not going along with Trump. Greg Jacob, former counsel to Pence, said that “Pence’s instinct” told him there was no way the framers of the Constitution intended the VP to have that kind of power.
It seems to me that being pulled into this story might actually have helped some viewers understand how Trump was feeling at the time. Obviously, he believed the election HAD been stolen by Democrats in those battleground states and that the Judicial Branch had not done its job. Yes, he chose to listen to the advisers who said what he wanted to hear, as we all do. And the way he saw it, he wasn’t trying to instigate a coup. He was hoping to prevent one, by the left. And some on the right did go way too far.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/house/january-6-hearing-pence-decision-to-certify-election
Mark Levin, speaking Thursday night on HANNITY, pointed out that while Biden, Schumer and Pelosi criticize Trump for not responding “quickly enough” to the January 6 riot, they still haven’t responded to the assassination plot against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanugh, which would certainly represent a more serious threat to our Republic than a bunch of unarmed ragtag Trump supporters.
They also haven’t responded to “the threats that are coming down, the potential need for the National Guard to protect the Supreme Court” when the decision is announced on their landmark abortion case.
He reminded viewers of how “extraordinarily violent” the left is, evoking the summer of 2020, the riots accompanying Trump’s inauguration –- to try to prevent HIM being sworn in as President (that apparently was okay) –- and the attack at the White House that injured 50 Secret Service agents.
So after putting January 6 in perspective, he said he was “disgusted” at the 40 minutes he watched on Thursday, seeing that it was “choreographed,” with teleprompters, spliced-up and cherry-picked video, and no contrary witnesses, contrary evidence, motions, challenges or cross-examination. No opposition whatsoever.
Even the legal analysts sit there on TV and say, we learned a lot today, he said. “You learned NOTHING."
As for the testimony regarding Pence, Levin pointed out that their chief witness, Michael Luttig, was not an adviser to Pence and never spoke to Pence. Levin’s sources close to Pence say Luttig “volunteered” his analysis by submitting it unsolicited to the Vice President’s office. None of that came out in testimony on Thursday --- could it possibly be because there was no cross-examination?
J. Michael Luttig is a conservative former federal judge who testified that Pence had no authority to stop Congress from certifying the election –- he had tweeted this on January 5 –- and that this would have brought on a “constitutional crisis.” He painted a picture of Trump as someone desperately trying to cling to power and called his efforts a “war on democracy.”
FORBES reports that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz clerked for Luttig and considers him to be a mentor. It would be very interesting to get Cruz’s take on his testimony. Amazingly, Luttig’s other law clerk was Trump attorney John Eastman, the very adviser who was the one encouraging Trump –- and Pence –- to challenge the election. What an interesting scenario. If only there were some real Republicans involved in these hearings, to bring in some cross-examination…
Levin also brought up the letter we reported on yesterday, from former U.S. attorney in Philadelphia William McSwain to President Trump, dating from June 2021. Recall that he was telling Trump that Attorney General Bill Barr had instructed him not to say anything publicly about the allegations of election “irregularities” that had been coming to his office, but to pass these along to the state attorney general, who had said Trump could not win.
“Wouldn’t it be nice when Barr was testifying, that somebody was there to challenge Barr? Somebody was there to challenge Luttig?” Levin asked. He pointed out that even some leftist legal professors agreed with Trump attorney John Eastman’s position “before it was John Eastman’s [and Trump’s] position.” The final say on election law was supposed to be with state legislators, he said, not with judges, and Levin holds that Trump “had every right” to ask state legislatures to look into these matters.
He also said it’s not clear under the 12th Amendment what the responsibilities of the Vice President are in such a situation. There needed to be challenges in the hearing about this.
“This is a railroad job,” Levin said of these hearings, “pure and simple. And it’s time the media get off its a-- and pay attention, and legal analysts act like real lawyers.”
Couldn’t have said it better.
The Kangaroo Court
This article was originally published on June 17th.
Nancy Pelosi has been conducting a kangaroo-court sham hearing about the January 6 riots, and it’s so theatrical that her committee hired a former “Good Morning, America” TV producer to stage it so it would be good TV. But it’s been very bad government. And the person who ought to be most ashamed of herself isn’t even Pelosi. It’s a pretend Republican from Wyoming, Liz Cheney.
According to the rules of the committee, there was supposed to be bipartisan participation, with the Republicans appointed by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. The names he submitted were real Republicans who were determined to make sure the committee acted in good faith. Well, Nancy couldn’t have that, so she arbitrarily rejected the Republican appointees and appointed her own lapdog pet Republicans who would run to the feeding dish when she rang the bell. The only two she could find who would disgrace themselves by being her tightly leashed love-pups were Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who at least had the dignity of not running again for his Congressional seat after he’s made a fool of himself by selling out to the likes of AOC and the radical Squad.
But Liz Cheney has no dignity left. Her personal animosity toward Donald Trump has eclipsed every last ounce of integrity she might have ever possessed, and she joyfully joined the most partisan and vicious Trump-haters in DC to try and blame Donald Trump for a breakdown in security at the Capitol, despite the irrefutable fact that he urged Pelosi, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, and others to allow him to supply up to 20,000 troops for security that day. They all turned him down, and then they had the audacity to blame him for a rally that turned into the riot.
The reason I hold Liz Cheney in such contempt is because she is pretending to be such the law-and-order stickler. But every conservative I know has clearly spoken out against those who did damage to property at the Capitol, or who threatened or challenged a police officer that day. But what Liz Cheney has NOT done is to demand an accounting for the unjustified shooting of the only person who died in the Capitol building that day—an unarmed woman and Air Force veteran named Ashli Babbitt who was shot dead by a Capitol Hill police officer –- but about which the details of the investigation have never been made completely public.
Liz Cheney has not demanded an accounting for Ashli Babbitt’s death. Nor has she said a word about the disgusting and humiliating treatment of Peter Navarro, who was arrested as he boarded a plane last Friday to come to Nashville to be on my show. The FBI office is literally next door to his apartment—next door! He offered in writing and on the phone to voluntarily come in should they wish to talk to him. Instead, they followed him to the airport and waited until he was boarding the flight to Nashville, when they arrested him, handcuffed him, and hauled him away in unnecessary humiliation. They then put him in leg shackles and strip-searched the 72-year-old Harvard scholar who had never been arrested.
Will Liz Cheney demand answers as to why he was treated this way but former Attorney General Eric Holder wasn’t? Holder was charged with criminal contempt of Congress, and even 17 Democrats voted for it because he refused to answer questions about the disastrous Fast-and-Furious operation that resulted in the death of border agent Brian Terry. And Adam Kinzinger, who cried about January 6, didn’t shed a tear about Ashli Babbitt or the treatment of Peter Navarro.
Here's what some of us want to see: Send Liz Cheney and other swamp creatures home and replace them with liberty-loving, courageous constitutionalists who will demand accountability for the corrupt officials at the FBI and DOJ and in the Biden White House who have persecuted their political opponents with the power of the government and hidden the crimes of the connected. As for Republican candidates or incumbents who won’t do that, vote them out and replace them with those who will fight for us and our country. And I mean fight like the third monkey on the ramp to Noah’s Ark when it starts to rain!