excalibur
Diamond Member
- Mar 19, 2015
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Wow!
The level of desperation is reaching a new low from Harris and Democrats.
But then again Democrats have come out against free speech multiple times the past month, Hillary, John Kerry, others, now this.
Funny, Kerry was doing private diplomacy while a private citizen. Oh well, that's the old Democrats double standard at work. The only standard they have.
Whatever else you may think of Trump’s alleged post-presidential contacts with Putin, they weren’t crimes.
We’re in the campaign stretch-run, so the rival candidates are liable to make any allegation against each other if it might sway voters who are already casting ballots. No surprise, then, to find a Harris spokesperson blathering to Axios that Donald Trump’s reported post-presidential contact with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin may warrant criminal prosecution under the Logan Act. The spokesperson is unidentified by Axios, which makes sense: You’d presumably want your identity concealed, too, if you said something so idiotic.
Earlier this week, reporting about Bob Woodward’s new book, War, spotlighted the author’s claim that Trump, since his presidency ended in 2021, has had at least seven phone calls with Putin.
As I have pointed out a number of times, the Logan Act (codified in §953 of federal penal law) is an almost-certainly unconstitutional statute that purports to criminalize a private citizen’s correspondence or other “intercourse” with foreign governments and their agents. It is a vestige of the John Adams administration’s roughshod run over free-speech rights. I invoke the qualifier “almost-certainly” in describing the act as unconstitutional because the federal courts have never weighed in on the question and probably never will. Recognizing its patent infirmity, the Justice Department never tries to enforce it. In its over two centuries on the books, the Logan Act has not resulted in a single conviction. In fact, there have only been two indictments under the act, the last one 172 years ago.
For attribution, Susan Rice, a former top aide in both the Obama-Biden and Biden-Harris administrations, echoed the Harris campaign’s Logan Act drivel. Rice knows better. Hence, I must assume that, rather than seriously suggesting the Democrats start yet another lawfare boondoggle, she was shading Trump. As president, Trump absurdly suggested that her colleague, former Obama secretary of state John Kerry, should be investigated under the Logan Act over his contacts with Iranian officials.
Of course, Rice is omitting some inconvenient history. The Obama-Biden administration and its Justice Department, led by the FBI, relied on the Logan Act as a baseless predicate for investigating Trump on suspicion that he was a covert agent of Russia. Indeed, that was the rationalization for the bureau’s bracing of then-Trump national-security adviser Michael Flynn — interrogating him over perfectly legal and routine conversations he’d had with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. while he was an official on the Trump transition team.
Taken seriously, which it should never be, the Logan Act could be a basis for opening a criminal investigation of, say, former president Barack Obama, who visited then-British prime minister Rishi Sunak in London earlier this year. The Clinton Foundation certainly has had some interesting contacts with foreign agents and dignitaries, including Russians — maybe DOJ’s crack Logan Act experts ought to be scrutinizing those, too. And it may be too late to indict former House speaker Nancy Pelosi for those 2007 talks she held with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in defiance of the Bush administration’s admonitions; but under the Biden-Harris lawfare approach — in which guilt is beside the point as long as government agencies can make the process the penalty — surely DOJ could open an investigation, issue some subpoenas, and inflict some pain, right?
To date, the Biden-Harris DOJ has taken no action against Robert Malley, its chief Iran envoy, who has been under investigation for about two years on suspicion of transferring classified intelligence to Iran. (In that same time frame, the Biden-Harris DOJ has given Biden a complete pass for his decades of classified-information offenses while simultaneously indicting Trump on about three dozen such charges.) A Malley aide, Ariane Tabatabai, to this day holds a sensitive counterintelligence position in the Biden-Harris administration (chief of staff to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations) despite her participation in the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI) — a program run by Tehran’s foreign ministry, which induced academics and researchers to advocate publicly for the mullahs’ policy preferences. One of Tabatabai’s co-authors while working on behalf of IEI was Phil Gordon, Vice President Harris’s national-security adviser.
www.nationalreview.com
The level of desperation is reaching a new low from Harris and Democrats.
But then again Democrats have come out against free speech multiple times the past month, Hillary, John Kerry, others, now this.
Funny, Kerry was doing private diplomacy while a private citizen. Oh well, that's the old Democrats double standard at work. The only standard they have.
Whatever else you may think of Trump’s alleged post-presidential contacts with Putin, they weren’t crimes.
We’re in the campaign stretch-run, so the rival candidates are liable to make any allegation against each other if it might sway voters who are already casting ballots. No surprise, then, to find a Harris spokesperson blathering to Axios that Donald Trump’s reported post-presidential contact with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin may warrant criminal prosecution under the Logan Act. The spokesperson is unidentified by Axios, which makes sense: You’d presumably want your identity concealed, too, if you said something so idiotic.
Earlier this week, reporting about Bob Woodward’s new book, War, spotlighted the author’s claim that Trump, since his presidency ended in 2021, has had at least seven phone calls with Putin.
As I have pointed out a number of times, the Logan Act (codified in §953 of federal penal law) is an almost-certainly unconstitutional statute that purports to criminalize a private citizen’s correspondence or other “intercourse” with foreign governments and their agents. It is a vestige of the John Adams administration’s roughshod run over free-speech rights. I invoke the qualifier “almost-certainly” in describing the act as unconstitutional because the federal courts have never weighed in on the question and probably never will. Recognizing its patent infirmity, the Justice Department never tries to enforce it. In its over two centuries on the books, the Logan Act has not resulted in a single conviction. In fact, there have only been two indictments under the act, the last one 172 years ago.
For attribution, Susan Rice, a former top aide in both the Obama-Biden and Biden-Harris administrations, echoed the Harris campaign’s Logan Act drivel. Rice knows better. Hence, I must assume that, rather than seriously suggesting the Democrats start yet another lawfare boondoggle, she was shading Trump. As president, Trump absurdly suggested that her colleague, former Obama secretary of state John Kerry, should be investigated under the Logan Act over his contacts with Iranian officials.
Of course, Rice is omitting some inconvenient history. The Obama-Biden administration and its Justice Department, led by the FBI, relied on the Logan Act as a baseless predicate for investigating Trump on suspicion that he was a covert agent of Russia. Indeed, that was the rationalization for the bureau’s bracing of then-Trump national-security adviser Michael Flynn — interrogating him over perfectly legal and routine conversations he’d had with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. while he was an official on the Trump transition team.
Taken seriously, which it should never be, the Logan Act could be a basis for opening a criminal investigation of, say, former president Barack Obama, who visited then-British prime minister Rishi Sunak in London earlier this year. The Clinton Foundation certainly has had some interesting contacts with foreign agents and dignitaries, including Russians — maybe DOJ’s crack Logan Act experts ought to be scrutinizing those, too. And it may be too late to indict former House speaker Nancy Pelosi for those 2007 talks she held with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in defiance of the Bush administration’s admonitions; but under the Biden-Harris lawfare approach — in which guilt is beside the point as long as government agencies can make the process the penalty — surely DOJ could open an investigation, issue some subpoenas, and inflict some pain, right?
To date, the Biden-Harris DOJ has taken no action against Robert Malley, its chief Iran envoy, who has been under investigation for about two years on suspicion of transferring classified intelligence to Iran. (In that same time frame, the Biden-Harris DOJ has given Biden a complete pass for his decades of classified-information offenses while simultaneously indicting Trump on about three dozen such charges.) A Malley aide, Ariane Tabatabai, to this day holds a sensitive counterintelligence position in the Biden-Harris administration (chief of staff to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations) despite her participation in the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI) — a program run by Tehran’s foreign ministry, which induced academics and researchers to advocate publicly for the mullahs’ policy preferences. One of Tabatabai’s co-authors while working on behalf of IEI was Phil Gordon, Vice President Harris’s national-security adviser.
Harris Campaign Revives Logan Act Idiocy | National Review
Whatever else you may think of Trump’s alleged post-presidential contacts with Putin, they weren’t crimes.
www.nationalreview.com
