Donald Trump, the man whose campaign met with hostile foreign power officials and spies during the 2016 campaign, just tried to accuse Democratic former Secretary of State John Kerry of possibly violating the Logan Act.
Saudi Arabia and others in OPEC will more than make up the Oil Flow difference in our now Full Sanctions on Iranian Oil. Iran is being given VERY BAD advice by @JohnKerry and people who helped him lead the U.S. into the very bad Iran Nuclear Deal. Big violation of Logan Act?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 22, 2019
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Donald Trump is implementing his reversal of the Obama nuclear deal, so now the U.S. will end all waivers granted to 8 economies allowing them to buy Iranian oil without facing U.S. sanctions, effective in May. This decision led to oil prices skyrocketing to their highest levels in 2019.
Trump is referring to Kerry meeting with Iranian officials and reportedly telling them to wait Trump out.
The Logan Act is a federal law that criminalizes negotiation by unauthorized persons with foreign governments having a dispute with the United States. No one has been prosecuted under the Logan Act since 1852.
You know, like Trump supporter Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, who misled Congress on details of contact he had with a Russian banker in January 2017, according to the redacted Mueller report.
Mueller’s report showed that Prince misled Congress about an encounter Prince had in the Seychelles with Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund who reports directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The two different accounts revolved around how Prince and Dmitriev came to meet in Seychelles on Jan. 11, 2017 and how many times they spoke.
Perjury before Congress is a crime punishable by up to 5 years in prison.
Another possible Logan Act violation was Mike Flynn speaking to Russia about Obama-imposed sanctions prior to Trump taking office.
In December of 2016, Flynn called the Russian ambassador and asked that Russia not retaliate against new U.S. sanctions. This is another Trump-campaign possible Logan Act violation.
Republicans aren’t new to Logan Act violation-adjacent acts, so if they want to start prosecuting them, there’s a long line.
In March 2015, 47 Republican senators released a letter to the Iranian government trying to undermine President Obama’s attempts to broker a nuclear arms agreement between Iran and 6 major powers, suggesting that because he wouldn’t always be president, whatever he did could be undone by the next president.
In other words, Republicans were going around Obama with foreign powers and inviting them to treat Obama as if he weren’t even president.
There is a rather huge difference between Kerry telling another country to wait Trump out in hopes of tamping down lashing out and Trump’s people telling a hostile country that helped them “win” an election to wait until Trump is in office so that he could revoke the harsh Obama sanctions on Russia for their meddling in the 2016 election that they handed to Trump.
It’s likely that Trump doesn’t even know what the Logan Act is, but he has heard it mentioned regarding his own campaign and so in typical Trump fashion, has been waiting for the moment he could lash out using the act to attack a Democrat to plant that false flag with his cult so they are less likely to care when they hear about his own betrayals of this country.
If Donald Trump really wants to start prosecuting the Logan Act, all patriots can say is: “Please proceed.”
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