John Kerry, Meet George Logan Is it a crime to meet with Iranian officials? It may well be. Seth Lipsky
https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-kerry-meet-george-logan-1537129799
George Logan, call your office. That’s my reaction to news that former Secretary of State John Kerry has, by his own account, been meeting privately with Iranian officials to try to save the nuclear deal.
Logan was the Pennsylvania politician whose unauthorized efforts to end the Quasi-War between France and America led to the Logan Act of 1799, which outlaws freelance diplomacy.
The New York Post has called Mr. Kerry’s conniving a “textbook violation” of the law. President Trump, after all, has pulled out of the nuclear accord and decided on a different course. Iran’s leaders, at least for the moment, are hanging onto the deal. Why not? It has brought billions to their coffers as they expand their military campaigns in the Mideast.
Last week the New York Times quoted “experts” as suggesting that the ayatollahs are “gambling” that Mr. Trump will be “crippled” in the midterm elections or swept out of office in 2020.
So have the Democrats been colluding with them? Or, as radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Mr. Kerry last week, has the former secretary of state been “trying to coach” Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif?
“That’s not how it works,” Mr. Kerry said. “What I have done is tried to elicit from him what Iran might be willing to do in order to change the dynamic in the Middle East.” He insisted he’d been “very blunt.” Mr. Kerry also told Mr. Hewitt that the administration appears “hell-bent-for-leather determined to pursue a regime change strategy” in Iran. “I would simply caution that the United States historically has not had a great record in regime change,” Mr. Kerry said. He added that it makes it “very difficult, if not impossible” for Iran to negotiate.
This is Mr. Kerry’s modus operandi. In 1970, as an antiwar Vietnam veteran, he met in Paris with enemy envoys while American GIs were still in combat. Back in Washington, in his notorious 1971 testimony, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that if the U.S. set a date for quitting Vietnam, the communists would allow GIs safe passage.
Sen. George Aiken of Vermont asked whether the North Vietnamese might help carry our bags. “I would say they would be more prone to do that than the army of the South Vietnamese,” Mr. Kerry quipped. The hearing broke into laughter and applause at the expense of America’s allies.
Once Mr. Kerry became a senator himself in 1985, he promptly jetted off, with fellow freshman, Tom Harkin of Iowa, to meet with another Marxist adversary, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. “From my vantage point,” Mr. Kerry writes in his new memoir, “it was far from a simple black-and-white battle of good versus evil. Even then it felt much more like a classic choice between shades of gray.” So the pair brought back a cease-fire proposal. That infuriated the Reagan administration.
Sen. Barry Goldwater suggested Mr. Kerry had violated the Logan Act. No charges were brought. The law hasn’t been used in 166 years—how could one compel foreign interlocutors to testify?—and no one has ever been convicted of violating it. That may be because circumstances are often cloudy, or involve members of Congress, such as calls for Logan charges against 47 senators who warned Iran in 2015 of the weakness of any agreement not approved by Congress.
In 2017 Democratic lawmakers even sent a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, asking for an investigation of President-elect Trump for alleged unauthorized diplomacy. They were upset at his phone calls with foreign leaders during the transition.
Yet has there ever been a case as clear as Mr. Kerry? The president tweeted that Mr. Kerry’s meetings with “the very hostile Iranian regime” were “illegal.” Will he take care that the laws be faithfully executed?
Mr. Lipsky is editor of the New York Sun.
Comments are closed.
