Whatever else you may think of Trump’s alleged post-presidential contacts with Putin, they weren’t crimes.
Whatever else you may think of Trump’s alleged post-presidential contacts with Putin, they weren’t crimes.
W e’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?
I don’t mean to be too flip, but could anything be more rich than Harris or the incumbent administration raising the specter of the Logan Act?
Put aside for a moment the $27 million that the president and his family members raked in from their years-long enterprise of peddling Joe Biden’s political influence — particularly when he was Obama’s vice president — to agents of corrupt and anti-American regimes, most prominently China’s. 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.
Concededly, I take Bob Woodward books with a grain of salt. He doesn’t reveal his sources, and his narratives are shaped by a long-played game of rewarding cooperative sources at the expense of those unwilling to dish. But still, did any of us really need a new Woodward book to know Trump’s gushing admiration for Putin is a disgrace?
Of course not. The Democrats’ collusion fable was condemnable because it was a shocking abuse of power in which the government’s law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus was politically weaponized, relying on bogus, Clinton campaign-generated opposition research to slander Trump as a clandestine agent of the Kremlin. That hardly changes the fact — and it is a fact — that Trump’s paeans to the smarts and toughness of Putin, a ruthless anti-American despot, are deeply disturbing.
Are you worried that Trump will get rolled by Putin? You’ll get no argument from me. We will quarrel, however, if your indignation regarding Russia and its ruler is a case of Trump myopia.
I recounted in Ball of Collusion how Democratic emissaries reached out to Soviet officials to try to boost their campaigns against President Gerald Ford in 1976, and against Ronald Reagan in both 1980 and 1984. In his determination not to dance on the Soviet grave when the evil empire imploded — and when a historical accounting of its monstrousness should have been an imperative — President George H. W. Bush even discouraged Ukraine from breaking away from Moscow in what critics tartly labeled his “Chicken Kiev” speech. (Bush-41 later contended that he’d been misinterpreted.)
President Bill Clinton strove to integrate Russia into the international financial system, bringing Moscow into what had been the “G-7” (it became the Group of Eight) even though its third-rate economy and repressive political system warranted no such treatment. Clinton also joined Russia and Great Britain in the Budapest Memorandum that — laughably, it now seems — purported to ensure Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and borders.
President George W. Bush enthusiastically seconded Clinton’s call for the admission of Russia — which was by then under Putin’s control — into the World Trade Organization. The Bush-43 administration also pushed through the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty that Clinton had negotiated with Russia — which calls for us to cooperate when the Putin regime seeks to obtain testimony, interview subjects of investigations, locate and identify suspects, transfer persons held in custody, and freeze assets. With Bush’s approval, then-senators Barack Obama and Richard Lugar won millions of funding to induce Ukraine to destroy much of its conventional military arsenal (it had already given up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for Clinton’s security assurances). After all, what did Ukraine have to fear from Russia, right? The Bush White House and State Department also portrayed Putin’s regime as a “strategic partner” in proposing the U.S.-Russia Civilian Nuclear Power Agreement. That delusion was popped when Putin invaded Georgia and annexed swaths of its territory in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, at which point the chastened Bush administration withdrew its proposal from Congress’s consideration.
Naturally, that didn’t stop the Obama-Biden administration, under the guidance of then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton, from attempting to “reset” relations with Putin . . . even as Russia persisted in occupying parts of Georgia (as it still does today). The Obama-Biden administration revived and put into effect the U.S.-Russia Civilian Nuclear Power Agreement (as an executive agreement that the White House induced Congress to support in statutory law). Obama and Biden not only brought Russia into the WTO; they teamed up with Putin’s foreign ministry in a technology initiative dubbed “Skolkovo,” in which the U.S. would help stand up Russia’s version of Silicon Valley — notwithstanding objections by the Defense Department and the FBI that the enhancement of Moscow’s military and cyber capabilities would exacerbate the threats it posed, both geopolitically and to the Russian people. Knowing Putin and having seen him swallow up parts of Georgia, why would the Obama-Biden administration do such a thing? Because, as Secretary Clinton wrote in a 2012 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Trade with Russia Is a Win-Win.” I imagine it seemed less so in 2014, when Putin seized and annexed Crimea in the midst of a war against Ukraine that, it turns out, was only just beginning.
During the Biden-Harris administration, Putin expanded his aggression from the border region, where he’d sought to seize a chunk of eastern Ukraine, to the ongoing all-out invasion, by which he hopes to swallow Ukraine whole — however brutally, and however long it takes. It is a horrific war of aggression. There is no doubt that Putin methodically planned his Ukraine gambit for years. It is equally certain, though, that he was encouraged by American weakness, illustrated by the debacle that was the Biden-Harris withdrawal from Afghanistan and by our deteriorating president’s reckless suggestion that there would be minimal Western response if Russia limited itself to a “minor incursion.”
Undoubtedly, Biden would tell you that he — advised by “last person in the room” Harris — was ingeniously calibrating his signals to Putin, in order to best manage a mercurial adversary. Obama would tell you that the blandishments to Putin, extended in collaboration with his veep and secretary of state, were intended to achieve stability by enticing a revanchist despot into changing his KGB ways. Upon peering into Putin’s eyes, Bush 43 somehow discovered a “strategic partner” in Putin’s soul, hoping against hope that Putin would start acting like one. Certainly Bush 41 and Clinton saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to bring the fledgling Russian Federation into the post-World War II Western order as if Moscow had no decades-long history as that order’s mortal enemy.
Trump obviously has a similar idea, but his carrots, as nauseating as they are, have come with real sticks.
Yes, like his predecessors, Trump wants to improve relations with Russia by enticing Putin with treacly rhetoric and profitable collaborations, in hopes of getting better behavior and stability. He also has a demonstrated willingness, however, to slam and squeeze Putin when the treacle fails — attacking Putin’s forces in Syria; increasing U.S. defense spending and inducing NATO countries to increase their defense spending; aggressively promoting U.S. energy development and exports; imposing sanctions on Putin’s Nord Stream 2 energy pipeline to Germany (which Biden and Harris, to appease Putin, waived); and sending Ukraine the lethal defense aid that Obama denied while giving Ukraine a wider berth to use U.S.-provided weapons against Russian forces and assets.
I despise the lengths to which Trump goes in appealing to Putin’s ego, projecting the flattery Trump covets for himself. On the other hand, Trump has also shown enough fang that his administration is the only one of the last four — Bush 43, Obama, Trump, Biden — in which Russia did not annex territory, though it was surely trying to do so in eastern Ukraine.
Trump’s approach to Putin could be wrong. Maybe he just got lucky the first time around and, in a second term, would tempt Putin into more aggression. But if he did, he’d hardly be the first recent president to miscalculate in that way, to disastrous effect.
In any event, can we stop the Logan Act nonsense? If Trump has had cordial contacts with Putin over the last few years, that may be foolish. If you think it’s a good reason to vote against him, that’s rational — although if you’re telling me Trump’s Russia record is worse than the wages of Biden-Harris appeasement, I think your myopia may be showing. But whatever you may think of Trump’s post-presidential contacts with Putin (if they happened, as I’m willing to assume), they’re not crimes. And if the Democrats’ message is, “Elect Kamala Harris and get four more years of lawfare,” I suspect that’s a boon for the Trump campaign.