Ah, the infamous 1799 Logan Act, John Adams’s never-repealed follow-up to the Alien and Sedition Acts.  Official Washington screams bloody murder about this law whenever some private citizen dares speak to a foreign leader.

Judy Woodruf had to apologize for a completely made up story about Trump blocking a ceasefire deal in Gaza that would violate the act.

As I wrote in 2017, Gen. Flynn did not violate this law back when he was accused, nor could Mr. Trump now have violated it by supposedly speaking to Mr. Putin on the phone on a few times.  That, of course, did not stop various Democrat hacks like Susan Rice from trotting out this stupid accusation.

Anyone who reads the law can understand why it is a non-starter.  It states that any citizen “who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title.”

Unless Trump was telling Putin how to jam HIMAR missile systems sent to Ukraine or some other way to directly defeat our efforts or something like that, he certainly cannot have criminally violated the law.  Unless you want to say merely chatting with foreign officials, such as the guests at the innumerable cocktail parties they throw at Washington, D.C. embassies, is a grave violation of the law.  

No one has ever been convicted under this law.  Only two people have even been indicted: one fellow for writing a newspaper column advocating for Kentucky leaving the union in 1803 and another one lobbying Mexico in 1852 with his own ideas on a railway concession.

You can see why prosecutions under this law are impossible.  One, it’s way too vague to be a valid law.  Second, it is a fundamental violation of the right to free speech.

Of course, there is sometimes a person who richly deserves to be prosecuted under this law.  For example, back in his first term, Trump could not prevail upon his DOJ to prosecute John Kerry under the Logan Act, who was working hand-in-glove with the Iranians to thwart American policy.  It would have exposed some of Kerry’s many rotten deeds with respect to Iran, and it would have forced the Supreme Court to rule on the Logan Act’s likely unconstitutionality.

Although the Logan Act is a dead letter that never amounts to anything, Congress is not yet finished investigating the boorish Kerry.  One can only hope there is a reckoning for all Deep State dirty tricksters under more viable legal theories than the Logan Act, and that John Kerry is one of them.

Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, Ky.

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