In the latest issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, I have a piece on the problems of a media almost totally reliant on anonymous leaks to cover the Trump administration. This is obviously a huge part of the scandal surrounding Michael Flynn’s resignation. As I note in the piece, “it’s remarkable to consider that when Flynn resigned there had yet to be a single named source making a verifiable accusation of his doing anything illicit,” despite a tremendous amount of innuendo. And it’s a big problem because you don’t know what the motivations of the anonymous leakers are.
Along these lines, there is a very curious detail that keeps popping up around the anonymous leaks attempting to discredit Michael Flynn.
On January 12, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius cites an anonymous leak telling him Flynn called the Russian ambassador. He frames it this way [emphasis added]:
On February 14, the New York Times reports:
Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that, despite other reports Flynn was truthful in his discussions with the FBI, Flynn may have lied to the Bureau about discussing the sanctions from the Obama administration. And then they report this:
But wait! There’s more. In Foreign Policy, there’s a story Friday about the Trump transition team’s effort to push back against Obama’s widely criticized decision to allow the United Nations to condemn Israel. Who exactly are these “critics” concerned about violating the Logan Act?
Let’s talk about the Logan Act for a bit. Or rather, let’s talk about why serious people don’t talk about the Logan Act. The Logan Act is to national security laws about what phrenology is to medical science. Since its passage in 1799, no one’s ever been convicted under the Logan Act, and just about every legal expert agrees it is wildly unconstitutional and runs counter to the First Amendment. George Logan, the senator whose actions motivated the passage of the law, was never even charged under it. Seriously, the only man charged under the law was a Kentucky farmer who wrote a newspaper article in 1803 about American territories allying with France—and even he was never prosecuted. The fact the Logan Act is still on the books is an accident of history, and to the extent it has been discussed in modern times, it’s almost exclusively invoked by cranks and the conspiracy-minded. Most recently, it’s become a dog-whistle bugaboo for the fever-swamps of left. There was a minor flap in 2015 where liberal activists argued that when Sen. Tom Cotton and 46 other senators signed a letter criticizing the Iran deal, they were guilty of Logan Act violations. Again, under the Logan Act, anyone who writes a newspaper article about foreign policy is potentially guilty of violating it.
Was the FBI really having serious conversations about using this as a legal basis to charge Flynn? Are national security journalists at places like the Washington Post and New York Times so daft they think this is a credible enough charge to mention, let alone accept as a legal basis for investigating Flynn? Did Obama advisers actually use the specter of Logan Act violations to justify spying on and investigating Flynn, as the New York Times report suggests? If so, that’s crazy and terrifying. As Bloomberg’s Eli Lake notes:
Further, in recent days there have been rumblings that Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor and architect of the infamous Iran Deal echo chamber; Obama National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor; and other Obama foreign policy officials have been active organizing and leaking against Trump. And specifically, it’s been said that Team Obama has a personal vendetta against Flynn because of his fierce opposition to the Iran Deal. Like the accusations against Flynn, the charge Obama loyalists are organizing against Trump has been anonymously sourced and Rhodes himself has characterized it as “bizarre conspiracy theories about Iran Deal.”
But the Logan Act talking point is a big tell. It’s clearly being shopped to journalists. The New York Times even says it originated with “Obama advisers,” as it wrote in its story this week about such “Obama advisers [growing] suspicious that perhaps there had been a secret deal … which could violate the rarely enforced, two-century-old Logan Act.” Keep in mind this doesn’t let Flynn off the hook—it can both be true that Obama advisers are waging a leak campaign against the White House, and Flynn could still have done something wrong that led to his resignation.
In the meantime, it’s worth trying to get a handle on how active and organized the Obama opposition to Trump is. At a minimum, it appears they managed to get multiple damning reports on Flynn in two of the country’s most influential newspapers that were premised in no small part on a talking point that has zero merit and should be discrediting on its face.
