You already know that the answer to this question is no, of course not. Just four years after the Obama administration authorized the secret surveillance of Michael Flynn for his communications with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, Ben Rhodes has boasted that Joe Biden is already talking to foreign leaders while another president rules the White House.
“The center of political gravity in this country and the world is shifting to Joe Biden,” Obama’s former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications and speechwriting said on MSNBC. “Foreign leaders are already having phone calls with Joe Biden, talking about the agenda they’re going to pursue on Jan. 20. If that reality hasn’t sunk in yet for some people in the White House, it will sink in when they have to leave on Jan. 20. And they’re going to be in for a rude awakening here.”
Stop the presses — isn’t Rhodes confessing that his (likely) future boss is committing the same supposed violation of the Logan Act that they claimed Flynn did, in order to justify further spying on the Trump campaign? After all, for years we heard the formerly liberal Left justify the intelligence community’s clandestine wiretapping of Flynn’s communications. They made the excuse that a Trump campaign member was arguably trying to undermine the sanctions of the sitting President Barack Obama. So how is what Biden is alleged to be doing here not the same?
The Logan Act justification was always farcical. For all of Flynn’s flaws that made him a clearly unacceptable choice for national security adviser, the case against Flynn was just one of many that showed the systemic violation of civil liberties created by the FISA Act and our surveillance state. So no, Biden won’t get the Flynn treatment, first and foremost because there’s no way on Earth the intelligence community would allow it.
Trump is set to squander the end of his presidency with an inane legal battle in a bid to reclaim the 2020 election, and a spying campaign, or anything else for that matter, will likely be seen as a distraction.
Biden may simply be sharing pleasantries, his defenders may say, unlike Flynn who was actively subverted by Obama’s policies with latent promises. Yeah, and maybe Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch were just talking about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding on that plane and not his wife under investigation. This defense requires us to believe that Biden’s not promising to rejoin the JCPOA, the Paris Climate Accords, and cancel arms sales and Israeli normalization deals with Riyadh.
Or perhaps Rhodes just has it wrong. In either case, it’s one of a million signs that Biden shouldn’t let him within a thousand feet of his administration.
