The Cover-Up in Search of a Crime

[Geee]

National Review:

How different is Flynn’s call from Obama’s ‘After my election, I have more flexibility’?

 

It’s a Watergate-era cliché that the cover-up is always worse than the crime. In the Mike Flynn affair, we have the first recorded instance of a cover-up in the absence of a crime.

 

Flynn Phone Call Coverup Searching for Crime

 

Being covered up were the December 29 phone calls between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to Washington. The presumed violation was Flynn negotiating with a foreign adversary while the Obama administration was still in office and, even worse, discussing with Sergey Kislyak the sanctions then being imposed upon Russia (for meddling in the 2016 elections).

 

What’s wrong with that? It is risible to invoke the Logan Act, passed during the John Adams administration, under which not a single American has been prosecuted in the intervening 218 years. It prohibits private citizens from negotiating with foreign powers. Flynn was hardly a private citizen. As Donald Trump’s publicly designated incoming national-security adviser, it was perfectly reasonable for him to be talking to foreign actors in preparation for assuming office within the month.

 

Worst case: He was telling Kislyak that the Trump administration might lift sanctions and therefore, comrade, no need for a spiral of retaliations. How different is this from what Barack Obama told Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, on an inadvertently open mic, during his 2012 reelection campaign? “This is my last election,” he said. “After my election, I have more flexibility.”