REPEAL THE LOGAN ACT

[Draggingtree]

Patterico

2/19/2018

Repeal the Logan Act

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 4:00 pm

As most people following politics know, there’s an obscure law called the Logan Act which makes it a crime for unauthorized people to conduct foreign policy with certain governments under specified circumstances. If someone like Michael Flynn negotiates foreign policy with a Russian ambassador, or Ted Kennedy asks the Rooskies to intervene in a U.S. presidential election, or John Kerry sends a message to Mahmoud Abbas not to yield to Trump’s foreign policy demands . . . well, then in theory, those people should be prosecuted if they were not a) government officials when they took those actions, or otherwise authorized to take those actions.

But nobody has ever been successfully prosecuted pursuant to the law, which was passed in 1799. Nobody has even been charged with a violation of the act in over 160 years. As a result, it’s become something of a running joke.