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Kerry violates Logan Act

A furor has arisen about former Secretary of State John Kerry’s meetings with Iranian government officials and others regarding the Trump Administration’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal. Kerry’s tenure as Secretary of State ended in January of 2017. The issue has been simmering for some time. The Boston Globe reported last May that Kerry met twice with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad to discuss the nuclear deal.

Inadvertently,  Iranian officials, describing those meetings, laid out the clear legal groundwork for an indictment under the Logan Act, which criminalizes negotiation by unauthorized persons with foreign governments having a dispute with the United States. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi, quoted in Iran’s FARS news Agency “We don’t see the U.S. just as Mr. Trump; the United States is not just the current ruling administration and there are many figures who have different views on international and regional issues…”

Qassemi failed to understand that, indeed, the United States Government does have just one entity at a time that is legally permitted to conduct foreign affairs. Current Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, in an interview, stated: “what Secretary Kerry has done is unseemly and unprecedented. This is a former secretary of state engaged with the world’s largest state sponsor of terror, and according to him…You don’t have to take my word for it. … He was talking to them. He was telling them to wait out this administration. You can’t find precedent for this in U.S. history, and the secretary ought not – Secretary Kerry ought not to engage in that kind of behavior. It’s inconsistent with what foreign policy of the United States is, as directed by this President, and it is beyond inappropriate for him to be engaged in this. I remember, I saw him. I saw him in Munich at the Security Conference…”

President Trump concurred in Secretary Pompeo’s concerns: “John Kerry had illegal meetings with the very hostile Iranian Regime, which can only serve to undercut our great work to the detriment of the American people. He told them to wait out the Trump Administration! Was he registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act? BAD!”

Raising further questions about Mr. Kerry’s actions is the revelation last April that Israeli undercover agents obtained 55,000 pages of documents and 183 CDs indicating that Iran lied about the extent of its nuclear program both before and after the Obama Administration’s deal with it, in which pallet loads of cash were transferred to the regime and sanctions were lifted in return for promises, without adequate verifications according to critics, to delay its legal ability to develop nuclear weapons.
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Unofficial dealings with Tehran are distasteful on a variety of levels, including the fact that it both supports terrorism abroad and gives support to a regime that oppresses its own population. The theocratic government routinely engages in horrific acts against many, and not just dissidents.  According to Human Rights Watch,“Under Iranian law, many nonviolent crimes, such as “insulting the Prophet,” apostasy, same-sex relations, adultery, and drug-related offenses, are punishable by death.

In January, the Spectator reported that “Shortly after the latest protests began, the country’s security forces, including the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, were seen photographing the events. In Iran, a regime camera is as deadly as a sniper’s sights. Only more delayed. As in 2009, the photographs will be used by the police to arrest demonstrators and also family members unconnected with the protests. This will be followed by the torture and rape of men and women in prison by the theocratic regime’s frontmen. As after the Green Revolution, there will in due course be show trials, forced recantations and executions. This is how a police state with four decades of experience goes about its business.”

Those protests were about a variety of causes, including repression at home, and the use of Iran’s new-found riches from the Obama Administration’s nuclear deal with Tehran not t benefit the Iranian people but to indulge in even greater levels of support for terrorism and regional wars.

Photo: Former Secretary of State John Kerry (U.S. State Department photo)

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Iran Nuclear Deal, North Korean talks: The Difference

There is a remarkable contrast between the current state of the North Korean negotiations and the recently decertified Iran Nuclear Agreement.

In August, President Trump threatened the Pyongyang government with “Fire and fury like the world has never seen” in response to its advances in atomic weaponry. Much of the media and the political left reacted to those words with a fit of apoplexy, and predicted something not very short of Armageddon.  The threatening tactic, however, has achieved the desired result.  Before even taking a seat at the bargaining table, Kim Jong-un has returned Americans he had illegally detained, and announced that he would abandon his nuclear efforts. Indeed, journalist have already been invited to a ceremony later this month in which the Hermit Kingdom’s test facilities would be publicly destroyed.

Compare that with Obama’s stance in negotiations with Iran, in which the former administration essentially entered the talks signaling it would grant major concessions before receiving any solid give-backs from Tehran. The result, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), failed to provide any substantive benefit to the United States, except, at best, a delay in Iran’s developing nuclear weapons and some inconvenience caused by the necessity of hiding prior or ongoing research, a fact made startlingly clear by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent revelations.

The flaws in the Iran deal are glaringly obvious. Even if the Mullahs faithfully complied to its provisions, they would still have the right to build atomic bombs within a decade. Additionally, JCPOA did nothing to inhibit Iran’s ICBM development program. In return, Iran received, upfront, vast sums of cash, and an end to sanctions.

Critics of JCPOA note that “JCPOA… merely ‘rents’ Iranian arms control for a limited and defined period, after which Iran will be permitted to have an industrial-scale nuclear program with no limitations on number and type of centrifuges, or on its stockpiles of fissile material, buttressed by the economic benefits obtained through sanctions easing.”

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The concept of American negotiators entering into talks with adversarial powers from a position of strength has, despite its apparent success with North Korea so far, received little support from those more used to Washington’s prior agreement-at-any-price nature. Martin B. Malin and Hui Zhang, wrote in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists “It is not yet clear if the Trump administration has a strategy for negotiating with North Korea. Since the announcement of a possible meeting, much public commentary has focused on the improbability of North Korea ever giving up its nuclear weapons and on the apparent lack of preparedness inside the US administration. There are good reasons to be skeptical about a possible breakthrough. North Korea has spared no effort to develop its nuclear arsenal and missiles. Kim will not give up his arsenal before he is convinced his regime’s security is guaranteed. It is not clear he can be convinced… with few exceptions, there has been almost no US thinking about a negotiating strategy. Incoming national security advisor John Bolton has recently suggested bombing North Korea. Even the most thoughtful analysts have focused almost exclusively on maintaining coercive leverage in the course of negotiations… The United States must come to terms with the possibility that it may need to make peace with North Korea, and take significant steps toward full normalization before Kim Jong-un would ever implement a complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement of his nuclear arsenal.”

Malin and Zhang have been proven incorrect, as were the extensive number of critics that decried President Trump’s “fire and fury” comments.

Obama was personally invested in the Iran deal. In essence, he placed his legacy above the needs of the nation.  Trump, despite the political gains he could reap from a North Korea deal, has repeatedly stressed that he is willing to walk away if the talks don’t produce good results, placing him in a far better negotiating position than his predecessor.

Photo: Trump at decertification of JCPOA (White House photo)