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On Monday, President Trump called out former Secretary of State John Kerry in a tweet for admitting to going around normal protocol and contacting America’s allies to try to keep the United States in the Iran deal. “The United States does not need John Kerry’s possibly illegal Shadow Diplomacy on the very badly negotiated Iran Deal,” the President said.
Some have specualted that Kerry's actions were in violation of the Logan Act, a law that forbids private citizens from negotiating on America’s behalf. Alhough nobody has ever been convicted for violating it, the statute appeared in headlines last year when it came out that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had spoken with Russian officials during the transition. But this time around, the major network news outlets (ABC, CBS, and NBC) couldn’t be bothered to give the possible violation a single second of airtime.
Back in early 2017, when the news about Flynn first broke, the Logan Act was a major topic of discussion for the liberal media. Both CBS’s Face the Nation and NBC’s Meet the Press mentioned the law, and on February 16 of that year, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos was on Good Morning America wondering if Flynn could face charges for it.
“Not likely,” Legal correspondent Pierre Thomas told him. “The law that's in question is called the Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from negotiating with foreign nations when there's a dispute with the US. There's never been a successful prosecution ever.”