OPINION:
Failed former Secretary of State John Kerry spent so much time wooing Iran Foreign Minister Javad Zarif during the Obama administration that people started talking.
After years of public canoodling, romantic garden strolls and secret pallets of cold, hard American cash sent under the cover of night, Monsieur Kerry never could get Mr. Zarif and the Iranians to kick their habit of bankrolling terrorism around the globe.
With the election of Donald Trump, the world thought Monsieur Kerry had finally given up his lusty pursuit of Mr. Zarif. Turns out they had just gotten a room.
A shocking new report by The Washington Times reveals that Monsieur Kerry kept up his torrid bromance with Mr. Zarif during the entire Trump administration.
“These relationships blossomed into what high-level national security and intelligence sources say allowed the Iranian regime to bypass Mr. Trump and work directly with Obama administration veterans that Tehran hoped would soon return to power in Washington,” according to the report.
It was a flagrant violation of the Logan Act — that antique law so preciously revered back when Democrats were trying to throw Trump officials in jail.
Remember Gen. Mike Flynn, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser whose phone calls with Russia’s U.S. ambassador were tapped by American intelligence services?
“Collusion!” they screamed. Then-Vice President Joe Biden, in an Oval Office meeting with President Obama and top intelligence officials, floated the idea of jailing Mr. Flynn for violating the Logan Act.
The Logan Act bars private Americans from conducting “shadow diplomacy” with foreign countries in contravention of official U.S. diplomacy.
Thin gruel, to be sure. Especially since — as Mr. Trump’s incoming top security adviser — Mr. Flynn had every right to begin talking with foreign officials about the upcoming administration.
What Monsieur Kerry and other wash-outs from the Obama administration were doing with Iran was much, much different. They were actively undermining the foreign policy of an elected administration. And they were doing that AFTER Americans voters had clearly chosen a starkly different path for dealing with the terrorist mullahs of Iran.
“Although details of Mr. Zarif’s face-to-face conversations with leading Democrats remain murky, one former senior U.S. official told The Times that the Iranian foreign minister held meetings throughout the Trump years, in 2017, 2018 and 2019,” according to the report.
“The underlying goals of Mr. Zarif’s meetings, the official said, was to ‘devise a political strategy to undermine the Trump administration’ and to continue building up a reservoir of support for the [Iranian nuclear deal], or another like it, that could be drawn up if a Democrat returned to the White House in 2021.”
By any measure, these clandestine efforts violated the Logan Act, not to mention flagrant collusion with an avowed enemy of the United States.
And, perhaps, another thing: Treason.
• Charles Hurt is opinion editor at The Washington Times. He can be reached at churt@washingtontimes.com.
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