Bob Woodward\u2019s new reporting that former president Donald Trump has spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin as many as seven times since leaving office raises all kinds of questions. Among them: What might they have talked about? Why the continued cloak-and-dagger on Trump\u2019s talks with Putin? Did any such conversations continue after Russia invaded a U.S. ally, Ukraine, in February 2022, and pertain to that?<\/p>\n
All are valid questions, given Trump\u2019s provocative and often-cozy relationship with Putin.<\/p>\n
And the significance of nearly all of those questions was quickly made clear, however unintentionally, by Trump running mate JD Vance.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven if it\u2019s true, is there something wrong with speaking to world leaders? No,\u201d Vance said Tuesday. \u201cIs there anything wrong with engaging in diplomacy?\u201d<\/p>\n
JD Vance on the report that Trump had seven phone calls with Putin AFTER leaving the WH:<\/p>\n
\u201cIs there something wrong with speaking to world leaders? No. Is there anything wrong with engaging in diplomacy?\u201d pic.twitter.com\/qUORbZt1lS<\/p>\n
\u2014 Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) October 8, 2024<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
There is, in fact, something potentially wrong \u2014 and potentially, technically, illegal \u2014 with a former official like Trump engaging in shadow diplomacy with Putin.<\/p>\n
And none other than Trump himself has said as much, at least when it involved a Democrat. Trump not only pushed for but also apparently succeeded in getting a political opponent, former secretary of state John Kerry, investigated for alleged \u201cshadow diplomacy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Given that, it would seem much more difficult for the Trump campaign to wave this off as a non-story.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s campaign on Tuesday broadly dismissed Woodward\u2019s book as \u201cmade-up stories,\u201d though Trump often falsely denies things that later prove to be true.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s one thing for Trump to have talked to Putin and another for this to have involved the word Vance invoked: \u201cdiplomacy.\u201d<\/p>\n
That could be illegal, under the letter of the law. The Logan Act bars unauthorized private citizens from engaging foreign governments with the \u201cintent to influence the measures or conduct of\u201d those countries, \u201cin relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States or to defeat the measures of the United States.\u201d Basically, you can\u2019t seek to undermine the official foreign policy of this country by conducting your own diplomacy. If Trump offered guidance to Putin on his conduct in the war in Ukraine, that would be problematic.<\/p>\n
But the Logan Act has never been successfully prosecuted, which was noted when it cropped up multiple times during Trump\u2019s presidency. So it\u2019s not as if Trump\u2019s breaking the law is a particularly live issue.<\/p>\n
What is a live issue, though, is the propriety of it. And Trump has made clear that he is against former officials speaking to adversarial foreign governments and undercutting American foreign policy.<\/p>\n
Trump not only repeatedly accused Kerry of breaking the law by speaking to Iran during Trump\u2019s presidency, he even pushed for Kerry\u2019s prosecution. And a clear timeline of events suggests this had a real impact, resulting in Kerry\u2019s being investigated by the Justice Department.<\/p>\n
The Kerry matter was one of the most significant examples of Trump\u2019s apparently weaponizing the government against his foes \u2014 something he has suggested he would do even more if he\u2019s elected to a second term.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s criticisms of Kerry were spread out, but he repeatedly cited the idea that a former official engaging a hostile foreign country was wrong and even illegal:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe United States does not need John Kerry\u2019s possibly illegal Shadow Diplomacy on the very badly negotiated Iran Deal,\u201d Trump tweeted in May 2018.<\/span> Trump\u2019s comments generally focused on the idea that Kerry had strategized with Iran about how to navigate Trump\u2019s withdrawal from the Obama\u2019s administration\u2019s Iran nuclear deal or urged it to wait to negotiate with a Democratic administration. There\u2019s no evidence Kerry actually did that, though, and Kerry denied coaching Iran on the subject. Kerry maintained that there was \u201cnothing unusual \u2026 about former diplomats meeting with foreign counterparts.\u201d<\/p>\n But Trump did apparently succeed in getting Kerry investigated.<\/p>\n Former U.S. attorney Geoffrey Berman wrote in his 2022 book that Trump\u2019s Justice Department referred the case to his Southern District of New York in May 2018 after a pair of Trump tweets in the two days prior. The Justice Department checked in again right after an April 2019 Trump tweet, and then again the following day.<\/p>\n Berman called the pattern \u201cclear \u2014 and outrageous.\u201d<\/p>\n Much more is apparently known today about Kerry\u2019s conversations with the Iranians than Trump\u2019s reported conversations with Putin, given that investigation and the fact that Kerry talked at some length about what was discussed. Berman has called Kerry \u201cinnocent\u201d and said two separate districts declined to prosecute Kerry.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s talks with Putin, meanwhile, have long been a black box.<\/p>\n That perhaps made some sense when Trump was president; official diplomacy often requires secrecy to work. But that doesn\u2019t apply when you\u2019re not actually supposed to be conducting diplomacy. And to the extent Trump might have been doing that with Putin, his own commentary on the subject would sure suggest we need to know more about it.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Bob Woodward\u2019s new reporting that former president Donald Trump has spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin as many as seven times since leaving office raises all kinds of questions. Among them: What might they have talked about? Why the continued cloak-and-dagger on Trump\u2019s talks with Putin? Did any such conversations continue after Russia invaded a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10850,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u201cJohn 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,\u201d he tweeted in September of that year.<\/span>
\n\u201cYou know, John Kerry speaks to them a lot,\u201d Trump said at the White House in May 2019. \u201cJohn Kerry tells them not to call. That\u2019s a violation of the Logan Act. And, frankly, he should be prosecuted on that.\u201d<\/span>
\n\u201cI think John Kerry shouldn\u2019t have been speaking \u2014 that\u2019s called the violation of the Logan Act,\u201d Trump told Fox News in March 2020.<\/span>
\nTrump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attacked Kerry in September 2018, saying, \u201cActively undermining U.S. policy as a former secretary of state is literally unheard-of.\u201d He called it \u201cunseemly and unprecedented\u201d to have a \u201cformer secretary of state engaged with the world\u2019s largest state sponsor of terror\u201d in this way.<\/span><\/p>\n