The Logan Act wackadoodles in the Obamagate affair

J.E. Dyer:
Technically, what’s of interest about the man in question, Robert Litt, is the number of Spygate-central waypoints he turns up in. I have to imagine John Durham has at least wanted to talk to him. Litt was one of the “Logan Act” chorus in early January 2017. He was also reportedly the conduit for informing then-DNI James Clapper of the Flynn-Kislyak phone calls. Yet again, he was right in the middle of staffing the last-minute changes to Executive Order 12333 at the same time (which, of course, we would expect him to be).

But there’s more. Robert Litt was General Counsel to the Office of the DNI from 2009 to January 2017. He was the lead attorney for the organization and was thus naturally involved in its chief dramas during that period. What put a focus on him this past week was a tweet from CBS News’s Catherine Herridge, highlighting a recollection by former Acting Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord in her interview with the FBI in July 2017.
McCord, remember, is the Justice Department official who recalls being informed at the earliest date by the FBI about the December 2016 phone calls between Michael Flynn and Sergei Kislyak. McCord says she learned of the calls on 3 January 2017, in a phone call with Andrew McCabe.

The FBI interview notes also reflect this bit of information:

Page 2 of McCord’s notes [i.e., her contemporaneous notes from that week] indicate General Counsel at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Bob Litt raised the issue of a possible Logan Act violation. McCord was not familiar with the Logan Act at the time and made a note to herself to look it up later.

Now, we needn’t kid ourselves that it took Litt at ODNI to popularize the Logan Act and get it circulating at the White House nosebleed level. (Herridge’s highlight points out that Litt raised it on 3 January, and then Joe Biden raised it in the Oval Office on 5 January.)

The theme had been a drumbeat for weeks. The media had been bringing it up in connection with Trump at least a month earlier, and by the end of December 2016, the Logan Act was an established theme.

(It reminded me at the time of the “New steps! New steps!” chant from the 1993 Australian film Strictly Ballroom, by Baz Luhrmann.)

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) even introduced legislation to amend the Logan Act. Basically, to make it more likely to stick, so appalled was he that the incoming Trump administration was doing what incoming administrations always do— opening channels with foreign governments during the transition.

So the Logan Act was out there. But: it wasn’t ODNI’s problem to find a legal basis for going after Michael Flynn and ultimately Donald Trump. In fact, if I’d been Litt – at least, Litt in a straightforward situation – I think I would have kept my mouth shut about what was so clearly someone else’s problem, no matter how brightly the bulb flashed over my head. The Logan Act, after all, has nothing to do with intelligence. It’s about diplomacy and influence. It’s not in ODNI’s lane.

So Robert Litt reportedly bringing it up with the DOJ (and probably the FBI; it’s not clear who was in that particular conversation) is noteworthy. It suggests what we may call a lack of professional detachment about the situation.

It’s unlikely that anything Litt did in that regard was prompted by Clapper. There’s Clapper’s general air of somnolence to consider, but he also testified to the House, later in 2017, that the person who first told him about the Flynn-Kislyak phone calls was … Robert Litt. (See p. 35 here.)

Assuming that’s true, it puts Litt in the middle of conveying FBI intelligence about Flynn to Clapper. It doesn’t necessarily mean a whole lot that James Comey said he briefed Clapper on it; Litt could have learned about it earlier and told Clapper as soon as he knew. That wouldn’t be unusual in such a relationship. But coupled with the volunteer “good idea” about the Logan Act, it starts to paint a picture of Litt’s role, and how much he was in the loop on the machinations of Spygate.
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What seems apparent in hindsight is that this was part of a desperate attempt by the Obamagate crowd to come up with an excuse to go after Flynn and ultimately Trump.  It is so off the wall crazy that it is hard to believe serious people would take it seriously.  Here Flynn was doing normal transition stuff and they were trying to think of a way to criminalize it.  It is a clear demonstration of the bad faith inside the Obama White House in dealing with the transition.

I think Obama was "brainstorming" for an excuse to go after Flynn and he had several coconspirators inside the intelligence and FBI establishment.  Hopefully, Durham will unravel this plot against the President and Flynn.

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