Persecuting Flynn

Mark Steyn:

The latest revelations in the Deep State entrapment of Michael Flynn (Trump's first National Security Advisor, for about twenty minutes) confirm what most sentient creatures have known for three years - that there was never any good-faith basis for the FBI's investigation, only (in the now released words of Assistant Counterintelligence Division Director Bill Priestap) the object "to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired".

The official pretext was that there might have been "a violation of the Logan Act". Oooooooh! The Logan Act of 1799 refers to a Dr George Logan, physician, farmer and Pennsylvania state legislator, who, at a time of tension in Franco-American relations, engaged in his own negotiations with the government in Paris. In the two and a quarter centuries since, there have been no convictions under the Act, and, in the event anyone were ever to be the first so convicted, it would undoubtedly be struck down as unconstitutional. John Kerry, one notes, has not been prosecuted for his recent meetings with his pal Zarif, "foreign minister" of Iran, about how to save Obama's deal with the mullahs.

In the case of Flynn, any hypothetical Logan prosecution would have been more ridiculous still - because he was not a freelance Pennsylvania doctor but the duly designated National Security Advisor of the incoming president. Peter Strzok went over to Flynn's office to (as they say of bent British coppers) fit him up - and indeed they did fit him up.

So one conversation, with disgraced corrupt rogue agent Strzok, without counsel present and without the defendant being aware that this was an interrogation of him as opposed to just a friendly intragovernmental chit-chat, has consumed three years of Flynn's life and all his savings.