Republican nominee Donald Trump seemed to commit treason in the practical sense of the word this week when he publicly asked Russian hackers to continue interfering with the Presidential election he’s currently running in – but it left the nation scratching its head and trying to figure out if what he had just done was an actual crime. As it turns out, the law he broke has been on the books since before Donald Trump was born – and it’s a felony.
If you haven’t much about the Logan Act lately, that’s because it was first signed into law a by President who is no longer in office; his name was John Adams. Initially aimed at preventing private U.S. citizens from interfering with government business by negotiating directly with hostile governments (which in 1799 was France), it also applies equally to a U.S. citizen who happens to be running for President while negotiating with a hostile power like Russia.
The catch is that Donald Trump has to have been attempting to negotiate with the government of Russia, and not merely some random Russian criminal hackers. There is already strong evidence that the Russian hackers who got into the DNC emails were in fact agents of Vladimir Putin’s government. If Trump was already aware of this fact when he went before reporters today and asked these hackers to continue doing his bidding, then he undeniably violated the Logan Act of 1799.
If any argument were to be made that the Logan Act might be too obsolete to be applied practically in modern American society, that argument goes out the window once one learns that it was legally amended as recently as 1994. In other words, unless it turns out Donald Trump somehow wasn’t aware that the Russian hackers he was appealing to weren’t a part of the Russian government, he did in fact commit a felony today under federal law.
http://www.dailynewsbin.com/news/he...when-he-asked-russian-hackers-for-help/25425/
Trump for Prison 2016
If you haven’t much about the Logan Act lately, that’s because it was first signed into law a by President who is no longer in office; his name was John Adams. Initially aimed at preventing private U.S. citizens from interfering with government business by negotiating directly with hostile governments (which in 1799 was France), it also applies equally to a U.S. citizen who happens to be running for President while negotiating with a hostile power like Russia.
The catch is that Donald Trump has to have been attempting to negotiate with the government of Russia, and not merely some random Russian criminal hackers. There is already strong evidence that the Russian hackers who got into the DNC emails were in fact agents of Vladimir Putin’s government. If Trump was already aware of this fact when he went before reporters today and asked these hackers to continue doing his bidding, then he undeniably violated the Logan Act of 1799.
If any argument were to be made that the Logan Act might be too obsolete to be applied practically in modern American society, that argument goes out the window once one learns that it was legally amended as recently as 1994. In other words, unless it turns out Donald Trump somehow wasn’t aware that the Russian hackers he was appealing to weren’t a part of the Russian government, he did in fact commit a felony today under federal law.
http://www.dailynewsbin.com/news/he...when-he-asked-russian-hackers-for-help/25425/
Trump for Prison 2016
