Quote (bogie160 @ May 1 2021 05:02pm)
If you believed that it was egregious for Michael Flynn, as a member of an incoming administration, to ask his soon to be counterpart not to overreact to sanctions, then undermining the government's foreign policy as a private citizen is obviously beyond the pale. It's orders of magnitude more serious.
You have your whataboutism the wrong way around. Anyone who argued that Michael Flynn's actions were unforgiveable, which includes every never-Trumper and the entirety of the Democratic party, must now denounce John Kerry and demand that Biden immediately eject him from the administration. To do anything less would be to admit that the attacks against Flynn weren't genuine at all, and that the outrage was little more than a partisan sham.
First, it's unclear from the article what went on. If Kerry met with Zarif and brought up public information, we would both agree there's no wrongdoing, right? If he met with him after he left office and shared classified information, that would obviously be problematic.
Mike Flynn was a transition official who undermined positions of the current US government. I don't view that as the same as Kerry meeting with Zarif to encourage maintaining the Iran deal. Sharing classified information is another matter entirely though.
The whataboutism works both ways. If Trumpists were cool with Flynn doing what he did because the Logan Act was an out of date statute that would never be prosecuted, they can't argue against what Kerry did. I view the statute as broad, and what Flynn did is far more offensive to me than what Kerry did(assuming he didn't share classified information).