Logan Act
Based on Wikipedia: Logan Act
The Law That's Never Sent Anyone to Prison
Somewhere in the United States Code sits a law that's been on the books for over two hundred years, threatens violators with three years in federal prison, and has never—not once—actually put anyone behind bars. It's been invoked in political arguments, threatened against former presidents and secretaries of state, and sparked petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures. Yet prosecutors seem terrified to actually use it.
This is the Logan Act, one of the strangest laws in American history.
A Quaker Walks Into Paris
To understand why this law exists at all, you need to travel back to 1798, when the infant United States found itself in an undeclared naval war with France—a conflict historians now call the Quasi-War. President John Adams had dispatched three envoys to negotiate with the French government, but the talks collapsed in spectacular fashion. The French foreign minister, the legendary schemer Talleyrand, had demanded bribes before he'd even speak to the American delegation. When word got back to the United States, it caused a scandal.
Enter George Logan.
Logan was a Philadelphia physician, a state legislator, a devout Quaker, and a man who simply could not abide the prospect of war. He was also a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, which made him a political enemy of the Federalists who controlled Congress and the White House. Without any official authority whatsoever, Logan booked passage to France and set about trying to make peace himself.
The audacity of it still stuns. Here was a private citizen, representing no one but himself, sitting down with Talleyrand and other French officials to discuss matters of war and peace. Logan was careful to present himself as just that—a private citizen. He didn't claim to speak for the American government. Instead, he simply suggested ways France might improve relations with the United States, explained that pro-British propagandists were poisoning American public opinion against France, and generally tried to smooth things over.
And remarkably, it seemed to work. Within days of Logan's meetings, France lifted its trade embargo against American ships and released American sailors who had been rotting in French jails.
Now, historians believe Logan probably didn't actually cause these concessions. The French government had likely already decided to de-escalate before Logan ever arrived, and his visit simply provided convenient timing. But that's not how it looked back in America.
The Federalists Strike Back
Democratic-Republican newspapers showered Logan with praise. Here was their man, a man of peace, succeeding where the Federalist administration had failed. The Federalists were furious.
Secretary of State Timothy Pickering—also from Pennsylvania, as it happened—urged Congress to "act to curb the temerity and impudence of individuals affecting to interfere in public affairs between France and the United States." Representative Roger Griswold introduced what would become the Logan Act, and the Federalist majority rammed it through. The House passed it fifty-eight to thirty-six. The Senate approved it eighteen to two.
President Adams signed it into law on January 30, 1799.
There was just one problem: they couldn't actually punish George Logan. The Constitution prohibits ex post facto laws—that is, laws that punish someone for doing something that wasn't illegal when they did it. Logan had broken no law when he traveled to France because the law making it illegal didn't exist yet.
The Federalists didn't really care. The point wasn't to punish Logan for what he'd done. The point was to make sure no one else tried anything similar.
What the Law Actually Says
The Logan Act is remarkably brief for a statute that's generated so much controversy. It prohibits any American citizen from engaging in correspondence or negotiations with a foreign government "with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government" regarding "any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States."
Violators can be fined and imprisoned for up to three years.
The law does include one important exception: you're allowed to contact a foreign government if you're seeking "redress of any injury" you've personally suffered from that government. So if France seizes your ship, you can write to France asking for your ship back. You just can't write to France suggesting it change its policy toward American shipping in general.
In 1994, Congress updated the penalty section to replace the specific five-thousand-dollar fine with a reference to the general federal fine schedule—apparently the only amendment the Act has ever received in its entire history.
The Constitutional Problem
The Logan Act exists because of a fundamental principle embedded in the Constitution: the President of the United States is the sole organ of foreign relations.
Article Two gives the President the power to make treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate. But the Supreme Court has interpreted this more broadly. In a 1936 case called United States versus Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation, Justice Sutherland wrote that "the President alone has the power to speak or listen as a representative of the nation." He continued: "Into the field of negotiation, the Senate cannot intrude; and Congress itself is powerless to invade it."
This is the constitutional foundation the Logan Act rests on. If only the President can negotiate with foreign powers, then private citizens who try to do so are undermining the constitutional order.
But there's a catch. The First Amendment protects free speech, and talking to foreign officials is, at its core, speech. A 1964 federal court decision in New York mentioned in passing that the Logan Act might be unconstitutional because terms like "defeat" and "measures" are too vague to give citizens fair notice of what's actually prohibited. The court didn't actually rule on the question—it just noted the problem and moved on.
This constitutional uncertainty may explain why prosecutors have been so reluctant to actually use the law. No one wants to be the test case.
Two Hundred Years, Two Indictments, Zero Convictions
In the entire history of the Logan Act, exactly two people have ever been indicted for violating it. Both indictments occurred in the nineteenth century. Neither resulted in a conviction.
The first came in 1803, just four years after the law was enacted. A Kentucky farmer named Francis Flournoy wrote an article in a local newspaper under the pseudonym "A Western American" advocating for the creation of a new independent nation in North America that would ally with France. A grand jury indicted him, but the United States Attorney—who happened to be the brother-in-law of Chief Justice John Marshall—never actually prosecuted the case. Later that year, the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France, and suddenly the whole question of French-allied separatism became irrelevant. The case quietly disappeared.
The second indictment came nearly fifty years later, in 1852. Jonas Phillips Levy was an American merchant living in Mexico who had obtained a grant to build a railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec—the narrowest point of the Mexican landmass, where a rail line could move goods from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. Secretary of State Daniel Webster was pressuring Mexico to accept a treaty that would let a different group of American businessmen build that railway instead. Levy wrote to Mexican President Mariano Arista urging him to reject Webster's proposal.
Webster was outraged and sought an indictment. But the prosecution collapsed when President Arista refused to hand over the original letter. Without the evidence, there could be no conviction.
And that's it. In over two centuries, those are the only two indictments. The Logan Act has been threatened, discussed, debated, and invoked in countless political arguments, but it has never once resulted in a criminal conviction.
Modern Near-Misses
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen the Logan Act invoked repeatedly—always as a political weapon, never as an actual criminal charge.
In 1941, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles told reporters that former President Herbert Hoover might face prosecution for negotiating with European nations about food relief. Hoover had left the presidency eight years earlier and was trying to organize humanitarian aid during World War Two. Nothing came of the threat.
In 1975, Senators John Sparkman and George McGovern traveled to Cuba and met with Cuban officials. This raised obvious Logan Act questions, but the State Department concluded that members of Congress have a constitutional role in foreign affairs that exempts them from the Act—especially when the executive branch knows about their travel and has validated their passports for the trip. McGovern was careful to tell the Cubans he had "no authority to negotiate on behalf of the United States" and had "come to listen and learn."
In 2007, Representative Steve King tried to pass legislation that would prevent Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi from using federal funds to visit countries the United States had designated as state sponsors of terrorism. The amendment failed.
The 2015 Letter to Iran
One of the most dramatic Logan Act controversies erupted in March 2015, when forty-seven Republican senators signed an open letter to the government of Iran.
At the time, President Barack Obama was negotiating with Iran and five other major powers—a group known as the P5+1, meaning the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany—over Iran's nuclear program. The Republicans were trying to derail the negotiations. Their letter warned Iran that any agreement Obama reached without Senate approval could be reversed by the next president.
Critics accused the senators of violating the Logan Act. A petition on the White House website demanding prosecution accumulated over three hundred twenty thousand signatures. But the Obama administration took no action. Members of Congress, like Sparkman and McGovern before them, arguably have constitutional roles that exempt them from the Act—though the 2015 letter was far more confrontational than a simple fact-finding trip to Cuba.
John Kerry and the Question of Intent
In April 2018, former Secretary of State John Kerry met with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. By this point, Donald Trump was president and was working to dismantle the Iran nuclear deal that Kerry had helped negotiate under Obama. Kerry, now a private citizen, was trying to keep the agreement alive.
A spokesperson for Kerry admitted that he had "urged Iran to keep its commitments under the Iran nuclear agreement." This seemed like a textbook Logan Act violation: a private citizen negotiating with a foreign government to influence its conduct regarding a dispute with the United States.
But legal scholars pointed to an interesting wrinkle. Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, argued that Kerry wasn't trying to undermine American policy—he was trying to preserve the policy that was in place when he was Secretary of State. The Trump administration was the one changing policy. Did the Logan Act really prohibit private citizens from encouraging foreign governments to maintain the status quo?
Vladeck also noted a deeper problem: "It raises serious constitutional questions that I think would dissuade even the most zealous prosecutor from trying a case under the Logan Act."
Years later, Geoffrey Berman, the former United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, revealed that the Justice Department had pressured his office to indict Kerry. Berman's office refused. The Department then sent the case to federal prosecutors in Maryland, who also declined to prosecute. The pattern continued: the Logan Act was invoked, but no charges were ever filed.
The Strange Case of George Logan's Revenge
Here's an irony that would have delighted George Logan himself. After the law bearing his name was enacted specifically to prevent people like him from freelancing in foreign policy, Logan went on to serve in the United States Senate. He was elected as a Democratic-Republican from Pennsylvania and served from 1801 to 1807.
During his time in the Senate, Logan tried to get the Logan Act repealed. He failed.
But that didn't stop him. In 1810, with war between the United States and Britain looming—the conflict that would become the War of 1812—Logan once again traveled abroad on a private diplomatic mission, this time to England. The mission failed to prevent the war, but the remarkable thing is that it happened at all. The very man the Logan Act was designed to stop conducted another unauthorized diplomatic mission while the Act bearing his name remained on the books.
No one prosecuted him.
Why the Law Survives
Legal scholars have questioned whether the Logan Act would survive a serious constitutional challenge. The vagueness concerns noted by the 1964 court remain unresolved. The First Amendment implications have never been fully tested. And the practical reality is that any prosecution would become an enormous political spectacle, turning the defendant into a martyr and forcing courts to rule on questions they've avoided for over two centuries.
In December 2020, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued a memorandum concluding that the Logan Act "was constitutional when enacted, and unless or until repealed by Congress, remains valid and enforceable." But saying a law is theoretically enforceable is very different from actually enforcing it.
The Logan Act persists as a kind of legal zombie—technically alive, practically dead, but capable of lurching into political debates whenever it's convenient for one side to accuse the other of treasonous diplomacy.
What It Means Today
In an age when former presidents maintain their own foreign policy relationships, when business executives negotiate international deals with enormous geopolitical implications, and when private citizens can communicate with foreign governments as easily as sending an email, the Logan Act seems both obsolete and newly relevant.
The law was written when travel to Europe took weeks by ship and communication with foreign governments required formal letters carried by messengers. Today, a former government official can sit down with a foreign leader on Tuesday and be back home by Thursday.
The fundamental question the Logan Act raises remains as vital as ever: in a democracy, who gets to speak for the nation? The Constitution says the President is the sole organ of foreign relations. But when a former president, a former secretary of state, or even a prominent business figure meets with foreign leaders, are they really just private citizens? Or do they carry an implicit authority that makes their actions something more?
George Logan thought he could help his country avoid an unnecessary war. His enemies thought he was undermining the legitimate government. Two centuries later, we're still having the same argument, still invoking the same law, and still declining to actually enforce it.
The Logan Act remains what it has always been: less a law than a statement, less a criminal statute than a constitutional principle, and above all, a reminder that in American democracy, the question of who speaks for America has never been fully settled.