Former Secretary of State John Kerry has been illegally acting as an unregistered foreign lobbyist — and on Monday he got seriously bad news on potential jail time.
In May, President Donald Trump asked for a formal investigation into Kerry. The president claimed that the Democratic leader has been undermining the Trump administration’s high stakes nuclear negotiations with Iran.
On Monday, Kerry and his team received news that Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, is resigning after two years.
Trump announced he’s replacing him with Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Tex., a fierce GOP investigator that has vowed to bring justice to former President Barack Obama officials.
Ratcliffe has big plans — and presumably, one of his first targets could be Kerry, who has repeatedly violated the Logan Act since Trump took office.
“I think the first thing we need to do is make sure we don’t do what the Democrats have done,” Ratcliffe promised host Fox News Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures. “They accused Donald Trump of a crime and then they try and reverse engineer a process to justify that accusation. So I’m not going to accuse any specific person of any specific crime, I just want there to be a fair process to get there. What I do know as a former federal prosecutor is that it does appear that there were crimes committed during the Obama administration.”
In June, The Daily Beast reported that anonymous officials from Obama’s former administration have been coaching Iranian leaders on how to negotiate with Trump. Kerry is suspected to be the leader of these officials.
After all, Kerry admitted to violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act in Dec. 2018, just months after Daniel Greenfield of Frontpage Magazine accused Kerry of violating the Logan Act. For years, there have been calls to prosecute the former secretary of state for these illegal foreign policy violations.
That could make him an appealing target for Ratcliffe, who in 2018 promised to go after the “secret society” of Obama loyalists that have been undermining the Trump administration.
In a letter of resignation released Sunday night, Coats said serving as the nation’s top intelligence official has been a “distinct privilege” but that it was time for him to “move on” to the next chapter of his life. He cited his work to strengthen the intelligence community’s effort to prevent harm to the U.S. from adversaries and to reform the security clearance process.
A former Republican senator from Indiana, Coats was appointed director of national intelligence in March 2017, becoming the fifth person to hold the post since it was created in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to oversee and coordinate the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies.
Confirmation takes a simple 51-vote majority, under new rules in the Senate — with Republicans holding a 53-seat majority.
Once he’s in charge of our nation’s intelligence services, Ratcliffe can potentially provide the Department of Justice all the information they need to formally prosecute former Obama officials.
That could be very bad news for John Kerry.
READ MORE: Inside John Kerry’s SERIOUS legal trouble
The Horn editorial team and The Associated Press contributed to this article