Democrat Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal openly admitted this week that she’s been chatting up foreign ambassadors to figure out how to get oil into communist Cuba — you know, the country President Trump just slapped sanctions on. She said this out loud. On camera. In Seattle. To applause.
What’s the Spanish word for “Logan Act”? Asking for several million Americans.
Jayapal had just returned from a congressional junket to Havana, where she apparently fell in love with the place. (Who wouldn’t? The cars are vintage, the bread lines are character-building, and the secret police really keep you on your toes.) Back home in Seattle, she stood at a podium and told the crowd, “I was in conversations with the ambassadors from Mexico and some other places… trying to figure out how to get oil there.”
The “there” is Cuba. The “oil” is the stuff Trump’s sanctions are specifically designed to keep out. And the “ambassadors” are foreign government officials Jayapal is allegedly conspiring with to help the Castro regime stay propped up.
This is the same Cuban regime that imports oil from Russia, Venezuela, and Iran, jails dissidents, and has spent six decades demonstrating that communism still doesn’t work no matter how many times you try it. But Jayapal and her congressional buddies took one look at the crumbling buildings, the empty pharmacies, and the political prisoners and thought, “These poor people just need more cheap fuel from our enemies!”
The reactions came in fast. Senator Mike Lee called her out for “actively working to undermine the application of U.S. law against a foreign adversary.” Senator Rick Scott said she was “OPENLY admitting to aiding a communist adversary.” Conservative commentator Chad Prather summed it up in five words: “This is what a traitor does.”
We’re inclined to agree with Mr. Prather.
Jayapal’s defense, when the heat showed up, was that members of Congress meet with foreign ambassadors all the time. “That’s literally our right and responsibility,” she huffed. Sure. Meeting with ambassadors is fine. Plotting with them to circumvent your own country’s sanctions on a hostile communist regime is a different sport entirely. One has a fancy dinner. The other has a federal indictment — at least it should.
Quick civics refresher for our friends in “the Squad”: the Logan Act is the 1799 law that makes it illegal for unauthorized Americans to negotiate with foreign governments in disputes with the United States. It’s been on the books for 226 years and has produced exactly two indictments and zero convictions. Maybe it’s time to dust that one off and take it for a spin.
Imagine the screeching if a Republican congresswoman flew to Tehran, came home, and announced she’d been working with the Mexican ambassador to help Iran sneak around U.S. sanctions. The cable news meltdown would last six weeks. There would be hearings. Pelosi would emerge from her wine cellar to deliver a speech about “sacred democratic norms.” MSNBC would run a 24-hour countdown clock to her arrest.
But because it’s Jayapal helping a left-wing dictatorship instead of a right-wing one, the legacy media response so far has been a soft cough and a quick pivot to a story about how Trump tweeted something mean.
Here’s the part that should make every American taxpayer’s blood pressure spike: Jayapal isn’t some random activist. She’s a sitting member of the United States Congress. She helps write the laws she’s now bragging about helping a foreign country evade. She voted on the very sanctions framework she’s now actively undermining. (We told you this was bonkers, right?)
The Cuban people deserve freedom. They’ve deserved it since 1959. The way they get it is not by Pramila Jayapal hand-delivering Mexican oil to keep the regime’s lights on for another decade. The way they get it is by the regime collapsing under the weight of its own glorious workers’ paradise — which is exactly what President Trump’s sanctions are designed to accelerate.
The DOJ should be asking Pramila Jayapal some very pointed questions this week. If she’s done what she said she did on that Seattle stage, the next room she walks into should be a courtroom — not the first-class cabin on her next taxpayer-funded trip to Havana.
Pop quiz: what’s the over/under on her doing it again before Memorial Day? I’d take the under, but only because she’ll probably brag about it on a podcast first.