John Kerry’s embarrassing exit

It didn’t go unnoticed here that smug climate envoy John Kerry is heading over to President Biden’s campaign suite. It’s the dark side — the place where the federal Freedom of Information Act goes to die.

It may go down in history that the Herald was the last media outlet to extract public records from the jet-setting former U.S. Secretary of State and Massachusetts senator. He was also a failed presidential candidate.

Yet, for someone who should understand the law, he sure ran from it. As we wrote last month, Kerry doles out six-figure salaries to all but one lone “policy analyst” in his office who just misses the lofty mark in the first public records release to the Herald from the notoriously secretive climate czar.

It was a rare glimpse into Kerry’s fiefdom that hits up taxpayers for $4.3 million in pay per year, according to records obtained using the Freedom of Information Act. But — there’s always a catch with Kerry — he did not reveal the names of anyone on his staff and redacted the titles of eight top aides paid up to $186,680 a year.

Now Biden is basically hiding Kerry away from the prying eyes of the Herald and Congress. The Office of Campaign and Political Finance is a great tool for watchdogs, but it won’t tell us what Kerry is up to, if anything, or who Biden sends him to consort with.

We’re not talking about King Arthur’s roundtable here. It’s Joe Biden and John Kerry, the two most entrenched politicians of the modern age, who are conspiring to upend the nation’s economy and fraternize with our enemies.

In case you’re thinking we’re being too hard on Kerry, just remember he dodged a whopping six-figure state tax bill on his multimillion-dollar yacht by mooring her in Newport, R.I. The Herald broke that story in 2010.

Isabel — Kerry’s luxe, 76-foot New Zealand-built Friendship sloop with an Edwardian-style, glossy varnished teak interior, two VIP main cabins and a pilothouse fitted with a wet bar and cold wine storage — was designed by Rhode Island boat designer Ted Fontaine.

But instead of berthing the vessel in Nantucket, where the senator used to summer with the missus, Teresa Heinz, Isabel’s hailing port was listed as “Newport” on her stern.

Alas, that’s the point we’ve been trying to make for decades. John Kerry does not care about the laws the great unwashed need to pay. He does what suits him best and the rest of us need to just live with it.

That’s why Biden has banished him to the re-election campaign. He is hiding the aloof climate envoy so the rest of us can’t try to find out what exactly he’s been up to and how much has it cost taxpayers.

It’s a shame Biden doesn’t have the guts to let Kerry sit and sweat in front of a Congressional committee. We’d add answer our Freedom of Information Act requests while you’re at it.

Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”

Someone should read that one to Kerry. He was the nation’s first presidential special envoy for climate and he worked in the shadows. It didn’t have to be that way.

But in Kerry’s world, Democracy is for the elite, not for the taxpayers.