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Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz appeared on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox News show on Sunday to discuss the unprecedented federal indictment of former President Donald Trump.
Dershowitz has never voted for Trump, but that doesn’t stop him from looking at cases from a legal standpoint rather than through a partisan lens.
The law professor said that Special Counsel Jack Smith had one job leading up to the 37-count indictment and that was to “get Trump!”
Dershowitz even entitled his latest book, “Get Trump, The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process, and Our Constitutional Rule of Law.”
“Applying those laws, collecting facts, that’s what determines the outcome of an investigation, nothing more, nothing less,” Dershowitz said.
Smith says otherwise. After handing down the indictment that included charges of willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and false statements, Smith said there is one set of laws in this country and they apply to everyone.
Most Americans are tired of that line because it is a blatant lie. Democrats have a different set of rules as evidenced by those who have gotten away with lying to Congress, destroying evidence, smashing blackberries with hammers, and deleting emails, to name a few.
“He was assigned only one job – to get Trump,” Dershowitz continued on “Sunday Morning Futures.”
“If you put aside all your resources and do what [Supreme Court] Justice [Robert] Jackson warned about 80 years ago – where he said it’s a question of picking the man and then searching the law books or putting investigators to work to pin some offense on him – that’s what they did.”
The proper procedure is to investigate a crime in search of a person. In the U.S., law enforcement is not supposed to choose a person and then search for a crime.
Former Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker agrees and added that Smith has pursued an “aggressive prosecution” of Trump.
“I’ll point out that he was the one that got reversed 9-0 by the U.S. Supreme Court on the Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell case for taking a very aggressive position on a statute.
“You know, the interplay between the Presidential Records Act, which says all documents are covered by that act, and the Espionage Act, which preceded it” and was passed in 1917 shortly after the U.S. entry into World War I, “I think is going to be the most important issue that the courts are going to have to decide,” Whitaker said.
Though Dershowitz believes that the case against Trump is political, he explains one problematic piece of evidence.
There is a recorded conversation where Trump claims to be holding a document he did not declassify.
“Now, the defense could be, ‘Hey, I had the right to have that piece of information because the Records Act permits me to have it.’ But that’s going to be a kind of weak defense. I think this is a much stronger indictment than the [Manhattan District Attorney Alvin] Bragg indictment, but it’s the product of targeting.”
