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The famed Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz said that the Department of Justice has enough evidence to indict Donald Trump, but they won’t. According to Dershowitz, the main reason is that the evidence doesn’t pass what he calls the “Clinton-Nixon test.”
Alan replied: “Every judge would’ve made the same ruling. So it’s no harm, no foul. The problem was not with Reinhart. It was with the attorney general who didn’t follow his own guidelines.
“If you want to indict a sitting president, you have to have evidence that is so overwhelming and compelling that it would result in a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt. That standard was not met in either the Clinton or Nixon cases, and it’s not going to be met in the Trump case either.”
Behar then asked if that meant Trump was “off the hook.”
Dershowitz replied: “In terms of criminal charges, yes, he’s off the hook. But politically, he’s not off the hook. The American people will make a judgment about whether they want to re-elect a president who has been accused of these kinds of things.
“But in terms of criminal charges, the Department of Justice is not going to indict, and every judge would throw out the indictment if it were brought.”
Alan Dershowitz dealt a blow to Joy Behar on Wednesday, saying that Donald Trump would not be indicted because the case against him did not pass the standards set by previous presidents.
“The other important thing is, there is enough evidence here to indict Trump. But Trump will not be indicted in my view because the evidence doesn’t pass what I call the Nixon-Clinton standards,” Dershowitz said on “The View.”
Dershowitz was referring to the impeachment trials of Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, respectively. In both cases, he argued, there was enough evidence to indict the presidents, but they were not indicted because the evidence did not meet the high standards required for indicting a sitting president.
“So you need evidence of something that is clearly criminal, that rises to the level of impeachment, and there is no such evidence against President Trump,” Dershowitz concluded.
This is not the first time Dershowitz has clashed with Behar on “The View.” Last year, the two got into a heated argument over the Special Counsel investigation, with Dershowitz saying that there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
“The only people who think there is collusion are people like Joy Behar, who know nothing about the law,” Dershowitz said at the time.
It seems that Dershowitz and Behar will continue to butt heads in the future, as they remain on opposite sides of the political aisle.
“There’s a big difference between an indictment and impeachment,” Dershowitz said. “An indictment is a finding of probable cause that a person has committed a crime. Impeachment is a political process.”
“You don’t need probable cause to impeach,” he continued. “All you need is a majority of the House and two-thirds of the Senate to agree that this person should be removed from office.”
“So, it’s a very different standard,” Dershowitz concluded. “Trump is not going to be indicted because the case doesn’t pass the Nixon-Clinton standards.”
Behar appeared to be taken aback by Dershowitz’s argument, and she admitted that she had not considered the issue from that perspective.
“I never thought of it that way,” she said.
“That’s because you’re not a lawyer,” Dershowitz shot back.
The exchange between Dershowitz and Behar is notable because it highlights the fact that, while there is a growing consensus among legal experts that Trump has committed impeachable offenses, there is still significant disagreement over whether he should be indicted for those offenses.
The issue is likely to be settled by the Supreme Court, which is currently considering whether to take up a case that could have major implications for the president.
