Just before the news broke that former President Trump was indicted on federal charges, famed attorney and Harvard Law professor Alan Ders...
Just before the news broke that former President Trump was indicted on federal charges, famed attorney and Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who represented Trump in his first impeachment trial, blasted the seemingly endless investigations into Trump.
Trump was indicted for allegedly violating the Espionage Act because of the way he handled classified documents. Although some of the charges are under the Espionage Act, that does not mean Trump is accused of spying.
“What I worry about is if it becomes Turkey, or it becomes Iran, or it becomes a country where a suspicion is equivalent to conviction of guilt on one side of the political spectrum, rather than the other,” Dershowitz said in an interview on Newsmax, pointing out the danger of a legal double standard. “But the key is, you have to have one system and one standard of law enforcement.”
“If there is a certain level of evidence of serious crime against anybody on either side — whether it’s the sitting president, the son of the sitting president, the former president, the same rule has to be applicable to all of them,” he continued. “The Justice Department cannot be allowed to use its enormous power of the criminal justice system to influence political elections.”
“He’s not acting like most criminal defendants,” Dershowitz said of Trump’s vehement response to rumors of his indictment. “Most of them stay quiet. And that’s why he’s gotten in trouble, but he’s exercising his constitutional rights, not only under the First Amendment, but under the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, and the Sixth Amendment.”
“He didn’t just simply roll over when prosecutors said, ‘We think you’re in trouble over possession of classified material.’ He fought back. And you’re allowed to do that,” Dershowitz noted, who also referenced Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s campaign promise to investigate Trump.
“You’re not allowed to cross lines into criminal obstruction of justice,” he explained. “But those are very hard lines to get evidence on. You have to prove corrupt motive. You have to prove that he went beyond just doing what any defendant is entitled to do, fighting back against what he believes is the government campaign to get him.”
Dershowitz noted that when former President Richard Nixon resigned, he had been urged to do so by members of his own party as well as Democrats. “It should be bipartisan when you’re going after a president, a former president, or a person running for president,” he asserted. “It should be a widespread consensus that he’s crossed the line into criminality. That consensus just isn’t there today.”
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