Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has come out strongly in opposition to calls for the Department of Justice to pursue a case against President Donald Trump.
While arguing that there is currently enough evidence in the more than half-redacted FBI affidavit to indict Trump, particularly by a grand jury in a Washington, D.C., that’s dominated by Democrats, Dershowitz cautioned the DOJ against it.
“Any grand jury in D.C. would indict Trump on the evidence that he had classified material in violation of various statutes,” Dershowitz told the New York Post.
The 83-year-old veteran attorney and respected legal scholar pointed specifically to failures of the DOJ probe to meet what he called “the Nixon and Clinton tests” according to the Post.
The first criterion is a need to establish broad, bipartisan support, Dershowitz told the Post. The second would be demonstrating that Trump’s conduct is “materially worse than Hillary Clinton’s own past mishandling of classified information.”
“Getting a search warrant is easy to do, and a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich, so that is why we need prosecutorial discretion,” Dershowitz added.
Dershowitz, known to be an ally to Trump and formerly a part of his legal team was highly critical of Attorney General Merrick Garland for even seeking a warrant in the first place.
“By the DOJ’s own regulations, you don’t seek a search warrant unless that’s the only way you can get the material,” Dershowitz told the Post.
On Friday, the Department of Justice released a heavily redacted version of the FBI’s affidavit stating its grounds for requesting the search warrant with 11 whole pages of the document, more than half of it, mostly in the middle, blacked out.
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The redacted nature of the release was not lost on Trump, who harshly criticized it in a Truth Social post,
He specifically referred to leaks from the Justice Department to The Washington Post that there was material relating to nuclear arms security involved in the documents the FBI was seeking in its raid on Trump’s home in the Mar-a-Lago Club in South Florida.
“Affidavit heavily redacted!!!” he wrote. “Nothing mentioned on ‘Nuclear,’ a total public relations subterfuge by the FBI & DOJ, or our close working relationship regarding document turnover – WE GAVE THEM MUCH.”
Dershowitz, in an interview Friday on “Just the News, Not Noise” on the Real America’s Voice network, argued that Trump is having difficulty obtaining “the best lawyers in the world” because of “left-wing McCarthyism.”
.@AlanDersh says the “left-wing McCarthyism” is an attempt to deny President Trump from getting the best legal representation by blackballing and attacking anyone that defends him.
Watch LIVE➡ https://t.co/cUOaVsjAMO#JustTheNewsNotNoise @jsolomonReports @AmandaHead pic.twitter.com/RLH7Atr0gB
— Real America’s Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) August 27, 2022
“I’m gonna make a prediction here,” Dershowitz told Just the News, Not Noise “If no more evidence comes out, based on what’s in the un-redacted portions of this affidavit, President Trump will not be indicted.”
He continued, “I don’t think Garland is going to indict him for technical violations of these kinds of statutes that look very similar to what happened with Hillary Clinton.”
“I think the same standard has to apply to a Republican candidate as to a Democratic candidate,” Dershowitz added.
