On Tuesday’s edition of the Fox News Channel’s “America’s News HQ,” Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz argued that, according to the Department of Justice, a sitting president can’t be indicted while in office.
Dershowitz said, “The Justice Department has twice ruled in a long extensive memo, which I just read this morning, for the second or third time, stating clearly that the president cannot be indicted, prosecuted, and tried while serving in office. The only mechanism the Constitution provides is that he could be impeached, and once impeached and removed from office, he can then be charged with a criminal trial. But a sitting president cannot — according to the Justice Department, be tried.”
He continued, “And the president would be making a terrible mistake by getting into the weeds of arguing the facts, rather than sticking with the conceptual, constitutional issues.”
Dershowitz added, “[I]f I was his lawyer, the first thing I would do is bring some masking tape and a pair of mittens, so the president couldn’t tweet and couldn’t talk. … And that’s what I do to all my clients.”
He also argued that it would be better if Trump didn’t get into the weeds because he ends up contradicting his own lawyers. Dershowitz added that there hadn’t been any “serious” contradictions and that the answer to the dispute over whether Trump is or is not under investigation is that he’s “under investigation-ish, not quite.”
Dershowitz concluded that the DOJ’s conclusion that a sitting president can’t be indicted “seems to be a correct statement of the law.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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