Dershowitz: No Crime’ in Trump-Cohen Tape, Cohen’s ‘Going to Flip’

On Tuesday’s edition of CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time,” Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz reacted to the release of a tape of a conversation between Donald Trump and Michael Cohen by stating that Cohen is “going to flip.” He added that even if everything Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis says is true, “there’s no crime. There’s no federal crime. There’s no impeachable offense.”

Dershowitz began by saying, “I don’t know why anybody waived the lawyer-client communication regarding this tape.”

He continued, “[H]ere you have the client maybe saying, let’s pay cash. The lawyer says, no, no, no, do it by check. And the client comes back and says, I’ll do it by check. That’s a typical conversation. I’ve had that conversation a dozen times with clients, and you persuade them to do the right thing. But I think the big picture here is, number one, Lanny is a terrific lawyer. And so, there is a real lawyer who is now against Trump, unlike Avenatti and some of the others, a really, really good lawyer who’s on this case. Second of all, you have a situation where, you know, he’s going to flip. There’s no question. He’s now made it clear.”

Dershowitz later stated, “This is all political. There is no crime here. The worst, worst case scenario, take everything Lanny Davis says as true, there’s no crime. There’s no federal crime. There’s no impeachable offense. This is all about how the president looks in the court of public opinion, whether or not he, through his lawyer, said something that was not true. I think they will win that fight because the tape’s ambiguous enough so that there will be people who will hear it the way they want to hear it, and other people who will hear it the way they want to hear it.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett