Exclusive — Alan Dershowitz: Bannon Indictment ‘Outrageous’, ‘Disputed Question’ Whether Trump Retains Executive Privilege

The Justice Department’s (DOJ) indictment of Steve Bannon is “outrageous,” Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz, author of The Case for Vaccine Mandates, said on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak.

Breitbart News reported on Friday, “President Joe Biden’s Justice Department indicted Steve Bannon on Friday, former President Donald Trump’s one-time White House senior counselor and a former chairman of Breitbart News.”

Bannon surrendered to federal authorities on Monday and faces contempt charges after defying a subpoena from a House committee ostensibly investigating the events of January 6th.

Dershowitz said, “It’s an outrageous indictment. I’ll tell you why it’s outrageous. You don’t indict somebody when you don’t know what the law is. Nobody knows whether or not Bannon has the right to refuse to answer if the president tells him not to.  That is a disputed question. That’s not a proper subject for criminal indictment.”

Retention of executive privilege by former presidents is a disputed legal question, Dershowitz stated. He explained the legal process he recommended for investigation of such contentious issues of legality.

“You go to court, you get a declaratory judgment, you get an injunction, you get a court order, and only then is it possible, but you don’t use the criminal justice system except after you’ve exhausted all the alternatives to try to find out what the law is,” he said.

“We don’t know what the law is,” he continued. “If you’ve got 10 constitutional scholars in a room — not Larry Tribe, because he’s not a constitutional scholar, he’s a partisan advocate, he was a scholar, but he’s now an advocate — but if you’ve got 10 reasonable constitutional scholars in the room and you didn’t tell them whether the person was a Democrat or a Republican, it would go five-to-five whether or not a former president has the authority to instruct his former adviser not to turn material over and not to testify.”

“[It is] a hard, close question, not a proper subject for criminal indictment,” he concluded.