Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz, author of Get Trump: The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process, and Our Constitutional Rule of Law, said on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak that Manhattan’s district attorney Alvin Bragg created “a crime that doesn’t exist” in his legal pursuit of former President Donald Trump.
Alvin Bragg knows he is not pursuing a “righteous prosecution,” Dershowitz stated.
Dershowitz speculated that a televised “perp walk” of Trump would amount to a political boon for Bragg’s reelection campaign.
“He knows he will probably lose in the end, but it doesn’t matter,” he remarked. “Get the perp walk. It will get to TV, and he’ll probably get reelected.”
He added, “What [Bragg] has done is rummage through every conceivable statute and regulation and creatively tried to mesh a New York misdemeanor statute with a federal felony statute to create out of whole cloth a crime that doesn’t exist; a one plus one equals eleven.”
Dershowitz considers an indictment and conviction of Trump possible in New York state.
“As Chief Judge Wachtler once said, ‘You can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich,'” he said. “In New York, you can get them to convict a ham sandwich; a petit jury if the ham sandwich’s name is Trump. So [Bragg] may have an easy job getting an indictment and even getting a conviction, though I think it will be reversed on appeal, and there’s the issue of the statute of limitations, all of this happened six or seven years ago, and they’re going to have to come up with some fancy way of getting around that.”
Dershowitz recalled a cautionary aphorism from the late Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson about abusive application of the law.
He stated, “[Jackson] famously said that any prosecutor rummaging through the hundreds and hundreds of statute books could find something to pin something on someone, and that’s not the way it ought to be be.”
The Harvard Law School professor concluded by describing the legal pursuit of Trump as as a partisan weaponization of the legal system undermining the rule of law and violating the ethos of blind justice.
“This is such a clear violation of Justice Jackson’s dictum, the Bible, and every notion of justice that I’ve been teaching about for 60 years,” he held.
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