Exclusive — Alan Dershowitz: I Was ‘Disappointed’ Merrick Garland Approved Search Warrant of Rudy Giuliani’s Home

Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz told Breitbart News Sunday host Joel Pollak he was “disappointed” in Attorney General Merrick Garland’s approval of a search warrant for the FBI to raid former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s apartment.

“I was a little disappointed,” Dershowitz said. “I would have thought that Merrick Garland, who I strongly supported when he was nominated for the Supreme Court, and who I remember as a student at Harvard Law School, a quite brilliant student … but I would have thought that he would have said — the way Barr said, ‘No, you can’t go for a search warrant. If you want to get a subpoena, okay,’ and then there’s a contest.”

He continued, “Search warrants are ex parte, and subpoenas are adversarial. You file a request for information as a subpoena, and then the other side says, ‘No,’ and then you go before an impartial judge who decides how much — if anything — the government is entitled to. I would hope they would do that.”

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Dershowitz said he is now advising Giuliani’s legal team on Fourth Amendment matters related to the raid.

He shared, “I have to disclose that Rudy has called me and asked me if I would advise his lawyers on the Fourth Amendment aspects of these issues, and I said I would, just as I would if a Democrat called me and had been victim of an abuse of the fourth amendment.”

Dershowitz described the raid as violative of Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure. He added that the FBI’s seizure of Giuliani’s electronic devices undermines attorney-client privilege — and other prevailed communications — given Giuliani’s role as an attorney, particularly as legal counsel for former President Donald Trump.

“The Fourth Amendment has nothing to do with criminal prosecution,” he explained, “The Fourth Amendment is about a right to privacy, not about criminal prosecution, and the government has no right to read confidential communications between the lawyer and client, the priest and a penitent, the patient and a doctor, or psychiatrist and a patient.”

He concluded, “That’s a simple matter, and it was clearly violated in this case, and so [Giuliani] is going to fight back, and I’m going to help him. … Certainly, former President Trump would have the right to bring a lawsuit and say, ‘Whoa, wait a minute. Don’t read the material I gave to him. Give that back to me. It’s my information. It’s my privilege.'”