Harvard Law School professor emeritus and noted civil libertarian Alan Dershowitz has panned the potential prosecution of former President Donald Trump, saying he is the victim of “targeted injustice” by Democrats.
Trump announced Saturday that he expected to be arrested by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on charges of falsifying business records related to an alleged “hush money” payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
The payment to Daniels was to ensure her silence toward the end of the 2016 campaign about an alleged affair she had with Trump. But the payment was not illegal — and it did not even violate campaign finance rules, as the Federal Election Commission (FEC) apparently concluded in dropping its investigation into the matter. Federal and local prosecutors who have targeted Trump in every other way have also shied away from the case.
In an essay for the New York Sun, Dershowitz described the looming decision to indict and prosecute Trump as “targeted injustice,” given that other politicians are not prosecuted for doing substantially the same thing:
Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, [is] targeting the former president and current candidate, Donald Trump. Does anyone actually believe that if someone else were accused of paying hush money to avoid a sex scandal in the manner that Mr. Trump is suspected of doing, he would be prosecuted?
After spending months searching the criminal code for a law that Mr. Trump might be accused of violating, Mr. Bragg has apparently landed on a highly questionable campaign contribution provision that has never before been used in a comparable situation.
…
All decent people, whether politically opposed to Mr. Trump (as I am) or supportive of his candidacy, should be concerned about this weaponizing of the prosecutor’s office for the political purpose of preventing a potential candidate from running for office.
Dershowitz also told the Epoch Times that Bragg, who was elected with the help of $1 million in spending by left-wing billionaire George Soros, is using “made-up laws” to prosecute Trump under a federal statute in state court.
Others have arrived at similar conclusions. Andrew McCarthy, a former Department of Justice prosecutor who is often quite critical of Trump, has called the impending prosecution a “ridiculous pile of bull cookies.”
Dershowitz has also written a book about Democrats’ effort to target Trump and how it has hurt American institutions and values: Get Trump: The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process, and Our Constitutional Rule of Law.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.