Harvard law professor and author Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax on Monday that New York Judge Juan Merchan should recuse himself from former President Donald Trump's criminal case because he was involved in a prior case with Trump's company.
"He was in a related case. He played a role in the conviction of one of Trump's leading associates, who then turned against Trump," Dershowitz said during "The Record with Greta Van Susteren" on Monday. So, [Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg] said, 'this was a related case, and that's why he should sit on it.' The law should be exactly the opposite. If it's a related case, you should be excluded from sitting on it."
Merchan is presiding over the Manhattan criminal case Trump was charged with last week dealing with a 2016 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged affair the pair had years earlier.
Although there have been recent revelations about the judge's small political donations to left-wing candidates and organizations, Dershowitz said the proximity to the earlier Trump case is more of a problem to his perceived objectivity.
"He's already heard evidence that's inadmissible in this case," Dershowitz said. "He's already formed opinions, and so when you consider the totality of the circumstances, and you impose the rule of the appearance of justice, particularly in a case as sensitive and politically divisive as this one, he would be smart to say, 'I'm taking it upon myself, although I did nothing wrong, to recuse [myself].'"
He said that he believes there is bias on behalf of the judge, but not because of the donations he made, or even that he presided over the prior case, but just because of the city he lives in and its bias against the former president.
"I want to go that far for this reason, judges are just human beings with robes, and considering what happened to me when I merely defended Donald Trump," he said. "I lost all of my friends and social contacts on Martha's Vineyard; I lost clients. Do you think a judge in New York City, in Manhattan, is really going to want to walk into his club [with] his fancy friends and have them point the finger at him and say, 'Oh, that's the guy who freed Donald Trump and allowed him to be the next president?' No judges could endure that. But that's going to be probably every judge in New York City because it's so heavily Democratic."
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