The only goal of New York's "get Trump posse" in a civil fraud case is to find former President Donald Trump guilty before the 2024 presidential election, legal scholar Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax on Monday.
Dershowitz said New York Attorney General Letitia James doesn't care whether a conviction gets overturned on appeal after the election. She simply wants the current Republican presidential nomination front-runner to be found guilty beforehand.
"The goal of the 'get Trump posse' is simply to get him guilty, found liable before the election," Dershowitz said during an appearance on "Newsline." "Then they'll be reversed after the election. They don't care. Their goal is to influence the election negatively toward Donald Trump.
"Look I'm not a Trump supporter. I want to see Trump lose in a fair election where there is no thumb of Democratic appointed politicians on the scale, and that's not going to happen if these efforts succeed."
Dershowitz told host Bianca de la Garza that anti-Trump Democrats are trying to take away the former president's money and resources by going after him "for crimes that never ever have been prosecuted before, like the New York crime of not disclosing hush money on a corporate form."
"My God, Alexander Hamilton would have been put in jail under that theory," Dershowitz said.
The Harvard Law School professor emeritus said James singled out Trump even though other wealthy real estate owners likely could be accused of similar actions.
"There must be a hundred real estate moguls in New York who have inflated the value of their properties for purposes of getting a loan or other purposes, but she's targeted only Donald Trump," Dershowitz said.
"If she went after every single real estate person, she might say, No one is above the law. But what she's basically saying is, Donald Trump is below the law. We're going to apply a different standard to him and we don't want the public to see it."
Dershowitz added that Judge Arthur Engoron should not be the person deciding the outcome of the civil case, which is not being televised.
"There's a dispute, whose [property] assessment is correct, the judge's assessment or Trump's assessment," Dershowitz said. "And who's going to decide it? Duh, the very judge who's assessment is in question.
"This case ought to be in front of a jury. It would be on television. It ought to be fairly analyzed, not part of the, quote, 'get Trump posse.'"
Dershowitz then reminded viewers that James campaigned for her job by boasting she would "get Trump."
"She promised to get Trump, and now she is getting Trump, and she got the right judge to get Trump, and he doesn't want the public to see what he's doing in that courtroom," Dershowitz said.
"He was perfectly happy to pose and smile, glasses off to look a little better, but when it came to having the American public access whether justice is happening in that courtroom or whether it's part of a get Trump partisan political, he doesn't want that before the American people."
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Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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