Constitutional law expert Alan Dershowitz has "never seen a weaker indictment," but he told Newsmax that "there's no chance of a fair trial or dismissal" for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's case against former President Donald Trump.
"It's a scandal; it's a shame," Dershowitz, a self-proclaimed liberal Democrat who has been ostracized for using the law to defend Trump, told Sunday's "The Gorka Reality Check." "For somebody who has devoted himself to the law — as I have so many years and, as you say, lost so many friends over my attempt to, ... as a matter of principle, defend the Constitution — I am just appalled.
"And I'm appalled that so many good lawyers in his office — and I know some of them; they're former students and friends — went along with this travesty of justice."
Trump was arraigned this week on 34 counts of falsifying business records, but the prosecutorial overreach, if not misconduct, will stand for now, with Dec. 4 the next court date, Dershowitz lamented to host Sebastian Gorka.
"There's no chance of a fair trial or dismissal," Dershowitz continued. "No judge who's elected in New York is ever going to allow himself to have the fingers of the public pointed it at him, saying, 'This is the judge who freed everybody.'
"I think the reason they put it off in December [is] because they know they have such an extraordinarily weak case. I've never seen a case put off so long. They probably are hoping that there will be indictments against him, perhaps in Georgia, or in Florida, or in Washington, D.C., and thus take the focus off him."
For Dershowitz, arguably the most renowned constitutional law expert of our lifetimes, to not find a legal standing for this case speaks volumes.
"I have read probably more indictments than any American lawyer over the last 60 years of my career," he said. "I have never seen a weaker indictment than this.
"With 60 years of experience, I do not understand it. I don't understand what crimes are being charged. Probably the reason he doesn't list them in the indictment is there are no valid crimes there. By the way, there's no misdemeanor, either. There's no misdemeanor. There's no federal felony. There's no state felony. There's nothing there at all."
Dershowitz had actually hoped the indictment would show something worth charging, but alas it came up empty.
"I went through the thing with a fine-tooth comb; I just couldn't find anything illegal, and I was shocked," Dershowitz said. "You know, part of me as a civil libertarian person who cares about America was hoping maybe there's a smoking gun, maybe there'd be an answer to the president of El Salvador, who wrote a tweet saying, 'You can no longer ever, ever, ever lecture us about democracy when you prosecute the man who is running against your president on made-up charges; we don't want to hear from you anymore. You've lost your credibility, America, in talking about democracy.'
"Well, he was wrong. It's not America. I mean, you can't have a local DA who ran on the promise of getting Trump destroy hundreds of years of American credibility on democracy.
"But [Bragg has] certainly done a good job trying to do that."
Dershowitz broke down all four cases Democrats and anti-Trump operatives are using to try to keep Trump from running for president again in his book, "Get Trump: The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process, and Our Constitutional Rule of Law."
"But, you know, in my book, 'Get Trump,' I go into detail into all of the four cases, and I show there is nothing to any of the four cases," Dershowitz concluded.
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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