Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz warned during an interview over the weekend that the federal indictment against former President Donald Trump is “much stronger” than the indictment that he faces from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office.
The remarks from Dershowitz come after he has repeatedly defended the former president, including as a member of his defense team during his first impeachment trial and as a pundit on cable news where he regularly defended the former president over a variety of issues, most notably against former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Dershowitz told Fox News on Sunday that he thinks that the indictment was an example of “targeting” the former president, but admitted that there was one “damning piece of evidence” included in the indictment that could cause serious problems for Trump.
The piece of evidence Dershowitz referred to was the following allegation in the indictment:
In July 2021, at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey (“The Bedminster Club”), during an audio-recorded meeting with a writer, a publisher, and two members of his staff, none of whom possessed a security clearance, [Trump] showed and described a “plan of attack” that [Trump] said was prepared for him by the Department of Defense and a senior military official. [Trump] told the individuals that the plan was “highly confidential” and “secret.” [Trump] also said, “as president I could have declassified it,” and, “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
“There’s one problem with that, and that is the tape recording in which Donald Trump foolishly waves a piece of paper and says, ‘I could have declassified this, but I didn’t. It’s secret. Here, look at it,'” Dershowitz said. “Now, maybe he didn’t actually allow the person to read it. But that tape recording, which can’t be cross-examined, you can’t say it’s a flip witness or a witness who shouldn’t have been able to testify. That’s a damning piece of evidence.”
Dershowitz added that attempts to claim that Trump had the right to have the document because the Presidential Records Act allows him to have it are a “weak defense.”
“I think this is a much stronger indictment than the Bragg indictment, but it’s the product of targeting,” he claimed.
Former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr told Fox News on Sunday that if even half of the things Trump is accused of doing are true that the former president is “toast.”
“It’s a very detailed indictment and it’s very, very damning,” Barr said. “And this idea of presenting Trump as a victim here, or a victim of a witch hunt, is ridiculous. Yes, he’s been a victim in the past. Yes, his adversaries have obsessively pursued him with phony claims. And I’ve been at his side defending against them when he is a victim. But this is much different. He’s not a victim here.”
Barr said the federal indictment is very different from other cases in which the justice system was weaponized against the former president.
“There was no problem or issue underlying the Russiagate claim. It was an effort to knock him out with a false claim,” Barr said. “Here, I think the government acted responsibly. They gave him every opportunity to return those documents. They acted with restraint. They were very deferential to him. And they were very patient. They talked to him for almost a year to try to get those documents and he jerked them around. They finally went to a subpoena, and what did he do? According to the government, he lied and obstructed that subpoena. And then they did a search, and they found a lot more documents.”
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