Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz harshly criticized the indictment of former President Donald Trump, describing it as an extreme case of prosecutorial misconduct.
“In 60 years of practice, this is the worst case of prosecutorial abuse I have ever seen,” Dershowitz told The Epoch Times on March 30. “What’s really unprecedented is not the indictment of a past president, but the indictment of a potential future president who is running against the head of the party of the man who indicted him.”
“It’s very dangerous—it means that district attorneys can indict their own political enemies,” the scholar said. “It really endangers the rule of law for all Americans. Today, it’s Trump; tomorrow, it’s a Democrat. The day after tomorrow, it’s your uncle Charlie, or your niece, or your nephew.”
Dershowitz was responding to the news that a Manhattan jury voted to indict Trump on charges surrounding alleged hush money paid to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, making Trump the first former president to be criminally charged in the nation’s history. It spawned from an investigation conducted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office that included grand jury testimony by Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen and Cohen’s former lawyer, Robert Costello.
Days before the 2016 presidential election, Cohen allegedly paid Daniels $130,000 in exchange for her silence on an alleged 2006 tryst between her and Trump—which the former president denies. Cohen pleaded guilty to violating federal campaign finance laws in 2018 for arranging payment to Daniels and another woman claiming to have had an affair with Trump. In his guilty plea, Cohen claims to have done so at Trump’s direction and was reimbursed by the Trump Organization through routine legal expenses.
While no charges have been announced, Dershowitz said Bragg likely relied on elevating a charge of falsifying business records involving the payment to Daniels—a misdemeanor—to a felony by tying it to a federal charge of campaign finance violation.
“In order to turn the state statute into a felony, you have to borrow a federal statute,” Dershowitz told The Epoch Times in an interview earlier in March. He said that this combining of laws “seems to raise real serious legal questions.”
By Gary Bai
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