Legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, usually a defender of former President Donald Trump, elicited shock Friday when he claimed point-blank that there’s now “enough evidence” to indict the former president.
“There is enough evidence here to indict Trump,” he bluntly said on Fox News’s “Hannity.”
Listen:
However, he then speculated that, despite there being “enough evidence,” Trump ultimately won’t be indicted because of what he termed the Nixon-Clinton standards.
“Trump will not be indicted, in my view, because the evidence doesn’t pass what I call the Nixon- Clinton standards,” Dershowitz said.
“The Nixon standard is the case has to be so overwhelmingly strong that even Republicans support it, and the Clinton standard is, why is this case more serious than Clinton’s case where there wasn’t a criminal prosecution?” he added.
He offered the bombshell, two-sided claim while speaking on “Hannity” about the release of a heavily redacted version of the affidavit that was used by the FBI to obtain a search warrant on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.
Trump blasts ‘heavily redacted’ affidavit that conveniently leaves a key claim out: ‘Obama must be proud!’ https://t.co/E7ds0MkxNT pic.twitter.com/HKA05Hai66
— Conservative News (@BIZPACReview) August 26, 2022
According to Politico, the affidavit justified the search warrant by “by pointing to a raft of highly classified material” that’d already been retrieved from Mar-a-Lago.
“Records the FBI obtained from Trump’s Florida home in advance of the Aug. 8 search bore indications they contained human source intelligence, intercepts under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and signals intelligence, as well as other tags indicating high sensitivity,” Politico reported after the affidavit’s release.
“[A]gents found 184 unique documents, 25 of which were marked ‘top secret,’ 92 of which were marked ‘secret,’ and 67 of which were marked ‘confidential’–the lowest level of national security classification. According to the affidavit, NARA officials found some of those ‘highly classified records were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly [sic] identified.'”
The problem, as hinted at by Dershowitz, is that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was also caught with “secret” and “top secret” documents. Yet her home was never raided. Nor was she ever indicted.
During his appearance on Fox News, Dershowitz also defended the embattled judge who’d approved the search warrant, Judge Bruce E. Reinhart.
“Reinhart did the right thing by signing the search warrant. Every single judge and magistrate in the United States would have found probable cause based on this affidavit. They may have narrowed the search somewhat, but there is absolutely no doubt there was probable cause,” he said.
If anyone’s to blame for the controversial search warrant, he continued, it’s Attorney General Merrick Garland, whom he accused of not following “his own guidelines.”
“There should never have been a search warrant requested here. There was a subpoena issued, and what I read — and I read it all of the unredacted material — makes a strong case against a search warrant. There was no urgency,” Dershowitz explained.
“If they wanted a search warrant, if it was so urgent, they could have gotten it five months ago. And even when they got the search warrant, they waited two days. There was no justification for a search warrant, so if you want to talk about who’s to blame here, it’s not Reinhart. It’s the attorney general of the United States. He should never have sought a search warrant.”
Listen to his full remarks below:
His defense of Judge Reinhart provoked massive pushback from fill-in host Jason Chaffetz’ two other guests, Fox News contributor Gregg Jarrett and former U.S. Attorney Brett Tolman.
“An impartial judge would have taken a look at this thing and … would have said, wait a minute, the controlling statute here — the Presidential Records Act — why aren’t you seeking an enforcement proceeding here to get the documents that you want. That’s what a good judge would have done. I think a good judge would have seen through this charade,” Jarrett argued.
“If there’s probable cause in this affidavit, it’s in the redacted parts, because the unredacted parts do not have probable cause in them. It’s not sufficient, based on what we know, in order to justify the search warrant,” Tolman added.
“I agree with the professor that a search warrant was not justified in this case, both because we don’t have the probable cause necessary to issue it, but also because the very things that are outlined in the unredacted part explicitly indicate a back-and-forth dialogue. It reads more like a civil dispute. And let me tell you, if you have to take 38 pages to try to convince a judge that there’s probable cause, you may have a problem with your case.”
As previously reported, Trump’s staff had been in communication with the Department of Justice regarding the classified documents that were being stored at Mar-a-Lago. And so it remains unclear why Garland took the unprecedented step of raiding Mar-a-Lago instead of continuing the negotiations or taking the matter to civil court.
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V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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