Dershowitz Slams Trump Indictment as Unconstitutional Targeting by Department of Justice

Former Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker and Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz appeared on this week’s Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo to give their insights and analysis regarding the indictment of Donald Trump and listed a number of problems with the Department of Justice’s case, including aggressive prosecution, selective targeting of Trump versus Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton, and whether the Espionage Act should even apply.

Calling Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Friday afternoon statement gaslighting (just as RedState did), Dershowitz slammed the DOJ for targeting Trump while ignoring similar offenses by elected officials who didn’t have the special privileges and protections Trump had as President.

He was assigned only one job: to get Trump. If you put aside all your resources and do what Justice Jackson warned about 80 years ago, where he said, “It’s a question of picking the man and then searching the law books or putting investigators to work to pin some offense on him.” That’s what they did. And Jack Smith is wrong when he says there’s one set of laws. He was assigned only one job: to get Trump.

Whitaker noted the aggressive prosecution by Smith, who’s already been reversed in one aggressive prosecution, before predicting that the issue of whether the Espionage Act or the Presidential Records Act applies will be the number one legal issue in the case.

It’s a very aggressive prosecution by Jack Smith. And I’ll point out that he was the one that got reversed 9-0 by the U.S. Supreme Court on the Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell case for taking a very aggressive position on a statute. You know, the interplay between the Presidential Records Act, which says all documents are covered by that act, and the Espionage Act, which preceded it and was passed in 1917, about four months into World War I, I think is going to be the most important issue that the courts are going to have to decide.

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This document [the indictment] only talks about national defense information under the Espionage Act. That’s a separate category under the statutes than classified information that’s marked classified.

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