Trump indicted on 37 federal counts in classified doc investigation
Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz offered his legal insight into the indictment of former President Donald Trump, saying Special Counsel Jack Smith had only one job when he was assigned to the case: “Get Trump.”
The 37-count indictment was released Friday and included counts of willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice and false statements.
Smith addressed the historic indictment of a former president by explaining that there is “one set of laws” in the country and they “apply to everyone.”
“Applying those laws, collecting facts, that’s what determines the outcome of an investigation, nothing more, nothing less,” he said.
Dershowitz argued that Smith was wrong when he said there is only one set of laws for the country.
“He was assigned only one job – to get Trump,” he said on “Sunday Morning Futures.” “If you put aside all your resources and do what [Supreme Court] Justice [Robert] 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.”
Former Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker added that Smith has pursued an “aggressive prosecution” against the former president.
“I’ll point out that he was the one that got reversed 9-0 by the U.S. Supreme Court on the Virginia Gov. 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 shortly after the U.S. entry into World War I, “I think is going to be the most important issue that the courts are going to have to decide,” Whitaker said.
Trump is scheduled to appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday. He maintains that he has done nothing wrong and plans to stay in the 2024 presidential race even if he is convicted.
Dershowitz said that while he believes the case against the former president is “the product of targeting,” the 44-page indictment lays out one “damning piece of evidence.”
The indictment highlighted a recorded conversation Trump had in a 2021 meeting in which he acknowledged he had a document that he did not declassify.
TRUMP: This was done by the military and given to me. Uh, I think we can probably, right?
STAFFER: I don’t know, we’ll, we’ll have to see. Yeah, we’ll have to try to –
TRUMP: Declassify it.
STAFFER: – figure out a – yeah.
TRUMP: See, as president, I could have declassified it.
STAFFER: Yeah. [laughter]
TRUMP: Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.
STAFFER: Yeah. [laughter] Now we have a problem.
TRUMP: Isn’t that interesting?”
“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.’ 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 told host Maria Bartiromo.
“Now, the defense could be, ‘Hey, I had the right to have that piece of information because the Records Act permits me to have it.’ But that’s going to be a kind of weak defense. I think this is a much stronger indictment than the [Manhattan District Attorney Alvin] Bragg indictment, but it’s the product of targeting.”
He added that Trump is “lucky” the case will be tried in Palm Beach County because he may get a “sympathetic” jury and has a “good judge” assigned to the case.
