Alan Dershowitz shredded Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s indictment on Fox News Monday night. He declared that “nobody should take it [the grand jury indictment] seriously” and that “the whole strategy of all these four cases is to get a conviction before the election, even if they’re going to lose on appeal.” Professor Dershowitz maintained that this was solid evidence of politically motivated prosecution in all these cases that are intended to damage Mr. Trump’s candidacy against his main rival Joe Biden.
Professor Dershowitz further elaborated that the hollowness of the grand jury indictment was exacerbated by the fact that “it [the indictment] was on his [the prosecutor’s] website before the grand jury even voted.” Here, he was referencing the leaking of the indictment prior to the grand jury’s vote on it. He also explained how charging someone with racketeering was something he teaches his students at Harvard Law, saying, “I used to teach my students, many of them future prosecutors…that increases your chances of winning a trial and losing on appeal. The same thing is true with conspiracy and other cases involving mental states.”
Dershowitz commented that “all four of these cases are designed to get quick convictions in jurisdictions that are heavily loaded against Donald Trump and these prosecutors don’t care as much as prosecutors generally do about having the convictions reversed on appeal, because that will happen after the election, which only goes to prove what I’ve been arguing now for months.”
He further explained, “If you’re going after the man who’s running against your incumbent president, you had darn well better have the strongest case possible. And these are among the four, at least three of them, three weakest cases I’ve ever seen against any candidate. We don’t know about the fourth, but it seems like it’s very much like the DC case [which Dershowitz had deemed weak].”
“Otherwise, it becomes a banana republic. Anybody can prosecute anybody. And we’re opening the door to prosecution of Democrats by Republicans, Republicans by Democrats. It’s what Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist [Papers] is the most dangerous threat to democracy, and we’re seeing it unfold in front of our eyes. Very, very tragically.”
The legal scholar emphasized that “I’m not a Republican, I’m not a Trump supporter, but I care deeply about the Constitution. I care deeply about preserving the rule of law. And we’re seeing it being frittered away for partisan political purposes.”