Free Republic

Now that Attorney General William Barr has rightly dismissed the case against Michael Flynn, the Justice Department should review all similar prosecutions and dismiss those that come within the principles that led to the dismissal of the Flynn case. If these principles were persuasive enough to warrant action in the Flynn case - and I believe they were - they cannot rightfully be limited to one high profile case, without lending support to the accusation, even if false, that politics may have played a role in the Flynn case. The Justice Department must not only be just, it must appear...

Attorney Alan Dershowitz filed a defamation countersuit against fellow lawyer David Boies, claiming Boies, his law firm and Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Guiffre attempted to extort money from rich and powerful men for private settlements. The suit, filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, alleging intentional infliction of emotional distress and extortion. It names billionaire Leslie Wexner as one of alleged extortion targets. This lawsuit comes in response to Boies’s suit against Dershowitz that was filed in November, accusing the attorney of disparaging Boies’s law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, by calling it “the law firm of extortion,...

Alan Dershowitz, one of President Trump’s attorneys, defended himself on Sunday after sparking controversy with one of his arguments justifying the president’s pursuit of investigations in Ukraine. The former Harvard Law professor triggered a wave of backlash after appearing to argue that whatever a president does for reelection could be justified as part of the national interest. It fanned the flames of those who believed Mr. Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine was an abuse of power. Mr. Dershowitz explained on Fox News Sunday that his comments were “deliberately wrenched out of context” and that he was trying to explain there were...

President Trump’s impeachment lawyer Alan Dershowitz argued the president should not have the stain of impeachment on his legacy if the Senate acquits him. “Nancy Pelosi has now pulled a real sharp one. She says even if he’s acquitted and vindicated, he’s still impeached. He’s going to have that label forever. That should not be how it is. Why? He didn’t have a fair trial,” Dershowitz, 81, told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Friday. “He was indicted. And what happens after a person is acquitted after indictment? The indictment disappears,” he continued. “If he wins this, I think nobody...

Donald Trump's most famous and flamboyant lawyer vanished from his trial Thursday - turning up in Miami to fight back against a tidal wave of criticism for his extraordinary defense that anything a president does to get re-elected is unimpeachable. The Harvard professor surfaced in Florida as other academics and attorneys reacted with astonishment to his position, which he then said he had never actually said. On CNN he told Wolf Blitzer that he had a commitment in the state Thursday and it was difficult to change his flight because the Super Bowl is on this weekend in Miami. He...

Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz, delivering a spirited constitutional defense of President Trump at his Senate impeachment trial Monday night, flatly turned toward House impeachment managers and declared they had picked "dangerous" and "wrong" charges against the president -- noting that neither "abuse of power" nor "obstruction of Congress" was remotely close to an impeachable offense as the framers had intended. In a dramatic primetime moment, the liberal constitutional law scholar reiterated that although he voted for Hillary Clinton, he could not find constitutional justification for the impeachment of a president for non-criminal conduct, or conduct that was not...

Professor Alan M. Dershowitz is a Brooklyn native who has been called “America’s most public Jewish defender” and “Israel’s single most visible defender – the Jewish state’s lead attorney in the court of public opinion.” He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Dershowitz, a graduate of Brooklyn College and Yale Law School, joined the Harvard Law School faculty at age 25 Love him or hate him he knows a thing or two about our constitution. Dershowitz, 81, insists he isn’t a political supporter of President Trump and that he backed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in...

The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Attorney General William Barr did "exactly the right thing" in dropping charges against former Trump administration national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn because there was never a crime committed, Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz asserted Friday. Flynn was exonerated by the DOJ on Thursday afternoon. The action comes even though prosecutors for the past three years have maintained that Flynn lied to the FBI in a January 2017 interview about his conversations with the Russian ambassador and following Flynn's own guilty plea. In a phone interview on the "Brian Kilmeade Show," Dershowitz...

The avalanche of denunciation that fell upon the head of Professor Alan Dershowitz after his address before the Senate’s impeachment proceeding was unsurprising. In lending his stature and knowledge to the President’s defense, he, of course, became the enemy of Trump’s progressive pursuers. The fact that Dershowitz is a lifetime Democrat and liberal made it worse. The Left does not react well to apostasy. But the adverse reaction to Dershowitz’s defense of the President emanated from the nominal right as well -- particularly from National Review and the Dispatch. Jonah Goldberg is not entirely persuaded that impeachable misconduct must be...

Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor who was part of President Trump’s legal team during the Senate impeachment trial, said the top Democratic leaders in Congress “have to go” if the party wants to regain power. “I think they need new leadership. I think Schumer and Pelosi have to go. Schumer, because of his history of lying. You know, Pelosi actually called for me to be disbarred … because I had persuaded some senators” in the Senate trial, he said referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “I think the Dems need new leaders if...

A week after being roasted for tweeting a fake conversation between Republican senators, CNN political commentator and former Clinton White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart claimed Wednesday night during the Senate trial’s dinner break that an argument used by Trump legal team member Alan Dershowitz was “un-American” and akin to those used by “authoritarian people” to justify “genocide.” OutFront host Erin Burnett asked Lockhart what he made of Dershowitz’s claim that a presidential action done “in the national interest...cannot be a quid pro quo that results in impeachment.” Without hesitation, Lockhart stated that while he’s “worked on about a dozen...

Retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz gave what may be the most persuasive case against impeaching President Donald Trump while in the well of the U.S. Senate on Monday evening. Speaking as a representative of Trump's defense team, the lifelong liberal Democrat urged senators to not "let the feelings about one man, strong as they may be, cause irreparable damage" to the fate of other presidents. "Passion and fears of the moment must not blind us," he pleaded. Giving a clinic on the history of impeachment in a matter-of-fact and understandable way, Dershowitz explained the derivation of the idea of...

Fox News anchor Chris Wallace goes into a heated tirade against Katie Pavlich over the impeachment trial: "Get your facts straight!"

After three days of the House Managers’ rollout of the case against Donald Trump, it became clear Saturday morning that his defense team had some video clips of their own. The key difference: Adam Schiff’s team buried us in quotes and excerpts designed to bolster conclusions fashioned in their heads; the defense attorneys provided a roadmap of things people actually said and did. Repeated examples of Trump voicing concern about Ukrainian corruption. Repeated examples of other nations facing interruptions in aid if their behavior didn’t improve. Taking up only a fraction of one day, Pat Cipollone, Jay Sekulow and company...

President Trump’s legal team on Sunday previewed what will be the meat of their forthcoming defense this week by saying that even if all the allegations Democrats laid out last week were true, they would still fall short of “impeachable” offenses under the U.S. Constitution. After House Democrats got their chance to make the case against Mr. Trump last week, the focus now turns to the defense as Republicans eye an end to a Senate impeachment trial that could see a vote to acquit the president by the end of the week. “Even if the factual allegations are true —...

As part of President Donald Trump's impeachment defense team, Alan Dershowitz is expected to argue on behalf of the president at the Senate trial early next week. But in a 2016 book he authored, the famed defense attorney called Trump a “destabilizing and unpredictable candidate,” warning that the then-presidential candidate “openly embraces fringe conspiracy theories peddled by extremists.” Dershowitz wrote those statements in his book titled “Electile Dysfunction: A Guide for Unaroused Voters.” In a phone call with NBC about his comments in the 2016 book, Dershowitz clarified his views about the president. “I was campaigning for Hillary Clinton at...

President Donald Trump’s legal defense team is working toward a Monday deadline to submit a defense brief against charges filed by House prosecutors in the Senate trial that is set to begin in earnest next week.https://omny.fm/shows/880-extras/alan-dershowitz-im-not-a-full-fledged-member-of-imAmong the president’s legal team is Harvard law professor and constitutional law expert Alan Dershowitz, who says he’ll be making a constitutional argument against impeachment.  Dershowitz was a part of O.J. Simpson’s legal “dream team” and has defended several controversial clients, including Jeffrey Epstein. Despite voting for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, Dershowitz has been a vocal defender of Trump, going so far...

The White House is offering a fiery legal response to the articles of impeachment, in an executive summary of a legal brief obtained by NPR. Decrying a "rigged process" that is "brazenly political," President Trump's legal team accuses House Democrats of "focus-group testing various charges for weeks" and says that "all that House Democrats have succeeded in proving is hat the President did absolutely nothing wrong." They sum up the impeachment as "a dangerous perversion of the Constitution that the Senate should swiftly and roundly condemn." Read The Impeachment Managers' Response To The Senate Impeachment Trial Summons POLITICS Read The...

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) on Sunday slammed liberal law professor Alan Dershowitz for his stance on the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. Although Dershowitz voted for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Harvard Law professor is taking part in President Trump's legal defense. Dershowitz's responsibility will be to explain how the Democrats' articles of impeachment fail to meet the Constitutional criteria of "treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors." "The facts aren't seriously contested. The president withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to an alley at war with Russia, withheld a...

The Constitution allocates to the president sole authority over foreign policy (short of declaring war or signing a treaty). It does not permit Congress to substitute its foreign policy preferences for those of the president. To the extent that the statute at issue constrains the power of the president to conduct foreign policy, it is unconstitutional. Even if the GAO were correct in its legal conclusion — which it is not — the alleged violation would be neither a crime nor an impeachable offense. It would be a civil violation subject to a civil remedy, as were the numerous violations...