Former Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz has offered his expert opinion regarding whether former President Donald Trump is about to be indicted on charges by the Justice Department after the release of the heavily redacted affidavit used to authorize the FBI’s raid on his Florida home earlier this month.
Dershowitz, who is considered a legal and constitutional expert, said he doesn’t see the DOJ arresting Trump based on the unredacted portions of the affidavit.
There is enough evidence here to indict Trump,” he stated bluntly during an appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity.”
However, despite there being “enough evidence,” he doesn’t see the DOJ moving to indict the former president.
“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.
As reported by Politico, the affidavit justified the search warrant “by pointing to a raft of highly classified material” that had already been retrieved from Mar-a-Lago. For the record, Trump has repeatedly stated that everything he had in his possession he had declassified prior to leaving the White House.
“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 following the release of the affidavit.
“[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 report added.
As for Dershowitz, he went on to put most of the blame on Attorney General Merrick Garland.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce “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 told host Sean Hannity.
But Garland did not even follow “his own guidelines,” Dershowitz added.
“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,” he explained.
Earlier, during an appearance on Just The News’ streaming TV network, the renowned law professor reiterated that he didn’t believe Trump would be indicted.
“If no more evidence comes out, based on what’s in the un-redacted portions of this affidavit, President Trump will not be indicted. I don’t think Garland is going to indict him for technical violations of these kinds of statutes that look very similar to what happened with Hillary Clinton,” the legal expert continued.
“I think the same standard has to apply to a Republican candidate as to a Democratic candidate,” Dershowitz offered.
