The House Jan. 6 Select Committee is not only unprecedentedly waxing in hyperbole, but it is opening the door for Republicans to turn the tables once they regain the majority, constitutional law expert Alan Dershowitz lamented on Newsmax.
"I have never seen a congressional hearing like this since McCarthyism," Dershowitz told Thursday's "The Record" with Greta Van Susteren, referencing the infamous "red scare" led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the early '50s.
The seven Democrats and two anti-Donald Trump Republicans on the committee are creating a dangerous standard for which Congress will follow in the future to castigate their political opposition without due process or cross examination.
"Once the Republicans take over, they're going to have a precedent to do the same thing, and it won't be fair when the Republicans do it – any fairer than when the Democrats have done it," Dershowitz added to Van Susteren, noting he disapproves of Trump's Electoral College objections but respected the former president's right to his position. "As a civil libertarian, I don't care about which party wins. I only care about having a fair process."
But this committee is decidedly biased and unfair, Dershowitz noted.
"What we heard today was so one-sided," he said. "For example, the claim that [Trump lawyer John] Eastman took the Fifth Amendment 100 times: Nobody explains that if you take it once, you have to take it 100 times. The law is once you start answering questions, you can't take the Fifth Amendment. You've waived it.
"So people who take the Fifth have to take it 100 times."
"Overstatements" such as that are plentiful when there is no cross examination or rebuttal, Dershowitz continued.
"There was so much overstatement, and that's what happens when there's no opportunity to hear the other side: You are always going to get overstatement, because having a two-sided situation is a check and balance on overstatement," he said. "And that's what we're having – overstatement after overstatement."
Dershowitz even took his former student Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., to task for hypocrisy, noting Raskin challenged the 2016 electors for Trump.
Dershowitz also denounced a California federal change for making an erroneous claim to potential "criminal" actions of Trump.
"It may be illegal, unconstitutional, but that doesn't mean it's criminal – and there's a vast distinction between something not being legal, or being unconstitutional, and being a federal crime in the criminal law books," Dershowitz concluded. "It didn't happen."
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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