Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz on Monday said it would be wrong to seek the prosecution of former White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci for funding the Wuhan, China, lab responsible for the leak of COVID-19.
In an interview on Newsmax's "John Bachman Now," Dershowitz called the effort "another example of the attempt to weaponize and criminalize the criminal justice system politically."
"Fauci used science and what he said ... was, 'We can't be sure about the origin ... but we can't exclude any possibilities,'" Dershowitz said.
"That's what science should do. The idea of immediately going to the ultimate of criminal prosecution is so typical of our time today. Both parties, both sides, immediately say, 'Let's criminally prosecute.'"
Dershowitz, a constitutional law expert, said "crying wolf" is "destroying the integrity of our criminal justice system."
"Criminal prosecution ought to be reserved for real criminals, for people who do the Hamlet's soliloquy: To be or not to be a felon. Today I crossed the line from innocent citizen to felon.
"Those are the people who should be prosecuted, not people who make honest mistakes."
Dershowitz also asserted that neither former President Donald Trump or President Joe Biden will be prosecuted for taking classified documents home.
"There are degrees of irresponsibility. There are differences. Some differences cut in favor of Trump. Some differences cut in favor of Biden," Dershowitz said.
"Biden's team immediately responded more quickly and more appropriately than Trump's team did. On the other hand, Trump may very well have declassified the material before they went into his house, so there are differences."
According to Dershowitz, the main point is that neither politician will be indicted "because in the public mind, the acts are similar enough so that if one is investigated and prosecuted, the others should be as well.
"So it's going to be a tie and nobody's going to get prosecuted and all these special counsels will have come to naught. And the American public will have learned very little more than they already know."
Changes, however, must be made, Dershowitz said.
"I think every bit of classified material ought to be electronically marked and should never be allowed to be taken out of the areas were classified materials are allowed to be," he said. "And if they're electronically marked, they'd be easy to identify and nobody can say we did it by accident. Also, things ought to be classified, much less often than they are today. Today there's too much classification."
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