Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax on Tuesday that blame for the 37-count federal indictment that Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to in Miami can be shared by the former president and the Department of Justice.
"I think there's fault on both sides," Dershowitz told "American Agenda." "The prosecution has targeted [Trump], as evidenced by what happened in New York, where the most outrageous indictment I've ever seen in 60 years of practice was issued by a district attorney [Alvin Bragg] who had campaigned on the promise to get Trump and then a special counsel [Jack Smith] is appointed not to investigate the problem of former officials taking documents home with them, but focusing specifically on Donald Trump. That's one side of it."
Dershowitz, author of "Get Trump: The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process, and Our Constitutional Rule of Law," said the other side is that Trump erred by falling into a prosecutorial trap.
"He made statements to his lawyers, which I'm sure he now regrets," Dershowitz said. "He made a statement to a reporter, which was recorded by his own staff, saying, 'See this? I could have declassified it, but I can't now, it's secret. I shouldn't show it to you, but it deals with the attack plan on Iran.'
"He wishes he wouldn't have said that. … They've both done wrong things."
Dershowitz derided the Espionage Act, violations of which make up most of the charges against Trump, calling it the worst named statute in the U.S. "because it has nothing to do with espionage."
"There is a provision of it that deals with espionage and people are in prison for that," he said. "But this merely deals with possession of classified material. If they had decided to prosecute Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, or [Mike] Pence, they would have prosecuted them, too, under the Espionage Act. It doesn't require espionage. It's a statute whose name ought to be changed to Improper Possession of Classified Material Act."
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