Any overtures President Donald Trump might have made to Russia are not treason as some on the left suggest, and would not be prosecutable while Trump remains in office anyway, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz said Tuesday.
That, Dershowitz told Fox News' "The Story with Martha McCallum," is because of two Justice Department rulings that presidents cannot be indicted for crimes committed while in office or campaigning.
"As for the Russian collusion, the worst-case scenario is still not a crime," he said. "It maybe should be a crime, but there's nothing in the statute books that would make it a crime."
Even if Trump called Russian President Vladimir Putin and promised him he would do good things for Russia if he helped him get elected, it might be "terrible," but not a crime, Dershowitz said.
And it would not be treason because "the president is elected, and he is entitled to make judgments about what's best for the United States," he said.
If anyone wants to indict a sitting president, he must first get Congress to impeach him, Dershowitz said.
Otherwise, "a single prosecutor could end the presidency of somebody by simply indicting them and saying you have to be in a courtroom for the next three months defending yourself."
That said, the Supreme Court did rule 9-0 in 1997 then-President Bill Clinton could be sued in civil court by Paula Jones over sexual harassment allegations.
"That's dumb," Dershowitz said of the ruling. "A sitting president has a job to do."
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