Harvard Law Professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz Friday flatly rejected Democrats' claims that President Donald Trump committed treason by initially seeming to side with Russian President Vladimir Putin against U.S. intelligence agencies on the issue of meddling in the 2016 election, and called any comparisons with the Holocaust specifically troubling.
"Treason is the only crime defined specifically in the Constitution," Dershowitz said during a panel discussion on Fox News' "Hannity," led by guest host Judge Jeanine Pirro. "It shall consist only in levying war against the United States or in adhering to their enemies giving them aid and comfort. Obviously, it's wartime. It's what Aaron Burr was accused of doing. It's what people who became Nazis and supported the Nazis and joined the Nazi regime were accused of doing. It's not what President Trump did."
One can't "just throw" the term treason around, and further, "to compare what President Trump did to the Holocaust or Kristallnacht is a form of Holocaust denial," said Dershowitz.
"What it suggests is that nothing more happened to the Jews than is happening today in America," said Dershowitz. "It suggests there were no gas chambers, there were no killing fields, there was no plan to kill six million Jews. It's a disgraceful comparison. It just demeans the suffering that so many people went through during the Second World War."
In an article in The Washington Post this week, Waitman Wade Beorn, a Holocaust and genocide studies historian and lecturer at the University of Virginia, wrote that comparisons between the United States under Trump and the Holocaust are not incorrect.
Fox News contributor Sara Carter said she finds it "frightening" that there are people comparing the matter of Russia attacks and Trump's comments to the 9/11 attacks, and she said she is concerned about the accusations that Trump committed treason.
"CNN dedicated nearly eight hours to calling the president treasonous," she said. "It is punishable by death. Think about that. This is disinformation. This is a campaign against an administration that is so volatile and so dangerous. Look, if they are worried about Russia, they should be worried about themselves more."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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