Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz Monday warned that President Donald Trump's legal battles will center around his business, and that investigators will take down people who were associated with him, such as with Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and his former attorney, Michael Cohen, in their push to find guilt in the president.
"Look, the biggest crime you can commit in America today is to have been associated with Donald Trump," Dershowitz told Fox News' "Fox & Friends."
"If you're associated with Donald Trump, they will Manafort you, they will Cohen you, they will do all these things to you. They will look hard and they are going to stretch. Maybe they will find something, maybe they won't."
The scrutiny will mean that in the future, businessmen like Trump will be deterred from running for office, because "they will know it will result in a kind of legal colonoscopy," said Dershowitz.
"They're going to go beyond the statute of limitations because they will allege RICO violations. I've been through this. They usually do it with the Mafia. It is the Al Capone approach."
Dershowitz added that the greatest threat to Trump is not special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, as that involves issues that have constitutional defense. Instead, he said, Trump needs to fear the U.S. attorney's office in the Southern District of New York.
"Of course, the president cannot be indicted, but his businesses can," said Dershowitz. "They can look into loans that he may have secured, foreign investments, foreign involvements. He has fewer defenses."
He said if he was representing Trump, he'd be focusing all defense efforts on the Southern District and let the Mueller probe go.
There is also no doubt that Trump and his businesses have been targeted, said Dershowitz, but the claims of illegal campaign contributions are going nowhere.
"The worst thing they will find is a failure to report, and that is on the treasurer of the campaign, not the candidate himself," said Dershowitz.
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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