Russia investigation special counsel Robert Mueller may have given President Donald Trump's camp the ability to claim prejudice by bringing in several Democrats and party donors as part of his investigative team, Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz said Monday.
"I think when you have a political prosecution of a sitting president being generated by Democrats, you have to make sure that everybody on that team is neutral, objective, and has a completely clear record," Dershowitz told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program.
"You should not have anybody on that team who made a $1 contribution to the other side. It should be completely neutral."
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, one of his key allies, has complained that many of the first people Mueller brought into the investigation were Democrats or donors to Democratic candidates, casting doubts on the former FBI Director's ability to conduct a fair investigation.
"President Trump understood that when he said essentially to Sen. [Joe] Lieberman that maybe he wasn't suited at this time to be head of the FBI, because he was a politician, although I think he would have been very well suited," said Dershowitz.
"In a partisan atmosphere like this, you have to be so careful not to give the other side the ability to claim prejudice, and I think they have given the other side the ability to claim prejudice."
Show co-host Brian Kilmeade commented that he is concerned Mueller and ex-FBI Director James Comey have "already been through the fire together" and wondered how Mueller could remain "dispassionate," and Dershowitz agreed.
"He can't," said Dershowitz. "Especially since he would be called as the first witness by the president if there were a case having him testify in front of Congress. The president had the right to fire him.
"The president had the right to make him stop the investigation. The other witness for the president, of course, would be [Deputy Attorney General Rod] Rosenstein who wrote the memo, saying 'you should fire Comey.' So this is becoming very political."
The Justice Department is in a position of having to take both the sides of prosecuting Trump and serving as defense witnesses for him, said Dershowitz,
"This is just becoming too political on both sides," he said. "Now, you have Republicans saying, 'lock her up, let's put the former Attorney General Loretta Lynch in jail.' We got to stop this. We have to stop criminalizing political differences.
"The criminal law should be reserved for obvious violations of the criminal law that exists, not for making political points against your political enemies on both sides."
Dershowitz said he's also be against an obstruction of justice investigation directed against Bill and Hillary Clinton in connection with his visiting with Lynch aboard her plane during the campaign last year, and he'd be against an investigation against Lynch herself.
The outcry against Lynch rose again following Comey's Senate Intelligence testimony, when he said she'd asked him to refer to the investigation into the former secretary of state's private email server as a "matter."
"I don't want to see broadening of the obstruction of the justice statute on either side," he said. "What we have in America today is Republicans trying to expand espionage, trying to expand obstruction of justice, trying to get Democrats and Democrats trying to expand it to get a Republican.
"Who were the big losers? We the American people, our civil liberties, our constitutional rights, the first victim of partisanship is often civil liberties and constitutional rights."
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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