Dershowitz: Mueller Made Manafort a 'Means Toward' Tagging Trump

Special counsel Robert Mueller has made President Donald Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort a "means toward an end" in his investigation into whether there was collusion involved with Russia during the 2016 election, but the charges against him could have been filed by any U.S. attorney, Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz said Wednesday.

"This whole Manafort case demonstrates there was never a need for a special counsel," Dershowitz said on Fox News' "America's Newsroom," noting that Manafort has been indicted for tax and bank issues, not anything to do with the Russian investigation.

Dershowitz also questioned Mueller's request to grant immunity to five witnesses he may call to testify in the Manafort trial, which is set to begin next week in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.

"A normal U.S. attorney wouldn't grant so much immunity for such a small fry defendant," said Dershowitz. "It really shows that what is going on here is they are targeting the president. They are targeting the people around him and using Manafort...they're trying not only to make him sing but make him compose possibly and putting all the pressure they can on him."

That makes Manafort a "means toward the end," and that isn't how justice should work, said Dershowitz.

"Civil libertarians have long been opposed to that method of squeezing witnesses, indicting them for unrelated crimes, and then trying to get them to testify against more important people," said Dershowitz. "I used to teach my first year criminal law students that if you commit a crime in America always commit a crime with someone more important than you are so you can flip on you and they can't flip on you. That's what's going on here."

Mueller, unlike a U.S. attorney, must produce results, and that means using "low-hanging fruit" to try to make his investigation succeed, Dershowitz added, explaining that if a U.S. attorney investigates a case and there is nothing, it "goes away."

"If a special counsel is appointed and given a lot of money and a large staff and comes up with nothing he failed," said Dershowitz. "He is searching and searching trying to get low-hanging fruit and using the power of the office to make sure they can squeeze him so perhaps he can testify against someone more important."

If Manafort refuses to testify, meanwhile, "he will go to jail for something he never would have gone to jail for, had there not been a special counsel," said Dershowitz. "If he does testify, we'll have to wait and see what he says and whether he has anything on anybody more important. The fear is not only will he sing, but he might compose. That is he might make things up or exaggerate. Witnesses like this understand that the better the story, the better the deal. They sometimes try to improve their stories and go beyond the bare truth"

Dershowitz also spoke out about former FBI Director James Comey's call to vote for Democrats this fall.

"Comey is a private citizen now," said Dershowitz. "As a private citizen he is entitled to vote for and urge other people to vote for anybody but it really discloses something important. People in defense of Comey, Mueller, and [Rod] Rosenstein say they're all Republicans. They're all Republicans. But it is centrist Republicans that hate Trump the most and a lot of the effort to try to get Trump has been done by Republicans or in Mueller's case ex-Republicans.

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