OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Constitutional expert and Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz has responded to the Justice Department’s unsealing of a heavily redacted affidavit the FBI used to raid former President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla., home earlier this month.
Notably, Dershowitz does not believe that the 45th president will be indicted for criminal charges.
“I’m gonna make a prediction here,” Dershowitz said Friday on the “Just the News, Not Noise” streaming TV program.
“If no more evidence comes out, based on what’s in the un-redacted portions of this affidavit, President Trump will not be indicted. I don’t think Garland is going to indict him for technical violations of these kinds of statutes that look very similar to what happened with Hillary Clinton,” the legal expert continued.
“I think the same standard has to apply to a Republican candidate as to a Democratic candidate,” Dershowitz offered.
That said, conservatives have pointed out that Democrats like Clinton appear to have been held to different standards in the past, such as never having their homes raided by squads of armed FBI agents in the first place.
To that point, Dershowitz did offer up some criticism of the FBI’s search for, in his view, going well beyond what the warrant authorized.
“The search was very broad, much broader than I think the warrant permitted,” Dershowitz said. “I didn’t see anything in the warrant that would justify searching Mrs. Trump’s closet, or even searching the locked safe.”
In addition, the former law professor said he expects Trump’s legal team to file new motions to have redacted portions of the affidavit unsealed as well.
“There’ll be motions to unseal more of the document,” he predicted. “In fact, there will probably be a motion soon to have the defense at least have access to certain things that maybe the public shouldn’t have access to. So this is very much a work in progress.”
Trump’s second attorney general, William Barr, clapped back on Thursday at those who were critical of the FBI’s raid and the Justice Department’s probe of his former boss.
Barr said he was getting “tired” of the “constant pandering” on the right over the outrage stemming from the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month, which is being viewed as highly political in nature by the former president’s supporters.
In an appearance on Bari Weiss’s “Honestly” podcast, Barr defended the Justice Department’s ongoing probe of Trump while acknowledging that fallout from the ‘Russian collusion’ hoax “created the condition” of the many Americans automatically thinking “the worst” of the agency and the FBI it oversees.
“So what do you say to conservatives who say, ‘Why should we possibly trust these institutions to prosecute people — let’s say who protested on January 6th or agents of the state going after a president they so obviously despise? Why should we trust them anymore?’” Weiss asked. “You still give them the benefit of the doubt, but many other people in your party don’t.”
“Well, the Russiagate thing, I think, to the extent the FBI was misused was decisions made toward by high-level officials in the FBI. I don’t think that Chris Wray is that type of leader nor do I think the people around Chris Wray are those types of leaders,” Barr answered. “I think there are problems in the FBI, but it’s not that. It’s not Chris Wray. Wray is going to wake up and say, you know, ‘How do I throw the FBI’s weight around to interfere in the political process. Just the opposite. I think he’s very cautious about that.”
Barr was also critical of Trump, as he has been in the past.
“The problem with Trump is that it’s all about running just the base election, whip up your base, get your base all upset, get them outraged and turn them out at the polls,” Barr told Weiss. “Both sides do that. That is a prescription for a continued hostility within the country and demoralization of the country and an impasse in the country.
“And the first side [to] break out of that by returning–restoring politics to what it should be, which is the politics of trying to capture a majority of the people through persuasion and decisive enough majority to change things–that’s what we should be focused on. And we’re not doing that right now. That’s not Trump’s approach,” he added.
