Alan Dershowitz On Trump’s Lawyers Home & Office Being Raided

The DAILY MAIL has a good piece on all this, here is the headline with their bullet points:

Justice Department violated Michael Cohen’s constitutional rights just by seizing his records, Alan Dershowitz tells DailyMail.com – hours before Harvard law professor has dinner with Trump

  • Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz will have dinner Tuesday at the White House with President Donald Trump
  • He tells DailyMail.com that the Department of Justice violated Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s rights when it seized his documents on Monday
  • The government will set up a team of agents and lawyers to review the material to make sure prosecutors don’t see anything ‘privileged’
  • That could include documents covered by the sanctity of an attorney-client relationship, whose mere presence in prosecutors’ hands could ‘taint’ a case
  • But since those ‘taint teams’ are made up of government agents, Dershowitz says the DOJ already has them – which is unconstitutional
  • UCLA Law School professor Harry Litman says the system works well and there’s ‘absolutely no cheating’ because the stakes are so high
  • Dershowitz also claimed Monday that if Trump were a Democrat, the American Civil Liberties Union would be protesting the search of his lawyer’s office 

Here is Dershowitz again on today’s Michael Medved Show:

Michael Medved interviews Professor Alan Dershowitz about the raid on Michael Cohen’s home and office. Alan in another interview said that if,

“…this were Hillary Clinton [having her lawyer’s office raided], the ACLU would be on every TV station in America jumping up and down,” he said. “The deafening silence of the ACLU and civil libertarians about the intrusion into the lawyer-client confidentiality is really appalling.” (FOX)

Yep. The silence is deafening. How bout if Ken Starr referred Lanny Davis’s home and office to be raided? Wow… we would still be talking about that till this day.

Former U.S. Attorney: Shoes Will Drop! (+ Article Dump)

“We Are Going to See Several Criminal Charges Against a Number of DOJ-FBI”

Here are the recent articles I have been reading….


 

 

 

 

Where Is The Dangerous Irresponsibility Jeopardizing National Security

HOT AIR pulls out an excellent point/quote by Jonathan Turley:

….However, he points out another problem which isn’t getting nearly as much attention. What happened to the dire threats to national security we were told were contained in this memo?

My greatest concern is what is not in the [memo]: classified information “jeopardizing national security.” Leaders like Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) declared that the committee had moved beyond “dangerous irresponsibility and disregard for our national security” and “disregarded the warnings of the Justice Department and the FBI.”

Now we can read the memo. There is a sharp and alarming disconnect between the descriptions of Pelosi and the House Intelligence Committee’s Ranking Minority Member Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and the actual document. It clearly does not contain information that would reveal sources or methods.

The memo reaffirms concerns over the lower standards that apply to FISA applications as well as the misuse of classification authority. Most of this memo references what was already known about the use of the dossier. What was added was testimonial evidence and details to the publicly known information. Yet, the FBI vehemently objected to the release of the memo as threatening “grave” consequences to national security…

The FBI opposition to declassification of this memo should be a focus of both Congress and the public. The memo is clearly designed to avoid revealing classified information. For civil libertarians, this is a rare opportunity to show how classified rules are misused for strategic purposes by these agencies. The same concern can be directed toward members who read this memo and represented to the public that the release would clearly damage national security.

In that first paragraph above, Turley is quoting the statement Pelosi put out about the memo on Tuesday. However, she made a similar claim on CNN during that contentious interview with Chris Cuomo. “Putting this aside in terms of tit for tat, which you seem to—well, with all due respect to you—trying to make it look like Democrats vs. [Republicans]. It isn’t about that,” Pelosi said. She added, “It’s about our national security.” In the same interview, she said, “We’re not talking about some issue that we’re having a fight about, we’re talking about our national security.”

The point is, this was raised many times this week by Democrats eager to prevent the release of the memo. In retrospect, it’s difficult to see how anyone could have thought it represented a grave threat to national security. Maybe the subsequent release of the Democrats’ own memo will shed some additional light on whatever threat they see in it, but at the moment it looks as if those warnings were overblown. As Turley puts it, “it proved to be an empty ‘grave’ after weeks of overheated hyperbole.”

“She’s Crying Wolf” ~ Dershowitz on Maxine Waters

“Waters Throws the term racist around so loosely and so inappropriately that it weakens her credibility.” ~ Dershowitz

NEWSMAX:

…But Dershowitz on Monday strongly disagreed.

“Look, every criminal lawyer I know, prosecutor, defense attorney, would agree with me that when you take a case from Virginia and put it in the District of Columbia, you are gaining a tactical advantage for the prosecution in a case in which the defendants are likely to come from the Trump administration,” he said.

“Politics matters. Race matters. Ethnicity matters. Every lawyer know that. I learned it from Johnnie Cochran who Maxine Waters praised to the hilt when he died and wanted to have Congress pass a resolution recognizing his greatness. Would she have called Johnnie Cochran a racist?

“Or does she revere it only for people that are not of her race? It absurdly throws around a word that should be reserved for true racists. When she calls a real racist a racist, nobody is going to believe her. She’s crying wolf and it dilutes the meaning of the word ‘racism.’ So shame on Maxine Waters.”

The renowned Harvard Law professor emeritus also called out Richard Painter, an ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, who demanded in a tweet that Dershowitz “stop the racist B.S.”

“He’s just dead wrong. And he’s been wrong about so many things. He is so determined to find criminal conduct on the part of Trump that he’s prepared to make up crimes that don’t exist. How he served as an ethics lawyer for any administration is unclear to me,” Dershowitz told Cosby.

“I think he has to look in the mirror and question his own ethics using the word ‘racism’ to describe what he understands because he’s a lawyer. He understands that what I’m saying is factually, absolutely correct.

Alan Dershowitz – The Only Sane Democrat Left?

Mind you, he is a Democrat, through-n-through… and I love that most other Democrats embrace the “Alt-Left” and ignore Dershowitz’ views:

  • Let’s acknowledge Alan Dershowitz. Here he is, asking Democrats to repudiate the Alt Left for their violent opposition to free speech. (GAY PATRIOT). 

The DOJ Cannot Indict a Sitting President

Mark Levin is the master at this stuff. He takes his legal knowledge to his radio show:

On his Monday radio program, Levin cited a DOJ memorandum from 2000 affirming the department’s position in 1973 that the Constitution does not allow the president to be criminally indicted. In 1973, the Office of Legal Counsel issued a memorandum stating that indictment proceedings would “unduly interfere in a direct or formal sense with the conduct of the Presidency,” as criminal proceedings would severely handicap the president from performing his “onerous” and “unique” duties under the Constitution, thereby short-circuiting the entire executive branch.

“A criminal proceeding against the president is in some respects necessarily political in a way that criminal proceedings against other civil officers would not be,” Levin read from the memorandum. “In this respect, it would be incongruous for a jury of only 12 to undertake the unavoidably political task of rendering judgment in a criminal proceeding against a sitting president.”

Levin explained that the memorandum is arguing that it is incredibly difficult for 12 people on a jury and a judge to leave politics out of a verdict on a legal matter involving the president.

(DAILY WIRE)

Soon after, Alan Dershowitz got the cue and he explained on FOX (http://tinyurl.com/y72l2ozl):

✦ “The Justice Department has twice ruled in a long extensive memo, which I just read this morning, for the second or third time, stating clearly that the president cannot be indicted, prosecuted, and tried while serving in office. The only mechanism the Constitution provides is that he could be impeached, and once impeached and removed from office, he can then be charged with a criminal trial. But a sitting president cannot — according to the Justice Department, be tried.” ~ Dershowitz (BREITBART)

It looks as though the Democrats are stuck in the mud a bit. But they will continue to hurl mud… it’s what they do:

 

“One Of The Worst Foreign-Policy Presidents Ever” ~ Dershowitz

 

HOTAIR h-t

DERSHOWITZ: What he did was so nasty, he pulled a bait and switch. He told the American public this is all about the settlements deep in the West Bank. And yet, he allowed he representative to the U.N. to abstain –which is really a vote for– a resolution that says the Jews can’t pray at the Western Wall, Jews can’t live in the Jewish Quarter [of Jerusalem] where they have lived for thousands of years. And he’s going to say, ‘Whoops! I didn’t mean that!’ Well read the resolution! You’re a lawyer, you went to Harvard Law School.

It’s nothing more than a petulant swipe at Benjamin Netanyahu, and as Dershowitz explains, it’s going to backfire — badly:

DERSHOWITZ: This will make peace much more difficult to achieve because the Palestinians will now say ‘we can get a state through the UN, we can get a state through the BDS movement,’ because this will encourage that. ‘We can get a state through the International Criminal Court,’ because this will encourage that. ‘We don’t have to negotiate, we don’t have to make painful compromises.’ He will go down in history, President Obama, as one of the worst foreign-policy presidents ever.

Steve Bannon And His Despicable Jewish Defenders! [/saracasm]

The most recent attacks by the Left and the Left leaning media against Steve Bannon (sounds like a superhero name) is so off the reservation that it really shouldn’t be responded to. But lies — allowed to fester — become more than a harmless fib. So, here is my quick rejoinder to assist those who want an answer to this silliness and continued convulsions of the Left. Here is an interview with Joel Pollak who himself is a very observant Orthodox Jew who has worked with Bannon for 5-years:

Firstly, it was Hillary that said “F**king Jew Bastard” of a Jewish man. Secondly, Trump is the most Jew loving man around. Thirdly, David Horowitz, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Joel Pollak, Alan Dershowitz, Mark Levin, and many other Jews reject the claim that Steve Bannon is an anti-Semite white nationalist. In fact, Bannon will probably be one of the most pro-Israeli chief White House strategist and senior counselor – EVA!

GAY PATRIOT notes:

  • If all that the media has is one Jew (David Horowitz) slagging another Jew (Bill Kristol) over something to do with Jewishness, on Breitbart.com while Bannon presided, let’s face it: They’ve got nothing.

Alan Dershowitz, a staunch Democrat and emeritus law professor at Harvard University, notes how awful this attack on Bannon is:

“But it is not legitimate to call somebody an anti-Semite because you might disagree with their policies. Or because in one instance, like in the Bannon case, an aggrieved wife in a divorce may have said something which he himself has denied having said. I think you always have to have a presumption of innocence and of good faith. And so, I am not prepared to accept those conclusions based on the evidence that I have now seen.” — Alan Dershowitz (via BREITBART JERUSALEM)

(The above video is also from BREITBART)

Another prominent leader in Israel said this in regards to Steven Bannon and the loathsome accusations (BREITBART):

Yossi Dagan, chair of Israel’s Shomron Regional Council, has released an open letter to incoming White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor Stephen K. Bannon, offering his support and congratulations.

[….]

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate you on the amazing election results for President-Elect Donald Trump and the United States of America. I would also like congratulate you personally on being appointed as Chief Strategist.

We know that you are a strong supporter of Israel and a true friend to the Jewish people and we look forward to your leadership in the White House.

It saddened me to hear about the uncalled for smear campaign against you by political opponents who refuse to accept the reality of losing a fair and democratic election. I am pleased that we in the Shomron, were first to openly support Donald Trump’s campaign and also opened a campaign headquarters here.

I, as leader of the second largest group with-in Israel’s Likud party central committee and Chairman of the Shomron Regional Council, am glad that after 8 hard years we now have decent minded people like yourself, coming to power in Washington DC.

[….]

Blessing from the people and Land of Israel,

Yossi Dagan
Chairman
Shomron Regional Council

Here Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in THE HILL also weighs in on the Issue:

…I barely know Mr. Bannon, having met him for the first time last week at The New York Hilton. But I do know Joel Pollak, an orthodox Jew who is my friend of many years and is a senior editor at Breitbart. Joel is one of the proudest Jews I know and one of the premier fighters for Israel in the national media.

He tells me that Steve Bannon has shown him, and the many other Jewish employees at Breitbart, especially those who are observant, incredible sensitivity and flexibility in helping them always keep the Sabbath and observe the Jewish holidays.

In addition, Breitbart has served as one of the leading publications in The United States that strongly opposed the Iran nuclear agreement, with its $150 billion given to the murderous Mullahs and their genocidal promise to perpetrate a second holocaust of the Jewish people.

I know this is close to both our hearts. Your wife was forced to flee the bloodthirsty Khomeini regime as a teenager. My father and his family were lucky to leave Iran well before Khomeini came to power.

In light of this fact, why would you immediately assume that Breitbart is anti-Semitic? Some of the world’s leading publications — including The New York Times — extolled the virtues of the Iran deal even though it never even punished the Iranian regime for being in constant violation of the 1948 UN Anti-Genocide Convention which expressly forbids genocidal incitement.

Even the ADL opposed the Iran deal and Breitbart stood with the pro-Israel community in making the argument against an agreement that legally gives Iran nuclear weapons in little over a decade.

Breitbart also defends Israel constantly against the anti-Semitic BDS movement whose goal is the economic destruction of the State of Israel.

That does not mean that we need agree with everything published on Breitbart or that there will not be columns we find offensive.

I write for many publications, some more on the left, like The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post, some considered in the middle like CNN, The Washington Post, and The Hill, and some more to the right like The Wall Street Journal and Breitbart. I also write for Israel-based publications like The Jerusalem Post and The Times of Israel, with their differing editorial slants. In all those publications there are those with whom I agree and disagree with strongly.

I have published hundreds of columns in The Huffington Post and consider Arianna Huffington a personal friend. I can tell you that I shared the home page many times with people who vilified Israel in pretty extreme terms. I never took offense. And I certainly never called the editors there anti-Semitic. Rather, I saw the attacks on Israel as an opportunity to respond intelligently and forcefully….

BREITBART’S Jerusalem Bureau Chief

TEL AVIV – Steve Bannon is a staunch supporter of the Jewish state who is committed to fighting anti-Semitism, asserted Aaron Klein, Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief.

Klein was reacting to the baseless smears of anti-Semitism against Bannon, Breitbart’s former executive chairman who was named by President-elect Donald Trump earlier this week as the chief strategist of the new White House administration.

Klein told BuzzFeed: “These smears are laughable to anyone who knows Bannon, a committed patriot who is deeply concerned about the growing threats to Israel. He has been particularly concerned with the dangerous trend of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel sentiment on U.S. college campuses. While at Breitbart, he pitched countless articles on these and other themes in defense of the Jewish state.”…

Roe v. Wade Is Bad Law ~ Per Liberal Scholars

The following is from LIFE SITE NEWS site:

Roe v. Wade — which ruled that the U.S. Constitution effectively mandates a nationwide policy of abortion on demand — is one of the most widely criticized Supreme Court decisions in America history.

As Villanova law professor Joseph W. Dellapenna writes,

  • “The opinion [in Roe] is replete with irrelevancies, non-sequiturs, and unsubstantiated assertions. The Court decides matters it disavows any intention of deciding—thereby avoiding any need to defend its conclusion. In the process the opinion simply fails to convince.”

Even many scholars sympathetic to the results of Roe have issued harsh criticisms of its legal reasoning. In the Yale Law Journal, eminent legal scholar John Hart Ely, a supporter of legal abortion, complained that Roe is “bad constitutional law, or rather … it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” He wrote:

  • “What is unusual about Roe is that the liberty involved is accorded … a protection more stringent, I think it is fair to say, than that the present Court accords the freedom of the press explicitly guaranteed by the First Amendment. What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure. Nor is it explainable in terms of the unusual political impotence of the group judicially protected vis-a-vis the interests that legislatively prevailed over it. And that, I believe … is a charge that can responsibly be leveled at no other decision of the past twenty years. At times the inferences the Court has drawn from the values the Constitution marks for special protection have been controversial, even shaky, but never before has its sense of an obligation to draw one been so obviously lacking.”

Below are criticisms of Roe from other supporters of legal abortion.

  • “One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.” — Laurence H. Tribe, Harvard law professor
  • “As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose. … Justice Blackmun’s opinion provides essentially no reasoning in support of its holding. And in the … years since Roe’s announcement, no one has produced a convincing defense of Roe on its own terms.” — Edward Lazarus, former clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun
  • “The failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations. … Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution.” — Archibald Cox, Harvard law professor, former U.S. Solicitor General
  • “[I]t is time to admit in public that, as an example of the practice of constitutional opinion writing, Roe is a serious disappointment. You will be hard-pressed to find a constitutional law professor, even among those who support the idea of constitutional protection for the right to choose, who will embrace the opinion itself rather than the result. This is not surprising. As a constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent. The court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether.” — Kermit Roosevelt, University of Pennsylvania law professor
  • “Roe, I believe, would have been more acceptable as a judicial decision if it had not gone beyond a ruling on the extreme statute before the Court. … Heavy-handed judicial intervention was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.” — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
  • “In the Court’s first confrontation with the abortion issue, it laid down a set of rules for legislatures to follow. The Court decided too many issues too quickly. The Court should have allowed the democratic processes of the states to adapt and to generate sensible solutions that might not occur to a set of judges.” — Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago law professor
  • “Judges have no special competence, qualifications, or mandate to decide between equally compelling moral claims (as in the abortion controversy). … [C]lear governing constitutional principles … are not present [in Roe].” — Alan Dershowitz, Harvard law professor
  • “[O]verturning [Roe] would be the best thing that could happen to the federal judiciary. … Thirty years after Roe, the finest constitutional minds in the country still have not been able to produce a constitutional justification for striking down restrictions on early-term abortions that is substantially more convincing than Justice Harry Blackmun’s famously artless opinion itself.” — Jeffrey Rosen, legal commentator, George Washington University law professor
  • “Blackmun’s [Supreme Court] papers vindicate every indictment of Roe: invention, overreach, arbitrariness, textual indifference.” — William Saletan, Slate columnist, writing in Legal Affairs
  • “In the years since the decision an enormous body of academic literature has tried to put the right to an abortion on firmer legal ground. But thousands of pages of scholarship notwithstanding, the right to abortion remains constitutionally shaky. … [Roe] is a lousy opinion that disenfranchised millions of conservatives on an issue about which they care deeply.” — Benjamin Wittes, Brookings Institution fellow
  • “Although I am pro-choice, I was taught in law school, and still believe, that Roe v. Wade is a muddle of bad reasoning and an authentic example of judicial overreaching.” — Michael Kinsley, columnist, writing in the Washington Post.