Recently, Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz condemned the prosecution of Donald Trump, which ruled the former President must pay a nearly $355 million fine alongside a three-year ban, prohibiting Trump and other family members from doing business in New York.
Dershowitz particularly singled out New York State Attorney General Letitia James, calling for her to be brought up before the bar. Fox News host Sean Hannity asked the law professor about his best-selling book “Get Trump” and what inspired its title.
Dershowitz explained the book’s title, claiming that rather than being a personal feat of creativity, he was inspired by Letitia James and her campaign to prosecute Donald Trump. Dershowitz compared the attorney general’s prosecutorial ambitions to the KGB under Stalin.
“I didn’t make it up,” Dershowitz answered. “I wish I were creative and original, but I got it from obviously Letitia James campaign. She ought to be brought up before the bar. You should not have an elected prosecutor campaigning on the promise to get a particular defendant. Now if she didn’t get him. She would lose the election. This is a variation of Stalin and Beria back in the 1930s when the head of the KGB says to Stalin, show me the man, I’ll find you the crime. This is — show me the man, we know who it is. She told us who it was, Donald Trump, and we’ll find you the fraud even though there was no harm.”
The Harvard Law School professor continued discussing the ruling on the case, addressing the exorbitant fine Trump has been ordered to pay. Dershowitz appeared to suggest that because Trump created no damages, there were no logical grounds to apply such a penalty.
“Generally in our legal system, particularly under the system of equity when you don’t get a jury trial, if it’s no harm, no foul, no harm, no fine, but when you have no damages at all. Usually you can do a multiple,” he added. “Say there’s a million dollars of damages, you can give $3 million fine. But when you have zero damages, no matter how many times you multiply it, zero plus and nth times whatever, is all still zero. So it it’s outrageous. Now, I don’t know whether it’s going to be reversed in the appellate division.”
Dershowitz proceeded to illustrate the political leanings of the appellate division, which is overwhelmingly made up of Democrats. He further lamented the “weaponization” and “politicization” of judicial processes, obfuscating the entire point of justice.
“The appellate division is also elected judges mostly by Democrats in a county which is 85% Democrat,” he stated. “The New York Court of Appeals which is the highest court may indeed come and give justice generally fines like this are reduced considerably, and that may very well happen in this case. But this tells us so much about the politicization of our justice system, the weaponization of our system and it’s so dangerous because it will mean that business people are not going to want to run for office because they know if they run for office, partisans are going to go after them, investigate them, figure out some way of getting them like overvaluating. You know, this is a judge, which over-evaluates when he wants to, $350 million for no damage, then under-evaluates when he wants to, Mar-a-Lago, $18 million. He’s just willing to manipulate the numbers to get him to the result he wanted. I hope the courts will look at this with a very, very, very stringent eye.”
