Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz joined other legal experts in disbelief that the FBI raided a former president’s house for documents.
Treating former President Donald Trump like a drug dealer, who feds fear will flush product down a toilet, has shaken many people to their core. Armed predawn raids on political opponents happens regularly in third-world countries but not in the U.S., or so Americans believed. Until now.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s treatment of Trump smacks more of petty retribution for Republicans blocking his appointment to the Supreme Court than a pursuit of justice.
The Epoch Times reported Dershowitz’s concerns more fully.
“The raid is supposed to be a last resort, but this administration has used the weaponization of the justice system against its political enemies. It has arrested people, denied them bail, put them in handcuffs—used all kinds of techniques that are not usually applied to American citizens. I just hope this raid has the justification. If it doesn’t have the justification, the materials seized in it will be suppressed,” Dershowitz, who assisted Trump’s legal team during the first impeachment effort, said on Newsmax.
“This is improper, and this is misconduct. We have to find out what the facts are. But we have to make sure the shoe fits on the other foot—that we want to make sure what is being done here is something that Democrats would not oppose if it were being done to Democratic operatives, as well,” he added.
“It’s a breathtaking moment to have a raid like this on a former president and potentially the future opponent of the current president,” Jonathan Turley, a criminal defense attorney and a law professor at George Washington University, said on Fox News.
Turley wondered why Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden appointee, did not appoint a special counsel, noting that then-Attorney General Elliot Richardson appointed a special prosecutor to investigate then-President Richard Nixon in the 1970s.
“Now, here you have the past opponent of the current president and the expected future opponent,” Turley said. “I can’t imagine how Attorney General Garland would look at that situation and not see an absolute necessity for a special counsel.”
Little about the justification for the raid is known. The FBI declined to comment and its parent agency, the Department of Justice, which Garland heads, did not respond to a request for comment. The White House did not return an inquiry.
Trump alleged prosecutorial misconduct in a statement on the raid while Eric Trump, one of his sons, said on Fox that the purpose of the raid was seeing whether his father still possessed any documents the National Archives and Records Administration is seeking.
“My father has worked so collaboratively with them for months. In fact, the lawyer that’s been working on this was totally shocked. He goes, ‘I had such an amazing relationship with these people and, all of a sudden, on no notice, they send, you know, 20 cars and 30 agents?’” Eric Trump said.
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