American Civil Liberties Union leaders are denying a claim from attorney Alan Dershowitz that they are silent on civil liberties issues involving President Trump because they oppose his policies.
Dershowitz, a former Harvard Law School professor, said in an MSNBC interview Thursday that “the ACLU has totally disappeared” and that civil libertarians have “forgotten what they have been preaching for 50 years because it’s Donald Trump that they are after.”
Dershowitz said that group should be concerned about the reported wiretapping of Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s phone weeks before April 9 raids of his office and residence, and that they should not trust authorities and judges to restrain a sprawling probe of possible crimes connected to Trump.
It was later reported that Cohen’s phone calls were monitored using a pen register but not wiretapped.
Laws are broad enough, Dershowitz argued, that prosecutors can find felonies committed by almost anyone, while specific banking laws that may affect Cohen — who facilitated a $130,000 payoff to former porn star Stormy Daniels — “are so elastic, so stretched” that they can apply to many activities.
“Civil libertarians ought to express concern,” Dershowitz said.
Leaders of the ACLU deny, however, that they are lacking interest in legal issues involving Trump because of his politics.
“I do not personally have any concern that our staff is acting in a partisan manner,” said ACLU President Susan Herman, a professor at Brooklyn Law School.
“We have opposed partisan gerrymandering, for example, whether by Republicans in Wisconsin or Democrats in Maryland,” she said. “And at this point I take Mr. Dershowitz’s biased assertions about the ACLU with a large grain of salt.”
David Cole, the ACLU’s national legal director, also pushed back on Dershowitz.
“We have expressed concerns about the review of the seized [Cohen] files, arguing for a special master” to review the files, Cole said.
“I don’t think Dershowitz’s charge is fair,” Cole said, arguing there are legal safeguards in place and good reason to investigate the conduct of Trump and people in his orbit.
“Search warrants based on probable cause of criminal activity justify searches, regardless of the party affiliation of the suspected criminal,” he said. “And evidence of Russian interference in our nation’s political process and President Trump’s apparent efforts to obstruct that investigation deserve investigation, which is why congressmembers of both parties have warned the president not to interfere.”
Cole said that the ACLU has focused on the civil liberties of a large number of groups impacted by Trump’s policies, as well as lower-profile conservatives, while “Mr. Dershowitz has focused virtually all of his energy on defending the asserted rights of the most powerful man in the U.S. and his personal lawyer.”
“We have continued to defend the civil liberties of all, including women denied contraceptive coverage, immigrant children separated from their parents by ICE, women discriminated against at work because they are pregnant or breast-feeding, conservative speakers denied the opportunity to demonstrate or speak, transgender military service members, citizens locked up because they are too poor to make bail, pregnant teens denied access to abortion, and voters wrongly removed from voter rolls,” Cole said.
Dershowitz stood by his criticism of the group.
“I’d love to debate them on the ACLU having abandoned its commitment to neutral civil liberties,” he told the Washington Examiner.
Editor’s note: This article was updated to include comment from Alan Dershowitz.
