Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz said it was a “terrible mistake” for the Justice Department to announce indictment of Russian officials ahead of President Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this week.
“I think it was a terrible mistake for the Department of Justice to issue that indictment on the eve of a foreign policy trip,” Dershowitz said in an interview with conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt on Thursday. “The Justice Department is not supposed to be intruding on the foreign policy of the United States. They should have, on their own, held off.”
“The issue is timing. You know, the Justice Department policy say[s] you don’t issue indictments just before an election, because you’re not supposed to be influencing policy,” Dershowitz added. “And embarrassing the president by issuing these indictments before he meets Putin was a serious blunder.The Justice Department should not have done that.”
[Nancy Pelosi: Trump was ‘afraid’ to mention Russian indictments to Putin]
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced last Friday that special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the Russia investigation on Russian interference in the 2016 election, indicted 12 Russian officials on charges of engaging “in a sustained effort” to break into computers owned by Democrats in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
Media reports indicate that Rosenstein asked Trump whether the indictments should be unveiled before or after he met with Putin. Trump opted for them to be announced beforehand, according to Bloomberg.
Trump’s meeting with Putin elicited widespread backlash after he told reporters during a joint press conference in Helsinki on Monday that he had no reason not to believe Putin, who stressed to him that the Russian government was not to blame for interference in the election.
The comments were at odds with a January 2017 report from the U.S. intelligence community that found Russian agents were responsible for interfering in the election.
On Wednesday, Trump admitted that he misspoke when he said he didn’t “see any reason why” Russia would have meddled in the 2016 election, and said he believes the U.S. intelligence community assessment that found Russian agents did interfere in the electoral process. Trump also said during a CBS News interview that he holds Putin “responsible” for interference in the U.S. electoral process.
