Famed lawyer Alan Dershowitz said Sunday that President Trump’s personal legal team seemed to play “into the hands” of special counsel Robert Mueller after Rudy Giuliani, a new addition to Trump’s legal team, gave a string of interviews contradicting previous statements issued by Trump and the White House.
“It seems to me that the approach last week of the Trump team plays into the hands of Mueller’s tactic to try at any cost to find technical violations against lower ranking people so that they can be squeezed,” Dershowitz said during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“The Trump team has to speak with a single narrative,” he added. “This is not the way to handle a complicated case.”
Dershowitz said Mueller’s strategy came under heightened scrutiny on Friday when U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III, the federal judge overseeing the case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, pressed Justice Department lawyers to explain why they thought they hadn’t exceeded the scope of Mueller’s probe into Russia meddling, speculating that their true objective was to pressure Manafort to flip on Trump.
“This was a bad week for both sides,” Dershowitz said, referring to Trump’s legal counsel and Mueller’s federal investigators.
“But as I said, a good week for America because Americans get the benefit now of a judge who is prepared to look at this from an objective point of view,” he added.
Dershowitz has been a vocal critic of the Mueller probe, arguing it could set a dangerous precedent for civil liberties.
Giuliani said during a Fox News interview on Wednesday that Trump reimbursed his personal attorney Michael Cohen after he paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 days before the 2016 election through shell company Essential Consultants LLC in exchange for her silence about her alleged affair with Trump. This appeared to contradict Trump’s denial in April that he knew anything about the payment, but White House counselor Kellyanne Conway insisted during a separate interview Sunday that Trump’s denial was in reference to knowing when the transaction originally took place.
The White House and Trump have repeatedly denied the affair and the president’s involvement in the nondisclosure agreement. Both Giuliani and Trump have also pushed back against concerns that any campaign finance laws were violated when Trump paid Cohen back via a retainer, arguing that the reimbursement was separate from the campaign.
