Alan Dershowitz said the use of a special counsel to investigate President Trump was an abuse of our constitutional system.
Special counsel Robert Mueller “knew he could not indict a sitting president under Justice Department regulations. And so, really, the question comes up, ‘Why did we have a special counsel at all?’” Dershowitz said Sunday on Fox News. “Why didn’t we have a nonpartisan independent expert commission looking into Russian efforts to influence our election, which are continuing in the 2020 election? That would have been the way to go, especially in light of the fact that we now know the Justice Department and Mueller concluded the result of this special counsel could not be the indictment of the president.”
The lawyer and professor emeritus at Harvard Law School said his frustration with the special counsel came in part after Mueller’s press conference last week. Dershowitz believed Mueller’s statement — “if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so” — was inappropriate. He added that he believed the country will not use a special counsel again after the Mueller investigation.
“I suspect we have seen the last special counsel,” Dershowitz said. “I think we have seen the death knell of special prosecutors, special counsel. I think and I hope the Mueller report is the last special counsel report we ever have. It’s inconsistent with the role of prosecutors. It’s inconsistent with the presumption of innocence. And it’s inconsistent with the constitutional system of separation of powers.”
Dershowitz also said Sunday, in a radio interview with John Catsimatidis on AM 970 in New York, that the U.S. had gone too far in trying to extradite Julian Assange.
”I think the Trump administration has overplayed its hand,” Dershowitz said. “They had a very strong case for extradition when they initially accused him … of breaking into a password [protected system] and stealing materials. That’s a crime.”
“But publishing materials? That’s the New York Times and the Washington Post, and I think Great Britain is going to have a lot of difficulty extraditing Assange to the U.S. to face trial for merely publishing information stolen not by him but by others,” he said.
The administration, which is seeking to extradite Assange to the U.S., is planning on charging the WikiLeaks founder under the Espionage Act rather than for leaking CIA spying tools.
