Attorney Alan Dershowitz, who has previously defended former President Donald Trump in public and in the congressional chambers, argued there is enough evidence to indict the former president.
While discussing revelations from the heavily redacted affidavit released Friday, Dershowitz argued that despite there being enough evidence, prosecutors won’t charge Trump due to precedents he dubbed the “Nixon-Clinton standards.”
“There is enough evidence here to indict Trump. But Trump will not be indicted, in my view, because the evidence doesn’t pass what I call the Nixon-Clinton standards,” Dershowitz said during a segment on Hannity.
SOCIAL SECURITY PAYMENTS: FIRST HALF OF MONTHLY $1,682 CHECKS TO BE SENT IN JUST SIX DAYS
“The Nixon standard is: The case has to be so overwhelmingly strong that even Republicans support it,” he said. “And the Clinton standard is: Why is this case more serious than Clinton’s case, where there wasn’t a criminal prosecution?”
Dershowitz cautioned that his assessment could change if redacted portions of the affidavit were revealed to the public, but he underscored that there “should not be an indictment based on what we’ve seen up to now.”
Drawing contrast with many conservatives, including Trump, Dershowitz also defended Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart’s approval of the search warrant that led to the raid in August, arguing that “every judge would have made the same ruling.”
However, he argued that Attorney General Merrick Garland should never have sought the warrant in the first place, contending that the affidavit indicated “there was no urgency.”
“If they wanted a search warrant, if it was so urgent, they could have gotten it five months ago. And even when they got the search warrant, they waited two days. There was no justification for a search warrant. So if you want to talk about who’s to blame here, it’s not Reinhardt, it’s the attorney general of the United States — he should never have sought a search warrant,” Dershowitz said.
Fill-in host and former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) pressed Dershowitz about Reinhart’s recusal from a case in June involving a Trump suit against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and others. But Dershowitz insisted that Reinhart’s decision on the search warrant was in step with what any other judge would have done.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
On Aug. 8, a swarm of plainclothes FBI agents converged on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and reportedly confiscated 26 boxes of material that allegedly included documents with classified markings. Trump has denied wrongdoing and filed a motion to block the Justice Department from reviewing the material.
The affidavit justifying the August search and seizure shed light on the 184 documents with classified markings retrieved from the lavish Palm Beach, Florida, resort in January by the National Archives and Records Administration that sparked the DOJ inquiry. At least 67 documents in the batch were marked “confidential,” 92 were marked “secret,” and 25 were designated “top secret,” per the affidavit.
