Alan Dershowitz, a renowned attorney, has challenged Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to identify “a single case” in which a person was indicted for the same crime for which former President Donald Trump was indicted earlier this month.
During an interview on “Forbes Newsroom,” Dershowitz deemed Bragg’s promise to prosecute Trump while he was campaigning for office “disbarrable.”
“I don’t think an indictment can actually come forward now after the comments made by [Robert] Costello,” the attorney said. Dershowitz added that Bragg “has proved that the main witness is going to be a perjuring liar on the witness stand, and that puts the district attorney in a terrible position.”
“If he uses Cohen as a witness, he could actually lose his bar license. It’s unethical to put a witness on the stand who you know is lying, and he has to know that Cohen will be lying. Or he tries the case without Cohen, which would be very difficult, or he does the right thing: he drops the case,” he said.
Bragg could face up to five years in prison, according to Dershowitz, if he is proven guilty of leaking information about Trump’s indictment to the media. In New York, leaking grand jury testimony to the public is a Class E felony punishable by between one and five years in prison.
Additionally, Dershowitz argued in an opinion piece that whoever leaked the confidential indictment is the only criminal in this case.
“It is likely that a serious felony has been committed right under District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s nose and he is not investigating it. Under New York law, it is a felony to leak confidential grand jury information, such as whether the jurors voted to indict. The protection of secrecy is as applicable to President Trump as it is to anyone else,” Dershowitz said in an op-ed for The New York Sun.
“We know that the information was disclosed while the indictment itself remains sealed and before any official announcement was made or charges brought. It is unlikely that the leak came from the Trump team, which seemed genuinely surprised,” Dershowitz said.
“The most likely, though uncertain, scenario is that a person in Mr. Bragg’s office or a grand juror unlawfully leaked the sealed information. That would be a class E felony, subject to imprisonment. It is possible of course that an investigation is underway, but it seems more likely that Mr. Bragg is too busy making up a crime against the man he promised in his campaign to get than investigating a real crime that took place on his watch,” Dershowitz added.
Dershowitz stated that Bragg’s hypothesis appears to be that Trump should have disclosed why he paid for a non-disclosure agreement with adult film actress Stormy Daniels, which would have rendered the non-disclosure agreement ineffective.
More on this story via Conservative Brief:
“Why would Mr. Trump pay the money in the first place if he had to publicly disclose the embarrassing reason? Furthermore, no one in history has ever been indicted for listing ‘legal expenses’ for setting a potentially embarrassing payment of hush money,” he said. CONTINUE READING…