Earlier this month, former President Donald Trump was indicted on charges related to his campaign and financial ties to Russia. Alan Dershowitz challenged Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to identify “a single case” in which these charges had been filed.

Dershowitz stated in an interview with Forbes Newsroom that Bragg’s promise to prosecute Trump while campaigning for office was “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,” Dershowitz added.

In addition, Dershowitz warned Bragg that he could face five years in prison if convicted of disclosing details of Trump’s indictment. In New York, providing grand jury testimony to the public is a Class E felony punishable by one to five years in prison.

Dershowitz also argued in his opinion piece that the leaker of 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.

As Dershowitz noted, Bragg’s hypothesis appears to be that Trump should have disclosed the reason he paid for a non-disclosure agreement with Stormy Daniels, thereby defeating the agreement’s purpose.

“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.

More on this story via The Republic Brief:

“Thus, even the misdemeanor allegation involving false entries is unprecedented and represents selective prosecution. It is also almost certainly barred by the two-year statute of limitations. In order to elevate this bookkeeping case into a felony, Mr. Bragg must also prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the reason Trump made the false entry — if he himself did it — was solely as a campaign contribution to help him win his election,” he said. CONTINUE READING…