Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz doomed Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg after a surprise witness came forward yesterday and potentially upended the DA’s case against Trump.
Dershowitz said: “Bob Costello has changed this case dramatically. I think that Bragg now only has two possible results from that. Number one, he can say, ‘alright, I’m going to try to make the case without Cohen.’
“He cannot use Cohen as a witness anymore. That would be unethical because of the testimony that Costello gave. Or he could say, ‘look, I have to drop the case.’ He may not be able to make it without Cohen.
“But if he can’t make it without Cohen, he can’t make it, because no ethical prosecutor is allowed to put on as a witness somebody who has told the lies and has contradicted himself so much.
“I think that Bob Costello, it’s a game changer.
“I think maybe that’s a reason for the delay here.
“I think ethical experts are now telling Bragg, ‘wait a minute, you cannot use Cohen.
“But if you can’t make it without Cohen, you cannot bring this charge,” he said.
Alan said earlier: “To paraphrase the late Justice Robert Jackson, these anachronistic statutes and precedents lie around “like loaded weapons“ ready to be selectively enforced against political enemies.
“That, precisely, is what we are now seeing with the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, targeting the former president and current candidate, Donald Trump. Does anyone actually believe that if someone else were accused of paying hush money to avoid a sex scandal in the manner that Mr. Trump is suspected of doing, he would be prosecuted?
“After spending months searching the criminal code for a law that Mr. Trump might be accused of violating, Mr. Bragg has apparently landed on a highly questionable campaign contribution provision that has never before been used in a comparable situation.
“As Jackson also presciently observed: “With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone.”
“He added: “In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.”
“Not to compare Mr. Bragg’s NYC to Stalin’s Soviet Union, a sordid episode from the past does come to mind: the notorious head of the KGB, Lavrentiy Beria, once said to Stalin: “show me the man, and I will find you the crime.” Closer to home, J. Edgar Hoover would often target his political enemies for investigation. Or as a South American dictator once threatened: “for my friends everything; for my enemies the law.“
“All decent people, whether politically opposed to Mr. Trump (as I am) or supportive of his candidacy, should be concerned about this weaponizing of the prosecutor’s office for the political purpose of preventing a potential candidate from running for office.
“Today this insidious tactic is being used by a Democratic prosecutor against a Republican candidate. In 2016, efforts were made to use it against the Democratic candidate. No one knows who tomorrow’s target will be, since the precedent will ”lie around like a loaded weapon,” to be misused by any ambitious prosecutor in a partisan manner.
“It is no answer to say, as supporters of this “get Trump” tactic are arguing, that Mr. Bragg is doing nothing more than fully enforcing the law on the ground that no one is “above” it. If Mr. Trump or anyone else did the crime, they should do the time.
“But others have done things similarly to what Mr. Trump is suspected of doing, and no else is being threatened with prosecution,” Alan said.
