Prominent legal scholar Alan Dershowitz said on April 5 that the Manhattan district attorney’s case against former President Donald Trump is “weak.”
“There’s nothing strong about it. You can’t create strength with multiple weaknesses,” Dershowitz told The Epoch Times a day after Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records at a court in Manhattan.
The 34 charges come as part of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation into a $130,000 hush money payment to adult entertainment actress Stormy Daniels in the weeks before the 2016 presidential election. Daniels claims she and the former president had an affair in 2006—claims Trump has denied.
New York prosecutors alleged that Trump directed his then-lawyer Michael Cohen to pay the hush money to Daniels, and then illegally reimbursed Cohen for it under the guise of a monthly retainer for legal service, leading to 34 false entries in New York business records. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleged those false entries were to conceal violations in state and federal election laws, as well as state tax laws. Trump denies any wrongdoing in the matter.
To Dershowitz, those charges don’t hold water. “There are 34 bad counts.”
“And 34 bad counts does not create a single good count,” he added.
He believes the entire indictment is based on a “deep fallacy.”
Prosecutors, he said, were working off a flawed assumption: “For Trump not to be prosecuted, he had to [disclose] on publicly available forms the very fact that he paid money to keep secret—namely the fact that he was accused of having an adulterous affair with a former porn star.”
Dershowitz indicated that this would have defeated the point of the hush money agreement in the first place, and expressed his own belief that the payment was “probably legal.”
‘Misallocation of Resources’
A crucial element in charges against Trump is that the false business entries were allegedly made to conceal violations of state and federal election laws.“These are the kinds of crimes that people ... if they’re convicted, they usually get a $25 fine or something like that,” he said.
In contrast, each felony count of falsifying business records carries a maximum of four years in prison.
Bragg’s pursuit of this tenuous criminal case against the former president is an inappropriate use of the district attorney’s resources, Dershowitz suggested.
“Interfering with the presidential election, spending hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars on security, to bring a former and potentially future president into court—it’s just such a misallocation of resources.”
