Alan Dershowitz probably leapt to the phone to speed dial his Fox propaganda buddies so he could shill for Donald Trump the moment the indictments against Trump-associate Roger Stone were announced this morning.
As it happened, Dershowitz did not make it to the air until shortly after 10 AM ET. But he certainly had his Mueller-investigation attacks ready, along with his blinders that allow him to ignore how Fox News operates as a pro-Trump propaganda machine while he pretends he’s on air to promote Constitutional rights. While he was at it, Dershowitz also blocked out the damning suggestions about the Trump campaign in the Stone indictment.
Right off the bat, Dershowitz let Fox viewers know he’s on the home team.
DERSHOWITZ: It’s a typical Mueller indictment – very, very heavy on stories, stories involving the collusion and Wikileaks but the indictment itself all relates to obstruction of justice, tampering of witnesses. In other words, crimes that occurred as a result of the investigation. This is typical of Mueller. He has found almost no crimes that occurred before he was appointed special counsel. He was appointed special counsel to uncover crimes that had already occurred. He has virtually failed in that respect in every regard. … [I]t really means that there’s been a failure to uncover the basic crimes for which he was appointed.
Well, last I checked, special counsel Robert Mueller’s team is still investigating so we do not know all he has uncovered. But, as you'll see later, there are hints that he has found those "basic crimes" Dershowitz suggested had not occured.
Dershowitz moved on to discredit Mueller’s indictments against Stone and, previously, Paul Manafort, as efforts “to get them to sing and perhaps even to compose, to create guilt allegations against the real target here,” i.e. Trump.
“As a civil libertarian, that’s a very disturbing tactic,” Dershowitz postured. I say “postured” because as a “civil libertarian,” Dershowitz only seems concerned with knocking the Mueller investigation and never about the civil liberties Trump seems hell-bent on destroying. That's not counting the fact you don’t need a Mueller indictment to see Trump’s disturbing relationship and behavior with Russia - another thing Dershowitz doesn't seem concerned about.
More to the point, Dershowitz offered no evidence that anyone made up “guilt allegations” against Trump. And even if such a thing had happened how unlikely it is that Mueller would run with a phony story without getting corroboration. But, not surprisingly, neither Fox host challenged that.
Instead, cohost Bill Hemmer called Mueller “a runaway prosecutor.”
Dershowitz drove home the “Mueller’s the real wrong-doer” point for Team Trump:
DERSHOWITZ: When you look at the scorecard of how many crimes this special prosecutor has uncovered against Americans, that occurred before he was appointed, and that relate to the Russia probe, you really have to say it’s been a very disappointing investigation if the best you can do is essentially create crimes by your investigation, which is what has happened here. That doesn’t exculpate the people who have really lied or really obstructed justice. But it tells you something important about the investigation itself.
Throughout the interview, Dershowitz dismissed much of the indictment as “storytelling” rather than alleging a crime. He likened the narrative laid out to “scribbling something on the wall of a bathroom, accusing somebody of something." He complained, “There’s no opportunity to rebut that ‘cause it’s not charged as a crime.”
That’s a load of hooey. For one thing, a narrative in a Mueller indictment is a far cry from graffiti in a bathroom. Second, there’s plenty of opportunity to rebut whatever has been said. And whether Dershowitz is so hungry for a place on the Supreme Court, is currying favor with Trump for some other reason or is even self-deluded enough to think he’s serving civil liberties when he spouts this kind of thing on Fox, that does not take away the fact that the Stone indictment suggests a lot of serious misbehavior on the part of the Trump campaign – and yes, from before Mueller was appointed.
As Aaron Blake’s excellent analysis in The Washington Post explains, “[T]he indictment does make clear (repeatedly) that the campaign was interested in the WikiLeaks information — and even sought the information from Stone — over a span of months, from the summer of 2016 to October 2016.”
Then there’s this nugget in the indictment (my emphases added): After the July 22, 2016 release of stolen DNC emails by Organization 1 [Wikileaks], a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton Campaign.”
Trump or not, whoever did that directing had to be at the top of the campaign. Blake noted this would not be a smoking gun if it was Trump but, obviously, “problematic.” It’s also a hint of what may be coming.
Dershowitz surely knows how unlikely it is that the special prosecutor would make such statement in such a high-profile, high-stakes case without good grounds. Shame on him for even suggesting it.
For what it’s worth, I am actually interested in concerns about an over-reaching prosecutor. But if Dershowitz had any real integrity, he’d air them in a proper venue that’s actually devoted to facts and honoring the rule of law, instead of on the network that hired Nazi-Party-tied Sebastian Gorka as a national security strategist one week after he called for Hillary Clinton’s execution over the bogus Uranium One “scandal.”
Now, there’s an example of a dishonest trampling of civil liberties and one that Fox News implicitly condoned if not approved. Yet I have never heard any concern about that kind of rhetoric on Fox from Dershowitz.
Watch Dershowitz disgrace himself below, from the January 25, 2019 America’s Newsroom.
Correction: This post originally misstated Gorka's title as "national security adviser" on Fox.