The White House/Fox News revolving door turns again with the announcement that Fox contributor Ken Starr and regular Trump shill Alan Dershowitz will be joining the impeachment legal team. UPDATED
From The New York Times:
Mr. Starr, whose investigation into President Bill Clinton’s sexual relationships led to his impeachment, will be joined by Robert Ray, who succeeded Mr. Starr as independent counsel and wrote the final report on Mr. Clinton, the person said.
Rounding out the team will be Mr. Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School professor emeritus who became famous as a defense counsel for high-profile defendants like O.J. Simpson.
Although the Times notes that Dershowitz has recently “faced questions about his representation of Jeffrey Epstein, a financier and convicted sex offender who committed suicide in a New York City jail in August,” (after Dershowitz obtained a shockingly lenient sentence for him in Florida) the paper did not mention that Dershowitz has also represented Claus Von Bulow (accused of murdering his wife) and Mike Tyson (convicted of rape) among others.
The question arises, has there ever been a high-profile abuser of women that Dershowitz has not represented?
Don’t get me wrong, I believe that everyone deserves the best legal counsel possible, including Trump and Epstein. But Dershowitz hung around with Epstein (while claiming not to have seen any underage girls), had a massage there from an older woman, but “kept my underwear on,” and didn’t let a little thing like Fox News pundits smearing war hero Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman as a traitor get in the way of chummy, Trump-defending appearances on Fox. That’s not counting the accusations of sexual assault by two of the Epstein accusers which Dershowitz vehemently denies.
As for Starr, why he was also involved in the Epstein case! From The Daily Beast:
Starr is known for leading the investigation into former President Bill Clinton, a man with his own Epstein ties, that ultimately ended in the president’s impeachment. He joined Epstein’s defense team in 2007, as the disgraced billionaire was facing possible federal charges. He has since defended the actions of Acosta, the Palm Beach prosecutor at the time, saying he “play[ed] tough” with the defense team in negotiations.
The “Acosta” mentioned above is Alex Acosta, Trump’s labor secretary until he resigned over his role in the Epstein plea deal. Oh, and Trump palled around with Epstein, too. NBC News unearthed old video of Trump and Epstein in July. You can watch the two partying at Mar-a-Lago below.
CNN’s Brian Stelter reports that after joining Trump’s legal team, Starr is no longer a Fox contributor. But I expect Starr and Dershowitz to continue getting a friendly platform on Fox to promote Trump’s case without much difference in the coverage.
(Dershowitz image via screen grab)
1/17/20 Update: Dershowitz is trying to distance himself from Trump, claiming he is "not a full-fledged member of the defense team" because he will "be there for one hour, basically," presenting "the constitutional argument that I would have made had Hillary Clinton been elected and had she been impeached." Because, yeah we all know that Clinton would have used taxpayer money to blackmail Ukraine into doing her political dirty work, just like Trump did.
Dershowitz is a desperate blackmail victim, pure and simple. He has thrown away any reputation he ever had by taking ‘Trump (+Putin?) apparatchik’ to a whole new level in what will inevitably become a forlorn hope of covering up his own despicable crimes.
Now that Parnas has exposed his involvement in the very crime being investigated, Sekulow should obviously have been stood down, but this mob boss president wouldn’t recognise a conflict of interest if it jumped up and gave him a haircut. Expect calls for Sekulow’s disbarment.
In the past several months, Baylor has been under fire on charges of doing too little to investigate reports of rapes by its male athletes of female students at the university in central Texas.
