Professor and legal expert Alan Dershowitz — a lifelong Democrat — spoke out on Fox News last week about the Mueller investigation and the legitimacy of the prosecution itself.
Dershowitz was on the air via telephone, talking about the recent guilty plea entered by attorney Michael Cohen. According to Dershowitz, the investigation itself and Mueller’s acts created some of the very issues that were being pursued as crimes. The situation, as the professor sees it, is a “perjury trap” and leaves no good way out for the intended target — in this case, Cohen.
In this specific case, the Mueller team ended up charging Coen with false statements instead of the actual “crimes” the group was supposed to be investigating and pursuing. The Harvard professor went on to say that Mueller’s investigation created an environment which offered few options for the targets.
“I think the weakness of Mueller’s substantive findings are suggested by the fact that he has to resort to false statement prosecutions, which really shows that he didn’t start with very much, and the very fact that he’s conducting an investigation has created these crimes,” Dershowitz told Fox News host Bill Hemmer.
A perjury trap is a legal trick designed by the prosecution to entrap someone who is or will be testifying. According to the University of Pennsylvania, this form of prosecutorial misconduct is used to coerce or bully a witness into giving a statement supporting something the prosecutor wishes to pursue. In essence, it forces the witness, often in a grand jury or investigation, to make a false or partially false statement — the witness is then threatened with perjury as a result and compelled to comply with prosecutors.
Many legal scholars feel this practice is unfair and should not be used; Dershowitz is referring to this questionable approach and how the Mueller team has used it to pursue several witnesses in the ongoing investigation.
According to Dershowitz, the only crimes Mueller seems to be uncovering are those he created himself using this investigation tactic.
“These are not crimes that had been committed prior to his appointment, they’re crimes that were committed as the result of his appointment,” he continued. “That raises some questions about the role of special prosecutors in creating crimes, or creating opportunities for crimes to be committed.”
“In the end, I don’t think Mueller’s going to come up with very much, in terms of criminal conduct, that existed before he was appointed, and that’s pretty shocking,” said Dershowitz.
See Dershowitz and hear his arguments for yourself in the original clip from Fox News and decide for yourself — is Mueller righteously pursuing the truth or is he working on a different agenda?
~ Liberty Planet
