Trump's lawyers: Alan Dershowitz

Ten years after O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder, one of his lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, admitted that “sometimes you lose sleep at night” while working as a defense attorney.

“Every lawyer who’s also a good person has these ambivalences,” he told PBS in 2005.

It might seem unlikely introspection for an outspoken lawyer whose high-profile career has been marred by his association with a now-dead pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, and who has now become a member of President Trump’s impeachment legal defense team.

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Dershowitz said his goal is to “defend the integrity of the Constitution and to prevent the creation of a dangerous constitutional precedent” by removing the president from office.

  LA Times

Actually, the Constitution specifically provides for impeachment in order to do just that.

In 1982, he represented socialite and financier Claus von Bulow, who had been convicted of trying to murder his wife in a case that involved adultery, enormous wealth and intense media interest.

Dershowitz successfully appealed the conviction and then won an acquittal in a second trial.

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Dershowitz says he is unimpressed with the case that House Democrats sent to the Senate this week for trial.

“The articles of impeachment simply do not charge constitutionally impeachable offenses,” he said in an interview.

Like abuse of power.

Abuse of power is not a “high crime or misdemeanor,” Dershowitz argued, because it’s too vague and the framers of the Constitution “didn’t want open-ended criteria that could be weaponized” for impeachment.

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Dershowitz also said it’s dangerous to impeach the president for obstruction of Congress because the executive branch often pushes back against legislative requests, and it’s not improper for Trump to want the issue to be litigated in court rather than immediately complying.

“The president was simply invoking his right to check and balance the legislature through the courts,” he said.

Which is why he's packing the courts with young right-wingers sometimes judged unqualified by their own professional association.

Dershowitz’s defense of Trump isn’t the only thing that has generated concern. There’s also his association with Epstein, a convicted sex offender.

In 2008, Dershowitz helped the wealthy financier secure a cushy plea deal with federal prosecutors in Florida while Epstein was under investigation on suspicion of sexually abusing underage girls.

A decade later, a Miami Herald investigation disclosed details of the deal for the first time, spurring outrage among Epstein’s victims.

Federal prosecutors in New York opened their own investigation, leading to Epstein’s arrest last July on charges of sex trafficking of minors and conspiring to commit sex trafficking of minors.

Epstein died by suicide the following month while awaiting trial in a Manhattan jail, but the investigation continues to reverberate through the court system.

I still don't buy the suicide bit.

One of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, has accused Dershowitz of abusing her. He’s denied the allegations and filed a lawsuit against her for defamation.

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In a 2015 affidavit, Giuffre alleged that she had been kept as a sex slave by Epstein from the age of 17. She accused the millionaire of trafficking her to his high-profile friends, including Prince Andrew and lawyer and Fox News regular Alan Dershowitz.

Epstein, Dershowitz, and Andrew have all denied the allegations.

Dershowitz, who represented Epstein for years, also appeared on Panorama, where he said the financier’s predilections were a total mystery to him. “We never ever saw him, or suspected that he was involved, with teenagers,” he said.

Hmmmmm. How does he explain that picture of a beaming Prince Andrew with his arm around teenaged Virginia Roberts?

Giuffre told the BBC that it was her work at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Largo that dragged her into Epstein’s net. She said [Epstein's alleged procurer Ghislaine] Maxwell had been the one who approached her in 2000 while she was working at the resort.

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She claimed Maxwell had offered to train her as a massage therapist, but she said the very first session had ended in her being touched inappropriately by Maxwell and Epstein. “I let them abuse me, I did what they told me to do,” she said.

Giuffre became a regular presence at Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion and often went with him to New York. She learned that she was to have sex with him several times a day, sometimes along with Maxwell and other girls. After several months, her duties increased. In a court document, she stated that she was “required to be sexually exploited by Defendant’s adult male peers, including royalty, politicians, academicians, businessmen.” She told me, “Ghislaine would say, ‘We want you to please these men in whatever way they want, I don’t care how gross or kinky it is.’ ” Epstein wanted her to report back about what the men liked. Giuffre told me that a video-recording system had been installed in the New York mansion, and she was convinced that Epstein was gathering information to use for leverage on the men.

  New Yorker

Which seems like reason enough to question "suicide" without the additional strange facts, such as an earlier "suicide attempt" that Epstein first reported as his cellmate choking him, and the two surveilance cameras failing at the same time that two guards were sleeping on the job when Epstein allegedly hung himself.

[In the Florida case against Epstien, his] team negotiated for a better deal with the U.S. Attorney in Miami, Alexander Acosta, who went on to become the Secretary of Labor in the Trump Administration. They arrived at a “non-prosecution agreement,” in which the federal government would throw out its indictment if Epstein pleaded guilty to two state felony charges for solicitation of prostitution, one involving a minor. The deal had two unusual facets. It contained a provision granting immunity to “any potential co-conspirators”; and it was made without informing Epstein’s accusers, a violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. (Dershowitz said, “I was not directly involved in any decision not to inform the victims. That was not my responsibility.”)

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Dershowitz says that after Epstein got out of jail they no longer socialized. He sometimes still visited the mansion on East Seventy-first Street, but only to offer legal advice.

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In December, 2014, Giuffre set up a foundation, Victims Refuse Silence, to help survivors of sexual abuse and trafficking. The same month, she filed a motion to join the suit. She claimed that Epstein had abused her, and had trafficked her to powerful friends. She named three: Jean-Luc Brunel, a modelling agent; Prince Andrew; and Alan Dershowitz. She asserted that she’d had sex with Dershowitz at least six times, in Epstein’s various residences, on his island, in a car, and on his plane.

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Dershowitz has strenuously denied the allegations, and maintained that Giuffre is a near-pathological liar engineering an extortion plot.

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Dershowitz presented his own difficulties as a witness. When taped depositions began, in October, 2015, he often refused to answer questions, delivering long soliloquies and furious denunciations. Even his own lawyer tried at times to restrain him. Eventually, a special master, a kind of referee, was appointed to help control the proceedings. The special master repeatedly admonished Dershowitz (“Mr. Dershowitz, I’m going to ask you to stop”), and struck some of his testimony from the record.

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[H]e called [Guiffre] a “serial liar,” a “prostitute,” and a “bad mother,” who could not be believed “against somebody with an unscathed reputation like me.”

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Giuffre’s claims about him have never been directly tested in court; instead, they have featured as side arguments in civil suits brought by others.

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In recent years, as Dershowitz approached the age of eighty, his public presence faded a bit. But Trump’s Presidency has enabled a comeback. Dershowitz, a proponent of civil liberties, has made a specialty of defending people who do outrageous things, and Trump does outrageous things constantly.

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On “The View,” [Whoopi] Goldberg [was] skeptical of Dershowitz’s defense of [AG William] Barr. He offered an explanation: lying to Congress or to the F.B.I. was illegal, but misleading the public was not. “The rule of law requires that we distinguish between sins and crimes,” he said. “There’s no federal crime that says that it’s illegal to lie to the media.”

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Despite sworn accounts from more than a dozen women, Dershowitz and his team secured a deal in which Epstein pleaded guilty to minor charges and served only a brief sentence. On “The View,” which was hosted by four women, Dershowitz described the experience as fraught: “It’s a case that was very, very difficult, and very, very painful for me, because I saw real victims out there. I’m a very strong supporter of the MeToo movement.” But, he said, an attorney is obligated to defend the rights of the accused: “I think of myself like a doctor or a priest. If they wheel Jeffrey Epstein into the emergency ward, the doctor is going to take care of him.”

Not sure comparing himself to a priest is exculpatory.

He specializes in appellate law, working to overturn convictions on appeal, a branch of law that often requires dismantling the strategy and the arguments of other lawyers. Laurence Tribe, a constitutional-law expert and a longtime associate of Dershowitz’s at Harvard, told me, “He revels in taking positions that ultimately are not just controversial but pretty close to indefensible.”

Dershowitz describes his early life as an ideal preparation for conflict. He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and has written that he often got into fights with Italian kids in the neighborhood, “though I don’t recall getting anything worse than a few deep cuts, several broken teeth, and one concussion.” (His mother, Claire Dershowitz, disputed this account, telling the Washington Post, “The only time his tooth was knocked out was when he played tennis.”)

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[When he was teaching, some of his Harvard Law School] students thought that he strained logic in order to defend men. “In Dershowitz’s view, men who are accused of rape, there has got to be a defense,” one female student from the 1991 class recalled. “He had convoluted ways of thinking about how men could misinterpret lack of consent. And it wasn’t relegated to when we were speaking about a rape case. Wherever we were on the syllabus, he would bring it up.”

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Midway through the semester, “a woman raised her hand and said, essentially, O.K., enough rape examples! There are women in this class who have been raped. Can we move on to something else?”

“His hair just caught on fire,” Murph Willcott, a male student who was in the class during the confrontation, recalled. “He seemed to take that as a challenge to his authority, and he made it clear he was going to teach what he wanted to teach.”

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Dershowitz has not shied away from provocative ideas about sex and the law. In a 1997 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, he argued against statutory-rape laws, writing, “There must be criminal sanctions against sex with very young children, but it is doubtful whether such sanctions should apply to teenagers above the age of puberty, since voluntary sex is so common in their age group.” He suggested that fifteen was a reasonable age of consent, no matter how old the partner was.

With an eye toward his own eventual defense.

He has also argued against punishing men who hire prostitutes. In a 1985 article, in the Gainesville Sun, Dershowitz proposed that a john “who occasionally seeks to taste the forbidden fruit of sex for hire” should not be arrested. [...] “He said, ‘Prostitutes know what they’re doing—they should be prosecuted. But you shouldn’t ruin the john’s life over that.’"

If there were no john, there would be no prostitution. The act takes two.

In the early nineties, Dershowitz represented the Reverend Jim Bakker after he was convicted of defrauding parishioners, and the hotel baroness Leona Helmsley after she was convicted of defrauding tax authorities; he represented Michael Milken after he was convicted of financial fraud. In a number of cases, he represented prominent men who had been accused of committing violence against women. He helped get O. J. Simpson acquitted in the killing of his wife; he represented Jeffrey MacDonald, a former Green Beret and doctor convicted of killing his wife and his two daughters, and Mike Tyson, who had been convicted of raping an eighteen-year-old contestant in the Miss Black America contest.

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He was confident enough in his case to tell the Star, “Tyson is going to be the cutting-edge case defining the law of acquaintance rape probably for the next decade.” In the end, though, the ruling went against Tyson.

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In April, 2018, [on Fox & Friends, Dershowitz] accused [Robert] Mueller, with no apparent evidence, of complicity in one of the worst scandals in F.B.I. history, in which four men in Boston were wrongly imprisoned for murder, in 1968, based on false testimony from a mafioso who was also an informant for the Bureau. In a radio interview, Dershowitz said that Mueller, who had worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Boston office, had “kept four innocent people in prison for many years.” The allegations echoed across the right-wing media, with statements from Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, and Dershowitz called for an investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general. As it happened, Nancy Gertner had been the presiding judge in the most expansive lawsuit in the case, in which representatives of the four framed men sued the federal government. On April 18th, she published an Op-Ed in the Times, noting that, in thousands of pages of court records, “there is no evidence that the assertion is true.” Gertner told me that she was dismayed by Dershowitz’s recent appearances: “He has squandered his position as a Harvard law professor and a civil libertarian—for the sole purpose of being on TV.”

[...]

This January, Dershowitz was on Fox News, discussing the Mueller investigation, when the host asked solicitously about the accusations against him. Not long before, the Miami Herald had published a deeply reported three-part series, by Julie Brown, that offered new details on Epstein’s case and the negotiations that led to his deal. Dershowitz seemed eager to answer the question. “There are e-mails so far that are secret, but that prove not only that I was framed but who framed me,” he said. “Have me back on the show when the e-mails come out. Boy, it will be so interesting—because there will be prominent people in handcuffs.”

He sounds like Rudy Giuliani.

When Giuffre’s allegations first became public, the Daily News quoted Dershowitz as saying that he never had a massage at Epstein’s home. After the story came out, he quickly asserted that he did have a massage there—though he said that it was given by a “fifty-year-old Russian woman named Olga,” and added, “I kept my underwear on.”

[...]

In mid-July, he went on Laura Ingraham’s show, on Fox News, to assail [Guiffre's attorney]. “I have had sex with one woman”—his wife—“since the day I met Jeffrey Epstein. I challenged David Boies to say under oath that he’s only had sex with one woman during that same period of time,” Dershowitz said. “He has an abnormal amount of chutzpah to attack me and challenge my perfect, perfect sex life during the relevant period of time.”

Now he sounds like Trump.

Alan Dershowitz has fallen a long way since his early days as a civil liberties attorney doggedly defending people's rights under the first amendment.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

UPDATE: