Dershowitz: Letitia James ‘Ought to Be Brought up Before the Bar’

“I didn’t make it up,” Dershowitz replied. “I wish I were creative and original, but I got it from obviously Letitia James campaign. She ought to be brought up before the bar. You should not have an elected prosecutor campaigning on the promise to get a particular defendant. Now if she didn’t get him. She would lose the election. This is a variation of Stalin and Beria back in the 1930s when the head of the KGB says to Stalin, show me the man, I’ll find you the crime. This is — show me the man, we know who it is. She told us who it was, Donald Trump, and we’ll find you the fraud even though there was no harm.”

“Generally in our legal system, particularly under the system of equity when you go get a jury trial, if it’s no harm, no foul, no harm, no fine, but when you have no damages at all, usually you can do a multiple,” he continued. “Say there’s a million dollars of damages, you can give $3 million fine. But when you have zero damages, no matter how many times you multiply it, zero plus and nth times whatever, is all still zero. So it it’s outrageous. Now, I don’t know whether it’s going to be reversed in the appellate division.”

“The appellate division is also elected judges mostly by Democrats in a county which is 85% Democrat,” Dershowitz added. “The New York Court of Appeals which is the highest court may indeed come and give justice generally fines like this are reduced considerably, and that may very well happen in this case. But this tells us so much about the politicization of our justice system, the weaponization of our system and it’s so dangerous because it will mean that business people are not going to want to run for office because they know if they run for office, partisans are going to go after them, investigate them, figure out some way of getting them like overvaluating. You know, this is a judge, which over-evaluates when he wants to, $350 million for no damage, then under-evaluates when he wants to, Mar-a-Lago, $18 million. He’s just willing to manipulate the numbers to get him to the result he wanted. I hope the courts will look at this with a very, very, very stringent eye.”