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Practicing law is hard, and the penalties for saying stuff that’s not true can be high. Just ask Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, who was recently sanctioned in Arizona for putting his name on documents making patently false claims about that state’s election laws in one of Kari Lake’s endless lawsuits.
Being paid to shill for Trump as the house “liberal” on a conservative network is much easier, and the only penalty for getting things hilariously wrong is to your own reputation. Just ask Dershowitz, who took to Fox this week to explain that the infamous phone call in which Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” is wonderful evidence for Trump.
“If I were a defense lawyer in this case, I would start with that phone call. It’s the most exculpatory piece of evidence,” Dersh vamped to Fox Business host Larry Kudlow in an interview flagged by the Daily Caller.
After being introduced as “the best legal mind in the country,” Dershowitz launched into a disquisition on his bar mitzvah, noting that he had just celebrated 72 years of manhood by re-reading a passage from the Torah admonishing judges to be blind to faces.
“The American system of justice has removed the blindfold, and they make a decision based on who the defendant is, what party he comes from,” the professor shouted, arguing that Trump had only done what candidate Al Gore did in Florida in 2000 — an odd pitch on a television network with approximately zero viewers who were under the age of 30 at the time when Gore, as vice president, presided over the electoral count which certified George W. Bush’s victory.
The professor explained that the phone call we all heard where Trump spewed totally fictitious numbers of dead voters and forged ballots and told state officials that not flipping the state for him was a “criminal offense” was actually completely exculpatory.
“Trump said find — FIND — not concoct, not manufacture, find,” he railed. “If I was the defense lawyer in this case, I would start with that piece of evidence. The word ‘find’ has a dictionary meaning. It means they’re there, they’re there to be found. Just please look hard and look for them. That’s what we did in Florida. We thought there were enough votes that could put Gore over the top.”
That is a very charitable way of interpreting that conversation. Because Trump made a lot of references to very specific numbers: “4,502 voters who voted but who weren’t on the voter registration list,” “18,325 vacant address voters,” “904 who only voted where they had just a P.O.,” “absentee ballots sent to vacant addresses … that’s 2,326,” “dead people voted and I think the number is close to 5,000 people,” plus “hundreds of thousands” of supposedly fraudulent ballots which would be discovered if Georgia officials would simply let Trump’s pals conduct their own signature audit in Fulton County.
But Trump didn’t ask for 231,507 votes. Or even 31,507 votes. He didn’t ask for state officials to conduct an intensive audit and then adjust the count accordingly. He asked for Raffensperger to immediately change the official tally to make Trump the winner, and he didn’t care by how much, as long as it exceeded Joe Biden’s 11,799 vote margin.
Trump made that ask on January 2, 2021, after there had already been three recounts and a signature audit proving that he’d lost the state, and after being told repeatedly by his own Justice Department, as well as by Raffensperger on the call, that there was no significant fraud in the state which would have affected the outcome.
Trump wasn’t asking for a recount. He was soliciting a public servant to create a false election record.
Which is not remotely “exculpatory,” no matter what nonsense Dersh or Jonathan Turley get paid to spew on TV.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.
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