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Liberal attorney Alan Dershowitz condemned the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago Tuesday as "unconstitutional."
The FBI raided Mar-a-Lago on Monday to reportedly retrieve classified documents that former President Donald Trump allegedly took from the White House and stored at his south Florida home.
The raid ignited a political firestorm, and Republicans accused the Justice Department of taking politically motivated retribution against Trump.
What did Dershowitz say?
Speaking with Glenn Beck on the "Glenn Beck Radio Program," Dershowitz — a constitutional scholar and former Harvard Law School professor — described the raid as "absolutely outrageous and unconstitutional."
"I’ve litigated dozens of cases on the Fourth Amendment. And I’m a liberal Democrat, who voted for Biden and against Trump," Dershowitz said. "But this raid is absolutely outrageous and unconstitutional."
According to Dershowitz, law enforcement should not conduct a raid unless they have "exhausted all other possibilities" to retrieve evidence. The most obvious evidentiary retrieval method is a subpoena, Dershowitz explained, but it is not clear whether one was issued in this case.
At any rate, if Trump did remove classified documents from the White House, raiding his residence is not an appropriate retrieval method, Dershowitz told Beck. What if the FBI agents tasked with conducting the raid lacked sufficient security clearance to be in possession of the documents?
"This is exactly the kind of thing that needs a document-by-document analysis — by a judge. Not the FBI coming in and sweeping everything together, breaking into a safe," Dershowitz said.
Even more important, Dershowitz emphasized the government’s action against Trump has the optics of using a different standard of justice against Trump from the standards levied against other individuals — like Hillary Clinton — who have also been accused of possessing classified information outside the proper channels.
"You must have a single standard of justice," Dershowitz said. "I’m a friend of both Sandy Berger, who was the former national security adviser … and a friend of Hillary Clinton. What they were accused of was exactly comparable. And there were no searches of their houses."
"People who have been found guilty of taking classified material improperly have been given fines. I don’t think there’s ever been a search like this based on the allegations made in this case," he added.
\u201cThe FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago was "absolutely outrageous and unconstitutional," attorney @AlanDersh tells me. "The most obvious recourse here was a SUBPOENA."\u201d— Glenn Beck (@Glenn Beck) 1660059257
Speaking with Newsmax in another interview late Monday, Dershowitz said the raid is more evidence the Biden administration has weaponized the DOJ.
"A raid is supposed to be a last resort," Dershowitz explained. "But this administration has used the weaponization of the justice system against its political enemies. It’s arrested people, denied them bail, put them in handcuffs — used all kinds of techniques that are not usually applied to American citizens."
Although the raid itself indicates that a federal judge agreed that investigators had secured probable cause that some crime had been committed, Dershowitz said the government will eventually need to prove the raid was justifiable.
"The government will have to show a court eventually that they exhausted all other possibilities or they had a reasonable basis for believing the evidence would be destroyed if it were sought in the normal legal course of events through subpoena," he said.
"Unless there is evidence that we’re not aware of, this is improper, and it is misconduct," Dershowitz declared. "We have to find out what the facts are. But we have to make sure the shoe fits on the other foot, that we want to make sure what’s being done here is something that Democrats would not oppose if it were being done to Democratic operatives as well. I don’t think it passes the test."
"This is improper, it is misconduct": Alan Dershowitz on the FBI’s raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago www.youtube.com
via b’Conservative Review’
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