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Practicing the legal profession is tough and the penalties for telling untruths can be severe. Just ask Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who was recently sanctioned in Arizona for publishing his name on documents making patently false claims about that state’s election laws in one of Kari Lake’s endless lawsuits.
It’s far easier to get paid to support Trump as a House “Liberal” in a conservative network, and the only penalty for being incredibly wrong is one’s reputation. Just ask Dershowitz, who contacted Fox this week to explain that the infamous phone call in which Trump pressured Georgia Foreign Minister Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes, that’s one vote more than we have.” is wonderful evidence for trump.
“If I were a defender on this case, I would start with this call. “That’s the most exculpatory piece of evidence,” Dersh told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow in an interview reported by the Daily Caller.
After being introduced as “the finest legal mind in the country,” Dershowitz began an argument about his bar mitzvah, noting that he had just celebrated 72 years of manhood by rereading a passage from the Torah in which the judges admonished to be blind to faces.
“The American justice system has removed the blindfold and they are making a decision based on who the defendant is and what party he is from,” the professor shouted, arguing that Trump only did what candidate Al Gore did in 2000 done in Florida: an odd appearance on a television network with about zero viewers under the age of 30 at the time Gore, as Vice President, was conducting the tally that confirmed George W. Bush’s victory.
The professor explained that the call we all heard, in which Trump gave out entirely fictitious numbers of dead voters and fake ballots, and told state officials that it was a “felony” not to take over the state for him, was actually completely exonerating be.
“Trump said find – FIND – don’t concoct, don’t make, find,” he ranted. “If I were defense counsel in this case, I would start with this piece of evidence. The word “find” has a dictionary meaning. It means they are there, they can be found. Just look carefully and look for them. We did that in Florida. We thought there were enough voices that Gore could surpass.”
That is a very charitable way of interpreting this conversation. Because Trump often referred to very specific numbers: “4,502 voters who cast their vote but were not on the voter registration list”, “18,325 voters with empty addresses”, “904 who only voted where they only had a PO had,” “mail ballots mailed 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 allegedly fake ballots that would be exposed if Georgian officials would simply let Trump’s cronies run their own signature check in Fulton County.
But Trump not Ask for 231,507 votes. Or even 31,507 votes. He did not ask state officials to conduct an intensive audit and then adjust the count accordingly. He urged Raffensperger to change the official tally immediately to make Trump the winner, and didn’t care how much as long as it surpassed Joe Biden’s 11,799 majority vote.
Trump asked this question on January 2, 2021. after There had already been three recounts and a signature check proving he had lost the state and after being repeatedly told by his own Justice Department, as well as by Raffensperger during the call, that there was no significant fraud in the state leading to it would have influenced the result.
Trump did not ask for a recount. He asked an official to create a false election protocol.
Which isn’t remotely “exculpatory,” no matter what nonsense Dersh or Jonathan Turley get paid to spit on TV.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore, where she writes about law and politics and appears on the podcast Opening Arguments.
