Democrat law expert says Trump indictment would be 'targeted injustice'

March 16, 2023

Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz said on Wednesday that if Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicts former President Donald Trump for making a non-disclosure payment to Stormy Daniels in 2016, it would be similar to Jim Crow-era efforts to keep Black people from voting in the 1950s.

"If Mr. Trump or anyone else did the crime, they should do the time," Dershowitz said. "But others have done things similarly to what Mr. Trump is suspected of doing, and no one else is being threatened with prosecution."

"It is in the nature of partisan selective prosecution that a target may well be technically guilty of some violation. The question is would he have been prosecuted for that violation if he were not the political target," he continued.

"When I was coming of age in the 1950s Southern prosecutors would target civil rights workers and search for any possible violation of the law, no matter how technical," Dershowitz said. "If they discovered or invented a violation, they would indict, prosecute, convict and sentence the target."

What Trump is accused of doing has never been prosecuted, Dershowitz said.

Prosecuting Trump violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution, he said in his Substack newsletter, and constitutes "targeted injustice" because others who committed the same or similar crimes have not and would not be prosecuted.