Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz spoke in an op-ed for The Hill and claimed that he can no longer defend Robert Mueller as non-partisan after his controversial final statement as special counsel on Wednesday.
Dershowitz, who leans left but has frequently found himself arguing against President Donald Trump’s critics, wrote: “Until today, I have defended Mueller against the accusations that he is a partisan.”
“I did not believe that he personally favored either the Democrats or the Republicans, or had a point of view on whether President Trump should be impeached. But I have now changed my mind. By putting his thumb, indeed his elbow, on the scale of justice in favor of impeachment based on obstruction of justice, Mueller has revealed his partisan bias. He also has distorted the critical role of a prosecutor in our justice system.” He continued.
The Harvard Law professor, whose new book makes the case against the Dems moving forward with impeachment plans against the President, begins by quoting the most eyebrow-raising of Mueller’s remarks from Wednesday: “If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that.”
That statement, as Dershowtiz wrote, is “worse” than the infamous statement by then-FBI Director James Comey regarding Hillary Clinton’s private email server in 2016, in which he said, “although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
During that moment, James Comey went “beyond his responsibility to state whether there was sufficient evidence to indict Clinton,” says Professor Dershowitz.
But what Robert Mueller did, was actually more egregious, Alan Dershowitz claims. “He went beyond the conclusion of his report and gave a political gift to Democrats in Congress who are seeking to institute impeachment proceedings against President Trump,” he writes. “By implying that President Trump might have committed obstruction of justice, Mueller effectively invited Democrats to institute impeachment proceedings.”
Dershowitz underscores that what Robert Mueller did was something that “virtually everybody” can agree it is out of bounds: suggesting that the subject might be guilty despite insufficient evidence to make the case. Anyone who tries to argue that somehow Robert Mueller and the investigation is a “special case,” he stresses, is simply “wrong.”
He concludes that the only logical explanation for Robert Mueller’s actions is that he was deliberately attempting to “help the Dems in Congress and to encourage impeachment talk and action.”
