dershowitz esq
blank 7/18
epstein lawyer with dershowitz? ken starr OJ?
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GOING FOR 5B MORE FOR ARAB SOV FUNDS WHILE OUR ENVOY
AN 3 26
Since the Epstein Files were released in January, people have been poring through its millions of documents in an attempt to uncover the truth about a rumored secret cabal. Much that was previously unknown has come to light, and some mysteries have only deepened, but one thing is clear: many of those in Epstein’s orbit were more connected — and up to shadier business — than anyone previously realized.
To that end, one recently unearthed FBI document contains the shocking allegations that Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is “the real brains” behind the Trump organization and presidency.
The file — an FBI Confidential Human Source (CHS) Reporting Document — makes wide-ranging assertions about Jeffery Epstein, attorney Alan Dershowitz, Jared Kushner and his brother Josh, Trump, and others in his orbit. It claims Dershowitz was an agent of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, and that he once said Epstein “belonged to both U.S. and allied intelligence services.” It tied Trump and the Kushners to a number of dubious real estate deals, asserted that the brothers were students of Dershowitz, and linked them all to Russian collusion efforts that connected directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin. It even threw Henry Kissinger into the mix, claiming that the former Secretary of State had introduced the Kushner family to the Chinese ambassador, who may have helped Jared Kushner navigate a sketchy billion-dollar real estate deal, in which suspicions were raised that he traded influence for a financial bailout from Qatar.
While all of this is intriguing, it is not the first suggestion that Epstein, Dershowitz, Trump, and their associates are possible intelligence assets for the U.S., Israeli, and Russian governments. But it does appear to be the first evidence of a previously unreported dynamic between Trump and Kushner.
According to the document, the “CHS advised that this was a real collusion story — Trump has been compromised by Israel, and Kushner is the real brains behind his organization and his Presidency.”
That is no small claim, as it would mean that Kushner — who the President has tasked with everything from brokering peace in the Middle East to reforming the criminal justice system to spearheading COVID response to solving the opioid crisis — is in fact manipulating the presidency from behind the scenes. The FBI source suggested that Kusher is part of a Russian-linked organization that is “doing everything they can to co-opt the Trump presidency.”
The document contains nothing to imply that Trump realizes the extent of his son-in-law’s influence over the presidency, but implies that Kushner wields inordinate power within the American government, which he uses to further his own financial gain.
According to the file, the source was blunt in its assessment, urging that “the FBI should investigate Kushner's family charities to find evidence of corruption and money laundering.”
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an 3 26
President Donald Trump’s sometime-attorney and longtime-friend, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, is reportedly urging the Republican leader to pardon two leaders of a sex-focused women’s wellness company accused of abusing their customers.
“I believe this is a miscarriage of justice,” Dershowitz said in an interview with NBC News. “I intend to present the case for clemency directly.”
The Harvard law professor is referring to OneTaste founder Nicole Daedone and former executive Rachel Cherwitz, both of whom were convicted in June of forced labor conspiracy and are held at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center for sentencing on March 30. They could receive as much as 20 years in prison for their convicted crimes. In addition to being convicted of forced labor conspiracy, Daedone and Cherwitz are accused of running a company that regularly inflicted emotional and physical abuse on its members. The former OneTaste executives adamantly deny all claims of abuse.
When it comes to at least the crimes for which they were convicted, Daedone and Cherwitz have a supporter in Dershowitz.
“As soon as I saw the indictment, I realized that with a few changes of words, this indictment could have been directed against Mormon groups, against Hasidic groups, against various Protestant or Catholic sects,” Dershowitz told NBC News. “There are so many people who join ideological or religious groups, volunteer their time and later become disillusioned. The idea that prosecutors can later say that voluntary participation must have been coercion is extremely dangerous.”
This does not mean that either Dershowitz or the OneTaste legal team has abandoned their hope in overturning the conviction on appeal. That said, they hope a pardon from Trump will make all of that unnecessary.
“We will seek every possible remedy, legal and political,” Dershowitz explained. “This is a federal case, and the president has the ultimate authority. President Trump has uniquely viewed the pardon and commutation power as part of the system of checks and balances.”
Certainly Dershowitz has the access to Trump to make such a plan theoretically possible. In December it was reported that Dershowitz loaned Trump an advance copy of his upcoming book, “Could President Trump Constitutionally Serve a Third Term?”, which offers the inaccurate advice that a president can ignore the 22nd amendment’s plain text and seek an illegal third term in office.
"I said ‘it’s not clear if a president can become a third term president and it’s not clear if it’s permissible,'" Dershowitz told The Wall Street Journal about his conversation with Trump regarding the book.
Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2019, Dershowitz infamously denied the reporter’s claim that Trump was planning on refusing to accept the result of the 2020 presidential election if he lost.
“No president will refuse to step down if his opponent is elected in his place,” Dershowitz told Salon at the time. “It just will not happen, and the American public would never tolerate it.”
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ggl 7 25
[### 2 lawyers on Trump defense team shared Epstein as a client
AP News
https://apnews.com › 2-lawyers-on-trump-defense-team...](https://apnews.com/2-lawyers-on-trump-defense-team-shared-epstein-as-a-client-005baf1972164c49924f787c08f985ae)
Jan 24, 2020 — Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr both helped the late hedge fund manager and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein win a lenient sentence for abusing underaged girls.
[### Alan Dershowitz and his role defending Jeffrey Epstein ... - Vox
vox.com
https://www.vox.com › identities › alan-dershowitz-jeff...](https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/7/30/20746983/alan-dershowitz-jeffrey-epstein-sarah-ransome-giuffre)
Jul 31, 2019 — Alan Dershowitz helped sex offender Jeffrey Epstein get a plea deal. Now he's tweeting about age of consent laws.
Missing: starr | Show results with: starr
[### Trump adds Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz to ...
CNN
https://www.cnn.com › 2020/01/17 › politics › donald-t...](https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/17/politics/donald-trump-impeachment-legal-team-alan-dershowitz-ken-starr)
Jan 17, 2020 — Dershowitz is embroiled in a lawsuit with a woman who claims she was a victim of Epstein's, who also claims Dershowitz sexually abused and ...
[### Trump Poaches Jeffrey Epstein's Legal Team to Save Him ...
Vanity Fair
https://www.vanityfair.com › News › donald trump](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/01/trump-hires-jeffrey-epstein-legal-team-ken-starr-alan-dershowitz-for-impeachment?srsltid=AfmBOoorM-eolsudKO27fi0YSQp2GNGnWatG0RJQLiNyHgkN1D3OmTpQ)
Jan 17, 2020 — Dershowitz helped negotiate the part of the plea deal—pushed through by then U.S. attorney for Southern District of Florida Alex Acosta, who ...
[### Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr join Trump impeachment ...
The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com › us-news › jan › ken-star...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/17/ken-starr-alan-dershowitz-trump-impeachment-legal-team)
Jan 17, 2020 — Dershowitz is known for defending Jeffrey Epstein while Starr led the investigation that culminated in Bill Clinton's impeachment.
[### Jeffrey Epstein's Lawyer on His 'Clients': I Know Who They ...
Yahoo.co
https://www.yahoo.com › news › jeffrey-epstein-lawyer...](https://www.yahoo.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-lawyer-clients-know-001030945.html)
Jul 15, 2025 — In 2008, Dershowitz helped Epstein secure a sweetheart plea deal that allowed him to serve only 13 months in jail while working during the day.
[### Trump impeachment defense lawyers Ken Starr and Alan ...
NBC News
https://www.nbcnews.com › think › opinion › trump-i...](https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-impeachment-defense-lawyers-ken-starr-alan-dershowitz-share-disturbing-ncna1120736)
Jan 23, 2020 — Starr has come under fire for assisting in Epstein's defense in 2007. That effort resulted in an egregiously lenient 2008 plea deal.
[### Attorney Alan Dershowitz and the Jeffrey Epstein Case
New York Magazine
https://nymag.com › intelligencer › 2019/07 › alan-ders...](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/alan-dershowitz-jeffrey-epstein-case.html)
Jul 19, 2019 — The famed attorney Alan Dershowitz's onetime client Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on sex-trafficking charges. Now Dershowitz can't stop ...
[### Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr both helped Jeffrey Epstein ...
https://www.facebook.com › nbcwashington › posts › ala...](https://www.facebook.com/nbcwashington/posts/alan-dershowitz-and-ken-starr-both-helped-jeffrey-epstein-secure-a-lighter-sente/10158422516013606/)
Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr both helped Jeffrey Epstein secure a lighter sentence for abusing underaged girls. Now they're defending Trump.
[### Dershowitz sues Netflix over Epstein documentary 'Filthy ...
Miami Herald
https://www.miamiherald.com › state › article251702518](https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article251702518.html)
May 26, 2021 — Dershowitz, 82, was a member of the legal team that defended Epstein against 2005 allegations that he molested and sexually assaulted dozens of ...
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an 6 24
... ‘Fantastical’ claims
Courts in other states have taken similar action to hold accountable attorneys who filed abusive or frivolous lawsuits challenging presidential election results:
Colorado: A federal district court penalized two attorneys, Ernest Walker and Gary Fielder, for filing a complaint seeking $160 billion in damages from 19 defendants for alleged misconduct related to the 2020 presidential election. After finding its claims were “fantastical” and “filed in bad faith,” the court ordered Walker and Fielder to pay defendants’ attorney fees totaling $187,000. Appeals to the 10th Circuit and Supreme Court failed.
Arizona: A federal district court imposed similar sanctions on three attorneys – Andrew Parker, Kurt Olsen and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz – who challenged the 2020 presidential election results in Arizona. The court found their complaint contained “false, misleading, and unsupported factual assertions” and “did not have an adequate factual or legal basis.” It ordered the attorneys to pay defendants’ attorney fees totaling $122,200. The attorneys have appealed.
Florida: One federal district court even confronted a 193-page lawsuit filed by Donald Trump in 2022, claiming 31 defendants disseminated false information about him to rig the 2016 presidential election. The court wrote: “This case should never have been brought. … No reasonable lawyer would have filed it.” The court ordered Trump and his lead counsel, Alina Habba, to pay defendants’ attorney fees totaling $938,000. Both are appealing.
These cases create a solid body of precedent for inflicting penalties on attorneys who file abusive pleadings challenging election results.
mma 8 23
right-wing media are attacking Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will preside over Donald Trump’s pending criminal case in Washington D.C.
Chutkan was randomly selected to preside over the case. Appointed by former President Obama, she has been described as a “tough Jan. 6 sentencer”of defendants who participated in the insurrection, though she has “avoided some of the most pointed criticisms of Trump that some of her colleagues on the federal bench in D.C. have delivered.”
Media figures on the right have leveled numerous attacks and charges against her, describing her as politically motivated, and calling for her recusal in the case against the former president.
- Fox News host Mark Levin described Chutkan as “the worst, radical, left-wing, Obama judge in America”on Fox and Friends, adding that Trump would be indicted for “drinking too much orange juice.”
- On his radio show, Levin reiterated his claim and called Chutkan “a whack job.” He then asked, “Do you think Trump will get a fair shot with her? Of course not.” He added, “And so the system is really truly rigged. Really truly rigged.”
- On WABC’s Chat with the Mayor, alleged co-conspirator Rudy Giuliani called her “the most inhumane sentencer on the court for January 6 people.” He went on to claim, “This is the Soviet Union, Red China, or Nazi Germany. That judge should recuse herself if she has any ethics.”
- Newsmax host Greg Kelly called Chutkan “a bad judge” for Trump’s case and said, “She has major conflicts.”
- The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro called Chutkan “a very left-wing judge” and said, “It is certainly fair to point out that Jack Smith is filing in a court in Washington D.C. with probably the most Trump-hating judge in Washington D.C.”
- Newsmax host Eric Bolling called Judge Chutkan “a very harsh judge on anything surrounding January 6.”
- On her SiriusXM show, Megyn Kelly**p**redicted, “This judge is going to hate Trump, and she's not going to dismiss this case on the papers.”
- Newsmax host Sebastian Gorka said, “This is their attempt to steal 2024,” and called Chutkan “the worst January 6 judge possible — an Obama appointee who has given the harshest sentences to people who walked through the velvet ropes on January 6.”
- Laura Ingraham said she has “doubts about her” and said, “I want to remind you tonight that she worked for Hunter Biden's law firm at one point, Boies and Schiller.”
- On Fox Business, Alan Dershowitz and Kash Patel called for Chutkan to recuse herself from Trump’s case, with Derschowitz calling her former law firm “one of the most corrupt firms” and accusing them of being “Democratic hacks.”
- Dershowitz also appeared on BlazeTV’s The Glenn Beck Program and asserted that Chutkan “has a very questionable background” and “worked for years for a firm that’s highly questionable.”
- On Steve Bannon’s War Room, Patel again called for Chutkan’s recusal, saying, “She’s so entrenched through her past legal representations and family to the Democratic national party and the Hillary Clinton campaign that she could not be a fair, detached … arbiter of facts.”
- On Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime, an over-the-shoulder graphic featured an image of Chutkan with the words, “the Obama Punisher,” and host Jesse Watters described her as “an Obama donor.”
- Turning Point USA’s Benny Johnson called Chutkan “a very nasty judge” and added, “This judge worked with Hunter Biden at a law firm. This judge should be recused, of course.”
- On Newsmax, co-host Bianca de la Garza pointed to the ties between Chutkan’s law firm and the president’s son, saying, “The person who runs it is ahuge donor to the Democratic party.” She predicted that Trump’s team would request a different judge to preside over the case.
- On Newsmax’s special coverage of the indictment, Newsmax contributor Joe diGenova said Chutkan will be “very, very bad for Donald Trump” and suggested there’s a risk “that she will not conduct a proper jury selection process” in Trump’s case.
- On hisradio show, Fox News host Sean Hannitysaid, “The Obama-appointed judge overseeing this case once worked for the same law firm as Hunter Biden. Is anybody going to call that a conflict of any kind? I’d say that might be a conflict.”
https://www.alternet.org/2022/12/federal-judge-orders-sanctions-for-kari-lakes-legal-team-in-voting-equipment-lawsuit/
After Democratic Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs defeated far-right MAGA Republican Kari Lake in Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial election, conservative Republican Gov. Doug Ducey congratulated her and said he looked forward to helping with the transition from a Ducey Administration to a Hobbs Administration. But Lake, a conspiracy theorist and Big Lie promoter who falsely claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, has refused to concede to Hobbs. And her campaign, in a lawsuit, questioned “the validity of the election results.”
Lake has also been in court attacking the electronic vote-counting equipment used in Arizona. But a federal judge, John J. Tuchi, disagrees with Lake’s claim that the equipment is problematic. And on Thursday, December 1, Tuchi ordered sanctions against Lake’s legal team.
Attorney/journalist Aaron Keller, reporting for Law & Crime on December 1, explains, “The attorneys being sanctioned are not directly named in Thursday’s order, but according to the court docket, Harvard Law School Prof. Alan Dershowitz is Lake’s lead attorney in the matter. Also on her legal team are co-lead attorneys Andrew D. Parker, Jesse Hersch Kibort, and Joseph Alan Pull of Minneapolis. Further listed as a member of her legal team is attorney Kurt B. Olsen of Washington, D.C.Parker, Olsen, and Dershowitz signed the original complaint, an amended complaint, and (an) opposition to a request for sanctions.”
Another far-right MAGA Republican who lost an election in Arizona, State Rep. Mark Finchem, joined Lake as a plaintiff in her lawsuit attacking Arizona’s voting equipment.In the 2022 midterms, Finchem ran for the position that Hobbs presently holds: Arizona secretary of state. And like Lake, he has aggressively promoted the Big Lie and Trump’s debunked voter fraud conspiracy theories. But Finchem lost to Democrat Adrian Fontes. Arizona was once a deep red state, but in 2023, it will have a Democratic governor (Hobbs), a Democratic secretary of state (Fontes) and two Democratic U.S. senators: Mark Kelly (who was reelected in November) and Kyrsten Sinema.
Dershowitz, however, stressed to Law & Crime that he is not questioning the election results in Arizona. And Keller points out that Lake and Finchem’s initial lawsuit questioning Arizona’s electronic voting machines goes back to April.
Dershowitz told Law & Crime, “I have not challenged the results of any Arizona elections. I have given legal advice about the future use of machine counting by companies that refuse to disclose the inner workings of their machines. I support transparency in elections.”
Keller explains, “The Lake/Finchem lawsuit as a whole, according to its opening salvo, sought to question the Grand Canyon State’s use of electronic ballot-counting devices. The case was filed in April, and — as Dershowitz noted — that was long before the results of the November 2022 midterms…. The lawsuit elsewhere bemoaned what it called ‘glaring failures with electronic voting systems’….U.S. District Judge John J. Tuchi rubbished the lawsuit in August— again, before the midterms — and on Thursday ascertained that sanctions were appropriate. Tuchi, a Barack Obama appointee, noted in August that Arizona election equipment is rigorously tested before it is used to count votes.”
READ MORE: 'Practical Republicans' in Arizona sunk Kari Lake because 'they want government to work': expert
Tuchi laid out the ways in which Arizona’s voting equipment undergoes extensive testing.
Tuchi wrote, “Before a single vote is cast, Arizona’s election equipment undergoes thorough testing by independent, neutral experts. Electronic voting equipment must be tested by both the Secretary’s Certification Committee and an Election Assistance Commission (“EAC”) accredited testing laboratory before it may be used in an Arizona election…. In addition to the equipment certification process, Arizona’s vote tabulation results are subject to four independent audits — two audits occur before the election, and two audits after.”
The judge continued, “The first of these audits is a logic and accuracy test, which is performed by the Arizona Secretary of State on a sample of the tabulation equipment…. The second required audit also takes place before election day. For the second audit, Arizona counties must perform a logic and accuracy test on all of their tabulation equipment.”
Tuchi wrote that Lake’s claims were “too speculative to establish an injury in fact.” Keller notes that the sanctions Tuchi has ordered only apply to the attorneys, not to plaintiffs Lake and Finchem.
The judge also wrote, “The Court shares the concerns expressed by other federal courts about misuse of the judicial system to baselessly cast doubt on the electoral process in a manner that is conspicuously consistent with the plaintiffs’ political ends.”
READ MORE: 'This is who they are': Critics blast Kari Lake for mocking Paul Pelosi after violent assault
https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/judge-smacks-down-alan-dershowitz/
https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/alan-dershowitz-boebert/
an 1120
critics slam Alan Dershowitz after he fights to defend his own questionable reputation
November 29, 2020
Formerly respected attorney Alan Dershowitz shifted into damage control Saturday on Twitter, perhaps in an attempt to win his way back into the dark heart of Donald Trump, at least for the moment.
Dershowitz had been a bad boy earlier this week when
11/22/20
Alan Dershowitz gives bad news to Fox News' Bartiromo: ‘The outcome of the election will not be reversed’
One of President Donald Trump's most high profile legal defenders on Sunday said that he did not expect the results of the election to be reversed.
Alan Dershowitz, who defended Trump at his impeachment trial earlier this year, told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that the president's legal team has failed to prove claims that the election was stolen by Democrats.
"They have to show that it affected numbers greater th...
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/roy-cohn-filmmaker-on-her-new-hbo-doc-about-trumps-mentor-and-the-man-who-killed-her-grandparents-julius-and-ethel-rosenberg/
salon
Filmmaker Ivy Meeropol has already made a documentary about her family connection to history. As anyone acquainted with 20th-century radical history will already recognize, she is the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the supposed “atom spies” executed by the federal government in 1953. Meeropol’s 2004 HBO film “Heir to an Execution” provides a moving, intimate study of that event and its personal and political legacy — although it does not and could not settle the question of the Rosenbergs’ guilt or the fairness of their sentence, which remains contested to this day.
(Full disclosure, although I don’t think it’s relevant to this story: Both my mother and stepfather were American Communists, and my stepfather, Mel Fiske, knew Abel and Anne Meeropol, who adopted the Rosenbergs’ children, including Ivy Meeropol’s father, after their parents were electrocuted. So, yeah, if you want an entirely neutral account of these events, go elsewhere.)
Meeropol’s new film uses her grandparents’ execution as an inciting event, so to speak, but it’s only indirectly about them and about the combustible collision of Communism and anti-Communism in mid-century America. “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn,” which premieres on HBO this week, is instead about one of the most notorious Americans of the last century — the man who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair, who served as Sen. Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man, and who groomed and nurtured a young New York real estate developer named Donald Trump, seeing in the callow womanizer and tabloid celebrity the seeds of greater things.
Few people shape history as much as Cohn did, and none of it was for the better. Given that, I told Meeropol in our phone interview this week, it’s remarkable that “Bully. Coward. Victim.” offers such a full, complicated and human portrait of Cohn — who may be best known in our age for his vivid satirical portrayal in Tony Kushner’s play “Angels in America” (as variously played by Ron Leibman, F. Murray Abraham, Al Pacino and Nathan Lane, among others). Not many people would have gone out of their way to be fair to the man who almost literally killed her grandparents.
My recording software glitched out for the first few minutes of our conversation, but I can reconstruct Meeropol’s answer fairly enough. She said that both as a storyteller and a human being, she thought it was important to pierce the mythology surrounding Cohn and depict him as a highly intelligent and almost uniquely conflicted person. Cohn was both Jewish and gay — and only partly in the closet, for the latter portion of his life — and at least initially identified as a liberal Democrat, yet made common cause with the anti-Communist crusade led by a right-wing Republican, which specifically targeted Jews and gay men as agents of the Red menace. (In the film, Tony Kushner observes that Joe McCarthy was too dumb to appreciate that Cohn was dragging him into a self-destructive conflict with the U.S. Army, which ended up destroying the Wisconsin senator’s career.)
The film’s title comes from a square in the AIDS Memorial Quilt that Meeropol and her father Michael (the Rosenbergs’ eldest son) stumbled upon when the quilt was on display in the National Mall in Washington in 1987. Cohn had died of AIDS at age 59 less than a year earlier.Their father-daughter discussion in the film about that discovery offers one of the most powerful moments in what is both a piercing personal memoir and a work of scrupulous and even generous social history.
Then I asked Meeropol about the fact that nearly everyone involved in her grandparents’ trial for treason — from the defendants and their attorneys to the key witnesses, the trial judge and of course Cohn, the lead prosecutor — had been Jewish.
You know, It finally dawned on me that in one sense the prosecution of the Rosenbergs was like something out of Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” ashow trial by which Jewish Americans could display their loyalty.
Oh, yes, absolutely. You know, back when I was making “Heir to an Execution,” a Jewish film producer, I’m not going to say who, kind of told Sheila Nevins at HBO, who’d greenlit the film, “You shouldn’t be doing this film. You should leave this story alone.”
Wow. Because, essentially, it “wasn’t good for the Jews”?
Yeah, even then. That was like in 2001 or 2002, when I was in the midst of making that film. “That’s a black hole. That’s a dark moment in Jewish history and you would do well not to revisit it.” That kind of thing. So yeah, in terms of [the Rosenberg trial] it was absolutely calculated. Cohn embraced that and he spent his career making sure that he was clearly – because he was proud to be Jewish, but he really wanted to be certain that he was always identified as an anti-Communist.
You may not want to touch this question, but I was really struck by the presence of Alan Dershowitz in your film. I’ve met him and interviewed him myself, and he’s such a peculiar individual. I’m well aware that in his youth he stood up for the rights of Communists at Brooklyn College, and has for much of his career been a civil liberties lawyer. But given his apparent slide to the right in recent years, and of course his strange relationship with Donald Trump, it was troubling to watch him on screen talking about Roy Cohn. I’m wondering how much any of that was in your mind.
Oh yeah, I mean, I wasn’t necessarily excited by the idea of interviewing Alan Dershowitz because he’d already been publicly for Trump. I find him very confusing. I don’t quite understand where he’s coming from or if he’s just a pure opportunist or what. But I felt that it was a really important interview to get. I went into that interview just really wanting him just to tell me his stories of Cohn, how he knew Cohn and what he knew of him. I knew that Cohn had admitted quite a few things to him about my grandparents’ trial and what had gone down. I never expected Dershowitz to go as far as he did, in saying, ultimately, that it was the greatest miscarriage of justice in his lifetime.
It’s an amazing moment.
Exactly, and to hear it from Dershowitz is important. It’s not the usual suspects telling us this, which is easy for people to dismiss sometimes. “Oh it’s just someone on the left, of course they’re going to say that,” right?
And then to have him be involved in the impeachment process was just like, oh God, there he is again.
Making bizarre circular arguments that I could not follow about how the president can’t be impeached unless he’s been charged with an actual crime, and he can’t be charged with an actual crime because he can’t commit an actual crime.
And then he was never to be heard from again after that day, right? He’s one of the only people from the film who — I have no idea whether he saw the film, or if he did, whether he likes it or not. I did ask him if he had had a chance to see it and he never responded.
Was there anything that really surprised you either about Cohn or about the story in doing the research — stuff that you learned about him or about his life that you hadn’t known about before?
I mean, probably the two biggest things that were most surprising were, one, that he fought so publicly against gay rights. I didn’t know that. By the time the gay rights bill was moving through the New York City Council [in 1986], he was pretty well known in a lot of circles as being gay. Yet there he is, aligning himself with the Archdiocese of New York at the same time. I didn’t know anything about that. So that was very surprising.
Then, I’ve come to learn how integral he was to Donald Trump envisioning himself on a national and even international stage. I knew, of course, about his connection to Trump. That was what made me want to make this film and actually decide to finally pursue it. But what we learned is just how important he was, in terms of where Trump got to, and even how we got to where we are now. I think just to see the machinations, the actual process of Cohn having these relationships with so many journalists. He had a close relationship with Lois Romano [of the Washington Post]. He says “You need to interview my guy Donald Trump, you’re going to be seeing a lot more of him.”
Then he’s on this campaign: You see footage of him talking about how Donald Trump is a genius and this, that and the other thing. He’s promoting him and helping him and he’s introducing him to everyone he needs to know in Washington, who turn out to be people like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. All those characters who end up helping him get to the White House. Rupert Murdoch, all these connections that originated with Cohn. I did not know the extent of his influence.
Yeah, that is obviously the big news hook in the film. There is also this sense, and I think you fill in the blanks on this really well, that maybe Donald Trump is nowhere near as bright as Roy Cohn, but he learned a number of tricks from him. Rhetorical tricks, public relations tricks, ways to position himself — maybe more than anything else the attitude of always attacking and never retreating. All those aspects that we see in the White House right now sound like things he picked up from Roy Cohn.
Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, even when Trump was being pressured about his relationship with Putin, he threw out my grandparents’ names. He said, “Traitors? That’s what Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are. That’s what they did.” That’s exactly the kind of thing Roy Cohn would say to divert attention from himself. You know, we were thinking as a family, at the time, like, “Trump doesn’t even know what the hell he’s talking about.” He probably only heard of them because of Roy. That kind of stuck with him and then he’s able to say “That’s a traitor. A traitor is a Rosenberg.” Then his followers say, “Oh yeah, right, that’s those Commie Jew atomic spies. That’s what a traitor is, not Donald Trump.”
That’s just one small example of that kind of language. He certainly learned how to deflect and blame and gaslightand do all sorts of Roy Cohn things. Whenever I hear about the entire Republican Party being too afraid to challenge him, that’s just like Roy, who would threaten to expose people to try to get a settlement. There’s Trump threatening to tweet you into oblivion.
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jumps the shark
"They are saying that abuses of power in order to…
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/alan-dershowitz-tries-to-play-the-victim-card/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/jeffrey-toobin-confronts-alan-dershowitz-for-using-trump-impeachment-to-elevate-himself-in-fiery-cnn-interview
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120 2 on AN
no lnx
Trump’s legal team is a wretched hive of scum and villainy
Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen
Written by Martin Longman / Washington Monthly January 17, 2020
From time immemorial, port cities have been “wretched hives of scum and villainy,” so why should spaceports be any different? That was the theory behind Mos Eisley, home of the famous bar scene in the original Star Wars. And why should Trump’s International Hotel in Washington, D.C. be any different? It’s a gathering place for every kind of crook and scoundrel. As Lev Parnas told Rachel Maddow, “It was like a breeding ground at the Trump hotel.”
And why should Trump’s legal defense team not follow suit?
President Donald Trump’s defense team for his Senate impeachment trial will include former independent counsel Ken Starr, who investigated President Bill Clinton, and famed defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, sources familiar with the president’s legal strategy told NBC News Friday.
Also joining the team is Robert Ray, who succeeded Starr as Clinton special counsel, and Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general who joined the White House in November to help manage the messaging around impeachment, the sources said.
Villainy may be in the eye of the beholder, but the stench of scum is hard to ignore.
Kenneth Starr is a completely disgraced man, after bringing Baylor University into total disrepute:
Starr was ousted as president of Baylor University and then resigned as chancellor in 2016 amid an investigation into claims he and school officials mishandled allegations of sexual assault by football players.
An independent investigation found that under Starr’s leadership the school actively discouraged “some complainants from reporting or participating in student conduct processes and in one instance constituted retaliation against a complainant for reporting sexual assault.”
Dershowitz has been credibly accused of taking advantage of the services of Jeffrey Epstein’s underage sex slavery empire.
“I kept my underwear on during the massage… I don’t like massages particularly.”
— Alan Dershowitz, via Skype, trying to explain why he was in an alleged sex trafficker’s house but was only massaged by an “old, old Russian woman” and had no clue what was going on in the rest of the house. Dershowitz also said: “Were there young women in another part of the house giving massages when I wasn’t around? I have no idea of that.”
Bondi is a poster girl for public corruption. Further, the worst of the accusations against her actually involves the person she’s supposed to defend in the impeachment trial.
Bondi was serving as Florida’s attorney general when allegations began to arise that Trump University was a fraud. On the one hand, she publicly said she’d look into it. On the other, she privately asked Trump to fund her reelection campaign. Trump obliged, illegally using his charitable organization to do it. Bondi promptly dropped the investigation into Trump University, and both parties defended the whole arrangement. Then they denied it had been an arrangement at all, with Trump claiming that he had actually donated the money to another organization with a similar name. But that organization never received any money, and Trump was fined by the IRS and his charitable organization was shut down.
More recently, Bondi has used her access to the president to rake in money from Qatar as a lobbyist. She also appears to disturbingly tight with the Scientologists.
Then there is Robert Ray. He’s another piece of work.
The former federal prosecutor who succeeded Kenneth W. Starr as independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation has been charged with stalking his ex-girlfriend, police said.
Robert W. Ray surrendered to police Thursday. He was ordered to appear in court at a later date and released, police said.
A complaint filed by Ray’s ex-girlfriend says he e-mailed, called and visited her against her wishes after their relationship ended.
There are many possible ways to respond to Trump’s choice of defenders.
Monica Lewinsky
@MonicaLewinsky
this is definitely an “are you fucking kidding me?” kinda day.
As far as I know, Bondi has never been closely associated with sexual misconduct or assault, but I think she’d fit in at the Star Wars cantina just fine. As it is, her lobbying firm regularly sends its clients to Trump’s D.C. hotel.
Maybe these are the only people who are morally compromised enough to see some advantage in arguing for the president’s innocence, but I hope the House Managers remember to bring their lightsabers to the proceedings.
Speaking of which, maybe Ponda Baba was an innocent victim and Obi-Wan Kenobi was wrong to cut off his hand. I’m sure Alan Dershowitz would be willing to make that argument.
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/reporter-behind-epstein-expose-describes-harassment-by-alan-dershowitz-followed-by-weird-computer-attacks
no lnx
Reporter behind Epstein exposé describes harassment by Alan Dershowitz — followed by ‘weird’ computer attacks
Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story July 25, 2019
In an interview with InStyle, Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown confessed that since her series of reports on Jeffrey Epstein broke — that led to the multi-millionaire being arrested in New York on child trafficking charge — she has been the recipient of “weird” computer and phone activity that she finds unsettling.
She also revealed that Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has tried to discredit her reporting with her peers.
Asked by InStyle’s Sarah Cristobal about pursuing Epstein, (” Jeffrey Epstein has quite the reputation for intimidation. Julie, did you ever experience that?”) Davis said that so far nothing has happened that she is overly concerned about.
“Nothing has happened yet — not yet,” she admitted. “I will say that the one thing I’ve noticed is that there is definitely something weird going on with my phones and my computer.”
“I’ve been getting incessant FaceTime calls, one after another, from different numbers. I’m talking millions. I answered only one,” she continued. “I hope that means they didn’t hack in. I got so frustrated, and I thought, ‘Who are you? Why are you doing this?’”
Then she took a shot at Dershowitz who has been tangentially implicated in the Epstein case.
“When you go after powerful people, you know that they are going to try to find a way to mess with you,” she explained. “When [my story on Epstein] came out, [Harvard Law School professor and former Epstein attorney] Alan Dershowitz wrote an open letter to the Pulitzer Prize committee, trying to discredit my work and influence the board [not to award the Miami Herald a prize].”
“He must have said a million times, ‘I know that you’re not going to tell the truth because you’re just aiming for a Pulitzer,’” she recalled. “When I do this kind of work, it’s the farthest thing from my mind. I never thought that this Epstein story would be as big as it’s turned out to be. Never. The thing that drives me is finding justice and telling a story people can relate to, because there are tons of vulnerable women who have gone through something like this.”
You can read more here.
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