Noted attorney Alan Dershowitz said Wednesday that special counsel Jack Smith will have trouble proving a key element of his case against former President Donald Trump.
Smith secured a superseding indictment against Trump Tuesday, almost two months after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Trump’s claims of immunity in a case stemming from a previous indictment secured by Smith over Trump’s efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election. Dershowitz said that Smith would have an “uphill fight” to prove Trump knew he lost to then-former Vice President Joe Biden in 2020.
“The indictment charges that Donald Trump knew, knew and believed that he had actually lost the election. How’s the government gonna prove that?” Dershowitz asked. “He never said that to anybody. He never wrote that anywhere. Did he ever think it? I don’t know. Did he say it on a phone call that was illegally overheard? I doubt it.”
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“I have spoken to President Trump about this,” Dershowitz continued. “I think he’s wrong. I think he lost the election, fair and square. Now I’m not talking about the influence of Russia and all kinds of things external, but in terms of the counting of votes, that’s just what I’m talking about now, I think he lost Georgia, I think he lost Arizona and I think he lost enough states so that Joe Biden was officially and correctly elected president of the United States. It’s not a crime to disbelieve that, in fact, the indictment says that it’s not a crime to speak about that and to oppose it, but if he believed it, if he honestly believed it, if he talked himself into it, even if he was wrong, if he believed it if he thought he had won the election, then everything he’s accused of doing is protected by the First Amendment, Article Two of the Constitution and the Twelfth Amendment.”
Dershowitz said that if Trump did believe he had legitimately won, then his actions were not any different from other historical challenges to election results, including the 2000 presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush, the 1876 presidential election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden and the 2016 presidential election between Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“I think it’s an uphill fight for the prosecution to win this case. Now they will win it, it’s not uphill in the District of Columbia. They could have indicted him, for you know, eating a salami sandwich and a jury in the District of Columbia will convict,” Dershowitz said. “We’ll wait and see what the instructions are, whether the instructions require the jury to find beyond a reasonable doubt based on evidence not based on surmise but based on hard evidence that Donald Trump actually knew and believed that he had lost the election and he just was lying.”
Featured Image Credit: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America
