Veteran attorney Alan Dershowitz and Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett criticized Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan for scheduling President-elect Donald Trump’s sentencing in the “hush money” case for January 10, just ten days before his inauguration.
Jarrett argued that the judge aims to label Trump a convicted felon before he takes office, while also pointing out the case’s convoluted nature, which involved dubious legal theories and a biased jury.
Dershowitz described the prosecution as reminiscent of a Soviet-style show trial, claiming it was a fabricated case without a legitimate crime.
Both analysts expressed doubts about the case’s validity and anticipated it would be overturned on appeal due to numerous legal errors.
Dershowitz said, “This is the worst instance of Stalinism in my 60-year career. Stalin was told, ‘Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.’ So Letitia James, the Democratic attorney general, and Alvin Bragg, the Democratic DA, tried to find a crime to convict Trump of, but they couldn’t,” he said. “They couldn’t find the crime. They searched the books. They couldn’t find the crime, so they made one up out of whole cloth. A totally made-up case. If they can make up a case against Donald Trump, they can make it up against you too.”
“Now they’re trying to avoid him getting an appeal. One way of avoiding him getting an appeal was not sentencing him. Now they’re going to sentence him,” he added. “There’s another possibility. The governor may pardon him. If the governor pardons him, then he still has the stigma of a conviction, and there’s a question about whether he can appeal if he’s been pardoned.”
“They’re looking at every possible way of avoiding an appellate reversal because any decent appellate court, any decent appellate court, will reverse this conviction for a dozen different reasons. One, there was no crime. Two, there was immunity. Three, error after error after error. Four, recusal and disqualification. The worst criminal case in my memory. The worst,” he said.
