Despite his admonishments of it being a “witch hunt,” and insistence that “there is no, there, there,” well-known attorney, and surprisingly frequent Trump defender, Alan Dershowitz, says that the forthcoming Mueller Report, could spell terrible news for the President.
Speaking on the Sunday morning news shows, The Harvard Law professor emeritus said that he believes the president will have to navigate the political impact of a potentially damning final report from the special counsel. “I think the report is going to be devastating to the president and I know that the president’s team is already working on a response to the report,” Dershowitz said. He added that he believes the report, although it will have a strong political impact, is unlikely to result in any criminal charges. He explained, “When I say devastating, I mean it’s going to paint a picture that’s going to be politically very devastating. I still don’t think it’s going to make a criminal case.”
Trump Provides Written Testimony
Dershowitz’s comments come on the heels of Trump having submitted his written answers earlier this week to questions from Mueller in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
On the same Sunday morning talk show, ABC’s “This Week,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, also said “that the investigation may be jeopardized by the appointment of acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker.”
Pointing to Whitaker’s previous public comments on the Mueller investigation before becoming attorney general, Klobuchar said he should not be running the Justice Department and that Congress should pass legislation protecting Mueller. “I’m really concerned about having him in charge. As you know, we have tried in the Senate on a bipartisan basis, to protect that investigation by law,” Klobuchar said.
The bill is still pending in the Senate.
Since Mueller’s probe began in the spring of last year, the investigation had secured indictments against 32 individuals and three Russian businesses on charges ranging from computer hacking to financial crimes.
Manafort’s Deal in Jeopardy
As if Dershowitz’s bombshell on Sunday wasn’t bad enough for the President, on Tuesday July 27, it was revealed that the Mueller investigation believes that Paul Manafort has compromised his plea deal, and has continued to lie to the investigation team. CNN has also revealed that Mueller’s team has been investigating a meeting between former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno, in Quito in 2017, and has asked explicitly if WikiLeaks or its founder, Julian Assange, were discussed in the meeting. But the biggest bombshell may be an unsubstantiated report published in The Guardian that claims that Manafort secretly met several times with Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, including around the time he was made a top figure in the Trump campaign. The Guardian, citing sources, said Manafort met with Assange in 2013, 2015 and in the spring of 2016. No other news agency has yet to confirm The Guardian’s report, but they are scrambling to do so.
For his part, Manafort says that The Guardian’s report is “totally false and deliberately libelous.”
As part of a deal for his cooperation, Manafort pleaded guilty to conspiracy and witness tampering on September 14, but according to a court filing on Monday, November 26, he breached that agreement by repeatedly lying to Federal Investigators. He potentially faces decades in prison, and had hoped that the plea agreement would lighten his sentence. Now that he is in breach, that is unlikely to be the case, which now raises the question if President Trump is planning to pardon Mr. Manafort.
