Alan Dershowitz: Trump’s bluff: Perfectly legal 'Corrupt motive' is a slippery slope

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Alan Dershowitz: Trump’s bluff: Perfectly legal

Now that President Trump has tweeted that he didn’t tape James Comey, the anti-Trump zealots are accusing him of witness intimidation.

This is most the absurd of the many absurd charges leveled against Trump by those out to get him without regard to the law.

Trump’s bluff was calculated to get Comey to tell the truth. How can that be witness intimidation? If it were, Abraham Lincoln would have gone to prison rather than the White House. As a young lawyer, he, too, bluffed a witness into telling the truth.

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Alan Dershowitz: 'Corrupt motive' is a slippery slope as the criterion for prosecuting a president

My academic and political colleagues who insist that President Trump has obstructed justice point to his allegedly "corrupt motive" in firing former FBI Director James Comey after telling him that he "hoped" he would end his investigation of retired Gen. Mike Flynn.

They concede – as Comey himself did – that the president has the constitutional authority to fire the director and to order him to end (or start) any investigation, just as he has the authority to pardon anyone being investigated. But they argue that these constitutionally authorized innocent acts become criminal if the president was "corruptly motivated."

This is a dangerous argument that no civil libertarian should be pressing. Nor would they be pressing it if the shoe were on the other foot.

If Hillary Clinton had been elected and Republicans were investigating her for asking the attorney general to describe the investigation of her as a "matter" rather than a "case," my colleagues would be arguing against an expansive view of existing criminal statutes, as they did when Republicans were demanding that she be locked up for espionage. The same would be true if Bill Clinton or former Attorney General Loretta Lynch were being investigated for his visit to her when she was investigating his wife's misuse of email servers.

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