Trump-era impeachment lawyer Alan Dershowitz claims former President Donald Trump is struggling to find legal representation in ongoing state and federal cases as major law firms are refusing to allow their attorneys to represent the one-term commander-in-chief.
Under directives from the Justice Department, the FBI recently raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to find whether the former president broke three federal laws, including the Espionage Act, when he allegedly removed government records from the White House upon leaving office.
"The firms won't let them go near any case involving Trump,” Dershowitz told Business Insider. These are firms that want to continue to have clients, and they know that if they represent Donald Trump, they'll lose a lot of clients,” he reportedly said.
"Everybody who has called me has shown reluctance to do it," Dershowitz insisted.
"They say their law firms won't let them do it. Their husbands or wives won't let them do it. Their children won't let them do it. Their friends won't let them do it, even though they want to do it."
Dershowitz also made headlines recently when he reported "nothing was in” the safe searched during the FBI raid and called for the affidavit to be released.
“I want to see the affidavit," Dershowitz said in an episode of his podcast released Thursday. "I want to know how Judge [Bruce] Reinhart justified allowing the breaking-in of the safe. Remember, to get into a safe, you have to have a special warrant."
"You can't just say in a search warrant we want to do this, we want to look at that, we want to go in a safe," Dershowitz said. "You really have to justify that. I want to see what the justification was. I don't care about the names of the people or the cooperating witnesses but what did they say was in there and why did they turn out to be wrong?"
"Was something moved? How long has it been since the safe was open? And all of these issues are things that we should have a right to know," he said.
Dershowitz also called attention recently to an apparent liberal double standard on the enforcement of the Espionage Act.
“The most serious alleged crime cited in the Trump search warrant is under the Espionage Act of 1917. In the past, many leftists and civil libertarians have railed against the breadth and scope of this law, calling it repressive and unconstitutionally vague,” he told the Daily Caller this week.
“But now that the shoe is on the other foot - now that the same law is being deployed against a possible presidential candidate they deplore - many of these same leftists are demanding that this accordion-like law be expanded to fit Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified material.”
Dershowitz is a longtime public figure and former Harvard Law School professor who advised and represented a number of high-profile celebrities and frequently courted controversy. In recent decades, he’s come under public scrutiny for his successful campaign to deny tenure to Norman Finklestein for having publicly humiliated Dershowitz on Democracy Now, and for taking frequent flights on the so-called “Lolita Express” jet belonging to notorious pedophile and intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein.