Is Donald Trump helping or hurting his case with Robert Mueller? That’s the question Andrew Klavan is trying to get to the bottom of after Mueller’s team accused former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort of lying to them, and Alan Dershowitz predicting the Mueller report will be “devastating” to President Trump. Klavan tackled this on Tuesday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show.”
“I just want to highlight this one quote from Alan Dershowitz, who is a liberal,” Klavan said. “He was on this show, he says he’s a stone-liberal, but he has been Trump’s supporter in the sense that he has felt that Trump has been hounded unfairly by both the press and the legal establishment. That the ACLU has covered itself in shame. So he has been fair so far.”
Klavan then provided the much-reported Dershowitz clip about the investigation: “I think the report is gonna be devastating to the President, and I know that the President’s team is already working on a response to the report,” said Dershowitz. “So at some point, when the report’s made public – and that’s a very hard question considering the new attorney general who has the authority to decide when and under what circumstance to make it public – it will be made public probably with a response alongside. The President will say ‘ah look! It’s political! There’s their account and there’s our account’ – then the American public will have to judge the credibility.”
“So that’s Dershowitz, a guy who’s been utterly fair about this, saying that this is gonna be a devastating report – and pointing out, by the way, that this whole fight about Whitaker at Justice is about whether or not this report is gonna be released,” said Klavan. “Of course Adam Schiff, the McCarthyite congressman, is going to try everything he can do to get it released if it’s as damning as he’s predicted.”
The bestselling author of “The Leftese Dictionary” added, “It’s going to be a fascinating thing, because we have Donald Trump, who’s stood up for a lot of values of which I approve. He’s been right about judges, he’s been right about business, about regulation, about Israel, about how to fight ISIS, about so many things that the Left has gotten tangled in their own politically correct stupidity. But, there’s no question that he’s a great big character with great big character flaws, and that those flaws may ruin even the truth that he speaks. So we’re gonna have to instantiate the values that we believe in, even if he gets himself in trouble.”
Video and transcript below:
Donald Trump, I’ve said this a million times I know, he is a flawed vessel. The Mueller investigation is really interesting right now. There was a development where Mueller went to the courts and said that Paul Manafort, who had made a plea deal that he was gonna tell everything he knew in order to get a better sentence, that he was lying to the FBI and to Mueller’s office, so they don’t want to give him the lesser sentence, they want to go back and have him sentenced. Manafort says no, he has told the truth as he knows it. The Guardian, the left-wing British paper, ran a story saying that Manafort may have met with Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks guy who printed a lot of emails that the Russians had taken from Hillary Clinton, and he did it just before Manafort joined the campaign. So that would be a good thing for Mueller and the people who want to get Trump on some kind of Russian collusion. Assange says he will bet a million dollars if someone can prove that meeting happened, he says everything that has happened to him has been recorded because he’s stuck in that embassy in Ecuador, nobody came, the story is completely untrue.
It really is interesting what is happening in the Mueller investigation, there’s something like over 50 closed indictments, he obviously has a lot of information if he can actually go to a court and say that Manafort is lying, he must have other means of finding stuff out. We don’t even know at this point, because he went back to the Justice Department, and Rod Rosenstein gave him a new brief to follow – so we don’t even know what Mueller is investigating. Trump is still hammering him, he put out this tweet: “The phony witch hunt continues, but Mueller and his gang of angry dems are only looking at one side, not the other. Wait until it comes out how horribly and viciously they’re treating people, ruining lives for them, refusing to lie. Mueller is a conflicted prosecutor gone rogue. The fake news media builds Mueller up as a saint when in actuality he is the exact opposite. He is doing tremendous damage to our criminal justice system, where he is only looking at one side and not the other.”
And we don’t know! For instance, Manafort may be playing for a pardon, he may be saying “oh If I’m a standup guy, I’ll get a pardon.” We don’t know. The one thing we do know is all the stuff that Trump is supposed to have done – fire Mueller, pardon Manafort – hasn’t been done. They keep saying he’s gonna do this stuff, but so far Trump has sat on his hands and let the investigation take place – well he’s sat on one hand, with the other he is tweeting all this stuff about Mueller.
I just want to highlight this one quote from Alan Dershowitz, who is a liberal. He was on this show, he says he’s a stone-liberal, but he has been Trump’s supporter in the sense that he has felt that Trump has been hounded unfairly by both the press and the legal establishment. That the ACLU has covered itself in shame. So he has been fair so far. This is what he says about the Mueller investigation:
Dershowitz: “I think the report is gonna be devastating to the President, and I know that the President’s team is already working on a response to the report. So at some point, when the report’s made public – and that’s a very hard question considering the new attorney general who has the authority to decide when and under what circumstance to make it public – it will be made public probably with a response alongside. The President will say ‘ah look! It’s political! There’s their account and there’s our account’ – then the American public will have to judge the credibility.”
So that’s Dershowitz, a guy who’s been utterly fair about this, saying that this is gonna be a devastating report – and pointing out, by the way, that this whole fight about Whitaker at Justice is about whether or not this report is gonna be released. Of course Adam Schiff, the McCarthyite congressman, is going to try everything he can do to get it released if it’s as damning as he’s predicted.
It’s going to be a fascinating thing, because we have Donald Trump, who’s stood up for a lot of values of which I approve. He’s been right about judges, he’s been right about business, about regulation, about Israel, about how to fight ISIS, about so many things that the left has gotten tangled in their own politically correct stupidity. But, there’s no question that he’s a great big character with great big character flaws, and that those flaws may ruin even the truth that he speaks. So we’re gonna have to instantiate the values that we believe in, even if he gets himself in trouble.