Famed defense lawyer, constitutional scholar, and best selling author Alan Dershowitz said that through the impeachment inquiry House Democrats are acting like the KGB under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Evidence does not matter to them, he said, and like KGB henchman Laverntiy Beria, all they declare is "show me the man," President Trump, and we'll "find you the crime."
Dershowitz, a liberal Democrat and emeritus professor at Harvard Law School, made his remarks on the Sunday edition of Life, Liberty & Levin, on the Fox News Channel. Host Mark Levin commented on how the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are accusing President Trump of bribery and asked Prof. Dershowitz to explain what this specifically means.
"There are four criteria – we know what treason is because it is defined in the Constitution," said Dershowitz. "Bribery, you know, we know it when we see it. When you pay a government official corruptly to perform an illegal act or an act that is motivated by money."
"But it can't operate when you're the president of the United States and you're conditioning or withholding money in order to make sure that a country isn't corrupt, and you're asking them to investigate," said Dershowitz. "That just doesn't fit any definition of bribery: common law definition of bribery, statutory definition of bribery. However you define the constitutional word bribery, it just doesn't fit."
He continued, "What they're trying to do is what the KGB under Lavrentiy Beria said to Stalin the dictator -- I'm not comparing our country to the Soviet Union, I just want to make sure it never becomes anything like that."
"Beria said to Stalin: 'Show me the man and I'll find you the crime,'" said Dershowitz. "And that's what some of the Democrats are doing. They have Trump in their sights. They want to figure out a way of impeaching him, and they're searching for a crime."
Beria, a serial rapist, was a secret police officer under Stalin and head of the NKVD, which became the KGB. He was responsible for the murder of millions of people in Russia and the slaughter of an estimated 15,000 Poles during World War II.
"First they came up with abuse of power," Dershowitz added, "[which] is not a crime, it's not in the Constitution. So now they're saying bribery but they're making it up."
"There's no case for bribery, based on even if all the allegations against the president were to be proved, which they haven't been, but even if they were to be proved, it would not constitute the impeachable offense of bribery," said Dershowitz.