Last month I I argued that Harvard Law Professor and frequent Fox guest Alan Dershowitz was lying to you by disguising his perfectly arguable view about what the law should be as a statement of what the law is. Specifically, Dershowitz argues that when someone (say, General Flynn) lies to an FBI agent, and the FBI agent knows that it's a lie, and in fact expected the lie, the lie is not material, and therefore not a violation of Title 18, United States Code, section 1001, that familiar and abused element of vast prosecutorial power.
Dershowitz took quite a bit of heat for his pronouncements on materiality. His defenders — here and elsewhere — argued that he's merely arguing what the law should be and isn't being misleading at all. Professor Dershowitz has now doubled down, and has done his defenders no favors in the process.
He starts out honestly and reasonably enough by framing the issue as one of what the law should be:
The question posed by the Flynn case is whether a lie can be material if the FBI already had indisputable evidence of the truthful answer and asked him the question for the sole purpose of giving him an opportunity to lie.
As a civil libertarian, I believe the answer should be “No.” The proper function of an FBI or a grand jury interrogation is to obtain information they do not already have, and not to create a new crime by giving the suspect the opportunity to pass or fail a morality test with criminal consequences.
This is perfectly arguable as a matter of policy; I agree for slightly different reasons.
But Dershowitz cannot abide criticism. It's not enough to clarify that he meant to be normative and not descriptive.
Well, it turns out that the issue is not “well-settled.” Nor did I invent it. In fact, two influential courts — the New York Court of Appeals, in an opinion by one of the most distinguished jurists of the 20th century, and the D.C. district court that is now preparing to sentence Flynn — have sided with my interpretation. (True civil libertarians, however, should be concerned about what the law and policy should be, regardless of whether there is a precedent.)
Leave aside, for the moment, what Dershowitz is trying to sneak past you in the parenthetical — the notion that it doesn't matter if you're deceiving people about what the law is because you should be concerned with what the law should be. Instead, let's focus on the authority he's talking about. Did I miss cases in my analysis? Did Dershowitz, a formidable legal mind, find support that I did not?
No.
In The People v. Tyler, the New York court’s Chief Judge Charles Breitel reversed a conviction for perjury of a former public official who had lied about his connection to a well-known gambler. The court reversed the perjury conviction, holding that:
“The primary function of the Grand Jury is to uncover crimes and misconduct in public office for the purpose of prosecution … It is not properly a principal aim of the Grand Jury, however, to ‘create’ new crimes in the course of its proceedings. Thus, where a prosecutor exhibits no palpable interest in eliciting facts material to a substantive investigation of crime or official misconduct and substantially tailors his questioning to extract a false answer, a valid perjury prosecution should not lie.”
The appeals court cited a district court case in D.C., which held that to interpret “materiality” more broadly would serve no proper legislative purpose. In U.S. v. Icardi, 140 F. Supp. 383, the court held that if “the committee is not pursuing a bona fide legislative purpose when it secures the testimony of any witness, it is not acting as a ‘competent tribunal’ … [and] extracting testimony with a view to a perjury prosecution is [not] a valid legislative purpose.”
So. Let's review. In my post, I cited six different United States Courts of Appeal – six circuits — specifically rejecting Dershowitz' argument.1 Dershowitz now argues that the point is not "well-settled" because . . . in 1978 a New York court interpreting a New York law came to a different conclusion, and in 1956 a federal trial court in D.C. made comments supporting Dershowitz' view on materiality.
This is not a serious argument. An honest commentator or advocate might cite those cases for the proposition that the current rule is wrongly decided and that it should be changed. But no honest advocate or commentator would cite a state court decision on a different statute and a trial court decision from 1956 to say that the law is not "well-settled" when every federal appellate court to take up the issue has explicitly ruled the other way. Notably, though Dershowitz discusses and links the two cases he cites, he utterly ignores the wall of federal authority contradicting his position. He's not saying "yes, there is contrary authority, but it's wrong." That would be honest. Instead, he pretends the contrary authority doesn't exist. If he did that in a brief, he'd be sanctioned. If the government did it in a brief about one of his clients, he'd be outraged. Dershowitz is trading on the fact that non-lawyers will not grasp the legal significance of every single federal court of appeals to consider the issue going one way and a state court and trial court going another. He's using his expertise to deceive.
Note how he frames the dispute with his critics:
One can reasonably disagree on these issues, and I am ready to debate which is the better civil-liberty view.
But that's not the dispute. Some people do agree with the current regime of prosecutorial power, but those aren't the people Alan Dershowitz is complaining about. The dispute is this — what is the law now? Dershowitz is arguing that the law is, at least, unclear, and that the Special Counsel is breaking it. He's making that argument in fora sympathetic to that view, in service of the general narrative that the Special Counsel is lawless and that the Trump Administration is a victim of wrongdoing. He's doing so deliberately. He's lying.
Dershowitz views himself as a principled victim of calumny:
Being principled and intellectually honest means that, sometimes, your positions may conflict with your partisan preferences. For most of my critics, however, it seems that partisanship trumps their fair-weather commitment to civil liberties.
There's nothing principled about Dershowitz' stance. Principled commentators don't use their prestige to lie about what the law is. The law is vastly complicated and often obscure, which helps the government abuse it. Dershowitz' commentary — as he knows perfectly well — is being used to portray the Special Counsel proceedings falsely as an aberration rather than as a continuation of a long pattern of very troubling federal prosecutorial power. That narrative is a barrier to reform, not an incentive to it, because it suggests we can solve the problem by firing the Special Counsel, who is merely doing what prosecutors do every day. That is not a civil libertarian stance; it's the stance of a hack.
Dershowitz suggests that he's been falsely accused of being a Trump supporter. Allow me to clarify. I do not believe that Alan Dershowitz supports Donald Trump in his heart. I only think he's willing to use deceit to support Trump's narratives, and the narratives of Trump's obedient media allies, to get on television and in print. Alan Dershowitz doesn't love Trump. But he loves the camera more than he loves the truth.
Copyright 2017 by the named Popehat author. https://www.popehat.com/2019/01/04/alan-dershowitz-is-still-lying-to-you/
