Politicians and members of the media on both sides of the aisle have debated whether or not President Donald Trump engaged in criminal activity when he told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" 11,789 votes that he believes went missing or were not counted. According to liberal law professor Alan Dershowitz, President Trump's call was not criminal and the media took the entire call out of context.
"Every major media is taking it out of context," Dershowitz told Just the News. "He's not saying, 'I want you to create the vote.' He's not saying, 'I want you to manufacture or concoct the votes.' He's saying, and he's been saying this for months, on Twitter and his statements and his campaign's, he thinks that people voted for him and those votes weren't counted. He's entitled, as a citizen, as a candidate, to say, 'I want you to find those votes, I want you to find the votes that will pass for me and what weren't counted, I want you to find votes that were cast against me that shouldn't have been counted — by people who are dead people, who are out of state.'"
The law professor said the real culprit in the entire saga is Carl Bernstein, the former Washington Post reporter that broke the Watergate scandal. Bernstein has repeatedly said Trump's call is "far worse" than what President Richard Nixon did.
"Carl Bernstein has repeatedly misled the American public by saying this is worse than Watergate," Dershowitz said. "... Here we have a president who's saying, 'I think there's votes out there that haven't been counted. Find them.'"
"Perfectly, perfectly acceptable," he said. "I've been teaching criminal law for what, over 50 years, I went through every word of that transcript. There is no crime there. Period. Carl Bernstein, shape up and stop being a zealot political partisan and stop diminishing your own reputation."
Dershowitz brought up an interesting point: if Trump's call was worse than Watergate, Nixon should have never been impeached and Bernstein himself should have never been made famous for his reporting.