We want to follow topics that you find of interest today. We got a real treat for you. Joining us is a man who requires very little introduction because he is one of the foremost legal scholars of our country, professor Alan Dershowitz. Professor Dershowitz. Welcome to On Watch. My pleasure to be on. I’ve been a longtime admirer of Judicial Watch, so thank you for having me. Thank you very much.

Today I want to talk about your latest book called Get Trump, where you highlight the threats to civil liberties, to due process, and the rule of law. And that’s a great image. Thank you very much. Get Trump is an important work right now because all the issues, all the topics you’re talking about are, frankly, popping up in the headlines on a weekly basis. To kick off, I want to talk about Judge Tanya Chutkin and the J Six charges that President Trump faces.

President Trump’s attorneys have moved to disqualify Judge Chuckin and seek a change in venue. Give me your kind of once overview of what’s proceeding in that particular case. I can’t imagine a worse location for a fair trial against Donald Trump than the District of Columbia, or a worse judge assigned by random to preside over his trial. She comes from a law firm that has long history of always siding with Democrats, and it’s a law firm that has been criticized, much criticized, over the years.

She herself has not shown the kind of objectivity that is required when the President of the United States is being challenged by an incumbent and that incumbent is being put on trial. When you have a trial like that, to avoid being a banana republic, you have to have the fairest trial in the most neutral place by the most objective judge. And this case fails all of those standards on my podcast.

I have a podcast, too, called the Dur Show. I hand out bananas. The most is ten. That makes you a banana republic. That’s obviously Russia, where they put dissonance on airplanes and crash them, or Ecuador, where they kill people running for president. We’re not there. But as the result of some of the rulings in the District of Columbia in this case, I’ve now awarded, I think, six bananas.

Up to six bananas. That’s pretty close to ten, much closer than America has been in my adult life. And so I am very concerned for the future of this country. I want to see a fair election in 2024 where every candidate who is nominated by their party is on the ballot. My own preference is I’d like to see the Democrats win the election. Everybody has the right to have a different point of view on that, but I want to see an election that’s fair.

As a result, I’d also like to see something happen in the United States that hasn’t happened here and that has happened in England and Israel and many other democratic countries, the creation of an election commission of distinguished nonpartisan people who can take complaints and see in a real time basis what’s going on in an election. I’ll give you an example. In 2000, I got a call on the morning of the election, presidential election from a rabbi in Palm Beach County saying, my Jewish congregants are all by accident voting for Pat Buchanan.

And Jews generally didn’t like Pat Buchanan. He had very negative views toward Israel and toward Jews in general because of the butterfly ballot. Can’t we do something about it? And we couldn’t. We couldn’t do anything about it. And that election may very well have turned on the failure of Palm Beach County to follow the law and how its ballots have to be created. So I think we need an election commission to make sure that the 2024 election is the fairest one in the history.

We do not want a recurrence of the loser being challenging the election. We want the loser to act the way losers have acted in the past congratulating the winner, showing up at the inauguration, and everybody in America realizing the election was fair. That’s my hope for the 2024 election. I doubt it will be fulfilled. A little fun fact back in 2000, when it came to gaining access to ballots to review them, judicial Watch led the way.

Our legal studies determined that ballots were public documents in Florida under their Sunshine Act. And so we filed 67 because there are 67 counties in Florida sunshine act request to gain access to those ballots. And so the rest of the world came storming in behind us. But we wanted to look at those ballots for exactly the reasons you’re talking about. All the weird claims about Dimples and Chads and all the rest of this nonsense.

Some of it was legitimately weird, and some of it was legitimate. And as usual, it’s always a matter of degree. We’ve never had a 100% pure election, and we’ve never had a corrupt election. We’ve had elections that have had problems. The Pennsylvania counting of votes after the Constitution permitted them to be counted was a problem in the last election, but it didn’t determine the outcome of Pennsylvania or any other state.

So look, judicial Watch has been our most important check and balance on judicial overreaching and the failures of the know. In the first book I ever wrote, the best defense, I called the judiciary the most dangerous branch of government because it’s unelected, it can’t be removed. It has no accountability, and it’s so important that there be somebody guarding the you know, to that point. Judge Chutkin, there is a canon of judicial ethics, and one of the canons discusses the appearance of impropriety and the fact that when there’s some sort of a conflict of interest raised, or when there’s some objection or it appears that a judge is prejudiced one way or the other, the judiciary is supposed to sort of police itself and have some right.

And that’s the problem I’m getting to. There is the appearance of a predisposition. There’s these disqualifying statements by Chutkin. There’s her past association with her law firm. There’s any number of things that are objectionable about Chutkin and about the venue here. So what is the vehicle? What’s the technique? Other than the Trump team filing briefs? What’s the way that this is corrected? Well, it’s impossible to correct. Why? Because even I have been threatened for calling out this judge.

Oh, my God. You’re violating the candidate of ethics by criticizing a judge. This new McCarthyite group called the 65 Project has filed a bar complaint against me. After I volunteered to defend anyone, they filed a bar complaint against. They went after me because I was involved in a case as a consultant challenging Arizona’s use of machines by a company that will not subject the machines to adversarial, testing a perfectly plausible claim under the Constitution.

But they’ve gone after me, which means that because I have a bar complaint, I can’t now defend some of these lawyers who are the subject of bar complaints themselves. So lawyers have become McCarthyites and making it harder to challenge judges. I was called and actually told, if you continue to say things about this judge, you’re going to be subject to a bar complaint. Well, I’m not going to be quiet.

This is a very important event in American history, and I’m going to say what I believe in, what my experience of 60 years teaches me about fairness in the judicial system, and if they want to come after me, hey, I’m ready for a fight because I’m on the right side. Constitutionally, that kind of conduct where bar complaints and legal proceedings, in fact, in some cases, indictments are brought against attorneys for doing exactly what attorneys are supposed to be doing, which is providing advice, working through hypotheticals alternative opinions, arguing all these things are basic components of the legal profession.

And somehow turning that on its head and trying to make it something that you’re charging someone with. This is an insane abuse. This is something thank God for Judicial Watch, because you’re keeping an eye on this. Look, when Lawrence Tribe was the lawyer in 2000, he came up with many creative approaches to challenging the election of the President, who was designated to be the President, president Bush alternate electors, a range of other issues and his law clerk, the person who worked for him on the case and helped him develop these arguments, has now been indicted for using similar arguments on behalf of Donald Trump.

I mean, there seemed to be two rules, which is why I wrote my book called Get Trump. There seemed to be rules for the Democrats. I’m a Democrat, but I don’t want to be subject to more favorable rules. There seem to be rules for Democrats challenging elections and different rules when Republicans, particularly when Donald Trump challenges elections. And by the way, many Republicans and even members of the Federalist Society are part of this Get Trump mentality.

Judge Lutek, who was very well thought of by many conservatives and members of the Federalist Society, has now drunk the Kool Aid and now believes that any secretary of state, based on an opinion, can simply take Donald Trump off the ballot because he what, participated in the Civil War on the part of the south. That’s essentially the argument. The 14th Amendment applies to people who fought in the Civil War on behalf of the south.

It doesn’t apply to people who sat in the White House and didn’t do enough to stop the January 6 protests in the Capitol. But there are conservatives and Federalist Society members who hate Trump as much. And I understand that if you’re a conservative and Republican, you don’t like the way Trump has behaved, so don’t vote for him. But the idea of disqualifying him, you know what that would do to America if Trump got the nomination by popular vote of the Republican Party and then was taken off the ballot by a handful of purple state secretaries of mean that would give us our 9th banana.

That really comes awfully close to short of assassination being a way of preventing a fair election, and I’m going to fight against that, even though I don’t want Trump to be our next president. How do you rate that? How do you rate the probability or the success of these 14th Amendment moves in various states? If the frame is of the 14th Amendment were making the decision, I’d rate it at zero.

But because we have a problem, judges are partisan, judges are political. I think it has maybe, I don’t know, a 1020 percent chance. I don’t think it would have much of a chance in the United States Supreme Court, but the goal of many of these things is to create problems in the election and in the run up to the election, and then they’ll be solved after the election by appellate reversals.

I think that’s what’s happening. For example, in New York. The New York indictment against Donald Trump is the worst indictment I’ve ever seen. In 60 years of practicing, teaching and writing about law, I’ve never seen an indictment like that. Under that indictment, Alexander Hamilton would go to jail for having paid hush money to the woman whose husband extorted him. It’s the worst indictment I’ve ever seen. But it’s in New York City, where 75% of the jury pool probably hates Donald Trump.

So there is a possibility of a conviction. It will be reversed on appeal, but the conviction may occur before the election and the reversal after the election, when it’s too late to undo the improper influences that the conviction might have occurred. The Get Trump posse is interested in getting down and dirty quick convictions. That’s why they’re setting these trials right in the middle of the primary season. They want to get convictions.

They think that will influence moderate centrist voters. And they don’t care that the convictions will be reversed on appeal because that’s after the election. That’s really playing dirty pool with the Constitution. Another Get Trump, as your book is titled, strategy would be the Gag Order. That the special prosecutor, this lunatic Smith, is trying to impose on President Trump. Discuss this gag order and what he’s trying to do.

Where is the ACLU? You would think the ACLU would be the first ones to oppose a gag order. And the gag order sought by Smith is much, much too wide and much too general. We have to remember that Donald Trump is presumed as innocent as you and I are. And since the special prosecutor could not control or constrain our freedom of speech, it certainly can’t prevent him from calling Smith names and attacking the judge.

That’s as American as apple pie. Of course, today, with the attempt to remove anything that people on the hard left don’t like. They want to get rid of the statue of Christopher Columbus. They want to get rid of the statue of George Washington. You can’t say unamerican anymore because America vespucius had his own problems, and if he had a statue, they would probably try to remove that. And so we live in 1984 orwell world of new language, and everybody trying to get it their way.

The real problem is certainty. The people on the hard left think they know the truth. Capital T. Capital T. And if you know the truth, what do you need to say? What do you need? The First Amendment. What do you need? Due process. We know that any man who’s ever accused of doing anything inappropriate with a woman, we know the man is lying and the woman is telling the truth.

That’s in their DNA. So what do you need? Trials. Why don’t you do what Yale does? Yale University. When a woman accuses a man, the man has no right to cross examine the woman, no right to be in the room as the woman testifies. And it insults kangaroos to call it a kangaroo court. Now Yale is being sued, and deservedly so, for denying young men. This is a case, very interesting case, where a young man who came from Afghanistan was an honor student, was accused by a woman after allegedly she invited the man into her room and was drunk, accused the woman.

He was tried criminally and acquitted by the jury. But of course, Yale convicted him in their kangaroo court proceedings, and he was expelled and denied his degree. And civil libertarians don’t complain because we know the truth. We know the truth. And people are now being prosecuted for giving opinions, opinions on the last election, opinions with which I disagree, but giving opinions, giving legal advice. And it has such a chilling effect on lawyers.

I know four lawyers who were asked by the Trump people to help defend Trump, and they refused to because they were afraid they’d have complaints filed against them by the 65 Project or other complaints filed against them. We’re living in an age of the new McCarthyism. It’s my next book. I just sent it into the publisher. And the subtitle is why the woke progressive new McCarthyism is even more dangerous than the original.

Let me tell you why it’s more dangerous. The original McCarthyism looked to the past. Were you a communist in 1930? It was done mostly by old people on the way out, like Joseph McCarthy. The new McCarthyism is the weapon of young people at universities and colleges. It’s the future. And unless we can turn it around, the new McCarthyism is in danger of becoming the new Americanism. What it really is is Marxism.

I mean, it is old school, hardcore Marxism is what you’re describing. I would change it a little bit. I would call it stalinism. Marx himself didn’t have much to say about freedom of speech and due process. It’s the distortion by people like Stalin and now Putin, obviously, who won’t tolerate dissent. As the Shakespearean villain, the Butcher Dick, said, first, let’s kill the lawyers. And that’s what Paul Pat did.

That’s what Mao Teitung did. That’s what Stalin did. That’s what Hitler did. You go after the lawyers first, and then you deny dissenters the weapon that they can use to approach the courts. If I were writing a new Shakespearean play, I would say, first, let’s kill Judicial Watch, because they’re the ones that really protect Americans from overreach. But once you go after Judicial Watch, Alan Dershowitz, other lawyers, you know you’re heading down a path that no American wants to see us go down.

Professor Dershowitz, we really appreciate you taking time to talk to us. The name of the book and everyone should go out and get it, or go out and get online and get it is called Get Trump. And there it is the threat to civil liberties, due process. And let me make one more point. You cannot buy Get Trump in your local bookstore. Local bookstores have banned. Get trump.

Local libraries have banned get trump. The only way to get Trump is to get it online through Amazon or through Barnes and Nobles when it was the number one, the number one bestseller of nonfiction books on Amazon. You could not buy it in local bookstores. My wife went around some of the local bookstores in midtown Manhattan. And the answer was get Trump. We’re not going to carry a book like that.

And so if you want the book, you have to get it online. You’re not going to find it in your local bookstore or your local library. That’s a commentary unto itself right there. That is a stunning and really very disturbing fact. So get online and get Trump. It’s a great book. Professor Alan Dershowitz, thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it. And we look forward to having you back on on Watch again sometime soon.

My pleasure. Thank you. Keep doing great things. I’m Chris Farrell on watch. .