{"id":63235,"date":"2021-05-01T17:21:07","date_gmt":"2021-05-01T21:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=63235"},"modified":"2021-05-01T17:21:07","modified_gmt":"2021-05-01T21:21:07","slug":"giuliani-raid-unconstitutional","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=63235","title":{"rendered":"<b>Giuliani Raid &#8216;Unconstitutional&#8217;<\/b>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!--more-->By Eric Mack | NEWSMAX<\/p>\n<p>The FBI raid this week of former President Donald Trump&#8217;s lawyer Rudy Giuliani violated the &#8220;spirit and the letter of the Constitution,&#8221; because it permitted prosecutors to read privileged information without permission, according to legal expert Alan Dershowitz on\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/newsmaxtv.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Newsmax TV.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This was just a misuse of the search and seizure power,&#8221; Dershowitz told &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/newsmaxtv.com\/Shows\/Saturday-Report\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Saturday Report.<\/a>&#8221; &#8220;Initially it was turned down; now it was approved, both by a judge and by the attorney general of the United States, so it wasn&#8217;t lawless action, but I believe that they acted inconsistently with both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution and that there should be remedies for it.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It just shouldn&#8217;t be done this way,&#8221; Dershowitz added to host Carl Higbie. &#8220;It should be done through subpoena, and that is the constitutional route to getting evidence.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The only reason to raid Giuliani&#8217;s privileged electronics is out of fear he would destroy evidence, but Dershowitz added that burden of proof falls short in this case.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;To conduct a search warrant is to imply that Rudy Giuliani and the other lawyers who are subject to the search warrant would destroy evidence,&#8221; Dershowitz said. &#8220;Now, Giuliani knew they were after the cell phones and the computers for months and months and months, and he didn&#8217;t destroy anything, so what&#8217;s the basis for the search warrant rather than the subpoena?<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The 4th Amendment demands a subpoena in these situations, not a search warrant. What they did in this case was unconstitutional.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Reading the privileged information is damaging enough to Giuliani or any of his clients, because of &#8220;tainting&#8221; prosecutors who tend to privately share information with each other.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;What the government does is they seize it all, and then they give it to some prosecutors: They call them the taint team,&#8221; Dershowitz said. &#8220;Those prosecutors read all the privileged information and they decide what to turn over to the prosecution team.<\/p>\n<p>Dershowitz added, the prosecutors then say,&#8221;&#8216;Well, all right, this is privileged, so we won&#8217;t use it in a trial,&#8217; but the government has already read it. That&#8217;s illegal. The 4th Amendment doesn&#8217;t protect you only against criminal prosecution, it protects your privacy, and so in situations like this, they should always use a subpoena, not a search warrant.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Dershowitz acknowledged to Higbie he has advised Giuliani&#8217;s lawyers in this case pro bono.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve been consulting with Rudy Giuliani&#8217;s lawyers; they asked me for my advice on this, and pro bono, I&#8217;ve given them general advice as I would to a Democrat who called me and asked me about constitutional violations,&#8221; Dershowitz said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;They ought to move to: A. Get the material back, and have the government subjected to subpoena analysis; B. They ought to reject the idea of a taint team and require that if anybody goes over this, it ought to be a judge, magistrate, or at least a master outside the prosecutor&#8217;s office appointed by the court.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;But the idea of having one group prosecutors tell the other group prosecutors whether they can see it or not is having the fox guard the chicken coop, and that&#8217;s just not the right way under the Constitution.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And, Dershowitz lamented, the basis for the investigation being a lack of registering as a foreign agent is weak on legal grounds, amounting to a political witch hunt of Trump&#8217;s personal attorney.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;They&#8217;re looking; they&#8217;re looking hard,&#8221; Dershowitz said. &#8220;I don&#8217;t think they have anything on this registration because, really, Giuliani was representing an American; he was representing the president. He was doing investigations in the Ukraine to see if it can help his president.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;That doesn&#8217;t generally require any kind of registration, but I have to tell you the idea of a search warrant for a violation of a registration, that makes no sense. That&#8217;s disproportional.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>There is a lack of &#8220;compelling evidence&#8221; of potential obstruction of justice by a former federal prosecutor like Giuliani, Dershowitz said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;What you do in a situation like that is you have a subpoena, or you produce very compelling evidence \u2013 which they couldn&#8217;t in this case \u2013 very compelling evidence that the former United States attorney for the Southern District of New York was going to engage in obstruction of justice by destroying evidence,&#8221; Dershowitz said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s just not going to happen. He volunteered to turn over evidence, not only involving himself but involving other people.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>___<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newsmax.com\/newsmax-tv\/alan-dershowitz-attorney-client-privilege\/2021\/05\/01\/id\/1019749\/\">https:\/\/www.newsmax.com\/newsmax-tv\/alan-dershowitz-attorney-client-privilege\/2021\/05\/01\/id\/1019749\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}