Harvard Law School professor emeritus and noted criminal defense attorney Alan Dershowitz said Monday evening that the evidence seized by the FBI in a raid on former President Donald Trump’s home would be ruled out if the raid were improper.
After telling Newsmax the FBI raid appeared to be “misconduct,” absent further evidence, Dershowitz went on to explain:
I just hope this raid has a justification. If it doesn’t have a justification, the material seized in it will be suppressed. … The law is clear: you don’t engage in a raid unless you’ve exhausted all of the other remedies. … Raids are not a first recourse in America. They’re a last recourse. And so the government will have to show a court, eventually, that they exhausted all other possibilities or they had a reasonable basis for believing that the evidence would be destroyed if it was sought in the normal legal course of events, through subpoena.
Federal courts follow the exclusionary rule in criminal prosecutions, which is that evidence seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment must usually be excluded from a prosecution, even if it implicates the defendant in a crime. The FBI obtained a search warrant, whose validity is presumed, but which may, Dershowitz suggested, have been obtained on an improper basis.
If the FBI and the DOJ knew that the evidence seized from the raid on Mar-a-Lago Monday were likely to be suppressed, that would lend weight to the speculation that the purpose was political, rather than to pursue the truth in a criminal investigation.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
