Attempting to stretch the campaign finance laws to cover Trump's situation is wrong

Alan Dershowitz:

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An overzealous prosecutor could, of course, stretch the words of the accordion-like statute to target a political enemy, or read it more narrowly to favor a political friend. If the same morass of laws were being applied to a President Hillary Clinton, civil libertarians would be up in arms about their ambiguity and lack of clarity.

As a civil libertarian who voted and campaigned for, and contributed to, Hillary Clinton, I am critical as well of efforts to stretch these laws so as to target a president against whom I voted. The guilty plea of Michael Cohen coupled with the conviction of Paul Manafort do not make President Trump look good politically. He promised the American people to surround himself with the best advisers, but he surrounded himself with too many people who broke the law, even if he himself was not legally complicit. But the rule of law demands that we distinguish between political sins and federal felonies. As the record now stands, Donald Trump appears to be guilty of political sins, but not federal felonies or impeachable offenses.

You wouldn’t know that if you just watched those cable-television stations that are determined to find crimes and impeachable offenses against President Trump without regard to the law, the facts or consideration of civil liberties. If one applies a single standard without regard to politics, what I call “the shoe on the other foot test,” there are still large gaps between Michael Cohen’s plea of guilty, on the one hand, and crimes or impeachable offenses against Donald Trump on the other. Until and unless those gaps are filled with credible evidence of criminal behavior by the president, his enemies should be cautious about tolling the death knell for this presidency.

What the proponents of using this to take out the President are doing is demonstrating a desperation to find an excuse and in doing so are showing that their Russian Collusion argument was just a hoax they used to try to reach those ends and they will grasp at any straw to find another.