Yet he has come under intense criticism for his steadfast and consistent championing of those same principles, and his famed 'shoe-on-the-other-foot test,' to those who have been 'cancelled' for any number of faults, both real and imagined.Ĭancel Culture is a defense of due process, free speech, and even-handedness in the application of judgment. Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.Alan Dershowitz has been called 'one of the most prominent and consistent defenders of civil liberties in America' by Politico and 'the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights' by Newsweek. Ah, well, must have slipped her mind when she was throwing shade at the judicial ethics of Trump appointee Judge Carl J. So in the unlikely event that this case gets overturned, it will not be because the jury pool was “97 percent Trump haters.”īut while we’re on the subject of things left unsaid, we’d note that Van Susteren’s husband John Coale is the lead lawyer on Trump’s ridiculous LOLsuits against Twitter, Google, and Meta. Of all the hundreds of pages of furious motions filed by the podcaster’s lawyers, not one of them involved moving his trial to redder pastures. But, in point of fact, he didn’t do that. Probably not, since none of the January 6 riot defendants have had success with such a motion - but at least he’d have preserved the issue for appeal.

And perhaps if Bannon’s lawyers had requested a change of venue based on the political composition of the jury pool, he’d have gotten his trial moved. Indeed, voters in the District of Columbia do detest the former president.

“And all you had to do was say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this man Bannon worked for Trump.’ That’s the end of the case.” “Well, not only that, but probably 97 percent Trump haters,” Dershowitz agreed. Van Susteren, herself a former lawyer, professed her profound respect for juries, but then tut-tutted that “this is a community of 94 percent Democrat.

“The conviction was a foregone conclusion,” he groused, going on to invent out of whole cloth an obligation for a court to order a witness to testify before he can be charged with defying a congressional subpoena. “They wouldn’t allow him to put on evidence that he believed that there was an executive privilege involved and he wanted a judicial determination before he violated an executive privilege,” Dershowitz went on, conveniently omitting the fact that there is binding Circuit precedent that mistake of law is no defense to a contempt of Congress charge. Which is a rather odd thing to say about a verdict rendered by a jury of Bannon’s peers in the city he calls home. “Entirely predictable and entirely in violation of the Constitution,” Dershowitz railed, adding that “The judge denied him a jury trial.”

Cancel Culture by Alan M. Dershowitz