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Friday on FNC’s “Hannity,” Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz criticized New York State Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan’s apparent effort to ward off the U.S. Supreme Court’s intervention in President-elect Donald Trump’s record-keeping criminal case.

Ahead of the January 10 sentencing, Merchan revealed no jail time for the incoming president would be a part of the sentence. However, Dershowitz speculated that it was intentional to “persuade” two of the high court’s justices not to take the case.

“What we saw today was a scam, a ploy,” he said. “It started with Judge Merchan telling in advance what a sentence was going to be. I’ve been doing this for years. I’ve never been told by a judge what the sentence is going to be. When I go into the courtroom with my client, I tell him to bring his toothbrush because he doesn’t know whether he’s going home or going to Rikers or some other lockup. The only reason Merchan said in advance what he was going to do is to try to persuade the two justices of the Supreme Court not to take the case now and they use that fact.”

Dershowitz added, “And they said the reason we’re not taking the case now and stopping the sentencing from going forward was because the judge said in advance that he’s not sentencing him to prison. So this was a ploy and the two justices unfortunately fell for the ploy. This is the worst thing that’s happened to the American criminal justice system since McCarthyism and the civil rights abuses back in the 1950s and the victims of the American people. Trump, yes, it was hard he said very honestly, that it was tough for him, but he prevailed, he won and the American people won because they rejected lawfare. You know, I invented that term lawfare back in the ’60s. I don’t know if I’d be proud or ashamed of it, yeah.”

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