Alan Dershowitz on reported Dowd quote ‘distortion’
By Charles Creitz | Fox News
Former Trump lawyer John Dowd on Monday slammed the Mueller report as a “fraud,” for allegedly mispresenting a quote he had said in a key voicemail.
Dowd said there will likely be more discrepancies in the future stemming from the report.
“Isn’t it ironic that this man [Mueller], who kept indicting and prosecuting people for process crimes, committed a false statement in his own report,” Dowd said.
U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes called for the release of “all backup and source information” for the Mueller report on Friday after a newly released transcript of a former Trump lawyer’s 2017 voicemail message included content that did not appear in a version that was part of the special counsel’s Russia investigation findings.
Nunes, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, was reacting to the release of a voicemail message that John Dowd, a former lawyer for President Trump, had left for a lawyer representing former national security adviser Michael Flynn, in which Dowd asks for a “heads up” if Flynn planned to say anything damaging about Trump to Mueller’s team.
Nunes retweeted a side-by-side comparison of the Dowd transcript text and the Mueller report text, suggesting that the Mueller report did not disclose the full Dowd message. The Mueller report had redacted the part of the voicemail where Dowd said he wanted the heads up “not only for the president but for the country” and that he wasn’t asking for “any confidential information.”
Alan Dershowitz claimed on “Hannity” Monday night that the quotation was “distorted.”
“This is a very, very serious issue,” he said. “The distortion of the Dowd quote is very serious. Especially since, remember, that a report by a special counsel is always going to be one-sided. Therefore, you have to trust it.”
DEVIN NUNES CALLS ‘FRAUD,’ CITING DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MUELLER REPORT, DOWD TRANSCRIPT
Dowd said, according to the transcript: “I understand that you can’t join the joint defense; so that’s one thing. If, on the other hand, we have, there’s information that… implicates the president, then we’ve got a national security issue, or maybe a national security issue, I don’t know… some issue, we got to — we got to deal with, not only for the president, but for the country. So… uh… you know, then-then, you know, we need some kind of heads-up.”
Federal prosecutors released the transcript in a court filing. Flynn, who pleaded guilty last year to lying to federal investigators about contacts with Russians and is awaiting sentencing, said the call was an effort to obstruct his cooperation with Mueller’s probe.
Fox News’ Greg Wilson and Brie Stimson contributed to this report.
