Tribe said this on Twitter,
Laurence TribeVerified account @tribelaw
If WH told @morningmika & @JoeNBC the Nat’l Enquirer wd smear them unless they laid off T on their show, that wd be a crime per 18 USC 872
Alan Dershowitz responded by saying this,
Alan DershowitzVerified account @AlanDersh
Alan Dershowitz Retweeted Laurence Tribe
Threatening to smear someone who smears him is not extortion. If it were prisons w/d be more overcrowded. Jefferson w/d have been imprisoned
Alan Dershowitz added,
I said,
This is but one of many statements in which Dershowitz attempts to show that Trump is the victim of an unfair attempt to bring ruin to his presidency and that by constitutional standards he is being illegally defamed, his tweets a sensible response to a campaign against him carried out by hypocritical people who are irrational and vicious, Trump hatred overriding good sense and fairness.
Dershowitz is an interesting individual to try to understand, his career a brilliant one, his perspective on the world, not easy for a person like me to understand from one instantiation of it to the next. In recent years, I have thought him to have an encompassing blind spot developed as he tried hard to discover sound rationale for his unquestioning support of Israel, support that caused him to ignore, intentionally I think, what was right and what was not right in regard to U.S. Middle East Policy and the policies and actions of the Israel government.
Trump seems to be his hero now, something of a valiant crusader for right causes. I hope that those who engage him in conversation will try to get at what he is actually thinking now that he is, perhaps, Trumps most brilliant advocate.
