Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax TV on Monday that media outlets have “the right to report on information” that comes from “legitimate sources,” but “the problem is who the sources are.”
The noted legal scholar was being asked about recent corrections from major news outlets.
Dershowitz said on “American Agenda” that “we’re entitled now to know who the sources are. Sources don’t have privilege if they provide fraudulent material, so we have to know who the sources are, then we can judge the media. Maybe the source was a good source, maybe the source was the United States government. The United States government leaks material all the time. The Justice Department is a sieve. It’s filled with leaks, not necessarily from the top, but at every level people want to have relationships with the media and so they leak material.
“So, we haven’t heard anything like the whole story here. The apologies are just the beginning.
Asked whether the search warrant that authorized the recent raid by federal investigators on the apartment and office of longtime prospectur and Donald Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was too broad, Dershowitz said that “acceptable would be a subpoena for information that’s not public, not privileged information that doesn’t involve conversations with lawyer/client, information that’s clearly related to matters that might be criminal. I’m not sure they had enough for a subpoena here, if they did, they probably would have issued one. They thought they had enough for a search warrant and a judge validated it, but it, too, was based on sources.
“You know, maybe the same sources, that’s interesting, maybe the same sources that provided the basis for the search warrant were the same sources that the New York Times had to apologize about, that would not surprise me at all.”
Asked to speculate about the Times’ sources, Dershowitz demurred: “I’m not the New York Times and NBC, I don’t disclose matters based on guesswork. I wanna hear the information, I want to make sure that it’s tied down before I accuse anybody of being an improper source. I’m perfectly happy to accuse an institution like the government, because I’ve had 50 years of experience with government leaks, which are systemic and which are pervasive. But I’m not going to accuse an individual unless I have a far better basis for making that accusation than a mere suspicion.”
Source: Newmax
