Constitutional law expert Alan Dershowitz said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is "risking his bar card" if he puts former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen on the stand to testify against his former boss.
"You can't put a witness on the stand who you know is going to lie, and any reasonable person knows that Cohen is going to lie," Dershowitz said on Newsmax's "National Report." "He doesn't know how to tell the truth."
Dershowitz said he hopes former President Donald Trump will not be indicted by Bragg after the grand jury reviewing Bragg's case suspended its activities last week.
"I would hope grand jurors finally would do what they were supposed to do under the Constitution — defend the rights of defendants — and the grand jurors will say, Look, there's no case here. We've looked at the case. Bragg tried to keep material from us. He didn't call Cohen's lawyer as a witness. He volunteered to come in. He didn't give us 300 of his emails. What is he hiding from us?" Dershowitz said.
Dershowitz, author of the new book "Get Trump: The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process and Our Constitutional Rule of Law," said his book title is not original to him and describes the motivation for Bragg's potential indictment of Trump.
"It was Letitia James' campaign slogan," Dershowitz said. "Along with Bragg, they promised if they got elected they would get Trump. The basic theory was, Look, we have to get Trump. Otherwise, we're not going to get reelected. I don't know what crimes there are. We'll look through the statute books, maybe we'll find something, but the goal is to get Trump whether we find something or not.
"And they went through the statute books and they found nothing. So they made up a misdemeanor, which was beyond the statute of limitations. Then they created a federal felony, which the federal government wouldn't prosecute. And they added it together and they got one and one equals 11. And so they went ahead and prosecuted."
Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said he hopes "wiser minds would prevail, both within the grand jury and within the office of Bragg."
"I know some of the people in that office," Dershowitz said. "Some of them are my former students. They're thoughtful and intelligent people, and they have to be telling Bragg, You can't do this. First of all, you can't put Cohen on the witness stand. You know he's going to lie and a prosecutor ethically cannot use a witness who he knows is going to lie.
"So, I'm not optimistic, because grand juries will indict a ham sandwich. But I would be hopeful at least that maybe one or two or three ... grand jurors would say, No, we're not buying this."