Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz on Sunday dismissed a charge of racism hurled at him by Rep. Maxine Waters, saying the outspoken California Democrat "doesn't know what she's talking about."
In remarks to Fox News' "Fox & Friends," Dershowitz declared, "Being black doesn't give you a license to call people racist any more than being Jewish gives you a license to call people anti-Semitic."
After special counsel Robert Mueller impaneled a grand jury for the investigation into the Trump campaign's relationship with Russia, Dershowitz commented moving proceedings from Virginia to District of Columbia might be bad for the president.
"[Washington] has an ethnic and racial composition that would be somewhat less favorable to Donald Trump," Derhsowtiz said.
Waters responded by calling that analysis "absolutely racist," Mediaite reported.
"She doesn’t know what she’s talking about," Dershowitz countered on Sunday. “First of all, I wasn’t talking about the grand jury. I was talking about the jury. Grand jury doesn’t matter.”
Dershowitz also said Waters' frequent charges of racism dilutes their impact.
“If I had said that race didn’t matter, she would have called me a racist,” he noted. “She throws around the term so loosely and so inappropriately, and it weakens her credibility just by calling everybody a racist, by calling me a racist, when she calls real racists racists, nobody is going to believe her.”
"She ought to understand that every criminal defense lawyer knows that race matters, ethnicity matters, political affiliation matters," he added.
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