Alan Dershowitz is a frequent presence on Fox News, providing help bashing the Mueller investigation, yet in not one of those appearances has anyone asked him about the case of Dershowitz client, pedophile and Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein.
The Daily Beast counted 27 appearances by Dershowitz on Fox News between November 28, 2018 and March 12, 2019, when the site published an article about the pass Dershowitz has gotten on the stinks-to-high-heaven Epstein case. It was on November 28 that the Miami Herald revealed the jaw-dropping favorability that Epstein received after he was accused of “assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day.” He was also “suspected of trafficking minor girls, often from overseas, for sex parties at his other homes in Manhattan, New Mexico and the Caribbean, FBI and court records show.”
It was a case that should have put Epstein behind bars for the rest of his life. Instead, with the help of Dershowitz, Epstein got a cushy deal that also served to “essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes,” the Herald noted.
To say Epstein got special treatment would be an understatement. More from the Herald:
Unlike other convicted sex offenders, Epstein didn’t face the kind of rough justice that child sex offenders do in Florida state prisons. Instead of being sent to state prison, Epstein was housed in a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail. And rather than having him sit in a cell most of the day, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office allowed Epstein work release privileges, which enabled him to leave the jail six days a week, for 12 hours a day, to go to a comfortable office that Epstein had set up in West Palm Beach. This was granted despite explicit sheriff’s department rules stating that sex offenders don’t qualify for work release.
The prosecutor who agreed to those terms was Alex Acosta, now the secretary of labor in the Trump administration. It also just so happens that Trump is a pal of Epstein's.
But while Fox is still obsessed with Hillary Clinton’s emails, the network has shown an astounding lack of curiosity about Epstein.
From The Daily Beast:
[O]n Feb. 21, a federal judge ruled that Florida prosecutors, including Trump’s labor secretary, had broken the law by signing the plea deal brokered by Epstein’s lawyers, including Dershowitz, without talking to the victims.
That evening, Dershowitz appeared on Laura Ingraham’s show. She didn’t ask a single question about the Epstein news. Instead, they discussed Empire star Jussie Smollett being charged with filing a false police report.
Dershowitz told The Daily Beast he never requested not to discuss the Epstein case.
“I actually raised it in discussing the case of the actor who falsely accused people of attacking him,” Dershowitz said, referring to Smollett. (According to transcripts, however, the lawyer only vaguely alluded to having himself been the victim of a “false report.”)
“I’m happy to discuss it on any media because I have nothing to hide and have overwhelming evidence that the story was entirely made up.”
The “entirely made up” story Dershowitz was referring to there was almost certainly the recent accusation by one of Epstein’s victims that she had been trafficked out to Dershowitz. In fact, that was the second such accusation against him. He has vehemently denied the claims.
Assuming that Dershowitz is innocent of the claims, it's still a big story that any legitimate news operation would ask about at least once. What are the chances that if a Clinton- or Obama-connected lawyer was involved in even half such a seamy matter that Fox News wouldn’t ask any questions in half Dershowitz's number of appearances?
We all know the answer to that.
Crossposted at News Hounds.
