Famed Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz says House Democrats at this point are gasping for air in the never-ending Russia saga.

“They’re looking to create something that isn’t there,” he told me in a brief phone interview Monday morning. “They’re trying to weaponize the criminal justice system for partisan advantage. It’s not there. There’s no obstruction of justice in the [special counsel] report.”

Democrats on Monday will hear testimony related to their absurd case against President Trump for supposedly obstructing justice.

Democrats have called in former President Richard Nixon's lawyer John Dean to offer testimony that would bolster their case for Trump’s impeachment. Dean is expected to draw parallels between Nixon, who resigned before his own imminent impeachment, and Trump, who committed the heinous crime of talking with his personal lawyer about ending the special counsel investigating him.

Dershowitz said that the difference between Nixon and Trump is that Nixon paid off potential witnesses, told them to lie, and physically destroyed evidence that could be used against him in the Watergate scandal. Trump, by contrast, had a phone call with his lawyer.

“What you see in the Mueller report is the president thinking about how to end this, what he called a 'witch hunt,'" said Dershowitz. "And any subject of an investigation is entitled to think about ending it and to seek advice about whether to fire or not fire those conducting it. And he’s entitled to pardon people and fire them. So I don’t see any criminal conduct."

Democrats in Congress and liberals in the news media have latched on to the part of the Mueller report that lays out several instances where Trump considered ways to manipulate the special counsel, either by limiting its reach or firing Mueller.

In the end, Mueller remained in his role for two years, completed his investigation, and found insufficient evidence of a conspiracy between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign. Mueller in the report laid out both sides of an argument on whether Trump attempted to obstruct justice (despite no underlying crime that needed justice), and he found “substantial evidence” that the president may simply have been motivated to end the probe because it was eating into his political capital, particularly as it related to relations with Russia.

Democrats have also targeted Attorney General William Barr for what they laughably claim to be partisan behavior. Here’s his partisan behavior: He quickly summarized the 400-page special counsel report, which everyone has been waiting for, and then a few weeks later he released the full thing with limited redactions, as required by law.

Dershowitz told me that it may have been better for Barr to have waited to make a public statement about the report until the public had a chance to digest it, but that he otherwise saw nothing wrong with his conduct. “I don’t think he’s done anything unlawful,” said Dershowitz.

If only that mattered. But Democrats have never cared about whether anything was unlawful. It’s a political hit job. We wouldn’t still be talking about this two years after FBI Director James Comey was fired if it wasn’t.