Alan Dershowitz said the discussion of whether Judge Brett Kavanaugh is "innocent or guilty" of sexual assault reminds him of what it was like when people were accused of being communists, they had to prove that they weren't one. Dershowitz named the ACLU as one of the organizations presuming guilt.



Dershowitz said he opposes the confirmation of Kavanaugh based on his judicial temperament but said the opposition of others, including the 700 law professors who signed a letter, is political.



"Well, can you imagine if this were a liberal who had been appointed by a liberal President who had been accused and would act similarly, I don't think a single one of those professors would have signed that letter," Dershowitz said on Tucker Carlson Tonight.











"They all fail the shoe on the other foot test," he said. "Senator Booker, who I like and know, is just dead wrong. This is all about partisanship. If the opposite was happening, and if it was the Democrats who were putting up candidate, everybody would behave in the opposite way. And so it is partisanship and I think the framers of our Constitution never intended the confirmation process to look anything like this."





TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS HOST: That was Senator Spartacus in New Jersey saying, as you just heard, it doesn't really matter if Brett Kavanaugh is innocent or if he's guilty. Democrats have spent so long attacking him without tangible evidence that really it's his obligation to just submit and let his career and reputation and family be destroyed for the good of the country. It's a moral question.



Alan Dershowitz is a retired Harvard Law professor. He's the author of the best-selling The Case Against Impeaching Trump. He is a reality check on first principles and he joins us tonight. Do you think, Professor, that that's a fine standard? It doesn't matter whether he's innocent or guilty, he should just submit.



ALAN DERSHOWITZ, PROFESSOR EMERITUS, HARVARD LAW SCHOOL: Well, it sounds very familiar. When I was in college, that's what they said about people who are accused of being communists.



CARLSON: Yes.



DERSHOWITZ: It doesn't matter if he or her is guilty. If somebody is accusing of you being a communist and you angrily responded and said you're not, then you don't have the temperament to have the job, and it's just a job interview if you're getting fired for being a Professor after 40 years, and what's the difference if you're innocent or guilty.



Somebody has said you're a communist. This goes all the way back to the inquisition, when they would call you in first and make you testify and then they present the evidence.



Look, once you're accused the most heinous crime imaginable, it turns into a trial, where you have due process.



CARLSON: Yes.



DERSHOWITZ: Where the burden of proof is on the other side, where the evidence has to be clear and convincing. In America, we don't allow people to destroy other people's reputations and careers based on an inference of guilt the way the ACLU now says. The ACLU says we should presume guilt, not presume innocent.



CARLSON: After a hundred years of defending due process, that's exactly what they're saying. So you are liberal, you have lived your life in a liberal world, you go to Martha's Vineyard, you know liberals. Do any of them ever say, "Look, I don't agree with Kavanaugh, I hate Trump, but I agree with you that due process is worth preserving." Are there liberals who feel that way?



DERSHOWITZ: I found very, very few of them. For example, today, 700 law professors signed a letter. They asked me to sign that, I refused and I wrote a dissent, saying he now no longer has the judicial temperament.



Well, can you imagine if this were a liberal who had been appointed by a liberal President who had been accused and would act similarly, I don't think a single one of those professors would have signed that letter.



They all fail the shoe on the other foot test. Senator Booker, who I like and know, is just dead wrong. This is all about partisanship. If the opposite was happening, and if it was the Democrats who were putting up candidate, everybody would behave in the opposite way. And so it is partisanship and I think the framers of our Constitution never intended the confirmation process to look anything like this.



CARLSON: I agree and I hope that I would be honest enough to say so. I mean we defended our Al Franken on this show, whom I don't like personally and I hate his politics, but I think he got shafted for the same reason.



DERSHOWITZ: We defended him too.



CARLSON: Yes, he deserves to be defended. You wrote or you were quoted in a recent piece saying that Julie Swetnick's lawyer may have a legal obligation to withdraw her previous statement. What did you mean?



DERSHOWITZ: Yes, I've done some research now on it and there are ethical and bar rules that say that, when you submit an affidavit, even to Congress, and you later learn that there are things in the affidavit that are false, you have a continuing obligation to withdraw the affidavit.



You cannot allow an affidavit to remain on the record.



CARLSON: Right.



DERSHOWITZ: If you have information suggesting it's false, and any reasonable lawyer hearing her on television says you can't any longer accept what's in that affidavit, she has to be investigated independently of the background check, criminally investigated to see if she deliberately and willfully, with or without the aid of anybody else, made a decision just to frame somebody for something that he had nothing to do with.



The evidence seems to suggest they never knew each other, they were years apart, they were operating in different circles. It wouldn't surprise me if an FBI investigation proved they never met each other. And if that turns out to be the fact, she belongs in a court of law, being prosecuted with a presumption of innocence--



CARLSON: Yes.



DERSHOWITZ: --defender (ph). But if the evidence shows that she committed perjury, prison.



CARLSON: Wow.



DERSHOWITZ: You know why, because--



CARLSON: I do know why.



DERSHOWITZ: --it's important to protect people against being raped, but it's so important to protect people against being deliberately and willfully, falsely accused of rape. That is a very, very serious crime and we tend not to pay as much attention to false -- deliberately false. I'm not talking about people make--



CARLSON: Oh I understand.



DERSHOWITZ: (inaudible). But deliberately false frame-ups of rape have to be taken seriously.



CARLSON: And they're not, I happen to know.