Newsmax rewarded Alan Dershowitz’s talking-head work for its TV channel by gifting him with a TV aimed at trying to clear his name after he was accused of being a client of Jeffrey Epstein, for whom he served as an attorney. So it’s more than a bit ironic that one of Newsmax’s chief TV talking heads on the resurgent Epstein scandal is … Dershowitz. One appearance got summarized in a July 15 article:
Redacted or sealed materials in connection with late Wall Street financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein are under the courts’ jurisdiction to release, not Attorney General Pam Bondi or the Department of Justice, Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor emeritus who helped secure a plea deal in 2008 for Epstein, tells Newsmax.
Dershowitz, in an extensive interview Monday with Newsmax’s “The Record With Greta Van Susteren,” also commented that he has “seen the names” of people accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, and that there “are lists of names,” but “there’s nobody currently serving in office” among them, so the controversy over a list is a “nothing-burger.”
“I don’t think you can fault Pam Bondi or the Justice Department,” when it comes to releasing any redacted or sealed materials, Dershowitz told Van Susteren. “They don’t have the authority to release this redacted material or the sealed material. I think — I can’t know this for sure — that they’ve released everything that they are able to release.”
It was not mentioned that Dershowitz made that 2008 plea deal for Epstein with then-U.S. attorney Alex Acosta, who is now on Newsmax’s board of directors. Dershowitz continued to sound like he was working for Epstein:
Epstein, he added, “had a life way before he was ever charged with any crime.”
“My wife and I went to his home for several events where he had some of the world’s greatest scientists,” said Dershowitz. “He had astronauts who had just come back from outer space. And so, of course, he attracted very, very prominent people. None of them knew he was doing anything wrong. It’s when he was first arrested for doing something wrong that everybody terminated their relationship with him.”
But, he said, “as they say in the movies, move on. There’s nothing to see here. I think almost everything that has to be released has been released.”
Dershowitz pushed more Epstein defense in a July 16 appearance:
There “never has been” a client list created by late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, one of Epstein’s former lawyers, in an interview on Newsmax on Wednesday.
“Jeffrey Epstein never made a list or created a black book, or anything, of any people who may have had improper sex with any of the young women,” Dershowitz told Newsmax’s “Wake Up America.” “What did happen is the FBI interviewed people, and the courts’ judges redacted the names of some of the people from the FBI files and from other material that was presented to the court.”
He added that he knows who the people are in the files, and said that even though their names are redacted, he could figure out who the people were from context clues.
“None of them are current public officials or elected officials or current prominent people,” said Dershowitz. “Some are dead, some are retired, but there are no smoking guns.”
[…]He also doubled down on rejecting claims that Epstein was in Israel’s Mossad.
“The first person he would have told was me as his lawyer, because we could have used that to get him a better deal,” said Dershowitz. “Second, I’ve confirmed it with Israeli intelligence… I can tell you with 100% assurance that [conservative commentator] Tucker Carlson is dead wrong.”
In a July 18 appearance, Dershowitz insisted that “There’s nothing incriminating about Donald Trump, nothing incriminating about Bill Clinton, nothing incriminating about me, nothing incriminating about other people.” In another appearance that day, he declared that “he has seen no credible evidence that the late financier and convicted sex offender trafficked ‘women or young women’ to other people.”
Dershowitz went to bat for Epstein gal-pal Ghislaine Maxwell in a July 20 appearance:
Ghislaine Maxwell, the one-time girlfriend and associate of late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, should have her prison sentence of 20 years commuted and be called to testify to Congress about what she knows, Alan Dershowitz, a former Epstein attorney, told Newsmax on Sunday.
“I don’t know of any abusers other than Jeffrey Epstein and the people surrounding him,” Dershowitz said on “Sunday Agenda.” “I don’t know whether any of these people were trafficked to other people. The people all deny it, and there’s no evidence of that.”
But Maxwell “knows everything,” he added. “Ghislaine Maxwell is basically serving the sentence that Epstein would have gotten,” said Dershowitz. “She should never be in jail for 20 years. What should happen is that she should be freed. She should have her sentence commuted. She should then be called in front of Congress, have Congress give her total immunity, and then she can tell everything.”
The next day, Dershowitz whined about a Wall Street Journal story on Epstein:
Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax on Monday that The Wall Street Journal contacted him regarding a letter he allegedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein as part of a package of letters gathered to celebrate the convicted sex offender’s 50th birthday in 2003.
The Journal alleged Thursday that President Donald Trump provided a salacious letter as part of the package gathered for Epstein’s birthday by socialite Ghislaine Maxwell from various Epstein associates. Trump denied having written such a letter, yet the Journal published the story, prompting Trump to file a $10 billion defamation lawsuit.
Dershowitz told “The Record With Greta Van Susteren” that he cannot remember whether he provided something to the birthday package. He said the Journal refused to show him a copy so he could verify the signature was his.
[…]“None of us knew at this point that Epstein was doing anything wrong. It was years before he was arrested, so I’m not embarrassed about having sent him a birthday letter, but I just don’t know if I did or not. And I’d like to know.
“My wife says she doesn’t think I did because I don’t do things like that, in terms of the cover of a magazine and using that as a way of saying something else. She just said, it doesn’t sound familiar. It doesn’t sound familiar to me either, but I’m not going to deny it. I want to see the evidence.”
Newsmax has reached out to Dow Jones & Company, Inc., the Journal’s publisher, for comment.
None of these articles disclosed that Newsmax made a pro-Dershowitz documentary. There was also no mention that, the same day on the podcast of ex-Newsmax host Eric Bolling, Dershowitz declared that Epstein “killed himself with the help of jailers. … I don’t think he could have done it by himself.”