Alan Dershowitz
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Alan Dershowitz is an American attorney and Harvard Law professor. John Kiriakou says he debated Dershowitz head-to-head on Piers Morgan's show over the Jeffrey Epstein case, an exchange Morgan himself called a "smackdown." Kiriakou told Dershowitz that, had Dershowitz gone to the White House seeking a lighter sentence for Epstein on the grounds that Epstein was spying for a foreign country, Kiriakou would have wanted to see him "hanging from a tree" after being convicted on espionage charges.

Kiriakou's assessment of him

Kiriakou's characterisation of Dershowitz is deliberately two-sided. "On the one hand he's a very kind and generous man," he says; "on the other hand, when it comes to Israel, he's irrational." Pressed on how, he sets out two things: that in Dershowitz's account "there's literally nothing that the Israelis can do that's wrong", and that he will not let an interlocutor finish, "if he thinks that you might possibly criticize Israel, he's going to interrupt you until you just give up and move on." Kiriakou concedes the antagonism is partly his own: "I just can't help myself sometimes when Alan Dershowitz and I are in the same room." He also relays, as a piece of trivia, that Dershowitz named Ted Cruz the most talented law student he ever taught.

David Boies's characterization

Kiriakou cites attorney David Boies, whom he calls one of the greatest criminal defense attorneys in modern American history, stating on a later Piers Morgan appearance that Dershowitz's problem was that he had been far more than just Epstein's lawyer: he was also Epstein's publicist and friend, and had been a guest on Epstein's island, appearing in his underwear alongside a 16-year-old girl. Boies also mocked Dershowitz's continuing claim that he could have gotten Epstein a better deal had Epstein actually been a Mossad agent, noting Epstein, in Kiriakou's telling, was in fact a Mossad asset.

The exchange on Piers Morgan

Kiriakou has described a televised argument with Dershowitz over whether Epstein was working for Israel: "I got into a spirited debate with Alan Dershowitz about this on the Piers Morgan show a few weeks ago, and I thought the man was going to have a stroke when I said that Jeffrey Epstein was most likely working on behalf of the Israelis."

What interests him is the shape of Dershowitz's rebuttal, which he calls "completely backward." Dershowitz's argument was that he had been Epstein's attorney, and that if Epstein had been working for the Israelis he would have told him, and that Dershowitz "would have used that information to get Epstein an even lighter sentence."

Kiriakou's answer treats that as a claim about American law that cannot survive being stated plainly: "wait a minute, professor. If you're saying that you would have gone to the White House to say, my client is committing espionage for the Israeli government, you think that would have gotten him a lighter sentence? I think he would have been hanging from a tree." Pressed, he put it without the figure of speech: "he would have been put in prison for the rest of his life, or put to death." The yardstick he reaches for is Jonathan Pollard.

See also

- Jeffrey Epstein
- Peter Mandelson
- John Kiriakou
