Attorney Alan Dershowitz is suing CNN for $300 million, alleging it slandered and libeled him through its editing of a comment he made to the Senate while defending President Donald Trump during his impeachment trial, saying the revision made it falsely appear he “had lost his mind.”
“What CNN did here, and it pains me to say this because … I have friends over there, what they did is they just totally doctored the tape,” Dershowitz told Fox News host Sean Hannity late Tuesday.
“If they had just shown the part where I said ‘if he does anything illegal he can be impeached,’ ” he continued. “But they doctored the tape to take that out.”
“I’m doing this to hold them accountable,” he later added. “They made a deliberate, willful decision, we believe from the very top, to purposely doctor the tape to make it look like I said something that was crazy, that a president can do anything, that he can commit crimes. Of course I never said that — I don’t believe it. I spent an hour in front of the Senate two days earlier saying if the president commits a crime, he can be impeached and that was a whole thesis of my presentation.
“CNN knew that and they doctored the tape and edited the tape to make me say exactly the opposite. Shame on them,” Dershowitz concluded. “They’re going to have to pay and some good charities are going to benefit from CNN’s willful deliberate malicious effort to destroy my credibility as a constitutional scholar.”
“CNN wouldn’t have me on the air because they want a one-sided presentation, and everybody who watches CNN was shocked by the conclusions. No one who watches me was shocked,” he added at the time.
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