Alan Dershowitz: Shunned for defending the 'Constitution on behalf of a president I didn't vote for'

Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz said "sticking to principle refusing to become a partisan" has cost him and his family "tremendously," reflecting the divided state of America.

People in tony Martha's Vineyard "essentially won't talk to me," Dershowitz told "Just the News, Not Noise" on Thusday as he discussed his upcoming book, "The Price of Principle: Why Integrity is Worth the Consequences."

Dershowitz said he has a friend who hosts an annual concert that he attended every year. "This year, he didn't invite me," recounted the constitutional law scholar, a member of former President Trump's legal team during his first impeachment trial.

"He said, 'I would have loved to invite you,'" Dershowitz recalled. "'But if you were to come, a lot of the people would have left, and the concert would have been empty.' 

"That's the reaction I get for sticking to principle. The idea that I would defend the Constitution on behalf of a president who I didn't vote for has created a situation where people have attacked me and my family. And it reflects what's going on in the United States today. We're so divided."

In another example, Dershowitz was invited to the White House for the signing of the Abraham Accords and he sat behind his former student, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whom he patted on the back.

People on the left attacked him for being there. 

"'Oh, my God, you patted Pompeo on the back!'" he paraphrased the indignant response. "'You're disgusting. You're beneath contempt.'" 

"Larry David screamed at me," he recalled. "How could I ever ever pat on the back somebody as terrible as Mike Pompeo who was my former student? And obviously, I'm going to congratulate him for bringing about one of the great peace efforts in the Middle East's history, but that's the world we live in today, and that's the book I've written." 

Dershowitz criticized the Jan. 6 committee for calling in former junior Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson as a witness. Her hearsay congressional testimony is "the first time this has happened in my lifetime since McCarthyism, and it's despicable," he said.

"It's not only unethical," he continued. "It's not only unfair. It's bad lawyering. Because if it turns out that the evidence doesn't get corroborated, these lawyers will look like idiots or partisan zealots." 

Recalling that he taught Jan. 6 committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) at Harvard, Dershowitz said the lawmaker "must have missed my class on the hearsay rule."

Raskin acknowledged last week that Hutchinson's testimony was hearsay. "Oh, sure," he said, adding, "We're not in a court of law, and we're not charging anybody with any particular offense."