After disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn walked back his comments defending his lying to FBI investigators and threw himself at the mercy of the court for sentencing, Twitter users piled on legal scholar Alan Dershowitz who insisted that lying to federal investigators isn't a crime.
Dershowitz, who has fashioned himself into an available cable news commenter always willing to defend President Donald Trump, has been on the pro-Flynn bandwagon for weeks now, cobbling together an argument that the FBI acted improperly.
In a recent column posted at The Hill 24-hours before Flynn faced the judge, Dershowitz wrote, "The media is asking the wrong question about the Michael Flynn case. They are asking whether Flynn lied or the FBI acted improperly, as if the answers to those two questions are mutually exclusive. The possibility that both are true, in that Flynn did not tell the truth and that the FBI acted improperly, is not considered in our hyper partisan world where everyone, including the media, chooses a side and refuses to consider the chance that their side is not perfectly right and the other side not perfectly evil."
According to the former Harvard law professor, "The FBI knew the truth. They had recordings of the conversations. Then why did they ask him whether he had those conversations? Obviously, not to learn whether he had them but, rather, to give him the opportunity to lie to federal agents so that they could squeeze him to provide damaging information against President Trump. "
With Flynn accepting that it was not a "perjury trap" in court Thursday morning, and conceding he committed a felony, followers of the case and non-admirers of Dershowitz's contrarian opinions were quick to pile on the attorney.
"Sounds like the interactions between Judge Sullivan, Michael Flynn, and his lawyer amount to a step-by-step demolition of the Hannity/Strassel/Dershowitz talking points," Media Matters' Matthew Gertz summed up.
You can see more Dershowitz bashing below:
Dershowitz, for his part was not going down without a fight:
