Famed lawyer Alan Dershowitz blasts Jack Smith, urges DOJ to rein in spying on phones

Famed Harvard University Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz says he believes ex-prosecutor Jack Smith trampled civil liberties during his pursuit of President Donald Trump by tracking the calls of Congress, defense lawyers and campaign aides, and he urged the Justice Department to impose new rules to rein in such phone surveillance.

“What we need are Justice Department rules that are enforceable, that indicate when you can do what investigative tasks,” Dershowitz told Just the News. “You can't leave it only up to the Constitution and the courts because something can be constitutional and still very very dangerous for civil liberties, like tracking people's phone calls, like tracking the children's phone calls, the wife's phone calls. All of that's extremely dangerous.

“This is a grave danger, and I would hope there'd be some congressional hearings … about what the Justice Department rules should be for when you can do this kind of surveillance of people's phone calls. Right now, it's just up to the Jack Smiths of the world, and we know from experience now that's not a good enough protection,” he added.

Dershowitz was reacting to recently released documents showing that Smith’s team obtained the long-distance phone records and text messages of members of Congress and tracked at least 21 defense lawyers’ calls to and from the phone of Trump‘s top advisor, Susie Wiles, while Smith was pursuing two separate criminal cases against the president.

Republicans and some legal experts described the taxes as excessive and intrusive, but Smith defended his conduct during a recent Senate hearing and said he would do it all over again if given the chance.

Dershowitz said the use of a pen register device to track the phone calls between defense lawyers and Wiles was deeply concerning and “a clear violation of expectations of privacy.”

“When you make a phone call, and you're a lawyer, you do not expect the fact that you made that phone call to say a wiretap expert or a lie detector expert, or a witness. You don't expect that the government will get access to that,” he said. “And yet the government has access to who the defense attorneys called, and that would give them a tremendous advantage in any case. It could give them the names of potential witnesses.”

Dershowitz said Smith could face civil lawsuits or actions against his bar license for the aggressive tactics he used to pursue Trump.

“In retrospect, it's clear that he had it in for Trump, and he was part of the Get Trump crowd along with Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York, (Manhattan District Attorney) Alvin Bragg, and others. They were out to get Trump, but they used mechanisms and techniques that can be used against anybody,” the famed legal scholar said.

“So if he's allowed to get away with this, then he is a dime a dozen, and then none of our civil liberties are protected,” he added.

A lifelong Democrat, Dershowitz also said he is now rooting for Republicans to win the 2026 election after leaving his old party, saying Democrats have become too extreme by indulging in antisemitism and anti-Americanism.

"The Democrat Party has become an extremist, radical, anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish party and anti-Israel party,"  he said. "And I think a lot of Americans, regardless of their religious faith, say this is not the party for me. This is not our grandfather's Democratic Party. This is not our grandmother's Democratic Party. This is El Sayed's Democratic Party. This is Mamdani's political party, and we don't identify with those radical anti-American extremists."