Due to the unpredictable nature of the ongoing impeachment dilemma, the President’s defense team has had to rethink how to best handle the case. One of the President’s defenders has issued an alarming suggestion on how to best approach the President’s case.
One of the best and undoubtedly the most well-known defense lawyers on President Trump’s well-stacked legal team, Alan Dershowitz, has spent much of his time going over the case. Specifically, Donald Trump, Ukraine, and the abuse of power of which the president has been accused. And Dershowitz has come up with one heck of an idea.
That is that “abuse of power” isn’t actually an impeachable defense.
Dershowitz, who’s serving as legal counsel forPresident Trump‘s defense team in the Senate impeachment trial, told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” that he is following in the footsteps of Justice Benjamin Curtis who defended President Andrew Johnson. He said Curtis had argued that proof of a crime was necessary for a president to be removed from office.“So I am making an argument much like the argument made by the great Justice Curtis,” he said. “And to call them absurdist is to, you know, insult one of the greatest jurists in American history. The argument is a strong one. The Senate should hear it.”
He said the constitutional framers worried about “giving Congress too much power” to weaponize impeachment on a partisan basis, adding that abuse of power is too “open-ended.”
Dershowitz says, “You can’t charge a president with impeachable conduct if it doesn’t fit within the criteria for the Constitution.”
Fellow legal heavyweight Ken Starr has joined forces with Dershowitz on President Trump’s impeachment team. You may recall that Starr was infamous for defending former President Bill Clinton during his own impeachment trial, which resulted in the former Arkansas governor remaining in office until the completion of his term.
