On Monday night, Donald Trump’s defense team argued that the charges of Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress, presented by the House of Representatives, are not impeachable offenses. They insist that the US President should be cleared of all charges immediately.
Trump is facing trial in the Senate over allegations of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. These allegations stem from his alleged withholding of military aid to Ukraine in exchange for an investigation into his political rival, Joe Biden, during a July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s President Zelensky.
Trump has consistently denied any involvement in a quid pro quo and has portrayed the attempts to impeach him by Democrats as a sustained campaign from the outset of his presidency, starting with the Russia collusion reports and now the Ukraine affair.
Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor and former attorney for O.J. Simpson, appeared as one of Trump’s star lawyers on the second day of the defense presentation. He made a controversial argument that “Abuse of Power” does not constitute an impeachable offense, emphasizing that the Founders of the constitution specifically rejected such vague terms when crafting the Constitution.
Dershowitz, while expressing his personal disapproval of some of the president’s policies and actions, stated that from a legal standpoint, impeachment should be reserved for presidents who commit high crimes and misdemeanors, rather than for instances of obstruction of Congress and abuse of power.
“Nothing in the Bolton revelations, even if true, would rise to the level of an abuse of power or an impeachable offense,” said Dershowitz. He continued, “If a president, any president, were to have done what the [New York] Times reported about the content of the Bolton manuscript, that would not constitute an impeachable offense.” He added, “It is inconceivable that the framers would have intended such a politically loaded and widely used term as abuse of power to be weaponized as a tool of impeachment.”
He also directly addressed the opposing Democratic lawyers, stating, “I’m sorry, house managers, you just picked the wrong criteria. You picked the most dangerous possible criteria to serve as a precedent for how we supervise future presidents.”