Trump Lawyer Alan Dershowitz Makes Wacky Claim That Presidents Can Do Anything to Get Elected
The impeachment trial of Donald Trump moved into a question-and-answer session in front of the Senate on Wednesday. One of the men Trump chose to represent him, Alan Dershowitz, a lawyer with multiple ties to underage-sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, made one of the most outlandish and fraught claims yet about the president's executive power.
In December 2019, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump for his efforts to coerce political favors from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. The president was holding nearly $400 million in military funding to push Zelensky to publicly announce that he was opening an investigation into Joe Biden and his son's business dealings in Ukraine, an issue that Trump reportedly believed would help him in a general election against the former vice president, should he secure the nomination. And because Trump believed that, Dershowitz told the Senate, he cannot be impeached.
"Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest. If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment," he said.
That argument from Dershowitz, a man who taught at Harvard Law, would essentially make impeachment nearly impossible in the future, so long as a president could argue that they believed their otherwise impeachable activity was in the public interest. And in this case "public interest" is broadly defined as anything that keeps the president in power. It's all the more curious that he would even be compelled to present such an extreme case since, arguably, he could have made almost any claim and Senate Republicans would still vote to acquit Trump.
Dershowitz's comments were met with widespread criticism. On Thursday morning, former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal told MSNBC, "You can't acquit [Trump] on the basis of the facts because the factual record is against the president and the president hasn't even bothered introducing any facts into his defense. So I think the only way you could read an acquittal tomorrow is on the basis of the Dershowitz argument, which would be, I think, one of the most destructive precedents to have existed in our nation's history."
However, Dershowitz took great offense to the word-for-word presentation of his quotes. He tweeted on Thursday that, "They characterized my argument as if I had said that if a president believes that his re-election was in the national interest, he can do anything. I said nothing like that, as anyone who actually heard what I said can attest."
Wednesday's hearing wouldn't be the first time that Dershowitz has claimed that a president has the infallibility of a king. In November, he told Laura Ingraham on Fox News, "Of course the president's not the king. The president is far more powerful than the king. The president has the power that kings have never had, it's a very, very powerful office. And the framers wanted it that way, that's why they required for impeachment very strict criteria to be met."
Of course, the framers of the constitution disagreed on many things. But according to Smithsonian Magazine, whether or not to refer to the head executive of the United States as "king" was one of the earliest questions the framers considered. Ultimately, the decision to use a different title won out, largely to make clear that the head of the republic shouldn't resemble an all-powerful monarch. At the time, George Washington wrote, "Happily the matter is now done with, I hope never to be revived."
Charging the Secret Service for golf carts, threatening the National Weather Service, and every other way the 45th president has turned the highest office in the land into one crooked cesspool.
Originally Appeared on GQ
