‘Absurdist’ Alan Dershowitz Defense Of Donald Trump Ripped By Adam Schiff As Impeachment Managers Submit Case
After lawyer Alan Dershowitz described what he said will be his arguments to defend Donald Trump in Trump’s upcoming impeachment trial, California House Representative Adam Schiff slammed Dershowitz’s defense as “absurdist,” according to an account by The Hill. Schiff leads the team of impeachment “managers,” the House reps picked by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to present the impeachment case against Trump to the Senate.
Dershowitz, in an ABC News interview this week, said that when he takes the floor in the impeachment trial, he will assert that even if the allegations against Trump — that he illegally withheld military aid to Ukraine in exchange for personal, political favors — are true, “abuse of power” is not an offense for which a president can be impeached.
“You had to go so far out of the mainstream to find someone to make that argument,” Schiff said in an interview Sunday, as quoted by The Hill.
“The logic of that absurdist position that’s being now adopted by the president is he could give away the state of Alaska.”
While the United States Constitution does not mention “abuse of power” as an impeachable offense, Congress has generally considered it to be covered by the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” that are cited as reasons for impeachment by the Constitution. “Abuse of power” was included in the articles of impeachment against both President Richard Nixon in 1974, and Bill Clinton in 1998.
Trump submitted his own defense against the impeachment case, in a seven-page document which he will send to the Senate on Monday but which is already posted on the official WhiteHouse.gov site.
In his defense document, Trump claims that the impeachment case is “a dangerous attack on the right of the American people to freely choose their President.”
But in their own summary of the case, submitted on Saturday and posted online by the House Intelligence Committee, the impeachment managers say that Trump must be impeached “to safeguard the 2020 U.S. election,” because Trump attempted to illegally influence the outcome of that election by pressuring Ukraine for assistance.
The House managers also say in their own 61-page brief that Trump himself presents a “threat” to America’s National security and that his removal is necessary to “protect our constitutional form of government.”
In his interview on Sunday, Schiff noted that Trump, in his own seven-page defense, does not deny the facts of the case against him.
“The facts aren’t seriously contested,” he said, adding that the only new element of Trump’s defense is that rather than denying the abuse of power allegations over the pressure campaign against Ukraine, Trump now attempts to claim that — as Dershowitz argues — “the president cannot be impeached for abusing the power of his office.”
