‘Bogus Legal Arguments’ By Donald Trump’s Impeachment Lawyers Must Not Be Allowed, Laurence Tribe Declares
In a seven-page brief released over the weekend, impeachment lawyers for Donald Trump revealed their legal strategy for mounting a defense in the Senate impeachment trial, which gets underway on Tuesday. But a leading Constitutional scholar, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, warned in a Washington Post op-ed column on Sunday that Trump’s lawyers are simply attempting to mislead the public with bogus arguments that should not be permitted.
One of Trump’s lawyers, Tribe’s retired Harvard Law School colleague Alan Dershowitz, revealed in an interview that he plans to argue that Trump may have indeed abused the power of his office, as Democrats charge in their articles of impeachment. But “abuse of power,” Dershowitz claims, is not an impeachable offense.
In their seven-page defense of Trump, posted on the White House site, Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone attempt to make the case that because the House articles do not not specifically allege that Trump committed a federal crime, the impeachment articles have no basis and should be thrown out.
“Both of these arguments are baseless,” Tribe wrote in his op-ed on Sunday.
Tribe wrote that the Trump lawyers are not the first to claim that only actual federal crimes are impeachable, but that the argument “has died a thousand deaths in the writings of all the experts.”
In fact, Tribe points out, when the framers of the Constitution wrote the impeachment clause about 233 years ago, there was no such thing as a federal crime, because the federal criminal code had not yet been created.
As for Dershowitz’s claim that “abuse of power” does not qualify as an impeachable offense, Tribe called the argument particularly strange, and noted that no serious constitutional scholar has ever agreed with it.
One of the primary authors of the impeachment provisions of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton, wrote in The Federalist Papers that “abuse or violation of some public trust” was the very definition of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” listed in the Constitution as impeachable offenses.
Dershowitz has also claimed that in the presidential impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868, lawyers for the 17th U.S. president won his acquittal by arguing that “abuse of power” was not impeachable. But Tribe also calls that claim “false.”
The Constitutional scholar noted that a majority of senators voted to convict Johnson. He was acquitted by the vote of a single senator, who is widely believed to have taken a bribe in exchange for his vote to keep Johnson in office.
In any case, Tribe notes, Johnson’s lawyers actually made the argument that he did not, in fact, abuse the power of the presidency — not that he did, but should not have been impeached for it, as Dershowitz claimed.
Trump, Tribe wrote in his op-ed, is entitled to robust legal representation. But his lawyers should not be allowed to use bogus legal arguments to mislead the American public.
