Harvard Professor Slams Alan Dershowitz For Wrongly Citing His Work In Impeachment Trial, Says ‘It’s A Joke’
A Harvard University professor whose work was cited frequently by Alan Dershowitz during Donald Trump’s impeachment trial is pushing back, saying his views on presidential abuse of power are being twisted.
In defending Trump, Dershowitz claimed that Harvard professor Nikolas Bowie had made a case that abuse of power by a president would not warrant impeachment. But Bowie fired back in an opinion column for The New York Times, saying that the lawyer had confused the idea of intentionally committing such abuses with “maladministration,” a concept that does not necessarily carry nefarious intent.
He said it was a “joke” that Dershowitz was conflating the two in incorrectly citing his work.
“Maladministration is just an 18th-century term for doing a bad thing at your job, for not filing papers correctly,” Bowie said. “But to equate that with criminal corruption, that’s a joke.”
Dershowitz, a controversial addition to Trump’s legal team due to his past defenses of notorious figures including O.J. Simpson and Jeffrey Epstein, has continued to make controversial arguments calling on senators to acquit Trump. On Wednesday, he said that any quid pro quo with a foreign leader that the president undertook in order to help his chances of re-election — if believed to be in the best interests of the United States — would not constitute an impeachable offense.
That was attacked by many legal scholars, many of whom expressed fear that under Dershowitz’s argument, a president could have almost total and unchecked power.
“What is scary about Trump’s view of executive power is that he tries to do as much as he can without the sanction of Congress, and to resist oversight by the other branches,” Peter Shane, an Ohio State University law professor and co-author of a casebook on the separation of powers, told The New York Times. “Put all that together and you get a picture of an executive branch in which all activity is subject to the whim of the president, and how that whim is exercised cannot be effectively checked.”
Dershowitz said his arguments were misinterpreted, taking to Twitter to say that the media was purposely twisting his remarks. The Harvard professor added that he was not trying to say that a president could do anything they wanted toward the goal of being re-elected.
“Let me be clear once again (as I was in the senate): a president seeking re-election cannot do anything he wants. He is not above the law. He cannot commit crimes. He cannot commit impeachable conduct,” Dershowitz wrote.
