Rep. Adam Schiff insinuated that President Trump could sell Alaska to the Russians in exchange for electoral support if acquitted in his Senate impeachment trial for abuse of power.
While delivering his concluding remarks in the trial on Monday, Schiff, 59, lambasted the president’s legal team for asserting that abuse of power does not fall under “high crimes or misdemeanors.” Schiff argued that if such a defense holds, then Trump could commit a variety of corrupt acts without consequence.
“If abuse of power is not impeachable … Trump could offer Alaska to the Russians in exchange for support in the next election or decide to move to Mar-a-Lago permanently and let Jared Kushner run the country, delegating to him the decision whether to go to war,” the California Democrat said on the Senate floor.
“Because those things are not necessarily criminal, this argument would allow that he could not be impeached for such abuses of power. Of course, this would be absurd. More than absurd, it would be dangerous,” he affirmed.
Alan Derschowitz, a Harvard law professor on Trump’s impeachment defense team, argued that the articles of impeachment levied against the president do not fall under the Constitution’s criteria of high crimes and misdemeanors. Derschowitz claimed that the House’s abuse of power and obstruction of Congress articles are so broad that they would have led to the impeachment of many presidents, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
“Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest, and mostly, you’re right. Your election is in the public interest,” Dershowitz said. “And if a president did something that he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”
Schiff said on Monday that such an argument is “unsupported by history, the founders, or common sense.”
