Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz said Monday that he doesn’t believe President Trump can be impeached for Michael Cohen’s campaign finance law violations.
“I don’t think [Trump]’s in trouble on campaign finance because people forget that a candidate can contribute as much as he or she wants to their own campaign,” Dershowitz told “The Laura Ingraham Show” on Monday. “The only issue in the case is whether or not the hush money, which was legal, was paid properly.”
“Was it done through personal funds, corporate funds, campaign funds?” Dershowitz said. “And we don’t know the answer to that question, so it does not seem to me that is an impeachable offense or an offense that would result in any kind of serious prosecution.”
Cohen was last week sentenced to three years in prison after he pleaded guilty before a federal court in New York to breaking campaign finance laws twice when he brokered deals to keep two women claiming to have had extramarital affairs with Trump silent before the 2016 election. Prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York also brought tax and bank fraud charges against Cohen, to which he also pleaded guilty in August.
Cohen’s three-year sentence, which is expected to start in March, will be served concurrently with a two-month sentence he received for pleading guilty to lying to Congress about a Trump Organization real estate project in Moscow. That last count was brought by special counsel Robert Mueller’s team of prosecutors working on the federal Russia investigation.
Cohen has told prosecutors his efforts to suppress the women’s allegations were undertaken in coordination with and at the direction of “Individual-1,” widely known to be Trump. The allusion to Trump in Cohen’s New York sentencing memo has sparked speculation from the likely next House Judiciary Committee chairman, Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., and senior Fox News legal commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano that the president may face legal exposure for an impeachable offense.
“Whether they are important enough to justify an impeachment is a different question, but certainly they’d be impeachable offenses because even though they were committed before the president became president, they were committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office,” Nadler told CNN this month.
Trump has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
[Michael Cohen: ‘Of course’ Trump knew he was breaking the law]
