Former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz boasted that he planned to serve as President Trump’s ace in the hole as the White House mounts an impeachment defense.
“I’m the kicker, and I can kick the field goal that wins the game,” Dershowitz said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.
Dershowitz was named Friday as a late addition to the president’s team of lawyers preparing to argue on his behalf during next week’s impeachment trial in the Senate, which is slated to begin on Tuesday. Dershowitz said he would be focused strictly on highlighting before a jury of 100 senators what the White House says is a lack of constitutional criteria meriting Trump’s removal from office.
“In the Constitution, the framers’ debates, the Federalist Papers, and the history of the three prior impeachment cases,” Dershowitz said about his area of focus. “I will be presenting a very strong argument.”
House Democrats pushed through two articles of impeachment late last year, the first for abuse of power and the other for obstruction of Congress. The impeachment centers on Trump’s relations with Ukraine and a July 25, 2019 phone call, during which he pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. An intelligence community whistleblower reported the incident, sparking the House investigation.
Over the weekend, House impeachment managers laid out their case against Trump in a legal briefing.
“The case against the President of the United States is simple, the facts are indisputable, and the evidence is overwhelming,” they said in a joint statement after filing the brief. “President Trump abused the power of his office to solicit foreign interference in our elections for his own personal political gain, thereby jeopardizing our national security, the integrity of our elections, and our democracy.”
The White House legal team also laid out its strategy in a court brief of its own.
“The articles of impeachment submitted by House Democrats are a dangerous attack on the right of the American people to freely choose their president,” Trump’s lawyers said. “This is a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election now just months away.”
Dershowitz has been openly critical of Democrats’ impeachment push since it began last fall. But he has also been critical of Trump in the past and claims to have voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
“It is a common role that lawyers play to be specialized lawyers of counsel on particular constitutional issues,” Dershowitz said of his responsibility on Trump’s legal team. “That is what I will be doing.”
