Lawyer Alan Dershowitz said convicting former President Donald Trump on an impeachment charge would “raise questions” from the public about the legitimacy of the 2024 presidential election.
The professor emeritus at Harvard Law School who was part of Trump’s legal team the first time he got impeached argued that a Senate impeachment trial of a former president is unconstitutional and destructive to the democratic process.
“In the event former President Trump is convicted and is disqualified, this will raise questions about the legitimacy of the 2024 election,” Dershowitz told Newsmax on Monday.
Dershowitz, who is not representing Trump this time, argued that the public would not support the next presidential election when “a group of Democratic senators with a few Republicans have denied the American public the right to vote for a candidate who they might want to see as president of the United States.”
Trump became the first president to be impeached twice. House Democrats were joined by 10 Republicans in voting to charge Trump on a single count of incitement of an insurrection in connection to the deadly siege at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. The Senate trial is expected to begin next month. A two-thirds vote is needed to convict, after which Trump faces the prospect of being barred from holding federal office again.
Several constitutional scholars, including Dershowitz, and Republicans have cast doubt about holding an impeachment trial for a president who is no longer in office, arguing that the constitutional process of removing a president only applies when he or she remains in office.
“We’re going to see an established precedent, a bad precedent, that when presidents leave office, they can be impeached,” Dershowitz added. “Are we going to go after President Carter now? President Obama, President Clinton, President Bush? Are we going to use this impeachment to prevent future people running for office? It’s not what the framers intended.”
