Of the myriad possible defenses of President Trump, Alan Dershowitz managed to make one of the worst available.
The rest of Trump’s legal team made the case that Trump wanted Ukraine to initiate investigations into the Bidens’ conduct during the Obama administration and whether the country had interfered with the 2016 election. Because the House refused to wait for witness subpoenas, Democrats haven’t been able to prove that Trump was actually calling for the Biden investigation to influence the 2020 election instead. So the Republican defense is one that defies instinct and was certainly not definitive, but it works. It tries to establish that Trump’s withholding of congressionally approved aid was intended to investigate corruption, however conspiratorial, rather than abuse his power for political gain.
But Dershowitz decided to embark on a bonkers aside, neither defending Trump on the grounds of his intent nor even denying the existence of the quid pro quo.
“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 at the Senate impeachment trial. “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.”
To be clear, in this hypothetical, Dershowitz isn’t even using the legally murky defense that an abuse of power must be criminal to constitute an impeachable offense. Instead, he’s saying that a quid pro quo posited solely to benefit a president’s electoral prospects cannot constitute an abuse of power because that president believes his reelection is best for the nation.
If Dershowitz intends this as anything other than an astoundingly dumb hypothetical, this means he’s conceding that Trump used his presidential power to initiate a quid pro quo with Ukraine with the explicit purpose of bettering his reelection odds. And Dershowitz says this isn’t an abuse of power because in the long run, Trump believes the country benefits from his reelection.
Dershowitz could have said Democrats still haven’t proven Trump had a personal motivation. He could have said it’s unwise to impeach a president in an election year. He could have even deflected about CrowdStrike or whatever whim Trump will muse about next.
Instead, he gave Democrats their next attack ad.
