Professor Alan Dershowitz was the sole guest on Life, Liberty & Levin on Sunday night. For the first and longest segment of the program, he dismantled the Democrats’ case for impeaching Trump.
Dershowitz echoed a line from Professor Jonathan Turley during one of the hearings last week, suggesting that it is the Democrats in Congress who are abusing power, not the president. He also outlined the Democrats’ ever-changing strategy, which has shifted from abuse of power to bribery and back to Russia.
Dershowitz even goes so far to say that impeaching Trump with what the Democrats have now would be unconstitutional.
Charles Creitz of FOX News provides details:
Alan Dershowitz: Some Democrats channeling Soviet minister’s ‘Show me the man, I’ll show you the crime’ maximSome Democrats pursuing the impeachment of President Trump are trying their hardest to pin an impeachable crime on the commander in chief, according to law professor Alan Dershowitz.In an interview airing Sunday at 8 p.m. ET, Dershowitz tells Mark Levin on “Life, Liberty & Levin” that Trump’s phone call with Ukraine does not rise to the level of bribery as defined in common law.”[I]t can’t operate when you’re the president of the United States and you’re conditioning or withholding money in order to make sure that a country isn’t corrupt and you’re asking them to investigate [something],” he said.”That just doesn’t fit any definition of bribery — common law definition of bribery, statutory definition of bribery — however you define the constitutional word ‘bribery.’ It just doesn’t fit,” he said.
While stressing that he was not comparing the United States to the former Soviet Union, he offered an excellent analogy from the Stalin era:
“What they’re trying to do is what the KGB under Lavrentiy Beria said to Stalin, the dictator — I’m not comparing our country to the Soviet Union — I just want to make sure it never becomes anything like that,” he said.Beria, once the Soviet deputy premier and interior minister, famously would reassure Stalin, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.””And that’s what some of the Democrats are doing,” Dershowitz claimed. “They have Trump in their sights. They want to figure out a way of impeaching him and they’re searching for a crime.”
Here’s a clip:
Here’s a longer video:
Dershowitz has been an outspoken critic of the Democrats’ effort to impeach Trump. Just last week, he wrote this op-ed for FOX News:
Impeachment has deeply divided our nation – Why weren’t legal experts cross examined?Wednesday’s House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing squandered an opportunity to educate the public about the criteria for impeaching a president. Instead of each side cross-examining opposing witnesses, Democrats and Republicans mostly threw softballs at their own witnesses. There were a few momentary exceptions, but for the most part what we heard from four legal scholars were prepared lectures that repeated what the witnesses had previously written.In previous hearings over the years, we have experienced dramatic cross-examination by experienced lawyers that exposed the weaknesses and inconsistencies of witnesses.It has been said that cross-examination, properly conducted, is the greatest engine for testing truth. Without cross-examination, witnesses simply express their rehearsed views without having them challenged by adversarial questions.Had the Democratic experts been effectively cross-examined, they would have had to justify their contention that the governing criteria for impeachment include abuse of office, corruption, violation of public trust, maladministration, bad conduct, placing partisan interests above national ones, and other vague, open-ended criteria of the kind the framers explicitly rejected.
Dershowitz is a Democrat, and defending Trump has come at great expense to him personally. He addresses this in his interview with Levin. If you didn’t see the program, check your listings for the rebroadcast dates. It’s worth watching in full.
Featured image via Twitter video.
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