U.S. Senator Doug Jones of Alabama Reacts to the Dershowitz Argument –

Dershowitz tells Senate ‘abuse of power’ is not an impeachable defense: Google

By Glynn Wilson –

In a press conference call with reporters on Thursday morning before the U.S. Senate was to go back into session to continue the impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump, Senator Doug Jones of Alabama hinted that the odds are diminishing of getting a vote to allow witnesses and documents, and indicated that a vote may be coming up sooner than he would like.

Some news organizations are still reporting that if a vote fails to allow witnesses and documents, which would only require four Republicans to join Democrats to get a simple majority of 51 votes or three Republican votes with a tie breaker from Chief Justice John Roberts, then a party line vote to acquit this president could come as early as this Friday.

When I indicated the other senator from Alabama, Richard Shelby of Tuscaloosa, asked a question on Wednesday and asked if he would have a question for Chief Justice Roberts to read on Thursday, Senator Jones said he would most likely have a question in the queue for Thursday afternoon or evening. This could give supporters and detractors an indication of what he’s thinking about and how he might vote, since he has remained steadfast in saying he will follow his oath to do impartial justice and not decide until the end.

Shelby, one of the longest serving Republicans in the Senate, has also refused to answer questions about how he might vote, although he indicated in an interview on ABC News that he doesn’t believe Trump’s conduct “rises to the standard of an impeachable offense.” But, he added, “I still think we should wait and see what comes out in the trial itself.”

In his question on Wednesday for the defense counsel for the president, Shelby asked: “How does the noncriminal abuse of power standard advanced by House managers differ from maladministration, an impeachment standard rejected by the framers? Where is the line between abuse of power and a policy disagreement?”

So Shelby is at least considering the Constitutional arguments and waiting to make up his mind, not making this a foregone conclusion like many players in the process and the news media covering it.

Most Important Takeaway

But the most important take away from where Senator Jones stands on Thursday is his reaction to my question on what he thinks of the controversial argument put forward on Wednesday by Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, which is drawing criticism from all across the political spectrum this week since it seems to say that this president is above the law.

“I have really been disappointed in professor Dershowitz’s arguments,” Senator Jones said in the press call. “He seems to be telling everyone that he is right and everybody else is wrong and we should listen to him and no one else. I have not liked those arguments whatsoever.

“He completely lost me,” Jones added, “when he essentially said that we are a divisive country and that you should vote to acquit simply because it might help bring people together. That is somewhat insulting because his client (Trump) has contributed to that divisiveness probably more so than anyone. And second of all, he’s essentially saying don’t follow your oath. Just do this and let’s get this over with. I don’t think that was appropriate.”

Within minutes after the conference call, Senator Jones put out a video on Twitter expanding further on his thoughts on Dershowitz.

“I think professor Dershowitz really blew it,” he says. “His lecturing about how right he was and how wrong everybody else was is a little bit insulting to the entire academic community, not to mention the Senate of the United States. One would think the we would just go ahead and disband the Supreme Court and appoint him as the supreme justice of the court because he’s always right.

“Quite frankly I was especially concerned when he talked about the divisiveness in this country and that we should just go ahead and vote to acquit because everyone knows the president is going to get acquitted in this and we should just do that to try to bring everybody together,” Jones added. “So what he was saying, this constitutional scholar, was essentially saying violate your oath because we are a divided country that has been stoked in large measure mostly by his client over the last few years. Just ignore your oath to do impartial justice and let’s just get this over with. I found that rather insulting.”

The other thing he found troubling was the president’s counsel “essentially confirming what the president said in a press conference at some point that under Article 11, I can do anything I want. They said that with regard to campaign finance. With interference with a foreign country,” Jones said. “That was something of a stunning statement from them and very, very troubling as a lot of commentators are talking about today.”

For background, Dershowitz has represented many high profile clients over the years, including Jeffry Epstein, O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, Jim Bakker, Patty Hearst and Leona Helmsley.

Many questions in the Senate on Wednesday were about allowing witnesses and documents.

“I am still on the side that we need to hear from witnesses, we need to see documents,” Jones said. “We need to test the credibility of witnesses. We need to be able to give the American public a fair trial. What I’m talking about is not just fair but complete. Going into the 2020 election, they deserve to have these facts.”

Senator Jones got the most animated in the video talking about the defense team’s tactics of threatening to drag out the trial if witnesses are allowed, calling it “bullying.”

“It’s just not helpful,” he said. “Because they are saying, again, don’t do your job Senate. Don’t follow your oath Senate. Don’t do impartial justice because if you do that, we’re going to drag this process out for weeks and months.

“I don’t believe that is the case. I think we can do these things relatively quickly if everybody put their mind to it,” he said. “I don’t think they want to do that. I think they want to do something very quickly before the Super Bowl, before the State of the Union, so that we have this thing over with. That is incredibly unfortunate. I think that does a terrible disservice, not just to the American public as a whole, but to the president’s supporters who also deserve to know what was going on. This is too serious, too important, to let time somehow get in the way of this.”

More Responses to Dershowitz

Shortly after Dershowitz made his dismissive case, including the argument that what Trump is accused of doing is not even a crime citing another Harvard Law scholar, that scholar, Nikolas Bowie, penned an op-ed for the New York Times challenging the interpretation of his scholarship by Dershowitz.

My friend and attorney Scott Horton, who also knows Dershowitz and has faced him in court, shared the column on his Facebook page with this comment.

“A lot of what Alan Dershowitz argued is the sheerest buffoonery,” Horton said. “Let’s start with the fact that abuse of power is the original offense for which officials of the Crown were impeached in the proceedings before Parliament in the seventeenth century. And far from ‘not being a crime,’ it was deemed a capital offense for which beheading was the normal remedy.

“Ask the Earl of Strafford, who was beheaded in 1641,” Horton says. “Those were the precedents known to the Founding Fathers when they shaped the Constitution. ‘Not a crime’? Time to get serious. And let one of Dershowitz’s Harvard colleagues set him straight.”

So he did.

“Even if you think impeachment requires a crime, as I do, that belief hardly supports the president’s defense or Mr. Dershowitz’s position,” Bowie said. “President Trump has been accused of a crime. Two in fact: ‘abuse of power’ and ‘obstruction of Congress’.”

Op-Ed.

In the straight reporting on the action in the impeachment trial, the Times called Dershowitz “the celebrity defense lawyer” and reported on his argument claiming a president cannot be removed from office for demanding political favors — if he believes his re-election is in the national interest.

“Every public official I know believes that his election is in the public interest,” Dershowitz claimed. “Mostly, you’re right.”

“If the president does something which he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” he said.

House prosecutor Adam B. Schiff of California, the lead House impeachment manager, called Dershowitz’s argument “very odd.”

House Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York came out Thursday and harshly criticized Dershowitz for advancing an argument that he called “a load of nonsense.”

“By Dershowitz’s logic, President Nixon did nothing wrong in Watergate. He was just breaking into the [Democratic National Committee] to help his reelection, which of course in the public interest, according to Dershowitzian logic.

“The Dershowitz argument frankly would unleash a monster, more aptly it would unleash a monarch,” Schumer added.

In an article in the New Yorker that came out Wednesday evening, the headline was:

Alan Dershowitz for the Defense: L’État, C’est Trump

That’s a French phrase that means, “the state, it is I.”

In other words, “I myself am the nation.”

That’s how Trump treats this, even prompting his followers in football stadiums to chant at him, not “Trump, Trump, Trump,” but “USA, USA, USA.”

He is the divine emperor like in Roman times, the god king and authoritarian dictator who is above the law.

Is that really what Trump’s followers want? I thought conservatives were for small government power?

Other Responses

“Sometimes things that sound like they are not right are just not right. What we know is that the Framers intended impeachment to be a protection against the abuse of public office, public trust, for private benefit,” Joshua Geltzer, founding executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, said on CNN. “They made no distinction between private benefit in the form of personal re-election campaign versus private benefit in the form of a check in one’s bank account. Here in Washington it’s hard to say which some people value more. The president here is alleged to have done this for private benefit — his own re-election. That’s in the realm of impeachable offenses.”

Andrew Weissmann, former prosecutor on the Robert Mueller team and a senior fellow at NYU Law School’s Center on the Administration of Criminal Law, called the argument “really interesting” in an appearance on MSNBC.

“Because this issue that the personal is the political and the political is the personal — that the president is the state — is embodied in the presidential team that is arguing this. It is one thing to have Dershowitz and private counsel make these arguments — because that’s what they do,” Weissmann said. “That’s what private counsel is supposed to do. It is shocking — as somebody who’s been in the Department of Justice for years — to see people who are paid by the public, these are public officers, arguing not just on behalf of the White House, and the White House’s interest, that would be fine, but to be making arguments that are so flatly contradicted by the law that no responsible public servant would be making that. That’s because there is absolutely no daylight between White House counsel and private counsel.”

Neal Katyal, a former acting U.S. solicitor general in the Obama administration, called it an “inane” argument on Twitter.

“The president could threaten people (including with our army) unless they voted for him? Could order a breakin of DNC headquarters? I’m not sure even Kings had such powers.”

Frank Bowman, impeachment scholar at University of Missouri School of Law, said in the the Washington Post that Dershowitz was all alone in the academic community in making this argument.

“What Dershowitz did yesterday was stand up and be a guy with Harvard attached to his name and spout complete nonsense that’s totally unsupported by any scholarship, anywhere.”