Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz said Saturday that congressional lawmakers are violating the U.S. Constitution in what he described as a “show trial” against former President Donald Trump.
The House impeachment brief (pdf) alleges that Trump incited a mob to breach the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 while lawmakers were convened in a joint session to consider certification of electoral college votes.
Trump’s legal team denies the allegation and argues in a memo (pdf) that the trial is unconstitutional because Trump is no longer president. The team also argues that Trump exercised his First Amendment rights in calling into question the results of the election.
Dershowitz argued that an effective legal defense is based on challenging the constitutionality of the allegations against Trump.
“The best arguments he can make, and he will make, are the constitutional ones, namely the Senate had no jurisdiction over a former president and the speech was covered by the First Amendment,” Dershowitz told Newsmax in an interview.
“Congress has put itself above the law,” Dershowitz added. “They say the president is not above the law; they’re right, but Congress is not above the law, and the law makes specific provisions for when a president can be impeached and you can’t impeach a president in violation of the First Amendment.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s account on the social media website Gab was active this week, in what appeared to be his first post since leaving the White House last month.
The account posted a copy of the letter Trump’s lawyers wrote to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the House of Representatives’ lead impeachment manager.
In the letter, they rejected his attempt to get Trump to testify in the upcoming impeachment trial.
Dershowitz, in his remarks to Newsmax, opined that Trump made the right call in refusing to testify.
“The president made the right decision. You don’t walk into a perjury trap when you have people you know are going to be hostile to you,” Dershowitz said.
He said Thursday that the House impeachment brief against former President Donald Trump, which seeks to undermine Trump’s First Amendment-based argument in his defense, amounts to a dangerous broadside against the freedom of speech of all Americans.
Writing in an earlier op-ed for The Hill, Dershowitz made a case against a key argument contained in the impeachment brief, namely that “the First Amendment does not apply at all to impeachment proceedings,” which the legal scholar said signals Congressional willingness to take aim at the freedom of speech more broadly.
“The brief filed by the House managers advocating the conviction and disqualification of citizen Donald Trump contains a frontal attack on freedom of speech for all Americans,” Dershowitz wrote.
Trump adviser Jason Miller echoed the sentiment that the reasoning featured in the impeachment brief is a threat to freedom of speech more broadly, writing in a statement that, “not only will President Trump be on trial next week. The First Amendment will be on trial next week because the Democrats aren’t going to stop with attacking President Trump, they want to go after the free speech and the rights of all Americans.”
Democrats face an uphill battle in the Senate in their pursuit of an impeachment conviction against Trump. Forty-five Republican senators voted in favor of a resolution calling the trial unconstitutional since Trump is now a private citizen. With the Senate split 50–50, the impeachment managers would have to convince 17 Republicans that the trial is constitutional and that Trump is guilty of inciting an insurrection.
Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
From The Epoch Times
