• Alan Dershowitz, one of the attorneys who will defend President Donald Trump in his impeachment trial, set out his core argument in interviews with CNN and ABC News on Sunday.
  • Dershowitz said he would argue that abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, the offenses Trump was charged with, are not actual crimes so can’t be the basis for removing a president from office.
  • “Is it your position that President Trump should not be impeached even if all the evidence and arguments laid out by the House are accepted as fact?” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked. “That’s right,” Dershowitz replied.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

As the US Senate prepares for the third presidential impeachment trial in history, one of the highest-profile and controversial members of President Donald Trump’s legal team laid out the core of the argument he would use to defend the president.

In interviews with CNN and ABC News on Sunday, Alan Dershowitz said he would revive an argument used 151 years ago by the justice who defended Andrew Johnson, the first US president to be impeached.

Dershowitz said that Johnson’s lead counsel, Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis, successfully argued that the framers of the US Constitution intended that only “criminal-like conduct” could be considered legitimate grounds for removing a president from office.

“That argument prevailed,” Dershowitz, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I will be making that argument as a lawyer on behalf of the president’s defense team against impeachment. That’s my role. It’s very clear. I have done it before.”

Trump was charged by the House of Representatives with abuse of power in seeking to pressure Ukraine to launch a corruption investigation into the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, and obstruction of Congress in refusing to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry.

Dershowitz said that neither abuse of power nor obstruction of Congress should be considered criminal - and he spelled out the implications of the argument in an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos.

"Is it your position that President Trump should not be impeached even if all the evidence and arguments laid out by the House are accepted as fact?" Stephanopoulos asked.

"That's right," Dershowitz replied.

"When you have somebody who, for example, is indicted for a crime, let's assume you have a lot of evidence but the grand jury simply indicts for something that's not a crime, and that's what happened here," Dershowitz said, adding, "The vote was to impeach on abuse of power, which is not within the constitutional criteria for impeachment, and obstruction of Congress."

The Constitution says only that a president can be impeached for committing "high crimes and misdemeanors," without specifying the terms.

Critics of Dershowitz's defense said that the crimes the framers had in mind aren't limited to those found in statute books.

donald trump

Foto: President Donald Trump.sourceAssociated Press/Evan Vucci

In an opinion column in The Washington Post on Sunday, Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law and a former colleague of Dershowitz's at Harvard, quoted Alexander Hamilton as writing that high crimes and misdemeanors are "those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust."

"Any number of such violations of the public trust - such as working with foreign governments in ways that make the president beholden to their leaders, or cooperating with those governments to bolster the president's reelection - clearly must be impeachable even though they might violate no criminal law and indeed no federal statute at all," Tribe wrote.

Dershowitz announced his appointment to Trump's legal team in a tweet on Friday, saying he was "participating in this impeachment trial to defend the integrity of the Constitution and to prevent the creation of a dangerous constitutional precedent."

Dershowitz has participated in some of the most notorious trials of recent decades and was part of the legal team that defended OJ Simpson against murder charges in 1995.

Dershowitz's association with Jeffrey Epstein has recently attracted controversy. Along with Kenneth Starr, whose appointment to Trump's legal team was also announced on Friday, Dershowitz helped negotiate a controversial plea deal in 2007 in which Epstein, who was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution, released after only a year.

Starr was also involved in the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, the last president to be impeached.