House Democrats are abusing congressional power in seeking impeachment of President Donald Trump, famed attorney and Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax TV.
"The framers debated whether to make maladministration the grounds for impeachment – just being a bad president and not having good policies – and they rejected that because James Madison said that would give Congress too much power over the president," Dershowitz told Thursday's "America Talks Live."
Dershowitz pointed to the four constitutional criteria for impeachment, which House Democrats have not yet met in their inquiry against President Donald Trump that recessed Thursday.
"Congress is not above the law," Dershowitz said. "They can't make it up as they go along. They have to find one of those four elements. This is not treason, this is not bribery, it's not a high crime, and it's not a misdemeanor. So, it's not impeachable."
Dershowitz, who voted for former Vice President Joe Biden before and might again if he were to be the Democratic presidential nominee, called the current process impeachment in search of a crime, which just is not there.
"This is not a crime; this is an argument about policy — whether the policy with Ukraine is the right policy or the wrong policy — and you can't criminalize that," he added. "You can't weaponize foreign policy and turn it into a crime without a criminal statute. It's just not there.
"So, I don't even get to the evidence, the presumptions, the inferences, because even if all the evidence is there, I don't see a crime."
What might be there, as revealed in testimony brought by the House Democrats' inquiry, are grounds to vote Trump out of office in 2020, according to Dershowitz.
"There may have been testimony to give people a good reason for voting against Trump, that's their business," he said. "That's why we have elections. But you don't try to remove a duly elected president from office because you disagree with his policies over the Ukraine."
Dershowitz, one of America's most famous defense attorneys, is author of "The Case Against Impeaching Trump," which he said began as "The Case Against Impeaching Clinton," thinking the candidate he voted for — Hillary Clinton — would wrongly be targeted for impeachment like Trump ultimately was.
"If I had written the book 'The Case Against Impeaching Clinton,' if she were the president, they would be building statues to me among liberals on Martha's Vineyard and Cambridge," Dershowitz lamented, rebuking the weaponization of political differences.
"Instead, I'm being vilified, because I'm being called a traitor, because I am a liberal Democrat who believes in the Constitution," he said.
Dershowitz has also been targeted with other allegations, which he vehemently rejects as false, as detailed in his most recent book, "Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo."
On Wednesday, Dershowitz described the impeachment process as Democrats "weaponizing" the process against Trump.
"There's just no crime – it's not a crime to use foreign policy to your political advantage," Dershowitz told "America Talks Live."
"Presidents have been doing that since the beginning of our country, and to make that a crime, Congress would have to legislate, and they wouldn't be able to. They wouldn't be able to craft a statute that would narrowly prohibit the partisan political use of foreign policy," he continued.
"So, what we're seeing is a misuse of the impeachment power, weaponization of the impeachment power, to make political points."
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