Republicans are trying to impeach Joe Biden for the wrong reason, Dershowitz says: Veteran lawyer and recent Trump defender Alan Dershowitz wrote an op-ed this week about the GOP’s quixotic recent attempts to impeach the president, and why they fall short
Joe Biden in the Hot Seat?
Alan Dershowitz, while he long had a reputation as a liberal lawyer, often defended Donald Trump in the media during his presidency, including during his impeachments, and was even part of Trump’s legal team for a time. Dershowitz’s advocacy, he said at the time, got him shunned by friends in his summer home of Martha’s Vineyard.
Now, there is another effort at impeachment, this time against President Joe Biden. And Dershowitz has written an op-ed in The Hill about it.
Republicans have been trying to impeach Biden since his first full day in office, with members of the right flank in Congress periodically filing impeachment legislation. Recently, two of those members of the House, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), had a confrontation on the House floor, over their rival impeachment resolutions. However, the House Republican leadership has shown little indication that they want any part of pursuing an impeachment inquiry.
In his op-ed, Dershowitz wrote that the impeachment resolutions are “weak and hypocritical.”
“When I defended former President Trump against a Democratic effort to impeach and remove him on grounds that I believe are unconstitutional, I predicted that when the Republicans gained control of the House, they would use that precedent as a justification for trying to impeach the next Democratic president,” Dershowitz wrote and compared those efforts to what the likes of Greene and Boebert are doing today.
When defending Trump, Dershowitz had claimed that what he was accused of, especially in hte first impeachment, did not rise to the level of “criminal-type behavior akin to treason or bribery” that he feels should be required to impeach a president. And now, he says, the GOP in doing the same thing with Biden, which he sees as hypocrisy.
Most of the impeachment efforts, including the recent ones, have centered not on any financial scandal or allegations of serious wrongdoing, but rather his handling of the situation at the border.
However, Dershowitz argues that there may eventually be legitimate grounds to pursue impeachment of the president.
“The irony is that there might actually be constitutionally valid grounds for impeaching President Biden under two possible circumstances,” Dershowitz writes. “1) if it turns out that Biden’s son, Hunter, was actually sitting next to his father and was aware that he invoked the former vice president’s name when he communicated a threat to a Chinese businessman; and 2) if a high crime committed by a former vice president and future president during his interregnum as a private citizen can satisfy the criteria for impeachment. The first is a question of fact; the second is a matter of constitutional interpretation.”
Even then, Dershowitz has caveats.
“I personally doubt that Joe Biden was aware that his son was invoking his name and power when and if he sent that possibly extortionate message,” the attorney says, and furthermore, it would be exceedingly difficult to prove that President Biden did such a thing.
“It is unlikely that this question will be presented in the Biden case, because credible evidence may not exist proving that Biden committed any impeachable offenses between the time he served as vice president and president — or at any other time. But we won’t know that unless the current allegations, which include claims of incriminating recordings, are thoroughly investigated,” he writes.
Dershowitz does not reference the serious but very dodgy allegations that the senior Biden accepted foreign bribes while vice president. If he had, that would likely represent an open-and-shut case for impeachment, but no solid evidence has emerged that he ever did so.
“If Republican House members are determined to impeach Biden, they should focus their investigative resources on specific allegations of serious crimes which, if true, may rise to the level of possibly impeachable offense,” Dershowitz concludes. “It will not do to rely on vague, partisan accusations of misconduct which, even if true, would not satisfy the criteria for impeaching and removing a duly elected president, as they themselves recently argued.”
Expertise and Experience
Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
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