Liberal law professor Alan Dershowitz was a member of President Donald Trump's legal team during his first impeachment trial. Now that the House officially impeached Trump for a second time, Dershowitz said he refused to be part of Trump's legal team a second time, assuming a trial in the Senate takes place. But it's not because of anything the president did or did not do.
“This is political theater, and I’m neither a politician or an actor,” Dershowitz told The Boston Globe. “So I don’t see a role for a real lawyer to play in this show trial.”
It's a moot point right now. Trump hasn't asked Dershowitz for any kind of legal help “and I don’t like to speculate about hypotheticals.”
The other issue Dershowitz has is President Trump being tried for impeachment after he's already out of office, something he believes the Senate has no power to do.
“Once the president leaves office, he becomes a private citizen. I don’t believe the Senate has jurisdiction to proceed at 12:01 p.m. Jan. 20," the law professor explained. "I think it loses all jurisdiction, because it can no longer remove the president, and that’s the only legitimate function of impeachment. … Even if the process began before he was the former president, the trial cannot continue.”
Dershowitz was also critical of the House of Representatives' bi-partisan vote to impeach the president because of a lack of due process.
"... there were no legal arguments. The president wasn’t allowed to present a defense. His lawyers weren’t there," he said.
The liberal law professor has gone to bat for the president multiple times. Most recently, he said Trump's call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was not criminal and the media took the entire call out of context.