Dershowitz says Trump impeachment standard ‘could put Joe Biden in jail,’ ‘Lincoln impeached’

Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, a member of President Donald Trump’s impeachment defense team, said Thursday that using Democrats’ impeachment standard would land former Vice President Joe Biden “in jail” and “Lincoln gets impeached.”

“[I]f you have mixed motives, if you are in the public interest, and you’re trying to help the public, but you’re also trying to get re-elected, according to [Adam] Schiff [D-Calif.] and [Jerrold] Nadler (D-N.Y.), that’s a crime,” Dershowitz told Fox News’ Sean Hannity.



“If you have any inkling of motive to help yourself get re-elected, they call that corrupt, and they say, even a tiny amount of motive to help yourself makes you into a criminal and makes you impeachable,” Dershowitz — who made an impassioned defense of Trump this week during the Senate’s impeachment trial — added.

“And I turned to all the senators, and I said, everybody in this room, every senator, every politician everywhere always has one eye toward re-election, another eye toward the public interest,” he continued.

“They almost always think it’s the same. They also think their own election is in the public interest. You can’t make that an impeachable offense.”

Dershowitz noted further that thinking “could put Joe Biden in jail,” referencing the former vice president’s pressuring of then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire the state’s prosecutor looking into corruption involving an energy company, Burisma, that employed his son, Hunter, as a board member for $83,000 per month.




“If somebody could claim that 99 percent of Biden’s motivation in getting the prosecutor fired was the public interest and preventing corruption, but 1 percent, in the back of his mind, he was thinking, maybe this could help my son a little bit,” the Trump defender noted.

“Because he works for the company that’s being investigated, according to Nadler and Schiff, that would be enough. According to Nadler and Schiff, Lincoln gets impeached.”

Reports Friday noted that it’s likely the GOP-controlled Senate will vote during the day to acquit the president of the two articles of impeachment against him — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, neither of which cites an actual crime.

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