Dershowitz delivers the staggering case.





One legitimately can be skeptical about the timing of the leak, which happened contemporaneously with the Amazon The New York Times leaked what President Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton allegedly claimed in his forthcoming book about an August 2019 meeting he held with President Trump regarding Ukraine. Bolton is said to have written that President Trump “wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens.” Senate Democrats and a few Republicans such as Senator Mitt Romney would like to hear Bolton’s first-hand testimony. However, it is much ado about nothing. Bolton's testimony would prove nothing of relevance to the Senate impeachment trial.One legitimately can be skeptical about the timing of the leak, which happened contemporaneously with the Amazon product page for the book going live. One can argue, as Robert Spencer has done , that Bolton sold the president out because “Trump represents a strong challenge to the foreign policy establishment views that have failed again and again, and of which Bolton is a foremost exponent.” But it does not really matter. Even if, for the purest of reasons, Bolton wants to tell what he knows at the Senate trial about his direct interactions with President Trump concerning the temporary hold on the release of the security assistance, it would not be worth prolonging the Senate trial to hear him.



John Bolton, a long-time neo-conservative hawk, left office following sharp disagreements with President Trump on a variety of foreign policy issues. Keeping security aid to Ukraine flowing without even a temporary pause was just one of those issues that Bolton felt strongly about. Bolton aired his opinions to the president, as he was obliged to do as the presidentially appointed national security adviser. President Trump rejected Bolton’s advice, as the duly elected president is entitled to do. Policy differences, whether between the president and his subordinates or between the president and members of Congress, are not impeachable offenses. Whether Bolton and members of Congress were right, and the president was wrong, does not turn a policy difference into an impeachable offense. And whether the president saw any political benefit in deciding to hold up the release of the security aid temporarily in order to satisfy himself that the supposedly anti-corruption reformist Ukraine government was truly serious about investigating allegations of corruption does not turn his mixed motives for taking an official action into an impeachable offense.

Former Harvard law professor and constitutional law expert Alan Dershowitz exploded any pretense of relevance as to what Bolton might have to say. It would add nothing of constitutional significance regarding the decision that the Senate must make in dealing with the rabidly partisan House Democratic majority’s fatally flawed articles of impeachment.

The abuse of power article rests on assessing the president’s “real” motives for withholding the security aid and allegedly pressuring Ukraine to announce the opening of investigations into reported Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election and into the Bidens’ activities in Ukraine. Bolton, the Democrats argue, would provide an invaluable first-hand account of the linkage between the hold on the assistance and the president’s improper political motivations that their case lacks so far.

However, in his riveting presentation to the Senate as part of President Trump’s defense, Professor Dershowitz used the text of the Constitution on impeachment, as well as the history of its origin and subsequent application, to render even first-hand proof of such a linkage absolutely meaningless in an impeachment trial context:

Like all human beings, presidents and other politicians persuade themselves that their actions seen by their opponents as self-serving are primarily in the national interest. In order to conclude that such mixed motive actions constituted abuse of power, opponents must psychoanalyze the president and attribute to him a singular self-serving motive. Such a subjective probing of motives cannot be the legal basis for a serious accusation of abuse of power that could result in the removal of an elected president. Yet this is precisely what the managers are claiming.

Such a mind reading approach to divine personal motive, even if assisted by first-hand testimony as to what the president said he wanted to do during one portion of a wide-ranging meeting, is fatally flawed. It provides no carefully defined objective standard for applying the Constitution’s drastic impeachment and removal remedy, while nevertheless supplanting the right of the voters to decide who they want to be their president.

“Quid pro quo alone is not a basis for abusive power,” Professor Dershowitz explained. “It’s part of the way foreign policy has been operated by presidents since the beginning of time. The claim that foreign policy decisions can be deemed abuses of power based on subjective opinions about mixed or sole motives that the President was interested only in helping himself demonstrate the dangers of employing the vague subjective and politically malleable phrase, abusive power, as a constitutionally permissible criteria for the removal of a president.”

Professor Dershowitz aimed his analysis directly at what Bolton claimed he heard President Trump say that he wanted Ukraine to do before he would lift the temporary hold on the security assistance. Professor Dershowitz explained that “if a president, any president were to have done with (sic) the Times reported about the context of the Bolton manuscript, that would not constitute an impeachable offense. Let me repeat, nothing in the Bolton revelations, even if true would rise to the level of an abusive power or an impeachable offense. That is clear from the history, that is clear from the language of the constitution, you cannot turn conduct that is not impeachable into impeachable conduct simply by using words like quid pro quo and personal benefit.”

The issue is not whether President Trump saw a political advantage for himself in pressing Ukraine to announce an opening of an investigation into the Bidens’ activities in Ukraine. The issue is whether there was any national interest in doing so, including even using a temporary pause on foreign aid as leverage for that and perhaps other purposes. There decidedly was such a national interest in addressing indisputable Ukrainian corruption. This included the potential impact of such a culture of corruption both on possible misuse of U.S. foreign aid and on the dropping of an investigation into the corrupt Ukrainian company the son of a former U.S. vice president worked for while the father was the Obama administration’s point man in Ukraine.

The following are undisputed facts. A much fuller description is provided in the Senate testimony of Pam Bondi