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No doubt many of Alan Dershowitz’s neighbors on the Vineyard and colleagues at Harvard are distressed by the news that he is in talks with the Trump administration about joining the legal team fighting the president’s impeachment. But the move would be utterly syntonic with Dershowitz’s values: he will take any case that will bring him publicity. Besides, it’s far from the worst thing Dershowitz, eighty-one, has ever done.

Partying With Pedophiles We’ll give Dershowitz a pass on representing Jeffrey Epstein (along with repellent probable woman-killers like O. J. Simpson, Claus von Bülow, and Ted Kennedy), since everyone deserves a good lawyer. By definition, the worst people are probably the most in need of high-end legal representation! But there’s no good excuse for being friends with the billionaire pedophile. Ask any defense lawyer about their most depraved clients, and you’ll find few who will reminisce fondly about spending quality time with such characters. But Dershowitz was a guest of Epstein’s, on his private jet, at his homes in Palm Beach and New York, and on his private island in the Caribbean. As Epstein’s guests, many grown men are said to have had sex with underage girls. Two of Epstein’s victims have accused Dershowitz of joining in, a charge he has denied energetically and with litigation, suing one of the women for defamation. He has also claimed that his accusers’ lawyer, David Boies, encouraged them to invent stories about him. Perhaps nothing is impossible, but this is a truly odd accusation on Dershowitz’s part. David Boies is not some desperate sleazy idiot taking out ads on bus benches. He is one of the most prominent lawyers in the country, having led the government’s successful prosecution of Microsoft and defending such zeitgeist villains as Harvey Weinstein and Theranos. Why would he risk disbarment and ruin by defaming another of the nation’s top lawyers? Boies has sued Dershowitz for peddling this batty conspiracy theory, calling it defamatory. No one has any way of knowing the truth of any of these charges and countercharges yet, since all this litigation is ongoing. The proven facts are that Dershowitz was friends with Jeffrey Epstein and spent significant time in his company, and that is bad. It was a passionate friendship: Dershowitz told New York magazine that he found Epstein “feisty,” exulting over his “quirky mind,” even claiming that he would have hung around with him even if he weren’t so rich. Despite all that, Dershowitz claimed Epstein was just an “acquaintance.” Fine. But really, what powerful man wasn’t on Epstein’s plane? Let’s get even more specific about why Dershowitz is so loathsome.

Crusading Against the Human Rights of Palestinians Dershowitz has for years dedicated significant intellectual energy to rationalizing and perpetuating the oppression of the Palestinian people. Just this year, he wrote an op-ed in the Hill claiming that the suffering of the Palestinians had “been largely inflicted by themselves.” He claimed that the only Palestinian homes being bulldozed are those of terrorists, that there is no real discrimination against Arabs in Israel, and he implied that Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow , who had written a strongly worded essay in the New York Times on Palestine, was antisemitic for criticizing the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinians. It was not the first time he’s lobbed baseless accusations of antisemitism or Holocaust denial at critics of Israel, including Jimmy Carter, Noam Chomsky, and J Street, among others.

Whitewashing the Real Bigots Yet in 2016, he defended white nationalist Steve Bannon against that same charge, lecturing that “it’s not legitimate to call someone an anti-Semite because you might disagree with their policies.”

He’s Actually Pretty Racist Himself After Dershowitz worried publicly that Trump couldn’t get a fair trial in Washington, DC, because of the city’s “ethnic and racial composition,” he was justifiably called racist by Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters.