Legal scholars pan Alan Dershowitz’s defense of Trump

 https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/20/politics/dershowitz-trump-legal-analysis/index.html

CNN legal analyst Ross Garber, one of the leading impeachment experts in the country, also rejected Dershowitz’s reasoning. In recent years, Garber defended four Republican governors who faced potential impeachment, three of whom eventually resigned from office.

“I’m not sure of anybody who’s defended more impeachments than I have, and even I think Dershowitz is wrong on this,” Garber said Monday on CNN. “I don’t think you need a technical criminal violation for there to be an impeachable offense, and there are lots of reasons for that.”

One reason, Garber explained, was that there weren’t many criminal statutes on the books when the Constitution was adopted. Another reason came from history, Garber said: The phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors,” was used in England before the framers included it in the US Constitution, and it wasn’t understood to require a criminal offense for impeachment.